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- Jimmy Kimmel reacting live onstage at the Oscars to disgraced former president Donald Trump’s review of his hosting the event on Truth Social, posted just minutes before
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Fresh off of his well-received, high-energy State of the Union, President Biden is taking his campaign message on the road and going on the offensive as he faces an uphill battle to win reelection.
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President Biden called on Monday for major new spending initiatives to lower the costs of healthcare, child care, and housing. To pay for the proposals and shave $3 trillion off the national debt over the next decade, he’s also pitching new taxes on the wealthy and major corporations. Biden’s ambitious $7.3 trillion reelection year budget lays out broad progressive policies that many Democratic leaders have been pushing him to embrace.
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The budget would offer universal pre-K, 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, and an expansion of anti-poverty tax credits. There would also be a new tax break for first-time home buyers. Biden’s plan would raise the minimum tax on billion-dollar corporations from 15 to 21 percent. It would also double the tax on foreign income for multinational corporations and eliminate some tax deductions for executive compensation. All of these proposals—to put it in technical terms—absolutely fucking rule. They also stand basically zero chance of becoming law so long as Republicans control the House. They will, however, provide an appropriate backdrop to Biden’s near-certain rematch with disgraced former president Donald Trump this fall.
- The long road to reelection for Biden winds through Georgia and North Carolina. Democratic strategists are starting to dream that Biden might be able to wrestle North Carolina out of Trump’s grasp in November, but they’re worried about his ability to hold on to Georgia. North Carolina is looking increasingly appealing despite the fact that a Democratic presidential candidate has not won there since Barack Obama in 2008. What’s different this year is that North Carolina Republicans nominated Lt. Gov Mark Robinson (R-NC) for governor. Robinson has a well-documented history of antisemitic comments and anti-LGBT views, as well as staunch opposition to reproductive rights and basically anything that threatens to allow society to remain in the 21st Century, so Democrats hope that he will drag down the GOP ticket in the Tar Heel State.
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Republicans, as always, refuse to be normal.
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The Kansas GOP hosted a fundraising event on Friday night in which attendees paid to kick and beat up an effigy of President Biden. The main attractions of the event in Johnson County, KS were unhinged far-right creep Ted Nugent and disgraced former state Attorney General Phill Kline (R-KS). None of this is surprising considering the fact that the Kansas GOP is chaired by Mike Brown, a big-time election denier. On Saturday, former state Republican Party chairman Mike Kuckelman (rough name) condemned the event, calling it “shameful” and “WRONG” and called for the resignations of Brown and Johnson County Republican Party chair Maria Holiday. None of this is particularly surprising after the past 8 years, but it shows how far in one direction the party has lurched.
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For his part, Trump has been on the campaign trail going fully nuts giving speeches filled to the brim with retribution, election denialism, references to the “deep state,” and promises to harshly crack down on illegal immigration through brutality. Despite the fact that Trump has long promised not to touch federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, he told CNBC on Monday that there is “a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements.” First of all: incredible sentence. Gorgeous diction. The White House responded immediately, with spokesperson Andrew Bates saying: “Cutting the Medicare and Social Security benefits that Americans have paid to earn their whole lives, only to make room for yet more unaffordable, trickle-down tax giveaways to the super wealthy, is exactly backwards.” The Trump campaign then tried to “clarify” Trump’s bumbling comments, saying he was actually talking about “cutting waste.” Lol, okay.
Well! The next eight months are certain to dramatically increase our collective blood pressure!
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Everyone needs to go the extra mile in an election year. In our case, a bunch of miles, because Pod Save America AND Lovett or Leave It are hitting the road. Pod Save America’s Democracy or Else Tour will be heading all over the country, including Brooklyn, Madison, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and more! Lovett or Leave It will also be on tour, because we’re leaving it all on the field. Friends of the Pod subscribers get early access to presale tickets. The presale is happening TOMORROW —and ends Friday, the 15th at 9 AM local. To get access to the best seats, subscribe at crooked.com/friends and we’ll send you the presale code!
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The Muslim holy month of Ramadan began on Monday without a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh blamed Israel for the collapse of the talks that the Biden administration once hoped would yield an agreement by now. Haniyeh said that the group does not “want an agreement that doesn’t end the war on Gaza,” and that they are open to continue negotiations “on any formulas that will end this aggression.” Israel has repeatedly refused the Hamas condition of a permanent ceasefire or withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for the release of hostages captured during the October 7 terrorist attack. Meanwhile, Israel and the United States have both blamed Hamas for failing to agree to a proposal that would have freed about half of the remaining hostages during a six-week ceasefire.
President Biden is considering conditioning military aid to Israel for the first time if the Israeli government moves forward with a large-scale ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Politico reported Monday, citing four U.S. officials. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, undeterred, repeated his intention to do just that on Sunday. More than half of Gaza’s remaining population have crowded into houses, tents, and makeshift shelters in Rafah to escape the brutal fighting elsewhere in the enclave. This sets the stage for what could be the largest public rift between Biden and Netanyahu since the conflict began. The Biden administration had been critical of Netanyahu’s attempted judicial coup last summer, as well as the expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, but since the Hamas terrorist attack, Biden has publicly presented only steadfast support for Israel’s military campaign in response. In an interview with MSNBC on Saturday, Biden said he would never “leave Israel” or cut off the supply of weapons, but he urged Netanyahu to “pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost”—a plea which Netanyahu has thus far repeatedly seemed to ignore. Biden went on to say that Bibi is “hurting Israel more than he’s helping.”
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The past three years saw banner gains for organized labor in the United States. We know you’ll be shocked to hear that corporate America isn’t happy about it. SpaceX—owned by anti-union enfant terrible Elon Musk—as well as Trader Joe’s (et tu, Trader Joe’s?), Amazon, Starbucks, and others have filed legal papers to challenge the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB is a federal agency that enforces labor rights and oversees unionization drives, and it has accused all of the aforementioned corporations of violating various labor laws. Should the courts declare the NLRB (which by the way can’t even issue fines when corporations break labor laws) unconstitutional, workers will be even worse off than they are now without the protection of an agency that has been around since the New Deal. The corporate attack on the NLRB is part of a series of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of various federal regulatory agencies. These corporations know that at the end of the judicial appeals rainbow sits a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court made up of justices just right-wing enough to perhaps find their baseless arguments persuasive.
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Former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on March 19 to begin serving a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a congressional investigation into January 6.
The Oscars were fun again! Jimmy Kimmel had a fun and lighthearted hosting set with just the right amount of bite, and Ryan Gosling’s performance of “I’m Just Ken” brought the house down. We are so back.
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