Crooked Media - What A Day: Eat the Mitch

The latest monthly employment report is a cornucopia of bad news and daily coronavirus numbers are a ghastly horror show, but Congress has drawn up a stimulus package that may actually pass by the end of the year, and it’s...a start! The important thing is, President Jobs has done it again.
 

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. added just 245,000 jobs in November. That’s 224,000 fewer jobs than economists had expected, and a brutal slowdown from the 610,000 jobs the economy added in October. Even the good news is just bad news wearing a hat: The unemployment rate ticked down from 6.9 percent to 6.7 percent, but that drop is mainly due to unemployed workers leaving the labor force altogether. We’re still down about 10 million jobs from February, before (gestures around vaguely) (knocks over empty liquor bottles). 
   
• Those numbers just emphasize the urgent need to throw Americans a lifeline before Congress packs up for the year. After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held negotiations hostage under his wattle for months on end, support is finally coalescing around the $908 billion proposal introduced by a bipartisan group of senators this week. As it stands, that package includes $300 billion for small businesses, $160 billion for state and local governments, and an additional $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits, but no new round of stimulus checks. It’s nowhere close to the $3 trillion package House Democrats passed back in May, but it’s something, and with existing aid programs expiring in less than a month, something sounds pretty tight. 
   
• Joe Biden and Democratic leaders have all signed on to the plan, along with a growing number of Republicans, and the package could become law quickly. The main sticking points are McConnell’s beloved liability shield for companies that recklessly expose their workers to a deadly virus, and the inclusion of (already inadequate) aid to state and local governments. We’re not suggesting that Republicans care more about sabotaging the Biden administration than helping ordinary people survive, but contrary to McConnell’s staunch opposition to a “blue state bailout,” GOP-led states are among those facing the most dire revenue shortfalls. Oh wait, sorry, that last thing is exactly what we’re suggesting. 

As Joe Biden noted in a Friday statement calling for “urgent action” from Trump and Congress, November’s bleak jobs report was a snapshot of the situation before the worst of the winter surge.
 

• The moderately out-of-control coronavirus didn’t do much to help our national economic recovery, but maybe a completely out-of-control coronavirus will do the trick? (Narrator: It won’t.) The U.S. continues to set horrifying coronavirus records daily—death rates have reached the daily-9/11 threshold—and we still haven’t arrived at the post-Thanksgiving peak. For the first time, the CDC has recommended “universal mask use” when people are in any indoor space other than their own homes. It’s surely a coincidence that this overdue, common-sense guidance came out days after White House Coronavirus Groupie Scott Atlas packed up his radiology diploma and hit the road. 
   
• Biden has said he plans to ask all Americans to wear masks for his first 100 days in office, and today called for an additional round of stimulus after Inauguration Day to include funding for getting the virus under control: “To truly end this crisis, Congress will need to fund more testing as well as the equitable and free distribution of the vaccine.” Addressing an economic crisis by resolving the health crisis that caused the economic crisis? Why, it’s just crazy enough to work!

Whatever stimulus package Congress passes now will only be acceptable as a starting point, but as soon as Inauguration Day rolls around, Republicans will do everything in their power to turn off the tap and blame the ravaged economy on Joe Biden. We have one month to shrivel their power considerably by electing Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate in Georgia, and the work we put in now could literally save lives. If that’s your kind of thing, votesaveamerica.com/georgia.

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A top Trump appointee at the Census Bureau is also serving as an expert in Sidney Powell’s bonkers, election-stealing Georgia lawsuit. Ben Overholt, who was sketchily installed at the bureau over the summer, filed an affidavit arguing that thousands of mail-in Georgia ballots should have been rejected, based entirely on the fact that Georgia has rejected more ballots for signature issues in previous years. (Subtext: Props to everyone who made calls to educate Georgia voters and helped with curing ballots, you crushed it.) Anyway, Overholt’s involvement in a deranged pro-Trump lawsuit should shut up everyone who worried that his appointment was part of a push to sabotage the Census and distort data to help unpopular Republicans win elections.

• Donald Trump is reportedly considering pardoning as many as 20 friends and flunkies before leaving office, and hesitating only because it has occurred to him that granting pardons to people for crimes they haven’t been charged with yet could, bear with him here, look like an admission that they’re guilty. Always thinking one step ahead, this guy. 
   
• The bribe-for-pardon scheme under investigation by the Justice Department concerned efforts by former Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy and Jared Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell to secure a pardon for tax-evading psychologist Hugh Baras.
   
• Trump’s Pentagon nominee Scott O’Grady has retweeted tons of election conspiracies and calls for Trump to impose martial law, stuff you love to see from a top defense official. Meanwhile, Trump’s purge of the Pentagon continued with the abrupt firing of nine members of the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board, and the installation of Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie on the same board for some down-to-the-wire looting. 
   
• The Trump administration has also been making last-minute changes to rules for agencies like the EPA and FDA as a means of sabotaging Joe Biden, in part by trying to hobble their ability to respond to public-health threats. 
   
• White House communications director Alyssa Farah resigned on Thursday, presumably to spend more time scraping the Trump decals off of her car.
   
• Trump praised QAnon as consisting of people who “basically believe in good government” during a meeting on keeping the Senate, prompting White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to lean forward and say he’d never heard it described that way. (Veep credits music plays.)
   
• Ivanka Trump’s last-minute effort to cement a better legacy than “find something new :)” has been dashed on the rocks, after Congress passed on including her shitty version of a women’s empowerment bill in the annual defense package. Ivanka, sorry the politics thing didn’t work out, but maybe you could just…find something new?
   
• Warner Bros. announced that all of its 2021 movie releases will stream on HBO Max at the same time they're playing in theaters. For a more complete movie theater experience, simply sneak a burrito into your own home.
   
• Mariah Carey has launched a cookie brand, and issued the following statement: “Yay, cookies! We love ‘em….love ‘em during the holidays…..love ‘em all year round!!” She'll be canceled for her controversial takes one day, but you gotta respect how she says it like it is. 

The Trump administration hasn’t bothered planning out vaccine distribution beyond the first phase, but to be fair, who could have known for the last nine months that a fleshed-out vaccine distribution plan would be necessary? The federal government is still figuring out basic processes like tracking critical supplies and establishing regular communication with providers, and it’s fallen to the broke states to establish thousands of vaccination clinics, staff them, and educate a wary public. That lack of planning also increases the likelihood that the vaccine will be distributed inequitably, and thus that rich and well-connected people will be able to take advantage of nebulous, ill-defined priority categories to jump the line for a vaccine. With any luck, they won’t be able to resist outing themselves on Instagram.

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The House has passed a bill to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level, the first time either chamber of Congress has ever backed marijuana legalization.

A new study found that people who received the Moderna coronavirus vaccine still had high levels of antibodies after three months. 

The Biden administration looks likely to be the most LGTBQ-inclusive in U.S. history.

Guy Fieri raised more than $21.5 million for restaurant workers in the span of seven weeks.