Crooked Media - What A Day: The ghost of Kyrstmas past

The one-sided negotiations over the American Jobs Plan are starting to give scarred veterans of the Obamacare Wars unpleasant flashbacks, but it’s a replay we all get to watch in slow motion until Manchin & Co. decide they’ve seen enough.
 

• In a Wednesday meeting with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Biden indicated that he would be open to a major concession on his tax plan to fund the package. If Republicans were to agree to at least $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending, Biden suggested, he might ditch his proposal to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent (for now), and instead emphasize measures that would ensure corporations pay a minimum tax of 15 percent. 
   
• That potential compromise doesn’t guarantee any GOP votes—negotiators are set to meet again on Friday, after Republicans have decided whether to try to chip away at the package further, or simply go full obstruction mode. Going into Wednesday, GOP leaders had offered just $257 billion in new spending, while calling on the Democrats to repurpose coronavirus-relief funding. Earlier this week, a coalition of mayors and county officials sent a letter to congressional leaders begging them to please not do that.
   
• Democratic operatives from the ACA days see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell back on his bullshit, and have warned against letting him stretch out negotiations for the purpose of wasting time. Former Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), a moderate who was a key vote for the ACA (but also helped draw out its passage), said that Biden should expect McConnell will make “a purely political calculation” to “thwart the president’s efforts.” But Democrats can’t knee McConnell in the groin and go the budget reconciliation route without all 50 votes, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has made clear that he wants the bipartisanship puppet show to continue.

Unfortunately for all of us, learning important lessons from recent history does not appear to be centrist Democrats’ strong suit.
 

• Days after missing the Senate vote to establish a January 6 commission for reasons she has declined to explain, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) called the filibuster “a tool that protects the democracy of our nation” while standing beside Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who had just used that tool to kill an investigation into an attack on Congress. Former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, a long-time Republican who endorsed Sinema in 2018, tweeted a slightly different assessment on Thursday: “If you don’t vote to protect voting rights and save our democracy by breaking the Jim Crow filibuster, it should be your last vote as a United States Senator. No exceptions.”
   
• Election-reform activists are hoping that Vice President Kamala Harris will be able to build public pressure and bring Manchinema around before the For The People Act comes to a floor vote later this month. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has started hinting more aggressively about running for president in 2024—now that he’s in deeper legal shit—and more reportering has confirmed that Trump indeed believes he’ll be reinstalled in the White House in August, evidently based on the podcast rantings of MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell. No rush on the democracy protections, though!

It’s not pleasant to watch a handful of Democrats force the party through a repetition of its old mistakes, particularly when the GOP has taken a headlong plunge into authoritarianism since the last time it pretended to negotiate in good faith. We can only hope that most Democrats have caught wise, and might be ready to pass Biden’s agenda in all its uncompromised glory when the kabuki theater finally comes to an end.

This week on Hysteria, Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco are joined by writer, activist Grace Parra and comic, writer Tien Tran to discuss Naomi Osaka’s decision to step back from the French Open and the importance of putting your mental health first. Catch new episodes of Hysteria every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts →  

The White House has announced its plan to distribute the first tranche of the coronavirus vaccine doses it donated, with 19 million of the first 25 million vaccine doses to be shared through the COVAX program. About six million doses of those COVAX doses will go to South and Central America, seven million to Asia, and five million to Africa. That announcement came shortly after the WHO sounded alarms that virus cases in Africa have spiked 20 percent in the last two weeks, while vaccine shipments have nearly slowed to a halt. The Biden administration plans to share 80 million total doses globally by the end of June, with 25 percent of the country’s surplus doses held back for emergencies, or to be shared with allies.

• Initial unemployment claims dropped to 385,000 last week, hitting a new pandemic low. Meanwhile, half of U.S. states (all led by GOP governors, natch) have moved to stymie Biden’s economic response by cutting off enhanced unemployment benefits early.
   
• Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put intense pressure on right-wing parties to oppose the new coalition government announced by his rivals. Friendly advice for whichever Israeli politician looks like an animatronic Cotton Hill and calls his wife Mother: Get somewhere safe. 
   
• Federal prosecutors have begun investigating whether Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) obstructed justice on a phone call with a witness in his sex-trafficking probe.
   
• Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) has been hiding from a civil lawsuit that Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) filed after the insurrection, taking advantage of heightened Capitol security to dodge the private investigator Swalwell's team hired to find and serve him.
   
• Sri Lanka faces a possible environmental disaster after a cargo ship carrying chemicals caught fire and started sinking off the coast. The chemicals that didn’t burn up could leak into the sea, along with hundreds of tons of oil, and several tons of plastic debris has already washed ashore.
   
• Facebook will stop exempting politicians from its content-moderation rules, at least in theory.
   
• The Trump Justice Department secretly seized the phone records of four New York Times reporters, in the latest insane violation of press freedom disclosed by the Biden Justice Department.
   
• The organizers of an Ohio Memorial Day ceremony deliberately cut off a veteran’s mic when he started talking about the holiday’s origins in Black history. Another shameful example of left-wing cancel-culture censorship. 
   
• United Airlines announced that it has placed an order for 15 supersonic jets, which will cut travel time in half, not counting the decade it will take for them to become operational.
   
• The beekeepers of TikTok are feuding, but they won't hurt you if you stay calm and don't antagonize them.

The FBI has been investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over campaign-finance law violations connected with his former business. Seems like this guy might not be on the level! Back in September, the Washington Post reported that DeJoy pressured his employees to attend fundraisers and make contributions to GOP candidates—bolstering his status as a Big-Time Fundraiser, which ultimately got him his current job—and then reimbursed them through bonuses. That could be a crime, and a very carefully-worded statement from a spokesman did not make DeJoy sound particularly innocent: “He has always been scrupulous in his adherence to the campaign contribution laws and has never knowingly violated them.” (DeJoy categorically denied that he broke the law while under oath in August, an interesting discrepancy!) The Senate has confirmed all three of Biden’s appointees to the USPS Board of Governors—might be a good time for them to cover DeJoy in stamps and send him on his way?

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U.S. coronavirus case numbers have dropped to their lowest level since March 2020.

Nevada has officially become the sixth state with universal mail-in voting. 

A new radiation treatment for prostate cancer was found to reduce the risk of death by 38 percent in patients with advanced cancer.

Just a terrible day for cancer: A long-running international study found that an AstraZeneca breast-cancer pill significantly reduced the risk of recurrence and death in early-stage patients.