Crooked Media - What A Day: Passing the BIF test

There’s a loud clanging in the distance, the ground is vibrating, and Rob Portman just trundled by on one of those old-timey handcars. It can only mean one thing: We’re about to see some movement on the bipartisan infrastructure track, maybe!
 

• The Senate voted 67-32 to advance the bipartisan deal on Wednesday evening, which will allow members to begin debating actual legislation. Seventeen Republicans voted with all 50 Democrats to launch the debate, after negotiators announced on Wednesday that they had Reached An Agreement and were ready to move forward, for only the fourth or fifth time since this process began. On the warped, taffy-like calendar that is Infrastructure Week, we have made it to at least Thursday.
   
• The package has undergone some substantial changes since the last time negotiators shook hands on a Final Framework in June, including a reduction in the total amount of new spending from $579 billion to $550 billion. Funding for public transit has been cut by another $10 billion, while highway funding has gone up by $1 billion. In one of the biggest sacrifices on the altar of bipartisanship, negotiators have gutted President Biden’s original proposal to spend $20 billion to reconnect minority communities that were cut off by freeways to a scant $1 billion. Feel that thrill of Unity and Cooperation, though!
   
• Those painful cuts in no way guarantee that Senate Republicans won’t filibuster the deal when it comes to the next test vote—the one to end debate on the bill—particularly since it would require defying their petulant overlord. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), the lead GOP infrastructure negotiator, has reportedly asked Donald Trump to stop shitting on the bipartisan deal and to instead actively support it, seeing as how it’s not far off from the package that Trump himself tried to pass. Trump has, um, not had a change of heart, almost as if he’s more interested in avenging his grievances and sabotaging Joe Biden than in doing anything at all about America’s crumbling infrastructure. Almost.

“But at least this saga will wrap up soon either way, right?”
 

• Hahaha. Thune said on Monday that Republicans will want an “open amendment process” once the bill makes it to the floor, allowing them to stretch the process out as long as possible by holding a bunch of votes on new changes to a deal that’s already been months in the making. (Almost as if wasting time is...the point? Almost.) The Senate has just one work week left before the August recess, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has threatened to keep everyone in Washington for as long as it takes.
   
• Meanwhile, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) used the occasion of a Successful Bipartisan Agreement (Part 2958628) to announce that she won’t support a $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill—too chonky for her sensibilities—but crucially, that she will vote to advance that plan to get the budget-reconciliation process started. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week that she’ll stand by her pledge not to hold a vote on the bipartisan deal in the House until there’s a reconciliation package to go with it. (She also called Kevin McCarthy a “moron,” which is totally unrelated, but this digest needed more good news.)

Wednesday's successful vote means that both infrastructure tracks are still operational, and that Democrats are one step closer to passing their own historic legislation. But they’ve lost both valuable time and funding for important proposals in the process, and beyond a smarmy pat on the back from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), it’s still not clear what their demonstration of bipartisanship will gain them.

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A far-right group made up a Black Lives Matter controversy out of whole cloth to drum up culture-war outrage, and right-wing media outlets obligingly gave them a hand. A group called Dallas Justice Now distributed flyers to white families in wealthy Dallas suburbs that urged them not to send their children to Ivy League schools, in order to preserve opportunities for students of color. The story went viral in the right-wing media ecosystem, with coverage on Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday and a slew of posts from conservative-media personalities on Twitter. Except, whoops, the whole thing’s fake: Dallas Justice Now’s website leads back to a right-wing PR firm called Arena, which has ties to another confirmed astroturfing effort, and the group doxxed a recipient of the flyer who tried to figure out who was behind it. If you’ve enjoyed Willful Misunderstandings of Critical Race Theory, you’ll love Inflammatory Hoaxes Presented As News!

• The Justice Department has rejected Rep. Mo Brooks’s (R-AL) request to defend him in Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D-CA) lawsuit over his role in the January 6 insurrection, since inciting a violent attack on the government does not fall within the scope of his employment as a member of Congress.
   
• Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) admitted on Fox News that he spoke to Donald Trump on January 6, and should be rewarded for his honesty with a nicely-wrapped subpoena. 
   
• State Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-TX) won a special election to fill a Texas House seat, defeating Trump-backed candidate Susan Wright, which Trump contends is actually a very big win for him.
   
• Simone Biles has withdrawn from the individual all-around competition at the Tokyo Olympics after pulling out of the team competition, having come down with what gymnasts call a case of “the twisties”: a loss of spatial awareness during complex, dangerous skills. 
   
• New national test score data has confirmed that Black, Latino, and low-income students had the biggest disruptions in their academic progress during the pandemic, widening racial and economic test score gaps.
   
• Well, here’s Nancy Pelosi arguing that a) Biden doesn’t have the power to cancel student loan debt, and that b) Congress maybe shouldn’t bother because taxpayers might not want to pay off other people’s student loans. Since taxes are about paying for only the things that you personally use and approve of, this makes sense!
   
• The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan has some thoughts on how to break Both Sides reporting habits in the face of a democratic crisis. 
   
• Bob Odenkirk is in stable condition after suffering a heart attack on the set of Better Call Saul on Tuesday, a huge relief for absolutely everybody everywhere, it turns out.
   
• Wanna get emotional about a picture of Ed Markey and a guy in an Arthur suit?
   

A 2015 FBI investigation into a KKK murder plot exposed the fact that klansmen were working inside the Florida Department of Corrections, and then, well, not much really happened with that. An informant who infiltrated a Florida KKK chapter learned that three members plotting to kill a Black man were active law-enforcement personnel, but the state’s Department of Corrections said it saw no reason to investigate how many other klansmen were employed in its prisons. Reporters who recently swung by the prison where the three would-be murderers had worked found plenty of cars in the employee and volunteer parking lots adorned with white supremacist decals. And in spite of extremists’ documented efforts to infiltrate law enforcement, there’s no coordinated system to keep them out: Even when white supremacists are discovered and fired from law-enforcement jobs, there’s no database that prevents them from getting hired at another agency. 

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Nearly 500,000 Americans  got their first jab on Wednesday, the highest daily number of newly vaccinated people in a month.

The FDA has approved a new treatment for an aggressive type of breast cancer. 

The immigration reforms in Democrats’ reconciliation bill have overwhelming bipartisan support. 

Major tech companies have climbed aboard the vaccine requirement bandwagon.