Crooked Media - What A Day: Minding their OAN business

With just 12 days to go until the government would have crashed into the debt ceiling, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sought to end the standoff by giving Democrats one last exciting opportunity to do his bidding.
 

• As Senate Republicans prepared to block another vote to suspend the debt limit on Wednesday, McConnell proposed a deal: Republicans would help pass a short-term extension of the debt limit to prevent a default into December, giving Democrats more time to raise it themselves through reconciliation. In that scenario, Republicans get what they demanded all along and the filibuster remains intact: A win-win compromise, in which both winners are the GOP.
   
• Senate Democrats have decided to accept the short-term patch in a vote that could come as soon as Wednesday night, while saying that they’ll still never use reconciliation to pass a longer-term solution. It means kicking the can down the road and probably facing the same standoff two months from now, but the deal will avert an immediate crisis, and, most importantly, allow senators to leave town on their regularly-scheduled vacations.
   
• Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) called McConnell’s terms “bullshit”, and she’s not wrong. Republicans want Democrats to address the debt limit through reconciliation because it would force them to raise it by a specific dollar amount, rather than suspending or abolishing it altogether. That would allow Republicans to use it as a cudgel on the campaign trail (dishonestly, since raising the debt limit is about paying off bills from past spending), and also to continue holding the debt ceiling hostage every few years whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House. Not great!

Also, not necessary! McConnell’s offer indicates that he’s pissing his pants over the prospect of losing the filibuster, as Democrats coalesce around the idea of reform.
 

• Earlier on Wednesday, noted filibuster-defender Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said that Democrats were very likely to use a carve-out to suspend the debt limit if Senate Republicans continued to filibuster the economy into a volcano: “My hope is that after today's vote Republicans will rethink their approach, or you may see, I think, some damage to this institution.” You know, the kind of damage that makes something way better, like dismantling a Confederate statue, or ending an arcane rule that’s basically a Confederate statue.
   
• Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) still hasn’t changed his tune, saying that he’s absolutely adamant about not letting the country default and also about not changing the filibuster in order to prevent a default. But McConnell reportedly told colleagues that he was worried about the growing pressure on Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) to get behind a filibuster carveout, and cited it as a reason for agreeing to co-operate on a short-term debt solution. 
   

Both sides seem to think they’ve come out on top: McConnell believes he can take the pressure off of Smanchinema to reform the filibuster by serving up some extra breathing room, while Democrats think that McConnell’s blink is a victory, and that they can take the time bait without getting stuck on the reconciliation hook. It’s a zero-sum game and they can’t both be right, so…see you back here in December for Debt Standoff: Holiday Edition?

Keep It is celebrating its 200th episode this week! Listen to the latest episode with Ira, Louis, and guest host Leslie Grossman. Alan Cumming also joins Keep It this week to look back on his career and discuss his new memoir Baggage. New episodes of Keep It drop every Wednesday. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

AT&T has played an enormous role in creating and funding the pro-Trump propaganda outlet One America News (OAN), according to a bonkers new Reuters investigation. OAN founder and CEO Robert Herring Sr. testified in a 2019 deposition that the network had essentially been AT&T executives’ idea: “They told us they wanted a conservative network. They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.” AT&T then directed tens of millions of dollars towards the network: OAN gets 90 percent of its revenue from a contract with AT&T-owned TV platforms, including DirecTV. An accountant and lawyer for OAN have said under oath that without its DirecTV deal, the company would immediately go out of business. AT&T kept the network afloat even as it turned into one of the biggest purveyors of MAGA conspiracy theories that threaten democracy and public health, but hey, at least it’s consistent.

• Johnson & Johnson has asked the FDA to authorize its booster shot. 
   
• Four people were wounded in a high school shooting in Arlington, TX, on Wednesday. Authorities have taken an 18-year-old suspect into custody.
   
• More Americans have died from coronavirus this year than in all of 2020, a bleak testament to right-wing efforts to undermine the vaccine rollout. 
   
• Sergeants Benevolent Association president Ed Mullins has resigned after the FBI raided his house and the union’s offices on Tuesday, 19 years after first assuming his post.
   
• Process servers for the House January 6 committee can’t find former Trump aide/current Halloween decoration Dan Scavino to deliver his subpoena. The panel quietly began its closed-door interviews on Friday, questioning former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.
   
• Crystal Clanton, a former Turning Points USA staffer who became infamous for saying “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE” in 2017, has since gone to law school and locked down a prestigious federal clerkship with a right-wing judge. Cancel culture: has it gone too far?
   
• Dubai’s ruler targeted his ex-wife Princess Haya with Pegasus spyware, a U.K. court ruled, confirming earlier reporting on widespread abuses of the spyware.
   
• Investigators say they've identified Gary Francis Poste as the Zodiac Killer, three years after he died. 
   
• Otis the bear has won Fat Bear Week for the fourth time. A well-deserved win for one of the fattest bears in the game.
   
• Meghan Trainor would like us to know that she and her husband only took simultaneous dumps on their side-by-side toilets ONCE, so everybody can stop making a big deal about it.  (“We pee together obvi.”)

No big deal or anything, but three gubernatorial races in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania could decide whether the GOP has the means to steal the 2024 presidential election and end American democracy as we know it. All three states have GOP-controlled legislatures that have aggressively pursued “audits” of the 2020 election results and new voter-suppression laws, impeded only by three Democratic governors with veto power: Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Tony Evers (D-WI), and Tom Wolf (D-PA). If Republicans replace any of them in 2022, they would not only be able to ramp up extreme voter-suppression in their states, but could potentially overturn 2024 election results by refusing to certify a slate of electors for a Democratic winner, and send rogue electors to a GOP-controlled House that’s itching to count them. Don’t panic, but do join the No Off Years team and stay in the fight: votesaveamerica.com/nooffyears. 

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The WHO has approved the first malaria vaccine, which could save tens of thousands of children each year. 

The Biden administration will spend $1 billion to quadruple the supply of at-home rapid coronavirus tests by December.

The Education Department has moved to overhaul its loan forgiveness program, which could erase debts for thousands of teachers, social workers, and other public servants. 

Joe Manchin said he supports including lower prescription drug pricing in the Build Back Better Act.