Crooked Media - What A Day: Back in the Babbitt

The more brazenly Donald Trump repeats the Big Lie, the more compelled other leading Republicans feel to kiss his ass, creating a feedback loop that will end either in their party’s resounding defeat, or in the death of American democracy. Happy Monday!

• Trump returned to Iowa this weekend to get everyone talking about his possible 2024 presidential candidacy, and regaled thousands of his most diehard loyalists with a cascade of lies about the 2020 election, making it clear he has no intention of letting up. “The single biggest issue, the issue that gets the most pull, the most respect, the biggest cheers is talking about the election fraud of the 2020 presidential election,” he said, referring to the election he lost several times. 
   
• That’s par for the course for the disgraced former president, but what made this latest rally more disturbing than usual was the giddy participation of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the most senior Republican senator, whom Trump endorsed for re-election, and whose presence was a sign that the GOP old guard has (once again) fully embraced Trump and all his lies about the election. After the January 6 insurrection, Grassley condemned Trump, but he now offers this inspiring explanation for why he’s let bygones be bygones: “If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91 percent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart.”
   
• That’s going to drag the already authoritarian Republican Party to even darker places. As the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley earlier this month issued a "rebuttal" to the committee’s investigation of Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to overturn the election—an attempted coup that Grassley and the committee Republicans described as consistent with Trump’s constitutional duties as president. That sounds bad, but, on the other hand, who among us has not sold out the entire foundation of democracy in exchange for a re-election endorsement?

At least the media is all over these terrifying developments, right?
 

• The verdict is mixed. After reporters unearthed the notorious memo by conservative lawyer John Eastman, which outlined instructions for Trump (through Vice President Mike Pence) to steal the election, the broader media all but blacked it out of the newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. The confluence of Trump’s rally and the Senate Judiciary Committee report has placed the ongoing insurrection higher on the national media’s priority list than it was. 
   
• But they could be doing more still. This weekend, Trump delivered pre-recorded remarks at a birthday celebration for Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who forced her way into the Speaker’s Lobby to accost fleeing members of Congress on January 6, and was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer. In his remarks, Trump endorsed the violent mob that upended the peaceful transfer of power in the U.S. His martyrization of the insurrectionists has received scant coverage in mainstream outlets, and Republican members of Congress have (thus) faced almost no scrutiny for their part in trying to rewrite history. 

October 11th marks Indigenous Peoples Day, a holiday that celebrates the first people of this land and commemorates our histories and cultures. In honor of that day, you can now listen to the entire second season of This Land, a podcast about the present day struggle for Native rights. Over eight episodes, host Rebecca Nagle takes listeners inside her year-long investigation of how the right uses Native children to try and quietly dismantle American Indian tribes. Binge season two of This Land for free wherever you get your podcasts.

The nationwide lapse in pandemic unemployment benefits, combined with an economic recovery hampered by the Delta-variant epidemic, reveals a major Republican pretext for hobbling coronavirus relief to be (can you even believe it?) completely meritless. Republicans spent months railing against the unemployment expansion, blaming it for discouraging people from returning to work and thus slowing the economic recovery. Had their claims been true, then the expiration of pandemic-level benefits would have driven a surge in hiring. But that’s not what happened. Instead, unemployed Americans have had to grapple with the reopening of schools and a fourth coronavirus wave without the cushion of pandemic benefits, creating more suffering but no more jobs. It’s not the only piece of evidence we have that the Republican theory of the economy is wrong. Earlier this year, a bunch of Republican-led states let their pandemic unemployment benefits lapse early to sabotage the economic recovery based on a sincere belief that their states would benefit from a surge in job growth, which, of course, never materialized. And a new study from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University finds that President Biden’s child tax credit has likewise had no significant effect on employment.

• A right wing appeals court struck down a lower-court order blocking Texas’s unconstitutional abortion ban late on Friday, allowing enforcement of it to resume. 
   
• Speaking of Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-COVID) has issued an executive order prohibiting any entity in Texas from imposing vaccination requirements, in order to spread more coronavirus and set up a conflict with President Biden's forthcoming workplace vaccination rules.
   
• Facebook’s oversight board will meet with whistleblower Frances Haugen. 
   
• Southwest Airlines canceled almost two-thousand flights over the weekend due to bad weather and air-traffic control problems that left planes without crews, so naturally Republicans lied about it and blamed vaccination requirements. 
   
• Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) can’t be bothered to consistently return calls from the White House.
   
• Moderna appears to be husbanding its coronavirus vaccine for wealthy countries so the company can make more money, and U.S. officials are pretty pissed about it.
   
• The Justice Department has conducted a war-crimes investigation against seven Americans who traveled to Ukraine to join a far-right paramilitary group in its fight against Russia, including one former Army soldier suspected of involvement in a double murder in Florida. 
   
• The L.A. Country Sheriff (a law-enforcement officer) said he won’t enforce California’s workplace-vaccination requirement (the law).
   
• Russia’s population is lower now than when Vladimir Putin came to power, even if you account for the annexation of Crimea. 
   
• Bonkers story about a Navy nuclear engineer and his wife who thought they were passing secrets about U.S. nuclear submarine technology to a foreign country, but were actually talking to the FBI.
   
• Mystery boom in New England.

The pileup of cargo at U.S. ports is the outgrowth of a series of supply-chain bottlenecks that can’t be easily fixed, creating fears of a new normal that will push prices higher and leave products and materials in a state of artificial scarcity. The coronavirus pandemic simultaneously boosted demand for online shopping among people who had never shopped online before, and created conditions that made assembling and shipping their orders harder. Those new sources of demand have not waned, and might never return to their pre-pandemic normal. To relieve the backlogs, U.S. ports would have to increase their capacities, and shippers would need to hire more truck drivers, but even then they’d be at the mercy of supply interruptions stemming from problems they have no control over in countries like China and India. The Biden administration has prioritized resolving these problems in tandem, but even their best efforts will run up against the looming holiday season and all the gifts and decorations that will have to clear U.S. ports before they reach their final destinations.

The coolest, hippest, best wines coming out of Napa Valley today are not Cabernet. They are the white wines being made by San Francisco Chronicle Winemaker of the Year, Dan Petroski. Don’t just take us on our word. If you’re a wine geek (if you read Wine Spectator or Wine Enthusiast, or you’re Tommy Vietor, then you’re a wine geek) you’ll recognize the Massican wines from the Top 100 lists of these magazines the last four years in a row.

Massican is Napa Valley’s only white-wine winery, and they are making the wine’s you’ll want to bring to your fancy friend’s next dinner party.

If $300 a bottle, 15% alcohol Cabernet is for Boomers, Massican is for everyone else. It’s white wine for the people.

Massican wines. $30 a bottle, low alcohol, under 120 calories a glass, no additives, no sugar.

Crisp, delicious, easy-to-drink white wines. Maybe don’t share it with your friends. Delicious white wine. Why would you drink anything else?

Massican is available for purchase on the Massican website (https://massican.com/) and in select Whole Foods nationwide.

Merck has asked the FDA to provide emergency-use authorization for its COVID-19 pill. 

The FDA will debate approving Moderna and Johnson & Johnson boosters this week.

New treatments have allowed doctors to successfully treat an aggressive form of breast cancer.

Vaccinated foreign tourists will be allowed to visit the U.S. starting in November.