Crooked Media - What A Day: Boost of times

Booster shots of all three approved vaccines are now available for millions of Americans, highly effective shots for young children are just around the corner, and Republicans are still working overtime to spread coronavirus across the land. Two out of three ain’t bad?
 

• The CDC has greenlit booster shots of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, after FDA regulators authorized them on Wednesday. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky also signed off on mixing and matching, meaning the 70 million Americans now eligible for booster shots can sample whichever shot they want, regardless of which vaccine they received first. Let the immunity cross-fading commence!
   
• For the moment, booster eligibility is limited to people over 65 and those over 18 who have certain underlying conditions, live in long-term care settings, or work in high-risk jobs. Anyone who received the J&J shot is also now eligible for the chaser of their choosing, as long as it’s been at least two months—and evidence suggests that they’d be better off with Pfizer or Moderna. More than 11 million adults have already received boosters, and there are now more people getting booster shots each day than initial shots, according to CDC data.
   
• Those initial-shot numbers should soon get some help from the sub-bar-mitzvah-age crowd. Pfizer said on Friday that its vaccine is safe and 90.7 percent effective against symptomatic infections in children ages five to 11, and the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to discuss whether to recommend the vaccine for small-kid authorization. The Biden administration has smaller doses and a distribution plan ready to go, with a focus on pediatricians and pharmacies over mass vaccination sites. 

As the national Delta surge continues to abate, GOP leaders have ramped up their fight against the vaccine mandates that made that progress possible.
 

• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), reliably on the front lines of pro-COVID dipshittery, has called for a special session of the Florida legislature to block President Biden’s vaccine mandates for business with more than 100 employees. Meanwhile, Florida’s new surgeon general Joseph Ladapo has been dutifully demonstrating why DeSantis hired him, denouncing workplace vax mandates and citing conspiracy theories to question the safety of the vaccines.
   
• Conservatives on the Supreme Court could have the final say on the future of government vaccine mandates when they rule on Does v. Mills, the first major case to reach the Court on whether individuals can claim “religious liberty” to avoid a government vaccine mandate with no such exemption. It could go either way: Even the most far-right justices haven’t been receptive to anti-vax whining thus far. They have, however, been extremely sympathetic to plaintiffs seeking religious exemptions to other pandemic restrictions. If they decide to open up that loophole for government mandates, there’s nothing to stop the unvaccinated from faking beliefs to wriggle through it—as Los Angeles cops have done in droves. 

Between the booster shot rollout and employer vaccine mandates going into effect, right-wing public-health saboteurs should be limited in the level of damage they can inflict this winter. That shouldn’t absolve them of trying, and every step towards normality should come with the reminder that it was achieved over strenuous GOP objections.

Are you caught up on season two of Phillip Picardi’s Unholier Than Thou? This season Phill focuses on the wisdom of everyday people falling down, getting up, and trying new things as they navigate re-entry into a newish world. Plus, he’s taking listeners on the road as he drives from LA to Cambridge as his search for illumination takes him to Harvard’s Divinity School.

Listen to the latest episode with guests Michael Arcenaux and Aminatou Sow who chat with Phill about the challenges of creating through disaster, seeing old injustices through new eyes, creating boundaries, and finding god in memes. Listen and follow Unholier Than Thou wherever you get your podcasts.

Roll out the mid-sized confetti cannons: President Biden said he’s on board for changing the filibuster rules during a Thursday night town hall in Baltimore, a day after Senate Republicans once again used it to block voting rights legislation. Asked by Anderson Cooper whether he was open to reforming the filibuster to protect voting rights, Biden replied, “And maybe more.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that Biden will elaborate in the coming weeks about the reforms he would embrace, but that he believes “we are at an inflection point on a range of issues.” In other signs of progress, Democrats in Congress say they’re optimistic about reaching a deal on the reconciliation package by next week. It looks like the final agreement could include a tax-plan compromise that would force billionaires to pay their fair share instead of raising the corporate tax rate.

• The Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on the Texas abortion ban on November 1, but will not block the law in the meantime.
   
• Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed on a movie set in New Mexico when Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun, in what appears to have been a horrific accident. The film’s director Joel Souza was also injured. Union crew members had walked off the set to protest working conditions just hours earlier.
   
• Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani, has been found guilty of violating campaign-finance laws as he sought to break into the cannabis industry.
   
• Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin claimed that George Soros allies were installing political operatives on Virginia school boards.
   
• Over on the other end of the antisemitism spectrum, the Sunrise Movement has distanced itself from Sunrise DC’s move to exclude Jewish groups from a Saturday rally, but not other groups with similar positions on Israel.
   
• The U.S. admitted zero Uyghur refugees in the last fiscal year, despite the government officially classifying China’s actions as a genocide.
   
• Lyft said that there were 1,807 sexual assaults during rides in 2019, in an impressively overdue report.
   
• President Biden has named Neera Tanden to be White House staff secretary, after Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin tanked her nomination to lead the OMB, citing mean tweets.
   
• A trucking company illegally fired a group of port truck drivers in retaliation for unionizing, a judge ruled this week.
   
• Oh, the pandemic made you nervous about cruises? Perhaps we can interest you in the cruise that never ends?

Eleven congressional Democrats have asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into the Rutherford County, TN, juvenile justice system, which is an unmitigated nightmare. A ProPublica report last week detailed how the system had illegally arrested and detained Black children for years, sometimes traumatizing them for crimes that didn’t exist. In 2014, Rutherford County jailed kids at nearly 10 times the state average, under the supervision of juvenile-court judge and power-tripping monster Donna Scott Davenport. Democrats’ letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asks the DOJ to investigate the role of judicial commissioners who approved nonexistent charges, and troubling gaps in statewide data on juvenile court systems: “Without data, we do not know whether similar abuses to those perpetuated by Rutherford County are occurring in the state’s 97 other juvenile courts.”

If you have investments, odds are high that your money has been winding up in places you would never put it on purpose. Places like Mitch McConnell’s campaign coffers. Here’s the problem: A lot of Americans own S&P 500 index funds—these are funds made up of the 500 largest U.S. publicly traded companies available, and they collectively contain over $1.5 trillion dollars of Americans’ retirement money.

Unfortunately, when you buy an S&P 500 index fund, you’re buying stock in the following companies:
 

• AT&T, which is already back supporting the election objectors in Congress, as well as the GOP sponsors of Texas’s abortion ban and voter-suppression law. It’s also a top donor to Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.

• ExxonMobil, which has misled the public about the dangers of climate change and spent huge amounts on Facebook ads to get Donald Trump reelected in 2020.

• Halliburton, one of the nation’s biggest defense contractors, which has funneled millions to the GOP.

• Lockheed Martin, which is one the largest weapons manufacturers in the world and one of Lindsey Graham’s top contributors.

The list goes on. But before you stuff all of your savings in your mattress and call it a day, you should know about DEMZ. 

DEMZ is the first investment product that allows you to get similar performance and exposure you would expect from the S&P 500,  without all the Mitch McConnell. It only includes companies who have made over 75% of their political contributions to Democratic causes and candidates. Since launching in November of 2020, DEMZ has outperformed the S&P 500 by 7 percent.

You can finally put your money where your vote is, even on Wall Street. Look for the DEMZ ticker wherever you invest, or visit DEMZ.fund to learn more. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland has launched a new initiative aimed at ending banks’ discriminatory lending policies.

The Biden administration has unveiled the country’s first-ever strategy for gender equity and equality.

The nonprofit AstroAccess arranged a zero-gravity research flight to explore how people with disabilities could safely go to space.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), and Grace Meng (D-NY) have reintroduced a bill to provide a fasttrack for legal status to immigrants who helped clear debris after 9/11.