Crooked Media - What A Day: Rom-vom Sinema

At long last, President Biden has unveiled a new framework for the Build Back Better Act, featuring the drastic cuts that were necessary to get all 50 Senate Democrats on board. Guess which two ding-dongs still haven’t committed to voting for it?
 

• Here’s what’s in the $1.75 trillion proposal: The biggest climate investment in U.S. history (more on that in a moment), universal pre-K and an improved plan to reduce child care costs, a one-year extension of the child tax credit, and the biggest expansion of affordable health care in a decade, including an expansion of Medicare to include hearing benefits. (Sorry, old people with teeth and/or eyes.) The pay-fors include a new tax surcharge on Americans with incomes above $10 million.
   
• If you’d never heard about Biden’s original proposal, this version would sound pretty sick! We may have mentioned it, though, so here are the provisions that fell prey to Smanchinema: Paid family and medical leave, prescription-drug pricing reform, a Medicare expansion that would have covered dental and vision, the clean electricity program, free community college, and a billionaires tax that had the added bonus of making Elon Musk cry. Democrats insist many of those provisions are still on the table, but as of Thursday, they’re out of the bill.
   
• Barring any last-minute centrist hijinks, Biden will have a historic clean-energy investment to show off at the U.N. climate summit. After Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) torpedoed the Clean Electricity Performance Program and a fee on methane, Biden’s new climate proposal includes $555 billion for measures focused on incentives, like tax breaks for clean energy and electric vehicles. Combined with federal regulation and state action, that plan could still allow the U.S. to reach Biden’s goal of cutting emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030.

It’s not everything it might have been, but it would be transformative. Now Democrats just have to actually pass it. 

• While many progressives are less than thrilled about the missing priorities, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said Thursday that members of the House Progressive Caucus “enthusiastically endorse” Biden’s framework, and that they were psyched to vote for both infrastructure bills in tandem. What they were not prepared to do was pass the bipartisan bill quickly on its own, once again thwarting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s odd attempt to gift Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) even more leverage over the reconciliation bill. Instead, the House will pass another short-term extension for surface transportation funding.
   
• All Manchin and Sinema have to do is stop making nauseating GIFs with Mitt Romney for long enough to say “I hereby commit to voting for the compromise I tyrannically demanded.” So far, they haven’t done it. Sinema released a vaguely positive statement saying that she and the White House “have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package.”  Manchin said he was “going to work in good faith,” while declining to publicly support the deal, which looks suspiciously like bad faith. Anyway, dozens of House Democrats have decided not to trust them for some reason.
   

As Biden pitched Democrats on the new framework, he told them, “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.” The party has made huge concessions to save the core of Biden’s agenda; what happens in the next week is all up to Manchin and Sinema. 

Today is the two year anniversary of What A Day the podcast, a.k.a the morning companion to the newsletter you’re reading right now! That’s two years of breaking down the biggest news stories in a way that hopefully doesn’t make you cry. Congratulations to our hosts Gideon Resnick, Priyanka Aribindi, Tre’vell Anderson, Josie Duffy Rice and the entire team at What A Day for reaching this incredible milestone.

To celebrate, What A Day has a brand new band tee available now in the Crooked Store! New episodes drop every weekday at 5:00am Eastern. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Big Oil CEOs testified under oath for the first time about the fossil-fuel industry’s role in spreading climate disinformation, in a landmark House hearing on Thursday. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform hauled in top executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Royal Dutch Shell to question them about their decades-long campaign to mislead the public about the role fossil fuels play in global warming. “They are obviously lying like the tobacco executives were,″ said Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney. Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) and her undefeated visual aids accused the companies of “greenwashing” their emissions with misleading ads that celebrate renewable energy, but account for a tiny fraction of their spending. To demonstrate that they’re not actually dishonest villains greedily laying waste to the planet, the executives, uh, refused to concede that climate change poses an “existential threat” or pledge that their companies wouldn’t lobby against future efforts to reduce emissions. Okey dokey.

• One of Andrew Cuomo’s victims has filed a criminal complaint accusing him of forcible touching, a misdemeanor sex crime, in Albany City Court. 
   
• The country’s economic-growth rate slowed to two percent in the third quarter as the Delta variant and supply chain bottlenecks disrupted the recovery.
   
• Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) sure seems to have warned his brother-in-law to dump stock based on nonpublic information at the outset of the pandemic, according to the SEC, which is still investigating Burr for insider trading.
   
• The Justice Department has reached an $88 million settlement with the families of the 2015 Charleston, SC, church shooting victims. The families had accused the government of negligence in the background-check system that allowed Dylann Roof to buy a gun.
   
• Facebook is called “Meta” now, and what do you know, it still sucks ass.  
   
• An American Airlines passenger punched a flight attendant who asked him to wear a mask, breaking her nose and sending her to the hospital.
   
• A federal judge has ordered Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and his family to disclose who’s paying for their defamation lawsuit over a 2018 Esquire story about their Iowa farm. 
   
• Tucker Carlson is now openly pushing “false flag” rhetoric about the January 6 attack, so that’s good.
   
• Joe Biden gave Olivia Rodrigo a shoehorn when she visited the White House and the lamestream liberal media is letting him off the hook for it.
   
• Penny the Fire Pig, an Instagram-famous teacup piglet, has outed herself as an anti-vaxxer. Nothing gold can stay.

A Texas GOP lawmaker has drawn up a list of 850 books that could “make students feel discomfort,” as Republicans continue to explore their war on education/incredible Safe Space Party rebrand. State Rep. Matt Krause’s (R) list of titles that touch on the forbidden literary topics of “race” or “sex” includes the Pulitzer-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner, along with V For Vendetta, The Cider House Rules, and a graphic novel of The Handmaid’s Tale. Krause has asked Texas school districts to let him know how many copies of each book they have and how much money they spent on them, and to identify “any other books” that he would hate. Not to steal focus from the unique awfulness of Texas Republicans, but this is the kind of stunt Virginians have in store if Glenn Youngkin wins Tuesday’s gubernatorial election, and a new Fox News poll shows him taking the lead. Take it with a grain of salt, but let’s make this last GOTV weekend count: votesaveamerica.com/virginia. 

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. 

A cheap, widely available antidepressant is effective as a life-saving coronavirus treatment, a large clinical trial found.

Fair Fight has donated $1.34 million to wipe out the medical debt of 108,000 people in Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Tyson Foods has reached a 96 percent vaccination rate after implementing a vaccine mandate. 

Happy zoo-animals-destroying-pumpkins season to all who celebrate.