Crooked Media - What A Day: Inf'ra treat

 -Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill

While you were enjoying your Friday evening, House Democrats did what for months they couldn’t and didn’t want to: passed one half of President Biden’s economic agenda without the other. We hope you enjoyed your long-overdue infrastructure weekend!
 

• Thirteen House Republicans joined all but six Democrats to pass Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, and send it to the White House for his signature. When it becomes law it will allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to building and repairing roads and bridges, public transit, and passenger rail, replacing lead water pipes, modernizing the electricity grid, and expanding broadband-internet access to rural communities. Among other things.
   
• Why did Democrats change tacks? Particularly given months worth of evidence that centrist Democrats and corporate lobbyists wanted to decouple the BIF from the Build Back Better Act, to gain leverage over the latter? Well, it probably had something to do with the fact that months of gridlock eroded Biden’s approval ratings, and demoralized Democrats, setting them up to take a beating in Tuesday’s off-off year elections. 
   
• It may also be the case that Democrats believe the Build Back Better Act is most of the way done and too big to fail. Most House Democrats, including progressive caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, supported the decision to delink the two bills; the agreement for their votes required the pass to also pass a measure setting up debate and a final passage vote on BBB, making it hard for House centrists to renege. The decision has spooked many progressives, who believe Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are now free to double cross the party. But conservatives are just as certain that Democrats wouldn’t have passed BIF without locking down both bills, and are furious at the 13 House Republicans who helped them seal the deal.

It’s also worth noting that the completion of the BIF is hugely and satisfyingly embarrassing for the GOP.
 

• After four years through which disgraced former president Donald Trump talked a big game but comprehensively failed to make any progress on infrastructure legislation, Biden logged hundreds of billions of dollars for needed, popular investments in less than a year. Biden took the opportunity to rub it in on Saturday at a White House press event. “Well, finally: Infrastructure Week. I’m so happy to say that: Infrastructure Week.”
   
• It also creates an awkward situation for the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans who are left to explain why they voted against investments they claim to support and their constituents need. If it’s socialism, why did 19 GOP senators (including Mitch McConnell) and 13 House Republicans vote for it? If it’s good for the country, why did they oppose it? Presumably they’ll have answers at the ready when they start showing up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Check out the latest episode of Jon Favreau’s new weekly interview series Offline with Jon Favreau. This week, host of Snapchat’s Good Luck America Peter Hamby talks to Jon about why Twitter has ruined political journalism, how the internet transformed the media business, and what a healthy, sustainable model of journalism might look like. New episodes of Offline drop every Sunday in the Pod Save America feed.

The economic bounceback from the pandemic could leave Americans, particularly in colder climates and remote parts of the country, paying significantly more in energy bills than they did last winter—something to keep in mind for when Republicans inevitably pretend to believe it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. Natural gas, which half of all households rely upon for winter heating, along with crude oil and propane, which help heat a smaller number of homes, have both about doubled in price since last winter. That reflects an increase in demand for energy as pandemic-related risks have fallen, but it also means people’s heating bills are likely to be higher this winter than in recent years—that is, unless the much larger problem of climate change delivers the country a milder-than-expected cold season. In anticipation of these costs, the Biden administration released most of the funds in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and is currently entertaining calls to provide other forms of relief, or even include heating assistance in the Build Back Better Act.

• The House January 6 committee has subpoenaed six more members of Trump’s inner circle including John Eastman, Jason Miller, and Michael Flynn.
   
• The Atlanta district attorney is reportedly prepared to empanel a grand jury to advance her criminal investigation of disgraced former president Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in Georgia.
   
• Three Republican-appointed judges, two nominated by Trump, blocked enforcement of Biden administration workplace vaccination rules that aren’t even in effect yet.
   
• President Obama delivered a rousing call in Glasgow for countries to accelerate emissions reductions and excoriated Republicans for “active hostility to climate science,” and Trump specifically for pulling out of the Paris accords unilaterally. 
   
• The Justice Department seized $6 million in payments from a Ukrainian hacker and accomplice who deployed REvil ransomware against an American company this summer.  
   
• A California-based cybersecurity company says foreign hackers have infiltrated major organizations around the world as part of an operation to steal data from U.S. defense contractors among others. 
   
• NRSC chairman Rick Scott refused to say whether Trump-backed Pennsylvania Senate candidate Sean Parnell, whose wife accused him under oath of strangling her and abusing their children, is the right man for the job.
   
• Multi-level-marketing schemers have showered Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) with donations, based on their keen sense that she’ll protect them from congressional action if they give her enough money.
   
• Eight people died and scores suffered injuries on Friday when a crowd rushed the stage at rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival in Houston, TX.
   
• Here’s Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) playing footsie with the notion of seceding from the union and stealing military installations, the space program, and oil reserves from the United States.
   
• If you want to pay the Intellectual Dark Web to enroll in a fake university that doesn’t offer any degrees, that may be something you can soon do to own the libs. 
   
• Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said the world’s richest man Elon Musk ought to pay more than $0 in taxes, so Musk said Wyden’s Twitter avatar makes it look like he just ejaculated. Don’t kill the messenger, folks!
   
• Penis worms may have been hermitc before crabs. Don’t kill the messenger, folks!
   
• Republicans are extremely mad at Big Bird for trying to protect children from the deadly novel coronavirus.

Some of the nation’s most prominent coup-supporters conducted a pre-election exercise to game out what would happen if they tried to do a coup, and you’ll never guess what happened next! But it turns out the aims and intentions of the pro-insurrection “intellectual” class are far more insidious and bloody than the events of January 6. In a fantastical report called “79 Days to Inauguration” Trump loyalists convened by the right-wing Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation contemplated what their political allies might and should do in the event of a contested election, and it went way beyond storming the Capitol. In their imaginations, right-wing paramilitaries, operating with the cooperation of federal and local law-enforcement officers, would have had carte blanche to arrest anti-Trump protesters demanding, kill their leaders, and declare Trump the winner.

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McDonalds employees in Bradford, PA, walked out in protest of meager wages and poor working conditions, and most quickly landed in higher-paying jobs, in an example of the kind of small-scale collective labor action that has been playing out across the country since the pandemic began.

The Biden administration plans to undo a last-minute Trump order exempting federal contractors who cite religious belief from rules prohibiting gender-idnetity and sexual-orientation discrimination.

A particular COVID-19 antibody appears to confer protection not just to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, but to variants and other coronaviruses as well. 

Heinz was able to produce tomato-based ketchup in conditions engineered to mimic the climate on Mars.