Crooked Media - What A Day: Beg, borrow, or Thiel

 -Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, whose defense against groping allegations somehow gets worse from there

After days of thumb-twiddling, the Biden administration has taken decisive action to address a major legal threat to one of the federal government’s most powerful pandemic-mitigation authorities: injecting bleach requiring masks in government-regulated public spaces.  
 

• At the CDC’s urging, the Department of Justice has finally appealed Monday’s ruling by a Trump-loyal federal judge in Florida to void the CDC’s rules requiring masks inside travel hubs. The DOJ's announcement marks a belated acknowledgement that the ruling is a serious threat to federal public-health powers and can’t be allowed to stand. It also marks a notable contrast to President Biden’s response to a reporter’s question about whether people should still wear masks on planes, which suggested he might be OK with the ruling.
   
• The president’s recent hesitation to engage in this wave of pandemic politics, and laissez-faire “Smoke 'em if you got 'em” attitude towards masking ahead of the midterm elections is a calculated risk that could ultimately have more negative repercussions for Democrats and public-health institutions than he bargained for. First, a new poll found that the majority of Americans support mask requirements on planes and other forms of public transportation, so waffling on this issue seems more likely to hurt the administration politically in the near term than help. Second, the administration’s failure to immediately signal it would challenge the Florida decision shows a level of ambivalence that could be used against the government in the appeal. And if the appeal fails, the CDC could have less authority to impose similar mask requirements or other public-health rules in the future.
   
• And there’s good reason for concern about an overall loosening of COVID-19-related restrictions at this point, because contrary to what Marjorie Taylor Greene wants you to believe, the pandemic is not over. While cases are still much lower than they were during previous infection spikes, they have climbed about 35 percent over the past two weeks. Turning airports across the country into superspreading sites for people en route to see family and coworkers is a great way to fuel another full-blown wave. 

Fortunately (???) a more general ambivalence seems to have grabbed hold of the party, just in time for the midterms.

• Despite messaging from the White House and top party leaders about the vital importance of voting rights and the dangers of election subversion, Democrats seem to have largely ceded the democracy space to Republicans spewing the Big Lie and inverting the truth. 
   
• The GOP’s disturbingly-successful anti-voting rights offensive is all the more maddening, of course, because the Republican Party is so clearly bent on destruction of democracy. An explosive new report  alleges that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy planned to tell Trump to resign after the events, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell privately stated that Trump should be impeached. But they of course went crawling back, knowing just how existential Trump’s threat to democracy is. 

Check out the latest episode of Stuck with Damon Young! This week, on “Stuck on All the Shiny Sh*t I Want to Buy” Damon unpacks the whiplash of new money with Samantha Irby and Mehrsa Baradaran. Follow Stuck with Damon Young, only on Spotify, to get new episodes every Tuesday.

It turns out JD Vance is just one cog in Peter Thiel’s vast disinformation apparatus. A new Vanity Fair exposé reports that Thiel has also given money to a small army of podcasters, influencers, and bloggers, many of whom have positioned themselves as online “leftists” or even self-described “Marxists.” Regardless of where any particular influencer falls on the political spectrum, the methodology is always the same: Thiel’s conservative Republican (often sneeringly white-nationalist) ideas are funneled through figures purporting themselves to be “post-partisan” populists, to a breathtakingly wide collective audience. Just imagine the worst people on the internet from every ideological extreme banding together as paid-but-undisclosed foot soldiers in the far-right infowars and you basically get the idea.

• Donald Trump is about to sell his Washington, DC, hotel where he did a lot of corruption for $375 Million, unless the Biden administration can get it together to cancel Trump’s lease on the property which belongs to, um, us. 
   
• In an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Ricans do not have rights to U.S. federal disability benefits under the Supplemental Security Income(SSI) program. Justice Sonia Sotomayor cast the sole dissenting vote. 
   
• Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has addressed the incriminating texts he exchanged with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election, claiming “I was not there to do [President Trump’s] bidding,” about the text messages in which he literally offered to do Trump’s bidding. 
   
• The most significant escalation in Israeli-Palestinian violence in over a year erupted in Gaza on Thursday morning.
   
• In a televised debate last night, French President Emmanuel Macron laid out his far-right challenger Marine Le Pen’s overt ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Zut alors!
   
• A Kaiser Family Foundation report states that 234,000 people have died preventably of COVID-19 since the coronavirus vaccine went on the market. File that under “something we knew was going to happen but is still massively upsetting.” Also under “thanks, Republicans.”
   
• Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) has vetoed a bipartisan bill that would rein in the state’s most negligent landlords in the latest and perhaps most baffling installment of “terrible people protecting each other for profit.” 
   
• Police abruptly evacuated the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday night citing a “probable threat”, which turned out to be a parachute demonstration as part of “Military Appreciation Night” at the Washington Nationals baseball game, making it the Most Wholesome Probable-Threat Warning in history.
   
• Los Angeles-based company Sameday Technologies faces a $20 million fine for sending fake COVID-19 test results to hundreds of people, telling them they had tested negative for the coronavirus when laboratories had not actually run their tests.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory in the city of Mariupol while also ordering his troops not to risk more casualties by storming the giant steel plant where some 2,000 Ukrainian holdouts in the city have created a fortress, calling instead for a full blockade of the facility. But he could scarcely create more carnage: Newly-released satellite images show more than 200 fresh mass graves where Ukrainian officials say Russians have been burying Mariupol residents killed in the violence, triggering an almost-immediate response from the United States. 

• The Biden Administration pledged an additional $1.3 billion in financial aid and weapons to Ukraine, including heavy artillery and drones, along with a new program that will streamline Ukrainian refugees entering the United States. 

• The U.S. Treasury Department announced more sanctions against Russia last night, this time targeting companies in Russia’s virtual-currency mining industry, the third largest in the world. 

• President Biden also announced today that Russian ships will be banned from all U.S. ports as the latest attempt to cut Russia off from the West. 

We can only hope that Putin is somewhere cursing the sea and crying, “Not my boats!”

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) will visit two recently-unionized Starbucks and Amazon locations this weekend to congratulate workers, take selfies, and presumably compare what everyone’s favorite soups are.

The Human Rights Campaign announced it has erected billboards condemning Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law in Tampa, Tallahassee, and the Orlando area, with plans for more across Southern Florida.

A new study from Cambridge University of over 12,000 cancer patients, the largest of its kind, uncovered 58 new genome patterns that researchers believe will lead to improved prevention and treatments.

Today is Queen Elizabeth’s 96th Birthday. That’s kind of fun, right? Okay I’m sorry everybody I know it’s not fun. But 96 *is* certainly a lot of years, so congrats, Liz!