In the almost two weeks since Democrats in Congress recommitted to passing both the Senate infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act in tandem, before the end of October, they have made big strides toward consensus that Build Back Better will be...something something.
 

• In a letter to colleagues Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that Democrats would deal with their new Sinemanchinized spending cap by shrinking the number of reforms in Build Back Better, rather than by making all the reforms smaller and less generous. “Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well so that we can still have a transformative impact on families in the workplace and responsibly address the climate crisis,” she wrote. 
   
• But then at a Capitol press briefing on Tuesday, she said Democrats “hope” they will not have to drop key family support programs from their bill, and would instead be “cutting back on years.” In other words, instead of dropping lower-priority programs to bulletproof a smaller number of reforms, they’ll include many programs in Build Back Better and set them to expire in a few years. That would hold down the price tag of the bill itself, and line up political fights throughout the coming decade over whether the programs should expire or be renewed.  
   
• The continued indecision reflects divisions within the party over which approach is preferable. Progressives would generally like to create many expansive reforms, and bet on them to be so popular that even Republicans will refuse to let them expire. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) seems to think that political calculation is correct, but views it as a bad thing, and thus wants the bill to create a smaller number of permanent reforms and drop the rest.

The Manchin approach may sound tidier and less risky, but in the near-term it makes everything more complicated.
 

• One problem is that some Build Back Better priorities are inextricably linked to one another. Manchin reportedly hopes to scale back or drop Biden’s plan to subsidize child-care services and focus instead on creating a universal pre-kindergarten program. The difficulty is that if you fund universal pre-K without also funding daycare for infants and younger toddlers, the daycare facilities will lose staff to beefed up pre-K institutions and thus have to either shrink or close or raise prices.
   
• Another problem is that Build Back Better is only so big because the safety net hasn’t been updated in over a decade and demand for improvements has piled up. Forcing Democrats to eliminate some priorities from their agenda will exacerbate tensions within the party coalition and among legislators who have spent years building support for their pet issues, which may soon be on the chopping block. It’s harder to build support and enthusiasm for child-care reforms if enacting them required abandoning, say, vision and dental coverage for seniors. 

If you’re in Los Angeles and looking for an alternative to sitting on your couch and scrolling on your feed, look no further than this week’s Lovett or Leave It live show at Cinelounge Outdoors in Hollywood. On Thursday, October 14, host Jon Lovett will be joined on stage by friend of the pod Akilah Hughes, plus Larry Wilmore, Solomon Georgio, and Brandon Wardell. To secure your tickets, head to Crooked.com/events.

The Paycheck Protection Program, which helped protect businesses from the ravages of the pandemic, also empowered smaller banks with racist staff to withhold loans from black borrowers through 2020. Though the program was administered by private lenders, the federal government underwrote its loans. That eliminated credit risk as a criterion for rejecting loan applications, which in turn insulated the program from exacerbating a key existing racial disparity among business owners. Nevertheless, minority entrepreneurs had a much harder time securing PPP loans in the program’s first several months than white ones did, and in a new paper, economists at NYU argue that racial animus at small banks was a big source of the disparity. Controlling for geography, industry, existing relationships with lenders, and other variables, these researchers found that small banks were far less likely than big banks to lend to black-owned businesses. Moreover, small banks with automated lending processes (like the ones big banks and financial-technology companies tend to rely on) exhibited less bias than small banks where workers approve or reject loan applications, and that the effect became more pronounced in parts of the country with higher levels of racial animus.

The upshot, beyond the obvious outrage, could be to re-weight existing debates over how institutions perpetuate bias. Automated and algorithm-driven systems have been under increasing scrutiny for perpetuating biases in opaque and accidental ways; these findings are a reminder that cruder human racism still likely accounts for the lion’s share of racial injustice in America.  

• Raiders head coach Jon Gruden resigned abruptly on Monday after the New York Times obtained homophobic and misogynistic emails he sent, and after a previous investigation revealed him to have sent racist emails as well. 
   
• Republican senators say they don’t want disgraced former president Donald Trump to run again in 2020, but only when they can do so anonymously.
   
• Here's Virginia's Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin hanging out with crypto-Nazi Sebastian Gorka.
   
• The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force says doctors should no longer recommend daily aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke in high-risk patients, because the benefits are dwarfed by the risk of internal bleeding. 
   
• Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a member of the January 6 select committee, warned Steve Bannon and other witnesses that they will be referred to the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress if they defy their subpoenas. 
   
• The House select committee on the coronavirus has deposed Dr. Deborah Birx. 
   
• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) announced Florida won’t conduct a Cyber Ninja’s-style sham audit, setting up a long and hungrily awaited confrontation between him and Trump. 
   
• Trump administration officials were not particularly scrupulous about observing anti-bribery laws governing gifts to and from foreign officials, if you can even believe it.
   
• Feral Trump loyalists in a north Texas county Trump won by a huge margin hounded their elections administrator out of office as part of an effort to transfer her authority to the county clerk, whom they like because she posts election-theft conspiracy theories and “Impeach Biden” content on social media. 
   
• Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), chair of the House Budget Committee, will retire at the end of this term. 
   
• To whomever hacked Maxine Waters’s Twitter account: Good luck.

There’s another Facebook whistleblower and she’s prepared to testify before Congress. Data scientist Sophie Zhang says she feels like she has “blood on her hands” because of her involvement with the company. Her complaints center around the allegation that Facebook takes few if any steps to curb hatred and disinformation in smaller and developing countries, leaving citizens of those countries much more vulnerable to corrupt political leaders than larger countries with more robust regulators. Zhang detailed and published her concerns in a lengthy online memo after Facebook fired her, prompting Facebook to retaliate by asking her hosting service and domain to zap her website. She claims to have submitted company documents that contain evidence of criminal activity to an unnamed federal law-enforcement agency.

We all know people affected by cancer… and have probably donated to cancer research fundraisers. Yet we don’t always understand what is happening in cancer research and how our loved ones may be helped. 

That’s why we, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute launched Unraveled. This new podcast takes us beyond the news headlines to share stories about the progress of cancer research.

Hear from the doctors, the researchers, the patients and the science involved in the breakthroughs that are transforming cancer research and providing hope for scientists and cancer patients. Hear how cancer researchers are using genetically engineered T Cells to turn a patient’s immune system into a cancer fighting machine. Learn about the complex process by which some cancers hijack the body’s response to oxygen deprivation, and how that discovery led to a Nobel Prize for one scientist. Listen in to hear how cancer research and care kept going even through the depths of the COVID pandemic. 

Listen to Unraveled from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  Find out more at www.dana-farber.org/unraveled.

Colorado will require private health-insurance plans to cover transition-related medical care for transgender patients as essential benefits.

Former White House COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt says forthcoming studies will show that mixing and matching of vaccines is both safe and has advantages over single-regimen boosters.

A group of anti-Trump Republicans co-led by former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R-NJ) will work to elect Democrats until the authoritarian threat to the U.S. is over.

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to re-suspend enforcement of Texas’s abortion ban.