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Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has an inspiring message for children growing up in a world wracked by climate change and economic inequality. And, to paraphrase slightly, that message is: Sucks to be you!
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As the end of October draws near, and pressure mounts on Democrats to finally pass their economic agenda, Manchin has reportedly begun to make concrete demands, and they are not good. According to Axios, Manchin has insisted that President Biden scale back his expanded child tax credit by including a work requirement and capping the benefit at an annual family income of $60,000, instead of the current $150,000. That would reduce the 10-year cost of the program, and possibly allow Democrats to fund it on a permanent basis. But it would also dramatically limit the program’s reach, and families who make between $60,000 and $150,000 would experience it as a tax increase.
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Manchin also reportedly opposes Build Back Better’s clean electricity program—the centerpiece of Biden’s climate-change agenda. It would reward utilities for sourcing electricity from clean energy and penalize those that do not. Manchin’s opposition has Democrats scrambling for alternative mechanisms for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, including a blunter but more politically contentious carbon tax, because it endangers Biden’s entire infrastructure vision. Remember “no climate, no deal”?
- Now that Manchin has made clear that getting his vote will require not just tweaking but dramatically scaling back Biden’s ambitions, knives are out. Most recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) published an op-ed in the Charleston, WV, Gazette-Mail singling out Manchin as one of only two Democratic senators currently aligned with “the drug companies, the insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire class,” against Build Back Better. Manchin fired back with a statement dismissing Sanders as a “self-declared Independent socialist.”
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Perhaps West Virginia is somehow immune from the ravages of the modern world?
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Fraid not. The Niskanen Center ran the numbers and found that the cuts and changes Manchin has demanded to Biden’s child tax credit would deprive almost 200,000 West Virginia children of the benefit, and siphon over a quarter-billion dollars out of the state’s struggling economy. It would also weaken aspects of the program that strengthen the labor market by providing help to fewer parents who would be working but for the costs and demands of child care.
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Also, it turns out that West Virginia is, to exaggerate just a bit, a giant floodplain. Manchin’s home state has the worst exposure to flood damage in the country, according to new data from the First Street Foundation. Residents there don’t have great options if forced to relocate from flooding waterways, in part because of the state’s mountainous terrain, and in part because the state’s government is overrun with climate deniers. Unfortunately for them, Manchin is highly invested in the dirty-energy industry, and only narrowly invested in the houseboat industry.
Manchin’s antics and changing goalposts have begun to rankle even his most patient Senate colleagues. We have to hope pressure from them and the general public (and, uh, the Pope) will help him discover wiggle room. Otherwise saving the most important parts of Biden’s agenda from him will require a miracle.
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Is the internet slowly breaking our brains, and if so, what can we do about it? In the new weekly series Offline with Jon Favreau, the Pod Save America co-host sits down for candid conversations with newsmakers, political figures, artists, entertainers, and writers, to get their take on how the internet shapes the way we live, for better or worse. Guests open up about how the internet shapes their day-to-day, and when they know it’s time to put the phone down. Offline examines society’s online habits, looks inward, and reaches for hopeful ways we can regain control over our hyperconnected world. Check out the series trailer for Offline With Jon Faverau right now. And stay tuned for the first episode dropping Sunday, October 24th. To listen, follow along on the Pod Save America feed.
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Colin Powell, the first African American chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and secretary of state has died of coronavirus complications. At the time he contracted COVID-19, Powell was fighting multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer that attacks the immune system, and made him highly vulnerable to COVID-19. According to a July study published in Nature, only 45 percent of patients with active multiple myeloma had an “adequate” immune response to the mRNA vaccines, which makes his death a reminder of how important and pro-social it is for people with healthy immune systems to get vaccinated. But because Powell was vaccinated and died anyhow, Fox News and other anti-vaccine forces immediately seized upon his death to sow doubt about the effectiveness of the vaccines in general. Powell served in several GOP administrations, and is perhaps most widely remembered as an architect of the Iraq war who lent his global reputation as an honest broker to a misleading justification for the invasion to the United Nations. He was 84.
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- President Biden supports the House January 6 Select Committee's decision to refer witnesses who defy subpoenas to the Justice Department for prosecution, and supports the Justice Department taking up those cases.
- On the other hand, disgraced former president Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit intended to prevent the same committee from obtaining documents it has subpoenaed (or, at least to tie them up in court until it’s too late).
- Dozens of judges across the country traded stock in companies that were actively engaged in litigation before their courts, in violation of federal law and ethics rules.
- The military judge presiding over the sentencing of Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who defied orders by publicly criticizing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, had to repeatedly mute Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) because she interspersed her virtual pleas for leniency with calls to impeach President Biden and other right-wing agitprop.
- Dozens of immigration activists “walked out” of a virtual meeting with Biden officials in protest of the administration’s continuation of Trump-era border policies.
- The oil spill that polluted Southern California beaches earlier this month might have been the consequence of a months old accident involving a cargo ship that dragged its anchor in rough seas, and inadvertently yanked a pipeline across the ocean floor.
- Murderer Robert Durst tested positive for coronavirus and was placed on a ventilator the day after a judge sentenced him to life in prison at a sentencing hearing where Durst labored to breathe and occasionally pulled down his mask.
- Startling revelations about Politico’s new owner, German publisher Axel Springer, including its international requirement that employees adopt pro-Israel politics and its seemingly lax sexual-harassment policies, were not mentioned in Playbook, a list of birthdays.
- Rep. David Price (D-NC) will retire at the end of this term.
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It’s difficult to quantify the GOP’s descent into authoritarianism, but here’s one approach. Of the hundreds of GOP lawmakers nationwide who have spread election lies, and nearly two dozen who actually participated in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, only one—West Virginia state delegate Derrick Evans, who filmed himself entering the Capitol—has resigned. The rest—who account for about 15 percent of all GOP state-level lawmakers nationwide, have either suffered no consequences or seen their political fortunes within the party rise. Three actual insurrectionists are now running for statewide office with Donald Trump’s support. Four are scheduled to speak this week at a QAnon conference organized by a genuine neo-Nazi. And that’s to say nothing of the non-elected Republicans who have entered GOP politics on the coattails of Trump’s election lies, including Kari Lake, the frontrunner for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Arizona, whose platform includes lies about the 2020 election and threats to imprison her Democratic opponent and unnamed members of the media.
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