The House easily passed a $78 billion bipartisan tax package on Wednesday after days of tensions within the House GOP, but it's already showing signs of trouble in the Senate.
Why it matters: The deal left House GOP leadership scrambling to appease various factions' grievances about the measure, and ultimately passed with the help of Democrats.
- In the eleventh-hour, GOP leadership provided assurances to moderate GOP New Yorkers that a fix for the state and local tax deduction would see action in the House.
- Conservatives who voted against the measure blasted it for being brought up on suspension of the rules and argued it provided tax relief to undocumented immigrants — an allegation House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) said was not true.
The big picture: While the deal made it out of the House, it faces hurdles in the upper chamber as key senators say they won't support it in its current form.
- Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a former chair of the Senate Finance Committee, appeared to say the quiet part out loud on Wednesday when he suggested presidential politics would play a role in the bill's fate.
- "Passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — mailing out checks before the election — means he could be re-elected, and then we won't extend the 2017 tax cuts," Grassley told reporters, incorrectly characterizing the child tax credit provision as a mailed check.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Disinformation about “open border” policies is helping spur a massive wave of Central American migrants to take the perilous journey north to the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a poll by America’s Voice, a national advocacy group pushing for immigration reform.
The poll, obtained by The Dallas Morning News, indicates many Central American residents are encouraged to travel up to the U.S.-Mexico border based on false narratives.
...About 8 in 10 Central Americans surveyed said they have heard, read or seen what is happening at the border, according to the poll, and about two-thirds said they have heard or read about U.S. asylum policies.
Meanwhile, 1 in 4 Central American respondents said they have heard the “border is open,” and nearly 1 in 5 respondents said they believed the term “open borders” — and believed most migrants can apply for asylum if they make the trip.
I’m not sure which is funnier — the Xweet itself, or the fact that MAGAs felt the need to post a Community Note “debunking” its “claims”:
Talk about shooting the messenger...
...In an email sent to staff on Wednesday afternoon, owner Jimmy Finkelstein said he was “personally devastated” to announce that The Messenger would be shutting down “effective immediately.” He added that he had “exhausted every option available” to secure enough funding to keep the site up.
… Additionally, employees publicly noted that media reporters had gotten the email Finkelstein sent out announcing the site’s extinction before many of them had.
Furthermore, as staffers noted online, The Messenger has no plans to provide any severance to impacted employees, and their health insurance benefits will also cease.
...By early evening on Wednesday, the site's homepage was replaced by a blank screen containing only the email address info@themessenger.com. Links to The Messenger articles also turned up the same blank screen.
...The announcement that The Messenger is no more puts a final coda on the site’s tumultuous nine-month run, which was beset by questions over its antiquated business model, executives fleeing due to clashes with Finkelstein’s handpicked president, journalists quitting over the site’s reliance on clickbait aggregation, and employee dissatisfaction with management’s lack of communication. Not to mention, of course, the company’s disastrous inability to draw revenue.
The Messenger was also a specific kind of failure. There is an uncanniness to it since it was perhaps uniquely predictable. In fact, it was so predictable it’s still a real mystery why the site was able to come into existence in the first place. This isn’t snark or crocodile tears. It’s a very strange story….
...Everyone sympathizes with the journalists, many of whom left really good jobs to take a chance on The Messenger. They all got burned badly. They trusted Finkelstein and he abused that trust horribly. But given the sheer amount of arrogance and stupidity Finkelstein and perhaps even more his investors brought to the effort a degree of schadenfreude on the part of onlookers is perhaps inevitable. But for myself and I suspect most others in the media business it’s not really schadenfreude so much as shock and amazement and just standing back aghast that the thing ever happened.
To extend my metaphor from above, it really is like if you were on a parachute jump and some cocky idiot just jumped out of the plane with no chute saying he had it covered and, obviously, plummeted to the ground died. You wouldn’t feel schadenfreude, though obviously dying is a lot more serious than lighting $50 million on fire. You’d just be slack jawed and amazed and feel sad about how needless and stupid the whole thing was. And that’s pretty much the story with and the appropriate epitaph for The Messenger.
An extensive investigation by The Associated Press has uncovered a vast, often overlooked workforce in the United States: prisoners who contribute significantly to the production of food products for several well-known brands. This revelation highlights a complex network of labor that influences the food industry and raises questions about labor practices within the prison system.
The journey of various food products to American households often begins in unexpected places, like the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a former slave plantation now known as the country’s largest maximum-security prison. Here, prisoners, often paid minimally or not at all, are involved in agricultural work, including cattle raising. These cattle are then sold and eventually become part of the supply chains of prominent companies like McDonald’s, Walmart, and Cargill.
The AP investigation traced agricultural products worth hundreds of millions of dollars back to prison labor, revealing how inmates are part of a hidden workforce contributing to a multitude of products found in American kitchens. This includes items like Frosted Flakes cereal, Ball Park hot dogs, Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola, and Riceland rice, available in major supermarkets across the nation.
The prisoners’ role in the food industry raises significant concerns about labor rights. Those who refuse to work can face serious consequences, including jeopardizing parole opportunities or solitary confinement. Moreover, prisoners are often excluded from protections afforded to other full-time workers and lack recourse even when seriously injured on the job.
This story is fascinating… even more so because in a long and comprehensive article, the author completely ignores the most important question: WHY?
From what I’ve been able to glean from other sources, the whole thing started due to pricing pressure from Walmart, that drove Huy Fong to put the screws to their suppliers, demolishing the friendly relationship that had made the whole business work...
...Sriracha’s success grew from the firm ground of Underwood and Tran’s business partnership: Underwood supplied all Huy Fong’s chilies, and Tran was Underwood Ranches’ only pepper buyer. By 2012, Tran had built a gleaming 650,000-square-foot factory less than two hours from Underwood’s Ventura County headquarters. On a tour of the site, he told Underwood that together they would fill it with chilies.
...The schism turned out to be even more catastrophic than either side could have imagined. It left Tran without the peppers he needed to meet the ever-growing demand for his sriracha. Since he lost Underwood’s chilies, his massive factory in Irwindale, Calif., has operated sporadically, at a fraction of its capacity. For the first year after the split, Huy Fong got by on stockpiled mash and Mexican chilies, which were cheap because of a glut. But supply has often been spotty since then: In the first half of 2023, Huy Fong had no chilies at all.
Underwood, meanwhile, faced financial ruin: The vast swaths of land that he had purchased or leased to grow jalapeños couldn’t be planted without a buyer. He was locked into 25-year leases on much of the land he had expanded into, and he didn’t have cash on hand to pay his own suppliers. He took out loans, sold some parcels, and laid off 45 workers.
Both businesses lost millions. The two men became bitter enemies—and they offer sharply contrasting accounts of what went wrong.
The stakes of the election go far beyond whether a GOP president signs a bill banning the procedure.
Anti-abortion groups have not yet persuaded Donald Trump to commit to signing a national ban if he returns to the White House.
But, far from being deterred, those groups are designing a far-reaching anti-abortion agenda for the former president to implement as soon as he is in office.
...The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project — a coalition that includes Students for Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion organizations — is drafting executive orders to roll back Biden-era policies that have expanded abortion access, such as making abortions available in some circumstances at VA hospitals. They are also collecting resumes from conservative activists interested in becoming political appointees or career civil servants and training them to use overlooked levers of agency power to curb abortion access.
“We’re trying to do as much, now, of the future president’s work that we can,” Spencer Chretien, a former special assistant to Trump who now runs Project 2025, recently told a packed room at Students for Life’s annual DC conference. “We need our people, our pro-life conservative people across America, to get fired up and to know that help is on the way and that they have something to look forward to.”
MIAMI (AP) — A small venture capital firm faced tough questions from conservative judges Wednesday as it defended a grant program for Black women-owned businesses in a lawsuit that has become emblematic of a growing legal backlash against corporate diversity programs.
The Fearless Fund, which provides early stage funding for businesses owned by women of color, is asking a three-judge panel in a U.S. federal court of appeals to lift an injunction against one of its programs, the Strivers Grant Contest, which provides $20,000 to businesses that are majority owned by Black women. The conservative group American Alliance for Equal Rights, filed a lawsuit last fall arguing that the program discriminates against people of other races.
...The Fearless Fund case has become a rallying point for civil rights activists who argue that a ruling dismantling the program would endanger other donations or programs designed to help disadvantaged groups. The Fearless Fund was founded to address the huge racial disparity in funding for businesses owned by women of color. Less than 1% of venture capital funding, for example, goes to businesses owned by Black and Hispanic women, according to the nonprofit advocacy group digitalundivided.
In the early 2000s, as climate denialism was infecting political institutions around the world like a malevolent plague, an Australian epidemiologist named Anthony McMichael took on a peculiar and morbid scientific question: How many people were being killed by climate change?
McMichael’s research team tallied up how many lives had been lost to diarrheal disease, malnutrition, malaria, cardiovascular disease (a proxy for heat-related illness), and flooding, worldwide, in the year 2000. The researchers then used computer modeling to parse out the percentage of those deaths that were attributable to climate change. Climate change, they estimated, was responsible for 166,000 lives lost that year.
...And 4 million lives lost due to climate change, a breathtakingly high number, is still an underestimate — probably a big one. The McMichael standard doesn’t include deaths linked to climate-driven surges of the many non-malarial diseases spread by mosquitoes, like dengue and West Nile virus. It doesn’t incorporate deaths caused by deadly bacteria, fungal spores, ticks, and other diseases or carriers of disease that are shifting in range and breadth as the planet warms.
It doesn’t examine the impacts of wildfires and wildfire smoke on longevity. It doesn’t look at the mental health consequences of extreme heat and extreme weather and the related increase in suicides that have been documented in recent years. “At the time we were doing it, we already knew it was conservative,” said Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a coauthor of McMichael’s 2003 study who is now the head of the climate change and health unit at the World Health Organization.
This past November, the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS, terminated what was to be “the first NuScale Power small modular reactor plant to begin operation in the United States.” This was a death foretold; the red flags have been obvious for years now. Although there were problems specific to that project, the financial challenges and cost trends witnessed in this case will afflict any small modular nuclear reactor project. In a rational world, no utility or government would invest another dime on these theoretical reactor concepts.
As announced in 2015, the UAMPS project initially involved constructing 12 reactor modules capable of generating 600 MW, with the aim of starting operations “around 2023,” and at an “overnight cost” of $3 billion. In 2018, NuScale announced a design modification with each module now producing 60 MW of electricity, or 720 MW for the whole plant, claiming this would lower the cost “on a per kilowatt basis from an expected $5,000 to approximately $4,200.”
The estimated costs of the project rose to $4.2 billion in 2018, then $6.1 billion in 2020, and finally $9.3 billion in 2023, after it was scaled down to 462 MW in 2021. In the end, the costs were clearly too high for UAMPS members to bear.
...All of this also means that nuclear power is not needed to solve the climate crisis. Not only are nuclear reactors very expensive, they also take a very long time to build. And this is time we don’t have because the climate crisis is urgent.
When announcing the end of the UAMPS project, NuScale’s Chief Executive Officer said on a conference call: “Once you’re on a dead horse, you dismount quickly. That’s where we are here.” The dead horse, in reality, is all the SMR projects. The sooner we get off this misguided quest, the more we can focus on rationally dealing with our energy and climate challenges.
They have the generational wisdom, environmental activism experience, free time — and they're not afraid of getting arrested.
...Climate grannies come equipped with decades of activism experience and aim to pressure the government and corporations to curb fossil fuel emissions. As a result they, alongside women of every age group, are turning out in bigger numbers, both at protests and the polls. All of the climate grandmothers The 19th interviewed for this piece noted one unifying theme: concern for their grandchildren’s futures.
According to research conducted by Dana R. Fisher, director for the Center of Environment, Community and Equity at American University, while the mainstream environmental movement has typically been dominated by men, women make up 61 percent of climate activists today. The average age of climate activists was 52 with 24 percent being 69 and older.
...A report released by the Environmental Voter Project in December that looked at the patterns of registered voters in 18 different states found that after the Gen Z vote, people 65 and older represent the next largest climate voter group, with older women far exceeding older men in their propensity to list climate as their No. 1 reason for voting. The organization defines climate voters as those who are most likely to list climate change, the environment, or clean air and water as their top political priority.
“Grandmothers are now at the vanguard of today’s climate movement,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project.
DeSmog — At Mann’s Defamation Trial, Defendants Are Doubling Down on Climate Denial
Debunked conspiracy theories are becoming part of the official court record.
On Monday, conservative blogger Mark Steyn wrapped up his confrontational cross-examination of Michael Mann, the climate scientist who is suing him and another climate denier for defamation in Washington, D.C. Superior Court.
Steyn appeared determined to portray Mann, currently the Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, as untrustworthy and deceitful, in an aggressive manner suggesting that more than a decade of litigation in this case has done little to dampen his contempt for Mann’s allegations, or for the science of climate change.
...In a 2011 blog post for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative think tank that has long espoused climate science denial and delay, Simberg stated that Mann had “molested and tortured data,” comparing him to Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach imprisoned for child molestation. Steyn, who was then a regular guest on Fox News, quoted and amplified Simberg’s charges in the National Review, a prominent conservative magazine.
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to take astonishingly detailed images of spiral galaxies, revealing how and where they spark star formation
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released a stunning smorgasbord of images of spiral galaxies. These pictures show 19 relatively nearby galaxies in greater detail than ever before.
“They’re mind blowing even for researchers who have studied galaxies for decades,” said Janice Lee at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland in a statement. “Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”
What are YOU trying to catch tonight? Tell us in the comments!
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.