Source: Huffington Post

The anti-Donald Trump group The Lincoln Project took credit Friday for five people appearing with tiki torches at a Charlottesville campaign stop by Virginia's GOP candidate for governor, a stunt recalling white supremacists who descended on that city amid violence in 2017.

Charlottesville TV station WVIR covered the campaign stop and reported candidate Glenn Youngkin was inside a restaurant when the group dressed in matching hats, khakis and white button-down shirts appeared beside his campaign bus. The former private equity executive and political newcomer is in a close race against former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe as Tuesday's Election Day nears.

Photos showed the group holding large tiki torches. Their appearance recalled two days of chaos in August 2017, when white supremacists gathered in the college town for a "Unite the Right" rally ostensibly to protest the planned removal of a Confederate monument.



McAuliffe staffers promoted a reporter's tweet about the group's appearance, using it to attack Youngkin and suggesting that those holding the torches were his supporters. Youngkin staffers accused the McAuliffe campaign or Virginia Democrats of being involved, drawing disavowals. "What happened today is disgusting and distasteful and we condemn it in the strongest terms. Those involved should immediately apologize," McAuliffe campaign manager Chris Bolling said in a statement. The Democratic Party of Virginia issued a statement saying neither the party nor its "coordinated partners and affiliates" had anything to do with "the events" at the campaign bus stop.

The Lincoln Project then weighed in, saying it was behind what it called a "demonstration." "The Youngkin campaign is enraged by our reminder of Charlottesville for one simple reason: Glenn Youngkin wants Virginians to forget that he is Donald Trump's candidate," the group said of the former president.




Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/virginia-governor-tiki-torches_n_617d33b9e4b0657357495b20

---

This was a stupid stunt by the Lincoln Project, it lends credence to all the rightwing nuts that keep claiming the 1/6 insurrection at the Capitol was a "false flag operation".



To be honest, I was fooled by this and thought those were actual Republican fascists holding those torches.

Perhaps its important to remember that the Lincoln Project members are still Republicans.

They might hate Trump, but is it possible this was a stunt to damage McAuliffe's campaign by getting Democrats to react to it as being real?

I just don't know...

Amid ongoing Build Back Better negotiations, lobbyists have stepped up their contributions to Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, the sole Democratic holdouts against advancing the Biden agenda through the Senate.

Manchin and Sinema are the 2018 Senate class’s top recipients of contributions from lobbyists. In the first half of 2021, Sinema (first elected to the Senate in 2018) received $408,000 in contributions from lobbyists, 150% of what she received at the same time last year despite not being up for re-election until 2024. Manchin (re-elected in 2018) received $512,000 from lobbyists, nearly three times as much as last year. Together, the two top the list of their Senate cohort—both Democrats and Republicans—in donations from lobbyists, which include direct campaign contributions from lobbyist and/or lobbyist-controlled PACs, costs of lobbyists attending/organizing fundraisers, or sponsorship of events promoting Manchin or Sinema.

To place these quantities in perspective, the typical six-year electoral cycle means that Senate candidates receive the highest volume of lobbyist contributions in the year or two running up to their elections, followed by a trough until the next cycle. Manchin’s 2021 contributions are now at the same level as his election year, and Sinema has received a steady stream of lobbyist money into her coffers since taking office. Both are taking in lobbyist contributions at more than three times the rate of the average Senator.

The data presented provides real-time evidence that Sinema and Manchin’s obstruction of the Biden agenda is being rewarded by lobbyists seeking to influence their legislative priorities. In this case, those priorities are to smother provisions like negotiated pharmaceutical pricing through Medicare and a just transition to renewable energy, measures that directly target the interests of Big Pharma and Big Oil. This comes as new DFP polling shows Sinema at a severe disadvantage for a potential primary challenger in 2024.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/10/27/sinema-and-manchin-flush-with-lobbyist-contributions


What a surprise....

Source: The Week

Thursday was full of ups and down for President Biden, his agenda, and perhaps the success of a crucial climate change summit, starting with the president laying out a $1.8 trillion framework he said congressional Democrats could all support — and ending with the failure of House Democrats to give final approval to a separate bipartisan infrastructure bill.

"Progressives were triumphant, but the rest of the Democratic caucus was seething," Politico's Katherine Tully-McManus reports. "I think it's wholly apparent that today was not a success," Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) said Thursday, blaming unidentified "obstructionists" for "not delivering" the infrastructure bill "because apparently failing roads and bridges can just wait in the minds of some people."

"But just when it looked like the day would end in embarrassment for Democrats, the Congressional Progressive Caucus issues a surprise endorsement of the president's compromise plan — removing one of the last big obstacles in its way," Politico's Rachael Bade recapped Friday morning. This endorsement "was drowned out" by the CPC's decision to block the infrastructure bill until it gets more assurances about the details of the $1.8 trillion framework and its fate in the Senate. "But the dispute over sequencing masked a major achievement for the president: Hill progressives now appear ready to swallow this deal — and that means it's likely a matter of when, not if, it passes."

The restive centrists of the Senate Democratic caucus, Sens. Joe Manchin (W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), also "offered positive comments about the deal, but without committing to vote for it," The Washington Post reports. But they got most of what they asked for in the negotiations. Progressive Democrats had to give up a lot. "We wanted a $3.5 trillion package, but we understand the reality of the situation," CPC chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told reporters Thursday night.



Read more: https://theweek.com/joe-biden/1006571/house-progressives-endorse-bidens-pared-back-spending-framework-likely-making

---

What's keeping Manchin and Sinema from committing to vote for the framework now?

If they just did that on Thursday, the infrastructure bill would have passed the same day!

Do Manchin and Sinema really want ANY form of the Build Back Better bill to pass?

Until then it's all just sound and fury.

And by support, I don't mean vague handwaving, I mean a public commitment to vote for an agreed upon framework.

I'll wait here.

Don't be left holding the bag on the Build Back Better agenda.

The progressives in Congress have supported President Biden's agenda and have fought hard negotiating with obstructionists like Manchin and Sinema. God bless them all.

But once President Biden presents the best bill he has been able to obtain with the senate divided 50-50, please just pass it and pass the infrastructure bill also.

We are at that moment where it's time to move the ball forward and get our Democratic party in the best shape possible for the midterms in 2022.

Just my humble opinion, your mileage might vary.

Hawaiian real estate is very expensive, don't use adblockers on facebook, Zuck needs the revenue.

Only bad countries like Russia have "oligarchs", we have kind hearted billionaires avoiding taxes, buying senators, and having their very own "tourism" space rockets.

Big difference.

DEATH AND TAX AVOIDANCE — The fine print of the billionaire tax being proposed by Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has yet to be released, but Robert Willens is already getting calls about how to evade it.



Not from one of the 700 or so people in the country with more than $1 billion in assets who would be affected by the tax, he says, but from some of the people who handle such matters for them.

Willens is Wall Street’s go-to tax guy, the person hedge fund managers turn to for advice. He is said to charge clients $75,000 a year. Nightly called him to see how he plans to counsel billionaire clients about how to avoid paying Wyden’s potential new tax. He said there’s not much he can tell them now: Tax avoidance is usually in the loopholes and gray areas and technicalities of such laws. But, he added, if Democrats manage to pass the tax and it survives an expected constitutional challenge, it would be hard for his ultra wealthy clients to finagle their way out of it.

“This is going to be perhaps the most difficult tax we have ever seen in terms of trying to plan to minimize it,” said Willens, a former managing director at Lehman Brothers who has been working on taxes since the early 1970s. “I believe this is going to be the biggest challenge we have ever had.”

Under current law, if someone owns a business or a piece of art or a property or a spaceship or NFT that rises in value, they don’t have to pay taxes on those gains until they sell it.

You could argue that those unrealized gains don’t put any more money in their bank accounts, but wealthy people often borrow money against the value of their assets to buy other fun stuff. They don’t have to pay taxes on those loans because they aren’t income. Borrowing against unrealized gains from assets is partly how many very wealthy people end up paying a smaller share of their money in taxes than most Americans. A ProPublica investigation dubbed this strategy, which concludes with a tax-free transfer to heirs, “Buy, Borrow, Die.”

The proposed Wyden tax would require billionaires and people who make more than $100 million a year for three consecutive years to pay taxes on the increased value of their assets, whether they have sold them or not.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2021/10/26/the-billionaire-tax-loophole-hunt-is-on-494854

I wish the media would stop referring to people like those three House Democrats and Senator Sinema as "moderates".

As a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, I find calling anyone opposing this core Democratic position a "moderate" to be an insult to actual moderate Democrats.

Source: Huffington Post

Democratic leaders floated the contours of a $2.5 trillion spending and tax cut reconciliation framework before senators left last week for a brief recess, in hopes that the whole caucus would go along with a slightly smaller price tag.

During a caucus meeting last Thursday with Senate Democrats, leadership pitched a top line of roughly $1.5 trillion in new spending on programs such as child care, housing, climate policies and Medicare expansions, according to presentation slides obtained by HuffPost and top Senate aides familiar with the presentation.
The bill would also provide around $1 trillion in “tax cuts for working families” — including an extension to the boosted child tax credit, Affordable Care Act premium subsidy credits and housing and clean energy tax credits. Overall, the bill’s price tag would be around $2.5 trillion.

Conservative Democrats continue to block the passage of President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan, a sweeping proposal that would invest heavily in climate policies, parental benefits, child care and universal pre-K, as well as housing and expansions of both Medicare and Medicaid.

The presentation offers a possible compromise top-line number that leaders, including Biden, have floated for weeks.
“This presentation was Leader Schumer informing Senate Democrats of what President Biden presented to the House Democrats the week prior,” Justin Goodman, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), said.

But even $2.5 trillion is higher than what Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), the Senate’s two most conservative Democrats, say they will support. Manchin has floated a $1.5 trillion top-line spending number. Sinema refuses to disclose a top-line number to her Senate colleagues, but she’s reportedly comfortable with a figure under the $2 trillion mark.

Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reconciliation-bill-price-tag-white-house_n_61671e35e4b028316c90b6cc

---

Sounds reasonable to me.

Let's pass both bills asap!