We are one week into this government shutdown and it doesn’t appear to be opening back up any time soon.
Today is the 260th awful day since Trump took office again, meaning there are still 1200 days until this term ends.
And today also marks two years since Hamas’ deadly, horrific attacks on Israel, provoking a deadly, horrific war that’s still raging in Gaza.
I dealt with all of that on today’s show… It started with David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, one of the better news sources that we can all trust and should be on your morning reading list. And, as with my work, they are not behind a paywall; they depend on readers’ support to keep them funded. So read them at prospect.org and contribute if you’re able to.
With David, we spoke about the shutdown. He laid out the facts without the finger-pointing, about what each side is saying about what they want. In his article, To Win the Shutdown, Democrats Need a Big Switch published yesterday, David tells of how the Democrats are saying one thing publicly and stressing a different need in private.
“In public, this is just a fight about a looming health care cliff, using the leverage of needing Democratic votes (at least under current Senate rules) to pass government funding to demand that Republicans avert a crisis of millions of people losing their insurance coverage or seeing the price of it double. In private, this is a fight about extreme executive power and autocracy, with Democrats demanding that any government funding they pass must actually be spent, not withheld or rescinded. A No Kings Budget, in other words.”
The Republicans seem, to me, content just to blame the shutdown on the Democrats, though I don’t think that will work for them. Dayen tells us that they do have a crisis of their own making.
So what’s the off-ramp, where Democrats can fight out government funding that actually gets funded, and save the health care conversation that Republicans are going to want to have for later? Well, one magically showed up last week: an imminent farm bailout.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s own policies, farmers in America are taking a beating…. And the shutdown is making things worse, because Farm Service Agency offices are closed, making it impossible for farmers to get services and plan loans for input needs next season.
Dayen works through the numbers and comes up with a solution!
There’s a way this could line up: keep the government funding fight about guaranteeing that the funding will actually be spent. And then there’s a separate negotiation that can trade something Democrats want (health care subsidies) for something Republicans want (a farm bailout).
I suggest reading the article as it makes a lot of sense. And, of course, brings the fight about the larger issue of preserving our democracy, which we’ll be out in force for next Saturday, October 18!
I could easily spend the entire hour speaking with David Dayen. We touched on this morning’s Senate Judiciary Hearing with AG Pam Bondi in the hot seat. It might have been the most contentious hearing I’ve ever sat through. Well, I sat through most of it…. I had to leave as I couldn’t listen to her nasty, combative, retorts every time she was asked a question she couldn’t, or didn’t want to, answer.
If you can stomach it, here’s the whole thing. Good luck.
I also asked Dayen about the other areas in which Trump is actively destroying out version of democracy, as in deploying the military on US soil to be used, in many cases, against US citizen. And with his attacks on our free press and our right to free speech… you know, the First Amendment!
BTW, today, Bari Weiss officially took over CBS News. Here’s a gift link to the NY Times’ reporting on it today: “Paramount Buys The Free Press, Ushering in a New Era at CBS News: Bari Weiss, a founder of The Free Press, will become editor in chief of CBS News.”
For the rest of the hour, I marveled at the ugliness of Pam Bondi’s responses to the senators’ questions, and the inanity of the liar-in-chief and his responses to answers from reporters in the oval office yesterday.
1200 more days of this? I hope not.
TAs I mentioned at the top, today marks two years since the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Two years ago today, my husband and I had just a few days earlier arrived in Phoenix, moving from Florida. We were looking for a house to rent as the news came trickling in about the atrocities. I had been off the air for a couple of weeks for the move, but the next day, I knew I had to address it. I put together a makeshift studio and David joined me on Oct. 8 to discuss what we knew and how we felt.
I spoke about it briefly today. We’ll get further into it tomorrow as the war those attacks provoked continue to rage.
The Times of Israel today is reporting on a Washington Post poll of US Jews:
Poll: Nearly four in 10 US Jews say Israel has committed genocide in Gaza
WaPo survey also finds 68% blame Hamas more for civilian deaths; 76% say Israel’s existence is vital for Jewish future; 31% feel unsafe in US; two-thirds have negative view of Netanyahu
(click the headline link to get the whole story)
We’ll discuss it a bit more tomorrow, as I did two years ago.
Here’s the video of today’s show via YouTube:
Peace out….
