Tuesday | September 28, 2021
00:03Congressional Democrats are scrambling for votes to keep their agenda alive,as several deadlines over the debt ceiling, the infrastructure bills, and government funding all come due this week.Will Democrats be able to push through their agenda without any Republican support?We've got the latest from Capitol Hill.I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley.It's Tuesday, September 28th, and this is Morning Wire.A health care shortage in New York State looms as tens of thousands of hospital and nurses.homeworkers will lose their jobs if they don't comply with the state's vaccine mandate.
00:41What is the state requiring and what impact might it have on a health care systemalready dealing with a staffing shortage?And social media giant Facebook has finally disclosed its new content guidelines,revealing which stories the platform suppresses.How will the new rules affect which posts you see and don't see in your feed?And did politics play a role in the new policies?Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire.Stay tuned.
01:07news you need to know. This show is sponsored by Birch Gold Group. Inflation is destroying the dollar.Birch Gold Group can help. Protect your IRA or 401k with a precious metals IRA. Text wire to9898998 to claim a free info kit on physical gold and silver. There's zero obligation.Text the word wire to 989898 to protect your savings today. Congress has begun a marathon week ofconsequential decisions about the amount of government borrowing and spending.The House of Representatives will vote on raising the debt ceiling, keeping the government open, and approving $4.5 trillion in new spending by Friday.Here to walk us through what's to come is Daily Wire reporter Ben Johnson.So, Ben, can you first help us untangle some of the separate components on this week's agenda?
02:01Sure, there's a lot to digest here.This week's legislative calendar contains four big items.Two of them have to do with the way the government functions and two are major spending bills that could define President Biden's legacy.First, government spending authorization is scheduled to expire at 1201 Friday morning.If that happens, non-essential parts of the government will shut down until Congress authorizes new spending.And how is that different from the debt ceiling?The continuing resolution deals with what the federal government can spend.The debt ceiling determines how much you can borrow.
02:34Debt ceiling of $28.5 trillion went into effect on August 1st.Since then, the government's been funding federal programs through what it calls extraordinarymeasures. Treasury Secretary Jenny Ellen has said that money will run out sometime in October.Congressional Republicans have said they would support a clean bill to fund the government.But Democrats paired government funding with a provision to raise the debt ceiling.So on Monday, Senate Republicans caused that bill to fail on a party line vote, 48 to 50.What happens if the debt ceiling isn't raised this week?Nothing, at least for a little while.
03:08After the Treasury runs out of cash on hand, the federal government would still collect more than enough taxreceipts to make the interest payments on the national debt, as well as Social Security,Medicare, and many other government programs. But the government would have to prioritize whichbills are paid and something would have to be excluded. That would probably mean freezing thesalaries of some federal employees and putting others on furlough. Well, in addition to thesemeasures, Congress is also weighing two historic spending bills. How are those related?Well, that's the controversy. Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to advance two bills this week. The first isthe president's $3.5 trillion
03:44Build Back Better Act, which containsthings like government-funded preschooland community college. The first piecefundamentally changed the structureand the nature of the economy in thiscountry. The second is the trillion-dollarinfrastructure investment and jobs act,which is mostly traditional infrastructure.
04:01Now, we've seen a lot of debateover the price of this bill,and even which of these bills the Houseshould vote on first. Can you tell usa little bit about some of the objections?Those have mostly come from membersof the House Progressive Caucus.Its chair, Representative Pramilla Jayapol,
04:17said its members will vote against the infrastructure billunless the House votes on the president's billto expand government programs first.Try us.I got more than half of the caucuswho feels very strongly we're going to deliverthe entirety of the president's agenda to the president.On the other hand,
04:34nine more centrist House Democratshave said they will not vote for the $3.5 trillion billuntil the infrastructure bill's been signed into law.And the president's bill is run into Democratic opposition in the Senate.Senator Joe Manchin says $3.5 trillion is too much money.And Senator Kirsten-Cinema opposes the income and corporate tax hikes the bill will likely contain.Unless the Democrats win almost all of these votes, the bill can't become law.And does Speaker Pelosi believe she can reconcile all of that by Friday?
05:04She said she's optimistic that the two sides will inevitably negotiate and pass a slightly less costly version of the Build Back Better Act.Regardless, this week shaping up to be a defining moment for the Biden presidency.Right.Thanks for reporting, Ben.Thanks, Georgia.That's Daily Wire reporter, Ben Johnson.Coming up, New York prepares to fire health care workers who won't comply with vaccine mandatesand may use the National Guard to fill staffing shortages.
05:31What's better than getting Moinck's delicious grass-fed and grass-finished meat delivered direct to your door?First, Moinck is helping save the family farm.Second, they're giving you free bacon.Get free bacon for a year and eat like the family farm matters at moinkbox.comslash morningwire.Tens of thousands of health care workers in New York are expected to lose their jobs this weekas the state's vaccine mandate for health care workers goes into effect.New York's governor said she may combat the worker shortage by replacing unvaccinated
06:04health workers with the National Guard.Daily Wire investigative reporter Marade Alorty joins to discuss.So, Marade, the governor is considering,bringing in the military to deal with this potential staffing crisis?Yes, it sounds like an extreme step,but that's exactly what Governor Kathy Hochel said she may doif the worker shortage is bad enough.So the vaccine mandate for health care workers
06:27was announced last month by former Governor Andrew Cuomo.As of Monday, health workers at all hospitals and nursing homes in New Yorkmust have at least one dose of a COVID vaccinein order to avoid losing their jobs.However, tens of thousands of workers still haven't gotten vaccinated,meaning New York could be dealing with mass firingsthat leave health care facilities severely understaffed.And they're already dealing with staffing issues, right?
06:50They are, but last week, Hockel told unvaccinated workersthat they have no excuses.What is looming for Monday is completely avoidable,and there's no excuses.On Saturday, the governor tried to prepare for a staffing emergencyby releasing a plan that includes potentially deployingmedically trained National Guard membersto replace the unvaccinated workers.
07:11So do we have exact numbers on how many health workers are still unvaccinated?Well, as of last week, a good chunk of the workforce had still not gotten the shot,with 85% of hospital workers in New York being fully vaccinated and about 15% not fully vaccinated.Then among nursing home and adult care facility staff, they had 77 and 81% that were fully vaccinated.So more than 20% not fully vaccinated in some cases.Right. Estimates as of last week said that amounts to as many,as 95,000 workers.95,000. Wow.
07:45So has there been any pushback among health workers to the vaccine mandate?Yes, there has.Just as we've seen with many of these vaccine mandatesthat offer no option to test out.Some say they already have natural immunity.Some say they're worried about potential side effectsand others say that the mandate is a violation of their medical autonomy.In New York City, a vaccine mandate for all public school workers,
08:07and there are more than 150,000 in the city,was blocked by a legal challenge before it went into a fact.So we may see something similar happen with this statewide health worker vaccine mandate.Okay, but in the meantime, health workers who don't want or can't get the vaccine have only one real option, right, leaving their jobs?That's exactly right. But one incredible detail from all of this is that the state labor department is saying that health workers who are fired because they refuse to get the shot will not be able to collect unemployment insurance unless they had a medical exemption.No unemployment insurance.Right.It's also worth noting, National Guard members are not the only ones who could be called
08:45into replace unvaccinated workers.Hococchi may also call in recent medical graduates and retirees to help.The governor also said she might ask for help from out-of-state health workers and even workersfrom out of the country.So one could argue that this is essentially a manufactured emergency.The state created a potential staffing shortage crisis by refusing to budge on the vaccine mandate.The health implications here are massive.Definitely. In fact, some centers are already planning to suspend both elective inpatient surgeries and turn away intensive care patients.
09:19Thanks for the reporting, Marade. Of course.Investigative reporter Marade Allorty.Last week, Facebook released its new content guidelines for suppressing posts on its platform, sparking more controversy over big tech censorship.Here to discuss Facebook's latest moves and how it fits into the broader political battle is DailyWire's Ian Howarth.So, Ian, first, what did Facebook just announce?Well, last week, Facebook made their content distribution guidelines public.These guidelines are a list of policies which explain, at least according to Facebook,how they downrank content.
09:58In other words, while Facebook's community guidelines explain what is and is not deleted from Facebook,their content distribution guidelines explain what is and is not suppressed on Facebook.And what kind of criteria are they using to make those decisions?The guidelines are very, very broad.which is part of the problem for a lot of people.There are almost 30 items split into three categories.The first category focuses on reacting to supposed user feedback.The second claims to incentivize the spread of so-called high-quality and accurate content,
10:28and the third seeks to provide users with a safer community.And while this might all seem pretty boring on the surface,it's the second category in particular,incentivizing high-quality and accurate content,which is triggering alarm bells for critics of big tech.And explain a little bit about what people are concerned.concerned about here? Sure. So the type of content that is suppressed based on these guidelines,guidelines which have been enforced for some time, by the way, and not revealed, is defined in a pretty
10:55subjective way. For example, deep down in the fact-checked misinformation section, the followingline is hidden. Content predicted to be a misinformation is sent to third-party fact-checkersand may be temporarily shown lower in newsfeed before it is reviewed. So posts can be downrankedbefore they're even confirmed as misinformation.Yes, and this is one example of why these guidelines are worrying thosewho are already concerned about anti-conservative bias on social media platforms.This line is effectively retroactively justifying the move by Facebook,and other big tech companies, by the way, during the run-up to the 2020 election.
11:30As you'll remember last October, Facebook's comms director and former press secretary for a Democratic senator,Andy Stone, announced that a New York Post story involving the alleged business dealingsof Hunter Biden and now President Bidenwas eligible to be fact-checkedand would be downranked in the meantime.Why is this important?Well, not only was the story never debunked,it's likely true.
11:5045% of Biden voters in seven swing statesknew nothing about the story,and over 9% said they would have changed their votefor president had they known.So this is just one example,among many,of how powerful these sorts of control leverscan be for social media companies
12:04and why many conservativesare sounding the alarm over these guidelines.Well, in this case,Facebook is imposing these guidelines independently, but there's also talk about government regulation.Yeah, this really falls into the attempt by some of the Democratic Party to impose certain levels of control over big tech.And these Facebook guidelines are arguably an example of this strategy in action.Back in July, for example, President Biden's Surgeon General called on big tech to impose consequences for users who violate platform policies.And more recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren has pushed Amazon to use this algorithm to throttle the sale of
12:39which she characterizes as spreading so-called COVID-19 misinformation.So when we put all of these stories together,it's clear that big tech is still at the center of an ongoing fightfor what many are seeing as a battle for freedom of speech, both online and elsewhere.Right. Ian, thanks for the update.My pleasure.That's Daily Wires, Ian Howarth.Other stories we're tracking this week.
13:06Dozens of brawls and public disturbances broke out in Norway on Sundayas bars and restaurants filled with Norwegians celebrating the end ofCOVID restrictions. In an unexpected announcement, outgoing Prime Minister Erna Solberg said Friday,quote, it has been 561 days since we introduced the toughest measures in Norway in peacetime.Now, the time has come to return to a normal daily life.The FBI has reportedly asked for some of Brian Laundry's personal belongings to help them withDNA matching efforts. According to the Laundry family lawyer, his relatives have complied withagency requests. The search for Laundry continues,
13:42after the remains of his fiancé Gabby Petito were discovered and her death was declared a homicide.And a new report shows that more migrants may be making their way to the United States.According to Reuters, two Panamanian government sources said that up to 4,000 migrants,the majority of whom are Haitians, have gone through Panama heading to the U.S.If you like this episode and are interested in hearing more,subscribe to Morning Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening,and give us a five-star review.That's all the time we've got this morning.
14:14Thanks for waking up with us.We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.If you like this podcast, get the Morning Wire newsletter delivered straight to your inbox when you join at Dailywire.com slash subscribe.Use code MorningWire to try a reader's past membership and get your first month for only 99 cents.
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