'BradCast' 10/6/2021 (Guest: Philly Inquirer's Will Bunch on the meanness of 'means testing'; McConnell Blinks)
b"On today's 'BradCast':\\xa0 Faced with the likelihood of the U.S. defaulting on its debts for the first time in American history (and potentially being blamed for the economic devastation that would follow), Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans blinked. They've agreed to stop their filibuster so Democrats can temporarily raise the debt ceiling for two months, putting a hold on the GOP's economic terrorism and weaponization until December. Congressional Democrats will now focus on passing their Build Back Better agenda with transformative and long-overdue expansions of healthcare, education, and child care, and the first meaningful attempt to take on climate change, paid for by a small tax increase on corporations and the wealthy. But Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and his sidekick Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are falsely pretending that wildly popular programs that help working families will lead to an 'entitlement society.' Manchin is now demanding 'means testing guardrails' on all new family- and health-related programs. What does that mean, exactly? Philadelphia Inquirer national columnist WILL BUNCH describes 'means testing' as 'two dirty words for America's middle class' and 'the two most insidious and abused words in American politics.'\\xa0 Bunch explains why, and other, alternative ways their may be to meet the seemingly intractable (and dumb) demands from Manchin and Sinema that the Democrats' fully-paid-for bill be scaled back from its current price tag. Also today: a number of elected Republican officials are really pushing the envelope with new standards of crazy, dangerous, and embarrassing behavior..."