Media top headlines September 29
In media news today, NBC's Chuck Todd calls for security after third-party Virginia candidate disrupts McAuliffe-Youngkin debate, an Axios reporter accuses LinkedIn of censorship after blocking her profile in China, and ESPN's Sage Steele slams the network's 'sick' and 'scary' vaccine mandate
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., became the latest prominent Democrat on Wednesday to declare the $3.5-trillion spending plan pushed by the Biden White House would cost "zero" dollars.
"It's not about a dollar amount," she told reporters. "The dollar amount, as the president said, is zero. This bill will be paid for."
Republicans have ripped Build Back Better, a $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, as a massive social policy bill that "ultimately provides benefits to wealthy liberal elites at the expense of working-class families." Moderate Democrats, like Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., have also raised concerns about the reconciliation package.
Yet President Joe Biden has insisted it will cost "zero dollars" while being a "once-in-a-generation investment in working America, and that claim has taken hold with some media allies as well.
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Pelosi's claim drew swift mockery online.
"New math," reporter Emily Zanotti quipped.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., weighed in as well, writing she was "as delusional as President Biden" if she believed that.
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Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen told "America Reports" on Wednesday that Biden's logic was akin to saying that because he'd paid for his child's tuition for school, school was free.
Others couldn't resist joking Pelosi's clear "zero" gesture with her hand was a "White supremacy symbol." The seemingly innocuous hand gesture has caused controversy in recent years due to the Anti-Defamation League declaring it had been co-opted by White supremacists. People innocently making the "OK sign" or even service-academy students playing the "Circle Game" have been investigated for possibly making racist gestures.
A $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Pelosi wanted a vote on this week in the House is in jeopardy as bitter, intra-party clashes continue among Democrats over the sprawling, separate $3.5 trillion package. Left-wing Democrats have said they will sink the infrastructure package that already passed the U.S. Senate without the "Build Back Better" plan being brought to the floor simultaneously.
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However, moderate Democratic Sens. Sinema and Manchin are standing in the way of the latter's passage in its present form over concerns about the price tag.
Fox News' Cortney O'Brien contributed to this report.
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