One Man One Vote: Continuing to exercise the veto power of his single vote, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has killed the paid family leave proposed in President Biden’s social policy spending bill.

  With only 50 Democrats in the Senate, they can’t afford to lose Manchin, who also denounced a proposal to tax billionaires as a way of paying for the bill. “I don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people,” he said.

  Manchin also appears to have killed a plan give the Internal Revenue Service power to examine some taxpayers’ bank accounts in order to catch tax cheats. 

  Biden’s proposal to spend $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years has already been whittled down by half.

  The President is reported to be delaying his departure to the G-20 summit in Rome to announce a revised framework for his social spending plan, The Washington Post reports. 

  Biden is hoping to get all this settled before departing today for  a G-20 summit in Rome and then a United Nations climate conference in Glasgow. Biden had been hoping to use his climate conscious infrastructure bill as proof of an American commitment to combating climate change as he pushes for a stronger response from the rest of the world. Top Democrats hope that a compromise on the plan could also help pave the way for a House vote on the $1 trillion infrastructure package that has already cleared the Senate.

Poor Little Rich Man: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who ranks #1 on the Forbes list of  billionaires, objected to the proposal before Congress to tax the unrealized and untaxed capital gains that make billionaires so rich.

  In response to a Twitter user’s suggestion that “any new unrealized capital gains taxes will slowly make their way down to middle class retirement investments over the next several years,” Musk replied, “Exactly. Eventually, they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you.”

  They would certainly come for Musk, whose holdings rocketed by $36.2 billion on the day Hertz announced their intention to buy 100,000 Tesla electric cars.

  Asked yesterday about Musk’s criticism, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, “We believe that the highest-income Americans can afford to pay a little bit more in order to make historic investments in our workforce, in our economy, in our competitiveness. And that has a net benefit on people across the country.”

Live Round: Investigators have confirmed it was a live round in what was supposed to be a “cold gun” that killed the director of photography on the New Mexico set of the Alec Baldwin Western “Rust.”

  They also say Assistant Director David Halls failed to check every round in the gun before handing it to Baldwin.

  The bullet passed through cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and was recovered from the shoulder of the movie’s director, Joel Souza.

  Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza said the gun was a Colt .45 revolver. He said about 500 rounds of ammunition were found on set: a mix of blanks, dummy rounds and what investigators believe are live rounds.

  Still to be considered is whether anyone should be charged with a crime. Santa Fe County DA Mary Carmack-Altwies said it’s too early in the investigation but “no one has been ruled out at this point.” She said, “If the facts and evidence and law support charges, then I will initiate prosecution at that time.” 

Covid Nation: A New York State judge yesterday denied a police union demand to delay New York City’s  no-nonsense vaccine mandate, which requires almost all of the municipal work force to get a first Covid shot by 5 pm tomorrow or go on unpaid leave.

  The lawsuit had been filed by the Police Benevolent Association, which argued that the city’s mandate was unnecessary now that Covid infections are dropping.

  About 46,000 of the city’s 300,000 workers remain unvaccinated. The biggest pocket of resistance is in the city’s Department of Corrections, where only half of the employees have been vaccinated.

  Requests for medical or religious exemptions were due yesterday and workers granted that status will face weekly testing.

Intercepted: Brett Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback, has repaid the state of Mississippi $600,000 he improperly received as part of a major fraud scheme. 

 Favre had been paid $1.1 million in welfare funds in December 2017 and June 2018 for speaking appearances he never made. He had already paid back $500,000. 

  Favre is one of at least 10 people improperly paid a total of $10 million in diverted welfare money. The state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars in anti-poverty money on lobbyists, football tickets, religious concerts, and fitness programs for state lawmakers.

The Spin Rack:  Former Chicago Blackhawks player Kyle Beach has publicly identified himself as the man who filed a lawsuit against the hockey team over how the organization mishandled his charge that he was sexually assaulted by one of the coaches. The team has already been fined $2 million. — The U.S. State Department has issued the first official passport with the gender marker “X,” a change the Biden administration promised earlier this year to make the documents more inclusive for people who identify as nonbinary, intersex and gender non-conforming. — George Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s vying for the title of Stupidest Member of Congress, is waging a campaign to get Dr. Anthony Fauci fired from his job as America’s doctor. She tweeted, “ Dr. Frankenstein has got to go!”

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