WHAT NOW: What Wall? Edition

Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.

BUILD THE WALL…LATER: The White House’s humiliating retreat from its demand for billions of dollars for the construction of President Trump’s border wall with Mexico as the cost of avoiding a government shutdown is apparently complete. House Republicans have now officially dropped the measure from their spending plan. But the latest version of the plan presented to Democrats does include additional border security measures.

WHAT ELSE?

• Fox News is getting rocked by a wave of new allegations, this time in the form of a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against two black women who worked in payroll. The latest lawsuit comes less than a week after sexual harassment allegations finally toppled Bill O’Reilly.
• Late in the day on Tuesday, a California judge stepped in to halt Trump’s plans to cut federal funding to sanctuary cities. Our president is not happy about that! He’s so unhappy that he got his facts completely wrong in a series of tweets. (It was a district court, not the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that dealt Trump the setback.)

• A headline I feel like I’ve read 1,000 times: Trump’s ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn might have broken the law in accepting payments from Russian groups. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who chairs the House Oversight Committee, made pretty clear where he stands on that issue:

• An investigation by The Daily Beast unmasked the creator of The Red Pill subreddit, a seething hub for internet misogynists on Reddit, as a state lawmaker in New Hampshire, Robert Fisher.

SOMETHING EXTRA:

• There’s now a vending machine on the UC Davis campus that dispenses emergency contraception. But, surprise, it’s not free!