Today's Liberal News

Former defense secretary: Trump wanted to fire missiles into Mexico and pretend someone else did it

As bad as Donald Trump’s presidency was, rest assured it could have been way, way worse. And believe me, I get how bad it was. On its best days, it was like a happy-ending massage from Edward Scissorhands. On its worst days, it was like a shiatsu massage from Edward’s younger brother, Larry Used-Heroin-Needle Thumbs.

And yet some people still think he could—and/or should—be president again. Yeah, him. The scamp who attempted to 86 Western democracy.

Ukraine update: Russia can’t stop getting snake bit

Maybe Ukraine’s patron saint isn’t actually St. Javelin, but St. Patrick. Whoever is running the show, they don’t seem to like Russians who hang around Snake Island. 

#Ukraine: A birdie flew past & gave us another angle of the Ukrainian TB-2 strike against a Russian Tor SAM system on Snake Island- another TB-2 was watching no less than 108km (67mi) away. Seems the missiles went a little crazy after the strike.https://t.co/eft74Bgj2H pic.twitter.

High school association now requires youth to compete on sports teams that match birth certificate

Thanks to Republican hate and queerphobia, trans youth are already suffering. As Daily Kos has covered, trans and nonbinary youth are uniquely ill-protected when it comes to basic rights and dignities, including everyday things like having access to bathrooms that align with their gender identity. We’ve also seen efforts to ban already difficult to access safe, age-appropriate, gender-affirming health care.

April jobs report shows continuing strong job creation

The April jobs report was strong, with 428,000 new jobs and unemployment holding steady at 3.6%. Black unemployment ticked down to 5.9%, which, while it’s far above white unemployment the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould notes is the first time it’s been under 6% in the pandemic recovery.

That’s the good news. There are key areas of weakness:

The private sector has now gained back 97.

The One Parenting Decision That Really Matters

A recent study calculated that in the first year of a baby’s life, parents face 1,750 difficult decisions. These include what to name the baby, whether to breastfeed the baby, how to sleep-train the baby, what pediatrician to take the baby to, and whether to post pictures of the baby on social media. And that is only year one.

Liberty No More

How strange it is, the condition of having a body, of being a body. Consider the sponge of the marrow that makes your blood, the skeleton frame that holds in your organs, the tendons that attach your muscles to bone, the heart that pumps blood through your veins, the electrical signals that travel along the optic nerve from your retinas, the neural networks that light up the galaxies of your brain like constellations.

Historian Timothy Snyder: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is a Colonial War

We speak to Yale University historian Timothy Snyder about his latest article for The New Yorker, “The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War.” Snyder writes about the colonial history that laid the foundations for the Russian war in Ukraine, such as Russia’s imperial vision and how leaders including Hitler and Stalin have aimed to conquer Ukrainian soil on different premises. “The whole history of colonialism … involves denying that another people is real.

The Truth About Irish Unity

Three seismic events have occurred in one go in Northern Ireland. One, for the first time in Northern Ireland’s 100-year existence, an Irish nationalist party placed first in an election—and not just any nationalist party, but Sinn Fein, the longtime political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

The Lessons Taiwan Is Learning From Ukraine

The more I’ve gotten to know her, the more I’ve come to think that Wang Tzu-Hsuan exemplifies some of the best qualities of the younger Taiwanese I’ve met here in Taipei: open-minded, serious but not too serious, spontaneous, and thoughtful. At 33, she is unlike most surgeons in Taiwan—who are typically older, and male—and while many of her medical-school classmates sought more lucrative careers in the United States, she opted to stay, out of a sense of duty.

Sinn Fein’s Win Brings a United Ireland No Nearer

Three seismic events have occurred in one go in Northern Ireland. One, for the first time in Northern Ireland’s 100-year existence, an Irish nationalist party placed first in an election—and not just any nationalist party, but Sinn Fein, the longtime political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

The Lessons Taiwan Is Learning From Ukraine

The more I’ve gotten to know her, the more I’ve come to think that Wang Tzu-Hsuan exemplifies some of the best qualities of the younger Taiwanese I’ve met here in Taipei: open-minded, serious but not too serious, spontaneous, and thoughtful. At 33, she is unlike most surgeons in Taiwan—who are typically older, and male—and while many of her medical-school classmates sought more lucrative careers in the United States, she opted to stay, out of a sense of duty.

News Roundup: Don’t worry says GOP as they line up laws to take away reproductive rights

It is Friday. This has been a doozy of a week. The Republican Party, the hypocritical evangelicals, and Christian conservatives who follow them are now on the precipice of receiving the deliverance they have been looking for: no rights for people who can get pregnant and no reproductive rights for anyone. The GOP is doing the doublespeak and doublethink of telling America that nothing has changed and nothing drastic will come of the overturning of Roe v.

Ukraine Update: One side knows how to fight a war, and it’s not Russia

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This past Monday, a local Telegram account gave us the first inkling something was happening near Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast. The account claimed that Ukraine had pushed Russians out of Staryi Saltiv, well east of the last known Ukrainian positions around Kharkiv (as well as complained that withdrawing Russians had run over his aviary). It’s as if Ukraine had leap-frogged a whole string of villages en route to the key city on the Donets.

China is not pitching in on Putin’s war, and Biden administration pressure may be part of the reason

Despite Donald Trump’s early assurances that he beat Chiiiii-na all the time, one of his favorite pastimes as president was losing to the country—while encouraging its worst excesses. 

Trump made a big show of acting tough toward China—imposing tariffs that succeeded in punishing our own citizens far more than Xi Jinping’s—but he ultimately lost his trade war, and rather decisively at that.