This week on The Downballot, we open up our mailbag! Listeners sent us questions on a wide range of topics, including Wisconsin’s Senate race, legislative elections in Georgia, how Democrats should address inflation, whether handwriting postcards to voters is an effective tactic, and much more. David Nir and David Beard answered those questions.
Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns! The old saying is that Republican voters fall in line and Democratic voters fall in love. There is a lot of truth to that statement. Along with that statement, we need to include something else. Voters in general like to hear some positives about your candidate’s accomplishments and reasons why they deserve to be elected.
Occasionally, you can run against the scandal of your opponent.
For a former president to appeal to the Russian leader for political help amid the “atrocities” in Ukraine is “completely unacceptable,” the GOP governor said.
The promise of economic recovery has rung in America’s ears since the false promises of an end to the pandemic in 2021. Lawmakers, business owners, and speculators assured us that hallmarks of our consumer life, like casual spending on nonessentials, were returning, and that this would mean the society that houses the world’s largest economy could finally assume a new normal.
Last August, an incarcerated friend of mine asked me to help him get into contact with his counselor, whom he hadn’t been able to reach. From that point on, I became an advocate and messenger. My friend had the support of his community; his loved ones sent money to deposit into his commissary account and to make sure they could talk to him via the kiosk system.
Six days after the Oscars Slap came to dominate America’s cultural conversation, Saturday Night Live joined the fray with not just one joke but a torrent of them. Perhaps this was inevitable: The now-infamous pop-culture moment—an attack on a comedian, no less—is clearly within SNL’s wheelhouse, and the show latched on to the moment with zeal. But it was too much, too late.
It’s striking how many stories and pictures from the war in Ukraine involve animals. One of the first Ukrainian civilian victims was a woman killed by Russian shelling as she tried to bring shelter dogs to safety near Kyiv. During the evacuation of the city, railway platforms and trains were crowded with pets of all kinds. A woman carried her infirm German shepherd a dozen miles on foot to cross the Polish border.
Last night
I saw that the moon
Was empty in the sky.The stars around did
What they do.
They areMillions of miles
Away,
Or millions of years,And are totally exhausted.
But the moon is blank,
Just a space to show Where it might have
Been. We will tell
Whoever will attendThat the moon used to catch
Light from the sun
And waxed and waned:Full, sickle, half-
Moon.
On the afternoon of March 3, 2020, Governor Mike DeWine stepped to a lectern inside the Ohio statehouse to announce his most difficult pandemic decision. Ohio, the governor announced, would bar most spectators from the upcoming Arnold Classic, a bodybuilding and fitness festival hosted annually by Arnold Schwarzenegger that draws a quarter of a million people from 80 countries to Ohio’s capital city. “Everything in life is a risk,” DeWine said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which invoked the controversial order in March 2020 to limit the spread of Covid-19, said the policy is no longer needed to protect public health.
Health organizations again seek to prioritize at-risk populations for Covid shots.
Despite concerns about the bill’s policy and strategy from both sides of the aisle, nearly all House Democrats as well as a dozen Republicans voted for it Thursday.
Ashish Jha takes over the Covid task force at a point of transition in the pandemic fight.
The company met its study goals, but experts are split over whether the data will be sufficient for the Food and Drug Administration.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The country’s latest jobs report is a dose of good news for an economy still struggling with inflation: The United States added more than 400,000 new positions in March, continuing its rebound from dramatic losses in the spring of 2020.
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White House officials deny any sense of panic over the economy or their midterm chances.
The administration’s difficulties in getting bank cop nominees through a Democratic-controlled Senate underscore the fault lines within the party over how to approach financial regulation.
The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates — but Congress has a chance to bring real relief.
The increase reported by the Labor Department reflected the 12 months ending in February and didn’t include most of the oil and gas price increases that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb.
The Fed is already expected to begin a campaign of interest rate increases next month in a bid to remove its support for economic growth amid a blistering job market and rapidly rising prices.
Imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is “crumbling” physically and psychologically, says journalist Chris Hedges, who last week attended Assange’s wedding to his longtime partner Stella Moris at London’s Belmarsh prison. Assange has been behind bars for nearly three years awaiting a possible extradition to the United States on espionage charges for publishing documents revealing war crimes committed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
YouTube has deleted the entire archive of “On Contact,” an Emmy-nominated television show by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges which was hosted on the Russian government-funded news channel RT America. We speak with Hedges, who connects the YouTube censorship of his show to a growing crackdown on dissenting voices in American media.
President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law on Tuesday, culminating efforts to make lynching a federal crime that started over a century ago. We’re joined by Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., who was 16 years old when he witnessed Till’s abduction from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, prior to his brutal killing.
With COVID-19 coverage ending for the uninsured, we look at how uninsured people and communities of color will bear the impact of the end to free COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccines, and how the pandemic has led to a renewed push for Medicare for All. We are joined by Dr. Oni Blackstock, primary care and HIV physician and founder and executive director of Health Justice, and Dr.
Today was rough, with too many gruesome pictures of dead civilians in liberated towns. The United States warned that Russia had kill-lists of people they wanted eradicated once they took control, and apparently it included even small town mayors. In one little settlement, the mayor was murdered along with her son and husband—the latter tossed into a sewer to bloat and decompose.
She’s leaving the White House and heading to MSNBC because “they need a redhead,” Trump declared.
She’s leaving the White House and heading to MSNBC because “they need a redhead,” Trump declared.
Toodles, March. In like a lion, out like … well, it’s out.
You know what GOP state lawmakers very much do not want out?
Any LGBTQ Americans.
As ever, Republicans are scratching away at voting rights and public education and abortion access and … well, anything their grubby little fingers can scrawl a grubby little bill to address.
We all hope we’ll live to be 100—at least, I do—if not older. But most of us would love to grow old and still be able to do what we love and contribute to society. National Park Service (NPS) Ranger Betty Reid Soskin did both. She’s 100 years old now and although she retired Thursday, she’s spent the past decade-and-a-half doing what she loves.