In the news today: It’s being reported that the real reason Sen. Joe Manchin is single-handedly destroying the Build Back Better plan is because he doesn’t trust poor people not to use drugs. On the bright side, this means Democrats can—and should—tell him to pound sand. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is in panic mode as he sues New York Attorney General Letitia James for investigating all his grifting.
I have a deep, visceral mistrust for anyone who says God is on their side. When has Providence ever sorted winners and losers like this? Didn’t we learn better from the bloody Crusades? Or centuries of ruinous sectarian violence? Or Tim Tebow’s NFL career?
Of course, these days we’re meant to believe that God is on the side of the vast majority of the people unnecessarily dying of COVID-19—because that’s what they keep claiming.
This article was updated at 11:39 p.m. ET on December 20, 2021.Just a few minutes before tip-off on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the PA announcer for the Oklahoma City Thunder broke the news to the gathered fans: That night’s NBA game between the Thunder and the visiting Utah Jazz was canceled “due to unforeseen circumstances.” A Jazz player, it would soon come out, had tested positive for the novel coronavirus.
Famed NASCAR driver Brandon Brown hasn’t gotten a lot of sleep lately. Not since his name has been at the center of a conservative Republican rallying cry, “Let’s Go, Brandon!” meaning, f**k Joe Biden.
The whole “Let’s Go, Brandon” hubbub began on Oct. 2 when Brown gave an interview to NBC Sports at the Talladega Superspeedway in Talladega, Alabama, after he won his first NASCAR victory.
The Georgia Republican used the term “yellow people” while refuting accusations her party is racist.
More than 350 students from Fairfax High School in Virginia walked out in protest Thursday to show their solidarity with a student who was allegedly attacked in an Islamophobic incident. According to a Change.org petition, a Black Muslim student, identified as Ekran Mohammad, was allegedly harassed by a group of boys, who threw her onto a desk and removed her hijab on Tuesday.
The White House has urged vaccinations and booster shots to combat the new variant.
The panel investigating the Capitol insurrection has requested an interview with Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
The devoutly anti-science mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, was forced to admit to turning off the fluoridation of the city’s water supply Tuesday, after learning it was a violation of municipal code. Once again, this is why you don’t vote for someone with no experience governing and who is also a conspiracy theorist.
Variants are a little bit like breakups: There’s never a great time for one to strike, but there absolutely are terrible times. With Omicron, it’s hard to imagine a worse possible moment. The promise of this holiday season has long been that Americans would finally get to make up for all the getaways and family reunions that didn’t happen last winter.
“That lack of integrity is stunning in a town where people say the only thing that you have is your word,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said she told Manchin.
In November 2019, Nixie Lam suffered the same fate as nearly all of her pro-Beijing compatriots running in Hong Kong’s local elections. The two-term district councillor was roundly defeated by a prodemocracy candidate whose campaign had been buoyed by months of sustained protests.
Manchin dislikes the bill but also complained of “inexcusable” treatment by the White House.
Former President Donald Trump confirmed he had gotten a booster during a live show with Bill O’Reilly in Dallas on Sunday.
Anyone who spent their teenagedom in a black hooded sweatshirt was served a nice piece of attention bait last year in the form of a TikTok phenomenon known as the “emo test.” In it, users listened to snippets of songs by such artists as Panic! At the Disco and Paramore to see how many tunes they recognized. If you got eight to 10 songs right, you were certified “emo.” If you got more than that, then congrats—you were “broken.
Fourteen years ago, the day before Thanksgiving, I lost my sister Tracie to breast cancer. She was 37, married, and the mother of three children. I can’t remember what happened the next day—what we ate or who even cooked. Everything was a blur. A couple of days after we laid Tracie to rest, my mother called me. William, my only brother, was being hospitalized. Doctors didn’t know what was wrong, but he couldn’t breathe.
Longtime immigrant rights leader Jean Montrevil has been granted three years of protection from deportation as part of a settlement for the First Amendment lawsuit Montrevil filed against the U.S. government that argued federal immigration officials targeted him for deportation due to his activism. Montrevil was abruptly deported to Haiti in 2018 but was allowed under the Biden administration to return home to New York in October to reunite with his family.
President Biden’s signature $1.75 trillion Build Back Better package appears to be dead after Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced on Fox News this Sunday he would not support the plan to expand the social safety net and combat the climate crisis. Without Manchin, Senate Democrats do not have enough votes to pass the landmark legislation, which has already been approved by the House.
With the emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, the United States is now averaging over 130,000 new COVID-19 cases a day, and health officials warn the U.S. could see a million new cases a day by February. We speak with health expert Dr. Carlos del Rio, who says that vaccination complemented by booster shots is the best defense against severe illness. “Everybody’s going to get infected.
A standard 50-microgram boost raised antibody levels about 37-fold higher than pre-boost levels 29 days after the shot was administered.
The U.S. was behind other countries in charting the spread of disease in the pandemic’s disastrous early months. It’s still behind as new variants threaten to disrupt the winter.
Discussions within the administration are focused on whether a third shot should be considered part of the original Covid-19 vaccine regimen.
Nearly the entire increase came from the burst of federal spending as the government mobilized to contain the spread of the virus.
The Fed plans to cease its bond buys entirely by March, rather than its earlier target of June to give itself room to begin raising interest rates as early as the second quarter of next year.
Costs for key goods and services soared 0.8 percent for the month and 6.8 percent for the year, the highest since 1982, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The middle class is facing serious economic hardship with little of the workplace flexibility now afforded to the well-off. Here’s how employers — and government — can help.
Powell’s comment came after the Fed already announced earlier this month that it would slow the pace at which it buys U.S. government debt and mortgage-backed securities.
Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia implored conservative members of his party to stop obstructing voting rights legislation in a powerful speech on the floor of the Senate Tuesday. While Warnock did not name Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two have come out against doing away with the filibuster in order to allow Democrats to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
We look at the life and legacy of trailblazing Black feminist scholar and activist bell hooks, who died at the age of 69 on Wednesday. We speak with her longtime colleague Beverly Guy-Sheftall, professor of women’s studies at Spelman College, who remembers her as “a person who would sit with young people and community people and students and help them understand this world in which we live, which is full of all kinds of domination.
The county of Williamson, Texas, has announced a settlement of $5 million in the wrongful death of Javier Ambler II in 2019. The 40-year-old Black man died after being repeatedly tased by police during a traffic stop. Police bodycam footage showed Ambler telling officers, “I have congestive heart failure,” and “I can’t breathe,” as they continued to tase him.