Today's Liberal News

Nuts & Bolts—Inside a Democratic campaign: Calling out a campaign for hitting below the belt

Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns. We have had an unusual period in the last few weeks, including a U.S. Representative openly publishing a cartoon threatening the life of another elected official. These issues are appalling, and they should make us angry and motivated. These are campaign issues that should be discussed with motivated Democratic voters in your district.

Watching Saturday Night Live Is Like Doomscrolling

Watching Saturday Night Live has always been an uneven experience—there are duds and gems, silliness and darker satire, and often stark shifts in tone from one sketch to the next. But given the anxious state of the world today, watching the show has started to feel uncannily like doomscrolling through a social-media feed. The news the show is riffing on has been unrelentingly bleak for years, and the show’s satire has only grown more apocalyptic.

Birthday

Gabriela Pesqueira / The Atlantic
At first, birthdays were
reserved for kings and saints.
But it’s rainbow sprinkles and
face painting for everybody
these days.The best way to avoid having
your birthday ruined is to avoid
having any expectations for
your birthday.Without the delineation of
years, time would become
an expanse of open water.
Horizonless, shark-filled. One
of my biggest fears.

The Complicated Truth About Trump 2024

If Donald Trump tries to run for president again, one of his former campaign advisers has a plan to dissuade him. Anticipating that Trump may not know who Adlai Stevenson was or that he lost two straight presidential elections in the 1950s, this ex-adviser figures he or someone else might need to explain the man’s unhappy fate. They’ll remind Trump that if he were beaten in 2024, he would join Stevenson as one of history’s serial losers.

The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls

Social media gets blamed for many of America’s ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself. But proving that harms have occurred to all of society is hard. Far easier to show is the damage to a specific class of people: adolescent girls, whose rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded.

Angela Davis: “Forces of White Supremacy” Are Behind Attacks on Teaching Critical Race Theory

We speak to legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis about the latest war waged by ultraconservative lawmakers against teaching the racist history of the United States. North Dakota’s Republican Governor Doug Burgum signed legislation banning the teaching of critical race theory, defining it as any suggestion that racism is systemically embedded in American society. The law prohibits even discussion of the law in state schools.

Community Spotlight: You never forget your first time

Daily Kos allows its members to be as anonymous as we like. We choose our own usernames, and we’re not required to provide our given names. As for the rest of our identities, we can reveal or keep back as much as we like.

Even with that anonymity, when you publish a story on the site, it’s still your username below the headline, and your tip jar at the top of the comments.

Watch Denver journalist condemn Lauren Boebert for saying ‘cruel, false, and bigoted’ things

On Wednesday, Republican pooperstar Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, one of the more wretched politicians allowed onto the House floor, spewed out an Islamophobic, invective-filled rant. Specifically, she attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, saying she was part of the “Jihad squad” and also saying she had two husbands, one of whom is her brother. Boebert also accused Rep. Omar of funding Islamic terrorism. She literally said all of teose things.