In the news today: As Democrats continue to negotiate with holdout Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to support some version of an infrastructure bill that will not send the state of Florida underwater due to rising seas, the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection has lost patience with another subpoenaed Trump ally.
I half expected Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to show up on the Senate floor today dressed as Ramses II, arriving on a pink, three-legged Shetland pony before airily plucking imaginary Skittles from Rand Paul’s leonine mane of laissez-faire locks. Turns out I should have bet the over.
Watching Sinema “legislate” is a little like watching H.R. PufnStuf on acid, only orders of magnitude more maddening. She and Sen.
President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda may be the largest and most substantive social legislation since the New Deal and Great Society.
Passing it will make transformative investments in jobs, the care economy (including child care and pre-K, the child tax credit, home care, and more), combating climate change, delivering relief for millions of immigrants, and much more. That’s why Daily Kos has put all of our resources to help make it pass.
If she were running in any other state, I might be tempted to take Republican Rachel Hamm seriously, but she’s running for secretary of state in California. Her goal is to align with other Republicans to fill the top elected positions in states throughout the country so they can avenge their beloved former President Donald Trump by flipping his 2020 defeat into a win. That’s her goal, and like many a Republican before her, Hamm is using God to achieve it.
I’m back!
(I went to Portugal, by the by, and I love all of you who voted in last edition’s poll. I did, in fact, drink a LOT of wine, and I also got some quality zzzzzzs.
President Joe Biden’s Thursday pitch to Capitol Hill eliminates any effort to crack down on drug prices, a coup for the industry that has spent months pouring millions into lobbying and advertising campaigns.
Before Grant’s killing, a federal judge suggested his execution could provide evidence for a trial over whether Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol is unconstitutional.
After Sen. Richard Burr dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new filing.
The paper said it printed Trump’s falsehoods without any kind of fact check because it trusts readers “to make up their own minds about his statement.
“You stripped middle and lower socioeconomic of programs that would be life-changing and kept drug prices up and you think that’s funny?” a Twitter user said.
Meta—the company formerly known as Facebook—desperately wants you to believe that it is going to put the future on your face. That was the gist of Mark Zuckerberg’s hour-and-a-half announcement today that the largest social-media company in history was officially rebranding, and reorienting itself to focus on “the metaverse.”The news was jarring, but hardly surprising. For Facebook, 2021 has been the Year of Trying to Make the Metaverse Happen.
Imagine Jupiter and its little asteroids as cosmic Halloween decor on the solar system’s front stoop. The planet itself—swirly, stormy, the largest in the solar system—is the pumpkin, while the tiny asteroids that accompany it are kind of like funky-shaped gourds, one cluster in front and the other behind. The pumpkin and these gourds have been on display like this for billions of years, strung together by a quirk of gravity, tracing the same loop around the sun.
A desert planet. An empire spanning the galaxy. A young boy burdened to be its savior. The 1965 novel Dune’s influence on Star Wars is obvious, but Frank Herbert’s work has echoed throughout all of modern science-fiction storytelling.
The former New York governor resigned in August instead of facing potential impeachment.
Thursday’s report from the Commerce Department estimated that the nation’s gross domestic product declined sharply from the 6%-plus annual growth rates of each of the previous two quarters.
Wealthy nations have received over 16 times more COVID-19 vaccines per person than poorer nations dependent on the COVAX program backed by the World Health Organization, according to a new Financial Times analysis. COVAX, which was set up to ensure global equitable access to vaccines, has delivered only 400 million doses after promising 1.4 billion this year. Higher-income countries struck separate vaccine deals with manufacturers, leaving COVAX with less negotiating power.
As an appeals court in London is deciding whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to the United States for publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes, we go to London to speak with British writer and activist Tariq Ali. Assange faces up to 175 years in prison in the U.S. under the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Panel members voted 17-0 to recommend the shot, with one abstention.
The latest idea is an attempt to save a pillar of the party’s health care agenda as members rush to broker final agreements on their sweeping social spending package.
Scott Atlas had rapidly consolidated power on a platform that downplayed the seriousness of Covid to most Americans.
“This deal will get the continent Moderna doses that have been long-awaited and in high demand,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
The most recent Consumer Price Index showed prices have gone up 5.4 percent in the past 12 months.
Too many employers are imposing crippling debt on workers. Biden can do something about it.
The current inflation spike now appears to be on track to persist deep into 2022.
Politicians like to argue in favor of more infrastructure — and more spending on it. But we can use the capacity we already have in much smarter ways.
Donald Trump’s “letter to the editor” was crammed full of nonsense, but the newspaper published it anyway,
In no time, the Fisherman’s Wharf In-N-Out was a top conversation topic at Fox News.
Montgomery, Alabama, is ready to do the right thing. For starters, the city finally renamed Jefferson Davis Avenue on Tuesday. Mayor Steven Reed, who is Montgomery’s first Black mayor, was on hand to celebrate the street now named after Fred. D. Gray, the legendary civil rights lawyer who worked directly with Martin Luther King Jr. and E.D. Nixon, representing leaders like Rosa Parks and King.
Word that the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial ruled this week that those shot by the 17-year-old could not be called “victims” during the trial brought a swift reaction from Rittenhouse defenders who claimed there was nothing unusual about that order. That includes the part where Judge Bruce Schroeder informed the defense that in their closing arguments, they could call those shot by Rittenhouse “looters,“ “rioters,” and “arsonists.
