Today's Liberal News

Sinema plays silly games with Mitt Romney as world impatiently awaits her answer on Biden agenda

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.

Build Back Better Act is historic. Daily Kos has set up a historic campaign to pass it

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.

God apparently told Rachel Hamm Trump left office ‘because he’s a good father,’ not because he lost

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.

The Real Reason Facebook Changed Its Name

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.

NASA’s Mission to Jupiter Has Nothing to Do With Jupiter

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.

Science Fiction’s Very Special Boys

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.

Vaccine Inequity: Meet the Doctor Refusing a Booster as Rich Nations Get 16x More Doses Than Poor

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.

Tariq Ali: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Must Not Be Extradited for Exposing War Crimes in Afghanistan

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.

Civil rights hero Claudette Colvin files to have her record expunged

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.

Rittenhouse judge has a history of jackassery that goes back over 30 years

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.

Biden blows cover off Youngkin’s private Trump pandering

If there’s one thing Republicans absolutely positively don’t want over the next year, it’s a cycle in which the party’s de facto leader Donald Trump is on the ballot in every single race across the country.

Senate Republicans are using every trick in the book to steer attention away from Trump and back to President Joe Biden.