Today's Liberal News

Taylor Energy billionaire used oil spill cleanup to avoid taxes for over a decade

In 2004, Hurricane Ivan tore through the Gulf of Mexico. One of the worst disasters wrought by Ivan’s wrath was damage to an offshore oil rig, owned by Louisiana-based company Taylor Energy, which fell over—uncapping the well beneath. Crude oil began to fill the Gulf.

Taylor Energy first lied and said that only a few gallons of oil were leaking every day out of the broken well, while they worked to plug the holes created by Ivan and their rig.

‘Appropriate use of state’s constitutional power’: Court dismisses challenge to Illinois’ ICE ban

Two Illinois counties went straight to court after lawmakers passed into law legislation that effectively ends immigration detention in the state. Their plan was to deal the Illinois Way Forward Act a death blow, and continue reaping in millions from federal contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

But that legal effort by McHenry and Kankakee Counties has failed for now, because a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit.

Senate Democrats are determined to ‘restore the Senate,’ if only Manchin will let them

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer notified Senate Democrats he is prioritizing an effort to “restore the Senate,” and do something about the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation. Politico has a bit more information on what “restore the Senate” means, and also why Schumer is so intent on trying to get the budget reconciliation for President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB) plan done before Christmas.

The 16 Best TV Shows of 2021

Last year, TV became essential. When the stages we used to go to—concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas—closed amid the pandemic, the small screen became the only outlet for safe viewing entertainment. Things have begun to change this year: Artists are announcing tours, people have trickled back into cinemas, and even the Summer Olympics happened. (Sort of.)But TV, thankfully, hasn’t stopped keeping us enthralled.

We Know a Lot More About Omicron Now

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.The flood of Omicron news can be overwhelming. The endless data, anecdotes, and studies are hard enough to synthesize. But what makes the information even harder to parse is that so much evidence (i.e., what people are seeing) is intertwined with opinion (i.e., what people are hoping and fearing).

The Pandemic of the Vaccinated Is Here

Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta.

How Europe’s “Shadow Immigration System” Pays Libyan Militias to Jail Migrants in Brutal Conditions

An explosive new investigation details how the European Union has created a shadow immigration system that captures migrants arriving from Africa before they reach Europe and sends them to brutal militia-run detention centers in Libya. “This is a climate migration story,” says Ian Urbina, investigative journalist and director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, who authored the report for The New Yorker magazine.

“Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset”: Calls Mount to Cancel Debt & Halt Wealth Transfer to the Rich

As calls grow for Biden to extend the moratorium on student debt, we speak with the Debt Collective’s Astra Taylor and feature her new film for The Intercept, “Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset,” animated by artist Molly Crabapple. The $15 trillion in U.S. household debt is “a form of wealth transfer” from the poor to the rich, Taylor says. “People are in debt by design.

Why Biden picked Powell

In the end, President Joe Biden did what many close to him expected: He took a longer-than-anticipated amount of time to arrive at a reasonable, moderate decision that thrilled few but carried limited risk.

NYC Opens Nation’s First Safe Drug Injection Sites; 15 Lives Saved in First Week of Operation

At least fifteen lives have been saved, so far, after the nation’s first supervised illegal drug injection sites opened in New York City about a week ago. The facilities provide clean needles and the opioid reversal medication Naloxone, as well as medical care and drug dependency treatment options. This comes as U.S. overdose deaths topped 100,000 during the first year of the pandemic.

News roundup: Not-great omicron news; Jan. 6 committee seeks phone records

In the news today: The select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed phone records for more than 100 people, even as key potential witnesses are refusing to talk. Elsewhere in government, Republicans continue their quest to make the United States a worse place, holding up important legislation and forcing Congress into some really stupid contortions to get the basics done.

Infrastructure bill gives states discretion on spending. They have to prioritize equity

President Biden’s new hard infrastructure bill—passed with a level of bipartisan support in both houses of Congress that’s almost unheard of these days for a spending package—is quite a major accomplishment. (What, you thought I was going to make a joke involving Biden’s prior use of an off-color exuberance?) One important measure of its success is the degree to which it increases racial equity.

After his latest pro-Putin rant, it’s fair to ask whether Tucker Carlson is an actual Russian asset

Is Tucker Carlson literally on Vladimir Putin’s payroll? He has to be, right? As the free world attempts to stand up to this ex-KGB thug who brazenly attacked our country and poisons political adversaries nearly as often as Tucky-son poisons minds, Fox’s resident trust fund bloviator is giving literal aid and comfort to the enemy.

You might say this foppish fish stick fuckwit is a modern-day Tokyo Rose—only slightly more transparent.