Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric.
In recent days, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) turned on the paid leave proposal, likely forcing Democrats to cut the popular policy out of their final package.
Patti Hidalgo Menders, president of the Loudoun County Virginia Republican Women’s Club, is the worst kind of Karen. She believes that teaching the racist history of America makes white kids feel bad, and Black and brown kids fall into victimhood—therefore it simply shouldn’t be taught.
About a year before Christine Mallinson gave birth to her first child, she and her husband agreed that all of their children would take her last name. The decision came down to family cohesion: The couple wanted their children—they eventually had two—to share a last name with the only cousin near their kids in age, who was Mallinson’s niece.
Before he was a favorite of those decrying “medical tyranny,” Florida’s GOP governor approved a mandate that doctors log kids’ vaccines into a database.
When I asked him about his film adaptation of Dune, the writer-director Denis Villeneuve quickly held up his prized copy of Frank Herbert’s book, a French-translation paperback with a particularly striking cover that he’s owned since he was 13. “I keep the book beside me as I’m working,” Villeneuve told me cheerfully over Zoom. “I made this movie for myself. Being a hard-core Dune fan, the first audience member I wanted to please was myself.
“Every sensible revenue option seems to be destroyed,” Sen. Bernie Sanders complained Wednesday.
Yet another climate provision may be out of the Democrats’ signature spending bill. On Monday, The New York Times and Reuters reported that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, one of two pivotal Democratic votes, wants to remove the bill’s tax on methane leaks from oil and gas operations. (A spokesperson for Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware whose committee oversees that proposal, denied the reports on Twitter.
Some good news finally—finally—appears to be on the horizon for roughly 28 million of the United States’ youngest residents. On the heels of an advisory meeting convened yesterday, the FDA is likely on the cusp of green-lighting a kid-size dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for Americans ages 5 to 11, a move that’s been months in the making.
The environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger joins us just before he is ordered to report to jail today, after a years-long legal battle with the oil company Chevron and 813 days of house arrest. In 2011, Donziger won an $18 billion settlement against Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Indigenous people in Ecuador for dumping 16 billion gallons of oil into their ancestral land in the Amazon.
We speak with one of the group of five climate activists who have entered their eighth day of hunger strike demanding President Biden pass the full $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan to combat the climate crisis and expand the U.S. social safety net. The climate programs drafted in the bill face opposition from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who has made millions of dollars from coal companies in his home state of West Virginia since taking office.
New York City taxi drivers have entered their second week of hunger striking outside City Hall to demand that the mayor grant debt relief for thousands of drivers impacted by the taxi medallion price crash. Many drivers purchased taxi medallions, the permits required to drive a taxi, for upwards of $1 million. After the incursion of ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft, as well as more recent plummeting demand for taxis due to the pandemic, they are now only worth about $100,000.
Four years after the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a federal civil trial charges the organizers with an unlawful conspiracy to commit violent acts. Defendants include Jason Kessler, the main organizer, and Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who spoke at the event.
Gossiping about celebrities is fun because you don’t know them personally and therefore you can’t hurt their feelings or directly ruin their lives. The idea that celebrity gossip could ever be dangerous is silly.
“If you are spread out doing your trick-or-treating, that should be very safe for your children,“ Rochelle Walensky said.
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.
As jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces an extradition hearing Wednesday in London, supporters gathered Friday for the Belmarsh Tribunal, named for the Belmarsh maximum security prison where Assange is being held. The mock trial highlighted major WikiLeaks revelations of U.S. war crimes and demanded Assange’s freedom. 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.
In the news today: Rep. Mo Brooks was a speaker at the Jan. 6 rally in which Donald Trump implored his crowd to “march” on the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt recognition of Trump’s November election loss, leading to violence and deaths. Brooks now continues to be extremely squirrelly about just how involved he and his staff were in those events.
Thomas Sibick is accused of ripping off DC Metro Police Officer Michael Fanone’s badge and radio during the melee that left Officer Fanone unconscious. The Buffalo, New York, resident tried to lie his way out of an arrest, after video evidence—including images of Sibick showing off a stolen riot shield after the attack—was shared with the FBI online. Sibick faces up to 15 years in prison for his part in the Jan.
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York tried to goad the former president in an MSNBC interview.
During interviews earlier this month with the House select subcommittee on the pandemic, Dr. Deborah Birx conceded that the Trump administration was “distracted” from its work on COVID-19 because of the election, and that the administration’s early failures likely led to as many as 130,000 unnecessary deaths.
As Daily Kos has covered, Republicans are eager to attack trans folks via a handful of approaches at the state level. Banning trans girls from participating in girls’ sports teams, for example, tends to get a lot of national media coverage.
A leaked internal government report obtained by BuzzFeed News continues to confirm what advocates were long saying when the anti-asylum Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) policy was in effect: There were particularly vulnerable adults and children who under “guiding principles” should have been exempt from the program, but weren’t.
The far-right lawmaker said the founding document “says to overthrow tyrants.
The longtime aide to Hillary Clinton didn’t name the senator or his party, the Guardian reports.
Some cuckoos are born assassins. Within a day or two of hatching, the infant birds—still blind, pink, and featherless—will start to evict the other residents of their nest, hurling them over the edge and to their death.Technically, the evictions they carry out are from living quarters that aren’t even their own. The cuckoos are parasites, strategically placed by their mother into the abode of another species so they can mooch their way through adolescence.
A voting rights bill before the Senate contains new protections for election officials.