Today's Liberal News

What’s new at Daily Kos? Highlights and updates from the month of August

August is typically a slower month here, but Daily Kos actually saw a rise in engagement in July and then again in August this year. There was plenty to cover and discuss with the delta variant spiking, Afghanistan and the many issues surrounding the ending of a 20-year war, and Hurricane Ida and its aftermath. We had a lot of stories about deaths of notable anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, which have been occurring at a record pace.

After school orders quarantine, a father and his friends threaten principal, zip ties in hand

Among the many weapons of choice carried by the domestic terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, one of the more common was the ordinary nylon zip tie. In addition to their well-understood industrial uses, these flexible, non-yielding fasteners are also commonly used by law enforcement as restraints.

Since they have a perfectly innocent utility, carrying them can hardly be considered a crime under normal circumstances.

The Strange, Sudden Silence of Conservative Abortion Foes

Few political issues inflame passions so much as abortion. The issues of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy (for abortion-rights advocates) and the sanctity of life (for their opponents) are so elemental that scant room exists for compromise, conciliation, or cool analysis.Yet something strange has happened since a new Texas law that practically bans abortion after six weeks went into effect this week, with the passive assent of the U.S. Supreme Court.

A Film About the Impossible Job of Valuating Lives

What is the value of a human life? This is the question with which the lawyer Kenneth Feinberg (played by Michael Keaton) opens the new Netflix film Worth, stressing to his students that he’s not posing it as a philosophical query. He is a high-powered mediator who assesses damages in cases involving unexpected, large-scale death—such as lawsuits involving Agent Orange or, in the case of this film, the September 11 attacks.

Your Phone Is Your Private Space

Privacy is a set of curtains drawn across the windows of our lives. And technology companies are moths that will chew through more of the fabric every year if we let them, and especially if we encourage them.An American who stores accumulated photographs in a spare bedroom or attic or self-storage space correctly presumes that those albums of visual keepsakes are off-limits to other people.

The Masks Were Working All Along

The most urgent question in the world for the past 20 months has been: What’s the best way to stop the spread of the coronavirus? But it’s a frustrating question to answer definitively, since even the most logical solutions have been shrouded in what I’ve called the fog of pandemic.For example, covering your nose and mouth seems like a sensible way to block virus particles that come out of the mouth and go into the nose.

How America Can Win the Middle East

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has talked repeatedly about competition with China. To fight off Beijing and other autocracies, he has said, democracies must uphold their values. He has talked much less about the Middle East in that time, and although he has never phrased it in so many words, Biden appears to be trying to deprioritize a region that he believes has consumed too much of America’s attention and resources.

This chilling campaign ad from 2020 will soon be the reality in every Republican-dominated state

Very late Wednesday night, just before midnight, five right-wing fanatics on the United States Supreme Court took the cowardly step of preemptively overruling Roe v. Wade from the shadows. They did this quietly and surreptitiously, mindful that they would have risked the full wrath of the American public by explicitly overturning Roe, a decision that has stood for nearly half a century in guaranteeing the right to terminate one’s own pregnancy without governmental interference.