Today's Liberal News

Nuts & Bolts—Inside the Democratic Party: Does a census change the party? Yes and no

Welcome back to the weekly Nuts & Bolts Guide to small campaigns. Every week I try to tackle issues I’ve been asked about. With the help of other campaign workers and notes, we address how to improve and build better campaigns or explain issues that impact our party.

Looking at issues beyond campaigns, we have to start looking at how the Democratic Party itself is impacted by shifts in population and the locations of that population in the United States.

Refugee program offers Liberian immigrants a pathway to citizenship, but it’s floundering

This story was originally published at Prism.

During his presidency, Donald Trump targeted some of the most vulnerable immigrant communities in the United States—including populations that were granted temporary protected status by the federal government because they came from countries afflicted by natural disasters, war, and other dangerous conditions. This included Liberians.

False Dawn

Waking, you’re delighted: “Oh!” A
long, loud cry. But the dog’s not there.
You were dreaming. I woke looking
at the hands you said were beautiful.
All this dead-end summer, the hours
at the end of the day debriding hope,
the hours in the morning asking fear
to stay beside us. These are the years
beyond perfection, the days the coneflowers
rock from side to side like particles
suspended in the drying early Front Range air.

How America Dropped to No. 36

In April, when I received my second Moderna shot, America was on a roll. Adjusted for population, the United States had distributed more COVID-19 vaccines per capita than any country but Israel, Chile, the United Kingdom, and a smattering of small nations and islands. With a surge of doses, we could have been No. 1 in the world.Five months later, the U.S. is no longer in the top five in national vaccine rates. We’re not in the top 10, or the top 20, or top 30.

Playing Defense Is Totally Fine

If you’ve turned on any cable-news channel or opened any newspaper or magazine since most of Afghanistan fell to the Taliban last month, you can see a clear narrative emerging: The terrorists are returning, and they will attack us.

The Progressives Have Already Won

In an Oval Office meeting with House progressives last week, Joe Biden made a joke about how much had changed in his long career: “I used to be called a moderate,” the president mused. He was, at that moment, trying to mediate a Democratic Party struggle between the left-wing lawmakers sitting before him and the moderates he had hosted a few hours earlier. When the meeting ended, Biden pulled aside Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington State.