Today's Liberal News

This Week in Statehouse Action: Dark and Stormy edition

In many parts of the country, warmer weather tends to bring rain and/or storms—something you may be enjoying from a dry, safe place even as you read this.

But as ever, GOP lawmakers in legislatures across the country continue to cast ominous clouds over things like equality, voting rights, and basic decency.

That’s right—you’ve been caught in a Statehouse Action squall.

New polling shows President Biden has quickly restored America’s stature in the eyes of the world

So now that we have a president who doesn’t pose an existential threat to NATO, respects climate change accords, takes worldwide pandemics seriously and won’t flatter dictators, threaten to nuke hurricanes, or otherwise make the world’s foremost democracy look like King Kong on a four-year Jägermeister-and-bath-salts bender, the rest of the world likes us better. 

Go figure.

We Choose Our Cults Every Day

Way back in January, I was idly thumbing through Instagram when I received a message that shook me like a nascent martini. “Did you hear that Taking Cara Babies donated to Trump?” a friend wrote. This sentence likely makes no sense to you, unless you’ve had a baby sometime in the past few years. Taking Cara Babies is the brand name for Cara Dumaplin, a neonatal nurse turned baby-sleep expert who became, in 2020, my everything.

In the Heights Knows the Second-Generation American’s Dilemma

This article contains spoilers for In the Heights. In The Heights, the director Jon M. Chu’s Hollywood adaptation of the groundbreaking Broadway musical, is ostensibly a tale about the aspirational young. Its focus stays mostly on some dreamers (and a “Dreamer”) living in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

Vaccine Hesitancy, Even by Healthcare Workers, Means Shots Expire, Variants Emerge, Pandemic Drags On

As President Biden pledges to buy half of a billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to give to the world, many Americans are refusing to get vaccinated, and thousands of Johnson & Johnson shots will expire soon. This week, Houston Methodist Hospital suspended 178 staff members who refused to abide by its mandate that employees be fully vaccinated. We speak with infectious disease epidemiologist Dr.

U.S. Led 2020 Nuclear Weapons Spending; Now Biden Going “Full Steam Ahead” on Trump’s Nuclear Plans

As President Biden prepares for the G7 and NATO summits and a meeting with Vladimir Putin, we look at how the United States, Russia and other nuclear-armed nations continue to spend billions on nuclear weapons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite President Biden’s criticisms of the Trump administration’s nuclear policies during his candidacy, his administration is continuing initiatives to expand the U.S.