Today's Liberal News

George Floyd Week of Action Marks Anniversary of His Murder as Police Reform Bill Stalls in Congress

As the world marks the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, attorney Lee Merritt says there is still a long way to go in reforming “the deadliest police culture in the modern world.” Merritt, who has represented the Floyd family and other victims of police brutality, says Republicans and Democrats should come together to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Robert Kennedy Jr. cavorts with Nazis, and suing Daily Kos won’t make that any less true

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pretty much the worst. The prominent anti-vaxxer (see here, here, and here, and also here and here as his family runs away from him), anti-masker, and anti-sound health policy scion of the famous family has done incredible damage to our ability to weather and emerge from this global pandemic, making common cause with Republicans like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to spread their anti-science, pro-COVID-19 message.

In Seattle’s wide-open mayoral race, which flavor of progressive will win out?

Filing closed on Friday for the Seattle mayoral race, which is an open seat after incumbent Jenny Durkan’s surprising retirement after just one term. Fifteen different candidates are seeking the Emerald City’s highest office despite the job’s long track record of being a destroyer of dreams: No Seattle mayor has managed to get reelected since Greg Nickels in 2005, and before that, Norm Rice in 1993.

Dan Frank Was a Gifted and Generous Editor

I don’t know how many people in the reading public would recognize the name Dan Frank. Millions of them should. He was a gifted editor, mentor, leader, and friend, who within the publishing world was renowned. His untimely death of cancer yesterday, at age 67, is a terrible loss especially for his family and colleagues, but also to a vast community of writers and to the reading public.Minute by minute, and page by page, writers gripe about editors.

George Floyd’s Murder Changed Americans’ Views on Policing

President Joe Biden likes to recall a conversation he had with Gianna Floyd, George Floyd’s daughter, at Floyd’s funeral last summer. “Daddy changed the world,” she told Biden. If the first step to changing the world is changing people’s minds, Floyd’s murder one year ago did that—though just how much, and with what long-term effects, remain unclear.

America’s Entire Understanding of the Pandemic Was Shaped by Messy Data

To understand any data set, you have to understand the way its information is compiled. That’s especially true for a patchwork data set such as the one composed of U.S. COVID-19 data, which is the product of 56 smaller systems belonging to each state and territory in the country.In our year of working with COVID-19 data, we harnessed our attention on these systems and found that much of the information they produced reflected their individual structures.

If Aliens Are Out There, They’re Way Out There

The mysterious flying objects showed up in Washington, D.C., on a hot, humid night in the summer of 1952. The air-traffic controllers at the airport saw them first, and then so did the operators at nearby Air Force bases—seven unexplained blips on their radar screens. A commercial pilot in the vicinity reported seeing bright lights in the darkness. The Air Force dispatched fighter jets but found nothing. A week later, it happened again. More blips. More jets.