Today's Liberal News

Sunday Night Owls: Replacing the gasoline tax with something that makes 21st Century sense

Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.

Gabrielle Gurley at The American Prospect writes—The Long and Winding Road to Replacing the Gas Tax. Can Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg convince Congress that road user fees are the next big revenue thing?

Pete Buttigieg has parachuted in for a soft landing at the Department of Transportation. There were no Betsy DeVos-esque moments at the Rhodes Scholar’s confirmation hearing.

Nuts & Bolts inside the Democratic Party: You don’t have to be the big game in town

It’s another Sunday, so for those who tune in, welcome to another discussion of the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. If you’ve missed out, you can catch up any time: Just visit our group or follow the Nuts & Bolts Guide. 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.

The consequences of an absence of trust with the COVID-19 vaccine

Why can’t we get some people to believe in universal healthcare, a Green New Deal, or the power of communities working together to effect change? We can’t even a good number of the population to trust their government to deliver a vaccine to help them. I work in healthcare, and when the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was announced under the Trump administration last year, I absolutely debated whether or not to get it, at first.

A Super Bowl Ad That the Biden Presidency Made Possible

1. Here is what happens in the ad that General Motors will air during the Super Bowl: Standing in a garage inspired half by the storage unit in True Detective and half by the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia conspiracy meme, Will Ferrell announces that the United States has not adopted electric cars as quickly as Norway. He punches a globe. He fetches his friends Kenan Thompson and Awkwafina (he is on a first-name basis with both, as celebrities always are); they set off for Norway.

SNL Is Breaking With Its Old Patterns

Saturday Night Live wants you to know that it’s still fun. “Trust me when I say this: It has only been good here at SNL,” the host, Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy, said in his monologue, without a hint of irony. Given the state of the world, that’s a dangerous statement to make: The show has been through a turbulent year of struggling to find humor in definitively not-good times, Dan Levy.

Superb Owl Sunday V

A special Sunday event: our fifth annual photographic essay celebrating these magnificent birds of prey. These nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, and are captured here in photos from recent years. If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely), I invite you to take a look; as always, it was a hoot to put this together.

Deciduous

Speak plainly, said November to the maples, say
              what you mean now, nowthat summer’s lush declensions lie like the lies
              they were at your feet. Haven’twe praised you? Haven’t we summer after summer
              put our faith in augmentation.

Tom Stoppard’s Double Life

This article was published online on February 7, 2021.In a short book about biography, Hermione Lee, literary life-writer par excellence, offered two metaphors for the art at which she excels. One was an autopsy. The other was a portrait. “Whereas autopsy suggests clinical investigation and, even, violation,” she wrote, “portrait suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character.” She argued that these contrasting approaches had something in common.