Today's Liberal News

The Comey Indictment Is Not Just Payback

President Donald Trump recently ordered his attorney general to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, and tonight, the Department of Justice delivered an indictment of Comey for lying to Congress. Comey, for his part, insists on his innocence. But the charges against Comey are not just about the president’s abuse of his power for personal retribution. They represent a test of the president’s plans for the future.

Clues That a Recession Is Coming

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Alan Greenspan knows a thing or two about underpants. American history’s second-longest-tenured Fed chairman also knows a thing or many about recessions, obviously, and the two are related: Sales of men’s underwear, Greenspan once reportedly suggested, are inversely proportional to economic anxiety.

Allen Ginsberg, Great American Poet-Buffoon

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Could be the weather, could be the news, could be the state of my digestion, but right now I’m in the mood for a proper American poet-buffoon.

How Charlie Kirk’s Death Will Change His Message

As the leader of a young conservative political movement that helped Donald Trump win a second presidential term, Charlie Kirk accomplished a lot in his too-short life. But at Kirk’s packed memorial in Arizona last weekend, his admirers proclaimed that the slain activist now stands to become something even more powerful and potentially lasting: a martyr.

What Republicans Can Do If They Really Want to Protect Free Speech

While out of power, the American right was unified in complaining about the left’s speech policing. Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, free-speech rights and values are dividing the coalition. One camp thinks Republicans should refrain from policing speech; the other favors policing the left’s speech. The second camp seems ascendant, unfortunately, while the first has failed to turn its beliefs into policy.
The Jimmy Kimmel controversy illustrates the fissure.

Israel Killed 31 Journalists in Yemen in Deadliest Attack on Press in 16 Years

The Committee to Protect Journalists says recent Israeli strikes on newspaper offices in Yemen killed 31 journalists and media support workers, making it the deadliest attack on journalists anywhere in the world in 16 years. CPJ said the attack was the second-deadliest attack on the press ever recorded by the organization. “These are civilians,” says Niku Jafarnia, Middle East and North Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch.

West African Asylum Seekers Sent Home Despite Risk of Torture, After Being Deported by U.S. to Ghana

More than a dozen West African men who were deported to Ghana by the United States have since been returned to their home countries by the Ghanaian government, despite legitimate fears of torture or persecution at home. Ghana is one of a growing list of countries that have signed “third country agreements” with the United States to accept U.S. deportees.

Where Are the Detainees? Hundreds of “Alligator Alcatraz” Prisoners Disappear from ICE Database

Hundreds of people who were once detained at the troubled immigration jail in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” have disappeared. Democracy Now! speaks with Shirsho Dasgupta, a Miami Herald reporter who found that, as of late August, about two-thirds of the 1,800 immigrants who were held there in July have gone missing from ICE’s online database, with their families and attorneys unable to locate them.