Today's Liberal News

The Lame-Duck Executioner: Trump Prepares to Execute Five Prisoners in Closing Days of Presidency

We look at the unprecedented five federal executions President Trump’s Department of Justice has scheduled before Inauguration Day, starting with Brandon Bernard on International Human Rights Day and ending with Dustin Higgs on January 15, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Four of the people set to die are Black men, and the other is Lisa Montgomery, a severely mentally ill white woman who faced a lifetime of sexual abuse and would be the first woman executed in nearly 70 years.

Tuesday Night Owls: Don’t assume there’s nothing bad left to discover about Donald Trump

Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

Timothy Noah at The Atlantic writes—The Trump You’ve Yet to Meet. Just because we know bad things about the 45th president, don’t assume that there’s nothing bad left to find out.

How well do we know Donald Trump? Pretty well, it would seem. Nobody has ever accused the outgoing president of possessing a complex personality.

Arizona governor appeared to send Trump to voicemail as he certified election results on live TV

On Monday, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed and certified the Grand Canyon state’s election results, sending president-elect 11 electoral points. This was [looks at notes] the third time Joe Biden won Arizona this year! Donald Trump and his cabal of treasonous coup promoters, continue to say that not only has the Democratic Party rigged all of the elections that are predominantly controlled by Republican officials, Republican officials are now complicit in treason.

The National Review calls Trump’s post-election behavior by its name: disgraceful and dishonest

It isn’t normal for an American political party to cling to a defeated, one-term president. But by all indications, since the Nov. 3 election, nearly the entirety of the Republican Party appears to have collectively committed itself, for the foreseeable future, to the fortunes of a demonstrably unstable and mercurial reality TV show personality—one whose political acumen over the course of the past four years has been questionable at best.

What Rudy Giuliani Is Really Up To

Updated on December 1, 2020 at 5:32 p.m. ET.In his frenzied crusade to help President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election result, Rudy Giuliani has displayed many of the characteristics that Trump has long demanded in his personal lawyers—albeit with more surreal and comedic elements.

The Atlantic Daily: What We Still Don’t Know About Vaccines

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox. SIPHIWE SIBEKO / REUTERSThe vaccine news cycles are just beginning.More trial data are coming, our science reporter Sarah Zhang says in her latest. Expect future results that are “sometimes good, sometimes confusing, and sometimes disappointing.

Trump Is Rapidly Becoming Irrelevant

“When can we stop thinking about Trump every minute?” the New York Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens asked yesterday. As usual with such queries, the correct answer is “What do you mean ‘we’?” To a remarkable degree, people have already stopped paying attention to the 45th president.

A New Day for Queer People in the South

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Allison Scott has waited years for this day to come. This day, specifically. Scott’s job is advocating for LGBTQ rights in the South, and for four years, her home state of North Carolina has prohibited towns and cities from passing new protections for queer people. Today, that ban is finally dead—and North Carolina has an opportunity to change the reputation it earned in the 2016 fight over H.B. 2, the so-called bathroom bill.

Galaxy Brain Is Real

In December of 1995, astronomers around the world were vying for a chance to use the hottest new tool in astronomy: the Hubble space telescope. Bob Williams didn’t have to worry about all that. As the director of the institution that managed Hubble, Williams could use the telescope to observe whatever he wanted. And he decided to point it at nothing in particular.Williams’s colleagues told him, as politely as they could, that this was an awful idea.

World AIDS Day Is Grim Reminder of an Ongoing Epidemic, with 700,000 Dead from HIV/AIDS in 2019

December 1 is World AIDS Day, and as the world waits on an effective vaccine for COVID-19, we look at the ongoing AIDS epidemic and how the coronavirus has threatened treatment for those living with HIV. Author and journalism professor Steven Thrasher says the coronavirus has amplified racial, class and other disparities, just as AIDS has done for decades, and that treatments must have an antiracist and anti-capitalist foundation in order to be successful.

Vaccine Ethics: Doctor Warns Against Paying People to Get COVID Vaccine as U.S. Preps Distribution

As distribution of coronavirus vaccines draws near, a recent poll suggests that 42% of Americans are reluctant to take the vaccine. In response, some, including former Maryland congressmember and presidential candidate John Delaney, are pushing to pay people to get vaccinated, a move being discouraged by many, including Dr. Monica Peek, a physician, associate professor of medicine and health disparities researcher at the University of Chicago.

“Part of the Solution”: Meet the Black Doctor Who Joined a Vaccine Trial After Her Dad Died of COVID

As the drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna seek emergency approval for their coronavirus vaccines, public health bodies and regulators are weighing how to distribute the vaccines and who will get access to them. The pandemic is disproportionately impacting African American, Latinx and Indigenous communities, exposing long-standing inequities and systemic racism in the U.S. healthcare system.