The state of Texas was hit hard, as was much of the central United States, when frigid Arctic air pushed southward and a winter storm blew through. Millions of Texas residents have been without electricity for days amid record-setting cold temperatures and widespread blackouts. The power situation is improving now, but officials warn there may be further rotating power outages as systems come back online.
Burnt buildings were still smoldering when Bill Clinton toured South Central Los Angeles, the historic center of the city’s Black community, in early May 1992. The presidential candidate had flown cross-country from the East Coast as the city was being consumed by waves of unrest following the acquittal of four police officers who had savagely beat Rodney King the year before.
As Democracy Now! prepares to mark 25 years on air, we celebrate Nermeen Shaikh’s 10th anniversary as a Democracy Now! co-host and feature a report she filed from protests at New York’s JFK Airport against the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, one of the many highlights from her time on the program.
Students, campaigners and top Democrats have been pushing President Joe Biden to use executive authority to cancel at least $50,000 in student loan debt per person. Student loan debt in the U.S. stands at $1.7 trillion, with some 45 million people owing money. Filmmaker and organizer Astra Taylor, an author, documentary director and organizer with the Debt Collective, says Biden has clear legal authority to cancel student debt. “Not doing this is a choice,” she says.
While COVID-19 infection rates and hospitalizations appear to be waning, the United States has a long way to go before people can safely return to everyday life without masks. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says it’s vital to stay vigilant even as vaccinations ramp up. “If we can get our transmission down as low as possible, that is actually going to make the vaccines more effective.
Millions of people in Texas were plunged into freezing cold and darkness as a major winter storm overwhelmed the state’s power grid. More than 12 million Texans face water disruptions and have been ordered to boil tap water for safe consumption, and some parts of the state have no running water at all. The state is also running out of food as the storms disrupt key supply chains.
“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.
I want to be supportive, but I’m hurt that he didn’t tell me sooner.
My daughter’s teacher already gave her a stern talking-to.
A once-in-a-century pandemic provides a once-in-a-lifetime chance to improve public health.
A new series from POLITICO and The Fifty surfacing the best ideas from around the country for speeding recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Which states are doing the best job of limiting Covid deaths and vaccinating their residents? A snapshot in two charts.
It turns out the pandemic may not have been the budget wrecker everyone feared.
Downtowns won’t recover from the pandemic anytime soon. Public transportation must look elsewhere.
Allies laud Brian Deese’s leadership on the stimulus negotiations, but he’s rubbed some the wrong way.
The U.S. wants to stop new coal projects, but risks losing poor countries to Beijing’s “Belt and Road” agenda.
Investors are pumping up bubbles across markets, with excitement growing about more stimulus and widespread vaccinations.
As the critical swing vote in a 50-50 Senate, Joe Manchin has emerged as the most powerful man in Washington.
The decision breaks with the Trump administration’s opposition to Okonjo-Iweala and brings the U.S. in line with much of the rest of the world.
Ecuador’s presidential front-runner says the country is facing a “double crisis” of COVID-19 and austerity. “We need a renewal in our politics,” Andrés Arauz tells Democracy Now! The left-wing economist secured nearly 33% of the vote in the first round of Ecuador’s presidential election on February 7 but fell short of the 40% needed to win outright.
The agency is looking at whether a lawmaker assaulted a police officer and an alleged attempt by another lawmaker to carry a gun into the House Chamber.
Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.
Alex Shephard at The Nation writes—Rush Limbaugh Made America Worse. The racist, sexist radio host played a pivotal role in injecting cruelty and conspiracy into conservative mass media:
Twenty-five years ago, Rush Limbaugh graced the cover of Time magazine.
In the past …
Ash Wednesday 2001 was also in February, just a few months after a close election decided by Bush v. Gore in December of 2000. I was a Catholic graduate theology student at a Methodist institution, in a suburb of Atlanta, filling my car up with gas. The station was literally across the tracks in a poorer part of town where the cheaper gas fit my budget. I had just come from a church that was hard enough to locate in the days before GPS.
President Biden’s plan would actually do a lot of good—but it could do even more.
The Fox News machine, along with the Republican Party, has spent the last 24 hours attempting to place blame for the power outages and electrical grid failures in Texas on environmentalism and “green energy.
Jamilah and williambryantmiles take on topics of race, sex, and identity.
New Jersey residents and others gathered early Wednesday morning on rooftops, at nearby venues, and in garage parking lots to watch the end of the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, marking the end of Donald Trump’s imprint on the city. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, some even watched from One Atlantic, a wedding venue on top of a pier.
Proponents of the economic aid measures are warning Congress not to abandon key tools for keeping sick working-class Americans isolated at home.
The toilets in one Harris County jail were filled to the brim with feces and urine because the facility had no running water, according to people incarcerated there.
When it came time to write a platform for the 2020 election, Republicans either could not be bothered, or could not think of anything beyond “whatever Trump says now.” In any case, they took the extraordinary move of simply discarding their platform and moving forward with no declared plan at all. Which at least means they can’t be accused of breaking promises, since they didn’t make any.