Today's Liberal News

Biden administration is foot-dragging on a COVID-19 safety standard, this week in the war on workers

In January, President Joe Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to release an emergency temporary standard on COVID-19 safety in the workplace by March 15. Well, March 15 has come and gone, as has April 15, and there’s no emergency standard, despite what Dr. Anthony Fauci described this week as “an unacceptably high level” of COVID-19 cases every day in the United States.

A terrible disease, children at risk, and a promising treatment that’s about to vanish: Part I

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a specific classification for what is known as a “rare pediatric disease.” Every condition that meets that designation is, by definition, horrible. These are the diseases that most families are blissfully unaware of, while for others the names of these diseases—Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease, CANDLE Syndrome, Pompe Disease—become a dark drumbeat that sounds behind each moment of their lives.

Who Wants to Watch Black Pain?

Updated at 6:40 p.m. ET on April 17, 2021.In the trailer for Amazon’s new horror series, Them, Diana Ross’s “Home” soundtracks a tender scene: A Black husband and wife in the 1950s survey their new house in wonder and dance in the living room with their two daughters. “When I think of home / I think of a place where there’s love overflowing,” Ross sings. But, as in the song, the tenor of the trailer changes.

An Ode to the Left Hand

Tim Lahan
This article was published online on April 17, 2021.I raised the drumstick, brought it down, and a dreamworld opened beneath me.A dreamworld, to be clear, of incompetence. A dreamworld of crapness and debility. A slump in tempo, an abyss. I was sitting at my practice drum kit, attempting one of the signature moves of the late John “Bonzo” Bonham, of Led Zeppelin: triplets with a left-hand lead.

The New Face of Trumpism in Texas

In 2015, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, the fates of two very different Texans collided.One was 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a precocious kid in a NASA T-shirt who had built a clock out of spare parts and brought it to school in a pencil case. His English teacher decided it might be a bomb, and the school called the police, who arrested Mohamed for bringing in a “hoax bomb.

The Year My Deductibles Disappeared

A little while ago, amid the timeless blur of pandemic lockdown, a calendar ping alerted me that April 15—Tax Day—was nigh. I had completely forgotten to set up an appointment with my accountant. Emailing him in a panic, I was relieved when he responded that he had a slot left the day before Saint Patrick’s Day. He wouldn’t be meeting clients in person this year, because of COVID-19, he explained, but we could go over my 2020 expenses on Zoom.

Left-Behind Suburbs Are a Civil-Rights Battleground

The death of Daunte Wright, a Black motorist killed by police in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, is a window into the future of civil-rights conflict in America. That Black Lives Matter was launched after a police shooting in a similar community outside St. Louis—Ferguson, Missouri—is not a coincidence. Both Brooklyn Center and Ferguson are small, older suburbs. Both have become racially and economically segregated, and much poorer, over time.

“We’re in a Transition Phase”: Dr. Monica Gandhi on Vaccine Safety & Why You Still Need a Mask

U.S. health officials have delayed a decision on whether to resume the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine after reports of blood clots in six women who received doses. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital, says it’s “prudent” to investigate reports of blood clots but notes the issue “is very rare” and unlikely to cause more than a temporary delay.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar launch ‘America First Caucus,’ and it’s as bad as you imagine

Do not—Do. Not.—dismiss this as just a handful of Republicans: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are starting an “America First Caucus” in the House of Representatives, and they might as well go ahead and call it the You Will Not Replace Us Caucus or get real honest and call it the White Supremacist Caucus, because the introductory description of the group’s purpose, as reported by Punchbowl News, is breathtaking.

First plea bargain for cooperating Oath Keepers witness in Jan. 6 insurrection cases is approved

A self-described “lifetime member” of the Oath Keepers has become the first defendant in the Jan. 6 insurrection cases to enter a guilty plea as part of a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, following a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Friday morning.

The plea bargain for Jon Schaffer, 53, a heavy-metal guitarist from Indiana who was photographed assaulting officers with bear spray and entering the U.S. Capitol, was approved by Judge Ahmit Mehta.