As winter storms overwhelmed Texas, many incarcerated people in the state went days without heat and water, making already grim conditions behind bars even more intolerable for thousands of people. Officials say 33 prisons across the state lost power and 20 had water shortages after the state’s electrical grid failed.
Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.
At The New Republic, Nick Martin (a citizen of the Sappony Tribe) writes—Deb Haaland’s Ascent and the Complicated Legacy of Native Representation. The congresswoman from New Mexico could make history if confirmed as head of the Department of the Interior. But there’s more to the story than that.
Deb Haaland could be the next secretary of the interior.
It all comes down to the subjective linguistic judgment of an unelected congressional functionary.
It all comes down to the subjective linguistic judgment of an unelected congressional functionary.
Every year, the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is a who’s who of corrupt officials, big-money donors, crummy human beings, morals-free religious zealots, and self-styled whining—lots and lots of whining. Last year’s CPAC made it clear that the whining would happen inside of the convention hall as only VIPs were tipped off to very real COVID-19 hazards.
Right-wing salacious-lie peddlers Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman got hit with some bad news on Monday, when senior U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero denied the two men’s attempts to have their civil case delayed until after their criminal proceedings are done.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee held a fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club last weekend, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem plans one for March.
For several election cycles now, voters across the country have ousted sheriffs who’ve collaborated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the flawed and racist 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement to act as mass deportation agents. In just one example last month, South Carolina Sheriff Kristin Graziano terminated the agreement on her first day in office, calling it “legal racial profiling.
“He’s looking for travel deals for his next trip to Mexico,” one of the Texas senator’s critics tweeted.
If the growing number of anti-trans bills aimed at excluding transgender girls and women from sports are beginning to blur together, that makes a lot of sense. Why? Because—especially in the last few months, much less the last few years—there are a stunning number of them coming from all around the country.
Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. In the middle of January, the deadliest month of the pandemic, one day after inauguration, the Biden administration put out a comprehensive national strategy for “beating COVID-19.
Every Tuesday, our lead climate reporter brings you the big ideas, expert analysis, and vital guidance that will help you flourish on a changing planet. Sign up to get The Weekly Planet, our guide to living through climate change, in your inbox.President Joe Biden’s legislative climate agenda has kind of fallen out of the news. Lawmakers are focused on what the Biden administration calls the “economic-rescue bill,” the one with the $1,400 checks.
Lawmakers say there’s plenty for them to do, and that it’s often important to be on the ground.
Mundane goals like securing power and water took a backseat to ideological battles against imaginary enemies.
The former president is stuck with a money-losing monument to his administration’s graft, and so is Washington.
Senate Republicans are really going all in on the idea that Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Interior Department is a “radical.
Behind the flashy events and quasi-spiritual jargon is a software service that wants to swallow the whole business world.
The argument over how much debt to cancel—and how to cancel it—needs to focus on the causes of the racial wealth gap.
All of the executives stressed that they are looking for ways to increase production to meet the overwhelming demand.
The descent of a little rover from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the surface is one of the most notoriously stressful occasions in space exploration. When NASA’s newest rover, Perseverance, took the plunge last week, the engineers at mission control braced themselves. They knew just how much had to go right—and how much could go terribly wrong—in the next seven minutes.The spacecraft came barreling into the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour.
Watching Allen v. Farrow, HBO’s new four-part miniseries about the 29-year-old allegations of child molestation against the director Woody Allen, I kept having a feeling that I couldn’t entirely identify. Since revelations about Harvey Weinstein emerged in late 2017—broken, in part, by Allen’s son, Ronan Farrow—harrowing stories about abusive men in the workplace have been reported one after another.
The visionary Black science-fiction writer Octavia Butler died 15 years ago on February 24, 2006, but her influence and readership has only continued to grow since then. In September, Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower” became her first to reach the New York Times best-seller list. We speak with adrienne maree brown, a writer and Octavia Butler scholar, who says Butler had a remarkable talent for universalizing Black stories.
As Democracy Now! marks 25 years on the air, we are revisiting some of the best and most impactful moments from the program’s history, including one of the last television interviews given by the visionary Black science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. She spoke to Democracy Now! in November 2005, just three months before she died on February 24, 2006, at age 58.
The United States has passed 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, by far the highest toll in the world. The morbid milestone comes as new COVID-19 cases continue to fall across the country amid an accelerating vaccine rollout, but the head of the World Health Organization is calling on rich countries not to undermine efforts to get vaccines to poorer nations by buying up billions of doses — in some cases ordering enough to vaccinate their populations more than once.
Among the visible remnants of Donald Trump’s presidency is a blank patch of wall along a hallway a short distance from Capitol Hill.
I’m now working up to 75 hours a week, including late nights and weekends.
Parenting advice on favoritism, safety, and birthday parties.
The rebuild from a devastating earthquake was Christchurch, New Zealand’s chance to reimagine what a city could be.
“Hatchet houses” survived a terrible year by providing a valuable public service.
