Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Excerpts from the December edition of Harper’s Index:
Hypothetical median income of full-time U.S. workers if income were distributed as evenly as it was in 1975: $92,000
Actual [2020] median income of full-time U.S. workers: $50,000
Percentage change since last year in the number of U.S.
American scumbags Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been charged with at least four felony counts connected to voter-suppressing, misinforming robocalls in Michigan that targeted “urban” areas in the weeks preceding this election. No, this isn’t connected to the time Wohl and Burkman attempted to trump up fake sexual assault charges against Dr. Anthony Fauci. No, this isn’t the time Wohl and Burkman attempted to create fake sexual intrigue allegations against Sen.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer seems to have suggested in a recent interview that President-elect Joe Biden bypass Congress and push up to $50,000 of student loan relief per person through via executive order in the first 100 days of his presidency. It’s not necessarily a new idea. Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced a resolution in September that would accomplish the same goal, and President Donald Trump has certainly been no stranger to executive orders.
Impeached president Donald Trump lost the election (it feels great to write that), but his stupid and racist border fencing construction continues (it doesn’t feel great to write that). In fact, NPR reports that not only is construction continuing, the administration is rushing to build as much as possible before Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20. The president-elect has vowed to end construction.
The Trump administration did not have a particular ideology, per se. On Donald Trump’s level, the singular goal was to do as little as possible. If there was time left over after doing nothing, go golfing. If both nothing and golf were unavailable, undo something his “maybe not a real American” predecessor did.
But Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says Graham’s implications were clear.
His tweets pushing blatant falsehoods are labeled as simply “disputed.
Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. The United States is now in what disaster-preparedness experts once modeled as a worst-case scenario. We are flooded with a highly transmissible virus that causes unpredictable symptoms: sometimes mild, sometimes fatal. The curve is not flat, or even a curve. It’s almost a line that points straight upward.
The president has until Wednesday to decide whether to pony up the money for the recount.
“People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia, we’ve even had people say, ‘I think it could be lung cancer,’” Jodi Doering said.
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.Jordan Casteel. Photo of painting: David SchulzeBarack Obama is somehow still hopeful.The former president acknowledges the very real threats to democracy in this moment. But he urges Americans to take the long view and, within the time they have, work to make things better.
“I find this more embarrassing for the country than debilitating for my ability to get started,” the president-elect said in a news conference.
“I feel like a drain on the system, but at the same time, I’m still helping a little bit.
I know this will sound crazy.
Lorenzo Meloni / MagnumIn the aftermath of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump, who has inflicted so much gratuitous harm on the United States—including making unfounded accusations of election fraud and declaring himself the victor, a malicious lie that is undermining the integrity of American democracy—there is an understandable temptation among those on the winning side to seek revenge and settle scores with Trump and Trumpworld.
Moderna said that its vaccine was more than 94 percent effective, a week after Pfizer released its own promising results.
Parenting advice on mansplaining children, potty resistance, and pod drama.
The Atlantic has hired Caitlin Dickerson as a staff writer, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Dickerson will write about immigration and the American experience, and begins with The Atlantic in January. She joins from The New York Times, where she has been a national immigration reporter since 2016.In a note to the newsroom announcing the hire, Goldberg wrote: “Caitlin is an indefatigable reporter with a deep magazine sensibility and great moral purpose.
“The vaccines are effective. We want to get it approved as quickly as we possibly can,” said the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
For the past three presidential elections, New York’s Twenty-First Congressional District—a humongous swath of rural, mountainous territory known as the North Country that’s closer to Canada than to the Big Apple—has voted along with the nation: Its constituents backed Barack Obama twice before flipping to Donald Trump in 2016.
“It’s a blessing within itself for me to even be sitting here right now,” says Ronnie Long, free after 44 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. Long, who is African American, was convicted in 1976 of raping a white woman by an all-white jury and sentenced to 80 years in prison.
A nearly three-decade-old ceasefire has ended in occupied Western Sahara — what many consider to be Africa’s last colony. Fighting has broken out in several areas between the Moroccan military and the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement seeking independence, after the Moroccan military broke into a no-go buffer zone in southern Western Sahara.
The once-feared tabloid has been in a tailspin since it got involved with Donald Trump.
Jacob Weisberg joins Slate Money to discuss Pfizer’s vaccine, Megaphone, and Supreme.
The tabloid built its business on some of the same wild tactics it used to catch its biggest scoops.
We can save lives—and businesses. Let’s get it right this time.
The politicization of mask-wearing shows how difficult it will be for Joe Biden to build consensus around even basic public health strategies after he’s sworn in.
The nation’s testing capacity has increased, but not fast enough to keep pace with the swarm of new cases.
Biden’s transition team must plan for a crisis response without access to essential information about the nation’s supply chains and testing supplies.
