I should have written this a year ago.
As 2020 began, I was stumbling into my new role in Daily Kos management, with eyes that were always damp after a devastating loss weeks earlier. I was building a new department even as my stomach never quite calmed, thanks to a looming pandemic. We’d finally impeached the motherfucker, to quote a certain Michigan congresswoman, and the primaries were raging.
McConnell stalled the trial, then insisted it was too late to convict Trump, even though the senator declared him “responsible” for the Capitol attack.
The Biden administration is ending Medicaid work requirements the previous occupiers of the executive branch foisted on the nation’s working poor. Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing officials at the Department of Health and Human Services to remove barriers to Medicaid, and that’s just what they are doing.
“He is guilty,” Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said.
In a Saturday statement, the White House staffer admitted to using “abhorrent, disrespectful and unacceptable language.
Anger. Rage. Disgust. That is the vibe after 43 cowards and zealots within the Party of Trump opted not to convict their Dear Leader for inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6 in his historical second impeachment. Seven Republicans—a record-breaking 14% of the caucus—did vote “Guilty,” but it wasn’t enough to protect the nation from four more years of Trump rallies full of emboldened devotees.
In 1955, a junior United States senator named John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, a collection of short essays about eight of his predecessors who had risked their careers for their ideals over the previous 150 years.In one single day in 2021, that many senators showed courage worth enduring historical honor. Seven were Republicans: Richard Burr, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey.
Medium is the latest digital media outlet to unionize, with that news coming Thursday after a “strong majority” of 140 workers signed cards to join the Communications Workers of America.
Senate Republicans have now acquitted Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.
Thanks to the Senate’s six-year terms, many of the Republicans who set aside their oaths to protect the Constitution in favor of protecting their lord and master, Donald Trump, won’t be on the ballot next year. But quite a few of them will be, and several hold very vulnerable seats. They must face a reckoning for their party’s failure to hold a dangerous renegade president accountable.
The ex-president’s boast he could get away with murder proved true.
Two new books flesh out the history of smut, from Etsy-like handicrafts to the sexy swamp of Tumblr.
Vaccine shortages frustrate countries around the world. The lines for vaccines are illogical. But residents of wealthy nations will likely get access to doses in the coming months. It may be much longer for the rest of the world—and, as epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves explains on the podcast Social Distance, that affects us all and should prompt dramatic action.
“The Black Panthers are the single greatest threat to our national security. Our counterintelligence program must prevent the rise of a Black messiah from among their midst.” And so begins Judas and the Black Messiah, with an ominous speech from the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (played by Martin Sheen) in 1968. The film, which debuted yesterday in theaters and on HBO Max, is part crime thriller, part civil-rights historical drama.
In a video that recently went viral after it was dug out of the aughts time capsule, the former late-night host Craig Ferguson brings up Britney Spears.
When Taylor Swift, the pandemic’s most productive pop star, announced that she’d be re-recording her albums in a push for ownership over her work, the venture sounded risky. Swift cast her decision as both a personal vendetta against the music executive Scooter Braun and a moralistic stand against the industry’s treatment of artists. But at face value, re-recordings seem to offer little to look forward to for listeners.
My brother wants me to talk to her. I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
The U.S. wants to stop new coal projects, but risks losing poor countries to Beijing’s “Belt and Road” agenda.
Downtowns won’t recover from the pandemic anytime soon. Public transportation must look elsewhere.
The Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the proposed wage hike looks bad—because it was designed to be.
What happens if a pandemic-era trend sticks around?
A century before GameStop, a stock market outsider took on short sellers. It was a spectacle and a disaster.
The 200 million doses just purchased will be available by May, rather than June as originally predicted.
Democrats long complained the rules were illegal and aimed at shrinking health coverage for poor adults.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last month abruptly announced the state would play a bigger role in California’s vaccination drive.
A year into the pandemic, the nation faces new challenges and new variants but could fall into an old replay.
Stoya and Rich Juzwiak on the book that has changed a lot of readers’ lives—their sex lives, in particular.
I don’t want to out her, but I can’t keep this from my dad.
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.
