Today's Liberal News

There’s No Real Reason to Eat 3 Meals a Day

For the first 34 years of my life, I always ate three meals a day. I never thought much about it—the routine was satisfying, it fit easily into my life, and eating three meals a day is just what Americans generally do. By the end of last summer, though, those decades of habit had begun to erode. The time-blindness of working from home and having no social plans left me with no real reason to plod over to my refrigerator at any specific hour of the day.

The Books Briefing: Gender Equality Is Valuable but Vague

Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter is a rerun.
We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter next week.Every year on March 8, International Women’s Day promotes gender equality—a term that leaves room for many interpretations, some of them contradictory. For example, the historian Paula J. Giddings describes how America’s early feminist organizations excluded women of color, including the journalist and activist Ida B.

‘This Is Unprecedented’: Why America’s Housing Market Has Never Been Weirder

If you think the U.S. housing market is behaving very, very strangely these days, that probably means you’re paying attention.In almost any other year, a weak economy would cripple housing. But the flash-freeze recession of 2020 corresponded with a real-estate boom, led by high-end purchases in suburbs and small towns. Even stranger, in America’s big metros, home prices and rents are going in opposite directions. Home values increased in all of the 100 largest metros in the U.S.

New York Congressmember Mondaire Jones: Israel Should Ensure Palestinians Have Access to COVID Vaccine

Israel has failed to make COVID-19 vaccines available to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, despite its responsibility under the Geneva Conventions. Critics in the United States say this “vaccine apartheid” is another example of Israeli human rights abuses going unpunished, even as the country receives billions in U.S. aid each year. Congressmember Mondaire Jones of New York says Israel must ensure that Palestinians are vaccinated.

Rep. Mondaire Jones: Voting Rights Bill H.R. 1 Is of “Foundational Importance” to U.S. Democracy

The House of Representatives has approved sweeping legislation protecting the right to vote with the For the People Act, which has been described as the most sweeping pro-democracy bill in decades. The legislation is aimed at improving voter registration and access to voting, ending partisan and racial gerrymandering, forcing the disclosure of dark money donors, increasing public funding for candidates, and imposing strict ethical and reporting standards on members of Congress and the U.S.

Rev. William Barber to Democrats: Overrule the Senate Parliamentarian & Pass the $15 Minimum Wage

The Senate has voted to open debate on President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. The legislation has widespread support from voters, with one new poll showing 77% of Americans support the bill, including nearly 60% of Republicans. But the Senate bill has some key differences from the package approved by the House, including a reduction in the number of people eligible for direct stimulus checks and no provision to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Not every Republican is as bone-headed as Greg Abbott, as vaccinations exceed 2 million per day

On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott decided to toss a big fat distraction on how Republicans turned that state’s energy market into a scheme that generates billions in instant profit from pure human misery. Abbott was just one of several Republican governors who have decided that, now that there’s reasonable leadership in Washington, there’s no longer any need for them to even pretend to be reasonable back at home.

Congressional Republicans flip all Trump’s blue-collar union voters the bird

On election night, the same party that added some $2 trillion to the national debt in order to deliver a giant tax break to the rich and corporate-y celebrated the inroads Donald Trump had made with blue-collar voters. 

“We are a working class party now. That’s the future,” tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Ultimately, Trump had won some 40% of union households, according to The New York Times.

The Pandemic’s Future Hangs in Suspense

COVID-19 cases dropped about 5 percent this week, while testing rose 12 percent as backlogs in reported tests—always a little slower to recover than reported cases—rolled in following disruptive mid-February storms. The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 dropped almost 16 percent week over week, making this the seventh straight week of sharp declines in hospitalizations.