Today's Liberal News

What Happens to Small Companies Now?

Earlier this week I mentioned the surprisingly important role that craft brewing had played in downtown renewal across the country over the past decade. And I talked with one of the pioneers of that movement, Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Company, about how this part of America’s startup economy was likely to fare.Here are reports from two companies of a similar spirit but entirely different scale from Koch’s nationally distributed Samuel Adams brand.

Barack Obama: Honor John Lewis by Renewing Voting Rights Act & Ballot Access in the U.S.

In his stirring eulogy at the funeral service for Congressmember John Lewis, President Barack Obama said expanded voting rights would be the greatest way to honor the civil rights icon’s legacy. In a speech that condemned the status of American democracy without ever naming the sitting president, Obama called for election day to be declared a national holiday, full Congressional representation for Washington, D.C.

Rev. James Lawson: John Lewis’s Life Is Call to Action Against U.S. Violence & Plantation Capitalism

As mourners gathered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to honor the life of Georgia Congressmember John Lewis, among those who spoke was civil rights icon Rev. James Lawson, who helped to train John Lewis in nonviolence when Lewis was a student in Nashville. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once described Rev. Lawson as “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” Lawson invoked John Lewis’s life as a call to action.

Civil Rights Icon Bernard Lafayette on His Friend John Lewis, Freedom Rides & Practicing Nonviolence

We revisit civil rights leader and Congressmember John Lewis’s early years of activism with Bernard Lafayette, one of Lewis’s closest friends and collaborators. Lafayette participated with Lewis in the first Freedom Rides of 1961 as they attempted to integrate buses and faced brutal beatings by white mobs, and was a fellow leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Photos of the Week: Stari Most, Flaming Jet, Hug Kit

An open-air school in Kashmir, preparing for Eid al-Adha in Bangladesh, a Comic-Con blood drive in California, idle fishing boats in China, a Navy Day parade in Russia, wildfires in Portugal, a successful Mars rover launch, a sparsely-attended Hajj in Saudi Arabia, outdoor opera in Greece, a farewell to the late U.S. Representative John Lewis, and much more.

It didn’t start in Portland. There’s a long history of secret police

by Jack Herrera

For a few days in Portland, Oregon, this month, it wasn’t clear who was abducting protesters and journalists. The heavily armed men rushing out of unmarked vans and grabbing people off the sidewalks wore army fatigues and bulletproof vests. They looked like U.S. soldiers, but, then again, they also looked like the far-right militia members who have appeared at many protests in recent years. Information was murky and chaotic.

This Week in Statehouse Action: Summertime Badness edition

Did you know that we’re only 95 days away from Election Day 2020?

There was some hubbub earlier this week as the 100-days-out-from-the-election point passed, but that’s not actually significant outside of the fact that 100 is a big round number.

Nevertheless, each day that passes brings us closer to the final election before the next round of redistricting.

Raging conspiracy theorist’s nomination to top Pentagon job fizzles

The Trump administration plans to withdraw its nomination of a racist conspiracy theorist to the No. 3 job at the Pentagon. Just one Republican senator had announced opposition to Retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata’s nomination as undersecretary of defense for policy, and Sen. Kevin Cramer wasn’t upset about Tata’s racism and Islamophobia—he was upset about a group of sailors he feels should be added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.