Tim LahanThe correct answer to the question “How are you?” is Not too bad.Why? Because it’s all-purpose. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions, Not too bad will get you through. In good times it projects a decent pessimism, an Eeyore-ish reluctance to get carried away. On an average day it bespeaks a muddling-through modesty. And when things are rough, really rough, it becomes a heroic understatement.
This is the era of expecting the worst while hoping for the merely tolerable. Some might say that the worst is already happening—economic disaster and 190,000 dead from a pandemic—while the president and his surrogates insist, in a feat of self-delusion, that the “best is yet to come.
In August, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported in exhaustive detail how Russia sowed division in the United States and sought to meddle in the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.
Advice on positive parenting, vegetarianism, and cannabis habits.
Two costumes, two time periods, one lovable comedic actor.
Will an unprecedented emergency finally heal the state’s factions?
They need to take automatic pay cuts whenever a recession—or a pandemic—hits.
Ryanair’s CEO has threatened to impose fees for toilet access, overweight passengers, even being able to sit while in flight. Customers kept coming back.
It wasn’t just because of a shortage of beer, hand sanitizer, yeast, and pasta.
The politically appointed HHS spokesperson and his team demanded and received the right to review CDC’s scientific reports to health professionals.
Francis Collins lamented that commonsense mitigation measures had become politicized.
A brief opportunity to bring down the caseload before cold weather sets in may be squandered.
About 20 percent of colleges plan to open exclusively or primarily in person, according to a tracker from Davidson College in North Carolina.
The White House once felt an obligation to stave off vigilante violence against Muslim Americans, not stoke it.
From a burlesque striptease to a firehouse dinner, memories from right before everything changed.
I’ll admit it: I wanted them to fail.
After months of setbacks amid Covid-19, the White House used Labor Day to focus on worker resilience and tout pre-pandemic conditions.
The trend is on track to exacerbate dramatic wealth and income gaps in the U.S., where divides are already wider than any other nation in the G-7.
It won’t exactly be an October surprise, but it could still be a shock: a wave of business failures hitting during the campaign season.
Canada’s prime minister is building a Covid-19 recovery plan he hopes will “change the future” — and turn the page for his Liberal Party.
Despite unemployment above 10 percent and millions of jobs vaporized, Trump is running on his economic record before the pandemic.
As the world races to find a COVID-19 vaccine, one of the most promising vaccine trials has hit a major roadblock. AstraZeneca paused its Phase 3 COVID-19 vaccine trial after a woman in the trial developed severe neurological symptoms consistent with transverse myelitis, or inflammation of the spinal cord.
Since the police killing of George Floyd in May sparked a nationwide uprising against police brutality, armed white supremacists have taken to the streets of U.S. cities in response to Black Lives Matter protests. Organizing against systemic racism has been met with apparent attempts by the Trump administration to cover up white supremacist violence.
As the United States marks 19 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, a new report finds at least 37 million people in eight countries have been displaced since the start of the so-called global war on terrorism since 2001. The Costs of War Project at Brown University also found more than 800,000 people have been killed since U.S. forces began fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen, at a cost of $6.4 trillion to U.S. taxpayers.
We look at the history of clinical vaccine trials and exploitation of vulnerable people in the U.S. and India, which recently surpassed Brazil as the country with the second most infections worldwide. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, says there is a documented history of “ethical lapses” and lack of accountability in vaccine studies in India.
One of the most striking things about the prodemocracy protests in Belarus has been the outsize role of women. A woman, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, has emerged as the unlikely political challenger to longtime Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Two of the country’s highest-profile opposition figures, who have been abducted or compelled to flee the country, are women.
The Trump attorney claims he had no idea Andrii Derkach, who fed him baseless dirt smearing presidential candidate Joe Biden, was working with the Kremlin.
Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
From The Nation—States Are Doing What Big Government Won’t to Stop Climate Change:
In Maine, state officials are working to help residents install 100,000 high-efficiency heat pumps in their homes, part of a strategy for electrifying the state.
“Because if someone doesn’t release their tax returns it means they’re hiding something, right?” wrote a critic on Twitter.
As you may have heard, Sen. Kamala Harris would be a historic vice president. Most attention has rightly been focused on the barriers she’ll break as the first woman, the first African American, and the first Indian American to hold that office. There is, however, another barrier of importance—one that before the Civil Rights era would have been just as unthinkable—relating to Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, who is the potential first Second Gentleman.