Today's Liberal News

Let the Incarcerated Vote

On the morning of Election Day in 2018, I went to vote at my local polling site in Maryland and then drove down to the D.C. Central Detention Facility, where I taught creative-writing workshops with a group of 18-to-24-year-old incarcerated young men. I parked, turned off the engine, and felt the soft vibration of the car come to a stop. I sat there and looked down at the I VOTED sticker in my hand—its adhesive clinging to my finger, its waxy paper catching the light through my windows.

25 Feel-Good Films You’ll Want to Watch Again—and Again

Over the course of 2020, I’ve compiled several movie-recommendation lists for viewers who are at once in desperate need of distraction and yet never able to fully escape the year’s pressing realities. A global pandemic. Economic turmoil. An impending election showdown. Natural disasters. Police killings and unrelenting national protests.

The YouTuber Who Treats the Inner City Like a Safari

Video above: A snippet from the YouTube video by Charlie Moore, a.k.a. CharlieBo313, titled “SAN FRANCISCO WORST HOUSING PROJECTS / HOOD INTERVIEW”Charlie Moore shoots hood safaris. For years, he’s filmed visits to the most impoverished neighborhoods in cities across the United States for his CharlieBo313 YouTube channel, which has almost 350,000 subscribers.

Trump’s Pathology Is Now Clear

The human brain makes decisions in two basic modes. One is analytic, which involves carefully weighing costs and benefits and choosing the best option. The other mode is intuitive: doing what feels right. Both have their merits. Intuitive thinking allows us to make split-second decisions. It helps guide our romantic lives and our lunchtime sandwich choices. But it is not the mode that should inform a strategic response to a pandemic.

Beware False Endings

Earlier this week, a striking thing happened at the Supreme Court: A justice inserted several errors into the record. The mistakes came as the Court was making last-minute decisions about the precise time span of an election that has been taking place for weeks. The errors were products, as The New York Times put it, of “the court’s fast pace in handling recent challenges to voting rules.

Pandemic Poverty: The CARES Act Kept Millions from Going Hungry. Why Won’t the Senate Renew It?

The massive $2 trillion CARES Act — which sent households one-time payments and boosted unemployment checks with an additional $600 a week through July — helped keep millions afloat, but more than 8 million people have been forced into poverty since the aid ended. “The relief was temporary, and much of it has now expired, so now we’re seeing poverty rise again,” says Megan Curran, a researcher at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University.

Friday Night Owls: State revenue loss not as bad as expected. But, as with pandemic, worse is coming

Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

At the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Micheal Leachman and Elizabeth McNichol write—Pandemic’s Impact on State Revenues Less Than Earlier Expected But Still Severe:

The pandemic’s impact on state revenues this spring was smaller than the historical record predicted. Nevertheless, states, localities, tribal nations, and U.S.

The fears we laugh about during Halloween say a lot about our politics

This year will see us celebrating a very different Halloween. In many places around the country, children will not be able to go trick-or-treating, and adults will not be able to dress up and make fools of themselves at the club, given the current pandemic. But what is Halloween without a scary story? And what is the nature of those spooky tales? Most of the time they are rooted in very real issues and very real threats.

Pennsylvania: The most important swing state in the final days

The election is almost over. And there’s only one state that’s literally keeping me up at night: Pennsylvania, a must-win battleground state for Joe Biden.

Here’s the problem: While states like Texas and Florida have had record early voting, the one swing state that noticeably did not turn in as many early ballots is Pennsylvania. Biden should win it, but if Pennsylvania slips through our fingers there’s a very real danger Trump could get reelected.

Twitter sends new Biden-Harris ad full of Black folks drumming and dancing straight to Peggy Noonan

Is a new ad posted to Twitter by Kamala Harris an epic 51 seconds of shade in response to the recent nasty diss of Harris by Republican columnist Peggy Noonan?

The Harris-supporting Twitterati seemed to think so, because as soon as the tweet dropped, it was being forwarded to Peggy Noonan, who, in a Wall Street Journal column, described Harris as “giddy,” “insubstantial,” and “frivolous.