Today's Liberal News

Trump Guts EPA’s Environmental Justice Office, Putting Poorest Communities of Color at More Risk

The Trump administration is planning to shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency and has placed nearly 170 employees on administrative leave. “I’m very concerned about the deregulation and the focus on corporate profits,” says Mustafa Santiago Ali, the former head of the environmental justice program at the EPA.

“Authoritarian Rampage”: Trump/Musk Sued to Block DOGE Access to Confidential Info of Millions

A lawsuit by a coalition of labor unions Thursday prompted the Labor Department to agree not to release any sensitive economic and privacy data to DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. Musk’s group has already gained access to sensitive files and computer systems across other key agencies as part of a push to restructure much of the federal government.

Holding Musk Accountable: Rep. Ro Khanna on Stopping DOGE’s “Unconstitutional” Power Grab

We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California about the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on the federal bureaucracy and the gutting of various agencies, led by the president’s unelected billionaire adviser Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“No DOGE employee should have access to any of Americans’ sensitive, confidential information, and they should not have access to be able to stop payments,” he says.

“Educational Arson”: Trump Moves to Abolish Dept. of Education Amid Broader Attack on Public Schools

As the Trump administration, led in part by his unelected adviser Elon Musk, sets its sights on cutting the Department of Education, we speak to longtime educator Jesse Hagopian about what he calls an “extremist, authoritarian power grab to dismantle public education and enforce ideological conformity.” Hagopian, whose new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, traces the history of racist educational censorship, adds, “This isn’t about protecting children.

What Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime Show Said

The Super Bowl halftime show is an opportunity for big, dumb fun: explosions, laser shows, left sharks. But big, dumb fun isn’t Kendrick Lamar’s thing. The 37-year-old Los Angeles rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner prefers subtlety, smarts, and fun that’s tinged by danger and unease. Amid tough, tense circumstances, he put on a tough, tense—and quite satisfying—show.
The event framed itself in self conscious terms. “This is the great American game,” Samuel L.

A Super Bowl Spectacle Over the Gulf

President Donald Trump’s promise—and subsequent executive order—to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America displayed a showman’s flair for branding.
Today Trump could take that showmanship a step further when Air Force One flies him across the Gulf of Mexico from his private Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, to New Orleans for the Super Bowl.

What Is Hims Actually Selling?

The ad that Hims & Hers Health plans to air during the Super Bowl comes at you with rapid-fire visual overload—a giant jiggling belly, bare feet on scales, X-ray results, sugary sodas, a pie in the oven, a measuring tape snug around a waistline—all set to the frenetic hip-hop beat of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A disembodied voice warns: “This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck.

Jethro’s Corner

I      Maps
The corner of Ashmun & Grove & the sometimes
When the only evidence is a map; the disappearing
English of old: plat, a funky word that exists most
In memory, meant to make a plan or map of;
To draw to scale; to plot.
A man who cannot read coordinates can still plot
On his freedom. Imagine a rectangle on the oldest
Map in these nine squares of geography
Once called a wilderness.