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One of the great myths of American politics is that detailed policy positions are crucial to winning elections. Yes, policy matters in broad strokes: Candidates take general positions on issues such as taxes, abortion, and foreign policy.
For nearly 50 years, the Hyde Amendment has been considered an unassailable fixture of the United States budget. First passed in 1976, just three years after the now-defunct Roe v. Wade ruling, the amendment prohibits federal programs from covering the cost of most abortions, with exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and life-threatening pregnancies.
The financier and bon vivant Wallace Groves had little use for the law or social norms. His wife, a former Hollywood starlet, left him in 1937 after he’d had their infant son briefly kidnapped from their glittering Park Avenue triplex apartment. A day after the supposed abduction, authorities arrested Groves on the tarmac at Newark airport, in the company of two women whom Time magazine coyly described as his “girl friends.
The pioneering TV host Phil Donahue, who revolutionized daytime television by tackling major social and political issues in front of a studio audience, has died at the age of 88. The Phil Donahue Show, later renamed Donahue, ran from the 1960s through to 1996, and the affable host won 20 Emmy Awards and received a Peabody Award throughout his career. In 2003, Donahue was fired from his primetime MSNBC talk show for airing antiwar voices during the run-up to the U.S.
What will happen if Donald Trump secures a second term as president? Polling remains close—and though a Democratic victory seems far more likely than it did before the Biden-Harris swap, it’s hardly assured. Should Trump pull out a win in November, voters might imagine that they know what to expect: more chaos, more grievance, more all-caps rants on social media. But a second Trump term would be much more dangerous than the first.
As Chicago hosts the 2024 Democratic National Convention, we look at the city’s long history of police misconduct, including the use of torture under police commander Jon Burge, accused of leading a torture ring that interrogated more than 100 African American men in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s using electric shocks and suffocation, among other methods, to extract false confessions from men who were later exonerated.
Arab American voters could significantly impact the 2024 presidential election, particularly in Michigan, home to the largest Arab community in the United States. Many of these voters, incensed at U.S. support for the Israeli war on Gaza, have mobilized over the past year to pressure the Biden administration to change policy, including by casting hundreds of thousands of ballots for “uncommitted” in Democratic primary elections to signal their demand for policy changes.
Democracy Now! is in Chicago for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, where protesters have actions planned throughout the week. The demonstrations kicked off on Sunday, on the eve of the convention, with the March for Bodies Outside Unjust Laws, which was organized by a coalition of several different activist groups to demand action on reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights and an end to the war on Gaza.
Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil rights icon who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., ran for president twice, in 1984 and 1988, and founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, is expected to appear on stage on the opening night of this year’s Democratic National Convention. We play footage of an event held Sunday in Chicago to honor Jesse Jackson, which featured fellow civil rights activist Al Sharpton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, among many other speakers.
Advocates of government health care are giving Harris leeway to decide how best to beat Donald Trump.
Negotiating your debt can minimize what you owe and help get your finances back on track.
The result is a $6 billion savings across 10 drugs when new prices take effect in 2026, according to the White House.
The move to protect some older Americans from higher costs would come just ahead of the election.
Both the White House and the Harris campaign have envisioned the savings promised by the negotiations as playing a significant role in the run-up to November’s election.
Walz is framing IVF as an issue that affects men, too.
The vice president makes her pitch in North Carolina, where Democrats have long hoped to flip the closely divided state.
The vice president’s plan aims to make housing more affordable, ease health care costs and crack down on corporations for rising grocery prices.
“We cannot win if people think we’re headed into a recession,” one Democratic National Committee member said.
Ukraine’s government has denied a Wall Street Journal report this week that Kyiv approved the plan to blow up the Russian-owned Nord Stream pipelines in 2022. According to the newspaper, a crew of Ukrainian civilians and active-duty soldiers used a rented yacht to reach the pipelines, which deliver Russian natural gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea, and used explosives to sever three of the four pipelines.
The World Health Organization has declared mpox to be a global public health emergency. The viral disease, formerly known as monkeypox, spreads through close physical contact and can cause fevers, rashes and extremely painful lesions. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also declared a public health emergency over mpox earlier this week after logging over 15,000 cases. Scientists say this strain of mpox has a fatality rate of around 5% in adults and double that in children.
As Donald Trump tries to distance his campaign from Project 2025, those behind the right-wing policy blueprint to remake the U.S. government continue to brag in private about their close ties to the Republican presidential nominee and how they intend to push a radical right-wing agenda in a second Trump administration. In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort.
Up to 200 Rohingya Muslims were killed in drone strikes last week in Burma as they attempted to flee to Bangladesh. This comes amid intensifying conflict between the military junta and the Arakan Army, a rebel armed group. Human Rights Watch says the military and the Arakan Army have both committed extrajudicial killings, unlawful recruitment for combat, and widespread arson against Rohingya civilians.
Former President Donald Trump sparked near universal criticism last week when he said that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, was “much better” than the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor.
This article was originally published by High Country News.
Every spring, about 2,000 mule deer traipse through Utah’s Cedar Valley, a broad, sage-dotted flatland some 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. The herd winters in the Lake Mountains, nibbling sagebrush and other forage, and summers around the Oquirrhs, whose green shoulders jut from the valley floor to the north.
By the time Donald Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president, the idea of a “new Trump” had become a running gag, taken seriously only by the most credulous reporters and most desperately optimistic Republican officeholders.
Then something funny happened: Trump seemed to pull off a reset. Yes, Trump was still the same candidate he’d always been—undisciplined, authoritarian, and capricious—but for the first time he had surrounded himself with a polished, professional campaign operation.
The word people keep using to describe Tim Walz—whether they mean it as insult or praise—is progressive. Since Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate, he’s been called “a true progressive”; “a far-left progressive”; “extremely progressive.”
But this isn’t right. Walz was a Blue Dog Democrat through his many years in Congress.
