Today's Liberal News

Ukraine update: As Russia prepares to force ‘referendums’ in occupied areas, Putin is a no-show

It’s been hard to locate any reasonable military response for Russia at this point in its failed invasion of Ukraine. Because there isn’t one. So Moscow is now scrambling for the means to justify even more attacks on civilian infrastructure—and civilians—and it thinks it has that plan in the form of a series of “referendums” to be carried out in occupied areas of Ukraine over the next week.

Lindsey Graham: Abortion ‘is not a states’ rights issue’

The most common way other Senate Republicans are trying to dodge questions on Sen. Lindsey Graham’s national abortion ban bill is to claim they think abortion is a states’ rights issue. But voters should take those claims as seriously as Graham’s own insistence just last month that he thought abortion was a states’ rights issue.

Trump got the special master he wanted, but he’s finding that Judge Dearie isn’t what he expected

Now that he has the “special master” he requested to deal with the documents he hoarded at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump is already finding reasons to object to the process. Specifically, Trump’s legal team is refusing to talk about whether, or how, Trump actually tried to declassify any of the documents by claiming it would harm their “defense to the merits of any subsequent indictment.

The Problem With New Cars

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Watching Spirited Away Again, and Again

Spirited Away came out in 2001, when I was 8. After watching it in a Japanese cineplex, I stumbled out into a wall of late-summer heat, shaken by what I had just seen: the grotesque transformation of parents into pigs, the vomiting faceless monsters, the evolution of a sniveling girl to a brave heroine. The way a dragon could be a boy magician and also a river, how the story seemed held together by association and magic.

Let Puerto Rico Be Free

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-RiveraIn 2017, as summer ends, when news anchors first mention the oncoming Hurricane Irma, the people go to the big-box store or the Econo supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of water, a portable gas-powered hot plate in case they lose power.

Putin Is Cornered

President Volodymyr Zelensky is playing the role of a Ukrainian Churchill, minus some of the fantastical notions and with an infinitely better workout regimen. Like Churchill in 1940, he has been the indispensable man in a mortal crisis, without whom his country might well have been lost, and whose eloquence has rallied not only his fellow citizens but a larger democratic world.

The Banned Books You Haven’t Heard About

At a packed school-board meeting near Rockford, Illinois, earlier this year, a woman waved blown-up images from Maia Kobabe’s illustrated memoir Gender Queer in front of the Harlem School District board. “If my neighbor were to give this to my child, guess what? He would be in jail,” she said to scattered applause.

“The Myth of Normal”: Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

In an extended interview, acclaimed physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté discusses his new book, just out, called “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” “The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people,” says Maté, who argues in his book that “psychological trauma, woundedness, underlies much of what we call disease.

McConnell was sure the GOP would reclaim the Senate. Too bad he miscalculated every step of the way

Analysts and pundits are finally picking up on the fact that the supposed red wave of 2022 was much more of a red mirage all along. The slow-but-steady downgrading of GOP prospects in November is everywhere. But nowhere is this more apparent than in the Senate, where Republican candidates are consistently underperforming and, in some cases, are downright comically bad (witness Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose political wizardry is already the stuff of legend).

‘It’s all of Mitch McConnell’s staffers’: Pro-MAGA dating app somehow can’t find women users

A new pro-Trump dating app that’s scheduled to launch this month is not exactly grabbing women by the … um … heartstrings. Nor have the folks behind the app assembled even one binder full of women. It’s almost as if no one’s attracted to men who both idolize serial sexual assaulters and want to force women to give birth to their rapists’ babies.

Pennsylvania and Michigan finally have un-gerrymandered maps. Now we can flip ’em both

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Republicans know just as well as we do that the road to the White House runs through two major swing states in the Midwest: Michigan and Pennsylvania. And since we also know the GOP no longer respects the results of elections unless they win, we can expect Republicans to use every lever at their disposal to subvert any outcomes they don’t like.