Today's Liberal News

The Real Problem With City Life Today

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.In a recent Atlantic article, Xochitl Gonzalez, the author of our Brooklyn, Everywhere newsletter, argues that the sound of gentrification is silence. I called Xochitl to talk about the article and the New York she once knew.

Stop Putting Lasers in Joe Biden’s Eyes

The president is terrifying! He has laser eyes, or he has laser eyes and he’s screaming, or he has laser eyes and he’s commanding bolts of lightning, like God. He is drinking Republican tears with a splash of lime. He is eating Mitch McConnell’s head?Although Joe Biden has often been the subject of memes related to his friendship with Barack Obama or his obsession with ice cream, he has lately become a different sort of internet figure, known as “Dark Brandon.

When Biden Went to China

On April 19, 1979, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware was in Beijing, meeting with China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, when he put Washington’s nascent friendship with the Communists to the test.That Biden was sitting there at all was remarkable. The United States and China had been implacable foes for decades.

“Political Pawns”: Immigrant Activists Decry Texas Gov. Abbott for Busing Asylum Seekers to NYC, D.C.

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott is sending busloads of asylum seekers to New York City and other “liberal” cities to oppose what he calls the Biden administration’s “open borders policies.” About 100 asylum seekers arrived Wednesday at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in a bus chartered by Texas, adding to the thousands of asylum seekers the city claims has strained its shelter system in the past few months.

Iran Nuclear Deal Appears Within Reach as Negotiators Send “Final Text” to Tehran & Washington

After months of failure to revive the Iran nuclear deal, European Union negotiators have drafted a “final” text for the U.S. and Iran to sign. An agreement seems more likely, due to Iran backing down on original demands for the U.S. to take the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps off its terrorist blacklist and for future U.S. presidents to not have the authority to pull out of the deal as the Trump administration did.

News Roundup: Russia loses at least 9 warplanes in airfield blast; Trump pleads the Fifth

The apparent Ukrainian strike against a Russian military base in occupied Crimea may turn out to be one of the most consequential of the war to date; video and satellite images taken after the blast show widespread damage, including the likely destruction of at least nine Russian warplanes. The blast, far from the frontlines, significantly dents Russian airpower in southern Ukraine—and Ukraine is being coy about how, exactly, they might have done it.

How Medicaid expansion could help relieve Georgia’s reproductive health care crisis

by Neesha Powell-Ingabire

This article was originally published at Prism

Medicaid expansion in Georgia is likelier than ever as Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams ties in the polls with Gov. Brian Kemp.

Kemp and his two Republican predecessors have refused to adopt Medicaid expansion, while Abrams, a former state representative, recently told a crowd, “I’m going to talk about Medicaid expansion every chance I get.

Republicans, please spare us your squealing

If that whiny sound emanating from so many elected Republican officials sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same high-pitched squeal a balloon emits when you carefully let its air out between compressed fingers. Republicans have been living in that balloon for so long, they’ve pretty much forgotten that the balloon existed in the first place.

Balloons are different than bubbles. You can live in a bubble and not really know you’re in it.

Right-wing extremists saying they’ve crossed the Rubicon aren’t kidding. More violence is coming

Back in 2007, several bloggers raised the matter of right-wing violence should the Democrats—and therefore a Black man named Barack Obama—win the November 2008 election. Among them were digby, Rick Perlstein, and David Neiwert, an expert on militias and right-wing extremists who now writes for Daily Kos. A good deal of the reception to these assertions was … skeptical. Some critics ridiculed these three and the others of us raising the issue.

‘Sweeping Campaign to Harass’ Asian Americans: California cops sued for targeted traffic stops

According to a new California lawsuit, hate crimes against members of the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community are not the only form of rising racism. Filed in Sacramento federal court on Wednesday, a class-action lawsuit against Siskiyou County and its sheriff alleges racism in traffic stops, access to water, and enforcement of cannabis-related property liens.

Trump Will Release the Warrant

Rarely in the annals of public controversy has so much certainty been expressed in the face of such great ignorance. With very few exceptions, the Republican Party has coalesced around Donald Trump and expressed the fierce conviction that the Department of Justice’s decision to serve a search warrant on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was a grotesque abuse of power.There’s a notable problem with this conclusion: The American public still hasn’t seen the search warrant.

The Pinched-Hose Economy

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.“It’s not just my opinion that things are weird,” Derek Thompson told me recently. It’s a fact of life, he explained, that the U.S. economy is behaving very strangely right now.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.