In the news today: The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol continues to make behind-the-scenes headway as it hears from all the witnesses who have not been refusing to testify—which puts the squeeze on those still trying to hide.

In case anyone had any doubts, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has made her most explicit statement to date regarding the target of her investigation into alleged attempts at improperly influencing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Willis’ letter sent Sunday to the FBI requesting a “risk assessment” of the county courthouse and the surrounding area has been covered by Daily Kos and other news outlets.

To say that Joe Manchin appears out of touch with the pressing needs of his constituents and Americans as a whole would be a grotesque understatement. The Build Back Better bill would be a godsend to millions of Americans who struggle to pay their monthly bills, find affordable child care and—not for nothing—worry about the effects of climate change on their children’s future.

Georgia Sheriff Keybo Taylor campaigned—and won—on ending Gwinnett County’s harmful 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is the racist policy that allows local law enforcement to act as mass deportation agents. On his first day in office at the very end of 2020, Taylor kept his promise and terminated the agreement.

In Cobb County, Sheriff Craig Owens also won on the issue that same year.

The floodgates appear to have opened on Starbucks workers trying to form unions. On Friday, voting in a union representation election concluded at a Mesa, Arizona, Starbucks. On Monday, the two Buffalo stores that already voted to unionize started bargaining, while ballots went out for three more Buffalo-area stores.

In the news today: In the latest of an unending series of new developments proving just how determined Donald Trump was to topple the government rather than abide his election loss, we now learn that Trump tried multiple times to seize voting machines—part of an overall plan to declare the election to have been illegitimate.

So what do you do if “too many” Black people vote in an election? You pass laws to frustrate and discourage them, of course! But why rest on your ugly racist laurels when there are still so many pesky murder laws standing in the way of regress? What if “too many” white people are being prosecuted for murdering Black joggers who obviously shouldn’t be jogging and certainly shouldn’t be Black while doing it?

by Reina Sultan

This article was originally published at Prism

Eric Adams began his tenure as New York City’s mayor making explicitly pro-policing and -incarceration promises, with a so-called tough-on-crime approach that he argued was what voters wanted when they elected him. Historically low voter turnout—the lowest New York City had seen since 1953—suggests otherwise. Still, he has remained steadfast in his desire to be the law and order mayor.

The U.S. media are still flummoxed by the question of how to cover Donald Trump’s actions, even a full year after his ejection from the Oval Office. That ambivalence is understandable; never before in the history of this country has someone so thoroughly brazen and insouciant in his raw criminality occupied a position now enjoyed by Trump, whose every utterance now smacks of outright, seditious intent.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have tried to push back on very legitimate criticisms that they’ve completely failed on pandemic safety response by claiming that if detained people want to be vaccinated or boosted against the virus, all they have to do is ask.

But a group of medically vulnerable immigrants says they have asked to be protected, and have been denied.