Today's Liberal News

Poor People’s March on Washington Saturday Demands “Moral Reset” on Poverty, Voting Rights, Climate

We speak with Bishop William Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, about plans for Saturday’s Moral March on Washington and to the Polls to demand the government address key issues facing poor and low-income communities. The march will bring together thousands of people from diverse backgrounds to speak out against the country’s rising poverty rates, voter suppression in low-income communities and more.

Trump’s Lawyer John Eastman Asked for Pardon After Giving Illegal Advice to Overturn Election

During Thursday’s third public hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann described in recorded testimony his call with John Eastman, the lawyer advising former President Trump on the plan to overturn the 2020 election. The call took place on January 7, one day after the deadly insurrection.

“Hang Mike Pence!”: Jan. 6 Hearing Shows Trump Targeted VP, Knew Plan to Overturn Vote Was Illegal

We air highlights from the third public hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, which revealed that President Trump pressured Vice President Pence to overturn the 2020 election results even though he knew it was illegal. The hearing included testimony from Pence’s attorney, Greg Jacob, who said the plan’s main architect, attorney John Eastman, actively admitted his strategy violated the law, and yet continued anyway.

Punished for Exposing War Crimes? U.K. Approves Assange Extradition to U.S., Faces 175 Years in Prison

In a blow to press freedom, the United Kingdom has approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to face espionage charges related to the publication of classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Home Secretary Priti Patel signed off on the transfer after the U.K. Supreme Court denied Assange’s appeals earlier this year, part of a years-long legal battle that rights groups have decried as an attack on journalism and free speech.

Ukraine Update: No, Ukraine isn’t suffering 1,000 casualties per day

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I’m a sucker for these kinds of videos: 

That moment when you get a short break from the frontlines and can go home on a surprise visit to your girlfriend. 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/L2voxNjVKf— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) June 15, 2022

A happy moment of a Ukrainian soldier meeting his family between rotations. In 2-3 days he will go back to the frontline. pic.twitter.

What Brexit Promised, and Boris Johnson Failed to Deliver

Britain today is a poor and divided country. Parts of London and the southeast of England might be among the wealthiest places on the planet, but swaths of northern England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are among Western Europe’s poorest. Barely a decade ago, the average Brit was as wealthy as the average German. Now they are about 15 percent poorer—and 30 percent worse off than the typical American.

News Roundup: Texas Republican Party platform calls Biden an illegitimate president

The Texas Republican Party held their state convention on Saturday, putting the finishing touches on a new party platform that rejects the legitimacy of President Joe Biden as president and demands the state hold a referendum on seceding from the nation. It also responds to the murder of 19 Texas grade schoolers by demanding the legislature be stripped from any power to regulate guns.

Nuts & Bolts—Inside a Democratic campaign: When the past won’t move out of the way

This week in Nuts & Bolts, we get to tackle a subject that has left decent candidates facing a double-edged attack: What happens when party members, former incumbents, turn on Democratic candidates and refuse to support them? More importantly, what happens if these same party members go on to endorse Republicans or denounce Democrats?

Oregon residents are currently facing this with Democratic Rep.

Incarceration costs people more than time: How prisons cash in

Think of it as Monopoly, but more sinister: You go to jail. You don’t pass go. Your fellow players circle the board, accumulate capital. You hope for your lucky break, for the arbitrary roll of the dice to free you. While you sit, stuck, isolated, more impatient by each turn, you’re paying to be imprisoned.

Let’s take a step back. Private prisons are operated by corporations, paid with tax dollars via government contracts.

Artificial Consciousness Is Boring

Last week, Google put one of its engineers on administrative leave after he claimed to have encountered machine sentience on a dialogue agent named LaMDA. Because machine sentience is a staple of the movies, and because the dream of artificial personhood is as old as science itself, the story went viral, gathering far more attention than pretty much any story about natural-language processing (NLP) has ever received. That’s a shame.

The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story

My father loved books more than anything else in the world. He owned about 11,000 of them at the time of his death, in March of 2021, at 83 years old. There were books in his living room and bedroom, books in the hallways and closets and kitchen.Sometimes I stop in the center of my own home like a bird arrested in flight, entranced by the books that line my walls. I live in a small Manhattan apartment, and I, too, have books in the living room, the bedroom, the hallway, the closets.

Russia Has a Plan for Ukraine. It Looks Like Chechnya.

The constant boom of artillery in the near distance is the defining feature of life in the Donbas today. As Russia presses its offensive to take the eastern part of Ukraine, the signs of conflict are everywhere: buildings smashed to ruins by cruise missiles, Ukrainian tanks and howitzers on the highway headed east. The Donbas region, encompassed by a front stretching hundreds of miles and currently the scene of the most extensive fighting in Europe since World War II, is in total war mode.

Does the Jason Kander Story Have a Third Act?

There’s a saying, though it’s more of a whisper, that politicians are damaged people. That those who run for office have a pathological need for validation, that they’re willing to go to obscene lengths to get attention, even if it means putting themselves or their family at risk. Jason Kander is ready to admit that all of this is true.You may remember Kander as the Millennial Afghanistan veteran who emerged on the national stage just under a decade ago.

Poor People’s March on Washington Saturday Demands “Moral Reset” on Poverty, Voting Rights, Climate

We speak with Bishop William Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, about plans for Saturday’s Moral March on Washington and to the Polls to demand the government address key issues facing poor and low-income communities. The march will bring together thousands of people from diverse backgrounds to speak out against the country’s rising poverty rates, voter suppression in low-income communities and more.

Trump’s Lawyer John Eastman Asked for Pardon After Giving Illegal Advice to Overturn Election

During Thursday’s third public hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann described in recorded testimony his call with John Eastman, the lawyer advising former President Trump on the plan to overturn the 2020 election. The call took place on January 7, one day after the deadly insurrection.