Here’s a question for you. You live in Los Angeles. You have a laptop that’s acting up; needs some work. Do you: A) Find a computer repair shop in your neighborhood via Google or whatever and take it there; B) Send it back to the manufacturer; C) Say to yourself, “Oh, I know, I think I’ll go to Wilmington, Delaware, and take it to a legally blind computer repairman, because like obviously, who wouldn’t do that?” Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, not yet indicted, and Steve Bannon, already indicted for allegedly scamming loyal Trumpies no less, want you to believe that […]
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The last few months of reproductive rights in America have looked like a cheap Handmaid’s Tale rip-off: a rushed nomination of a conservative judge to the Supreme Court; the president spreading lies about “late-term” abortions; and, in a cinematic flourish, the spread of a deadly pandemic that shuttered abortion clinics in multiple states. But amid this reproductive dystopia, abortion-access organizations have quietly introduced modern solutions to an increasingly regressive present. Abortion funds—dozens of groups around the country that help people fund and access abortions—are rolling out programs and applications to make their work easier, even as politicians to try to make […]
In this members-only episode of “The New Abnormal,” host Molly Jong-Fast sits down with award-winning journalist Soledad O’Brien to chat about the media’s role in covering elections. “So is the media doing a better job in 2020 than they did in 2016?” asks Jong-Fast. O’Brien gets straight to the point: “Obviously, they’re not.” She then suggests that the media didn’t understand they had a lesson to learn in the first place. Source link
Witnessing these last few months in America has really got me thinking about my stance on gun ownership. With civilians essentially given the OK to take their cars and run over demonstrators, a vigilante killing peaceful protesters, and the president telling a white supremacist group to “stand by” (for what, exactly?), I thought—if the racists and MAGA-fanatics are packing heat, why aren’t the rest of us? Before very recently, I’d never been to a gun range or even held a real gun, because for the longest time, I was afraid of them and what they empower people to do: kill. But […]
Huntergate was meant to be the WikiLeaks 2.0. Trumpworld hoped the story of the contents of Hunter’s laptop would mimic the trajectory of the story about the contents of Anthony Weiner’s laptop. It was literally a reprise of October 2020. Rudy Giuliani hoped another laptop might save the self-devouring Ouroboros snake of fuckery that is the Trump campaign. Hunter Biden, of course, had a drug problem. The bet in Trumpworld was clearly that the rest of America would think of addicts as hopelessly damaged, corruptible, and beyond hope, and that Joe Biden is somehow at fault for loving his addict son. […]
The Supreme Court retains a strong but largely undeserved reputation as a protector of the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. In fact, there is a long history of right-wing Supreme Court majorities serving as dead hands to enforce reactionary policies favored by political minorities who have lost electoral power, or even wars. Most notoriously, a right-wing court favored the South’s radical, pro-slavery positions before the Civil War and, after that war, played a critical role in nullifying Reconstruction and instituting Jim Crow; the so-called Lochner court devoted years to voiding federal and state health and safety regulations and other progressive laws, […]
I kept a little running tab of questions Amy Coney Barrett said she couldn’t possibly answer without compromising her future Supreme Court tenure. I’m sure I missed a lot of them, but here were six: One: Lindsey Graham asked her if there existed a constitutional right to polygamy. She couldn’t say. Two: Pat Leahy asked if a president could self-pardon. Couldn’t touch that one. Three: Amy Klobuchar asked if she thought mail-in ballots were legitimately democratic. That’s a policy position, I can’t express a view. Four: Richard Blumenthal asked if Obergefell was properly decided and asked her to consider its being […]
Look, I’m voting for Joe Biden. I get why white racists and millionaires—and people who stand at the intersection of those two groups—are all-in for Donald Trump, but for the rest of us, self-preservation dictates that Biden is the better choice. Thursday night’s dueling presidential town halls, which featured a belligerent Trump and a comparatively contemplative Biden, drove that all the way home. If I believed, at this late stage, that “undecided voters” were real, and not people with made-up minds in desperate need of attention, I cannot imagine how the contrast could have been any starker or the decision clearer. […]
After a summer surge that devastated the state’s plans to cut back on restrictions, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has tried to put his state back on the reopening track. In late August, he hinted at new reopening plans being on the way before rolling out an executive order in September that boosted the capacity allowed in places like restaurants and shops. And last week Abbott took action on bars in the state, which he had ordered closed back in late June amid the surge, saying the venues could soon reopen at as high as 50 percent capacity in most places if […]
An honest question: If Donald Trump were trying to lose the presidency, what would he have done differently? Not much, if you ask me. No, I’m not suggesting Trump wants to lose so he can be a martyr and quit having to do any real work. This theory, which I see as the triumph of hope over optimism, continues to persist (at some points, the hope has gone so far as to suggest that Trump might even resign). Trump wants to win. It’s just that he’s pursuing a strategy that will probably guarantee he doesn’t. Consider a checklist of recent decisions: […]
Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation is a done deal. Democrats don’t have the votes, and not enough Republicans have the principles. Democrats’ only recourse, many have argued, is to increase the size of the court—“Court-packing” is the derogatory term—to offset the illegitimate appointments of Justice Gorsuch (after the stonewalling of Should’ve-Been-Justice Garland) and Justice Barrett. Presuming they win the presidency and flip the Senate, of course. Joe Biden has notably refused to take “court-packing” off the table, but the idea doesn’t poll well, and there are real reasons to fear it—not least the likelihood that Republicans would retaliate as soon […]
As Savannah Guthrie grilled Donald Trump on QAnon at Trump’s town hall event, he did his usual lying and dodging and then whined to Guthrie about Antifa and asked her: “Why aren’t you asking Joe Biden questions about, why doesn’t he condemn Antifa?” Let’s settle this. Joe Biden does not have to denounce Antifa. He’s done so, anyway, but even if he hadn’t, he has utterly no responsibility to do so, and since this appears to be an attack line Trump might amp up in these waning days, it’s important for people to understand why. It’s important because it probably sounds […]
Americans saw two men last night in the closing days of their respective pursuits of the highest office in the land, and their split-screen town halls clarified and catalyzed an understanding of this race in a way that their one debate so far did not. It was one more sign of a Trump campaign in total collapse; broke, broken, and unmoored. As Donald Trump was eviscerated by a smart and determined Savannah Guthrie, who put up with exactly zero bullshit from a subject who usually submerges interviewers under a tidal wave of bullshit, while Joe Biden connected with both his audience […]
Maine Senator Susan Collins says she will vote ‘no’ to confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, since it’s too close to the election, while refusing to say anything critical about how Barrett’s originalist judicial philosophy might imperil a woman’s right to choose. Collins is a Republican who supports abortion rights, a brand that has carried her to victory four times, but with Barrett’s confirmation all but certain, Collins’ longtime balancing act may have reached its tipping point. The GOP is getting closer to reaching its goal, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the now almost 50-year-old ruling that made […]
It was another balancing act for Joe Biden tonight, and if Donald Trump hadn’t killed our outrage receptors, many of us would probably find the confusion truly alarming. Even if you’re convinced that Biden is, by far, the lesser of two evils, it’s still worth taking a minute to stop to consider what we might be getting ourselves into with Biden and the Democrats. It ain’t pretty. Thursday night’s town halls were a stark contrast in style, with the ABC town hall being stylistically like Biden (slow and substantive), and Trump’s NBC event reminding me of him (flashy, interrupting, and entertaining). […]
Not this time. In 2016, many mainstream media outlets let themselves be used by Donald Trump and his henchmen (Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, etc.) to amplify nutso Hillary conspiracy stories. It helped put Trump in the White House, where he has violated the Constitution and his oath of office and common-sense decency pretty much every day of his presidency. So far this time around, the track record has been better. But it’s better because all the conspiracy-mongering has fallen flat. Prosecutor John Durham, who I really thought was going to do Bill Barr’s dirty work and try to rig […]
On a surreal day of GOP-generated alternate reality, every Senate Democrat tried to get America to awaken out of the Matrix but only one succeeded. “This is not normal,” said Senator Cory Booker, before asking a Supreme Court nominee if she would condemn white supremacy. (Good news: she did.) “This is not normal,” said Amy Klobuchar, before reminding viewers that 7 million Americans have gotten the coronavirus, including people in the hearing room itself. “These aren’t normal times,” said Chris Coons, before noting that we’re in the middle of a presidential election and an unprecedented pandemic. And yet, nothing seemed to […]
In Amy Coney Barrett’s America, the Supreme Court will take health care away from millions of people during a deadly pandemic. That is inevitable, at least, if you believe what Democrats had to say on the first day of Barrett’s confirmation hearing. Democrats had plenty of visual props to reinforce this point: Photos of people with pre-existing conditions on easels, which had the effect of making this confirmation hearing look more like a murder trial. Despite all of this, Barrett wasn’t explicitly cast as the villain, but rather, as a pawn. In fact, while invoking the horrific outcomes that would surely […]
Stopping Mitch McConnell from his latest SCOTUS power grab will take an act of providence even with three GOP senators sidelined by COVID-19 and Senate rules requiring an in-person vote to advance the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and then confirm her before the election. There is nothing McConnell won’t do to get Barrett on the Supreme Court. If senators infected with COVID can’t be in Washington, he could change the rules about in-person voting, just for SCOTUS nominations, the same way he deployed the so-called nuclear option to end the filibuster so he could confirm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh with […]
The president is better! Or maybe not. Who knows? Spoiler: Trump’s first on-camera interview since his abrupt return to the White House, with Tucker Carlson, did nothing to answer any of those questions, though we did get to see Trump lie and present half-truths himself. It was one week ago that President Superspreader got into a helicopter on the south lawn in front of the White House and took off for Walter Reed Medical Center. Since then, we’ve heard doctors lying or presenting half-truths about Trump’s health. Was he on oxygen? No! Yes! Maybe! By Sunday he was either “not out […]
Candace Owens’ BLEXIT Foundation—founded to give people the false impression that Black voters are abandoning the Democratic party en masse for Republicanism—reportedly put together Saturday’s campaign event thinly disguised as an official government function, where Donald Trump spoke to a pro-police Black and Latinx audience from the Truman Balcony during what was in effect his first in-person rally since his trip to Walter Reed. Two thousand people were reportedly invited to hear his “Remarks to Peaceful Protesters for Law & Order,” but many of the few hundred who showed up had their travel and lodging costs paid by Owens’ group, which […]
Donald Trump is losing it in a big way, and the polls are widening. Still, I say don’t get overconfident. This may yet be close—close enough that Trump can challenge the results in some key states and try to steal it. And if Trump and the Republicans can get away with it, they can produce some outlandish scenarios. Maybe one in which a minority of House members decides Trump won re-election. Maybe one in which there is no president next Jan. 20. Maybe even one in which Mike Pence just decides, against the will of Congress, that he and Trump won—and […]
The experimental novel coronavirus drug Donald Trump took last week is not, as the president claims, a cure for COVID-19. The monoclonal antibody cocktail, under development by New York pharma Regeneron, seems promising, experts and health officials say. But it and a similar antibody cocktail from Indiana firm Eli Lilly—also touted by the president—are still in trials. It’s too soon to say exactly what they do and how well they do it, and the president’s bluster about them is just the latest in a pattern of pandemic braggadocio. Welcome to Rabbit Hole, where we dive deep on the biggest story. It’s […]
Donald Trump is headed toward a massive defeat—at least, if any of the polls (or our eyes) are to be believed. What is more, there’s a decent chance a massive blue wave could do the unthinkable, sweeping even “safe” Republicans like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham out to sea. If that happens, there will be a window of time, however fleeting, for sane Republicans to try and take back the GOP. Doing so will require following the motto of Cobra-Kai: Strike first. Strike hard. No mercy. What I am about to propose is admittedly heavy-handed. It will be called “undemocratic.” But […]
Donald Trump insured that the fly, not Mike Pence or that “monster,” Kamala Harris, who womansplained to the vice president, would be the story coming out of the vice presidential debate by calling into Fox News before the sun was barely up. He delivered a message to that pesky Commission on Presidential Debates to take its virtual debate scheduled for Thursday and shove it. There’s no need to go virtual, since he’s “not contagious at all.” Or so says Dr. Trump, who knows more than his physicians, who can’t offer a second opinion because of blanket NDAs. What’s all the fuss? […]
Dear Judge Barrett, Everyone who knows you says that you are a person of principle, conscience, and strong moral character. Having read much of your writing, I am inclined to agree with them. I therefore urge you to reflect on the profound moral questions that your judicial nomination process raises. I believe that if you do so, you will make the painful but necessary decision to withdraw. Source link
One month after regulators in the United States and United Kingdom froze trials of a British novel coronavirus vaccine candidate, U.S. testing is still on hold. That has big implications for the urgent, multi-billion-dollar effort to produce a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine. The testing pause could slow development efforts by Astrazeneca, the U.K. pharmaceutical company, and, in turn, leave two rival pharmaceutical giants alone as leading developers of coronavirus vaccines. The problem? Both of those firms are developing the same basic type of high-tech—and potentially risky—messenger-RNA vaccine, one that has never been successfully rolled out in modern medicine.. Welcome to Rabbit […]
I got a tension headache from watching the vice presidential debate. I recognized the source instantly, because it felt exactly like the throbbing pain I’ve felt every time I’ve had a man shout me down, cut me off and interrupt me during what’s supposed to be a public conversation. And I honestly cannot imagine that millions of women didn’t also instantly recognize the same feeling after watching Mike Pence’s performance on the debate stage. People spend a lot of time emphasizing the supposed odd-couple pairing of Vice President Pence and the president—contrasting the corrupt evangelicism of the former with the corrupt […]
Vice President Mike Pence lives in an America most of us have never known. It’s a fringe conservative’s dreamscape, where impulsive, half-baked decision making is met with fawning and flattery. Far from the world I grew up in, Pence’s insulated bible-scape is populated by stadiums of devoted followers, courts stacked with judicial enablers, and staff who indulge every foolish instinct. But on Wednesday evening, Pence will step onto a debate stage in Utah where Kamala Harris will force him to defend a record notorious for its shamelessness in prying dignity, justice, and decency from millions — not just those he’s misled […]
The next time you’re in the presence of someone who tries to tell you that Donald Trump is a political genius, I’d like you to grab the nearest copy of Men’s Hairstyles magazine and whack them upside the head. Maybe not too many people are saying that these days, as he’s clearly in the early stages of a ’roid-driven meltdown. But people have remarked many times on Trump’s supposed genius. It has never been true. He didn’t win his massive following by being a political genius. He won it by lying his ass off and being a racist. That’s not political […]
If you think same-sex marriage isn’t in danger of being overturned, Justice Clarence Thomas would like you to think again. Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, today published a blistering attack on the Supreme Court’s landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down state bans on same-sex marriage in 2015, arguing that it should be overturned. Thomas’s opinion is not a court decision, and has no legal impact. My husband and I are still legally married, and our daughter has not yet been taken away from us. But Thomas’s screed is a terrifying warning for the millions of LGBTQ Americans […]
After months of downplaying the danger of COVID-19, President Trump and the first lady tested positive, and on Friday the president was taken to the Walter Reed Medical Center “for the next few days” as “a precautionary measure.” On Saturday, a series of confusing and conflicting updates, on and off the record, about the president’s condition landed on top of the confusion spread by the president about the virus. He’s not the first national leader to be stricken with the virus and, when he recovers, the question may be which example he follows: that of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or British […]
Every element of the criminal system is implicated in the failure to secure justice for Breonna Taylor. The cops, per the judge who signed off the warrant that set the events leading to Taylor’s murder in motion, likely obtained that paperwork using fabricated information. Shoddy police work saw Louisville law enforcement raid Taylor’s home despite the fact that the suspect they sought was already in their custody. The three officers who killed Taylor wildly fired more than 30 rounds between them into the darkness of her apartment, pumping at least six fatal shots into her body. They then ignored their own […]
Even if Donald Trump gets voted out of office in November (and actually leaves), Trump-appointed judges with lifetime seats on the federal bench have already dramatically changed the face of our courts in Donald Trump’s image on a whole range of issues. The effects of the relentless push by Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to pack the courts with Trump’s picks is being directly felt in rulings to restrict voting rights and curtail immigration. Even if Joe Biden wins the presidency, his policies and legislative remedies will face legal challenges that before Trump took over the courts would have been tossed out. […]
Yes, the coronavirus hit the president and his White House hard, likely because of the irresponsible choices this president has made, but let’s not kid ourselves: The virus has devastated with alarming efficiency minorities and the impoverished, particularly in cities, while accelerating our return to a more hierarchical and far less democratic society. The virus has been inconvenient for the affluent, many of whom still could work comfortably from home and who suffered far lower rates of infection. And it’s been a boon for the elite bureaucracy and even more so for the already fantastically wealthy tech oligarchs whose ownership of […]
The news that President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump contracted COVID-19 serves as a reminder: This is why having an irresponsible man-child as president is a bad thing, irrespective of everything else. It’s not that the president tested positive; that could be any president. But just two-and-a-half days ago, at the presidential debate, this president, who went months without ever wearing a mask, said he wears them only “when I think I need it.” He then mocked Joe Biden, saying, “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from them and […]
If the Trump administration tries to push out a novel coronavirus vaccine before it’s fully tested, there are three committees of independent experts who could stand in its way. It’s a testament to the massive stakes of this kind of work that some of their names are effectively kept secret. These committees—two in government and one in the private sector—keep tabs on vaccine-testing, sign off on new drugs and vaccines, and advise the government on how to deploy a new inoculation. But it remains to be seen just how much clout they have if the government decides to skirt science and […]
The headlines said it was a disgrace, a national embarrassment, and a shitshow, but the debate wasn’t any of those things. Donald Trump was, and why don’t we say so? Putting his actions in the passive voice, as things that happened rather than things he did is to show how little has been learned since 2016 and how successful he’s been at normalizing the unthinkable. Putting all that on the debate, rather than the president, lets him off the hook for behavior so frightening that parents who let their kids stay up to watch rushed them off to bed early. Watching […]
Well. I need a shower. That was a disgusting event, and we all know why. It’s been said a million times, but it’s never been truer than on this night: Donald Trump drags everything down to his level. And the moderator let him. That was the most shocking and pathetic moderator performance that we’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine Trump helped himself with that performance. I suspect that to regular voters, he just looked rude or worse, in failing to denounce white supremacy and railing on about Hunter Biden. Fox went gaga over that performance, of course, but I think most […]
Tuesday’s “debate” was a trainwreck. A national embarrassment. A disgrace. If Joe Biden were looking for a pretext to skip the next two debates, he found it. It would be hard to blame him for concluding this is simply a waste of everyone’s time. We’ll see. From the start of this debate, Donald Trump interrupted Biden. Repeatedly. For a while there, it looked like Biden was going to get destroyed—that Trump would simply run over him and Biden would be left sitting there, with that far away look in his eyes. But Biden rallied. He embraced the shit-show format, grew stronger […]
Joe Biden, unless he has some huge brain fart, is going to win the debates. But it’s not likely to help him very much, for two reasons. So I would caution his campaign against thinking they can lock this thing down with solid debate performances. My advice would be: Rather than trying to win the debates, Biden should give Donald Trump the room to lose them. I’ll explain what I mean by that below, but first, let’s get to those reasons. Reason one why winning won’t matter much is that everyone expects him to win. This may sound kind of odd […]
When can you call a lie a lie? And, more to the point, when can you call a liar a liar? These are not abstract questions. From the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 with a semi-extemporized, 46-minute speech that included numerous documentable falsehoods, journalists and news organizations throughout America and around the world have struggled to find the right language to describe his language. Are words like “falsehood” and “untruth” adequate terms for a responsible journalist to use? Or should the word “lie”—which suggests intention, rather than accident or ignorance—be used instead? It should. In new research that […]
Win McNamee/Getty Images After shadow boxing for months, taking jabs and lobbing insults, Donald Trump will meet his challenger in a socially distanced way Tuesday evening for the first of three debates. The bar is high for Trump in the age of COVID. Can he con the country into wanting the chaos he generates for four more years when there are 200,000 Americans dead from the virus on his watch? Will the rally-loving president be able to perform in an almost empty debate hall without an audience of admirers chanting “fill that seat”? For Joe Biden, this will be the first […]
Amy Coney Barrett, the smart young nominee, accompanied by her young family (including seven children—two of whom were adopted from Haiti), entered the fray today. Noting the number of justices on the Supreme Court, she joked: “I’m used to being in a group of nine—my family.” It was a beautiful scene in the Rose Garden. The flags were flying—God knows there were plenty of flags—but, more importantly, there was a smart young nominee, accompanied by her smartly dressed young family (did I mention the seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti?). “I love the United States, and I love […]
Errol Morris is one of non-fiction cinema’s all-time greats, a godfather of modern true crime thanks to 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, which famously got Randall Dale Adams off of death row. So when he says that another murderer is innocent of the crimes for which he’s been convicted, it’s necessary to listen—if not to instinctively believe him. And yet A Wilderness of Error, FX’s five-part adaptation of Morris’ 2012 book of the same name, makes a far from convincing case, raising plenty of doubt about whether the illustrious filmmaker was, in this instance, on the wrong side of the truth. […]
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast On the one hand, Donald Trump isn’t saying anything he didn’t say in 2016—I’ll respect the results if I win, and so on. On the other, though, there is one thing that’s very different: He’s president now. He wasn’t then. And when a sitting president refuses to commit to the peaceful transfer of power, that’s a flag that’s as red as red gets (and he gets a kick out of it, as the Beast reported). But this column isn’t aimed at Trump. It’s aimed at everyone else, especially this country’s elites, from politics to the […]
President’s Trump’s plan to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Saturday to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court is a shocking political spectacle. The formal announcement Saturday will come the day after Ginsburg became the first woman and the first Jew to lie in state at the Capitol, and less than 40 days before the presidential election. In 2016, Republicans refused to consider President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland, 260 days before that year’s election. The nomination is also a remarkable achievement for the religious right. In less than four years, Trump will have selected […]
Everything about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has felt wrong. I don’t mean surprising—she was an 87-year-old woman who had battled cancer multiple times and been hospitalized earlier this year; it’s not uncommon for people with that medical history to die. But every second of what’s happened since the news broke of her death has felt like some kind of perversion of what should be happening. In my nights of anxiety and insomnia since her death, robbed by the news cycle insistent on the politics of it all to be sad, I started feeling despair. I thought about how the justice once […]
Who was that masked man going nuclear on Trump proxy and part-time ophthalmologist Sen. Rand Paul? Could that be Anthony Fauci, usually as buttoned down as his shirts, shooting down Paul’s nonsense about COVID-19, the same Dr. Paul who tested positive for the virus and then swanned around the Capitol without telling anyone? Yes, the same Paul who praised Sweden’s herd immunity that didn’t save lives or its economy, and dumped on New York’s draconian measures that ultimately did and Fauci’s “authoritarian mandates” of “the nanny state.” Dr. Fauci was having none of it. “I challenge that,” he said and asked […]
When I look at the smears already being aimed at potential Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett, I’m left with one conclusion: This is how we got Donald Trump. Long before Trump took that now-famous escalator ride, conservatives were regularly attacked in pretty unfair ways. The closer to an election or confirmation vote, the more vicious the attacks. In recent years, decent, mainstream conservatives have been accused of owning a racist rock (Rick Perry), giving forced, homophobic haircuts, declaring a “war on women” and not paying taxes (Mitt Romney), and not knowing how many houses they own (John McCain). In […]
Sometimes there is a difference between law and justice. On Wednesday, Kentucky Attorney General Dan Cameron announced that a police officer would be charged in the shooting incident that killed Breonna Taylor. But the officer who was charged is not one of the officers who shot at her. Former Detective Brett Hankison was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment for firing shots that entered a neighboring apartment where a couple and their five-year old child were sleeping. They were not physically harmed. Hankinson was fired from the Louisville Metro Police Department after the incident for violating policy that forbids shooting […]
When a Louisville grand jury chose not to charge any of the police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor for their role in killing a 26-year-old Black woman, it was confirmation that, to many, my life as a Black woman does not matter. And as a native Kentuckian, that shattered me. I spent my early years and every summer in Southeastern Kentucky. As I grew up and moved around, I was made fun of for my “country accent” that eventually faded as I got older. But jokes never ended about my “country” upbringing and whatever myths people chose to […]
Joe Biden didn’t mince words as Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump abuse and corrupt the Constitution in their rush to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. “The infection this president has unleashed on our democracy can be fatal. Enough. Enough. Enough.” He has since added that expanding the Court is a legitimate question. Biden sees McConnell’s desire for total unitary executive, judiciary and legislative control for what it is: A tyranny of extremism. Source link
How fast the Supreme Court nominee talk began, with the monumental life that precipitated it surreally relegated in its shadow. It’s there in Donald Trump’s creepy, elated stump speeches, and Mitch McConnell’s pathetic justifications for his own hypocrisy; in the liberal scramble to avert their idea of disaster; and in the glassy eyes of pundits who rack up their appearance fees chatting ever so amiably about the violations of our democracy. It’s there in Meghan McCain’s foghorn petulance which makes The View so often unwatchable. Everyone is in on the game, ghouls at a poisonous feast. Source link
As COVID-19 deaths in the United States approached 200,000, the toll among health-care workers came to include a 28-year-old doctor who had gone about with a toy stethoscope as a youngster in upstate New York. Dr. Adeline Fagan had grown up to become an OB-GYN resident at HCA Healthcare in Houston. A photo shows her in scrubs, holding a swaddled newborn. She has the incandescent smile of someone who could not think of anything better to do than to bring new life into the world. But with the arrival of a pandemic, she sometimes delivered babies whose mothers were infected. And […]
There’s a Jewish tradition that someone who dies on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, must have been a tzaddik, a righteous person. After all, God waited all year to carry out the decree. Perhaps that offers some comfort to those mourning the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Hebrew name, Yita Ruchel bat Tzirel Leah), who finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 87, after convincing many of us that she was immortal. But the themes of Rosh Hashanah offer another lesson as well: a warning to those Republican senators pondering whether or not to support Senate Majority Leader […]
If Michael Caputo, a top official at Health and Human Services, hadn’t melted down and spewed out on Facebook Live that his job description included suppressing “rotten scientists” in a “resistance unit” at the CDC, he would still be twisting the apolitical data coming out of the single most important source of health information in the world. Caputo also warned that Democrats were getting out of their sweatpants only long enough to plot an armed insurrection to defeat Trump by publicizing a running tab on death and destruction from COVID-19. At night, Caputo saw shadows on the wall. In short, he […]
There is no shortage of local topics that interest the Kremlin—from the poisoning of an inconvenient dissident, to the events in neighboring Belarus and the ongoing battle against the coronavirus. In the thick of it all, America remains front and center of the Russian state media’s steely focus. In Putin’s Russia, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s rallies, events and press comments are viewed and reported with maniacal obsession. Russian state media happily poked fun at the Trump campaign’s use of a stock photo of Russian-made fighter jets, but aside from an occasional jab, Moscow’s coverage of the Trump presidency closely resembles […]
TEL AVIV—Assuming last-minute disputes about mask-wearing and social distancing can be ironed out in time, the South Lawn of the White House will once more be the site of a historic Middle East peace deal signing. Two deals, in fact, as both Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates normalize ties with Israel. Rejecting the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East has been a totemic political and moral commitment in the Arab world for 75 years now. Travel to or from Israel was prohibited, as was all trade and cultural exchange and sporting competition. For years even the mention […]
Appearances are everything down South, part of the region’s noted cordiality and social decorum. Yet on coastal Alabama’s Mobile Bay, a group of residents is determined to peel back their languid locale’s veneer of colonnaded mansions and Spanish moss-draped oaks to confront the proverbial “ugliness that cuts to the bone.” And to build something better from those truths. A cross-section of faces spanning age, sex and race popped onto computer screens and launched into friendly banter. Finally, a woman’s voice quelled them and asked for committee reports. It is the Mobile County Remembrance Project’s monthly online meeting, 20-plus activists driven onto […]
Trump’s four-year mantra to Black voters, people like me, has been “what do you have to lose?” He has proclaimed it loudly since the summer of 2016 to all who will listen. Trump has stepped up that refrain in recent months, saying, “I have done more for Black Americans than any President, maybe with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.” What about old Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson to name a few? Each of those presidents dramatically expanded opportunity and freedom for African Americans in ways Trump couldn’t imagine […]
The most heartbreaking exchange between Donald Trump and Bob Woodward came on March 19, when the president dramatically informed the reporter that the virus could infect young people after all. If Trump had acted on that inside info, instead of just using it to impress Woodward, 100 children might be alive today, going to school, albeit on Zoom. But he kept that, and so much more, between him and Woodward, an associate editor at the hated Washington Post who became famous for breaking the Watergate scandal. Earlier, on Feb. 26, the president confided to Woodward that if you just “breathed the […]
Picture this. You’re a fan of President Donald Trump. But you’re on the fence about donating to his campaign. The pandemic has taken a toll on your finances. And giving $50 to a billionaire’s election bid seems like a foolish thing to do when paying for groceries on a fixed income is a challenge. And then, you get an email from the campaign itself. You’ve won the title of Trump Patriot of the week (!!!!). Not only that, Donald Trump is going to see your name—your actual name!—provided you give in the next hour. But here comes the coup de grâce: […]
Every once in a great, great while, life is more delicious than you’d dared to hope. I was reading early Wednesday afternoon about what may be the big scoop from Bob Woodward’s new book on the Trump administration: that on February 7, while Trump was pooh-poohing the virus publicly, he told Woodward: “This is deadly stuff.” In fact, five times as deadly as the normal flu, he said. There’s no denying that Trump said this; lordly, there are tapes. So I asked myself the question that any journalist would : What was Trump saying publicly on that day? When the president […]
Government regulators in the United Kingdom have ordered Cambridge-based pharma AstraZeneca to pause development of its novel-coronavirus vaccine candidate after a patient in the U.K. apparently had an unspecified adverse reaction to the vaccine. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the stand-down order came from the U.K. Data Safety Monitoring Board, which oversees pharmaceutical trials. The U.K. board coordinated with American regulators in making its decision, HHS stated. A “standard review process triggered a pause to vaccination to allow review of safety data,” a spokesperson for AstraZeneca told Statnews. Source link
As more than a million viewers tuned in to see ‘90s icons Brandy and Monica, singers of the hit song “The Boy is Mine,” in the same room for the first time in nearly a decade last week, a familiar face suddenly popped up on the screen between them: Senator and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Wearing a Howard University shirt, Harris made a plug to get registered to vote—and social media was on fire with comments about it. An R&B battle is a rare place for a national candidate to make an appearance, but Harris makes cultural history in many […]
Remember when the worst President in American history was George W. Bush? While his dad’s good old days of being able to “read my lips” are long gone, The Daily Beast is helping people get their voice heard in these strange times with our new line of designer face masks. Very comfortable yet extremely confrontational, these masks make a statement. Here’s your chance to support quality journalism—and look good doing it! Source link
If you want to know who will win the presidency in 60 days, the real question may be this: What crazy story will dominate the news between now and then? In politics, the battle isn’t just over which candidate you prefer. Often, that determination is downstream from a more urgent question: What issue are you thinking about when you go to the ballot box? This explains why “October surprises’ ‘ (think James Comey reopening his investigation into Hillary’s e-mails) can be definitive (especially for swing voters), and it explains why politicians, at the risk of looking like phonies, parry questions and […]
Ronald McKeithen was trying to beat a clock he could not see. He’d gathered close to 100 certificates from programs completed during his three decades in prison: meditation, anger management, visual arts. He wrote a court petition by hand, then asked a friend to type it. He needed three copies, but the prison administration charged $1 a page, money Ron didn’t have. So, he bartered with a fellow prisoner who had access to a copy machine inside the prison, paying him with a pouch of tobacco. This petition was Ron’s one remaining avenue to freedom, and he’d heard a rumor that […]
Donald Trump’s alleged comments that Americans who died serving our country are “losers” and “suckers” probably won’t matter—unless it is the first salvo in a larger battle. If elections are about who’s on offense on who’s on defense, then the biggest thing about this military story may be another lost cycle for Trump where he’s responding to a story not of his choosing, and as he’s running out of cycles here to close a persistent gap in the polls—suggesting our amp-to-11 president is going to do something wildly over the top now to try and reclaim control of the conversation. But […]
The Trump administration’s white supremacist propaganda machine removed a video on Saturday that it had posted earlier in the week. The removal came hours after this story, which has been updated, reported on its use of false migrant crime statistics and a fictionalized story about a dark-skinned migrant murdering a man with a knife. The video had been uploaded to YouTube on Thursday by Border Patrol, part of the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond to a request for comment about it on Friday and also did not immediately respond to a request Saturday evening for comment on its […]
A few weeks ago, I re-watched Jordan Peele’s racial thriller Get Out. The movie still elicits a visceral response of horror, mostly due to its banality and familiarity. The upper-class liberal white family is creepy, but they are given the benefit of the doubt, repeatedly. The situation is familiar to many of us who move in racially mixed social and work spaces. We ignore the uneasiness until we realize that, like a frog in water set to boil, it’s too late. They never actually saw your humanity. Instead, they saw you as a commodity, and you and the labor of your […]
Polls show voters have more confidence in Joe Biden than Donald Trump on every key issue except the economy, where the president’s strength has Democrats worried that Biden could be falling into the same trap as Hillary Clinton by not running robustly enough on jobs. The Democratic convention’s focus on social justice issues deepened concerns among nervous Dems that history might repeat itself with another searing loss as the GOP hammered home its message of law and order. You’d think Biden was down eight points, not up. “The race is totally unchanged,” pollster Stan Greenberg assured me as he was putting […]
What the fuck did we do to deserve this? Why is our so-called president so entirely batshit crazy? These are questions many, or maybe most Americans try to avoid these days. They shrug, pretend our mad king’s latest excesses and offenses are just an act, or that it will be over soon. They excuse the externalities bearing down on us as fate or bad timing, and Donald’s eccentricity and incompetence as just the icing on the political cake of America’s Annus Horribilis. (And no, Don Jr., that’s not a symptom of a bad booty bump.) To those Americans, I say: Don’t […]
So off goes Joe Biden to Kenosha on Thursday with wife, Jill, to host a town hall meeting and “to make a local stop,” as the press release put it, which we can perhaps presume means a visit to Jacob Blake’s family (sans nonexistent pastor). I guess this is a good idea. The first principle of campaigning against a bully is don’t be bullied. Show you’re not intimidated. Biden did that successfully Monday in Pittsburgh—his rhetoric was pugnacious and direct. So don’t leave the Kenosha optics to Donald Trump. Show you’ll play on his turf. But there’s a tightrope Biden has […]
If you don’t think Donald Trump could still win this election, then you’re snorting better Xanax than I am. Trump is a preternaturally gifted demagogue with riots and a bully pulpit to exploit. He has three debates still on the calendar, a history of stunning everyone, and a couple of months to work his magic. Counting him out at a time when cities are on fire would be insane. And here’s another reason: There are millions of potential voters out there you’ve probably never even thought of. And unlike the assumption that “bringing in new voters” means moderating your message or […]
As the end of convention season brings with it the final stretch of a years-long presidential campaign, a hauntingly familiar feeling is in the air in Minnesota, slowly alarming Democrats as November approaches—the chill of 2016. Four years ago, Minnesota was supposed to be a breezy, no-drama pickup for Hillary Clinton. Neither the Clinton nor Trump campaigns bothered investing any significant resources there, and certainly not much in-person time—Trump flew in for a last-minute rally days before Election Day; Clinton never set foot in the state as the Democratic nominee. Clinton won Minnesota’s 10 electoral votes by a mere 1.5 percent, […]
Robin Williams’ self-inflicted death on Aug. 11, 2014, at the age of 63 shocked the world, not only because few knew that the acclaimed actor had been suffering in any way, but because despite his history of substance-abuse problems, his effusive, uninhibited, hyperactive spirit was so joyous and infectious that it simply didn’t gibe with suicide. With no concrete explanation for why he’d taken his own life, the media filled in the gaps with wild speculation about depression, drugs, and financial woes. None of those guesses, however, did anything to alleviate the sheer mystery of it all. It was simply incomprehensible—to […]
The Senate race in Massachusetts is blue on blue in a blue state so the seat will remain safely Democratic whatever the outcome in Tuesday’s primary. That’s little solace for Democrats torn apart by a race that forces them to choose between Joseph Kennedy III, a rising star in the party and heir to the storied Kennedy legacy, and incumbent Senator Ed Markey, a champion of progressive causes in the House and Senate for 47 years—longer than Kennedy, 39, has been alive. Kennedy has struggled to explain why he’s running, other than that he’s a Kennedy and would “leverage” the power […]
Here we go. It’s law and order week. And with the eyes of the nation fixed on Kenosha, Joe Biden is going to… southwestern Pennsylvania, to give a speech on why you aren’t safe in Donald Trump’s America. And Trump is going to Kenosha on Tuesday. So we confront one of the enduring questions of American presidential politics, which goes back to Richard Nixon’s time: Can the Republicans scare enough white people into thinking that their beautiful suburb is going to be taken over by Black criminals if the Democrat wins? Pretty much every liberal I know is terrified that the […]
Donald Trump’s acceptance speech Thursday night was interminable, sprawling, and littered with superfluous lines. But it also included some finely tuned themes that were repeated over and over during the four-night infomercial called the Republican National Convention, starting with the timely issue of law and order. “If the Democrat Party wants to stand with anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners, that is up to them,” Trump declared, “but I, as your President, will not be a part of it. The Republican Party will remain the voice of the patriotic heroes who keep America Safe.” At first blush, this might sound like […]
Every four years, during the procedural announcement of delegate vote tallies at both parties’ nominating conventions, Americans are reminded of something I’m sure the vast majority of them forget all about in between conventions: the very existence of the five unincorporated United States territories–Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Territories that are under United States sovereignty, inhabited by about 3.5 million people who are United States citizens and nationals, but, inexplicably, will have no right to vote for the president come November. Ask any mainlander to find these five territories on a map […]
Before last night’s neon obscenity—a Trump rally on the South Lawn of the American White House—the 2020 Republican National Convention was close to cartoonish in its attempt to scare the country into voting for Donald J. Trump. It began as dark comedy with a cast of family members, supplicants, incompetents, political ne’er do wells and loud worshippers of a guy who never really believed he’d win on that long-gone night in November 2016 but now thinks he belongs on Mount Rushmore. As each day melted into the next, though, there were no laugh-lines. Only the specter of a dark hand with […]
Right on cue, the country’s dominant political and media voices, after wildly applauding Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have responded to Donald Trump’s week in the spotlight with laughter, derision and anger for its supposed amateurism, lack of star power, and racism. And the convention has given critics plenty to laugh at, or cry if you are a Republican. The use of the gun-wielding wealthy St. Louis couple was a strange way to address the Democrats’ very real plans for undermining the nation’s suburbs. Placing the utterly clueless and unsympathetic Donald Trump Jr. on the podium, while elevating the Trump family […]
Donald Trump’s acceptance speech Thursday night, a deranged Fidel Castro parody of maniacal gaslighting proportions, could not be mistaken for an American president’s. In his bizarro unreality, 180,000 dead and rising is public health. Divisive hate mongering is law and order. Historic unemployment and inequity is strength. Police brutality is a race war. Protests for civil rights are anarchy. Still he attempted to inject himself into the American tapestry of Lincoln, Jackson, and even Roosevelt, of course making zero correlation between their actions and his own in office. That’s because Trump has employed the only strategy he knows: Fake it til […]
While our attention has been hyper-focused on the pandemic and the upcoming national elections, new regulations and protocols have been implemented by the Trump administration that are increasing the misery experienced by migrant children and families detained on the U.S. Southwest border. Since March, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have used a century-old provision in the federal code to grant unprecedented authority to the agency to halt immigration proceedings and accelerate the deportation of more than 100,000 families, unaccompanied minors, and individuals. Mark Morgan, the CBP chief, said, “We’re trying to remove them as fast as we can.” Indeed they […]
Bob Eckstein With the aid of a live — at least for now — audience, Donald Trump energized the faithful this week with a revival of this country’s fear of socialism and the horror that would be a Biden America, making every American forget there ever was murder hornets. Most importantly he proved he really can assemble a better team (a better TV production team, that is) to create a compelling and convincing work of fiction. Almost every speech, every takeaway claimed to show America the real Trump behind the curtain, the one we don’t see, the caring and humane Trump, […]
“I recognize that my dad’s communication style is not to everyone’s taste. And I know his tweets can feel a bit unfiltered. But the results speak for themselves.” Perhaps not the best phrase to utter mid-pandemic, but Ivanka seemed not to be tethered to such terrestrial worries. It was an ambitious speech filled with flourishes and corporate doublespeak. It was a fancy speech filled with words, and ideas! They were needless to say all lies, but they were polished lies: Heritage foundation-style lies, not tacky Gateway Pundit-style lies like Junior uses. Ivanka is a sophisticated, Wall Street Journal opinion page liar […]
Four years ago, Rudy Giuliani took to the stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver a shouty monologue about how his friend Donald Trump would usher in a new era of law and order and end the racial strife prompted by police killings of Black men. Four years later, Giuliani is back at the RNC. He’s still shouty. And this time he’s monologuing about how an unprecedented wave of protests, civil strife, and outrage over yet another new round of police shootings is why we need to re-elect Trump. Claiming that “my city is in shock” over a rise in […]
Socialism—it’s a convention tradition for the GOP. References to the economic philosophy of government ownership were only slightly outnumbered by the words “the” and “Trump” on the first night of the remote-access GOP summit on Monday. Ex-United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley warned of the nefarious influence “the socialist left” would have on former Vice President Joseph Biden’s prospective administration, while Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) imagined the Democratic nominee and his understudy Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) would look to implement a “socialist utopia.” The first son’s significant other, Kimberly Guilfoyle, inveighed against a “socialist Biden-Harris future,” while Florida businessman Maximo Alvarez warned […]
At 9:30 p.m., as hundreds of protesters marched down Kenosha’s streets to protest a police shooting that left 29-year-old Jacob Blake paralyzed, National Association of Police Organizations President Michael McHale took to the stage at the Republican convention to chide Democrats for disrespecting America’s police officers. “Chaos results when elected officials in cities like Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York make the conscious and very public decision not to support law enforcement,” McHale told millions of Americans who have watched as scenes of police violence consume our daily lives. “The violence we are seeing… isn’t happening by chance; it’s the direct […]
Eight years ago, Bill Clinton earned the title “explainer-in-chief” when his speech at the Democratic National Convention made a very persuasive case for reelecting Barack Obama. Mike Pence earned that title this year, after Bubba was all but sidelined by his party, in his renomination acceptance speech Wednesday night that connected all the dots and laid out the brick-by-brick argument for why Donald Trump deserves four more years. Pence addressed the elephants in the room: Hurricane Laura, currently a Category 4 storm, is bearing down on Louisiana and Texas, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a tinderbox in the aftermath of still another […]
On Wednesday night, as police described a 17-year-old out-of-state militant who shot and killed two protesters as “involved in the use of firearms to resolve whatever conflict was in place,” as a preventable pandemic’s death toll inched toward 200,000 Americans, as California burned and as a category 4 hurricane barreled toward the US, I thought about optimism. Wednesday’s was the third night of what GOP officials and sycophants promised would be an optimistic response to the “doom and gloom” of last week’s Democratic convention. But things are pretty widely acknowledged to be bad, no matter how many wrinkled flags are displayed […]
On the second night of its national convention, the Party of Trump resorted to reruns, hammering home the message he’s been pushing for four years: That the radical left—with help from Communist China and the Lamestream Media—is hellbent on destroying the traditional (white) American way of life, and the only person who can stop them is Trump. Among the invitees to take up the theme was Nicholas Sandmann, the Kentucky prep school student who became a darling of the right after he and his MAGA hat went viral following an incident with a Native American activist last year. Sandmann blasted the […]
If you just returned from 40 years (or even four) in a jungle in Borneo without television and modern communications and watched Tuesday night’s Republican convention, you’d think these were lovely people doing wondrous things. There was the former robber and the FBI guy who befriended him (needless to say, across racial lines). The New Mexico cop who adopted the heroin addict’s baby and helped her clean up. And then all that bragging about all those best-ever accomplishments. You’d turn the TV off wondering what kind of nutcase can possibly be against this? Then your host would sit you down and […]
Being Secretary of State is, as it turns out, is really just a side hustle for Mike Pompeo. He’s happy to have the gig if it helps advance his personal political ambitions, but should the burdens or restrictions associated with being America’s chief diplomat ever get in the way of those ambitions, time and time again, this heir to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson chooses himself or his political party over his country. He, like his boss, has turned his solipsism into his brand. As Donald Trump turned the White House, his pardon power and the oath of citizenship into campaign […]
The Republican party has been headed down the wrong path on inclusion and diversity for decades and on Monday night, America saw the results as a lineup intended to highlight the party’s diversity instead exposed how little of it there is. The night opened with Charlie Kirk, the 26-year-old white founder of Turning Point USA and one of the most divisive, and angriest figures in America. As the night went on, the party trotted out regular, everyday citizens to spotlight its supposed diversity, but they lost me when they spotlighted the man and woman who pulled loaded weapons on peaceful Black […]
Bloomberg It’s never a good sign when someone gives a speech and people’s reaction is to talk about something other than the words. And this is what happened Monday night to the president’s large adult son, who came to the speaker’s podium on night one of the Republican convention with very red shrunken eyes that did not escape the Internet’s notice. People wondered and wondered what was up with Junior’s eyes. In fact, after the speech, #cocaine started trending. As for the words, Junior accused the left of “trying to “cancel” all of those Founders.” He also said that this election […]
Last week, Aaron Coleman was declared the winner of a Democratic primary for a Kansas House seat. Coleman, a 19-year-old who cites Bernie Sanders as an inspiration and ran on a platform of defunding the police, free college, and single-payer, defeated a long-time incumbent by 14 votes. But after national outrage he withdrew on Sunday, blaming “feminism” and what he believed was a demand that elected officials be faultless, for his decision. It isn’t that people want their representatives to be perfect — that’s impossible, and such a bar would, and has, stopped plenty of potential leaders from running at all. […]
In the early 2010s, a famous white male writer, Colum McCann, cofounded a group calling for “radical empathy” and made a lot of money talking about this group on the speaker circuit. This was around the same time that many news outlets reported on a now-debunked scientific study that claimed literary fiction produces empathy—and the attendant opinion pieces making the case (for white audiences) that empathy was the cure for racism. Literary fiction, claimed Scientific American in 2013, “prompts the reader to imagine the characters’ introspective dialogues… undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such […]