In the months ahead of what’s likely to be a brutal Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign are laying the groundwork for his big, bombastic return to major social media platforms. Such a return, though, would inevitably involve Trump screwing over one of his own companies — …
Read More »'Really Scary and Sad': How School Counselors Got Caught in the GOP's Culture-War Dragnet
To hear Angela Mann tell it, a paralysis has set in among Florida school counselors and psychologists since Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill last month. They wonder if sponsoring their schools’ Gay Straight Alliance means they’ll have to break their students’ confidences. They’re confused about …
Read More »How One Priest Turned Putin's Invasion Into a Holy War
This article was published in partnership with Religion News Service. Two days before he launched a bloody invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat alone in front of a camera and delivered a rambling, hour-long address. It outlined the ideological justification for what would ultimately become his “special military …
Read More »Putin Is a Fossil-Fuel Gangster. Clean Energy Could Cut Him Off at the Knees
For decades, world leaders and Big Oil CEOs were happy to turn a blind eye to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic impulses and fantasies of empire building. They were all fossil-fuel junkies, hooked on the easy money of oil and gas, and Putin had plenty of it. They helped finance …
Read More »Wisconsin Is Ground Zero for the MAGA Effort to Steal the Next Election
At 5:01 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2, Tim Ramthun was sitting in his living room with the TV on when his cellphone rang. He turned to his wife of four decades, Carolann. “Oh, the president’s calling,” he told her. She scoffed. “Hello, Mr. President,” Ramthun said to the caller. “This …
Read More »'Once the World Looks Away, We Are All Dead'
A man with a white scarf wrapped tightly around his face strides across a footbridge holding a pistol by his side. An Afghan journalist, sobbing on a friend’s shoulder, says, “They betrayed us.” Passers-by gather around the body of a motorcyclist lying by the side of the road; too much …
Read More »What Joe Manchin Wants
1. This is Joe Manchin’s moment It was the morning of Friday, March 5th, and victory was in sight. Joe Biden’s first major act as president, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, had gone to the Senate, and it appeared to be headed for a swift passage. The moderates in …
Read More »Democracy on the Brink
WASHINGTON — In the coming weeks, the battle over democracy’s future in America will hit a boil. On one side is a group that looks at the last election and sees a resilient but damaged system. A system that withstood —sometimes only barely — a raging pandemic, a conspiracy-theory-peddling president, …
Read More »What Pollsters Want You to Know About What Went Wrong
“I don’t want you to lose your job, but why should you exist?” This is what Siena College Research Institute Director Don Levy says a reporter asked him earlier this month after it became clear that he and his fellow pollsters drastically underestimated Donald Trump’s support, four years after making …
Read More »Veterans Feel Betrayed as U.S. Immigration System Fails Imperiled Iraqi Allies
Early in his deployment, in the summer of 2003, Maj. Dave Kleiber would sit with his fellow soldiers at night, smoking cigars from Saddam Hussein’s humidor on the roof of the Radwaniyah Palace and watching tracer fire over Baghdad. The former digs of the deposed Iraqi dictator served as the …
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