Новости за 27.07.2020

For the sports-deprived American discontent with watching Premier League games, last week was something of a reprieve: The National Basketball Association, ensconced in its Orlando bubble, began running scrimmages between 22 invited teams. The National Women’s Soccer League crowned a champion. And Major League Baseball kicked off its 60-game sprint of a regular season. Sports were back! 

Republican prospects in November are so dire—with President Donald Trump trailing Joe Biden by about ten points and Biden’s fellow Democrats projected to win a Senate majority and expand their House majority—that speculation has begun about what a post-Trump GOP might look like. A good guess is that it will look like California’s pitifully shrunken Republican party, which today holds not a single statewide office and only seven of the state’s 56 seats in the House and Senate.

It’s not a great month to be running a utility company. Last week, Ohio Republican House Speaker Larry Householder’s farm was raided as part of an FBI investigation into a $61 million conspiracy between GOP leadership and the utility FirstEnergy to pass a wide-ranging bailout for coal and nuclear plants that also kneecapped the state’s clean energy and energy efficiency measures. In brief, House Bill 6 put Ohioans on the hook for propping up power plants that would otherwise have shut down. In the wake of the arrests... Читать дальше...

This week, the Senate is expected to take up the nomination of Judy Shelton to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board. She is widely considered to be a monetary crank due to her past support for a gold standard. Placing Shelton on the Fed’s governing board would be like a university giving tenure to an alchemist in its chemistry department or an astrologist in its astronomy department. Even the free market economist Milton Friedman would oppose Shelton, since he opposed her promotion to senior... Читать дальше...

A special education teacher at a public high school in Queens remembers a week in April when almost every day, she learned another student at her school had lost a parent or grandparent to Covid-19. Now, she fears reopening this fall—even with a hybrid learning model like the one proposed in New York—will trigger another wave of grief. 

On Friday, the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump conservative group, released two new ads both focused on focused on President Trump’s recent comments about arrested Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell, who, like Epstein, allegedly participated in the sexual abuse of minors. “I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump said at a press conference. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years.” The quote is repeated in both ads between darkened photos of her, Epstein, and Trump. One spot suggests Maxwell... Читать дальше...