Новости за 05.02.2021

For a few short hours from Thursday afternoon to Friday morning, Larry Summers seemed to be on the verge of blowing up another big stimulus. Back in 2009, Summers, then the White House’s top economic adviser, had pushed Barack Obama to go small, based on overoptimistic economic projections and worries about political blowback, a catastrophic decision for both the country and the Democratic Party, which went on to get drubbed in the 2010 midterms. Now Summers was back on his bullshit. In a Washington Post op-ed... Читать дальше...

On Thursday, the House voted to strip Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments, putting an end to one chapter of what’s sure to be an ongoing saga in the chamber’s Republican caucus. In a meandering nonapology in the hours before the vote, Greene, who has endorsed an impressive array of conspiracy theories, including QAnon and claims that Hillary Clinton had raped, mutilated, and consumed the blood of a child, characterized negative coverage of her as—surprise, surprise—more “cancel culture” run amok. Читать дальше...

On Thursday, Republican Senator Mitt Romney made a huge splash: He put forward a proposal to create what would amount to the first-ever child allowance in the United States, sending nearly all families $350 a month for children age zero to five and $250 a month up to age 17.

In a campaign ad released a few weeks before Georgia’s January Senate runoffs, an aide tells his boss, GOP Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw, “We have two patriots down there, Senator Loeffler and Senator Perdue.” Crenshaw loosens his tie, removes his shirt, and parachutes into Georgia like a comic-book superhero, landing on the car of some unsuspecting antifa members, who wail in terror. In its narcissistic incoherence, the ad was a perfect demonstration of the confusion over what it means to be an American patriot... Читать дальше...

Sometime in 1988, the actor, musician, and painter John Lurie was busy designing the cover for Voice of Chunk, an album by his band, The Lounge Lizards, then slated for release in Germany. Lurie wanted to revise the original cover art, which foregrounded his face in profile, framed by a saxophone, and which annoyed him. His solution? An eel. That is: a photo of a live, or at least newly dead, eel, laid out in a straight line, bisecting the photograph.

Last month, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger issued a press release announcing that he had certified the results of the U.S. Senate runoff elections held on January 5. He concluded it with a paean to his state’s voting laws. “Georgia is recognized as a national leader in elections,” he claimed. “It was the first state in the country to implement the trifecta of automatic voter registration, at least 16 days of early voting (which has been called the ‘gold standard’), and no-excuse... Читать дальше...

This week, NBC News’s national political reporter, Sahil Kapur, tweeted a bit of interesting color from the Hill: Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, passing West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, greeted him with a “Your Highness” as he walked by. The title was deserved—Manchin, for all intents and purposes, is now running both the Senate and the Democratic legislative agenda. There are other Democratic members of the party’s Senate caucus who will have to be wooed and won over in order to pass any of President Biden’s big-ticket items during this Congress... Читать дальше...