Новости за 22.02.2021

A new billboard looms over the I-80 freeway in San Francisco, near Twitter’s headquarters. A blown-up screenshot of a tweet, it reads, “Thinking of moving to Miami? DM me.” While the billboard itself was reportedly paid for by a group of tech investors, the author behind the trollish tweet was Miami’s increasingly tech-thirsty mayor, Francis Suarez.

Cartoonist Al Capp, famous for the twentieth-century comic strip Li’l Abner, created a visually memorable character named Joe Btfsplk who walked around under his own rain cloud. That mood of persistent gloom afflicts the Democrats these days, even though Joe Biden is in the White House and the party holds shaky majorities in the Senate and the House.  

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is over, and Washington is now congealing around some sort of august body to investigate the January 6 insurrection. Earlier this week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would support creating an “outside, independent 9/11-type commission” to investigate that fateful day’s events and the government response to it. Some House and Senate Republicans have also warmed up to the idea, especially where security failures are concerned.

In July 2017, Donald Trump gave a speech in Warsaw that seemed, at the time, to herald a new age. In remarks dredged from the imagination of adviser Steve Bannon, the president drew a rhetorical line in the sand and enlisted his host—the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist Polish President Andrzej Duda—in an epochal fight. “I declare today for the world to hear,” Trump said, as if he were standing behind ramparts and not a podium, “that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Читать дальше...

Deb Haaland could be the next secretary of the interior. Her hearing is scheduled for Tuesday and, if seated, the congresswoman from New Mexico and citizen of the Laguna Pueblo will make history. Her name will be etched into the minds of young Native women across Indian Country, and her late-career path to Congress and then the Cabinet will serve as an inspiration to any Native person who believes that such offices are the places where change happens. 

Although Donald Trump’s status as a bestower of brilliant nicknames was always overrated, the GOP is clearly lost without his marketing savvy. On Friday, House GOP Whip Steve Scalise released a statement lambasting the $1.9 trillion stimulus package that’s expected to be brought to the floor next week as the “Pelosi’s Payoff to Progressives Act.” It is a mouthful—not well suited to hashtags or bumper stickers.