Новости за 04.03.2021

This week, the first true headline-grabbing legislative battle of the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress has begun as the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package takes center stage in the Senate. As with any piece of rock-star legislation, the bill’s movement through the Capitol has been accompanied by backstage maneuvering, bickering, and poor judgment. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and his crew have been skulking around the political arena’s passageways and green rooms. Читать дальше...

Less than a decade ago, it wouldn’t have taken much to imagine either Andrew Cuomo or Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office as president about now. Cuomo, elected New York governor in 2010, and Emanuel, who became Chicago mayor in 2011, had always radiated a lean and hungry look. Their raging ambitions and their tough-guy personas suggested that they could get big things done—no matter how many aides and politicians they threatened and broke in the process.

Joe Biden ran for president promising to “revive” the spirit of bipartisanship, put an end to factional battles, and bring Americans together after an era of painful division. Yet faced with an intransigent, extremist Republican Party that has little to gain from compromise, such a vision of politics seems quaint at best. On Episode 26 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene look into the history of bipartisanship as an ideal. The show features Paul Blest, a co-founder of Discourse Blog; Ed Burmila... Читать дальше...

Speaking on the House floor on Tuesday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy updated Martin Neimoller’s famous post-Holocaust poem. “First they outlaw Dr. Seuss,” he solemnly intoned, “and now they want to tell us what to say.” 

It’s been almost two months since former Vice President Mike Pence narrowly escaped a violent mob of Trump supporters in the Capitol building that wanted to lynch him for betraying the former president. Pence largely stayed quiet in the days and weeks that followed. He made an appearance at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. And then he journeyed to the Virgin Islands for a brief vacation.

By March 2020, there was no denying that the mysterious virus that had ravaged the city of Wuhan—and placed large parts of China in varying levels of quarantine—had arrived in the United States. Curious to know what we could expect from life under lockdown, The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick interviewed Peter Hessler, one of the magazine’s contributors who was teaching in Chengdu that year, about how everyone there was adjusting to this new reality. At one point, Hessler remarked how funny... Читать дальше...