Новости за 10.09.2021

Last week, the right achieved a goal it has worked toward for decades: the circumvention of reproductive rights enshrined under Roe v. Wade. Senate Bill 8, a devious and flagrantly unconstitutional Texas law that, among other things, allows citizens to collect $10,000 bounties for identifying people who “aid or abet” abortions, up to and including any Uber driver who might unwittingly provide transportation to or from a clinic. Strangely, the right-wing media is barely covering the news of this triumph at all. Читать дальше...

These days, you can depend on the Trumpian Republican Party to descend to the occasion. In an earlier time, Richard Nixon, as depicted in the 1950s by the great Washington Post cartoonist Herblock, was drawn emerging from the sewer. But today’s GOP won’t even lift a manhole cover to briefly glimpse daylight.

The Select Committee investigating the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol took a significant step forward late Thursday night when it announced that it had received thousands of documents it had requested from social media and telecom companies.

For many people, the turning point was in mid-July: the moment the delta variant started to surge out of control and “hot vax summer” became the summer of hastily canceled plans, harsh recriminations, and fears for autumn. But experts I’ve spoken to said the turning point came earlier: May 13. That was the day Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Americans that if they were vaccinated, they could begin returning to their normal lives.

Twenty years ago, I was sitting in Mr. Carey’s history class discussing the differences between constitutional and absolute monarchies. He got called out of class for a few minutes, and when he came back, he told us in a deadpan voice, “So there’s been a terrorist attack in New York. Both of the Twin Towers were hit with hijacked airliners, one of them just collapsed a few minutes ago, and there may be other hijacked planes. You now know everything that I know.”

The hard part of Democrats’ massive $3.5 trillion reconciliation package kicked off Thursday with multiple congressional committees beginning their markups of the proposal. Democrats are sure they’re going to pass something, although exactly what is way up in the air. So the core questions at hand are not if the reconciliation package will move forward but how big it will be and what taxes will be included. 

In 2019, when West Virginia passed legislation that allowed for the creation of charter schools, it represented yet another feather in the cap of the school-choice movement. Nearly three decades after the creation of the very first publicly funded, privately managed school, in Minnesota, charters now educate more than 3.3 million K-12 students in 7,500 schools across the country, and West Virginia—where lawmakers ignored the fierce opposition of the state’s teachers’ union—became the forty-fifth state to allow them. Читать дальше...

One candidate wants to fight for freedom. Another wants to protect children, families, and small businesses. And almost everyone running in California’s gubernatorial recall election wants to restore the so-called California dream. 

Heather got a job as a drone operator because she wanted to get out of small-town Pennsylvania and she didn’t have money for college. Now when she passes the Beale Airforce Base in California, Eyal Press writes in his new book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, she glares at the anti-war women’s group that throngs the entrance. “They didn’t know what kind of shit we had to see,” Heather said, “they didn’t know most of us wanted to go home and fucking kill... Читать дальше...

The Justice Department sued the state of Texas on Thursday to block a controversial statute that had effectively banned most abortions in the state, opening a new front in the legal war over the procedure. In a press conference announcing the move, Attorney General Merrick Garland described Senate Bill 8 as a “scheme to nullify the Constitution of the United States.”