Новости за 29.11.2021

However much the Build Back Better Act has been whittled down from the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion opening salvo, the latest version still retains some significant goodies, including spending on health care, family leave, and climate. Now that the bill has passed the House, members of Congress and their political allies have been out in force, hyping its contents in order to build public support and encourage the bill’s passage in the Senate, where it can’t afford to lose a single vote.

Is cultural leftism going to destroy the Democrats’ chances in next year’s midterms? That’s the drumbeat. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait argued in a much-discussed essay last week that a “well-funded left-wing [base] has poisoned the party’s image with many of its former supporters” (that was only one side of Chait’s argument; half of his ire, or even more than half, was aimed at centrist Democrats in Congress who’ve delayed and whittled down Joe Biden’s economic agenda). Ryan Grim of The... Читать дальше...

Apocalypse Now played on my iPod as my flight lifted off from Arkansas. Watching Willard cruise up the river to kill Kurtz for most of the flight put me in the right frame of mind on the long arc that took me over Mississippi (state and river), Alabama, Florida, and Joe and Mika’s house with its conveniently attached Morning Joe studio garage on the Atlantic Coast.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has probably not had the year he had hoped for. In late spring, New York Times reporters Sheera Frankel and Cecilia Kang made waves with the release of their new book, An Ugly Truth, which took readers deep inside Facebook’s cutthroat corporate culture and revealed that internal concerns about the spread of hate and misinformation on the social media titan’s massive platform were routinely sidelined in the pursuit of pure profit. A torrent of worse news ensued: A Wall... Читать дальше...

There’s an amnesia particular to the experience of parenting babies and toddlers that makes it ill suited for advocacy. No matter how acute the parenting pain of the moment, it never lasts long. Paid parental leave, universal childcare? They have broad public support, and their impact can be felt for decades, even generations. But because parents experience the strain of their absence for only a handful of years, they have never had the same organizing momentum of, say, the student debt movement. Читать дальше...