Новости за 09.12.2021

Everyone agrees California has an affordable housing crisis. From 2012 to 2019, the average price for a home in the San Francisco Bay Area increased 88 percent. The number of people living without shelter there on any given night is 28,000; in the city of Los Angeles, in January 2020, it was over 41,000. A record number of Californians are leaving expensive metropolitan areas for the less temperate Central Valley, and many more are moving eastward to states like Texas or Nevada, where the cost of a house runs more like $200,000 to $400,000. Читать дальше...

Every step of the way, Republicans under scrutiny by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol have worked to grind the panel’s work to a halt. They’ve ignored subpoena threats. They’ve tried to invoke executive privilege to get out of cooperating with the committee. And as we creep toward the new year, the time the committee has to issue an impactful report—something investigative committees don’t always manage to do—is starting to become a factor.

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz revived an outlandish-sounding idea earlier this week: If House Republicans retake the majority in 2022, he and his colleagues will push to elect former President Donald Trump as the new speaker of the House. This notion has hitherto been either dismissed out of hand or derided as unlikely by political observers. In a post–January 6 world, however, the Speaker Trump proposal should be taken more seriously and ominously than it currently is.

“This is a moment to try to refocus our fellow citizens on what makes us exceptional,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Politico’s James Traub of the White House’s two-day Summit for Democracy, kicking off Thursday. “It does speak to something that continues to unite us, and that people aspire to, even despite the frustrations.”

In early November, in a crushing defeat for the Democrats, Terry McAuliffe lost his bid for governor of Virginia to private equity executive Glenn Youngkin, a Trump-friendly Republican. Youngkin ran on familiar GOP themes—job creation, taxes, crime—and McAuliffe, a centrist who had served as governor of the state between 2014 and 2018, was expected to skate to victory. But when the Democrat proclaimed on the debate stage that he didn’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach, Youngkin pounced. Читать дальше...

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit on Tuesday, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin issued a dire warning about the threat of inflation. “The unknown we’re facing today is much greater than the need that people believe in this aspirational bill that we’re looking at,” he said, referring to the Build Back Better Act, a multitrillion social spending bill. “And we’ve got to make sure we get this right. We just can’t continue to flood the market as we’ve done.” Manchin has expressed similar concerns before... Читать дальше...