The other day in Pretoria, South Africa, a German expatriate told me about an entire classroom of kids at a private international school who came down with Covid over a three-day period. One of my work colleagues, whose only known risk was grocery shopping in a mask, had to skip Zoom meetings because the virus knocked her flat.
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On Wednesday, the bells of the National Cathedral began ringing, and they didn’t stop for one hour, fifteen minutes, and fifty-five seconds—tolling 800 times in all. Listening to it, I found myself drowning in sudden, immense grief: Each ringing of a bell was still reverberating when the next one started. It was such a brief time to honor a life. And then with horrifying clarity I remembered: the tolls didn’t represent one person’s life. Each bell tolled for a thousand lives lost to Covid-19. And they just kept rolling. Читать дальше...
This week, Congress steered itself out of yet another crisis of its own making when it once again managed to successfully raise the debt ceiling. But if you think this means that Congress can finally get important things done now, think again. To raise the debt limit this time around, the Senate had to arrange a bizarre kludge, in which Republicans agreed to briefly suspend the filibuster because they definitely would filibuster the measure if they could. And, no, what I have described does not really make sense. Читать дальше...
At a press conference earlier this week, a reporter asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi about an Insider report that 49 lawmakers and nearly 200 staffers had violated the STOCK Act’s disclosure requirements since last year. Should lawmakers be banned from buying and selling stocks, the reporter asked her? “No,” Pelosi replied. “We’re a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that.”
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