Новости за 27.01.2022

With Justice Stephen Breyer’s announcement that he will retire at the end of this year’s Supreme Court term, Senate Democrats are already gearing up for what could be yet another potentially contentious confirmation process.

There’s a new conventional wisdom emerging to explain the Biden administration’s bumpy first year: He’s “too far left.” Centrist lawmakers, Democratic strategists turned talking heads, and Never Trump conservatives are all jumping on the bandwagon.

Hunter S. Thompson doesn’t think much of the “button-down” lives of the squares. He likens them to “ribbon salesmen,” enslaved to their “time payments,” at best hypocritical pseudo-hipsters when they try to swing, and, at worst, the liberal persecutors of the aberrant, or victims of affluence and “abulia,” and the creators of a mass hysteria toward California’s obscenely festooned gangs of motorcycling Hell’s Angels which has only helped to glamorize and institutionalize their “outlaw” status... Читать дальше...

I glanced at the invitation nervously, not wanting to decline, but reluctant to go indoors with unvaccinated people. “Everyone invited has been vaccinated,” I read with relief but also sadness: that meant the hostess had excluded two of our closest friends. Some vaccine-refusers think the rest of us have acquiesced to government tyranny with these decisions. Then again, I also know vaccinated people who still won’t ride public transit even when masked, or send their kids to school, all of which seems excessively Covid-conscious to me. Читать дальше...

As President Biden and his White House team round the one-year anniversary of their time in office, there’s been a persistent question floating around Washington political circles: What to make of chief of staff Ron Klain’s time in the job?

Since the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies have produced no evidence that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate despite their dozens of failed lawsuits, shrill propaganda, and bad-faith postelection reviews. But Trump’s party has shown no reluctance to revise the rules of voting to advantage Republicans before 2022’s midterms and 2024’s presidential election.

In his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, Brian Cox recounts making The Boxer, a somewhat treacle-bound 1997 Troubles film set in Northern Ireland. As he has done throughout his entire film career, he played a significant supporting character—a local IRA patriarch whose daughter (Emily Watson) pursues a dangerous romance with boxer Barry McGuigan, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. “Back, then, Daniel was full method, of course,” Cox writes. One day, he and director Jim Sheridan watched Day-Lewis doing his thing. Читать дальше...

The expanded child tax credit expired at the end of last year, leaving families reeling just as the program began to make a dent in child poverty. The American Rescue Plan, passed last March, had provided parents with a larger credit that was for the first time disbursed on a monthly basis, as opposed to once a year as a tax refund, and accessible to households too poor to file income taxes. It was set to be extended by a year by the Build Back Better Act, but that bill was tanked at the end of last year by Senator Joe Manchin... Читать дальше...