Новости за 11.05.2022

If you didn’t know better, you’d say Oregon Congressman Kurt Schrader has been running the kind of reelection campaign over the past few weeks that would satisfy every corner of the Democratic Party. If reelected, he’s promised to make a renewed push for lower prescription drug pricing. He’s promising to be a loyal ally of President Biden’s agenda. Schrader, who has represented Oregon’s 5th congressional district for over a decade, was even endorsed by the president—Joe Biden’s first congressional endorsement as a sitting president. Читать дальше...

There’s a horrifying scene in Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, in which a ruthless gangster intimidates the detective Philip Marlowe by smashing a Coke bottle against his own girlfriend’s face. “That’s someone I love,” the gangster tells Marlowe. “You I don’t even like.”

Speculative bubbles have a way of leaving in their wake dozens of discredited economic writers, whose careers after the crash are forever haunted by the enthusiastic pronouncements they made while prices still rose. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his history of the Wall Street crash, academics in the run-up to disaster praised the stockbrokers of their day for shaking off the “heavy armor of tradition” and adopting “vision for the future and boundless hope and optimism.” In June 1929, financier... Читать дальше...

It wasn’t that long ago that some political pundits believed that America’s growing ethnic and racial diversity would put the conservative movement on the path to extinction. “There’s not a single demographic megatrend that favors Republicans,” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios declared in 2019. “Republicans are sitting on a demographic time bomb of their own making,” Thomas E. Patterson of the Boston Globe wrote in 2020, adding that they “are paying a stiff price for defaming immigrants. If they hadn’t... Читать дальше...

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade in the next two months, as a recent leak of a draft decision indicated that it would, it will mark a major turning point in how Americans understand their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court has expanded those rights at times and narrowed them at others. It has recognized certain constitutional rights while denying that others exist. But the court has never before said that a constitutional right existed and then reversed itself to deny it, until Justice Samuel Alito came along. Читать дальше...

Easter in South Africa traditionally provides locals with their last chance for a sun-soaked autumnal holiday. Tens of thousands of Johannesburgers head to Durban, or “Durbs,” to lie on beaches, take their kids to the aquarium, and eat sinus-clearing crab curries. This year, though, a mere three days before the Good Friday tourist crush, a subtropical depression named Issa dumped 16 inches of rain—half what Durban typically gets in a year—on the city in less than 24 hours.

Representative Sharice Davids, the lone Democrat representing a district in Kansas, faces a difficult reelection fight in November. The House Republicans’ campaign arm has targeted her seat, and she represents one of Democrats’ “frontline” districts. (The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently launched a billboard in Davids’s district highlighting her likely Republican opponent’s opposition to a gas tax holiday, which Davids supports.) Axios reported last month that Davids is among the Democrats who discuss inflation most... Читать дальше...