Новости за 09.12.2022

Progressives made clear Friday they are not happy with Kyrsten Sinema and her decision to switch party affiliation.

With Senator Kyrsten Sinema announcing her departure from the Democratic Party in a shocking but rather unsurprising move, her progressive critics may seize the opportunity to launch campaigns against her. Sinema has been instrumental in crafting some of the biggest bipartisan victories of the past two years while also aggravating her own party for occasionally stymieing President Joe Biden’s agenda.

After Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced her departure from the Democratic Party to become an independent, Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego pounced to criticize her.

We have, at long last, reached peak Kyrsten Sinema. The Arizona senator’s decision to leave the Democratic Party is characteristically ineffectual and largely symbolic, as she will continue to caucus with the party and thus preserve the narrow one-seat majority Democrats need to enhance their powers in the upper chamber. But the move reflects who Sinema is at her core: devoid of any scrutable ideology but profoundly cynical. And while Democrats should be able to navigate the immediate impact of her decision... Читать дальше...

On Friday morning, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema bravely announced she is now a registered independent, rejecting the “partisan process” in favor of “solving problems and getting things done.”

Senator Kyrsten Sinema may have thought that switching political affiliation Friday would help her get reelected, but in fact, she is deeply unpopular in Arizona across party lines—which is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Every great cause, wrote the American longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer, begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. One can only imagine how appalled the conservative Hoffer, who died in 1983, would be to learn that this principle extends even to government-funded hospice care, as ProPublica’s Ava Kofman documented in a shocking story last month on the industry and its abuses.

Kyrsten Sinema seems unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the potential consequences of changing parties just days after the Democrats secured a 51-49 majority in the Senate.

Friday started out with an undeniable political bombshell: Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the former-Green Party-turned-conservative-Democrat, has decided to once again switch parties and become an Independent. She’s making this announcement through embargoed news interviews and an op-ed in The Arizona Republic. She also taped a short two-minute video:

In the days following the 2022 midterm elections, conventional wisdom had it that the much-predicted “red wave” never materialized because too many GOP candidates ran too far to the right on too many issues—abortion, gun control, election denialism, and connections to Donald Trump and January 6.  As Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin explained, “The message on [Election Day] was the average person is done voting for extremism.”

“Abolish the FBI!” New Leftists might have demanded half a century ago—if they thought the idea had the slightest chance of being taken seriously. The bureau, radicals correctly assumed, was bent on dividing and destroying their movements. Undercover agents moled inside antiwar and Black power groups, amassing voluminous files on thousands of activists. Other operatives wiretapped hotel rooms where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed to record him having extramarital sex. Knowledge of the tapes, they hoped... Читать дальше...

In a celebrity-crusted ceremony in Boston on last week, start-up Notpla received one of the coveted $1.2 million awards from Prince William’s Earthshot prize for developing a biodegradable plastic alternative out of seaweed. “We’re hoping to make single-use plastic a thing of the past,” one of the founders said in a video introduced by David Beckham. Notpla’s small team cheered wildly from London as the award was announced, and the audience was treated to a video about Notpla’s remarkable discovery. Читать дальше...

On Thursday, thousands of airport workers from at least 15 American airports rallied to call for better working conditions. In three airports—Boston Logan International, Chicago’s O’Hare International, and Newark Liberty International—workers went on a full strike, calling attention to unfair labor practices by their employer Swissport USA and Swissport Cargo, including poor working conditions and improper payment and wage theft.

The House of Representatives passed the behemoth $858 billion annual defense bill on Thursday in a 350-80 vote. Among its many provisions is one aimed at improving security for federal judges, which became part of the final bill despite some criticism from judicial watchdog groups.