Новости за 08.02.2023

It is said that the State of the Union response slot is cursed, that whoever gets the “lucky” draw to deliver the response may thereafter come into some bad political luck. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s speech may push the idea further; her unfocused and culture war-inspired remarks on Tuesday, ringing impressively discordant compared to President Biden’s largely positive speech, may not only leave a mark on her own career, but actually further hamper her already-flailing party.

Democrats secured the majority in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives for the first time in more than a decade, giving them the power to block Republican legislation on abortion rights.

The fiery train derailment that led to thousands being forced to evacuate their homes in East Palestine, Ohio, didn’t have to happen. This is what the workers of Railroad Workers United (RWU) inter-union caucus argues. And, they warn, if action is not taken against corrosive industry trends, the Ohio disaster will be one of more to come.

Portraiture celebrating men who owned people has gazed down upon visitors to the U.S. Capitol for generations. But interestingly and tellingly, the slaver portraits had never been cataloged until December, when Washington Post history reporter Gillian Brockell found that one-third of the artwork in the Capitol depicts slavers or Confederates. That’s 141 slavers depicted in the Capitol’s oil paintings, marble busts, and statues of bronze and stone.

On Monday, the English Premier League charged Manchester City Football Club—the most successful English soccer team of the last decade— with more than 100 violations of its economic regulations. The charges are unprecedented in their breadth: They essentially lay out a massive campaign of financial doping, dozens of instances of the club lying about or covering up where the money it was using to pay its players and staff was coming from in order to circumvent European regulations. The charges go back more than a decade... Читать дальше...

We live in an era defined by extreme political stupidity, where the idiotic and nonsensical are wrung out of every incident and policy decision—from gas stoves and drag shows to Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

Many Republicans who were put off by Donald Trump’s peccadillos, ignorance, and outlandish behavior have found their anointed one in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis offers Trumpism without Trump, promises to Make America Great Again without saying the words, and wallows in the culture-war cruelties that propelled Trump into office in 2016. The betting markets now have DeSantis and former President Trump in a dead heat for the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.

The history of American capitalism consists, to a surprising degree, of routinizing and legitimizing scandalous practices.

Certain oil companies have spent much of the last decade telling the public how committed they are to funding renewable energy. Now, as they continue to rake in record profits from high oil prices, they’re walking back that rhetoric and whatever modest plans accompanied it. This retreat challenges one of the hallmark assumptions of the energy transition, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act: that once solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels, they will outcompete them. What if, however,... Читать дальше...

President Biden delivered arguably the most pro-worker, populist, and shrewd State of the Union in modern history. Though the bar on those standards is low, Biden found a way to expose Republicans as reactionary in both demeanor and policy, while still coming off as generally pleasant and focused on offering the American people an affirmative vision for the future.

President Joe Biden said the word “abortion” exactly once during the State of the Union Tuesday, the first since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

President Joe Biden appeared to get Republicans to agree not to cut funding for Medicare or Social Security during the State of the Union Tuesday night.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to bring a white balloon to the State of the Union Tuesday night, a move she unveiled just hours after her new best friend Kevin McCarthy said there would be no “childish games” from Republicans during the speech.