Новости за 17.04.2023

Former President Donald Trump, who brings to the federal government two impeachments and a criminal indictment, is making reelection commitments, threatening further cuts to regulations—the sort that might allow corporations to get away with even more chaos beyond disasters like the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. He also plans to impose some sort of mandatory test on federal employees.

Tennessee’s Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton is facing growing calls to resign amid reports he has lied to his constituents.

Team Ron DeSantis continues to demonize everyday Americans, this time targeting his own state’s residents. On Saturday, Christina Pushaw, rapid response director for the Florida governor and potential 2024 presidential candidate, celebrated the idea of people fleeing Florida and the measures DeSantis has supported with the explicit goal of making their lives worse.

U.S. senators hold one of the most influential positions in the country, with the power to shape policy and confirm nominations that may remake the judicial and executive branches. But that authority only goes so far. Not every issue can be easily solved through legislative means, and some challenges are so nebulous that they must first be identified before they can be addressed.

On Monday, Jim Jordan brought the latest hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to Manhattan, where he and his fellow House Republicans attempted to paint New York City as a crime-ridden disaster. However, they instead managed to remind Americans that loose gun laws and Republican leadership have led to high crime rates and unlawful schemes that ship guns from red states to blue ones.

The Louisiana state Republican Party thinks that diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs on college campuses are too “divisive” and should be banned.

Montana Republicans are working 9 to 5 to prohibit minors from attending drag shows, but a recent amendment to an anti-drag bill could ban more than they perhaps intended.

“‘Eat bugs, live in a pod,’ is not a meme. It’s their real agenda,” tweeted the conservative provocateur Mike Cernovich to 1.1 million followers last month. The tweet was responding to an anodyne Economist story about the role of meat consumption in global climate emissions. And unless you’re deep into online culture, it’s probably incomprehensible.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s promise to pardon Daniel Perry, the man who was just convicted of killing Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster, is many things, including infuriating, hypocritical, hurtful, dangerous, and stupid. It is also profoundly petty, a tantrum barely passing as governance, because (obviously?) there are no principles involved, nor is there a legitimate legal argument. There is just Greg Abbott’s profound desire to unseat Ron DeSantis as most violent participant in the culture wars. Читать дальше...

Here’s an instructive and telling little exercise for you, one that I engaged in myself this past Sunday morning.

The dress code at the Charter Day School, a supposedly nonsectarian, publicly funded K-8 charter school in Leland, North Carolina, requires that female students wear skirts, jumpers, or “skorts.” The school’s founder justifies the dress code by explaining that girls are “fragile vessels.” The family of a kindergartner complained that the dress code violated their daughter’s civil liberties, and a federal appeals court, in the case of Charter Day School v. Peltier, had no trouble agreeing that... Читать дальше...