The day the Republican Party took one of its sharper turns away from conservatism I didn’t notice it at first. It was August 29, 2008. I was with my parents in Bethany Beach, Delaware. It was a hot, sunny day— another scorcher — and before we walked up to the …
Read More »A Pro-Choice Hacking Team Defaced the Texas GOP Website. So We DM'd Them
For several hours on September 11th, 2021 — a little more than a week after the most restrictive abortion ban in the country went into effect — the Texas GOP’s website was plastered with an army of adorable, amphibious Pokémon. Scroll a little further down the home page and you …
Read More »How the War on Terror Gave Us Trump
The following is an excerpt from Spencer Ackerman’s new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” out now. Every Republican national leader since 9/11 had backed the harshest possible prosecution of the War on Terror. Even Mitt Romney pledged to double Guantanamo. Those relatively …
Read More »Now Is Our Last Best Chance to Confront the Climate Crisis
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The Earth’s climate has always been a work in progress. In the 4.5 billion years the planet has been spinning around the sun, ice ages have come and gone, interrupted by epochs …
Read More »Will America Finally Lead on Climate?
When John Kerry was a kid, his mother took him for walks in the Massachusetts woods, where they often stopped and stood among the trees. “Just listen,” she told her son. Whatever he heard, it stuck with him. Kerry, who is 77, has been on the front lines of the …
Read More »Loving People Who Love Donald Trump
When news finally arrived last Saturday morning that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been elected the 46th president of the United States, here is a non-exhaustive list of the things I wanted to do, in no particular order: Run out to the street with fists pumping, dance a jig, bang …
Read More »Donald Trump's Presidency Is a Saturday-Night Massacre That Never Ends
Attorney General William Barr‘s ham-fisted firing this weekend of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the powerful Southern District of New York, bears all the hallmarks of the Trump administration’s shoot-first-aim-second approach to governing. But the clumsiness of Berman’s ouster shouldn’t overshadow the chilling message sent by the firing of …
Read More »'If It's Not True, Don't Put It on TV': A Former TV Exec on How to Save Live News in the Trump Era
Many Americans are disturbed that TV networks air the Trump White House’s misinformation-filled coronavirus briefings live and in primetime. One of those people is Mark Lukasiewicz, a former executive at NBC News who also happens to be an ideal person to consult to try to understand why the networks and …
Read More »The Price of Greed
Sing it hard, and sing it well, Send the robber barons straight to hell. The greedy thieves who came around, And ate the flesh of everything they found. Whose crimes have gone unpunished now. Who walk the streets as free men now. They brought death to our hometown, boys. — …
Read More »Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism, Elizabeth Warren and the Media
If it seems like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is fighting for his political life amid a series of negative articles, it might be because he always is. The Sanders campaign is grounded in a principle that an absence of controversy would be the real indication of trouble. It’s not a …
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