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Kill the Senate filibuster and save U.S. democracy before it’s too late

Kill the Senate filibuster and save U.S. democracy before it’s too late

Noah Bookbinder writes: I worked as a counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee for eight years. I heard senators that I admired repeat the apocryphal story of George Washington supposedly explaining to Thomas Jefferson that the Senate was “the saucer that cools the tea,” preventing the House from rushing through ill-advised legislation. While the filibuster was not part of the framers’ plan — and indeed some of the framers warned against a supermajority requirement for legislation — it seemed consistent…

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Major companies like FedEx and Nike paid no federal taxes

Major companies like FedEx and Nike paid no federal taxes

The New York Times reports: Just as the Biden administration is pushing to raise taxes on corporations, a new study finds that at least 55 of America’s largest paid no taxes last year on billions of dollars in profits. The sweeping tax bill passed in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed into law by President Donald J. Trump reduced the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. But dozens of Fortune 500 companies were able to further…

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Five ways fungi could change the world, from cleaning water to breaking down plastics

Five ways fungi could change the world, from cleaning water to breaking down plastics

Shutterstock By Mitchell P. Jones, Vienna University of Technology Fungi — a scientific goldmine? Well, that’s what a review published today in the journal Trends in Biotechnology indicates. You may think mushrooms are a long chalk from the caped crusaders of sustainability. But think again. Many of us have heard of fungi’s role in creating more sustainable leather substitutes. Amadou vegan leather crafted from fungal-fruiting bodies has been around for some 5,000 years. More recently, mycelium leather substitutes have taken…

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Inside the ‘Lord of the Flies’ factionalism now plaguing Trumpland

Inside the ‘Lord of the Flies’ factionalism now plaguing Trumpland

Politico reports: Just one month after Donald Trump left the White House, a top donor to his campaign received a call on his personal cellphone from a Republican candidate seeking financial support. The call was unsolicited, according to four people familiar with the situation, and it rubbed the donor, whose friends had received similarly unexpected fundraising pleas, the wrong way. Shortly thereafter, the firm Jones Day, which served as counsel to Trump’s campaign committee, sent out a letter to former…

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Georgia’s new voting laws are all the evidence we need for federal voting rights protections

Georgia’s new voting laws are all the evidence we need for federal voting rights protections

Jessica Levinson writes: In 2013, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted, with prescient clarity, what is happening right now in Georgia. Ginsburg knew then, when the Supreme Court threw out half of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, that it would be open season for voter suppression in states previously covered under the act. And here we are facing that reality with a sweeping and unquestionably restrictive new voting law passing on a party-line vote in Georgia late last…

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Most Republicans don’t want to make it easy for every citizen to vote

Most Republicans don’t want to make it easy for every citizen to vote

Pew Research Center reports: As partisan conflicts over voting access take center stage in Congress and in scores of states around the country, the share of Americans who say “everything possible” should be done to make voting easy has declined since 2018 – with the decrease coming entirely among Republicans. Currently, a majority of U.S. adults (59%) say that everything possible should be done to make it easy for every citizen to vote. A smaller share (39%) says that citizens…

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Republicans have been waiting for a Matt Gaetz scandal to break

Republicans have been waiting for a Matt Gaetz scandal to break

The Daily Beast reports: After Rep. Matt Gaetz accused a Florida lawyer of a $25 million extortion scheme to make sex trafficking allegations disappear, Republicans on and off Capitol Hill on Wednesday largely kept their mouths shut. Gaetz—the Trump-loving, Fox News-grinning, 38-year-old Florida Republican—has a less-than-sterling reputation among his congressional colleagues. More than a half-dozen lawmakers have spoken to these reporters about his love of alcohol and illegal drugs, as well as his proclivity for younger women. It’s well-known among…

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Can vaccinated people spread the virus? We don’t know, scientists say

Can vaccinated people spread the virus? We don’t know, scientists say

The New York Times reports: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others. The assertion called into question the precautions that the agency had urged vaccinated people to take just last month, like wearing masks and gathering only under limited circumstances with unvaccinated people. “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during…

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The pandemic’s wrongest man: Alex Berenson

The pandemic’s wrongest man: Alex Berenson

Derek Thompson writes: The pandemic has made fools of many forecasters. Just about all of the predictions whiffed. Anthony Fauci was wrong about masks. California was wrong about the outdoors. New York was wrong about the subways. I was wrong about the necessary cost of pandemic relief. And the Trump White House was wrong about almost everything else. In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated…

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There are no borders in the climate crisis

There are no borders in the climate crisis

Bill McKibben writes: The “crisis” at the border is dominating the news, and, as my colleague Jonathan Blitzer has written, the immediate focus is on the political battle to prevent Joe Biden from passing meaningful immigration reform. But this might also be a moment for thinking about what globalism means in a world where borders ultimately can’t offer protection against the most serious threats. To give an example: owing in part to climate change, there was a record hurricane season…

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White House unveils $2 trillion infrastructure and climate plan

White House unveils $2 trillion infrastructure and climate plan

The Washington Post reports: The White House’s unveiling of a $2 trillion jobs, infrastructure and green energy proposal to reshape the U.S. economy met a chorus of opposition late Wednesday, with Republicans panning it as a partisan wish-list, some liberals challenging it as not sufficient to combat climate change and business groups rejecting its proposed tax hikes. Under what the administration calls the American Jobs Plan, President Biden aims to tackle some of the nation’s most pressing problems — from…

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Japan’s Kyoto cherry blossoms peak on earliest date in 1,200 years, a clear sign of climate change

Japan’s Kyoto cherry blossoms peak on earliest date in 1,200 years, a clear sign of climate change

The Washington Post reports: Amid an exceptionally warm March in Japan, the cherry blossoms in Kyoto peaked Friday, the earliest in more than 1,200 years of records. The record bloom fits into a long-term pattern toward earlier spring flowering, a compelling indicator of climate change, experts say. The March 26, 2021, peak bloom date surpassed the previous record holder of March 27, 1409, nearly a century before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. The long-term record dates back to A.D. 812,…

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N.Y. prosecutors seek Trump insider’s records, in apparent bid to gain cooperation

N.Y. prosecutors seek Trump insider’s records, in apparent bid to gain cooperation

The New York Times reports: State prosecutors in Manhattan investigating former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Organization have subpoenaed the personal bank records of the company’s chief financial officer and are questioning gifts he and his family received from Mr. Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter. In recent weeks, the prosecutors have trained their focus on the executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, in what appears to be a determined effort to gain his cooperation. Mr. Weisselberg,…

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Silicon Valley investors want to oust San Francisco’s reformist district attorney

Silicon Valley investors want to oust San Francisco’s reformist district attorney

Mother Jones reports: San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was at home cooking dinner on a Thursday evening in January when he opened a new app called Clubhouse that lets people drop into virtual “rooms” and listen to live, unrecorded conversations. Someone had messaged Boudin to let him know that tech investors were hosting an “interesting” conversation about the “Future of SF.” As he prepared his food, some of them were speaking critically about San Francisco’s liberal political leaders. Soon,…

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