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Category: Politics

As the rich get richer during the pandemic, U.S. sees biggest revenue surge in 44 years

As the rich get richer during the pandemic, U.S. sees biggest revenue surge in 44 years

Politico reports: Despite a pandemic, a recession and a slew of tax cuts, federal tax receipts are booming. Revenues jumped 18 percent in the fiscal year that just ended, analysts say — the biggest one-year increase since 1977. That translates into $627 billion more than in 2020, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that, for the first time, total government revenues topped $4 trillion. “They are just booming,” said Mark Booth, a former top revenue forecaster at…

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Counties with more Confederate monuments also had more lynchings, study finds

Counties with more Confederate monuments also had more lynchings, study finds

The Washington Post reports: It was 1898, and John Henry James was on a train headed toward certain death. The Black ice cream vendor had been falsely accused of raping a white woman, arrested and taken to a neighboring town to avoid a lynch mob. But the next morning, authorities put him on a train back to Charlottesville, where he was to be indicted at the Albermarle County Courthouse. He never made it; an angry crowd pulled him from the…

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The mysterious case of the coronavirus lab-leak theory

The mysterious case of the coronavirus lab-leak theory

Carolyn Kormann writes: Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in central China? Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease expert at…

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Covid is the most common cause of duty-related deaths among police officers

Covid is the most common cause of duty-related deaths among police officers

The New York Times reports: Over the last year and a half, a majority of the roughly 40 police officers who patrol Baker, La., a suburb of Baton Rouge, tested positive for the coronavirus. All of them recovered and went back to work — until Lt. DeMarcus Dunn got sick. Lieutenant Dunn, a 36-year-old shift supervisor who coached youth sports and once chased down someone who fled the police station after being arrested, died from Covid-19 on Aug. 13. His…

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By attacking me, Justice Alito proved my point

By attacking me, Justice Alito proved my point

Adam Serwer writes: Last month, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the Supreme Court’s critics are wrong. The Court is not “a dangerous cabal” that is “deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view,” he said. Reading aloud from a piece I wrote in the aftermath of the Court’s recent ruling on an abortion law, Alito insisted that it was “false and inflammatory” to say that the 1973 Roe v….

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A record number of workers are quitting their jobs, empowered by new leverage

A record number of workers are quitting their jobs, empowered by new leverage

The Washington Post reports: The number of people quitting their jobs has surged to record highs, pushed by a combination of factors that include Americans sensing ample opportunity and better pay elsewhere. Some 4.3 million people quit jobs in August — about 2.9 percent of the workforce, according to new data released Tuesday from the Labor Department. Those numbers are up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting, reflecting how the pandemic has continued…

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The GOP alliance with Europe’s far-right deepens

The GOP alliance with Europe’s far-right deepens

Ishaan Tharoor writes: Toward the end of last month, a major right-wing summit in Hungary had a conspicuous guest. Former vice president Mike Pence joined Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and a coterie of other illiberal, nationalist leaders from the continent in a two-day conference in Budapest on “family values” and demographics. The forum, which began in 2015, is one of the spaces where Orban champions his brand of Christian nationalism — raging against Western liberalism, non-European migration and LGBTQ…

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Trump won the county in a landslide. His supporters still hounded the elections administrator until she resigned

Trump won the county in a landslide. His supporters still hounded the elections administrator until she resigned

ProPublica reports: An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office. Michele Carew, who had overseen scores of elections during her 14-year career, had found herself transformed into the public face of an electoral system that many in the heavily Republican Hood County had come to mistrust, which ProPublica and The Texas Tribune covered earlier this month. Her critics…

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‘The president’s decline is alarming’: Biden trapped in coronavirus malaise

‘The president’s decline is alarming’: Biden trapped in coronavirus malaise

Politico reports: In a focus group last week, Pennsylvania Democrats one after another articulated the issue vexing top White House aides, party operatives in Virginia and voters in Georgia: Why isn’t President Joe Biden’s diminished job rating rebounding? All nine participants from Tuesday’s session gave Biden C- grades or lower. And their answers circled back to a similar point: The pandemic and the many ways it continues to hinder normal life is souring their views of Biden. One woman said…

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Washington is getting China wrong

Washington is getting China wrong

Michael Schuman writes: Evergrande Group, one of China’s largest property developers, is tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. Its founder, Hui Ka Yan, is scrounging to find the cash to meet payments on the $300 billion his company owes. Beijing has warned local officials to prepare for possible fallout if the gargantuan firm collapses. Around the world, financial analysts are wondering if Evergrande is China’s “Lehman moment,” the starting gun for a destructive wave of defaults that could take down…

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Simple mathematical law predicts movement in cities around the world

Simple mathematical law predicts movement in cities around the world

Scientific American reports: The people who happen to be in a city center at any given moment may seem like a random collection of individuals. But new research featuring a simple mathematical law shows that urban travel patterns worldwide are, in fact, remarkably predictable regardless of location—an insight that could enhance models of disease spread and help to optimize city planning. Studying anonymized cell-phone data, researchers discovered what is known as an inverse square relation between the number of people…

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Mass protests in Poland amid EU exit fears

Mass protests in Poland amid EU exit fears

BBC News reports: Poles backing EU membership have taken part in protests across the country, amid fears it could leave the bloc. The rallies on Sunday were held in response to a top court ruling that said key EU laws were “incompatible” with the Polish constitution. Protests were held in about 100 towns and cities, with some 100,000 people gathering in the capital, Warsaw. The ruling has raised concerns Poland could exit the EU, but the government has denied having…

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Being Persian before nationalism

Being Persian before nationalism

Mana Kia writes: At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory. The nation was gaining ground at this time as the acceptable and legible idiom of collective political demands. As in most of Africa and Asia, nationalism was anticolonial, understood as a liberatory…

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Fix the Senate, save America

Fix the Senate, save America

Norm Ornstein writes: In the face of obduracy, the only way Democrats can get democracy reform, universal background checks on guns, climate change laws, minimum wage increases and immigration reform will be to overcome the impossible 60-vote hurdle. To do so will require all 50 Democrats to agree, and several, led by Manchin and Sinema, are resistant. But it is still doable, not by eliminating the filibuster or weakening it, but by restoring it. For most of its existence, the…

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Kyrsten Sinema wants to cut $100 billion in proposed climate funds, sources say

Kyrsten Sinema wants to cut $100 billion in proposed climate funds, sources say

The New York Times reports: Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who began her political career with the Green Party and who has voiced alarm over the warming planet, wants to cut at least $100 billion from climate programs in major legislation pending on Capitol Hill, according to two people familiar with the matter. Sinema is one of two centrist Democrats in the Senate whose votes are crucial to passing two bills that together would comprise President Biden’s legislative agenda: a…

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U.S. and China enter dangerous territory over Taiwan

U.S. and China enter dangerous territory over Taiwan

The New York Times reports: The 25 Chinese fighter jets, bombers and other warplanes flew in menacing formations off the southern end of Taiwan, a show of military might on China’s National Day, Oct. 1. The incursions, dozens upon dozens, continued into the night and the days that followed and surged to the highest numbers ever on Monday, when 56 warplanes tested Taiwan’s beleaguered air defenses. Taiwan’s jets scrambled to keep up, while the United States warned China that its…

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