As we face another Trump presidency, I hope we can turn our attention to the most vulnerable: those who are less safe today than they were yesterday
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Today is a day of despair, and it would be futile to tell those who fear and grieve for what is to come in America that they will be OK. It would also be dishonest: many of us, in truth, will not be OK.
Donald Trump
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Trump renews attack on Baltimore congressman Elijah Cummings – live
- Trump on Twitter goes after Cummings and Al Sharpton
- Director of national intelligence Dan Coats to leave post
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Trump’s comments this morning to 9/11 first responders that he “spent a lot time” at Ground Zero are raising serious doubts.
A New York Times reporter who spent years covering the fallout of the attacks for the New York Post tweeted this:
So, I covered rebuilding at the WTC for three years after covering the immediate aftermath of the attacks for NYPost. Giuliani was a frequent presence w families, as was Pataki. I recall one instance where Trump was at the site. https://t.co/7Ish98CX1g
Trump’s reference to ‘7/11’ was a slip of the lip. News accounts from days just after 9/11 include references to Trump giving high-fives to police officers and volunteers on their way to the World Trade Center site. ‘I have a lot of men working down here. I want to make sure they’re OK,’ he said. Trump said his employers were cleaning and digging out, but declined to say where they were working.
Joe Biden’s campaign has released its own blistering criticism of Kamala Harris’ health care plan.
A statement from Biden’s campaign accuses the California senator of having “released a health care plan that both backtracks on her long-promised – but then-hedged – support of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation while at the same time committing to still unraveling the hard-won Affordable Care Act that the Trump Administration is trying to undo right now.”
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Fox News condemns host Jeanine Pirro’s attack on Ilhan Omar – live
- Fox News host went after Omar for wearing hijab
- Network: ‘We strongly condemn Jeanine Pirro’s comments’
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s advisers are skeptical to say the least about his potential presidential bid.
De Blasio, who traveled to South Carolina this weekend, has said he won’t rule out jumping into the already crowded 2020 Democratic primary field.
Donald Trump will be unveiling his proposal for the federal budget today.
The president’s budget doesn’t carry the weight that it once did, Reuters reports. Congress is expected to largely ignore it. The proposed budget for 2020 comes a month after its deadline, which the White House has blamed on the government shutdown.
Trump’s plan for the 2020 budget year will propose cuts to many domestic programs favored by lawmakers in both parties but leave alone politically popular retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
Washington probably will devote months to wrestling over erasing the last remnants of a failed 2011 budget deal that would otherwise cut core Pentagon operations by $71 billion and domestic agencies and foreign aid by $55 billion. Top lawmakers are pushing for a reprise of three prior deals to use spending cuts or new revenues and prop up additional spending rather than defray deficits that are again approaching $1 trillion.
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D.C. voters just raised the tipped minimum wage, but the fight isn’t over yet
Voters in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to pass a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and include tipped workers. D.C. now joins eight states that have established a single minimum wage, and its passage makes the city a bellwether for states currently considering tipped wage increases of their own — including New York, Michigan, and Massachusetts.
Initiative 77 passed 55 to 44 percent, despite a well-funded campaign from the restaurant in...
The Supreme Court’s original sin in gerrymandering cases
Few matters capture the pathology of the Roberts Court more completely than the two Abbott v. Perez cases, a pair of identically named racial gerrymandering cases that the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday.
The Perez cases are about partisan gamesmanship. In 2013, the state of Texas admitted in a brief filed in a federal court that their “redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democr...
A sweeping, multi-state anti-poverty movement kicks off in the age of Trump
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized thousands of Americans in an anti-poverty effort popularly known as the Poor People’s Campaign, a group of progressives want to revive the effort on the heels of a sweeping new report surveying poverty in the United States.
Gathered in the nation’s capital on Tuesday, organizers and activists announced a 40-day multi-state action protesting economi...
The 2020 Census citizenship question is going to mess with Texas
Last week, the Commerce Department announced that a citizenship question would be added to the upcoming decennial Census for the first time in 70 years. The implications are stark for the entire country, but results could be dire for one state in particular: Texas.
The Census is a constitutionally mandated project, one that meets a number of crucial national needs. But years of funding shortages, stalled efforts to upgrade its technology, and general leadership issues within the Cen...
Happy Presidents’ Day! Meet the five most underrated American presidents
The institution of the presidency’s had a bad year.
With a few exceptions, Donald Trump makes all of his predecessors look good. There was a time when the President of the United States did not spend hours at a time watching cable news. Or when they didn’t compare the size of their, um, “Nuclear Button” to that of other foreign leaders. At least in recent decades, there was also a time when the White House’s immigration policies weren’t guided by ...
