All posts in January 2021

Taylor Greene’s claims about space lasers are a perfect illustration of one of the many threads that weave together to make QAnon. He claim ties together solar power company Solaren, former California Gov. Jerry Brown, and the Rothschild family in a conspiracy that uses a space laser to blast the California countryside, creating an emergency and manipulating stock…

As McCarthy chummed it up with Trump in Florida, pet Trump seditionist and Sunshine State representative Matt Gaetz jetted off to Cheney’s home state to rail against her reelection. “Defeat Liz Cheney in this upcoming election, and Wyoming will bring Washington to its knees,” Gaetz told hundreds of mostly maskless attendees.  Gaetz topped off his Cheney hate…

This isn’t the only place where the Democratic Party looks little like its predecessors, with a 50-seat Senate caucus and a House majority more ideologically cohesive and unified than anything before it. And they ain’t playing games.  Republicans have long gotten big mileage from playing to historical Democratic desperation for “bipartisanship.” Obama made countless concessions…

A number of Biden’s allies and advisers are urging him to establish a commission styled after the one that examined the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and was foundational in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” that followed. Notably, a key adviser to Biden’s new homeland-security team, Russ Travers, seems likely to push…

According to a joint statement from UFW and UFW Foundation, farmworkers would be eligible for immediate legalization under the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 if they “pass criminal background checks and show they have labored in agriculture at least 100 days in four of the previous five years.” The groups note that the legislation contains overtime pay…

For anyone tuning in that awful Wednesday morning, it was hard to differentiate the Stop the Steal rally from any of the other rallies that had marked Trump’s campaign from the beginning. Not only was Trump coming to speak at the close of events, everything from the signs to the music (almost all of it…

But while questions about Trump largely broke down along party lines, an overwhelming majority, 89%, said they opposed the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol last week—80% said they “strongly” opposed them. Only 8% of respondents supported the Capitol attack.  Finally, when asked whether they believed there was “solid evidence” supporting Trump’s claim…

The changes to U.S. life expectancy are recorded in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers Theresa Andrasfay from the University of Southern California and Noreen Goldman from Princeton University document how loss of life due to the coronavirus has dropped U.S. life expectancies overall to 77.48, the lowest since 2003. Meanwhile, Black…

Fanone told CNN that “some guy started getting a hold of my gun. And they were screaming out, you know, ‘Kill him with his own gun.’” Fanone said at that point he realized that while he could maybe shoot a few of the people attacking him, it was unlikely that doing so would save his…

But after Trump’s armed insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol Wednesday and terrorized lawmakers, Loeffler was also among the first of the Senate Sedition caucus to conclude that going through with her pledge was a fundamental betrayal of U.S. democracy. Plus, she had already lost her election. “I cannot now in good conscience object to the…