“I’ve never signed anything with a ‘T’ before,” Donald Trump quipped at the signing of the $2 trillion CARES Act. He reportedly wants his signature on coronavirus relief checks, as if they were Trump Plaza casino chips. This might be a fitting metaphor for America’s post-virus economic future. The new bailout bill, which combined with a series of Federal Reserve interventions is more like a $6 trillion rescue, is a massive double-down on the 2008 rescue efforts. This bailout of the last bailout sets the stage for permanent state sponsorship of America’s overheated financial markets. Lik ..read more

Sen. Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign for president, conceding the 2020 Democratic nomination to former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders announced his decision Wednesday in a livestream address to supporters saying his grassroots-supported run — conducted under the banner of “Not me, us” — had changed the country for the better, demonstrated the progressive movement’s power, and proved it was possible to run a campaign “that is not dependent on the wealthy and the powerful.” He declared he and his supporters had “won the contest of ideas,” but his ebullience faded when he ..read more

Twitter has hidden a tweet made by US President Donald Trump and labelled it as “misleading” after he claimed that certain election ballot drop boxes are not “COVID sanitised” and threaten voter security. Tweeting on Sunday morning, Trump wrote: “So now the Democrats are using Mail Drop Boxes, which are a voter security disaster. Among other things, they make it possible for a person to vote multiple times. Also, who controls them, are they placed in Republican or Democrat areas? They are not COVID sanitised. A big fraud!” By that afternoon, the tweet had been flagged by Twitter, with a labe ..read more

The president told the meager audience who attended his rally in Tulsa on Saturday night that he gave an order to slow testing for coronavirus. Ever since, his staff have downplayed Trump’s claim by calling it a joke. But on Monday, the president himself refused to back down from the order and instead avoided the question put to him twice during an interview. With the U.S. coronavirus death toll at 122,000 and nearly half of the states reporting a rise in cases, Trump seems to think by playing a game of confusion he might escape some blame for his administration’s incompetent handling of the ..read more

Minutes after announcing plans to mobilize the military to violently crack down on the millions of Americans who since last week have been demonstrating against police brutality, President Trump sauntered over to Washington, D.C.’s historic St. John’s Episcopal Church to have his picture taken with a Bible. His path was cleared by the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., was not happy. In fact, she was outraged. “I’m outraged,” she told the Washington Post. “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even ..read more

When the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written, Bill Gates will be one of the heroes of the story. He has understood the risk of infectious diseases for a long time, and through his foundation he has spent billions of dollars trying to eradicate them. His work has saved millions of lives, particularly in the developing world. His approach, and the approach of the Gates Foundation, has been rigorously analytical, and has operated on Gates’ faith that science and innovation, intelligently applied, can defeat infectious diseases and reduce human suffering. That may sound like an obvious tr ..read more

There’s no prison (yet) for climate criminals, but if there was, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro would have a spider-infested cell all to himself. Now that Trump is gone, Bolsonaro — a.k.a. “The Trump of the Tropics” or “Captain Chain Saw”— is the most dangerous climate denier in the world. In his two years as president, Bolsonaro has presided over the destruction of about 10,000 square miles of the Brazilian rainforest, one of the most precious ecosystems on the planet. And like Trump, Bolsonaro is proud of his efforts to fuck up the planet. If people were so concerned about climate chan ..read more

Ken Newburger felt like he’d been blindsided. He knew a legal challenge had been mounted against the medical cannabis ballot initiative he’d worked on last year in Mississippi. He knew the state’s Supreme Court had taken up the case. But the argument against Initiative 65 was so nonsensical that Newburger had zero doubt the court would rule to uphold the measure. He was wrong: The court overturned it, and with it the will of the 74 percent of Mississippi voters who approved it last fall. “It was not how I felt the decision would go,” Newburger says of the May 14th ruling. “I didn’t even con ..read more

The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to impeach President Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” making him the first president in American history to have been impeached twice. The vote comes exactly one week after Trump incited a mob of his followers to storm the U.S Capitol in a violent insurrection that left five people dead. The resolution passed by a vote of 232-197. House Republicans overwhelmingly opposed the measure, though 10 did join with Democrats to vote that a president who encourages his followers and his party to overthrow a U.S. election is no longer eligible fo ..read more

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 pots and pans, pop champagne, happy stomp, shout in jubilation to the heavens, fall to my knees and weep with happiness, kiss my husband, kiss my children, kiss the American soil that was soon to be delivered from the tantrums of a Twitter tyrant, pray a prayer of thanksgiving, twirl around with my arms outspread, sing. H ..read more