Politics

It was eerily warm in New York the day before the midterm elections, and the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten — one of America’s most powerful union leaders and arguably the Democratic Party’s most influential non-elected power broker — was bracing for a confrontation that threatened to push the atmosphere past boiling point. We were standing in front of Public School 169, in Bay Terrace, a majority-white, upper-middle-class neighborhood in Queens, where Weingarten was attending a rally for three Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. “You probably heard that the anti-vaxxers are going to show up,” she told me with a hint of exaggerated amusement.

The Select Committee to Investigate January 6 announced Monday that it would refer former president Donald Trump for charges to the Department of Justice’s special counsel. The committee also released its Executive Summary, which includes a description of findings and charges. Since its formation in July 2021, the committee has heard testimony from dozens of officials in the Trump administration and individuals who were associated with the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The Executive Summary lists seventeen findings of the Select Committee which inform their decision to refer Trump for charges.

When asked whether he will leave the Democratic Party and become an independent at a press conference on Monday, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said, "I'm not a Washington Democrat, I don't know what to tell you… I have no intention of doing anything right now. Whether I do something later, I can't tell you what the future's going to bring." Simultaneously, Manchin threw a punch at former Senate challenger and current congressman Alex Mooney, stating, "[Governor Jim] Justice is a much better candidate, and he would be doing it for the right reasons. I think Mooney is doing it strictly for his political ambition." While Manchin hasn't yet confirmed a re-election bid, his comments leave the door open for his departure from the Democratic Party.

In early May, I explored the left’s reaction to billionaire Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter and his vow to make it a free speech platform again. Since then, Musk and his vision have repeatedly been portrayed as “right-wing.” It’s the damndest thing. Canadian Conservative politician Andrew Scheer picked up on this strange phenomenon back in April, saying that that the corporate media framing free speech as a “right wing value” was just plain weird. As though to drive home the point, Twitch’s Zachary Ryan called Musk a right-winger on Monday. And over the weekend, entrepreneur Samir Tabar had a question for a whiny Robert Reich: https://twitter.com/SamirTabar/status/1601984560345907200 Answer: since, well, now. The evolution of this trend is not new.

Viewed from a coldly logical perspective, releasing Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner is a highly lopsided trade in favor of the Russians. The former was one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers on earth, a man responsible for sending weapons to some of Africa’s deadliest conflicts during the 1990s and early 2000s. The latter was a basketball player who was arrested for a smidgen of cannabis oil in her luggage. The two offenses are incomparable, which is one of the reasons why conservatives were so upset about President Biden green-lighting the swap. Donald Trump and John Bolton don’t agree on much, but both believe the decision was the epitome of feckless surrender (for Griner’s family, of course, it’s anything but).

The main reason why I lined up in the pouring rain to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 was that he’d campaigned as a gay-friendly candidate. It wasn’t just his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. It was that he talked about gays as if we were human beings and not demons — fully equal to our heterosexual brothers and sisters. Back then, for gay Americans, every new election cycle meant one thing for sure: we’d have to gird ourselves for a fresh round of gay-bashing by presidential hopefuls. Clinton seemed to promise a new era in politics, when our very existence would no longer be an issue. Well, Clinton won the election. And four years later he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. “Defense” as in defense from us.

Will Washington clamp down on crypto? Sam Bankman-Fried is set to testify before Congress tomorrow. If he does so, it will be the latest in a series of public appearances and interviews that suggests the disgraced crypto conman thinks he can spin his way out of trouble — and leaves the rest of us wondering, why isn’t he in jail yet? The hearing comes as Washington mulls how the law should handle cryptocurrencies. For some time now, lawmakers have wanted to do something about the burgeoning crypto craze and address the fact that no comprehensive regulatory framework for the sector exists. The fall of FTX underscored the point. With further trouble afoot in crypto-world, Washington is divided on muddled and cross-party lines over what to do about this Wild West of finance.

Today’s progressives like to imagine they're clever when it comes to engineering a carbon-free future. Yet when we look at the record, we see green policies yielding self-defeating public backlashes. The effort by California’s legislature to ban all gas-powered vehicles by 2035, for example, has wreaked havoc on the state’s economy. It's produced not only the nation’s highest energy prices and last summer’s rolling blackouts but the need to import expensive electricity from neighboring states. And while European governments would like to blame Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine for their countries’ high energy costs, angry voters know that prices began spiking years ago, when green activists forced the shutdown of coal plants across the continent.