As of 7:00 AM ET on Saturday, Hurricane Ida is a Category 1 storm with maximum winds of 85 mph, heading northwest after crossing western Cuba overnight. However, the National Hurricane Center predicts that Ida will continue to strengthen throughout the day as it passes over the warm waters of the central Gulf of Mexico.
As the CDC Data Tracker shows, the United States continues to suffer from an expanding wave of COVID-19 cases attributed to the delta variant. As has been the cases for several weeks, that outbreak is concentrated in the Southeast. Which, unfortunately, includes the same areas about to be hit with the winds, rain, and storm surge of a major hurricane.
On Friday evening, U.S. Central Command announced that an unmanned done had conducted an airstrike in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan. This drone strike came after President joe Biden spoke Thursday afternoon and stated that the United States would track down those involved in the bombing that left 13 American service members and over 160 Afghan civilians dead at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKAIA) outside Kabul.
There are some stories that seem just too … outlandish. Even in an age where Republicans are waging war to lower the health of schoolchildren, a headline of “Horse deworming tablets dangerous for humans and not approved COVID-19 treatment” seems like it should be beyond the pale.
Unfortunately, it’s not.
Here are some simple facts:
1. Wearing an inexpensive disposable mask can help to protect children, teachers, and school staff against infection by a debilitating and potentially deadly disease. However, this effect is only most effective if wearing a mask is nearly universal.
The good news about Tropical Storm Henri on Saturday morning is that it’s still Tropical Storm Henri. That it, it has not not yet found enough energy to become a hurricane. However, the National Hurricane Center indicates that the storm is just beginning the push that will see it become Hurricane Henri as it heads toward New England.
In terms of hurricanes, Henri is expected to remain a Category 1 storm, with maximum sustained winds around 80 mph.
In the days following the attack on the United States by al Qaeda militants on September 11, 2001, then-President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban government of Afghanistan hand over al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The Taliban refused to extradite bin Laden. On October 7, the United States attacked and invaded Afghanistan to prove that no nation could safely harbor terrorists such as the al Qaeda militants. Within two months, the Taliban forces were largely driven from power.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has made it clear that, when it comes to COVID-19, he has one priority: Punishing anyone who gets in the way of spreading the virus. In particular, DeSantis has focused on making sure that school children and teachers are as exposed as possible by both mandating that schools have to hold in-person classes and declaring that schools cannot implement either mask mandates or vaccine requirements.
What happens when Republican governors institute policies that are 100% about showing their Trumpism, and 0% about taking care of the people in their state? Here are two good examples.
In Texas, Greg Abbott has declared that no one can require proof of vaccination, As a direct result of this decision, the Texas Tribune reports that only half of workers at Texas nursing homes are vaccinated.
It’s easy to break records when you just keep going faster. Put the foot on the accelerator and now you’re going faster, and now you’re going faster, and now you’re going faster. Every moment is a new “record” until something gives out. This works whether you’re headed down the highway, or directly off a cliff.
There needs to be a word. A word that combines frustrating, terrifying, and infuriating. A word for a story that contains information that lets you know that the people who are not just riding on the bus, but steering it toward a cliff, have absolutely no plans for what comes next even as the front wheels leave the ground.
This article from The New York Times starts off describing a specific incident that’s frightening enough, but also strangely heartening.
For some reason, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt believes that protecting the SARS-CoV-2 virus from the threat of masks is his top priority. And this week he has demonstrated that belief both by refusing to meet with the mayor of Kansas City and by filing a lawsuit against St. Louis that’s not just factually incorrect, but riddled with lies meant to disguise Republican failings.
Back when I was, unfortunately, working for the world’s largest coal company, employees were regularly made guinea pugs for the various propaganda pitches that the industry concocted to combat clear evidence that fossil fuels were generating enormous harm at all levels. One of those pitches what that coal-powered electricity was the only way to provide energy to Africa. The core of that pitch was simply this: Coal is cheap.
At the moment, there are two stories in the news when it comes to COVID-19. One is the well-deserved concern over the rising tide of cases. Over the last three weeks, the nation has seen cases rise steadily, erasing months of progress and putting the national total back to where it was in March. While cases are up in all 50 states, the surge is far from uniform.
On July 9, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued recommendations that surprised many Americans. In looking ahead to the upcoming school year, the agency recommended that “masks should be worn indoors by all individuals (age 2 and older) who are not fully vaccinated,” but did not call for mask use by staff or older students who were fully vaccinated.
The leaders of the Republican Party—Rep. Matt Gaetz and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—have been touring the nation. Whether this is part of Gaetz’s plans for expanding his sex trafficking ring, Greene’s recruiting drive for terrorists, or simply a cash grab by both, isn’t clear (except for the part where it definitely is a cash grab).
Honestly, a better question might be “Why is Tucker Carlson not in jail?”
On Friday night, Carlson was back on Fox News to welcome COVID-19-”truther” Alex Barenson to his program. Together, the two said that “masks are useless” and nothing more than a symbol that someone is obedient to the government, and claimed that mask mandates have no intention other than to make people scared, and are doing “psychological damage.
In June, Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly announced that they were teaming up for a “history tour” at arenas across the nation. The promise is that Trump and O’Reilly will take the stage so that the disgraced former Fox host can interview the disgraced former real estate scammer, with the later promising to provide a “never-before-heard inside view of his administration — which will be historical in and of itself.
How can we be sure that we’ve drifted into the Worst Possible Timeline? Because it’s always CPAC. Not content with one event in 2021, the Conservative Political Action Conference is on again, with CPAC Part 2, Eclectic Bugaboos now underway in Dallas.
Once upon a time, the History Channel actually had shows about history. The Science Channel had shows that tried to explain science.
Every single piece of evidence released on the events of Jan. 6 only makes things worse. In the past six months, it’s become clear that intelligence agencies and police repeatedly downplayed the threat represented by Trump’s white supremacist supporters.
On June 25, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence produced that long-anticipated report on “Unexplained Aerial Phenomenon.” The ODNI prepared the report with the assistance of a serious alphabet soup of other agencies, including the DIA, FBI, NSA, and every branch of the armed forces.
There are laws whose purpose is an unalloyed good, such as the Civil Rights Act. There are others whose origins are definitively gray, and whose utilization has put them in support of both justice and injustice, and whose use is more a measure of the person wielding the law than the contents of the legislation. Consider the uses of the Insurrection Act.
Then there are laws that seem at best misguided, and at worse, simply bad—like the Smith Act.
The Insurrection Act, allowing the president to deploy military forces within the United States, was signed into law in 1807. Of the course of that 214 history, the law has been used for vastly different purposes. In 1871, Ulysses Grant used it to position federal forces against the Klu Klux Klan after Klansmen conducted waves of lynchings killing thousands, including hundreds of Black politicians, across the South.
Just over a month ago, the world was looking upward to see where a large booster—the first stage of a Chinese Long March 5B—was going to fall to Earth. Despite a lot of publicity, and a good deal of resulting anxiety, most of the booster burned up in the atmosphere somewhere near the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, and there did not appear to cause any resulting damage.
America is going to come this close to hitting President Biden’s goal of having 70% of the nation vaccinated by July 4. But as that date crowds closer, it seems like we’re just going to miss.
Biden originally set a goal of delivering 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office — a goal that was far from certain, since he came into a system where deliveries of vaccine were uncertain and chaotic.
Looking back through Daily Kos’ coverage of the Keystone XL pipeline turns up 99 articles. On the front page. In the last year.
Over the just-short-of-a-decade lifespan of the project, the Keystone XL pipeline actually appeared in thousands of articles, and there are very good reasons.
When Daily Kos first covered the situation with children suffering from Niemann-Pick type C (NPC) and the possible treatment now called adrabetadex back on April 14, the story was left at a moment of confusion, frustration, and real fear that the only available treatment for this heartbreaking disease was about to become unavailable.
For more than a year, the world has—quite understandably—been caught up in looking at a crisis that threatened to (and did) kill millions of people more or less immediately. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how the genuinely existential threat of climate change hasn’t been getting nearly as many headlines as it has in recent years. However, that doesn’t mean that the threat has in any way declined.
On April 29, China’s National Space Administration launched a new heavy lift vehicle capable of taking over 27 tons of payload to Earth orbit. Although, as it turns out, the rocket is capable of more than that. While previous versions of the Long March 5 rocket included a booster that arced into the sea, the new 5b variant has four additional solid boosters.
It’s sometimes easy to think of Daily Kos as a place that reacts to the news, digesting and analyzing reporting done elsewhere rather than generating original content. That’s never been true.