At dawn this morning, workers loaded couches and tables into a moving truck parked outside the West Wing. Men wearing white coveralls and carrying roller brushes and paint cans walked across the north driveway. Inside the White House, pictures of the 45th president had been removed from the walls. Only the hooks remained, ready for a new set of portraits of the 46th.
A look inside QAnon’s virtual inauguration watch party, which went horribly wrong.
Jerome Adams played a leading communications role in President Donald Trump’s pandemic response.
We look at the path forward for the Biden-Harris administration and the role of social movements with political strategist Waleed Shahid and author and analyst Michael Eric Dyson. Shahid, spokesperson for the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats, says Biden could be “one of the most transformative presidents” in U.S. history if he acts boldly.
As Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are inaugurated and the Trump presidency comes to an end, we look back at his regime with author and analyst Michael Eric Dyson. “The Trump presidency has been an unmitigated disaster,” Dyson says. His “direct assault” on democratic processes resulted in a “neofascist presidency that attempted to undermine the very legitimacy of the democracy that he was put in office to uphold.
Avril Haines, Biden’s nominee for director of national intelligence, began her confirmation hearing Tuesday. She was President Obama’s top lawyer on the National Security Council from 2010 to 2013 and CIA deputy director from 2013 to 2015, where she authorized using drone strikes to carry out targeted extrajudicial assassinations.
With less than 12 hours before the end of his presidency, Donald Trump issued 143 pardons and commutations, including a pardon for Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist and campaign manager. Trump, who has pardoned other associates and allies during his single term, has so far rejected calls to pardon prominent whistleblowers including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Reality Winner.
How do I communicate how hurt I am without ending these friendships?
Parenting advice on affair revelations, angry fathers, and expensive avatars.
Biden’s plan to encourage better masking, social distancing, testing and contact tracing could gain traction with governors whose states are overwhelmed.
He can’t possibly expect the GOP to go along with this—but that might be a good thing.
Or his ability to help Americans will be doomed from the start.
What was the point of Fortress D.C.
This is why so many of us spent the late summer and fall screaming our heads off for Congress to pass some sort of new coronavirus relief bill.
“There’s no doubt about it that that can be done,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
Born as a second Manhattan Project, the Trump administration vaccine program actually achieved most of its goals – until distribution problems marred its success.
The decision cuts scientists at the Food and Drug Administration out of the process.
Trump’s presidency may be best remembered for its cataclysmic end. But his four years as president also changed real American policy in lasting ways, just more quietly. We asked POLITICO’s best-in-class policy reporters to recap some of the ways Trump changed the country while in office, for better or worse.
At the same time, the unemployment rate stayed at 6.7%, the first time it hasn’t fallen since April.
The share of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent sits at levels not seen since the 1920s. Biden’s hopes for changing it rests on Senate control.
A government shutdown was averted after the president approved the Covid relief package and annual spending bill.
The president has thrown the fate of the bill into jeopardy.
Federal prosecutors have alleged that Bannon’s “Build the Wall” fund served as a slush fund for the former White House adviser and his partners.
Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.
Half a day until JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE
Excerpts from the February Harper’s Index:
Estimated amount spent on 2020 campaigns for the U.S.
Since the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol we’ve been treated to the spectacle of people like Rep.Kevin McCarthy, Sen. Ted Cruz, and others within the Republican party invoking a spirit of “unity” as they urge Democrats to temper their response to a crisis that Republicans themselves were responsible for causing.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is well known to Kansans. In his six years in the U.S. House, Pompeo was ranked as one of the most conservative by GovTrack, and the policies he promoted were, well, the kinds of things most of America simply would roll their eyes at even considering. As a secretary of state, Pompeo has served failure after failure and has been rewarded for it, repeatedly, as one of Trump’s members who followed his marching orders.
Who is Michael Boulos, how is Lindsay Lohan involved, and why the heck now?
It looks like one of Team Trump’s last-minute efforts to destroy the civil service has fizzled. With less than a day to go, the plan to strip protections from tens of thousands of career federal employees hasn’t been put into effect at any federal agency.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management had rushed to list many of their jobs in the new Schedule F, a new classification for jobs involving policymaking.
Joining the increasing number of Trump supporters arrested after storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, a Pennsylvania woman who allegedly took a laptop belonging to Speaker Nancy Pelosi was arrested Monday. The woman, identified as 22-year-old Riley June Williams, is charged with intentionally entering into a restricted building without lawful authority in addition to disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
