Today's Liberal News

Professional athletes stage a historic wildcat strike, this week in the war on workers

As strikes go, there weren’t a large number of workers involved in the most consequential work stoppages of the past week. And professional athletes are often framed as something other than real workers. But make no mistake, when the players on the Milwaukee Bucks said they weren’t playing their playoff game on Wednesday in protest over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, that was a wildcat strike, and it turned into a seriously successful one.

Cell phone data indicates that Sturgis rally attendees later visited 61% of U.S. counties

Just as many health officials feared, South Dakota’s annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is on its way to further the current health crisis. Cases of the novel coronavirus continue to grow nationwide and with bikers from across the country returning home from the event states are bound to see an increase in local cases. More than 100 COVID-19 cases have been linked to the event so far, the Associated Press reported.

I Know What Makes Conventions So Maddening

Having been to many political conventions over the years and watched many more slumped on the sofa bed in my home bunker, and now having watched two mostly remote events courtesy of Republicans and Democrats, I have finally isolated the element that has historically made these occasions so maddening and unpleasant: people.Specifically, I have in mind the people who go to political conventions.

‘America First’ Enters Its Most Combustible Moment

The months before and after a presidential election are particularly fragile for foreign policy. Each of the five presidents I served understood, as did his team, the weight of this time. Politics and legacy were always front of mind. They were all also conscious of the ways they could help pave an easier path for their successors. They all ultimately put country over party. That won’t be the case with Donald Trump.

I’m Optimistic That We Will Have a COVID-19 Vaccine Soon

On January 11, a Chinese team reported online the RNA genome sequence of a novel coronavirus causing a strange new pneumonia-like disease in Wuhan, China. Within 48 hours, scientists at Moderna, a Massachusetts biotechnology company, had the entire genome synthesized. Remarkably, about 60 days later, the company, in collaboration with the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, began a human Phase 1 clinical trial of an RNA vaccine.

The Red State That Isn’t Worried About a Mail-In Election

President Donald Trump has spent months trying to convince Americans that universal mail-in voting would be a disaster for democracy. It is “dangerous,” he says, potentially “catastrophic”—an “embarrassment” that would “make our country the laughingstock of the world.” Just this week, in his speech kicking off the Republican National Convention, Trump called voting by mail “the greatest scam in the history of politics.

The Profound Heroism of Chadwick Boseman

Almost as shocking as the news that Chadwick Boseman died yesterday at the age of 43 was the revelation that the actor had spent the past four years battling colon cancer. This timeline means that he was diagnosed in 2016—the year that he debuted as King T’Challa in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War.

Chadwick Boseman Was the Definition of a Hero

Almost as shocking as the news that Chadwick Boseman died yesterday at the age of 43 was the revelation that the actor had spent the last four years battling colon cancer. This timeline means he was diagnosed in 2016—the year that he debuted as King T’Challa in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War.

Together, we can destroy Republican trifectas in these two battleground states

 In a horrific display of the significance of down-ballot elections, the two states that lead the world (not just the nation) in coronavirus cases are both currently under complete Republican control: Arizona and Florida. In both states, the GOP controls both Houses of the state legislature and occupies the governor’s mansion.

As sparring continues between the FDA and HHS, the only people losing their jobs are the messengers

Ask Donald Trump about any issue, and he’ll tell you his TV ratings. Trump is far more concerned about the way something plays in the media than he is about the reality on the ground. Which is why, in the latest compound screw-up over the approval of the use of convalescent plasma over the unanimous advice of a panel of medical experts, the only two people to lose their jobs are a pair of PR experts from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).