by Ray Levy Uyeda

This article was originally published at Prism

Fall is a tough season for Da’Ton Harris, a wildland firefighter who spends multiple weeks at a time attempting to tamp down fires without hoses. Harris and his crew of 20 other firefighters with the Urban Association of Forestry and Fire Professionals, where he’s a superintendent, are responsible for cutting down a forest to its soil so that, theoretically, there’s less fuel to burn.

More than two years into the pandemic (still not over, President Biden!), there have been nearly 100 million cases of COVID-19 in the United States. In the early part of the pandemic, some workers benefited from a first-ever federal paid sick leave law, and a growing number of states require paid sick leave for many workers. But many workers have had to face COVID-19 with no paid sick time, and as usual, the burden falls most heavily on the workers who already have the least.

On Saturday evening in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces are moving block by block through the city of Lyman, looking into houses, checking IDs of any residents still there, and accepting the surrender of any Russian forces willing to lay down arms. Russian casualties north of the city, and along the highway to the east, are reported to be horrendous, and it’s probably going to be some time before any since of the true scale of the carnage becomes clear.

Secretaries of state are almost always the top elections administrators in their states, giving them a crucial role in upholding the basic tenets of democracy across the United States. That hasn’t exactly been a secret before this year, and Republicans in those roles have repeatedly made it more difficult to vote or purged voter registrations. Abuse of power has been frequent.

On Friday, in a widely condemned speech in which he laid claim to territory of a neighboring country, Vladimir Putin only spent about 15 minutes talking about Ukraine. In the rest of his speech, Putin spent his time attacking the West for “perversions” that have  “completely moved to a radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family.

Right now, Russian sources on Telegraph are evenly divided. Half of them are convinced that Russia is sending, or has already sent, massive reinforcements that will keep Lyman in Russian hands forever.

More than a decade ago, Ginni Thomas’s political activities drew scrutiny to her more public husband. More to the point, the failure of that husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to declare decades of his wife’s income from that political activity drew attention, resulting in him revising 20 years’ worth of financial disclosure forms.

Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker is trying to out-Christian a pastor. In his latest attempt to gloss over his violent past, the former NFL star opted for a few Bible verses about redemption to gaslight his opponent.

In a recent interview with Christal Jordan, host of the YouTube show From Christal with Love XO, the former Heisman Trophy winner was asked about his history of domestic violence.

When news broke that Republican House candidate J.R. Majewski’s self-proclaimed military record was filled with what right-wing viral YouTube clips would call “stolen valor,” it perfectly illustrated the hypocrisy of faketriots like Donald Trump and similar MAGA chickenhawks.

Though Republicans love to accuse LGBTQ+ folks and allies of “grooming” young people into being queer, the reality is that our society is so deeply ingrained in a cisgender, heterosexual world that most people don’t even consider aspects of life to be norms—they just see it as normal.