Today's Liberal News

Carnage & Chaos: “I Was Slipping in People’s Blood” on Jan. 6, Says Brain-Injured Capitol Officer

The second witness who testified live in the first primetime hearing of the House select January 6 committee was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as she tried to hold the line outside the Capitol with fellow officers. She was with officer Brian Sicknick, who she said appeared to have been sprayed in the face and was extremely pale. Sicknick died the next day. Sicknick’s fiancee sat behind Edwards as she testified.

“From Protesters … to Insurrectionists”: Jan. 6 Witness Describes Proud Boys’ Violence at the Capitol

The white supremacist Proud Boys group and the far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers militia played an instrumental role in planning for a violent insurrection on the Capitol, according to the January 6 House committee, which aired new testimony from witnesses and the groups’ leaders in its first public hearing Thursday night. British filmmaker Nick Quested was embedded with the Proud Boys and shared his footage with the committee.

“Attempted Coup”: First Public Jan. 6 Hearing Puts Trump at Center of Plan to Overturn 2020 Election

The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection held its first public hearing Thursday night, televised in primetime by all major networks except Fox News. We spend the hour featuring excerpts from the hearing, starting with Committee Chair Bennie Thompson’s opening statement, in which he argued January 6 was the “culmination of an attempted coup” by Donald Trump, comparing the insurrection to the ransacking of Washington, D.C.

News Roundup: Senators announce tentative deal on gun violence; public hearings on Jan. 6 continue

A group of Democratic and Republican senators have reached a tentative deal on a bill that would deal with the nation’s rampant gun violence problem, but there are two problems remaining. The first is that many in that group are already well-known for “negotiating” compromises that they themselves later back out of; the second is that the proposals for curbing gun violence pointedly dodge doing anything about the actual guns.

Who decides what gets taught in college classrooms? If Republicans end tenure, they will

Republicans—even before The Man Who Lost An Election And Tried To Steal It crawled out of the muck of birtherism to take over the party—have been engaged in a multi-front assault on public education. They’ve sought to weaken K-12 schools through all kinds of measures—for example, vouchers that often end up with taxpayer dollars supporting private, even religious institutions—and they’ve attacked higher education funding as well.

Ukraine Update: Don’t believe everything you hear; and a ‘state of the war’ analysis

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The fog of war is thick, and propaganda muddies it further. The Ukrainian government isn’t immune. For example, the Ukrainian government is saying this: 

Ukraine has now almost completely run out of ammunition for the Soviet-era weapons systems that were the mainstay of its arsenal, and the Eastern European countries that maintained the same systems have run out of surplus supplies to donate, Danylyuk said.

Overturning Roe could have consequences for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities

This article was originally published at Prism

Intellectually and developmentally disabled people have historically been weaponized against abortion rights by conservative politicians, or forced into sterilization by eugenicists. But a recent poll conducted by Data for Progress and shared with The 19th shows that 53% of Americans with disabilities want abortion to remain legal in most circumstances, in line with 55% of non-disabled people who want the same thing.

Ajar

Illustrations by Miki LoweThe poet A. E. Stallings lives in Athens, where the past is always bumping up against the present and ancient ruins stand amid trendy cafés. The old and new mingle in her work too. A classics scholar, Stallings tends to draw on Greek mythology and traditional poetic forms—but she uses them to explore thoroughly contemporary themes.

How I Learned to Eat Alone and Not Be Lonely

Updated at 2:45 p.m. ET on June 12, 2022.Eating alone began as a matter of circumstance.In the spring of 2020, as my world shrunk to the square footage of my apartment, food became a mode of injecting pleasure and delight into an otherwise bleak and lonely period of my life. I frequently ordered pizza from my favorite local spot in Washington, D.C.; I sampled different brands of instant ramen; I baked loaves of banana bread. In some ways, this routine was familiar.

Biden Is Right About Saudi Arabia

I regret to inform you that Joe Biden is right to go to Saudi Arabia.Biden’s planned visit to the kingdom represents a determination to both rationalize the amount of attention we pay to the region and formulate a foreign policy that works on behalf of the American middle class. But it is not going to make anyone happy in the near term, and it is going to cost him precious political capital with his own party.

The Moral Desolation of the GOP

Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearings—hearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that “Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, “Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.

Carnage & Chaos: “I Was Slipping in People’s Blood” on Jan. 6, Says Brain-Injured Capitol Officer

The second witness who testified live in the first primetime hearing of the House select January 6 committee was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as she tried to hold the line outside the Capitol with fellow officers. She was with officer Brian Sicknick, who she said appeared to have been sprayed in the face and was extremely pale. Sicknick died the next day. Sicknick’s fiancee sat behind Edwards as she testified.