Group items tagged

House Republicans narrowly passed a controversial bill to revise Affordable Care Act, helping to fulfill a major campaign promise but sending the measure to an uncertain fate in the closely divided Senate

Passage in the House by a vote of 217 to 213 capped weeks of fits and starts for the GOP and represented an enormous victory for President Trump, who repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail last year to repeal and replace Obamacare but has struggled to secure legislative wins early in his president

Democrats, meanwhile, predicted that the measure would be devastating for Americans’ health-care coverage but also, on a political level, for Republicans who voted for it

We’ve been sending brave service members — many of whom were just children, or weren’t even born, when the United States first invaded — to fight a mission that long ago strayed from its original purpose. Our veterans know this better than most. A poll from the right-leaning Concerned Veterans for America showed that 67 percent of veterans support a complete withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. A recent letter from a coalition of veterans’ groups urged Biden to “honor the sacrifices our troops and their families are willing to make on America’s behalf by not asking our women and men in uniform to remain entangled in a conflict with no clear military mission or path to victory.”

We should also use our leverage with other countries to channel their aid to Afghanistan in ways that involve women and young people in the peace process and promote protections for women and girls, as well as other human rights reforms.

By ending wars in Afghanistan and around the world, the United States can give our troops the long-overdue homecoming they deserve, usher in a new chapter of American global engagement that prioritizes diplomacy to keep Americans safe, and protect democracy, human rights and the rule of law

he 1776 Report can be understood as the other side of the coin to Anton’s rage. It’s the positive vision that justifies Trumpian cruelty. By conjuring an idealized and imaginary past, West Coast Straussians—and too many on the right—transform current conflicts into a satanic fall from an American Eden.

The American past is rich, complicated, beautiful, and powerful, but also wicked and painful. It needs to be reckoned with. The 1776 Report is the Trumpian and West Coast Straussian response to a prominent recent attempt to reckon with part of that history, the New York Times’s hotly debated 1619 Project.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, a prominent critic of the 1619 Project, dismissed the 1776 Report as “the flip side of those polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a slavocracy, and that slavery and white supremacy are the essential themes of American history. It’s basically a political document, not history.”

Donald Trump's era in Washington is over.

The President, addled and mostly friendless, will end his time in the capital a few hours early to spare himself the humiliation of watching his successor be sworn in.

He departs a city under militarized fortification meant to prevent a repeat of the riot he incited earlier this month. He leaves office with more than 400,000 Americans dead from a virus he chose to downplay or ignore.

The coronavirus crisis could not have been more cunningly engineered to expose Mr Johnson’s flaws. He was made prime minister not because anyone thought that he was a cool and decisive head with the leadership skills and moral seriousness required to handle the gravest public health emergency in a century.

He was put there because he was a successful representative of the entertainer branch of populist leadership that prospered in the pre-virus era. “We elected him to be a ‘good times’ prime minister,” comments one senior Tory. “His curse is to be prime minister in bad times.”

The wrong criticism of his performance is to say that he has made mistakes. Confronted with a novel disease for which the country was unprepared, any prime minister would have made errors. The correct criticism is that he has failed to learn from his mistakes and egregiously repeated them.

It begins with dramatic music and slick graphics – skyscrapers, clouds, big screens, the roar of a helicopter and chants of “Four more years!” Then come clips of Donald Trump Jr mocking Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and hurling red “Keep America Great” caps into a crowd at a rally. A fireball darts across the screen, trailing the word “Triggered”.

Welcome to the virtual Trump campaign starring his three children, Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka, and their partners, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Lara Trump and Jared Kushner. The six are among the president’s most important surrogates and strategists, constantly pushing his cause, rallying his base, trashing his opponents and earning a reputation as a modern political mafia.

“And guess what?” he said on Fox News. “After 3 November [election day], coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen. They’re trying to deprive him of his greatest asset.”

he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.

Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.

Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.

Iran’s Guardian Council watchdog body approved a law on Wednesday that obliges the government to halt U.N. inspections of its nuclear sites and step up uranium enrichment beyond the limit set under Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal if sanctions are not eased in two months.

he killing last week of Iran’s top nuclear scientist

Tehran has blamed on Israel

A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.

A divided Senate voted Monday night to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, capping a lightning-fast Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory only days before the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.

Republicans overcame unanimous opposition by Democrats to make Judge Barrett the 115th justice of the Supreme Court and the fifth woman ever to sit on its bench.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to reassert America's commitment to refugees, after the Trump White House has slashed the resettlement program, part of his anti-immigration drive.

In 2016, President Barack Obama aimed to admit 110,000 refugees. President Trump lowered the cap of refugee admissions every year of his presidency. For fiscal year 2021, he set the cap at 15,000, the lowest on record.

The agencies' budgets are based on the number of refugees admitted. Low admission levels reduced government funding, which decimated programs supporting newly arrived refugees. After the State Department told them to pare their operations, many agencies had to shutter or reduce offices and lay off workers.

A whopping 80% of New York City’s income tax revenue, according to one estimate, comes from the 17% of its residents who earn more than $100,000 per year. If just 5% of those folks decided to move away, it would cost the city almost one billion ($933 million) in lost tax revenue.

The large differentials in our current system of state and local taxation enable the mega-rich to save millions, and in some cases tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year, simply by moving from higher-tax states, most of them blue, to lower-tax states, which are typically red

While the pandemic has helped to accelerate remote work and potentially the geographic flexibility it allows, such migrations were more likely set in motion by Trump’s changes to the tax code: The so-called SALT deduction capped the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxes.

Douthat believes — evidently quite deeply — that the biggest danger to the United States is the cultural left, which means he’s stuck. He cannot or will not face the full extent of the Republican party’s turn against democracy, and focuses his energy on downplaying it, perhaps in part to convince himself.

This encapsulates Douthat’s assessment of our historical moment: Yes, Trump is bad, but vigilance against anti-democracy forces on the American right is misguided because they’re so incredibly weak. The real threat is the left

Douthat continued (and continues) to underestimate the threat from the Trumpist-authoritarian right. He criticizes the Big Lie and January 6 less as threats to American democracy and more as hindrances to his vision of a “Trumpism without Trump.” In the December 5 column, he worried that “stop the steal” was crowding out “the more compelling narrative” that “Trump’s presidency demonstrated that populism can provide a foundation for conservatism.” After the Capitol attack, he lamented that, “By allowing his presidency to be possessed by the occult online, [Trump] sealed his legacy to the populist causes he sometimes pretended to serve.”

Fast-food restaurants have a problem: Customers are returning but workers aren’t.And, increasingly, neither are their dining rooms.

broke? Or do I want to be broke working 40 hours a week and working my life away?’”

That’s 1,734,000 openings vs. an estimated 1,475,000 unemployed people, the Fed data shows.

In at least two experiments over the years, Facebook has explored what happens when it turns off its controversial news feed ranking system — the software that decides for each user which posts they’ll see and in what order, internal documents show. That leaves users to see all the posts from all of their friends in simple, chronological order.

The internal research documents, some previously unreported, help to explain why Facebook seems so wedded to its automated ranking system, known as the news feed algorithm.

previously reported internal documents, which Haugen provided to regulators and media outlets, including The Washington Post, have shown how Facebook crafts its ranking system to keep users hooked, sometimes at the cost of angering or misinforming them.

While loudly and proudly proclaiming that their goal is to nurture nest eggs for the working class, lawmakers have constructed a complex of tax shelters for the well-to-do. The lopsided result is that as of 2019, nearly 29,000 taxpayers had amassed “mega-IRAs” — individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more — while half of American households had no retirement accounts at all.

according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 10th of households reap a larger share of the income tax subsidy for retirement savings than the bottom 80 percent.

It’s working out just fine for the financial institutions that manage assets in IRAs and 401(k)s. The combined amount in those vehicles reached $21.6 trillion at the end of 2021 — up fivefold since 2000 — and the more money that pours in, the more that managers collect in fees

A renewed buildup of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border has raised concern among some officials in the United States and Europe who are tracking what they consider irregular movements of equipment and personnel on Russia’s western flank.

The renewed movements of Russian forces in the area come as the Kremlin embraces a harder line on Ukraine. Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down have escalated their rhetoric in recent months, attacking Kyiv’s Western ties and even questioning its sovereignty.

The situation also comes as the simmering 7½-year conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region enters a new stage. On Oct. 26, Ukraine’s military confirmed it had used a Turkish-made drone against a position in Donbas, the first time Kyiv has employed the technology in combat, prompting an outcry from Moscow.

Chinese authorities have been so proactive about regulating some uses of AI, especially those that allow the general public to create their own content, that compliance has become a major hurdle for the country’s companies.

As the use of AI explodes, regulators in Washington and around the world are trying to figure out how to manage potential threats to privacy, employment, intellectual property and even human existence itself.

But there are also concerns that putting any guardrails on the technology in the United States would surrender leadership in the sector to Chinese companies.

The zoomers were consistent: It wasn’t teens who changed, it was businesses

with workers in short supply, teen hiring became a necessity. So James embraced flexibility: She began drawing up schedules that accommodated teen activities and hired a mix of young folks involved in different sports and clubs who don’t all need to be off at the same time.“We still have good coverage and staffing, and yet the kids can still be kids,” James said.

Other businesses told a similar story. Around the time zoomers started returning to the workforce, the competition for workers heated up, and folks who mastered teen hiring had a significant advantage.

President Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad.

Comparisons were made to the years before the 1860 election when Abraham Lincoln warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand” and the lead-up to the 1940 election, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled rising domestic sympathy for European fascism and resistance to the United States joining World War II.

Biden, at these tabletop sessions, often spends hours asking questions and testing assumptions, participants say.