Opinion

By now, we know that the overly loud ruckus raised by Congressional Republicans criticizing too much spending and a growing deficit is a message leveled only when that spending is aimed at those of us at the bottom and middle.

As progressives have argued endlessly, there was no Republican concern about lowering tax rates for the wealthy and corporations.

Americans and Britons alike are still processing the "what?!" heard round the world, courtesy of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's spilt tea during Sunday's "Oprah with Meghan and Harry" special on CBS. Now let's look closely at the context in which that particular bomb dropped.

Meghan, fully open but diplomatic in what she chooses to say, tells Oprah that a member of the royal family had expressed to Harry "concerns" about how dark the couple's son Archie might be when he was born.

After delaying long enough to cause serious anxiety among prominent public health experts, on Monday the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finally released their recommendations for people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The delay was worrisome, especially in light of reports that there was a debate in the White House over how lenient the guidelines should be with regards to what vaccinated people can do. In the end, however, what was settled on was a little more freedom than earlier reports suggested. Not only do the guidelines say vaccinated people can socialize together, as was anticipated, they also indicate that vaccinated people can visit with unvaccinated people – so long as they are all low-risk and from the same house. Mostly described as the "you can hug your grandkids" rule in the press, the guideline also includes increased freedom for things like a vaccinated couple hosting an unvaccinated couple for dinner.

Many prominent public health experts celebrated the loosening of restrictions on vaccinated people because, as Harvard-based epidemiologist Julia Marcus explained on Twitter, "Vaccines provide a true reduction of risk, not a false sense of security." Others, such as Dr. Leana Wen, visiting professor at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health, remain critical, not because they believe the new guidelines are too generous — but because they are still too strict.

One of the first lessons attorneys involved in high-stakes litigation learn is that it sometimes pays not to say the quiet part out loud, lest your client's true intentions be revealed.

Michael A. Carvin, a highly respected partner in the powerful Jones Day law firm based in Washington, D.C., may have forgotten this lesson during the oral arguments conducted by the Supreme Court on March 2 in a pair of appeals from Arizona involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In a shocking comment made toward the end of his presentation, Carvin revealed the Republican Party's entrenched and dedicated commitment to partisan advantage and voter suppression. In the process, however, Carvin may have unwittingly opened the door to abolishing the legislative filibuster and enacting H.R. 1, the landmark omnibus voting rights bill entitled the "For the People Act of 2021" that has passed the House and is now pending before the Senate.

My formative experience of America came during this country's great summertime of resurgence. It was 1984, I was sixteen years old, and I had flown into Los Angeles on the eve of the Olympics. For the next six weeks, I watched, wide-eyed, as the long national nightmare of Vietnam, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis was brought to an end by a modern-day gold-rush.

A multi-racial team of US athletes, led by the likes of Carl Lewis, Mary Lou Retton, Michael Jordan and Greg Louganis, completely dominated the medal table. Team USA even performed well in some of the more obscure events - a calorific boon for customers of McDonalds, which ran a scratch-card promotion, planned presumably before the Soviet boycott, offering Big Macs, fries and Cokes when Americans won gold, silver or bronze. With the thumping chant of "USA, USA" echoing from coast to coast, it was hard, even as a visiting outsider, not to be swept up in this torrent of patriotism.

Quinton Lucas, one the nation's top big-city Black mayors, indicated today he's considering a run for the U.S Senate seat being vacated by veteran Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Blunt made a surprise announcement Monday that he wouldn't seek reelection when his term expires in 2022. That move caught political insiders by surprise, but while most attention focused on the Republican free-for-all that will ensue in a scramble for the GOP nomination, Lucas is the Democrat most likely to have a serious chance to flip the seat blue were he to decide to run.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress scored a huge victory this weekend with the passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill in the U.S. Senate. It is a major accomplishment that, if signed into law, gives the average family of four more than $7,600 right away, makes Obamacare more affordable for more people, provides $27 billion in rental assistance and much-needed help to cities and states, and finally establishes a child allowance of $3000-$3600, which will hopefully become permanent over time. Upon the package's passage, none other than Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, gave this statement:

Critics of both Donald Trump and the Republican Party rejoiced on Saturday morning over the growing civil war between the two that has now led the ex-president having to threaten a lawsuit if they continue to use his name and likeness for fundraising purposes.

Trump, who is increasingly trying to take control of the Republican Party since he lost re-election, has set himself up as a kingmaker with his own PAC in Florida and is continuing to fundraise.

With that in mind, on Saturday it was reported he sent cease and desist letters to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee demanding they stop using him to fundraise.

As one commenter on Twitter put it, Trump's growing war with the GOP is "f*cking hilarious."

You can read some comments below:

When Emily Brimmer's family dentist sent out an email that they were administering vaccines, she jumped at the opportunity. Brimmer is certainly entitled to get one: though only 36 years old, she has type 1 diabetes, lives with family and helps to take care of her 101-year-old aunt. But once inoculated, Brimmer wasn't prepared for one of the unexpected side effects: guilt.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

The day of "The Storm" keeps moving for QAnon, the loosely-affiliated cult that sprang up online with Donald Trump as its god-like savior figure. At first, the belief was January 6 was the prophesied day when Trump would supposedly ascend to his true power and have all their political enemies, who QAnon adherents believe are blood-drinking pedophiles, arrested. After all, Trump himself repeatedly signaled that January 6 was "go" time and the faithful did as they were told, storming the Capitol in an effort to turn the prophecy into reality.

That failed and many QAnoners found themselves in handcuffs while their leader, Trump, escaped without consequence. But while some got disillusioned and dropped off, many more just did what cultists do and moved the day of the prophecy down the calendar, to March 4 as the new day for Trump would ride into town and kick Joe Biden out of the White House, kicking off "The Storm" for real.

Donald Trump's disgraced lawyer, Roy Cohn famously said, "F*** the law, who's the judge!"

Chief Justice Roberts, defending judicial independence, said that there is no Republican or Democratic way of deciding cases. In his confirmation hearings he likened judges to baseball umpires, calling balls and strikes, oblivious to the score or the team or the player. There is a certain tyranny in analogy.

One of the more revealing political moments of recent times was when the Republican Party decided they weren't going to bother writing a platform for the national convention in 2020. They simply announced that they supported President Trump and pretty much left it at that. It's not that platforms necessarily guide the party's agenda, but they are an indicator of its priorities, philosophy, ideology, etc. Yet the erstwhile "party of ideas" didn't think it was important enough to even make a half-baked stab at writing them down ahead of the last election. That's because they don't have ideas anymore, at least any that could possibly be translated into a legislative program.

Maybe it's the influence of Donald Trump or the fact that the right-wing media's culture war machine is permanently turned up to 11, 24 hours a day, but the right has clearly decided that turning politics into a non-stop circus is all they need to do. That's why we have Republicans in Congress refusing to negotiate in good faith on the COVID relief bill and pulling stunts like forcing the clerk of the Senate to read the bill aloud for no good reason other than to delay the process.