Opinion

Drawing on Wisconsin's progressive history and praising the state for being a leader in education, Underly acknowledged standing on “the shoulders of those who came before us," then slammed Republican legislative leaders for their “shortsightedness" in passing a budget that declined to spend part of a historic surplus on schools.

“Not long ago, Wisconsin's budget invested in our public schools," Underly noted. “We saw the impact of this on the kids who graduated from our schools before 2010." But over the last decade, the state has failed to make up for budget cuts made during the Great Recession. As a result, “in 2020, we graduated an entire generation of kids who have known nothing but austerity in our school funding — who have known years of divestment in their future."

Insurrectionist Rep. Paul Gosar has been railing about imaginary voter fraud as long as anyone -- since long before Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. So, it was notable to hear what he had to say Friday after being seen taking notes at the report on Arizona's fake election audit.

He said nothing. There was not a peep about the election audit in his home state of Arizona, not even after he was seen posing and present at the report session Friday.

The biggest fallacy about our exit from Afghanistan is that there was a "good" way for us to get out. There is no good way to lose a war. With defeat comes humiliation. We were humiliated in the way we pulled out of Kabul — and we should have been, because we believed the lies we had been told right up to the last moment.

This article first appeared in Salon

For critics outside the orbit of fallen US biotech star Elizabeth Holmes, her pledges of a medical revolution reeked of quackery. But the faith of close backers -- from a future Pentagon chief to a lab scientist -- was very real.

"I thought it was going to be the next Apple," Adam Rosendorff, one-time laboratory head at Holmes's now-defunct blood testing startup Theranos said at her Silicon Valley fraud trial on Friday.

If a frontline has emerged in the new culture war, it's surely local school board meetings — where right-wing activists in dozens of municipalities have staged scenes over everything from COVID-19 safety measures to anti-racist lessons.

It was into this "thunderdome" — a school board meeting in Johnston County, North Carolina — that The Daily Show's Jordan Klepper stepped this week in an attempt to better understand the psyche of anti-maskers who had gathered for a protest against school COVID-19 prevention measures. Leading the protest just a few paces away was Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from the state who has emerged as a key figure in the conservative war on public health measures to tamp down on the surging virus.

There are many inane rituals that take place in the U.S. Capitol, but none that rival the tiresome conventions around the annual funding of the government known as "raising of the debt ceiling."

It's like Groundhog Day, with Republicans balking at participating and everyone else running around in circles trying to cajole them into getting onboard so the United States doesn't crash the world economy. It is no way to run a country. This year the issues are more acute than usual because the Democratic majority is concurrently trying to pass two very large programs — the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill that contains the vital human infrastructure program that Joe Biden and the party ran on in 2020. It's all coming to a head at the same time.

Let's set aside the distant possibility of the United States government defaulting on its debt. Despite what you are reading and hearing, there is no real chance of that happening. The United States Congress is going to raise the debt ceiling. Whether this game of chicken has any real-world effect — whether it lowers the US rating among crediting agencies, as transpired the last time around — is a different matter.

Make no mistake, though. It's a game of chicken and the Republicans in the United States Senate are winning. I would say, if we're going to be honest with ourselves, that the Republicans are humiliating the Democrats. Democratic allies are laboring mightily to obscure that.

President Joe Biden in his recent address at the United Nations announced that the United States will "lead" the world on "human dignity and human rights." If the scenes from the southern border are anything to go by, the reality as it stands is the polar opposite.

It's not just that America's racist past has yet to be accounted for. The past has a direct correlation to the present. In the same way that local police departments have roots in slave catching, in every aspect of state authority imaginable, racism festers. The United Nations recognizes this, and so do countless others around the world.

Years ago in a high school anatomy class, I saw film footage of a man — perhaps a prison inmate or a patient at a mental hospital — who "volunteered" for a heinous medical experiment. His brain was bisected, meaning the left and right spheres were surgically split from one another. He survived the procedure, but his left and right hands now behaved as if they belonged to two different people. The man was told to use his right hand, the one over which he still had conscious control, to seize control of the left hand. The left hand continually escaped, and the two hands essentially began fighting with each other. He begged the doctors for help, but they were too busy obsessively noting every detail of the "subject's" behavior. Our teacher told us the film came from her "private collection."

This article first appeared in Salon.

Former White House press secretary-turned-Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany attempted to slam President Joe Biden on Twitter Thursday using a graphic that showed a significant uptick in the U.S. murder rate during the 2020 calendar year.

There was only one problem — Donald Trump was president for that entire time.

Sinema won the ire of progressives because of her insistence on preserving an archaic Senate rule that has historically been used to hamper civil rights: the filibuster. Democrats fear the filibuster will prevent any hope of passing major election reforms. Reforms needed because of the continued assault on voting rights in conservative states across the country, including Arizona.

I've taken a swing at Sinema, as well, commenting on more than one occasion that real mavericks don't simply say “no" to their party, they get stuff done.

Alabama's population is dwindling for the first time in state's history as a result of COVID-19's deadly spread throughout its residents.

"Our state literally shrunk in 2020, based on the numbers that we have managed to put together, and actually by quite a bit," State Health Officer Scott Harris said in a Friday press conference, according to The Guardian. "2020 is going to be the first year that we know of in the history of our state where we actually had more deaths than births."

Much has been written about the enormous stress that frontline health workers have been coping with during the COVID-19 pandemic. But journalist Abdullah Shihipar, this week in The Guardian, reports on another group that is feeling overwhelmed during the pandemic: those who work behind the scenes in public health departments.

"The results of a nationwide (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) survey of public health workers, released this July, were revealing," Shihipar explains. "Of the more than 26,000 surveyed individuals working in public health departments across the United States, more than half reported recent symptoms of at least one major mental health condition. Their reported prevalence of PTSD was 10 to 20% higher than in frontline medical workers and the general public."