Doctor Who: The Decades Collection is a series of six novels, each telling a story from a different decade of the show & that era's Doctor.
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Against committed clowns Scott Lemieux comments at Lawyers, Guns & Money on our authoritarian party’s redefinition of freedom. Lemieux referenced Jamelle Bouie’s helpful reframing of FDR’s Four Freedoms as an antimatter version for the MAGA party. It is a repudiation of everything conservatives once claimed to hold sacred and didn’t. But you knew that.
Also, Minnesota creates protections for warehouse workers, electric school bus makers unionize, Chicago addresses environmental racism, and activists sue Shell over emissions.
where gender-nonconformity hurt you Real Americans™ might want to reevaluate their life choices. People who complain loudest about having political opponents forcing randy random things down their throats have a new obsession, says Kat Abughazaleh of Media Matters. It’s piss. * And transphobia. This would be embarrassing if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was capable of it (Al Jazeera): Most recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to announce his bid to be the Republican presidential nominee, signed bills that ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict chosen pronoun use in schools and force people to use the bathroom corresponding with their sex assigned at birth. Lydia Polgreen adds in The New York Times: The new bathroom law is particularly cruel and absurd. Politicians claim these measures seek to make bathrooms safer. But I have yet to see any of these legislators produce a shred of credible evidence that transgender people pose a safety threat to cisgender people in bathrooms. […] Bathrooms have long been porcelain crucibles for our deepest fears and anxieties.
Believe it or not, the debt ceiling is an improvement on what the United States used to do.
The post The Debt Limit Is Just One of America’s Six Worst Traditions appeared first on The Intercept.
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Kevin Drum points to an obscure, but radical proposal to change the way the US government does benefit cost analysis. The Office of Management and Budget has released draft guidance saying One practical approach to implementing weights that account for diminishing marginal utility uses a constant-elasticity specification to determine the weights for subgroups defined by […]
Baby foxes! We are so excited to feature the two newest members of the Cincinnati Zoo fam…bat-eared fox kits! These 2 little boys were born on April 6th to first-time parents Frankie and Otis. While Otis prefers to live out of the public eye, you may have seen their mom, Frankie, during a program at the zoo! Through ultrasounds, radiographs and even thermal imaging, we were able to stay on top of how the babies and mom were doing during the entirety of her pregnancy and beyond. The kits are strong and full of personality already. These kits are not yet available to be viewed by the public.
By Matthew Guariglia, Cindy Cohn, and Andrew Crocker: Electronic Frontier Foundation
On May 20, 2013, a young government contractor with an EFF sticker on his laptop disembarked a plane in Hong Kong carrying with him evidence confirming, among other things, that the United States government had been conducting mass surveillance on a global scale. What came next were weeks of disclosures—and official declassifications—as Edward Snowden worked with some of the world’s top news organizations to reveal critical facts about the National Security Agency vacuuming up people’s online communications, internet activity, and phone records, both inside and outside the U.S..
By Chip Gibbons: Defending Rights & Dissent
So long as protests are treated as national security and intelligence matters, national security and intelligence tools will be used to endanger political expression.
Not bloody likely The Freedom Caucus belated realizes that negotiations mean they won’t get everything they want: The House Freedom Caucus is calling for “no further discussion” on legislation to raise the debt ceiling until the Senate passes the bill House Republicans approved last month that would pair an increase in the borrowing limit with steep spending cuts. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called the bill “dead on arrival.” The hard-liner conservative caucus said it adopted its official position on Thursday as debt limit negotiations continued behind closed doors between representatives for Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the White House. “The U.S. House of Representatives has done its job in passing the Limit, Save, Grow Act to provide a mechanism to raise the debt ceiling. This legislation is the official position of the House Freedom Caucus and, by its passage with 217 votes, the entire House Republican Conference,” the caucus wrote.
Listening for the sounds of coastal restoration.
The post What an Oyster Hears appeared first on Nautilus.
This week on our Callin show, where listeners ask us questions in real time.
The bigots won, but it’s not enough. Ted is such a worm: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) this week opened a Senate investigation into his allegations that Anheuser-Busch markets Bud Light to underage consumers in its ad featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. In a letter to Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth, Cruz and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) also asked the beer industry trade group Beer Institute, which Whitworth chairs, to conduct its own investigation. Or the company could say it’s sorry for any infraction and publicly disassociate from Mulvaney to avoid further inquiry, the senators wrote, making their actions appear more like a publicity stunt.
The Twitter CEO draws establishment media outrage for criticizing a NATO state propaganda outfit. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has triggered headlines by claiming that the website Bellingcat, a trusted source for establishment US media outlets, engages in “psyops.” Musk invoked Bellingcat’s role in “psychological operations” while expressing skepticism about the group’s claims that the mass shooter in Allen, Texas was motivated by white supremacist views. Prominent voices came forward to defend Bellingcat as a “a great journalistic organization” (CNN anchor Jake Tapper), and “a […]
The post Elon Musk is right: Bellingcat is a Western ‘psy-op’ appeared first on The Grayzone.
Which side will the cops be on? On January 6th the police did their jobs fighting against the rabid mob threatening to kill members of congress and Vice President Pence. But I still wonder what police around the country might do in the face of an organized right wing rebellion. So many of them are MAGA. Here’s the story of one who was in cahoots with the Proud Boys leading up to January 6th: It’s good to have friends in high places. Federal prosecutors on Friday highlighted a nexus between a top intelligence official in D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a relationship which continued from July 2019 through the Jan. 6 insurrection. Former Metropolitan Police Department officer Shane Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the department’s homeland security bureau, faces four counts stemming from allegations that he fed information to Tarrio about law enforcement investigations into him and then lied about it to federal agents. An attorney for Lamond didn’t immediately return our request for comment.
Here’s something to make your blood run cold. From Semafor (sub. req.) Think tanks often act as an administration-in-waiting for presidents — a place to stash future appointees, generate policy plans, and flag promising young staffers. This year their role on the right is taking on outsized importance, however, as the 2024 Republican field has made overhauling the bureaucracy with more reliable allies one of their top stated goals. That’s where the Heritage Foundation, alongside 50-plus conservative organizations in partner roles, hopes to come in. In April, the conservative nonprofit unveiled the start of a new $22 million project intended to staff the next Republican presidential administration from day one — a “private LinkedIn for conservatives,” as Paul Dans, the lead of “Project 2025,” described it. Their work dovetails with the goals expressed in Donald Trump’s calls to “destroy the deep state,” for example, and his plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse.
We must not exchange American hegemony for a dominant China. A new regional balance of power is the best answer. The Defence Strategic Review rightly tells us that the unipolar moment has passed. But if that also marks the end of US strategic primacy, no one has told the Americans. Maintaining global US primacy and Continue reading »
Titan Comics' solicits for August include new sci-fi series Blitmap by Jack Timmer and Matias Basla as well as Robotech, Conan and Doctor Who