Month: June 2019

Sen. Kamala Harris had a few memorable moments during Thursday’s Democratic primary debate, from ending a shouting match with a quip to challenging Joe Biden on his record on busing. According to a new poll from Morning Consult, those moments seem to have had a highly positive impact on her candidacy — following the debate, she now places third among likely voters.

Harris now polls at 12 percent, up 6 points from the previous week. This puts her in third place alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also polled at 12 percent, a one percent dip compared the previous …

Stranger Things 3 is almost here, and it sees all the characters from Hawkins, Indiana growing and evolving. And yes, I’m including a few monsters in that mix.

The second season of Stranger Things came in for its fair share of criticism, including from Vox, for a meandering and sometimes disjointed plot, and writing that clearly undervalued and underused the show’s female characters. And yet, as my colleague Emily VanDerWerff noted in her season two review, “when it works, it works. I’m powerless to resist it. You probably are too.”

That’s still true in season three, debuting July …

Megan Rapinoe, the captain of the US Soccer Women’s National Team, has said she would not attend a White House celebration in the team’s honor if the US wins the 2019 World Cup, as it is currently favored to do. She has, however, accepted an invitation to visit the people’s House following the tournament.

Rapinoe, who scored both her team’s goals against France in a nail-biting World Cup victory Friday, accepted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) invitation to tour the US House of Representatives following a dramatic week that saw the soccer star in President Trump’s crosshairs.

“It may not be …

The second round of the first Democratic primary debates on Thursday included a revealing — and at times tense — discussion of race between several candidates. But a defining moment was when Sen. Kamala Harris took former Vice President Joe Biden to task over his recent comments about segregationist senators, as well as his opposition to using federally mandated busing to racially integrate schools in the 1970s. She pointed directly to how it affected her life as a young child.

“You also worked with [those segregationist senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said, speaking directly to Biden. “And there was …

The man who drove a car into a group of people protesting the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 has been sentenced to life in prison by a federal court.

On Friday, nearly two years after his actions killed one woman, Heather Heyer, and injured more than two dozen others, 22-year-old James A. Fields Jr. was sentenced on 29 counts of committing federal hate crimes. Fields was indicted on the charges last year and agreed to plead guilty to them earlier in 2019. As part of the deal, prosecutors dropped one charge against him that …

The first two Democratic presidential debates for the 2020 election this week devoted more attention to climate change than in all the 2016 debates combined. But the climate crisis got just 15 minutes across four hours of airtime. And it wasn’t time particularly well spent: The questions were muddled, the discussion was shallow, and most viewers probably didn’t come away better informed.

All of this helps to make activists’ case for why the Democratic National Committee should hold a separate climate change debate. Groups like the Sunrise Movement and Greenpeace have been calling for one and were disappointed with …

Before President Donald Trump even landed in Osaka, Japan, for the G20 summit this week, he was already venting about America’s allies, threatening to rip up treaties, and generally being weird on Twitter.

So … a typical Trump foreign trip.

As usual, Trump’s harshest stances tended to be reserved for America’s partners. He assailed a Japanese defense treaty before departing for Osaka and ahead of his meeting with Prime Minister Abe Shinzo; he lambasted India’s trade policy ahead of his sit-down with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; and he accused Germany of shirking its defense commitments…

In a Wednesday night debate marked by serious — and at times confrontational — discussions of policy, candidates didn’t have much to say about how these issues affect communities of color, a large swath of the population that plays a significant role in the Democratic electorate.

It wasn’t that race wasn’t discussed at all. There was a robust discussion on immigration, and several candidates — including Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro — briefly commented on issues like police violence, voting rights…

President Trump gave a dizzying, rambling speech to an evangelical group on Wednesday, including a very weird aside about the late Sen. John McCain, who he seemed pleased to say has “gone on to greener pastures … or perhaps far less green pastures.”

McCain, who died last August, cast the decisive vote against repeal of the Affordable Care Act in the summer of 2017, which is still a personal sore spot for Trump.

“We needed 60 votes and we had 51 votes, and sometimes, you know, we had a little hard time with a couple of them, right? Fortunately they’re …

After weeks of speculation about whether special counsel Robert Mueller would testify before Congress, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff have announced Mueller will appear in front of their committees in July.

On Tuesday night, Nadler announced Mueller had agreed to testify, after his committee and the House Permanent Select Committee issued subpoenas. Mueller will testify in open session on July 17, according to the chairs.

“We look forward to hearing his testimony, as do all Americans,” Schiff and Nadler’s statement reads. “Americans have demanded to hear directly from the Special Counsel …