Political News

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos…

Source

Late-night host Stephen Colbert interviewed former President Barack Obama at his presidential library, which is set to open in June. Colbert’s criticism of President Donald Trump has led to the sycophantic network CBS has been canceling his show—something that he and Obama joked about Tuesday night. “I’m looking for a new gig soon, and a lot of people tell me I should run for…

Source

As the threat of economic calamity due to fallout from the Iran war nears, you can sense President Donald Trump and his administration’s growing desperation to end the conflict Trump stupidly started without a plan. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that “Operation Epic Fury is concluded.” He also shared that the U.S. “achieved the objective of that operation”—even though…

Source

Apparently, President Donald Trump’s alleged policy of deporting only the “worst of the worst” isn’t even worth lip service anymore. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was asked by Newsmax host Rob Schmitt whether the administration was committed to deporting “all illegals” or shifting focus to criminal cases. “No, we’re staying focused on all illegals, without question,”…

Source

A former Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who had helped lead President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda went down in flames in a Republican congressional primary in Ohio, showing how disenchanted the public is with Trump’s take on this key issue. Madison Sheahan could muster only a third-place finish in the race for the Republican nomination in Ohio’s 9th Congressional…

Source

One of the challenges with the old site was basic performance—an old code base larded up with decades of cruft meant it was slow, jittery, and non-compliant with basic web conventions. Pages took too long to render, layouts shifted unpredictably as ads and other elements loaded, and core interactions that should’ve felt seamless instead felt clunky and fragile. Modernizing the platform wasn’t just…

Source

President Donald Trump is getting more unpopular by the day as his war in Iran leads to ballooning gas prices here at home. But if you think that would give GOP lawmakers cover to vote against Trump’s wishes, you’d be wrong. The results in Indiana’s primaries Tuesday night show why. Trump endorsed primary challenges against a set of seven Republican state senators in the Hoosier State…

Source

Man, what is the world coming to when bribing President Donald Trump and his large adult sons doesn’t guarantee eternal peace and prosperity? Crypto magnate Justin Sun is finding out, as he’s locked in a battle of dueling lawsuits with World Liberty Financial, the highest-profile Trump family crypto grift company. Let’s all point and laugh at the richest, most coddled people in the…

Source

Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87. CNN reported that he died Wednesday, citing a Turner Enterprises news release. Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning…

Source

Ahead of the June 2 primary, California’s gubernatorial race is unclear at best. After the scandalous exit of former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, there has been no obvious front-runner. Democrats Tom Steyer and Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton have been swapping in and out of the top two spots depending on the polls you look at. That matters in the state’s nonpartisan primary…

Source

But long-standing stigma in public safety professions remains a major barrier to care. By Amanda Watford for Stateline Ty Wooten didn’t realize the weight of answering his first 911 call — until more than a decade later. A woman had dialed 911 to report that her husband had shot himself in front of her and their 7-year-old son, on the family’s living room couch. It was Wooten’s…

Source

The Current Work List The Fix List Deleting A Block An early issue users said they had was not knowing how to delete an image or block when writing a story on an iPad or phone. After investigating, we realized that we had removed a menu from the community story editor that we should not have. As of this morning, that menu is restored. To delete an image or block using…

Source

Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | How Democrats plan to fight the Supreme Court’s racist ruling…

Source

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Last month, when MAGA luminaries Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Joe Kent turned on Trump over his impulsive war against Iran and his threat to destroy its “whole civilization,” Trump decried this gang as “low IQ.” That was an unusual move for him—in that three of the four are white.

As has been observed by others, Trump often hurls the “low IQ” insult at Black people. For some, that’s a sign he’s a racist. There certainly are others: His family real estate business was sued in the 1970s by the Justice Department for racial discrimination; he exploited the racially charged case of the Central Park Five in 1989, when five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger; he peddled the racist and fraudulent birther conspiracy about Barack Obama; people who worked with him on The Apprentice say he used racial slurs, including the n-word; he referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole countries”; he called on Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries; he characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists; during a 2020 campaign debate, he refused to condemn white supremacists; he has appointed people with racist records and ties to white nationalists; he shared a video on social media that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

Then there’s his vicious assault on DEI and wokeness—and his hiring practices. As of the 300-day mark of his current term, 91 percent of his confirmed appointees were white. For Biden that figure was 61 percent. (About 60 percent of the current US population is white.) Photos like this one of Trump’s US attorneys tell the story:

via @patriottakes2.0 on Threads

Look, there’s one brown guy! And only a handful of gals.

So it’s not tough to make the case that Trump is a racist. And it’s easy to cite his frequent use of “low IQ” to denigrate Black people as another data point showing he’s a bigot. But might Trump just be a jerk who calls a lot of his critics and foes “low IQ”?

I asked the director of a research shop—which would prefer to not be named—to crunch the numbers on this. These bean counters looked at both Trump’s social media posts and his public statements. The findings are no surprise.

Since April 10, Trump has zapped out nine Truth Social posts deploying the “low IQ” tag. Six times his missive referred to a Black person.

This team examined his Truth Social posts for the past four years, ending on April 10. In that stretch, Trump called individuals and communities “low IQ” at least 50 times, and 60 percent of these instances involved Black public figures and legislators. These targets included Vice President Kamala Harris; Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.); the Rev. Al Sharpton; New York Attorney General Letitia James; and political strategist Donna Brazile. The white people he excoriated in this fashion included Joe Biden, Tim Walz, Liz Cheney, and Robert De Niro. 

Since April 10, Trump has zapped out nine Truth Social posts deploying the “low IQ” tag. Six times his missive referred to a Black person—House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, or Owens. Once the target was Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.); another time, Carlson. And there was that post that railed against his MAGA antagonists: Kelly, Kent, Carlson, and Owens.

The tilt is clear. Trump reaches for this characterization more often when he’s denouncing Black people. Notice, though, that it’s just not Black people but Black women who draw much of Trump’s wrath.

That pattern holds when the data set expands beyond his Truth Social rants. Those researchers also scrutinized a collection of Trump’s public statements for the past 10 years, searching through a repository of C-SPAN videos that covered Trump speaking at rallies, press briefings, and other events. They found he deployed the “low IQ” aspersion at least 75 times. Forty of these instances—53 percent—targeted Black people. He also used it to describe Somali and Hispanic immigrants.

Trump has often derided Obama’s intelligence and suggested he was accepted at Columbia University and Harvard Law School only due to his race. The idea that the first Black president was a smart fellow seems to be too tough for Trump to accept.

Harris clocked in with the most mentions (23). Biden was next (17). Then came Waters (8), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (5), and Crockett (3). Trump claimed Harris was too “low IQ” to be president. In October, he said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “low IQ” and could not pass a cognitive test.

Last week, speaking at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida full of Trumpers, he also declared that Barack Obama could not pass a cognitive test. In the past, he has often derided Obama’s intelligence and suggested he was accepted at Columbia University and Harvard Law School only due to his race. The idea that the first Black president was a smart fellow seems to be too tough for Trump to accept.

If you want to get technical—and give Trump the benefit of the doubt—you could argue that since Democrats (and Democratic politicians) are disproportionately Black compared to the overall population, Trump’s political enemies will more likely be Black than an average sampling of Americans. Consequently, more targets of his “low IQ” slur will be Black. But it does seem that Trump often picks nasty fights with Black opponents—and relishes doing so. And there are plenty of ways to assail a political foe without calling him or her an idiot.

Trump has long displayed an obsession with IQ. He believes people are either born with intelligence or they’re not, and he has asserted that immigrants have brought “bad genes” into the country. He has frequently boasted his IQ is sky-high, attributing that to his “good genes” and pointing to his uncle, John Trump, who was a highly accomplished MIT professor. He has never made public any IQ test he’s taken, though he regularly brags about passing cognitive tests that screen for dementia. (Lion, rhinoceros, camel!) For him, “low IQ” is one of the most stinging insults he can sling. It’s hard not to attach significance to the fact that he so often hurls this barb at Black people.

To make the case that Trump is a racist, it’s not necessary to rely on his use of this epithet. But it’s an obvious piece of evidence. One would have to be not the sharpest tool in the shed to not see the connection.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Americans do not care about the climate crisis, only economic issues: That’s the message some wonks have put forth in the past year, as the Trump administration has dismantled environmental protections. But the shift away from climate is misguided, an influential group of progressives is arguing.

“The climate crisis is a core driver of the cost-of-living crisis and instability we see across the economy,” says a new policy platform from left-leaning think tank Climate and Community Institute (CCI).

The proposal, “Stop Greed, Build Green,” outlines a framework for what its authors call “green economic populism.” Decarbonization should be understood not as competing with affordability, but as a potential tool for achieving it, says the group, which has written federal bills for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and was behind a groundbreaking New York public power law.

It’s a rebuttal to the growing Washington, DC, chorus claiming climate policy is politically toxic. “The strength of this approach is that it directly challenges the perception that reducing emissions will make your life harder and more expensive,” said Naomi Klein, a prominent author and founding advisory board member for CCI.

The think tank unveiled its “working-class climate agenda” at a recent New York City launch event, with speakers including Louise Yeung, Zohran Mamdani’s chief climate officer, representatives from the Democratic Socialists of America, and Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute. A week later, CCI took its message to Washington, meeting with lawmakers and hosting a day of panels with former White House officials, congressional staff, scholars, advocates and union leaders.

The advocates backed their proposal with new data: a recent survey by CCI and the progressive polling firm Data for Progress found that 70 percent of voters, including 65 percent of Republicans, believe climate action can lower the cost of living. That suggests working people—an audience long targeted by right-wing populists such as Donald Trump—may be receptive to green policies, they say.

“What we have to be focused on is the real pain that people are feeling in their everyday lives right now as a result of decades of underinvestment on the part of capital and the government in working people,” Patrick Bigger, research director at CCI, said at the New York event.

Other Democrats and progressives are currently linking the cost-of-living crisis to climate. But CCI says it aims to go beyond short-term fixes, promoting economic democracy by confronting corporate power and working with unions and social movements to shape policy.

“What we have to be focused on is the real pain that people are feeling in their everyday lives.”

“True affordability has to fundamentally rewire the hardware that our economy runs on and not the wallets of shareholders and corporate executives,” said Rakeen Mabud, a political economist and senior fellow at CCI.

The approach builds on the Green New Deal, the sweeping framework popularized by the Sunrise Movement and Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, for which CCI served as a policy arm. That movement sought to yoke decarbonization to an extensive expansion of the social safety net, promising jobs, housing and healthcare alongside a rapid energy transition.

CCI, then the Climate and Community Project, helped develop federal Green New Deal proposals, including a 2019 public housing bill introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders and a 2021 schools bill from then representative Jamaal Bowman and Ed Markey, a senator. It was a “moment for big ideas,” said Daniel Aldana Cohen, the CCI’s founding co-director, whose research underpinned both acts.

Those federal initiatives, while politically galvanizing, stalled in Congress. Elements of the Green New Deal were folded into more incremental policies such as Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA), which delivered major clean energy investments yet fell far short of the broader economic overhaul progressives envisioned. After returning to power last January, the Trump administration swiftly began unraveling those gains.

The new platform aims to learn from both the strengths and limits of that era. Like the Green New Deal, it foregrounds Americans’ everyday material concerns.

Past “neoliberal climate policies” such as carbon pricing, said Klein, paid little attention to impacts on household costs.

“The Green New Deal was our movement’s attempt to correct those errors, by focusing on big-ticket infrastructure and jobs programs,” she said. “But it was so big picture that it came to seem unfeasible to a lot of people, and it was so far off in the distance that detractors could lie about what it was and wasn’t.”

Green economic populism aims to make carbon-cutting proposals more tangible, focusing not on system-wide decarbonization but “climate policy you can touch,” said Aldana Cohen. “We need to show people: ‘Hey, these policies are for you,’” he said.

One pitfall of the Biden-era climate policy, Cohen argued, is that its benefits were uneven and often invisible. Despite its scale, only 35 percent of voters in a 2024 survey said they had heard “a lot” or “some” about the IRA. The new approach aims to deliver quick, observable wins: lower bills and expanded access to heat pumps, union-built affordable EVs and free electric buses.

While the Green New Deal emphasized job creation, the new framework focuses on cutting everyday costs. Underemployment remains a concern, Cohen said, but the green jobs created under Biden were a “drop in the bucket” relative to the broader labor market. All working people, he added, are feeling the cost-of-living crisis—especially as the Iran war drives up fuel prices, underscoring that “fossil fuels cause deadly wars and make your life more expensive.”

“Right now, we need to address the entire working class,” he said.

Demonstrating that climate policy can improve people’s lives, CCI says, can help build a broader political coalition willing to defend and expand it. The group says those efforts are already under way.

Green economic populism could help “tuck climate aims into other policy, into the issues that are the most salient for people.”

In New York City, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, centered his campaign on affordability while integrating climate policy. “The mayor inspired New Yorkers by putting affordability at the front and center of his administration, and that extends to how we think about climate solutions,” Yeung, Mamdani’s chief climate officer said. “I really want to make sure we are imbuing all our work with that value.”

Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new socialist mayor, ran on a populist platform that integrated climate, notably plans for green social housing. “I think there’s a lot of alignment between my priorities in office and the green economic populism platform,” Wilson said on a recent CCI press call.

CCI also points to organizing beyond elections, such as the Chicago Teachers Union linking school investment to climate resilience and tenant campaigns in Minnesota paving the way for energy-efficient upgrades, as evidence the approach is gaining traction.

The platform calls for policies including rent and insurance caps to shield residents from taking on the costs of disasters and green upgrades, expanded free public transit, and taxes on polluters to fund climate programs. CCI is also working with unions, social movements, and advocates to develop proposals and engaging with federal lawmakers, from progressive mainstays to traditional Democrats.

“By meeting with folks who might not necessarily be in the left flank, we can get a better idea of what kinds of green economic populist policies can resonate more broadly,” said Ruthy Gourevitch, CCI’s housing director and former senior policy adviser for Bowman. “We’re trying to be the research arm of a majoritarian coalition.”

At its DC convening, CCI also solicited feedback. Labor advocates raised questions about tradeoffs between job quality and cost suppression. Sameera Fazili, who served as a deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden administration, questioned whether large-scale public spending plans would gain traction in a high-debt environment. And Jigar Shah, who was Biden’s clean energy loans czar, wondered if the plan leans too heavily on price controls and regulation over technological solutions and innovation.

It’s the right time to have debates and “build consensus” about the best way to frame climate policy, Shah said. “This is why I’m so happy that CCI put out this paper…and that they want my opinion.”

Though she had feedback for CCI, Fazili said she believes green economic populism could help show Americans that climate need not be a culture war issue. While the Green New Deal era encouraged green advocates to put climate first, she said, green economic populism could help “tuck climate aims into other policy, into the issues that are the most salient for people.”

Experts say rapid and transformative emissions cuts are still urgently needed, but achieving them will require durable political support, said Bigger, the research director at CCI. “The really big emissions wins come from the broader structural transformation that we need to win in the long term,” he said. “To get there, we need buy-in.”

In 2002, journalist Vicky Ward—then a writer for Vanity Fair magazine—was assigned to investigate a mysterious New York City financier named Jeffrey Epstein. During her reporting, she stumbled upon sexual abuse allegations against Epstein by Maria and Annie Farmer, whose account was ultimately cut from Ward’s piece, titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein.” That decision sparked recriminations between Ward and then–Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter that have continued for more than a decade.

In previous interviews, Carter has claimed that Ward’s reporting didn’t meet Vanity Fair’s editorial standards and that the allegations came too late in the editing process. But Ward says the magazine left out the Farmer sisters’ account after Epstein personally pressured Carter to remove it.

jQuery(document).ready(function(){prx("https:\/\/play.prx.org\/e?ge=prx_149_37adb587-451f-4e77-85f7-9e469c86e129&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast", "prx-1", "embed")});Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

“I’ve since been asked if Tina Brown or any other woman had been an editor at Vanity Fair at the time, do I think the Farmer sisters’ allegations would have run?” Ward tells More To The Story host Al Letson. “The answer to that is absolutely yes.”

The Farmer sisters eventually came forward publicly with their accusations. Epstein’s pattern of abuse continued until he was ultimately indicted for sex trafficking.

On this week’s episode, Ward looks back at the editorial decisions surrounding her 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein, the role Ghislaine Maxwell played in Epstein’s crimes, and what she thinks about the circumstances surrounding the convicted sex offender’s death.

Following our interview with Ward, we reached out to Maria and Annie Farmer for comment. Portions of their response appear in this week’s episode, and their full comment can be read here: “We trusted Vicky Ward with our firsthand accounts of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes. She chose to omit our experiences and instead, in 2003, published a Vanity Fair article that sanitized, shielded and even enhanced his reputation. She then published another glowing profile on Epstein in 2011. Articles like Ward’s allowed Epstein and Maxwell to continue targeting other young women and girls with the same abuse for decades afterward.”

In response to the Farmer sisters, Ward wrote: “This is obviously very sad to read, and I understand Maria and Annie’s frustrations and disappointment. I have already apologized to them in my podcast series Chasing Ghislaine and I stand by that. I wish I could have gotten their allegations into the 2003 story for Vanity Fair. I was as disappointed as they were that their allegations were cut from the article, which is why I reached out to them again in 2015, and with their permission told the story of what had happened inside the magazine. I would not have rehashed all this in public, had they not wanted me to, and had I not hoped to reverse a travesty that should never have happened – and ensure it never happened again. I also understand that the internal politics inside Vanity Fair are small-fry, compared with what Maria and Annie have suffered, and I wish them nothing but the best.”

RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

With six months to go until Election Day, the White House seems to have already accepted that Republicans will lose control of at least one chamber of Congress. A Washington Post report on Monday said that lawyers in Donald Trump’s White House are privately briefing Trump political appointees about how to handle congressional investigations—which Democrats are sure to launch if they flip the…

Source

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Hegseth: What war? The defense secretary says don’t believe your lying eyes when it comes to Iran. Par for the course: Trump tries to snatch another DC landmark The megalomania is out of control. Man with worm in brain thinks he can fix your brain RFK Jr.

Source

Now more than ever, we modern-day court jesters need your support! Become a paid subscriber to any (or all!) of the platforms below to keep Keef gentleman-cartooning into the future and beyond! www.patreon.com/keefknight keithknight.substack.com ko-fi.com/… kchronicles.com/… Related | 60 days into Iran war and Trump doesn’t have a concept of a plan…

Source

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is parroting the Trump administration’s claim that we’ve somehow won the war in Iran—but also we can’t call it a war. “Operation Epic Fury is concluded. We achieved the objectives of that operation,” he said during a press conference Tuesday. “We’re not cheering for an additional situation to occur. We would prefer the path of peace. What the president would…

Source