A retired Air Force auditor — we’ll call him Andy — tells a story about a thing that happened at Ogden Air Force Base, Utah. Sometime in early 2001, something went wrong with a base inventory order. Andy thinks it was a simple data-entry error. “Someone ordered five of something,” …
Read More »Six Historians on Why Trump's Border Wall Won't Work
President Trump’s promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was a defining and divisive talking point throughout the 2016 campaign, rallying his conservative base enough to help win him the election. In trying to fulfill one of his most popular campaign promises, President Trump has halted the U.S. …
Read More »Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Will Not Log Off
Since winning her seat in Congress on November 6th, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been using social media —particularly Instagram Stories —to provide a detailed, comprehensive and often humorous breakdown of her process of preparing to take office in January. In the first post from a pinned Instagram Story titled “Congress Camp …
Read More »Forget 'Conventional Wisdom': There Are No More Moderates
It happens after every election. National press voices sift through results, toss around hot takes, and within a news cycle or two, the disease called conventional wisdom is pandemic again. Listening the other night to talking heads like CNN’s Jake Tapper yammer on about how “candidate recruitment” and “veterans” are …
Read More »Chatting With Richard Ojeda, Who Might Pull Off the Biggest Midterm District Flip in 20 Years
Richard Ojeda is a 24-year Army veteran who went on combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, but his closest brush with death may have come after he decided to get into West Virginia politics. “I was almost murdered two days before I won my Senate race,” he says of the …
Read More »Roe v. Wade Is Hanging by a Thread
At a JW Marriott hotel a few blocks from the White House last January, Denise Burke, a cheerful-looking 52-year old woman with wispy blond hair and a lopsided smile, explained to attendees of the 2018 Evangelicals For Life conference exactly how she and her colleagues intended to make abortion illegal …
Read More »Trump's Separation of Children and Families Is What You Voted For
Ms. L, as the American Civil Liberties Union identified her, is a Congolese woman who sought asylum in the United States last November. She feared imminent death amid the escalating violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, violence that has displaced millions of residents. I learned about her circumstance reading …
Read More »Pot Showdown: How Congress Is Uniting to Stop Sessions' War on Drugs
Pro-pot lawmakers in the nation’s capital spent much of last year fighting behind the scenes to protect their state’s legal marijuana industries, but now the cannabis fight is out in the open after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he’s unwinding the Obama-era guidance that directed U.S. Attorneys to not go …
Read More »At Trump's Urging, Republicans Are Trying to Ram Through Their Tax Plan
With 2018 just around the corner, President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress are desperate to deliver their first major legislative victory to their base and donors: an overhaul of the U.S. tax code that they’re pushing through the Senate this week. While the party’s top brass is trying to …
Read More »Congressional Baseball Shooting Looms Large Over Gun-Silencer Hearing
The shooting at a congressional baseball practice this summer, which left the number-three House Republican, Steve Scalise, in critical condition and four others injured, brought about some small changes in Washington, D.C. There are now a few more Capitol Police officers stationed at entrances on the Capitol grounds, and more …
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