Madison Cawthorn arrived at Patrick Henry College’s small Christian campus in northern Virginia in fall 2016 blazing with charm, bravado, and a flashing white smile. His former classmates said the future member of Congress would whip his white Dodge Challenger into the parking lot and regale his classmates with the story of how he survived a harrowing car crash as a teen, which left him paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair for life. After his intensive recovery, he was older than most students — 21 — and didn’t fit the mold of the Christian and largely sheltered first-year students who chose the conservative school in Purcellville because of its commitment to God and rigorous academics. And, former Patrick Henry students said, it didn’t take long for women on campus to start warning one another: You don’t want to be alone with him, especially in his car.

Yesterday, the Senate Parliamentarian, a baloney made-up advisory office with absolutely no real authority within or over the U.S. Senate, held by an unelected bureaucrat so anonymous and unimportant that her name—Elizabeth MacDonough—does not even appear until the eighth paragraph of the Washington Post‘s story from last night only and entirely about what she did yesterday, issued an opinion that a provision setting a new $15-per-hour federal minimum wage is written in such a way that it violates Senate parliamentary rules and therefore must not remain in the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill wending its way through Congress. Never mind that the Senate is not in any official way bound by anything the parliamentarian says. Never mind that, even to whatever (fictional) extent this powerless advisor’s proclamation even counts as any kind of “ruling,” it can be overruled or just flat-out ignored by basically anyone who wishes to do so. Never mind that, to the extent this ruling actually governs anything—it doesn’t—it’s only whether the bill as written can be passed through budget reconciliation and thus circumvent the threat of filibuster, and the Democrats could do away with the filibuster altogether and render the whole thing moot. Never mind that none of these things—the Senate parliamentarian, Senate parliamentary procedure, the filibuster, budget reconciliation—appear anywhere in the Constitution, and that to allow any of them to constrain the operations of the Congress is, in effect, to allow the nation to be governed by some older version of Congress instead of the one it just elected. Never mind that, back in 2001, the Republican majority leader, Trent Lott, just straight-up fired and replaced a parliamentarian who’d issued unfavorable decisions on a couple of bills favored by the George W. Bush administration, not incorrectly judging that the Congressional majority’s mandate to govern supersedes some unelected functionary’s opinions about the finer points of entirely made-up parliamentary procedure. Never mind that virtually no number of Americans give even the tiniest of shits about the dubious norm of deferring to the Senate parliamentarian, or about parliamentary procedure. Never mind that probably not even one out of 200 random Americans could have told you who the Senate parliamentarian was, or what the Senate parliamentarian does, or absolutely anything about Senate parliamentary procedure, prior to the Democrats agreeing, yesterday, to further the pretense that these things amount to legitimate constraints on their ability to govern. ... The $15 minimum wage may yet pass as part of the pandemic relief bill; who knows. The Democrats in the House, admirably, intend to go right ahead and pass the relief bill with the minimum-wage increase included in it, in effect daring anybody in the Senate to be the one who’ll sign their name to having stripped it out. But this, exactly this kind of dithering and capitulating, is why the Democratic party is always so much less popular than incredibly well-liked ideas—Medicare For All, gun control, COVID-19 relief checks, minimum-wage increase, a federal government that does more to help people directly, etc.—whose only support in government comes from its own members. Given the rare opportunity to flex some power, and a clear and obvious moral mandate to do so, they’re throwing their hands up at non-binding parliamentary procedures and well actually-ing their own supporters over what exactly the phrase “$2,000 checks” means. Bigots and billionaires and culture warriors can at least count on the Republican party to gleefully immiserate the classes of vulnerable people they despise, whenever it’s entrusted with the power to do so. The only thing you can count on the Democratic party to do is to develop a sudden paralyzing case of situational Budget Concern or Norms Respect, whenever it can cripple or stall or dilute the fulfillment of a pledge to make common people’s lives better, to materially address any of the myriad ways American society has been warped into incoherent brutality by capitalism and white supremacy.

A confidential U.S. government report found that people in Tigray are being driven from their homes in a war begun by Ethiopia, an American ally — posing President Biden’s first major test in Africa.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put the squeeze on more people's income and job prospects, a growing number of renters have formed grassroots tenant unions to collectively speak up against landlords and stave off the threat of possible evictions.

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement. It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to legal equality for women. Though Buffy had been off the air for more than a decade, its legacy still loomed large; Whedon was widely respected as a man with a predilection for making science fiction with strong women for protagonists. Whedon went on to outline why, precisely, he hated the term: “You can’t be born an ‘ist,’” he argued, therefore, “‘feminist’ includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state, that we don’t emerge assuming that everybody in the human...

The Pinball Hall of Fame will be able to make the move to its new location near the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor.

A pickup truck parked at the United States Capitol and bearing a Three Percenter militia sticker on the day of the Jan. 6 riot belongs to the husband of freshman U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, who approvingly quoted Adolf Hitler a day earlier. Researchers on Twitter first noticed the Ford pickup truck with the far-right militia’s decal parked on the Capitol grounds in footage posted to social media and taken by CBS News. The presence of a vehicle with a militia decal so close to the Capitol, inaccessible to normal vehicle traffic, raised questions about how it got there—and whether it belonged to any of the hundreds of suspects involved in the deadly riot. But in an email to The Daily Beast, Chris Miller, Rep. Miller’s husband and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, conceded the truck belonged to him even as he pleaded ignorance about the militia group.

President Biden ordered retaliatory strikes against the militias whose attacks in Erbil this month killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member.

As a modern analogy, it would be as if only bears and lions existed, and also small carnivores like cats, weasels, and civets, but no medium-sized predators such as wolves, coyotes, and hyenas

Sir Ian McKellen has called on gay people to stand in support of the trans community. In a wide-ranging chat with It’s A Sin star Olly Alexander hosted by TikTok to mark LGBTQ+ History Month, Sir Ian compared the hardships faced by trans people today to those experienced by gay people when he was younger. But despite these similarities, the actor expressed disappointment that support is not universal among gay people.

The parliamentarian ruled that the provision, which would gradually increase the wage to $15 an hour, violated the strict budgetary rules that limit what can be included in the package.

But thanks to some of the more conspiratorial ideas circling around in the big tent of the Republican coalition, CPAC was unable to provide its attendees a space safe from censorship. On Monday, three days before the conference began, it canceled an appearance from a panelist who “has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization.” Though CPAC did not initially state who they booted from their list of speakers, the decision came hours after Media Matters published a story about the panelist Young Pharaoh, an online commentator who has called Judaism a “complete lie” and claimed that “all the censorship & social media platforms are controlled by CCP & Israel through Jewish CEO & corrupt Democrats.” Soon after, Ben Jacobs reported that the rapper was removed from the program. Young Pharaoh later confirmed to The Hill that he had been cut from his Saturday appearance; in an interview he repeated several anti-Semitic claims, and added: “Basically, I’m being censored.”

The U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. But in the face of emerging threats, some say a new strategy is in order.

Pipeline companies can find leaks. But they often don't, even as small spills grow bigger over days.

Dolly Parton is having a moment. After 60 years in public life, the sassy songbird in indelible drag is a reigning queen among pop culture’s most elite celebrity tier: the “unproblematic fave.” Those are celebrities who have transcended whatever domain first made them famous, have not disappointed their core fanbase, and manage to avoid a casual audience’s wrath. Rare in its own right, Dolly’s ascension is even more noteworthy because of what she is selling. Mediatized to our collective eyeteeth and insolent in our aesthetic preferences, we usually denigrate Dolly’s type of earnest sentimentality in the discourse. Yet over the past five years, it has become verboten to dislike her, much less to critique her. By tacit consensus, Dolly Parton is the one good thing in our empire’s twilight. The Dolly Parton Moment owes a lot to nostalgia. She has simply lived long enough, performed at a high level for enough years that we can spare the warm fuzzies she inspires in us. Nostalgia blunts the politics that produces all art, especially middlebrow art of the kind Parton creates. Even if you remember that 9 to 5 was part of a mainstreaming of big-tent working-woman feminism, you cannot feel the urgency of the time. The shoulder pads and Equal Rights Amendment and raucous debates on the Phil Donahue Show are artifacts now. There is no petition to sign, no march to attend and fight to be had about whether women belong in the workplace. Nostalgic celebrity is a neutered artist. We like that.

Days after South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg fatally struck a man while driving in September, detectives told the Republican official they had found a pair of broken reading glasses inside his Ford Taurus. They belonged to the man he killed. That was a problem, detectives said, because Ravnsborg, 44, said he didn’t know he had hit a man until the following day, when he returned to the scene and found the body of Joseph Boever, 55, in a ditch. “They’re Joe’s glasses, so that means his face came through your windshield,” one of the detectives said in an interview released by the South Dakota Department of Public Safety on Tuesday.

Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama are voting on unionization and Amazon is doing everything it can to stop them. As part of its anti-union campaign, Amazon ran anti-union ads on Twitch, the games streaming giant that it owns. Now Twitch has broken with its parent company and told Motherboard it has removed the ads, and that they should never have run in the first place.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s new Democratic leader, is retaining a Republican rule that allowed President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to be confirmed to federal appeals courts over home-state senators’ objections. Under a longtime Judiciary Committee policy, senators from the home state of a president’s judicial nominees are given blue slips of paper that they can return to the committee if they approve of the nominee. Some committee chairs, including the most recent Democratic chairmen, have allowed senators to veto a nominee by withholding a blue slip, while others have allowed the nominations to proceed, sometimes requiring the president to consult with the home-state senators.

In a 1995 article in the Journal of Black Studies, Kenneth Christmon describes an interaction between the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule and a Dogon elder and priest named Ogotemmeli. Griaule, who was doing work in Mali, told Ogotemmeli that he was confused by the occasional ramblings he had heard from older, apparently drunk men who repeated what he believed to be a curious phrase: “The dead are dying of thirst.” Ogotemmeli explained the phenomenon thusly: Death, he said, requires certain rituals to be performed before the departed can join the ancestors in peace. These rituals included a costly amount of food and drink; to economize, a family might wait until they could be performed with other families. While they waited, the spirits, caught between two worlds and in search of something to quench their thirst, would gather at the vats of fermenting beer that the families traditionally prepared for religious and secular purposes. They imparted the beer with their energy, giving it its intoxicating qualities. When an older man consumed it, Ogotemmeli continued, his ensuing state of drunkenness was the struggle between his own life force and that of the departed. So what sounded like incoherent nonsense to Griaule — “the dead are dying of thirst” — was actually the drinker’s attempt to expel the foreign energy. It made people take notice. The spirits are getting restless; it’s time to give them peace.

A San Francisco police officer accused of fabricating a reason for arresting a man is back on patrol even after a federal judge tossed a case over his false testimony, the San Francisco Examiner has learned.