Closing arguments are scheduled to begin Monday morning in the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the now 18-year-old Illinois gunman who traveled across state lines and killed two men and injured another during racial injustice protests in Wisconsin in the summer of 2020.
The defense and the prosecution will each have two-plus hours to make their closing arguments. Things are scheduled to get underway at 10 a.m. ET.
President Donald Trump and his administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the earliest days of the virus’ spread in the U.S., was an unmitigated disaster. We covered this as it unfolded for months and months.
But new media reports and documents released by a congressional committee probing the prior administration’s steering during 2020 confirm jarring new details about just how far the Trump White House went to interfere with the release of crucial public health-related information to the American people.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Docs Confirm What We Saw In Real Time – Trump’s COVID Handling Was An Intentional Disaster”A Texas man faces a federal charge for allegedly intentionally setting fire to an Austin synagogue on Halloween. He allegedly wrote down details of the attack in his diary.
Continue reading “‘I Set A Synagogue On Fire’: Texas Arson Suspect Wrote About Crime In Diary, Feds Say”During his speech Monday just before he signed a mammoth, bipartisan infrastructure package into law, President Joe Biden acknowledged that the massive achievement could actually be a vulnerability for the dozens of Republicans who supported it.
Continue reading “The GOP Members Of Congress Who Dared To Attend The Infrastructure Bill Signing”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
A Connecticut judge has found Alex Jones, a well-known media personality, liable in the defamation claim brought against him by parents of 6- and 7-year-old children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre for falsely claiming they were accomplices in faking the murders of their own children.
Like an earlier decision in a Texas court brought by different parents, the court entered a “default judgment,” which means that Jones lost for failure to put on a defense to the parents’ suit. But the fact that the parents’ claims were not fully litigated means that important issues in the law of defamation remain unresolved.
Continue reading “Alex Jones Loses By Default In All Sandy Hook Defamation Lawsuits”The Jan. 6 panel notched an indictment last week, after the Justice Department charged Steve Bannon with two counts of contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with a committee subpoena.
Continue reading “Bannon In Court As Jan. 6 Panel Flexes Its Muscle”Fox News on Saturday night edited an article to remove the “white nationalist” label from a white nationalist group holding an anti-vaccine rally in New York City.
Continue reading “Fox News Zaps ‘White Nationalist’ From Story On White Nationalists”As you can see here, this morning Steve Bannon is using his contempt of Congress charges to publicize his podcast and fundraise. Tweet or I guess publicize through it, you might say. It’s not surprising. This is pure Bannon: all defiance and spectacle. As we learned with Trump 5+plus years ago, there’s no shaming people in the Trump world. They lean into it. The only way forward is bringing all the reality of the situation to the foreground, the movement’s penchant for violence, contempt for democracy and eagerness for foreign subversion. Along these lines I wanted to point out an abiding feature of Trumpism and Bannon’s role in it: in this self-styled American ‘nationalist’ movement it’s surprisingly difficult to find … well, Americans.
Continue reading “Why Are All Bannon’s Operatives and Funders Foreigners?”Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced Monday that he would not be seeking reelection for a ninth term in office. Leahy, 81, said he would retire at the end of his current term in January 2023.
Continue reading “Leahy Won’t Run For Ninth Term”Russia experts are wondering what Vladimir Putin is up to. We are witnessing one of the recurrent build-ups of Russian military forces on the Ukraine border. For a variety of reasons experts on the region believe this may be building to a new full-scale military engagement. Putin also seems at least passively involved in the engineered refugee crisis on the border between Belarus and Poland. Josh Kovensky surveyed these developments here on Friday. Meanwhile we’ve seen a new round of saber-rattling over Taiwan, with aggressive military exercises from the mainland and deepening expressions of support from the US. All of which is to say that while we in the US see a deepening wave of crises in the US, this is matched by an increasingly tense and dangerous climate abroad. Both of these tension points – Ukraine and Taiwan – hold the possibility of direct military confrontations with nuclear powers Russia and China. And that’s not great.
Continue reading “A Dangerous World”
