“Biden will have a relatively easy time pushing through tax cuts he has proposed for modest earners and the middle class, such as expanding the child tax credit for the duration of the economic crisis, and permanent tax cuts to ease the burden of paying for health insurance, child care and a first home,” Yeganeh […]
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Deplatforming: After the mayhem on Wednesday, the president was suspended from Twitter for 12 hours and from Facebook for at least the next two weeks, but Greg Bensinger argues in The Times that the bans should be permanent. “Jan. 6, 2021, ought to be social media’s day of reckoning,” he writes. “There is a greater […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Eight months after Congress cut the first stimulus checks to help Americans absorb the shock of a pandemic-induced recession, it’s finally making plans for a second round. “We are going to stay right here, right […]
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“Healthy democracies need a division of labor between military leaders, who are trained to follow orders and win battles, and civilian ones, who are tasked with asking hard questions about why those battles are being fought in the first place,” The Times editorial board writes. “That’s why mature democracies around the world have civilians serving […]
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In a public-health crisis that is killing more than 2,200 Americans a day, it is easy enough to meet that burden. It takes a bit more effort to see, as Dr. Srinivasan argues we should, how the very existence of such forced trade-offs constitutes a form of invisible injustice, “a Sophie’s choice between self-preservation and […]
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But after this population, deciding who’s next in line arguably becomes even more complicated. One reason for that is while the first vaccines appear to at least stop most people from developing severe disease, we do not yet know if they stop people from spreading the virus — a key secondary benefit that, while possible […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For weeks now, as coronavirus case and hospitalization counts surged to unprecedented levels across the country, public health experts have been pleading with Americans to change their holiday plans. “The safest way to celebrate Thanksgiving […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For months, New York City managed to keep the coronavirus under control — until it didn’t. As coronavirus cases surge to fearsome levels across the country, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that the […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The drugmakers Moderna and Pfizer buoyed hopes for an end to the coronavirus pandemic when they announced this month that their vaccines were 94.5 percent (Moderna) and 90 percent (Pfizer) effective at preventing Covid-19, based […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The 2020 presidential election always promised to be a “historic” one, and there’s no question it delivered: More than 66 percent of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot, according to projections from The Washington Post, […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Even as Democrats were celebrating the result of the election over the weekend, it was apparent that the outcome contained for them the seeds of political disaster: Unless they effectively retake the Senate in January […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Less than 24 hours after the first ballot counts began to pour in on election night, the media and political classes had already declared a loser: polling. “Devastating for my industry” was how one Republican […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Election Day is here, and if you’re like most Americans, you are probably anxious about it. As one California voter put it to The Times: “Everyone is starting to panic.” The feeling is fairly bipartisan: […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesday, my colleague David Leonhardt wrote about the battle Democrats and Republicans are waging over voting rights. “In almost every instance,” he noted, “Democrats are trying to make it easier for Americans to cast […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Thursday, Columbia University published a study with a grim finding: Since May, as most of the aid from the $2 trillion CARES Act that Congress passed in the spring has dried up, eight million […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sitting before the 22 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday — some behind a mask, others behind a computer screen — Judge Amy Coney Barrett took pains to stress that she was neither […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Wednesday night’s debate between Senator Kamala Harris of California and Vice President Mike Pence may have been more conventional than last week’s presidential debate — not a high bar to clear — but there were […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On a spring day in the nation’s capital in 1856, five years before the start of the Civil War, Preston Brooks, a staunchly pro-slavery congressman from South Carolina, entered the Senate chamber, approached the desk […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. By now you have probably heard that the great white whale of American politics — or one of them, at least — has finally been found. On Sunday, The Times published an investigation of President […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A few days ago, a friend of mine became terrified of a tickle in his throat. He had come down with a moderate case of Covid-19 back in the spring, but five months had passed […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Gov. Gavin Newsom, standing in an ash-coated clearing scorched by the largest wildfires in California’s recorded history, last week vowed to fast-track his state’s transition to 100 percent renewable energy, a target previously set for […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Tuesday, the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca halted clinical trials of its promising coronavirus vaccine candidate, one of three in late-stage testing in the United States, after a patient developed an inflammation in her spinal cord. […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For weeks now, gleeful Republicans and anxious liberals alike have been warning that Joe Biden’s edge over President Trump is on the verge of collapsing. But eight weeks away from the election, it hasn’t: Mr. […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In October 2017, a user of the notoriously foul online message board 4chan, known as “Q,” posted a conspiracy theory that would change the future of American politics. Among the theory’s ever-metastasizing catalog of claims: […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. President Trump has never been a picture of legal rectitude — this is, after all, a man who boasted during his campaign that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters — but […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For its quadrennial convention this week, the Republican Party broke with precedent by declining to articulate a new vision for governing. Instead, the party opted to recycle its 2016 platform and declared that it “enthusiastically […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is perhaps for the best that the Democratic Party has long prided itself on being a “big tent,” since it is quickly reaching circus-size proportions. On Monday night, John Kasich, a Republican who enacted […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Deficit hawks are circling Capitol Hill again, after a period of relative dormancy during rounds of tax cuts and increased military spending. The already enormous increases in the federal budget deficit caused by the coronavirus […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a speech that many likened to a declaration of a Cold War against China. Gone, he said, was “the old paradigm of blind engagement” that had prevailed […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mere months ago, back before the campaign trail had closed down on account of plague, Joe Biden told fellow Democrats who questioned his commitment to stopping climate change to “vote for someone else.” Now, he’s […]
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This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In two landmark cases last week, the Supreme Court delivered President Trump a stinging legal defeat by ruling against his claim to “absolute immunity” from subpoenas, paving the way for prosecutors in New York to […]
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