Politics Features

Jason Ravnsborg just won’t quit. In the 647 days since he fatally struck a man with his car, Ravnsborg, South Dakota’s attorney general, has faced near-endless calls to go away –– from county sheriffs and police groups, Republicans and Democrats, in letters to the editor and on billboards. A poll …

Heat-seeking cameras that see you in the dark, sometimes even through walls. Firepower and vehicles for “dealing with crowd management security and potential civil disturbances.” “Specialized crime scene mapping technology,” encrypted radios, and data-collection software for “gathering intelligence and enhancing surveillance.” Using federal funds earmarked for Covid-19 relief, these and …

One by one, the witnesses described the stench, a rancid odor that befouled the air and ruined your clothes, made you close your windows in the summer and run from your car into church on Sundays lest you bring that smell into God’s house. They talked about undrinkable tap water …

Cori Bush never wanted to be a politician. She watched her dad, a mayor and city councilman, work long, thankless hours doing it. Instead, she became a nurse, a pastor, and later, an activist in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown. It was in Ferguson that Bush …

WASHINGTON — Senator Bernie Sanders was well on his way to winning the Democratic Party nomination … and then black voters had their turn. It began with Joe Biden‘s decisive victory in the South Carolina primary, where a strong turnout by a predominantly black electorate performed life support on Biden’s …

Sharon Lavigne knows some 30 people who have died in and around her tiny parish of St. James, Louisiana, in just the past five years. She buried two close friends this past weekend — one died of cancer, the other heart disease. Two of her brothers have cancer, and her …

For the last eighteen years, the United States has done nothing but lose wars in the Middle East. That’s what made the 2014 – 2019 campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria so exceptional. The Pentagon actually accomplished the mission it set out to accomplish. Mosul and Raqqa …

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of our federal government and its response to climate change. While most of Washington has been woefully neglectful of the crisis or outright denying its existence, what is arguably our most conservative institution — the U.S. military — has begun taking the …

Everyone laughed at Ross Perot. If the biggest third-party threat to the presidency since the Bull Moose Party hadn’t existed, late-night comics would have invented him. In the early nineties, when Perot took on Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush for the presidency and became a political phenom, Perot impersonations …

Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton didn’t make the debate stage this week but he’s been pushing bold policy proposals about mental health during his campaign for the presidency. Moulton’s advocating for a 511 national mental health hotline, pushing mental health as an essential part of basic health care, advocating for regular …