The letter includes 11 incumbents, four incoming freshman and one candidate, Ben McAdams of Utah, whose race has not been called… Pelosi’s critics had been trying for weeks to garner 20 signatories on their letter. They fell short of their own goal by four names — five if McAdams is excluded. Still there’s no denying the gravity of the predicament before Pelosi. And simple math suggests that the minority leader will have to cut some sort of deal with her critics.

Pelosi has to project total and complete confidence that she will reclaim the gavel, even if she’s still working out the math… But Pelosi’s public dares for opponents to enter the race against her aren’t necessarily feints. She knows that having a direct challenger when the Democratic caucus votes for a speaker-designee would only improve her overall chances of returning to the position she lost eight years ago.

…the anti-Pelosi crowd doesn’t have a candidate to be, well, for. The only person considering the race is Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, although she has given no indication of where she is leaning. If Fudge says no, it’s very hard to imagine any other Democrat challenging Pelosi. But, her detractors would argue, that is beside the point. Because, unlike past failed insurrections against Pelosi, they aren’t trying to beat her in the Democratic caucus vote — where Pelosi will need only a simple majority of the 232 or 233 Democrats elected to the House. They are trying to beat her in the floor vote for speaker.

The Green New Deal is a brilliant turn of phrase that succinctly summarizes a vastly complex policy platform intended to save the world, and it is a policy that will surely rise in prominence in the lead-up to the 2020 election… Unless mankind does something truly revolutionary in the next ten years and dramatically changes our entire economy to not be reliant on fossil fuels, the planet will become incredibly hostile to life in twenty years…

[The Green New Deal], though daunting, is one that climate experts say governments must take on to avoid the most destabilizing and existentially threatening impacts of climate change. One of those experts is Dan Lashof, the director of the World Resources Institute, a global environmental-research organization. Like others, Lashof warns that federal policymakers are running out of time to craft a national strategy for dismantling the fossil-fuel economy.

…this idea that we’re going to mobilize some carbon army to insulate nearly every building in the country isn’t going to work. The scale of the work to be done, the granularity of the decisionmaking process (which house should be dealt with in which manner?) isn’t suited to central direction from Washington to 329 million people. The very idea itself is an import from Europe. more specifically, from my native Britain. It’s an idea that doesn’t travel well.

We know that people will disagree with this decision and appreciate their perspective. This is a controversial issue. There are many strong views as it relates to lands that have been the subject of historic and intense disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. Airbnb has deep respect for those views. Our hope is that someday sooner rather than later, a framework is put in place where the entire global community is aligned so there will be a resolution to this historic conflict and a clear path forward for everybody to follow.

Airbnb blacklists Jewish apartments in Judea and Samaria – not Palestinian apartments, not apartments in Turkish occupied Cyprus, in Moroccan occupied Sahara, not in Tibet or the Crimea. Airbnb’s policy is the very definition of anti-Semitism. No one should use its services.

The Israeli NGO Peace Now said, “Even if the Green Line is invisible to Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] and [Education Minister Naftali] Bennett, the rest of the world distinguishes between Israel and the occupied territories. “Airbnb is still choosing to support our economy, just not the government’s controversial pet settlement project,” Peace Now said.

The recent inadvertent revelation that Assange has been charged with one or more crimes by the Justice Department was welcome news to anyone who believes that leakers like him threaten both this country’s security and the peace of nations. What WikiLeaks reminds us is that the naivety of liberals — with their slogans about the value of transparency and their meliorist faith in the redemptive power of technology — is as valuable to America’s enemies as the crimes of right-wing torture apologists.

If Assange can be prosecuted merely for publishing leaked classified documents, every single media outlet is at risk of prosecution for doing the exact same thing. There would be no way to differentiate a traditional media outlet such as The New York Times or The Atlantic from an entity like WikiLeaks without involving the government and the courts in the formulation of a legal definition of what qualifies as a part of the press. Is it only a traditional outlet like a newspaper or a television network? What about legal bloggers who do freelance work? Or how about online-only platforms? Is one more deserving of First Amendment protection than the other?

Granted, there’s a lot that’s unknown here. And with the charges against Assange under seal, that may be the case for quite a while. But, in the meantime, here’s something to keep in mind: You can dislike Assange. You can consider him unethical — a far cry from journalists who apply a rational filter in publishing governments secrets. You can be disgusted by the political effects of his publishing the Democratic emails. But it would be a mistake to confuse any of that with what’s ultimately good for press freedom in the United States.

…conservative pundits are trying desperately to cast free college and student loan forgiveness as some kind of boogeyman. But they’re right to be desperate. The current system is indefensible, especially if someone as unqualified and inexperienced as DeVos can step in and destroy what minor relief efforts already exist.

The fatal flaw of universal student-debt cancellation is that it’s not, in fact, progressive. It mostly benefits the upper middle class. “Education debt,” as Sandy Baum and Victoria Lee of the Urban Institute have written, “is disproportionately concentrated among the well-off.” The highest-earning quarter of the population holds about half of all student debt, according to Baum and Lee. Which means that universal student debt cancellation would be a giant welfare program for the bourgeoisie.

Significant student debt forgiveness could be part of a grand restart in which Washington rips up the old higher-ed finance system and starts fresh, perhaps with some kind of tuition-free college program, accreditation reforms to weed out scam schools, sane loan limits, and a better approach to managing repayment. (Even in countries with free college, students still often take out loans to pay living expenses.) Beyond that far off possibility, there are already multiple student-loan forgiveness mechanisms in place that badly need to be fixed, and left-leaning politicians could get to work on now.

“Why would the government ban the cigarettes that I prefer, while the estimated 78 percent of non-Latino, white smokers who prefer non-mentholated cigarettes are allowed to keep on puffing?” he wrote, adding that a cigarette ban should not be applied unless all cigarettes were banned… Proponents, however, argued that banning menthol cigarettes is actually an anti-racist policy—a way to combat the tobacco industry’s racist marketing strategies. “Cigarette companies know that most African-American smokers prefer menthol cigarettes and they exploit this preference in their marketing efforts to African Americans, in general, and to African-American kids, in particular,” the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids wrote in a memo that compiled research on the subject.

The Food and Drug Administration’s naive plan to ban menthol cigarettes will lead to countless unintended consequences, including increased youth smoking, especially in minority communities, where a ban would spark illegal markets reminiscent of the days of alcohol prohibition. Kids could easily buy loose cigarettes stored in sealed baggies with unwrapped menthol cough drops. The FDA has failed to enforce its own rules. Consider the agency’s inability to prevent youth use of e-cigarettes, despite an outright federal ban.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned child-friendly flavors in cigarettes in 2009, it didn’t include menthol cigarettes. That was unfortunate because, like cherry and mocha, menthol hides the harsh taste of tobacco and as a result is popular with young and underage smokers. The FDA is expected to right that wrong this week by proposing to ban menthol cigarettes altogether, while also imposing new restrictions on the sale of flavored e-cigarettes at gas stations and convenience stores.