2018 was one of the richest years in recent film history, and Oscar voters had their work cut out for them selecting the nominees. Their choices are eclectic - I'm still pissed Bradley Cooper wasn't nominated for Best Director for A Star is Born - but they reflect the evolving ...read more
Throughout the film's first hour, McKay plants the seeds for conservatism’s rise. Cheney meets Roger Ailes as a young congressional staffer; Antonin Scalia before he became a Supreme Court justice; and even a drunken George W. Bush (a hilarious Sam Rockwell) crashing a Christmas ...read more
Last month, the North Carolina Board of Elections unanimously refused to certify the election of Republican Congressman-elect Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by about 900 votes. Harris, the only representative not to be seated when the new Congress ...read more
Last November, The Guardian revealed Julian Assange met with Paul Manafort at the Ecuadorian Embassy, shortly after Manafort had been appointed to run the Trump campaign in the spring of 2016. Assange has vociferously denied these claims, calling Guardian reporters Luke Harding ...read more
(Photograph courtesy of Michael Rozman/Warner Bros.) As of this writing, the Oscars still do not have a host, but Hart is campaigning to get the job back. His first step was to sit down with Ellen DeGeneres on her daytime talk show for an interview. Appearing with one of the most ...read more
After incumbent Wisconsin governor Scott Walker lost re-election to Democrat Tony Evers last November, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a controversial bill stripping key powers away from both Evers and incoming Attorney General Josh Kaul. Under the new rules, ...read more
The 2017 Women's March drew at least five million attendees worldwide and was one of the most galvanizing moments of the Trump presidency. However, recent controversies over the anti-Semitism of the movement's four major organizers - Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and ...read more
Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke is a rising star in the Democratic party and has gathered steam as a contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Perhaps threatened by his ascension, Bernie Sanders militants have relentlessly attacked him, claiming amongst other things that he ...read more
2018 has been a year of trauma for the United States, which is why for my final article this year, I want to end things on a positive note - with Barack Obama appearing on the final Hamildrop, Lin-Manuel Miranda's series of Hamilton covers. I've made no secret of my love for ...read more
During a rant about immigrants last week, Tucker Carlson told his audience that accepting them into the United States would make the country "poorer and dirtier and more divided." He blamed Democrats for telling people like him to "shut up and accept this." Since then, 20 ...read more
In a bombshell report released yesterday, The New York Times revealed that Facebook allowed companies such as Netflix and Spotify to harvest its users' data without their consent, potentially violating their 2011 Federal Trade Commissions agreement. Over the past few years, ...read more
Few people in the Trump Administration are as loathsome as Stephen Miller, or, as Pod Save America's Jon Lovett calls him, "the C+ Santa Monica fascist." With the exception of Trump himself, he is more responsible than anyone else for crafting the immigration policies that have ...read more
Over the past few years, the Banter has intermittently covered internet troll HA Goodman, a case study in what happens on the political fringes in America. Goodman originally wrote hundreds of articles claiming Hillary Clinton would be indicted. Since then, he has evolved (or ...read more
Maria Butina, the alleged Russian spy who posed as a gun rights activist to court influence among Republicans, will plead guilty today for conspiring to violate Section 951 - the federal statute referred to by the DOJ as "espionage-lite" - during the 2016 election. She has also ...read more
In his latest book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Stephen Greenblatt analyzes the Bard's most power-hungry characters. The book never mentions Donald Trump by name, but it is easy to see the parallels between our president and the characters ...read more
For its 2018 Person of the Year, Time Magazine has selected a group of journalists who have faced prison time, put themselves at great risk, and, in some cases, given their lives for reporting the truth. Billed as "The Guardians and the War on Truth," they include the staff of ...read more
Over the past few weeks, Paris and France at large have been rocked by the gillet jaunes ('yellow vests'), who have taken to the streets. The protestors were ostensibly motivated by French President Emmanuel Macron's fuel tax, that puts disproportionate stress on rural French ...read more
Last night, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft announced that he has launched an investigation into outgoing Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley, claiming that Hawley hired campaign staffers to run his office while using taxpayer dollars. Hawley ran for Attorney ...read more
Despite the Democrats' massive victory in the 2018 midterms, Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania - the three states that decided the 2016 election - are determined to hold on to power by any means. The GOP's bid to maintain power is so extreme they are willing ...read more
Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office released both a sentencing memo and a heavily redacted addendum regarding former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn. He recommended a "sentence that does not impose a term of incarceration," because Flynn cooperated ...read more
Young Turks journalist David Sirota is known for stirring division within the Democratic Party. Throughout 2015 and 2016, he dedicated most of his reporting to attacking Hillary Clinton while showering Bernie Sanders with praise, despite receiving criticism for failing to ...read more
This week, outgoing Congressman Beto O’Rourke said he would not rule out running for president in 2020. While a tantalizing prospect, should Beto run, he may be missing an opportunity to build something else far more powerful in the long run.... To continue reading this article, ...read more
Professor Elizabeth Midlarsky had her office at New York's Columbia Teachers' College vandalized with Nazi swastikas this week. She also found the Jewish slur "Yid" painted on her office door. Midlarsky, who has applied her training as a clinical psychologist to the field of ...read more
According to tax records obtained by The Daily Beast, the NRA's income dropped $55 million, from $367 in 2016 to $312 million in 2017, ending in the red for the second year in a row after spending a substantial amount to elect Donald Trump. The lack of revenue comes from a ...read more
