You may have your favorites from Daily Kos this week, but these are the articles our staff writers picked as the ones they liked best, or stuck with them the longest, or hit them hardest emotionally, or felt were the most important. Here are the staff picks for this week.
'Dignity, not detention': Chicago nonprofit helps asylum seekers restart their lives in U.S.
“Dignity, not detention” is the basis of the work of the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants, which shelters asylum-seekers and other vulnerable immigrants in Chicago’s Marie Joseph House of Hospitality in Cicero as an alternative to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention while they try to seek protection in the U.S.
This Week in Statehouse Action: Doggo Days of Summer edition
It feels like the dog days of summer are in full effect, but I may be a little bit behind on this one. Or I’m not, depending on where you are while reading this—astronomical dog days occur at different times, depending on things like latitude and the position of the stars relative to the Earth and such.
Trump's response to California fires: We need to plug the rivers and clear the trees
Not only is Donald Trump an idiot, but it is almost impossible to concisely categorize all the myriad ways he is an idiot. … As someone who is looking at the smoke pillars from one of those fires outside my window, I can assure you that this doesn't make any more sense than you think it might. California wildfires have been made worse by viciously hot weather and by dry conditions that are arriving and persisting long past what would have been considered normal a few decades ago. Whether you attribute this to climate change or to magical weather fairies makes no difference, as the results are the same.
The Senate's quietest rock star has some very tough questions for Trump's Supreme Court nominee
Quietly and determinedly, Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii has become one of the fiercest voices among the still too-small cadre of women senators. She's doing it in the nomination hearings of all five of the committees she sits on, starting with these questions.
Democrats seize on Trump's corruption ahead of midterm: 'the fish rots from the head'
When Democrats introduced an anti-corruption plank of their "Better Deal for our Democracy" platform in May, it didn't exactly make waves. But competing headlines this week about the indictment of one of Donald Trump's earliest congressional backers, New York Rep. Chris Collins, for insider trading and the serial grifting of Trump Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross have given a new group of young anti-corruption Democrats a chance to raise their initiatives once again with the American people. The AP writes:
Transit union forces D.C. officials to scrap special treatment for white nationalists
Late last week, the Washington, D.C. transit authority floated the idea of providing reserved train cars for white supremacists on their way to what's intended to be Charlottesville 2.0—the new “Unite the Right.” Officials were quoted saying it was to prevent violence between white supremacists and counter-protesters, but seriously, give us a break here. The idea was quickly scrapped after the union whose members operate the trains said they would not enable special treatment for white supremacists:
Once a teacher, always a teacher: Elizabeth Warren's lesson of persistence for progressives
Last week at Netroots Nation in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to speak with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. A well-beloved figure among progressives and the Daily Kos community, Warren graciously agreed to give us some time before her speech to ask a few questions about her background, priorities for Congress, and what she’s most proud of accomplishing in the Senate.
The Kochs turned the GOP into a crazy train, then left the keys where any idiot could find them
The thing about a rampaging mob is that it rampages. Once it gets out the tiki torches and starts yelling “Monster,” someone’s windmill is going to burn, and steering this marching disaster can turn out to be a little trickier than it seems.
Migrant kids likely to be exposed to chemicals at military bases where gov't wants to detain them
Back in June, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced that two military bases had been chosen to house migrants who enter the United States without the required paperwork. The Pentagon said then that it would house up to 20,000 children in tents at military bases. At the time, the Trump regime’s policy of separating undocumented children from their parents had been reversed in favor or family detention.
A state struggling to get lethal injection drugs is experimenting on a man with ... an opioid?
Nevada really, really wants to execute Scott Dozier. It’s even marshaled support from 15 other states to fight for the right to execute Dozier using an untried cocktail including never-before-used fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin. But pharmaceutical giant Alvogen, which produces one of the other drugs involved, has argued in federal court that its product, midazolam, was illegitimately obtained. The court ruled for the drug company; the Supreme Court opted not to upset the district court’s decision.
Desperate Ted Cruz humiliatingly invites the man who called his wife ugly to campaign with him
Ted Cruz has long believed his U.S. Senate re-election was a given in deep red Texas (that’s trending more purple every day). But, along came Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic challenger who has relentlessly toured the state, holding one town hall meeting after another and is suddenly within striking distance of this once safe Senate seat. Enter desperate Ted Cruz, the ugliest form of Ted Cruz. The Ted Cruz most likely to make mistakes. Take for instance, the time he announced Carly Fiorina as his running mate, well before coming close to securing the nomination. We all know how that went. About as well as this victory hand thing.
A different take on the Nunes tape: He's laying the groundwork for exonerating Trump of collusion
In the leaked recordings of Trump henchman Devin Nunes speaking at a GOP fundraiser last month, Nunes lays out a pretty explicit example of what kind of collusion he says would rise to the level of illegality. In the audio obtained by The Rachel Maddow Show, Nunes paints a hypothetical scenario in which the fundraiser's host, Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, gets stolen emails directly from a foreign government and then releases them.
'But I'm a cheerleader!' SC woman tries to flex white privilege during DUI stop, fails miserably
It’s no secret that police brutality is typically reserved for folks of color, while police congeniality is reserved for their white counterparts, whether they ask for it or not. A South Carolina woman actively demanded the White Girl Treatment this weekend after law enforcement caught her blowing through a four-way stop at over sixty miles per hour.