Get in on this scandal on the ground floor
If you’re looking for a Sunday longread, we have a story up today that dives deep into the chemical weapons attack in Douma in spring 2018. It attempts to sort through the propaganda to find out what happened there, how it unfolded, and how that maps with how it was reported.
There isn’t much to recommend presidential campaigns, but there’s at least one nice feature: it’s the time in our political cycle when fresh ideas get tested out, and if the public responds, those ideas have a chance of becoming reality. I hope that’s the case for child care for all, which was floated today in the New York Times by Katha Pollitt.
If it comes, it’ll probably come too late for me -- my youngest is 3, so bound for pre-K soon (which should be universal, too). For millions of families, child care is an excruciating burden. The concept of a federal job guarantee has picked up steam lately, and I’d love to see the ideas married. Training people to be part of a national corps of child care workers would have all sorts of ancillary benefits, too. Here’s Pollitt’s argument in the Times. All of it is pretty green, too.
And if you want in on a scandal at the ground level, I’ve got one for you: Sheldon Adelson, in the brief window between AG Jeff Sessions and AG William Barr, and in the midst of a government shutdown, got a memo issued that effectively bans online gaming, the main competitor to his casinos. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this story. Here’s Rachel Cohen in The Intercept on it, and watch this line of questioning by Rep. Jamie Raskin to see where it’s probably headed.