Author: activepulsnews
This story first appeared in The Logoff. Sign up here to get articles like this delivered to your inbox every weekday. Good evening. Welcome to the first edition of Logoff. This newsletter delivers the Trump news you need to log off and get back on with the rest of your life.There are many things going on today, but I would like to concentrate on this. Legal battles over birthright citizenship; Because the consequences will affect millions of people.What did the law say before Trump? Under the Constitution (the 14th Amendment, to be exact), nearly everyone born on U.S. soil automatically…
The Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles destroyed more than 10,000 homes, businesses, and everything inside, from bathroom cleaners to electrical wiring. Naturally, people in the Los Angeles area are reaching for their phones to see what the Air Quality Index (AQI) is saying about the air around them. But to most people's surprise, AQI was good to moderate across Los Angeles, even in the areas hardest hit by the fires. In Pasadena, the AQI fell from a high of 293 (a rating of “very unhealthy”) on January 11 to a low of 30 (a rating of “good”) the…
Joe Biden has had a rough go of things. He leaves the presidency with the worst end-of-first-term approval rating of any president since Jimmy Carter; 55.8 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance and only 37.1 percent approve, as of Friday.Biden’s legacy will take years to sort out, and I certainly think he made serious mistakes. But one of the greatest triumphs of his presidency has gotten far too little attention, including from journalists like myself. That triumph is the reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP).The phrase “reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan” feels like it was concocted…
A ban on TikTok appears to be imminent. The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that could mean the end of TikTok as it is known in the United States, and now everyone involved is in dismay. Influencers are fleeing to rival platforms such as Xiaohongshu, a China-based app also known as RedNote. Politicians are trying to delay the ban, including those who initially supported it. TikTok employees are probably wondering what they'll be doing at work next week.But some are wondering whether a future without TikTok is really a great thing for America. The complete demise of TikTok…
President Joe Biden made a surprising announcement three days before leaving office. He declared that a decades-old proposed constitutional amendment enshrining equal rights on the basis of gender is now the “law of the land.”A senior administration official told CNN that Biden has not taken any executive action, only “stating his opinion” that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is in effect. The National Archives (the federal agency that officially administers the Constitution) is bound by Justice Department precedent that says it cannot lawfully publish proposed amendments. I've said this for many years. Moreover, Donald Trump will soon take office and…
President Joe Biden on Friday commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes, setting a record for issuing more individual pardons or commutations than any other U.S. president. In December, Biden also commuted the sentences of 1,500 people who were released from prison during the pandemic and subsequently placed on home arrest, as well as 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates. These developments highlight how important pardon powers actually are, the last possible remedy when the criminal justice system incarcerates too many people and punishes them too harshly. .But all this happened after Biden…
On Friday, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a federal law that effectively bans social media app TikTok in the United States unless the platform's China-based owners sell it. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch disagreed somewhat with the rationale of the unsigned majority opinion, but no justices dissented.Additionally, all three lower court judges who heard the case TikTok v. Garlandagreed that the law should be complied with. In other words, no judge has ruled that the law is unconstitutional.Nevertheless, it's unclear what this decision will mean for TikTok and its users in the long term. Congress passed a law banning…
Wildfires are a concern here in California. It is still unclear to what extent Los Angeles' devastating fires were caused by gross mismanagement by the city and state governments, and what actions the city and state governments should and have not taken. Many new details are still emerging. It is clear that the city and state have failed. State insurance price regulations force homeowners to forego good private insurance and enroll in state insurance programs of last resort, shifting the responsibility to all homeowners in the state and devastating them. is on the verge of bankruptcy. The reservoir, which was…
One of the main reasons Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election is the Biden administration’s record on immigration and the border — polls show it ranks up close with inflation among the top issues that drove swing voters to Trump. And the recriminations about how Democrats got so out of step with the public on this issue are well underway. Part of the story, as The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma and others have written, involves a badly wrong electoral theory that held that support of unauthorized immigrants was key to winning over Latino voters. And part of it is the…
Donald Trump did not win the 2024 election — the Democratic Party lost it.So argues Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO and author of the highly influential Substack, Weekend Reading.Podhorzer’s recently published newsletter on how Trump “won” — he insists on those quotation marks — garnered lots of attention among Democratic insiders. In it, he explains that America didn’t “shift rightward” in 2024 but “couchward.” American voters’ “basic values or priorities” did not become more conservative. Democrats lost merely because turnout among “anti-MAGA” voters collapsed.Podhorzer does not pair his diagnosis of the Democrats’ woes with any detailed…