Don’t smile because it’s over. Cry because it happened! In this final episode of Positively Dreadful, host Brian “Maverick” Beutler answers listener’s questions with the help of his trusty producer copilot, Emma “Rooster” Illick-Frank. It’s less of a goodbye than a see you later—so don’t unsubscribe from the feed! Brian shares what he wants listeners to take away from the show, explains his theory of politics, and reminisces about that one time he skewered John Boehner with a well-worded...

After a three-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans will have to begin repaying their student-loan debt this month. And after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in June to strike down President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program, mass relief probably won’t come anytime soon. Biden has adopted other, narrower programs, and may try to salvage a Plan B for broader forgiveness. But in the meantime, millions of Americans are financially unprepared to start making payments again,...

We have every reason in the world to try to stop climate change. But when it comes to geoengineering––lacing the atmosphere with particles to block the sun’s warming effect––experts are split on whether the intervention would create more problems than it would solve. At this rate of global warming, though, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which humans won’t eventually try it out. Inadvertently, we’ve already piloted the method through air pollution. Is the geoengineering genie already out...

At the start of the pandemic, China built a 1,500 room hospital in 5 days. In the United States, things don’t tend to go that way. We’re notorious for our boondoggles, cost overruns, and the slug-like pace it takes us to complete relatively small projects. It’s given rise to a debate over why we so often suck at building stuff, and what we should do to get better at it. Is the problem red tape that ultimately cripples projects or falls victim to abuse? Is it that powerful interests have a...

A few weeks ago the left-wing writer and critic Freddie DeBoer published an essay in New York magazine, in which he argued that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become “just a regular old Democrat now.” The piece described left-wing dissatisfaction with AOC’s record in Congress as an outgrowth of a larger left-wing disaffection with U.S. politics, and concluded the Democratic Party is simply structurally resistant to socialist change. DeBoer generated a lot of warranted counter-criticism, but...

Last week, Pod Save America interviewed former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. An early and critical endorser of Donald Trump, Christie has now broken with his Republican contemporaries to wage a staunch never-Trump presidential campaign. So far, he’s the only candidate that has both qualified for the first GOP debate and demonstrated that he’ll attack Trump directly. Some PSA listeners were upset with our choice to give Christie a platform, but what does it really mean to give someone...

The runaway favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination will soon be under felony indictment in three, or maybe four jurisdictions, but most leading Democrats are withholding comment on Donald Trump’s mounting legal problems. Joe Biden has reportedly ordered his campaign and the Democratic National Committee to keep quiet about it, even as Republicans work overtime to try to muddy Biden’s far more ethical record of conduct. Why aren’t Democrats doing more to emphasize character...

Whatever you think of recent, watershed Supreme Court opinions, it’s indisputable that the court’s six Republican appointees are deeply out of step with the will of the public—not to mention the entire institution was constituted without public consent. But should anything be done about it? The Court’s architects think everything is wonderful and will claim any criticism of the justices represents some kind of subversive attack. But even good-faith critics can’t agree on an answer. Some...

President Biden cut a deal with House Speaker McCarthy to increase the national debt limit. Or, more accurately, he defused the Republican threat to default on the debt and tank the economy if Democrats don’t accede to their policy demands––at least for the next few years. Many pundits have said Biden “won” the debt-limit fight, that he didn’t concede any more than he would’ve during the regular government-funding process, and that he achieved some semblance of bipartisanship. But that stands...

Shortly after the Coast Guard kicked off its rescue mission to find the OceanGate submarine, one of the company’s founding advisers posted the following message online: “I hope to get a few hours of sleep, wake up and see very positive responses from the U.S. government in my Inbox. If I don’t, the whole world will know the names of the people who did not do their jobs.” It’s the latest example of powerful “disruptors” who got rich touting high-minded libertarian principles about innovation...

Donald Trump recently marveled that talking about trans rights whips his supporters into a frenzy far more effectively than economic issues like tax cuts do. He and other Republican leaders are (thus!) intensifying attacks on trans kids, banning health-care procedures and trying to separate them from their parents. The politics and discourse in some parts of the U.S. have left families with trans children little choice but to pack up their belongings and move to more welcoming places....

This week, just as Donald Trump was placed under arrest and arraigned for stealing and concealing troves of state secrets, House Republicans advanced a resolution to censure Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who’s been one of their main boogeymen since the early days of the Trump administration. The resolution, which failed Wednesday afternoon, is best viewed as a diversionary tactic, and an attempt to pin Trump’s legal woes on Schiff, who was instrumental to Trump’s first impeachment and...

If the debt limit fight was any indication, President Biden appears to be minimizing setbacks, pausing his forward-looking policy agenda, and focusing on the stuff he enacted last Congress. But is that the best he can do? After all, low-hanging fruit remains within reach of his executive power. No one expects the president to spend the next 17 months bombarding the political world with executive orders. But it’s worth asking what he’s capable of doing in theory, and why he isn’t doing those...

In the past few years, the Republican politics of crime and racial scapegoating have given way to the outright glorification of vigilante killers like Kyle Rittenhouse, Eddie Gallagher, and most recently, Daniel Penny. Last week, Penny choked a Black street artist to death for the crime of being mentally ill on a New York subway. In response, Ron DeSantis called him a “Good Samaritan” and said America has his back. Why has this trend taken hold? Is it new? And, most importantly, to what end?...

The World Health Organization and U.S. government have declared an end to the COVID-19 public health emergency. And it’s not hard to understand why: the herd got pretty immune. As great as it is that fewer people are getting sick and dying, memory-holing COVID has perverse consequences for people who are suffering from long-term effects of the disease. What happens to them now? Is there any progress towards a cure? And is the back-burnering of COVID-19 slowing that progress down? These...

Joe Biden released his first re-election campaign video and it was…actually good. Instead of touting minimum wage or Medicare protection, Biden characterized this election as a fight for freedom––the freedom to choose when to become a parent, to be an out and healthy trans person, and to safely inhabit schools and other places of learning. It’s a big move considering Republicans have had a near monopoly on emotionally resonant rhetoric for the last 40 years. So what will Biden’s “freedom”...

Clarence Thomas has been accepting lavish gifts from a Republican mega-donor for almost as long as he’s been on the Supreme Court, while disclosing none of it. Or rather, he initially disclosed some of it, but stopped when reporters got wise to the relationship. Meanwhile, his real-estate tycoon patron, Harlan Crow, has had business before the Supreme Court, and Thomas did not recuse himself. Since these revelations came to light, Thomas has shown no indication of remorse, or that he’ll...

Republicans in the Tennessee assembly expelled two of their colleagues for joining a protest for new gun laws at the state capitol after a nearby school massacre. And the whole stunt blew back at them righteously. The country saw a party that responded to a mass shooting by exerting maximum punishment on gun control supporters and their democratically elected colleagues (but only the Black ones). What’s happening in Tennessee might be remembered as a clarifying moment when voters had to pick...

Donald Trump got arrested and the world didn’t end. The fear of backlash that seemingly paralyzed so many of our institutions of accountability now seems mostly like a figment of the imaginations of the people who run those institutions. What took so long? Some of that is attributable to corruption, to former Attorney General Bill Barr and other Trump loyalists who ran interference for him while he was president. But some of it looks more like cowardice. People were anxious about doing...

A social media app is causing a bipartisan furor in U.S. politics, and it’s the one where young people make funny dance videos. Because TikTok is owned by the China-based company Bytedance, Congress is concerned the platform is more of an espionage front than an entertainment medium. TikTok at least theoretically allows China to collect private data from Americans, sow division in U.S. society for geopolitical gain and even inundate U.S. users with propaganda to influence our elections. On...

Silicon Valley Bank failed and it remains to be seen what unintended consequences we may have unleashed by bailing it out. What’s clear, though, is that SVB’s risk exposure could probably have been detected and its failure prevented, and SVB’s richest, most powerful depositors tried to whip up a broader banking panic in order to build pressure on the government to save them from their poor decisions. They warned of everything up to civilizational collapse if the government didn’t announce...

Let’s talk about the movies. A bunch of factors have contributed to the shrinking of the movies and the Oscars in recent years. The film industry itself has changed. Streaming services have become fixtures in most households. COVID-19 happened. Social media wrecked everyone’s attention span and came to compete with every other kind of media for what was left of that attention span. Social media also tribalized the collective experience of movie watching and entertainment awards. It has tended...

D.C. is not a state. At least not yet. The District is allowed to govern itself in some ways, but its laws are subject to veto authority by the federal government. All that forms the backdrop for a big dust up surrounding a lengthy effort by the city council here to update the city’s janky old criminal code. What would ordinarily be a technical, local issue turned into a multifaceted political fiasco for the city, the mayor of Washington, the people of Washington, Democrats in Congress, and...

The train derailment in East Palestine, OH, created a state of uncertainty over how severe the contamination is and the risks posed by acute and chronic exposure to the chemicals that spilled and combusted. At the same time, we’re living through a period of scientific and industrial history that seems to drown us in information about what is and isn’t toxic. And it feels like all of us, not just residents of eastern Ohio, ought to have a clear sense of which products and pollutants pose real...

After a train crash pumped toxic chemicals into East Palestine, OH, Republican Party leaders wasted no time trying to turn tragedy into partisan outrage, alleging an elite liberal conspiracy against the white working class. Republicans have gotten really good at acting livid about everything from train derailments to gas stoves to migrant caravans, which leaves us all drowning in their culture war fights. How do the flashpoints of those culture wars arise? To what extent are they organic...