Most corporate media outlets have depicted President Biden’s effort to win Senate confirmation of Neera Tanden as a battle to overcome Republican hypocrisy about her “mean tweets,” name-calling and nasty partisanship. But there are very important reasons to prevent Tanden from becoming the Office of Management and Budget director. They have nothing to do with her nasty tweets and everything to do with her political orientation.

Tanden has a record as one of the most anti-progressive operators among Democratic Party movers and shakers. Long enmeshed with corporate elites, she has been vehemently hostile to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. Progressive activists have ample cause to be alarmed at the prospect of her becoming OMB director -- one of the most powerful and consequential positions in the entire Executive Branch.

Yet some leaders of left-leaning groups have bought into spin that carefully ignores Tanden’s fervent embrace of corporate power and touts her as eminently suitable for the OMB job. Media coverage has been a key factor. The newspaper owned by the richest person on the planet, Jeff Bezos, is a good example.

For Palestinians, exile is not simply the physical act of being removed from their homes and their inability to return. It is not a casual topic pertaining to politics and international law, either. Nor is it an ethereal notion, a sentiment, a poetic verse. It is all of this, combined.

The death in Amman of Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, an intellectual whose work has intrinsically been linked to exile, brought back to the surface many existential questions: are Palestinians destined to be exiled? Can there be a remedy for this perpetual torment? Is justice a tangible, achievable goal?

The cornerstone of every social structure is its belief system, and those who control and benefit the most from the system have one primary job: Keep its myths and scapegoats viable.

That explains the emergence, in recent weeks, among right-wing politicians and media hacks, of a truly bizarre and unexpected scapegoat: the evil windmill!

In the wake of the winter storm that shut down the Texas power grid and deprived much of its population of electricity, warmth and drinkable water, these hacks and pols have been desperate to divert public awareness from basic facts, such as the utter failure of the state’s deregulated power grid to winterize and remain functional in difficult weather, and — ultimately far worse — the looming ecological collapse caused in large part by ongoing fossil fuel extraction and consumption.

With all the media hoopla last week about the Perseverance rover, frequently unreported was that its energy source is plutonium—considered the most lethal of all radioactive substances—and nowhere in media that NASA projected 1-in-960 odds of the plutonium being released in an accident on the mission.

“A ‘1-in-960 chance’ of a deadly plutonium release is a real concern—gamblers in Las Vegas would be happy with those odds,” says Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Indeed, big-money lotteries have odds far higher than 1-in-960 and routinely people win those lotteries.

Further, NASA’s Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for the $3.7 billion mission acknowledges that an “alternative” power source for Perseverance could have been solar energy. Solar energy using photovoltaic panels has been the power source for a succession of Mars rovers.

Miriam Vargas walked into First English Lutheran Church on June 29, 2018 and was sheltered by the church in sanctuary from a deportation order issued by  Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE).

Nearly 1000 days later, on February 23, 2021, she walked out of the ICE office in Westerville, Ohio freedom. Due to a memo send to ICE on January 20, 2021 from the Biden administration, priorities were set to deport only undocumented individuals that were aggravated felons. 

Previously, the Trump administration determined that all undocumented and documented immigrants were subject to deportation.

Miriam is currently in no danger of removal.

Miriam is now under an Order of Supervision (OSUP) which is a way that ICE can keep tabs on immigrants before immigration court hearings.

According to Ms. Vargas' immigration attorney, Jessica Rodriquez Bell, the benefits of the OSUP are that Miriam Vargas can leave the sanctuary of the church without the threat of deportation. She is required to report weekly to ICE via telephone to document where she is located.

She can also apply for and obtain a work permit and legally obtain a driver’s licence.