Tangle

On Saturday, four people — including a rabbi — were taken hostage inside Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. The small city of 26,000 people is just north of Fort Worth. A 44-year-old British man named Malik Faisal Akram was later identified by the FBI as the hostage taker. You can read today's podcast here . You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar...

Momentum to reform the Electoral Count Act is growing in both Republican and Democratic circles, a change some say would help avoid the chaos of January 6 and ambiguity about how presidential elections are decided in the U.S. You can read today's podcast here . You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and p...

Starting next year, 800,000 legal permanent residents will be eligible to vote in New York City, despite not being citizens. The measure applies to legal residents, including those with green cards, and Dreamers who were brought here illegally as children under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). These residents will not be allowed to vote in state or federal elections, but will be allo...

On Friday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases: The first was the National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor , which is a challenge to the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate that was instituted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The mandate requires employees at companies of at least 100 people to be fully vaccinated against...

If you've been reading the news recently, you have probably stumbled across some stories about Kazakhstan. The country is currently in the midst of civil unrest that has left at least 164 people dead, and more than 5,800 civilians detained. Today, we breakdown what's going on. You can read today's podcast here . You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by click...

On Friday, the latest jobs report was released, giving one final look at the state of the economy as we head into 2022. The report's numbers drew both celebration and disappointment in certain quarters, with a mixed bag of data on where things stand. You can read today's podcast here . You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our newsletter is...

Isaac sits down with former presidential and New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang. They discuss his new third-party, what he thinks will happen in 2024, and why Democrats are in trouble. You can read a transcript of this conversation here . You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Baile...

Well... Covid-19 upended my travel plans. The result is I am on an airplane today, as is my podcast editor, so we don't have anyone to produce our reading of today's newsletter. You can go read it for yourself here if you want, though. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we'll be back tomorrow with our Andrew Yang interview! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/...

At the end of the year, the child tax credit legislation that provided monthly checks that were going out to millions of parents — which Democrats passed last year — lapsed. Party leaders had expected to pass a temporary or permanent expansion of the CTC in the Build Back Better legislation, but that bill was effectively killed last month when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who Democrats needed to pass...

On December 27, President Biden signed the NDAA for fiscal year 2022 into law. The bill, which authorized $768.2 billion of spending in 2022, passed the House and Senate with overwhelming majorities (88-11 in the Senate, 363-70 in the House), with Republicans outnumbering Democrats in support in both chambers despite being in the minority. Each year, the NDAA is considered a "must-pass" bill, as i...

You can read today's podcast here . You can take the poll about Tangle we mentioned in today's podcast here . Shortly before Christmas break, Business Insider published a series that found 52 members of Congress and 182 senior-level staffers had violated the STOCK Act, which requires members and their familiey members to publicly disclose sales or purchases of individual stocks, bonds and commodit...

A quick heads up that this is our last podcast until January 3rd. Today's episode is about the House committee investigating the riots at the Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6th, which voted to hold former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress over his refusal to cooperate with the probe. The full House voted on the measure, which passed bywith a 222-to-208 vote, with jus...

On today's Tangle podcast, we sit down with Clint Watts, a counterterrorism expert who studies Russian misinformation and used to serve in the FBI. Watts has testified before Congress and is considering one of the leading experts on Russian misinformation.  You can read the transcript of this conversation here . You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by...

Isaac tells the tale of his Covid-19 diagnosis. You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and mu...

Yesterday, the West Virginia Democrat went on Fox News Sunday and all but ended the negotiations over President Biden's $1.7 trillion social spending and climate change bill plan, dubbed Build Back Better (BBB). Speaking with Bret Baier, Manchin cited rising inflation, the national debt, and the latest Covid-19 variant, and said "I can't go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can...

Trevor is on the mic today to pass along a note from Isaac, and give you the quick hits of the day. You can read today's podcast  here . You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena...

On Friday, a British court ruled that Assange could be extradited to the U.S. to face charges under the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military and diplomatic cables. These charges are tied directly to a U.S. indictment against Assange for helping former Army analyst Chelsea Manning leak thousands of U.S. military reports on Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as American diplomatic...

This week is crunch time for President Joe Biden and Democrats, who are hoping to push through Biden's $1.7 trillion social spending and climate change package before Christmas. Democrats are using a Senate process called reconciliation to pass this bill, so they don't need a single Republican vote to push it through. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), a longtime holdout, would not commit to voting for t...

Last week, news outlets in the U.S. began reporting that intelligence officials had determined Vladimir Putin was considering a "military action" in Ukraine — possibly an invasion — that could begin as early as 2022. The intelligence finding estimated Russia was planning to deploy as many as 175,000 troops and almost half of them were already present along Ukraine's border. In response, President...

Last week, a 15-year-old boy named Ethan Crumbley was charged with murder and terrorism for a shooting that killed four students and injured several more at Oxford High School in Michigan. Then on Friday, prosecutors took the unusual step of also charging Ethan's parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, with involuntary manslaughter. Karen McDonald, prosecutor for Oakland County, Michigan, says the C...

Yesterday, the Biden administration confirmed that it will not be sending the president or any other official U.S. government delegation to the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. The move is designed as a protest against China's ongoing human rights abuses, and is a notable snub given the Chinese government’s hopes to use the Olympics to enhance its public standing. But the boycott by officials...

Every now and then, I like to put together a newsletter of reader feedback on a specific edition. I do this for a few reasons: One, I think it's really interesting to let Tangle readers see the kinds of emails and replies I get. Two, I think it's important to keep sharing the opinions and views of people who aren't me. And three, I think it's important to share those opinions even — and especially...

Mississippi’s abortion law. Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , the case regarding a law enacted in 2018 by the Mississippi legislature that banned abortions if the "probable gestational age of the unborn human" was more than 15 weeks. The law had narrow exceptions for medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormalities, but no excepti...

On Monday, Jack Dorsey announced he was stepping down as CEO of Twitter, the social media website he co-founded in 2006. He is going to be replaced by Parag Agrawal, the company's chief technology officer who started at Twitter as an engineer and has been working on technologies associated with cryptocurrencies. Why it matters: Twitter is one of the most important meeting places for political mind...

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two Supreme Court rulings that have mostly defined the Constitutional right to abortion in the United States. If the state of Mississippi wins the case, depending on the nature of the justices’ ruling, it could effecti...