The Note: Top Takeaways From The First Democratic Debate

As wildfires continue to burn all around Los Angeles, influencers have emerged to promote sales of their own, highly specific solutions to the crisis. With smoke filling the air of many neighborhoods, the wellness machine has sprung into action, promoting tinctures, detox products, essential oils, parasite cleanses, and even raw milk as “treatments” for its effects. The fires began in earnest on Tuesday, January 7.

It took nearly two hours into Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday for Democrats to effectively underscore the deeply alarming allegations surrounding the former Fox News host as he attempts to get confirmed as Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense. But when they finally did, Democrats came out swinging. As for Hegseth, it was his refusal to answer key questions related to those accusations—whether domestic abuse is a disqualifying factor for the job or if he’d resign if he reneged on a drinking pledge— that proved equally damning. “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?” Sen.

Jack Smith‘s final report on Donald’s Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election doesn’t contain much new information, but what timing it has. Released around 1 a.m. Tuesday—less than a week before Trump’s inauguration—the document takes aim at Trump’s and his lawyers’ contention that the end of Smith’s prosecution amounts to the “complete exoneration” of the president-elect. “That is false,” Smith writes in a letter included with report, pointing out that the cases against Trump were dismissed not because he was acquitted, but simply because he won an election. Smith makes it as clear as he can that the sole reason he dropped the January 6 case—along with the separate case regarding Trump’s attempts to hang on to classified documents he removed from the White House—was a Justice Department policy that bars prosecuting a sitting president. “The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution,” the special counsel, who resigned last week, wrote in the concluding lines of the report.

Last Thursday, as wildfires continued to blaze through Los Angeles, firefighters appeared to be no match for the deadly combination of winds and flames. But one entrepreneur in the LA suburb of El Segundo had an idea. Augustus Doricko, a 24-year-old who runs a geoengineering startup called Rainmaker, announced on X his attention to help.

On July 10, 2020, Terry Tamminen wrote a letter to the board chair of Waterkeeper Alliance, the clean-water group founded and led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to say that he wanted out. Tamminen, a veteran, highly-regarded environmentalist and co-founder and longtime board member of the organization, had become concerned about the outfit’s finances—so worried that he was tendering his resignation.

On Tuesday morning, the Justice Democrats—the group that helped usher in a wave of progressive candidates during the first Trump presidency—announced they’re actively recruiting candidates to primary centrist Democrats. The PAC, which started in 2017, became known for backing “the Squad” and other left-wing Democratic candidates, some of whom ousted incumbents with decades of experience.