Good morning from Cora Currier, temporarily the entirety of The New Republic’s Los Angeles bureau. It’s still dark out as I write this, darker than it will be at this hour next week, once standard time kicks in. I learned from Timothy Noah that I can thank Big Candy for the fact that we change from daylight savings to standard in early November and not late October, and maybe also blame them for depressing voter turnout some years as discombobulated, cranky voters struggle to the polls. Though since this year November started on a Monday, and turnout was actually quite high, this cannot enter into the myriad attempts to understand why the Democrats lost Virginia. (California voters actually decided to stop switching between standard and daylight saving back in 2018, but we still do because lawmakers haven’t figured out if we should spring forward or fall back. Which feels like some sort of metaphor?)

No vote yet on budget or infrastructure in the House, though Nancy Pelosi thinks it might happen today. Among the things being hammered out until late last night were the reconciliation bill’s immigration provisions. It’s long been unclear whether the Senate parliamentarian will let anything immigration-related stay in; previous proposals have been deemed not budget-related enough. House Democrats are now considering a measure that would give undocumented immigrants who came before 2011 five-year work permits, a form of “parole” that shields them from deportation.

In other news: The Justice Department sued Texas over its new voting law, charging that it violates the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act because it would “disenfranchise Texans who do not speak English, people with disabilities, older voters and those who live outside the United States,” per The New York Times.

Once again, Greta Thunberg tells it like it is: The COP26 climate summit, she said, is “sort of turning into a greenwash campaign, a P.R. campaign.… We are so far from what actually we needed.” (Related: Kate Aaronoff’s latest dispatch from Glasgow for TNR, about how the White House is praying the private sector will take the wheel.)

I’m also reading this great investigation at the Los Angeles Times into the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s relentless stops and searches of Latino bike riders. “It’s just another version of stop and frisk,” one activist said.

And something more, uh, over-the-horizon: A Pentagon watchdog released its investigation into the U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, in Kabul, during the withdrawal in August. The Air Force inspector general determined that, while a child did appear on the surveillance video feed minutes before the missile was launched, there were no violations of law or wrongdoing on the part of the people involved in the strike. What had happened was “confirmation bias,” the I.G. said: “When you go, ‘That is a suspicious person,’ every activity they take thereafter, you start seeing it through that lens.” It’s rare that the U.S. government even admits to killing civilians, let alone gives this much information about its investigation. I spent several years as a national security reporter on the drone beat during the Obama administration, and would often have to call up the National Security Council press person when there was a reported civilian casualty in Afghanistan or Yemen or Somalia. No matter how detailed the allegation, they almost never confirmed it. The implication was that they had the feeds, the metadata, and the intel to say whether someone was a child or a military-age male, while the journalists and human rights investigators—even when they were on the ground—did not. The August strike got this level of scrutiny because of its timing as a capstone to the occupation, and because it happened in Kabul, not the hinterlands. There’s still time to correct the record on many others. There have been very few airstrikes in Somalia under Biden, and the U.S. Africa Command recently said it had no open casualty reports. “With this spare capacity,” the Airwars monitoring group wryly noted, Africom “could of course review the many dozens of locally reported civilian harm events in Somalia from 2009–2017, which under its previous commanders were all denied.” It’s a thought! 

Today at NewRepublic.com, we have Maya Wiley on how Glenn Youngkin actually talked about education on the eve of the Virginia election: For all the Republicans’ cynical scaremongering on critical race theory, Wiley writes, Youngkin actually connected with parents’ dissatisfaction. Terry McAuliffe didn’t, and Wiley (a candidate for high office herself earlier this year, of course) has thoughts about what Democrats can learn. Matt Ford explains why Biden’s vaccine mandate for businesses could technically be described as a “testing mandate with a vaccine exception”—and why OSHA is hoping a conservative Supreme Court will agree. Julian Epp has a fascinating essay on what climate change augurs for corn tasseling, his old summer job and “one of the only forms of genetic engineering performed by children.” And finally, rare good news from the Sold Short desk: NYC taxi drivers won debt relief.

Cora Currier, contributing editor, Sold Short

Yesterday’s political question: How many Republicans have been elected governor of Virginia since Reconstruction, and how many are still living?

Answer: Six, of whom four are still living. The first, Linwood Holton (1970–1974), died on October 28 at age 98. Holton broke the Democrats’ 84-year stranglehold on the governorship and dismantled Virginia’s “massive resistance” to desegregation. The others were John Nicholas Dalton (1978–1982), who died at age 55 of lung cancer; George Allen (1994–1998); James Gilmore (1998–2002); Bob McDonnell (2010–2014); and now Glenn Youngkin, who under Virginia’s constitution cannot run for reelection in 2025.

Today’s question: Just to really emphasize the fact that this is the weekend you need to reset your clocks, if you still have any: Can you name the states that stick with one time all year? And for each state, do you know if it’s daylight saving or standard time?