Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives. The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration…
Image by Jim Cooke Realistically, there is only one way out of our predicament. We know that we live in an age of staggering economic inequality. The top 10% of earners now take in nearly half of all our national income, a portion that has been rising steadily since the Reagan era. Meanwhile, the average…
On inauguration day in DC, the souvenir business was slow. I asked a vendor wearing a huge Bob Marley hoodie while hawking Trump hats and scarves and keychains whether he might not have had better luck selling Obama gear, and he shrugged. “It’s too late.” But he also said: “Tomorrow.” Tomorrow! You lie and I…
If the very worst happens, it won’t be because we didn’t know that it might happen. We have all been amply warned. We’ve been warned of the many disturbing parallels between Donald Trump and Hitler. We’ve been warned that the rise of Trump resembles the rise of other authoritarian populist demagogues. We’ve been warned—by Donald…
Image by Jim Cooke Last week, I asked people who voted for Donald Trump to write in and explain why they made that choice. They did! We got dozens of emails from Trump supporters telling us why they voted the way they did, and I have grouped selections of them into general categories…
WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials. They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence —…
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with…
President Obama’s administration has an unfortunate record of prosecuting whistleblowers, some of whom have been important sources for journalists. That’s not a legacy any president should want. In the waning days of his administration, the president can turn that around, not entirely, but in an important way by pardoning the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden…
Evidence suggests that a Russian intelligence group was the source of the most recent Wikileaks intel dump, which was aimed to influence the U.S. election. Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands…
American politicians constantly speak of the middle class. Democrats, Republicans and even many independents all insist their policies defend it. But what does it really mean? This question is rarely asked. What exactly is the middle class? A new study suggests that the U.S. hardly even has one. More than half of Americans — 56…