Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law. A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept…
From left, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Melania Trump and President Trump during the opening of an anti-extremist center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May 2017.CreditCreditSaudi Press Agency Handout/European Pressphoto Agency WASHINGTON — I was having dinner here once with a Saudi muck-a-muck. Midway through the interview, he passed…
In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with…
Pieter Hanson was in the middle of a marketing exam when his phone started blowing up, buzzing and buzzing until he was convinced something terrible had happened. Too anxious to focus, he whizzed through the rest of his test, handed it in to his University of Central Florida professor and bolted into the hallway to…
It would make sense that the people most likely to believe the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford would be the ones who look like her: middle-aged, white women. But polls and even a cursory glance at cable news show this not to be the case. Fox News host Martha MacCallum said that following Ford’s…
Image: AP The steady erosion of abortion rights in the United States has been nothing if not subtle; through the last decade, a certain kind of restraint has generally been rewarded in the anti-abortion movement. Sweeping bans—at 15 weeks, sometimes earlier—tend to fail for being unconstitutional on their face. But waiting periods, counseling requirements, insurance…
Photo: AP Let’s be clear: Republicans are to blame for the fact that Brett Kavanaugh is about to become the next justice of the Supreme Court. But that doesn’t mean that Democrats don’t have anything to apologize for. Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by a string of women. The evidence of his excessive…
Photo: Melina Mara-Pool (Getty Images) In a 50-48 vote mostly along party lines on Saturday, the U.S. Senate confirmed accused sexual predator and right-wing operative Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in a lifetime appointment. The polemical vote capped a weeks-long contentious nomination process in which credible allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted multiple women while…
Jihadi rapists. Muslim invaders. Faked mass shootings. Pizzagate. Somebody browsing highly partisan websites in recent weeks could have seen articles about all of these subjects — and on the same pages seen cheerful green ads for the Girl Scouts, bearing the slogan “Helping Girls Change the World!” Such juxtapositions, documented by a Washington Post review…
Two senators considered crucial to the confirmation prospects of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh criticized President Trump on Wednesday for mocking the account of a woman who has accused his Supreme Court nominee of sexual assault decades ago. “There’s no time and no place for remarks like that,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said on NBC’s “Today”…