Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) will resign from Congress amid a controversy over his spending habits, Politico reported Tuesday. In a statement to Politico, the congressman said he will resign effective March 31. “I do this with a heavy heart,” reads the statement. “Serving the people of the 18th District is the highest and greatest honor I have…
A lipid panel is one of the most basic blood tests in modern medicine. Doctors use it to measure cholesterol levels in their patients, probably millions of times each year. This is not a procedure where some hospitals are really great at lipid panels and some are terrible. There’s just not space for quality variation:…
In Dec. 2014, president Barack Obama nominated Colleen Bell—a soap opera producer—as the country’s next ambassador to Hungary. Before Bell’s confirmation vote, Obama’s 2008 Republican rival, senator John McCain, took to the Senate floor. “I understand how the game is played,” McCain protested, “but [Hungary] is on the verge of ceding its sovereignty to a…
And so, a little over a year after the last debt ceiling hike melodrama, in allowed the US kicked the can on its maximum borrowing capacity was extended until, well, know, and in the meantime total US public debt rose to $18.149 trillion… … the soap opera with the self-imposed borrowing ceiling on America’s “credit…
Republican senator and presidential maybe-hopeful Lindsey Graham stopped by the “politics and pies” forum in Concord, New Hampshire, today, where he announced that if he is elected president in 2016, his first act will be to deploy the military in Washington to force Congress to reverse cuts to the defense and intelligence budgets. Yes, you heard…
Sen. Lisa Murkowski was knee-deep in the starting ceremony for the world-famous Iditarod dog-sled race on Saturday in Anchorage when her phone blew up. On the other end of the line was Sen. Tom Cotton, eager to recruit as many Republican senators as he could for a letter to Iran’s leadership that would soon anger…
by Melody Kramer Published Mar. 10, 2015 8:00 am Updated Mar. 10, 2015 1:01 pm How do you convince people to care about a local, municipal primary election in a city with historically-low voter turnout? That’s the question KPCC’s managing editor Kristen Muller posed to science reporter Sanden Totten as they were planning KPCC’s coverage of the…
A letter from U.S. senators suggests the lawmakers “not only do not understand international law, but are not fully cognizant of the nuances of their own Constitution,” says Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Kyodo /Landov hide caption itoggle caption Kyodo /Landov A letter from U.S. senators suggests the lawmakers “not only do not understand…
You may have heard that the internet is winning: net neutrality was saved, broadband was redefined to encourage higher speeds, and the dreaded Comcast-Time Warner Cable megamerger potentially thwarted. But the harsh reality is that America’s internet is still fundamentally broken, and there’s no easy fix. An Economy Built on Wires When I say “fundamentally…
Wikipedia is suing the NSA over surveillance programs that involve tapping internet traffic en masse from communications infrastructure in the U.S. in order to search it for intelligence purposes. The lawsuit argues that this broad surveillance, revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, violates the First Amendment by chilling speech and the open exchange…