Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border….
Cathartic musings on a legal pad, a trip to the basement, and a eureka moment all led Cohen, Trump’s disgraced former lawyer, to a moment of public triumph. February 28, 2019 1:33 pm Michael Cohen is sworn in to testify before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Capitol Hill. From J Scott…
Photo: C-SPAN (Twitter) Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib may have been the last lawmaker to question Michael Cohen during today’s mind-numbingly long hearing before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, but it ended up being absolutely worth the wait. After initially offering a basic overview of Cohen’s testimony, and the allegations of crimes committed by President…
Photo: Alex Brandon (AP) During today’s House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made Michael Cohen a stepping stone, focusing her questioning instead on what the committee needed to know. In doing so, she effectively made a list of the Democratic majority’s next targets. Ocasio-Cortez’s Republican colleagues attempted to make the…
GOP Sen. Thom Tillis said on Monday that he will support a resolution to block President Trump national emergency declaration on the U.S.-Mexico border. “I would vote in favor of the resolution disapproving of the president’s national-emergency declaration, if and when it comes before the Senate,” Tillis wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. Tillis’s decision comes…
Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP You know who got a hefty pay increase between 2017 and 2018? The banks! According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s 2018 Q4 report, more than 5,400 federally insured banks made $236.7 billion in profits last year, and saw a $72.4 billion increase in profits from 2017. Per the Hill, $28.8…
The strong boy.Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images) “It’s not going to change a damn thing,” the President of the United States told an assemblage of news anchors at an off-the-record White House meeting some weeks ago. “But I’m still doing it.” To a certain extent, that groaning is just standard Trump shit—his signature all-caps triumphalism…
The news has been so batshit this week that we almost forgot to tell you there’s a new tell-all book from a pissed off former Trump staffer! This dude’s name is Cliff Sims and he was a communications aide — you know, when the comms department wasn’t quite as much of a wasteland as it…
Of all the disagreements that drove President Trump and then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis apart, one of the most perilous had to do with blowing up Iranian boats. “Why don’t we sink them?” the president would ask. Acting on an obsession that went back to the campaign, Trump repeatedly asked his national security team for plans…
Photo: Susan Walsh/AP If you’re new on the job and your boss is a tyrannical creep who yells at you that you’re fucking everything up, you could be a personal assistant in Los Angeles. Or you could be President Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who, according to Axios, appeared to have gone…