Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Reading archive 2017-02-07

Ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump

Sam Waterston: The danger of Trump’s constant lying

Trump is a boy’s idea of a man

Why You Need Less Noise for Work and Your Health

Republican lawmakers face rising anger at town halls

GOP gets bolder in breaking with Trump

Bannon flies close to the sun

New Documents Show Trump Retains Direct Tie to Businesses

Trump’s loose talk about Muslims gets weaponized in court against travel ban

How to Build an Autocracy: The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism. - Over the past generation, we have seen ominous indicators of a breakdown of the American political system: the willingness of congressional Republicans to push the United States to the brink of a default on its national obligations in 2013 in order to score a point in budget negotiations; Barack Obama’s assertion of a unilateral executive power to confer legal status upon millions of people illegally present in the United States—despite his own prior acknowledgment that no such power existed.

Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.

The popular uprising that threatens the Betsy DeVos nomination

The provocative faith of Lady Gaga

‘I shot dad’: The tragic case of a child who killed his abusive, neo-Nazi father

Monday, February 6, 2017

Reading archive 2017-02-06

Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles

Donald Trump Says ‘Negative Polls Are Fake News’

As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

Why Melissa McCarthy Had to Play Sean Spicer

Sean Spicer Must Be Taking His Suit Advice From Donald Trump: Specifically, from Trump’s 2005 book “Think Like a Billionaire.”

ADDITIONS TO THE FIVE JOURNALISTIC “W”S

Conway used 'Bowling Green massacre' days before MSNBC interview

Cancel dinner plans. Send ‘nerd prom’ to the history books.

Obama got the Pentagon’s medal for distinguished public service, and Sarah Palin didn’t like it

George Will on leaving Fox News: ‘It’s their toy’

The Trump administration has sprung a leak. Many of them, in fact.

Hundreds of people showed up for a town hall with California's Rep. Tom McClintock, and things got intense

Mike Pence’s awkward — and telling — response to whether the U.S. is ‘morally superior’ to Russia

President Trump is now speculating that the media is covering up terrorist attacks

How to be an American: Syrian refugees find a home in Trump country

Former top diplomats, tech giants blast immigration order as court showdown looms

President Trump’s simplistic, illogical worldview, in one tweet

The White House and Fox join forces to undermine anti-Trump protests as violent and fake

We’re having the wrong argument about GMOs

Friday, February 3, 2017

Reading archive 2017-02-03

The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence: He's trampled on the rights of women, LGBTQ folks and the poor. Then there's the incompetence. Meet, quite possibly, the next president - During my travels across the self-proclaimed Crossroads of America, I learned that Mike Pence had once paid his mortgage with campaign funds, dragged his feet during an HIV epidemic and a lead-poisoning outbreak, signed an anti-gay-rights bill that nearly cost Indiana millions of dollars, lost his mind on national TV with George Stephanopoulos, and turned away Syrian refugees in an unconstitutional ploy laughed out of federal court. And he ended his gubernatorial term unpopular enough that his re-election bid in a Republican state seemed dicey at best.

How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind: Self-Care Lessons for the Resistance

Trump's 'Voter-Fraud' Investigation Targets States That Opposed Him: The White House says an inquiry into baseless claims of illegal voting will spare states that voted for the president.

America’s Leading Authoritarian Intellectual Is Working for Trump

Donald Trump’s Excuse for Gutting Wall Street Regulations Is Hilariously Flimsy

What CEOs say happened in Trump’s closed-door meeting with big pharma

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner worked to sink LGBT order: Members of the religious right with ties to the Trump administration say they have been led to believe that some changes will still be coming.

Trump’s Enemies Within: The president has awakened the slumbering beast that felled presidents before him: the federal bureaucracy.

Will This Man Take Down Donald Trump?: They’ve been squaring off for years. Now New York’s attorney general is emerging as the leader of the Trump resistance.

A special warfare unit was spotted flying a Trump flag in public. Now the Navy is investigating.