Gary D Cohn is director of Trump's National Economic Council; Steven Mnuchin is Secretary of the Treasury; Jared Kushner is Trump's son-in-law and Ivanka Trump is Trump's daughter, who converted to Judiasm: not one of them has said anything in public about Trump's bizarre rant in which he said that not all the Nazi marchers in Charlottesville were bad and some were "very fine people." Read the rest
Robert Kuttner is a veteran left-wing reporter who writes for the left-leaning American Prospect; while he was on vacation, Steve Bannon's assistant tracked him down and asked him if he'd talk to Bannon. Read the rest
HB 214 signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott [R], bans abortion coverage from all public and private health insurance plans, and mandates that abortion insurance be sold as a separate product to women who are concerned that they'll need an abortion in future due to risks to their lives, unplanned pregnancies, unviable pregnancies, or rape-related pregnancies. Read the rest
Last January, the alt-right website Daily Caller ran a post called "Here's A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road," in which drivers endangered the lives of protesters while Ludacris's "Move Bitch" played in the background: the post was syndicated to a Fox websites and many other outposts of the right-wing media. Read the rest
Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes released this study in 2015, comparing the outcomes for students enrolled in online charter schools with comparable students (controlled for grade level, gender, race/ethnicity, free lunch eligibility, English language status, special ed status and historical state achievement test scores) in brick-and-mortar classrooms. Read the rest
During the heyday of the Standing Rock demonstrations, Republican state lawmakers across America introduced laws that would legalize murdering protesters with your car; now that a white supremacist terrorist has murdered an anti-Nazi protester with his car, these lawmakers are letting it be known that they won't back down from their proposals. Read the rest
Yesterday, Merck CEO Ken Frazier quit Trump's advisory council and today the CEOs of Intel and Under Armor joined him, which raises the question: why were these guys on the advisory council for an avowed white supremacist who campaigned on a platform of racial discrimination against Mexicans and Muslims? Read the rest
Jose writes, "I was offended by Trump's speech to the Boy Scouts. It's a slippery slope and seemed so reminiscent of the past. I synchronized Adolf to deliver Trump's remarks to show how close we are to repeating the past. It's an ode to Chaplin's City Lights and The Great Dictator." Read the rest
Donald Trump represents the eminently foreseeable outcome of Reagan's Republican bargain: welding together a coalition of racists and religious fanatics with the finance sector and its lobbyists, making two groups who had spent a century cordially loathing each other into one. Read the rest
Only two people on the 30-seat FCC advisory panel come from city governments and have experience overseeing telcoms regulation; the other 28 members are executives, consultants, lobbyists and think-tankies from the telcoms sectors. Read the rest
Buzzfeed presents a long (and somewhat rambling) data-driven look at the recent history and current state of Facebook's hyper-partisan news (AKA "fake news") bubble, tracing the money, growth areas, declines and personalities behind what's possibly the cause or the effect (or both) of today's political chaos. Read the rest
Erik Prince is the creepy-rich war criminal/ex-CIA agent who founded Blackwater and put John Ashcroft in charge of its ethics department (no, seriously), whose rap-sheet includes reckless, corrupt, murderous, genocidal violence, conducted with near-total impunity. Read the rest
Foxconn has wrung a promise of $3 billion in corporate welfare from the state of Wisconsin, but even that is no guarantee that it will open a factory there, even if it swears up and down that this is in the cards. Read the rest
In 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services barred nursing homes from forcing their residents into accepting binding arbitration agreements, insisting that nursing homes that engaged in neglect, physical or sexual abuse should be subject to legal consequences: but then the Trump administration killed the rule, giving a sweet gift to the giant nursing-home lobby and the Chamber of Commerce. Read the rest
Trump's Secret Service detail's command-post is no longer leasing high-priced office-space in Trump Tower; now they operate out of a portable trailer on the sidewalk somewhere nearby, having vacated after a dispute over the high rents levied by the Trump Organization. Read the rest
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of a Nobel prize in economics, describes the foolishness of enacting further tax cuts for the wealthy in America, and the structural impediments that stand in the way of Trump's pursuit of this foolish goal. Read the rest
Writing in Politico, Jeff Flake -- the junior Republican Senator for Arizona -- writes that the Republican Party is "in denial" about the extent to which trumpism (and its precursor, which he says is was the obstructionist movement to block Obama's agenda) has destroyed the GOP's brand of conservatism. Read the rest
