Favorite Following the vote last week by the Federal Communication Commission to unwind the net neutrality rules enacted during the Obama administration, House Republican lawmakers received an email from GOP leadership on how to defend the decision. The email was shared with The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy. Net neutrality is the principle that…
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Will Freshman Congressman Ro Khanna Chart a New Course for Democrats?
Favorite Freshman California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna rode to an upset victory this past November over long-serving California Democrat Mike Honda on a wave of Silicon Valley support. Among his prominent backers stood titans of the tech industry such as Yahoo executive Marissa Mayer and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg — as well as Peter Thiel, the…
Donald Trump May Escalate the Afghanistan War He Spent Years Calling a “Terrible Mistake”
Favorite The Trump administration is reportedly weighing a proposal to send thousands of more troops to Afghanistan, an escalation of the longest war in U.S. history. This would be a significant about-face from Trump’s public position in the years prior to his presidency. In 2015 he declared that invading Afghanistan in the first place was a…
Jimmy Carter and Bernie Sanders Explain How Inequality Breeds Authoritarianism
Favorite On Monday night, one day after the far-right Marine Le Pen lost France’s presidential election but garnered a record number of votes for her political party, Bernie Sanders and Jimmy Carter sat down together to discuss rising authoritarianism across the globe. The two spoke at the Carter Center, in a discussion that was streamed online. Asked by…
Six Ways the New York Times Could Genuinely Make Its Op-Ed Page More Representative of America
Favorite The New York Times defended hiring former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens — a writer who has promoted climate denial and bigotry against Arabs — by insisting that it is seeking diversity of thought. Public Editor Liz Spayd responded to readers’ complaints about Stephens by writing that the Times is looking “to include a…
Bush Already Tried Trump’s Proposed Corporate Tax Holiday and It Was a Total Failure
Favorite As part of its radical but still mostly undefined tax plan, the Trump administration proposed a tax holiday for corporate earnings stored overseas. Reporters have been hearing on background that the tax rate would be slashed from 35 percent to 10 percent. But judging from the last time it was tried, most of the cash Donald…
Members of Congress Demand Trump Provide Legal Justification for Syria Attack
Favorite Nearly three weeks after ordering a cruise missile attack against one of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s airfields, Donald Trump has yet to explain how that was legal without congressional authorization. Two Democratic members of Congress are demanding that Trump offer some sort of legal justification beyond off-the-cuff remarks from administration officials. Sen. Tim Kaine…
Republican Candidate Opposed to Gun Registry Made Millions With Company Slated to Build Gun Registry
Favorite “Your name, your address, your guns — in a big government computer,” the narrator of Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte’s TV ad says as a computer screen shows an imaginary “national gun registry.” Then Gianforte, declaring his support for the Second Amendment, raises a rifle and shoots the computer screen to bits. The…
Republicans Sell Access to Congressional Staffers, Flouting Cardinal Ethics Rule
Favorite Congressional Republicans are baldly enticing donors with the promise of meetings with senior legislative staff, effectively placing access to congressional employees up for sale to professional influence peddlers and other well-heeled interests. Documents obtained by The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy show that the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional…
Donald Trump Expected to Pick Shadow Banker for Key Position at the Fed
Favorite The Federal Reserve’s vice chair for supervision is arguably the most important financial regulator in the federal government. No agency has greater oversight responsibility of U.S. financial institutions than the Fed. And the vice chair influences what kinds of trades those institutions can make, how they must prepare for unexpected losses, and what punishment…