Amy Davidson/New Yorker:
Then again, why would this Republican Party want to block Pruitt? This is the other answer: the senators pushed him through because they wanted to, for their own non-Trump reasons. He is, in many ways, more typical of where many congressional Republicans stand than Trump is, though Pruitt might express his views more crudely and with fewer circumlocutions than some. His ties to industry are, in many cases, their ties to industry, too. (Jane Mayer has covered the influence of the Koch brothers, for example, in this regard.) When Ryan talks about dismantling the regulatory state, he is not far from Pruitt. Indeed, when asked about the influence of human activity on climate change, Ryan has said that he just didn’t know what it all added up to, “and I don’t think science does, either.” In a statement that Ryan issued in December, 2009, he accused certain scientists who did recognize the effect of using “statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” He added that any rules restricting American industry in the name of fighting climate change would be a “tough sell” in Wisconsin, “where much of the state is buried under snow.” Similarly, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, tends to deal with climate change by saying that he is not a scientist. In the opportunistic calculations of the congressional Republicans, Pruitt may not even count as a price they have to pay, or a Trumpian burden to bear. To the contrary: he is their reward.
The Hill:
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Friday accused President Trump's senior adviser Steve Bannon of being "a stone cold racist and a white supremacist sympathizer."
Jeffries on Friday told MSNBC that any meeting between Trump and the Congressional Black Caucus must exclude Bannon.
Charles P Pierce/Esquire:
Steve Bannon's lips didn't even move. I think he was drinking a glass of water.
How many more of these whackadoo performance pieces does he have to present before somebody throws sand in the gears? If four Republican senators—say, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, and Susan Collins—would agree to caucus with the Democrats under Chuck Schumer, the whole thing would grind to a halt until we could catch our breath and see if we really want to live in the madhouse of this president*'s mind for the next four years. Bold speeches in Munich and chest-thumping on Twitter won't cut it. It's put up or shut up time.
And, please, for the love of god, ye editors and news directors throughout the land, enough with the expeditions into the heartland to talk to people who helped bring this down upon themselves and on us. These folks have nothing new to say. They voted their id and their spleen and they're still on a high from that. Some guy in a café in Dubuque wants to say that he voted for this president* because he "tells it like it is," or because he thinks the steel mills are coming back? Can you watch that rally in Florida and believe that these opinions have any real merit?
Bruce Y Lee/Forbes:
Our society is woefully under-prepared for a bad pandemic. This was obvious in 2009 when I and Shawn Brown, PhD, Director of Public Health Applications at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), were embedded in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to use our computational models to help with the national response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. People in HHS were working very hard each day to mobilize the national response. However, the external resistance that they encountered was troubling. Many external parties put their own individual or business interests in front of national security and were reluctant to share information. Some of the general public questioned whether the pandemic existed and even raised a number of conspiracy theories. Fortunately, the virus was not as harmful as initially thought and the world was spared real disaster. Was the H1N1 pandemic a wake-up call for society? Not really.
Science:
He looked at his list of abstracts and did the math. Purchasing the papers was going to cost $1000 this week alone—about as much as his monthly living expenses—and he would probably need to read research papers at this rate for years to come. Rahimi was peeved. “Publishers give nothing to the authors, so why should they receive anything more than a small amount for managing the journal?”
Many academic publishers offer programs to help researchers in poor countries access papers, but only one, called Share Link, seemed relevant to the papers that Rahimi sought. It would require him to contact authors individually to get links to their work, and such links go dead 50 days after a paper’s publication. The choice seemed clear: Either quit the Ph.D. or illegally obtain copies of the papers. So like millions of other researchers, he turned to Sci-Hub, the world’s largest pirate website for scholarly literature. Rahimi felt no guilt. As he sees it, high-priced journals “may be slowing down the growth of science severely.”
Paywalls for science articles are a tremendous rip-off. Scientists are beginning to fight back.
Jonathan Cohn/HuffPost:
To hear President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans tell it, Obamacare has been a disaster, even for those who obtained coverage through the law. [Maryann] Hammers has a very different perspective. She’s a freelance writer and editor, which means she has no employer-provided insurance. In the old days, if she’d gone shopping for a policy with her cancer diagnosis, she would have struggled to find a carrier willing to sell her one. …
These days, something else looms even larger in her mind — the possibility that Trump and the Republican Congress will repeal the health care law without an adequate replacement, or maybe with no replacement at all.
“I’m terrified — isn’t that crazy?” Hammers said. “My biggest source of stress right now isn’t the fact that I have incurable cancer. It’s the prospect of losing my insurance.”
Sabrina Tavernese/NY Times with an illustrative piece:
Are Liberals Helping Trump?
Jeffrey Medford, a small-business owner in South Carolina, voted reluctantly for Donald Trump. As a conservative, he felt the need to choose the Republican. But some things are making him feel uncomfortable — parts of Mr. Trump’s travel ban, for example, and the recurring theme of his apparent affinity for Russia.
Mr. Medford should be a natural ally for liberals trying to convince the country that Mr. Trump was a bad choice. But it is not working out that way. Every time Mr. Medford dips into the political debate — either with strangers on Facebook or friends in New York and Los Angeles — he comes away feeling battered by contempt and an attitude of moral superiority.
“We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ”
He added: “I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”
In response: 3. No, liberals are not helping Trump. 2. The world does not revolve around conservative whites 1. There is still an excellent point buried here about not shaming Trump voters.
Axios:
The 10 biggest leaks of the Trump presidency
As President Trump pointed out, his biggest problem has quickly become a leaking administration.
A grain of salt: Obama had major leaking problems too. Like in 2012, shortly after his re-election, when officials leaked to the New York Times that the then-President had authorized secret cyber attacks on Iran. Or Edward Snowden in 2013, the guy whose name has become synonymous with government whistleblowers.
Yael Abouhalka:
KANSAS’ TAX-CUT NIGHTMARE IS ALMOST OVER. YOUR MOVE, BROWNBACK
In lightning speed, the Kansas Senate on Friday passed the much-needed bill to kill the worst parts of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax-cut package from 2012.
Congratulations to the Legislature for approving a fairer, improved tax policy to help restore greatness to the Sunflower State.
Brownback should not veto this measure. If he wants, he can let it go into effect without his signature. Then he can rail against it all he wants.
The governor — who has dragged the state into fiscal hell — must acknowledge that the people have spoken. The House and Senate members who are closest to the residents of the Sunflower State decided this week that the tax-cut nightmare has to end.