The Day’s Reading, 1/13/17

3 min readJan 14, 2017

Happy weekend to all of my friends. Let’s go hack some politicians.

2016 — 2020

Corey Robin, n+1, The Politics Trump Makes — a hopeful note that maybe, maybe, if we can survive four years of Trump, a better world may be coming

Ezekiel Kweku, MTV News, Obama’s Mistake

Immigration

Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, In remarkable exchange with undocumented mom, Paul Ryan exposes cruelty of Trumpism — there’s more here as well because it’s a morning round-up post

Healthcare

Mike DeBonis, The Washington Post, It will only get harder for Republicans aiming to repeal Obamacare

Hacking

David Weigel, The Washington Post, Some on the left want Democrats to move on from Russian hacking

Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, Donald Trump’s team is running a misdirection campaign on Russian hacking

Del Quentin Wilber, Los Angeles Times, Democrats are irked with FBI director after briefing on Russian hacking of election

Piss

Danica Kirka and Paisley Dodds | AP, The Washington Post, British ex-spy behind Trump dossier seen as a cool operator

Associated Press, The Washington Post, Peskov: alleged author of Trump dossier unknown to Kremlin — wouldn’t that be … a good thing for a secret agent man?

China

Adam Taylor, The Washington Post, Taiwan was already diplomatically isolated. Now Beijing wants to make it worse.

Nominations

David Dayen, The Nation, Ben Carson Doesn’t Have Much Interest in the Agency He Will Run — I’m not fully ready to declare Carson the dumbest brain surgeon in history, but he’s profoundly unqualified for this job, at least, and he never should have accepted the nomination

Kate Aronoff, In These Times, Either Rex Tillerson Lied Under Oath, Or He Doesn’t Understand How Fossil Fuel Subsidies Work — he’s quibbling with the word disingenuously because he can’t leave behind an entire lifetime of using whatever tools he has at his disposal, lying being among the tamest of them, to make money for Exxon

Jonathan H. Adler, The Washington Post, A reassuring choice for deputy attorney general — I was hoping for explanation, not a copy/paste of his resume.

Workers

Geoffrey Mohan, Los Angeles Times, California farm labor board chairman quits in anger — Gould takes shots at everyone, including the UFW.

Emoluments

Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, Will Trump Avoid a Constitutional Crisis? — the argument Trump’s lawyer made at the press conference, that he shouldn’t be expected to tear down his life’s work or whatever, is transparently ridiculous. He chose to run for President. He did not have to do that. Nobody required him to submit to this particular Constitutional rule. Trump and his whole team can eat a hot bucket of garbage dicks if they want to whine about the unfairness to a billionaire who decided on a lark that he wanted to run a country for a while.