Morning Reads

Good morning! Here’s your daily digest of news and the headlines of the day, compiled by BillMoyers.com’s John Light. (You can sign up to receive Morning Reads daily in your inbox!)


“Enlightening” –> Eight Republican candidates debated on the main stage last night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Moderators sought to focus their questions on the economy and foreign policy, but… Ron Fournier at National Journal: “Don­ald Trump was a con­des­cend­ing, nar­row-minded brag­gart who dis­missed the gov­ernor of Ohio like a bil­lion­aire to a bum: ‘I don’t have to hear from this man.’ In oth­er words, the fourth GOP pres­id­en­tial de­bate was as en­light­en­ing as the first three.”

The NYT calls out a bunch of misleading statements in its fact check. NPR offers a succinct summary, Slate’s Joshua Keating has  the 10 “looniest” foreign policy lines, and Mother Jones the seven best moments. Also, this: The password set up by the Republican National Committee for reporters to access wi-fi in the debate press room was “StopHillary” (via Mediaite).

Lobbying on the airwaves –> Lobbyists for Navient, a student loan company that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is investigating for allegedly cheating and exploiting its borrowers, aired ads on the Fox Business Network during the debate painting the CFPB “as a roomful of bureaucratic automatons mercilessly stamping ‘DENIED’ on loan applications, beneath Soviet-style banners depicting CFPB’s director, Richard Cordray, and its principal architect, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.” (Created after the financial crisis, its actual purpose is to investigate predatory lenders and abusive financial practices.) Lee Fang reports for The Intercept.

More spending for Rubio –> A super PAC — called “Baby Got PAC” — is throwing its support behind Marco Rubio wth an ad casting him as “the candidate most feared by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” It’s financed by multibillionaire John Jordan, an investor and winery owner who likes to help script and film the ads his PACs run. Time‘s Zeke J. Miller has more.

Fight for $15 –> Paul Davidson at USA Today: “Fast-food workers demanding a $15-an-hour minimum wage walked out in hundreds of cities Tuesday, kicking off a campaign to muster the political power of 64 million low-wage workers in next year’s presidential election.” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders joined them at a rally in Washington, DC, writes Nadia Prupis at Common Dreams.

Get me rewrite –> Obama announced support for legislation to rewrite the Civil Rights Act to include language barring discrimination “on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.” Congress is unlikely to consider the legislation, but “President Obama’s support elevates the question of whether lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans need greater legal safeguards.” Juliet Eilperin at The Washington Post has details.

Frightening milestone –> We’ve warmed the world by one degree Celsius. Scientists have warned policymakers that after two degrees, climate change will become far more dangerous and much harder to reverse.

Half full or half empty? –> The Guardian’s Damian Carrington reports that renewable energy accounted for almost half of new power plants last year. That’s good news considering where we were, but not considering where we need to get. The transition is moving too slowly, writes Stanley Reed at the NYT.

Concentration of power –> “Gaius Publius” argues at Hullabaloo that we’re blurring the line between for-profit corporations and universities: “You see it in the way the CEO class and university presidents tend to think like each other, mimic each other’s preferences, serve each other’s interests — and sometimes be each other — as they move from one wealth-serving job to another.”

One bad way to balance the budget –> A new report from the Institute for Justice suggests that during lean economic times, law enforcement tends to take more of peoples’ things through a controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture, “which lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted — and in many cases, even charged — with wrongdoing.” Christopher Ingraham reports for The Washington Post.


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