Reading List: December 6, 2016
It’s been four weeks since Donald Trump became president.
Jim Naureckas of FAIR takes issue with Aaron Blake’s column for the Washington Post blaming Clinton’s loss on millennials.
Whoa, wait — ”Clinton’s 55–36 margin among those ages 18 to 29″? Yep, Clinton won among voters under 30 — the Millennials, basically — by 19 percentage points. Blake doesn’t spell it out, but this is the age group that delivered by far the biggest margin for Clinton. The next-best cohort for Clinton was those aged 39–44, who picked her by a 10-point margin. This is in sharp contrast to the 45–64 and 65+ age groups, who voted for Trump by margins of 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively.
The Dakota Access Pipeline may have been halted, but as Kelly Hayes reports over at Truthout, the battle is just beginning.
As long as there is money in this pipeline, there’s a good chance oil will follow. I have heard numerous arguments to the contrary, and would of course prefer for one of those arguments to prove true. Some believe that the pipeline will be rerouted, as the Army Corps of Engineers again hinted was possible(a “victory” that would be wholly incomplete, as the movement’s goal is to “kill the black snake,” not resituate it). Others have pointed out that the contracts that have kept the project funded are set to expire in the near future. But history has taught us that the Army Corps’ efforts to placate Water Protectors have no substantive value. The idea that this struggle might be resolved by a reroute effort rings hollow after so many months of dangled hopes and ongoing police violence. This administration has taken no concrete action to stop the pipeline, and has once again kicked the can down the road — this time into the hands of the Trump administration.
Speaking of the Trump administration, they plan to open Native American lands up to oil exploration, Reuters reports.
Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves.
Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.
Finally, Matt Taibbi reviews Thomas Friedman’s latest book for Rolling Stone.
No modern writer has been lampooned more. Hundreds if not thousands of man-hours have been spent teaching robots to produce automatedFriedman-prose, in what collectively is a half-vicious, half-loving tribute to a man who raised bad writing to the level of an art form.
We will remember Friedman for interviewing 76 percent of the world’s taxi drivers, for predicting “the next six months will be critical” on 14 occasions over two and a half years (birthing the neologism, “the Friedman unit”), and for his unmatched, God-given ability to write nonsensical metaphors, like his classic “rule of holes”: “When you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”
Enjoy your day everyone.