Opinion

In the latest blow to the integrity of the science used by government agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dismissed nearly all of the members of its Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC) this week. The board, which reviews and advises EPA’s internal research departments on their scientific methodology, was already understaffed.

In October 1969, a national security official named Daniel Ellsberg began secretly photocopying 7,000 classified Vietnam War documents. He had become increasingly frustrated with the systematic deception of top U.S. leaders who sought to publicly escalate a war that, privately, they knew was unwinnable.

This month, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will join gay pride marches in cities big and small. In many cities, pride marches are controversial. In some – like Moscow – they are even banned. But for many people in North America, parts of Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, attending the local pride march has become an unremarkable ritual of summer.

President Donald Trump doesn't actually want to be president, said Politico columnist Jack Schafer on Thursday, he really wants to be the White House communications director, a position the administration has left unfilled since Michael Dubke walked off the job in May.

You may have mocked claims about the existence of paid protesters as just another lie from the right. As it turns out, at least on this one issue, they’re actually telling the truth. The problem is, the right neglected to mention those paid protesters are part of the right-wing apparatus.

Obstruction of justice was among the articles of impeachment drafted against both Presidents Nixon and Clinton. The parallel between Nixon and Trump is almost exact. White House tapes revealed Nixon giving instructions to pressure the acting FBI director into halting the Watergate investigation.

We are currently passing through an ugly crisis in our history, one of the ugliest in recent times. At the center of this crisis is a president who acts like a bratty child, who delights in rubbing salt in the wounds of the people he insults, who blurts out anything that comes into his head, who makes accusations without a shred of evidence — let alone proof — and who ridicules any who dare to question his words and deeds.

With his recent statement of intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change, separating us exceptionally from the other 195 states which signed it, President Trump has promoted the project, started in the campaign season, of turning America from an exceptional nation, leading the free world, to an ordinary, unexceptional country, single-mindedly chasing its own, narrowly defined interests.

Like Valerie Castile, I’m mad as hell.

In the emerging American dystopia, reaching for the gun has become the order of the day. From Ferguson and the militarizing of police equipment, through the execution-style killings in Charleston, through the uniformed immigration dragnet bringing fear to 11 million undocumented residents, to serial executions in Arkansas, to Trump’s April speech to the NRA convention, the demons of the American propensity for “violence first” are fully out of the shadows and running rampant in the land. And the Trump administration wants to double down on its real and symbolic commitment to violence in its proposed defense budget.

In just a few short months, the Trump wrecking ball has pounded away at rules and regulations in virtually every government agency. The men and women the president has appointed to the Cabinet and to head those agencies are so far in sycophantic lockstep, engaged in dismantling years of protections in order to make real what White House strategist Steve Bannon infamously described as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”