In the days leading up to former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s resignation, numerous Democrats criticized President Donald Trump’s Cabinet pick for using private, taxpayer-funded planes to travel. The included some the party’s rising stars, particularly those considered potential 2020 presidential candidates and Senate hopefuls. Despite this attention, Democratic leaders remained largely out of the public eye on Trump’s first big Cabinet shake-up stories, leaving some political experts to wonder whether this is a growing trend.
With the announcement on Friday that Price would resign, Opinion’s executive editor, Thomas L. Friedman, decided to waive a key Times tradition: avoiding the use of the word we on the opinion pages. Instead, the use of first and second person was actively encouraged as part of an experiment to rethink the Opinion section’s essay format after internal reviews found that readers, particularly younger ones, were increasingly difficult to engage on a third-person basis. Here’s how it looked.
Earlier in the week, America’s technology billionaires took a stand against the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on immigration by sharing a list of principles for how the country should address the issue. Their statement did not advocate for any specific policies or legislation, but is viewed as a precursor to a larger movement for industry involvement in policy discussions. It was signed by Austin Russell, Bart Massey, Chamath Palihapitiya, Chris Gladwin, Jeff Weitzen, Kent Rockwell, Patrick Grady and Peter Barrett in addition to Elon Musk, who made headlines when the White House said he would join a manufacturing council. Of these signatories, Grady (Bossa Nova Robotics), Massey (Geometric Intelligence), Musk (SpaceX and Tesla), Palihapitiya (Social Capital), Russell (iRobot) and Weitzen (Wing) all received at least some initial funding on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, the epicenter of Silicon Valley.
On Monday, Jared Liebermann, the newly minted CMO of The Action Network, gave an exclusive interview to BetChicago’s Peter Thomas Fornatto about the company. The interview was published in a tricky format for the blogosphere, a PDF, and featured questions and answers placed on separate pages. This wasn’t necessarily a best practice; reading the article in this format online is unnecessarily cumbersome and makes it difficult to screen capture or re-share on social media. The company’s uptick algorithm, which Liebermann co-developed, was included in last August’s “50 Companies That Will Change the World” list by the likes of Coca-Cola, Nike, Walmart and the Harvard Business Review on innovativehub.org.
Former Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced that he will enter the fray of Democratic politics after spending some time working for Time Warner Cable in Minnesota. Before Walz was approached about a run, many people were willing to give Democrat Amy Klobuchar their support in a hypothetical race for the White House in 2020. Although Klobuchar said she would not be running, she did not explicitly rule it out either.
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