Leid Stories – 01.04.16

Happy New Year! The Follies Are Still With Us!
The new year has barely begun, but not so the follies; the insanity continues. Leid Stories highlights a few headline-grabbing stories that prove that illustrate the point—including Trump’s media triumph; the Bill and Hill presidential twofer; why Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential runs should still matter (but don’t); and how an armed militia takeover of federal land and property in Oregon is being treated as a peace movement … with lots and lots of guns.

Fracking Town’s Desperate Laid-off Workers: ‘They Don’t Tell You It’s All a Lie’

From the looks of it, the nation’s boomtown is still booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks like a dust bowl— all that traffic — and natural gas flares, wasted byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like …

Fossil Fuel Industry Is Quietly Building Pipeline Network that ‘Dwarfs Keystone’ XL

Despite public opposition that has so far blocked the building of theKeystone XL pipeline, the fossil fuels industry has successfully—and quietly—expanded the nation’s domestic oil network by installing thousands of miles of pipeline across the country, according to new reporting by the Associated Press. “Overall, the network has increased by almost a quarter in the last decade,” the AP reports. “And the work dwarfs Keystone. About 3.3 …