Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is QVC-ocracy:
• What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, by Mark E Andersen
- How to turn trolls into your best friends, by David Akadjian
- The 2017 legislative elections and the post-Trump map, by Steve Singiser
- Trump’s amazing and dangerous world of alternative fact and alternative truth, by Frank Vyan Walton
- No Trump tax returns? No GOP tax cuts, by Jon Perr
- Trump-Russia scandal: Like Watergate and Iran-Contra, only worse, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Numbing the pain of self-inflicted wounds in Trump’s America, by Propane Jane
- We must keep the protests, but we need a lot more action, by Egberto Willies
- Trump trauma versus no drama Obama, by Ian Reifowitz
- Ona Judge Staines—the black woman who escaped from and outwitted George and Martha Washington, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Robert Michael, longest serving House minority leader dead of pneumonia at 93:
Robert H. Michel of Illinois, a conservative Republican and genial politician who served as House minority leader for 14 years — a tenure marked, toward the end, by partisan rancor and intraparty warfare stoked by his firebrand successor, Newt Gingrich — died Feb. 17 at a hospital in Arlington, Va. He was 93.
• Hillary Clinton hearts Kate McKinnon:
While President Donald Trump has bashed Alec Baldwin for playing him on “Saturday Night Live,” Hillary Clinton seems to be a big fan of her comedy double, Kate McKinnon.
One rowdy diner began chanting “Lock him up!” as a riff on the anti-Clinton cheer.
Before seeing Glenn Close in “Sunset Boulevard” on Wednesday, Clinton was at dinner with McKinnon at Orso restaurant. “Lots of laughter emanated from their table,” said a spy.
• Take Trump’s super-objective Mainstream Media Accountability Survey. For yuks.
•
• Activist Riseup will encrypt all emails to prevent FBI searches.
• Colorado GOP uses discredited anti-choice smear in language of failed bill:
Colorado Democrats on Wednesday killed GOP legislation aimed at curtailing fetal tissue research at state-funded universities, as Republicans repeated language deployed in an anti-choice campaign that used deceptively edited footage to attack Planned Parenthood.
The bill, voted down in a 6-3 party line vote in the house committee on state, veterans, and military affairs, would have required Colorado to halt state funding for any public university that engaged “directly or indirectly, in the purchase or trafficking of aborted human body parts.”
• Elon Musk begins digging that tunnel he promised in Los Angeles:
In December, when Musk got stuck in traffic, instead of leaning on the horn or flipping off the other drivers, he decided to build a new transportation system. An hour later, Max Chafkin writes in Bloomberg Businessweek, “the project had a name and a marketing platform. ‘It shall be called The Boring Company,’” Musk wrote.
Musk told employees to grab some heavy machinery and they began digging a hole in the SpaceX parking lot. He bought one of those machines that bores out tunnels and lays down concrete walls as it goes. It’s named Nannie.
• Texas attorney general Paxton could do a lot of prison time:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will face two criminal trials on felony charges of securities fraud and failing to register with state securities regulators, prosecutors said Thursday at a pre-trial hearing. If convicted of all charges he could be sent to prison for life. [...]
Special prosecutors Kent Schaffer and Brian Wice said they want to try Paxton on a third-degree felony count of failing to register with the Texas State Securities Board first, then on two first-degree felony counts of securities fraud. He was indicted by a Collin County grand jury on August 2015.
• White House seems to have developed a scheme for how it handles controversial proposals. At a press conference Friday morning, press secretary Sean Spicer said the media had never sought a comment from the White House regarding a reported plan to use the National Guard to round up undocumented immigrants for deportation. But the Associated Press said that was not true, noting that it had repeatedly sought a comment but got no response. Some top political reporters have taken notice of a pattern:
1. Wait for a draft memo of a proposal to be leaked to the press.
2. Refuse to comment when asked about the draft.
3. Wait until story is published to deny that the report is accurate.
4. Allege that the press never sought comment to begin with.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: THE “press conference,” including a well-reviewed Trump impression & an Armando call. Special & off-year elections. Closing out the week: Trump’s unfitness, the family’s spendthrift travel ways, Flynn’s violations, Pruitt’s e-mails, personnel flameouts & more.
YouTube | iTunes | LibSyn | Support the show via Patreon