250 days left until the November election
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Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Teacher and guns: what could go wrong?
• Manafort to go on trial in September:
A judge in Washington on Wednesday set a Sept. 17 trial date for former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort on charges from special counsel Robert Mueller, including money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent.
The decision from U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson would put Manafort on trial at the height of the midterm campaign season, a potentially unwelcome distraction for Republicans as they try to maintain majorities in Congress.
• Grim front pages: A newspaper history of mass shootings: If the front pages after the Parkland school shooting seemed familiar, that's because they were. For the past 20 years, newspaper front pages have acted as historical markers for many such shootings.
• Republicans trying to burnish their eco-credentials by joining the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the U.S. House, but their votes bring the tarnish: The League of Conservation Voters found the average climate-friendly voting score of the 34 Republicans in the caucus to be 16 percent. One scored 71, one 43, four scored in the 30s, and the rest were in the 20s or below, with 18, more than half, in single digits. Nobody got a zero. As reporter Marianna Lavelle noted: “These are hardly mavericks keen to break party ranks over key environmental issues, let alone to embrace third-rail proposals like putting a price on carbon. So why have they enlisted?”
The evidence suggests that most of the Republicans who populate this group hold imperiled seats in competitive or swing districts. They are using the big tent of the climate caucus to seek shelter from a possible storm of voter dissatisfaction with their party's refusal to systematically address climate change.
In other words, their joined the caucus was to paint a deceptive picture of their commitment to doing something about climate change while that “something” appears from their votes to be making things worst.
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MIDDAY TWEET
• Norway to phase out semi-automatic firearms by 2021. Seven years after rightwing extremist Anders Breivik killed 69 people in 2011 with a semi-auto rifle and pistol, the Norwegian government is on the verge of banning ownership of semi-automatic firearms over the next three years:
“Today, it has become clear that there is a parliamentary majority in favour of the government’s proposal. Semi-automatic weapons will therefore be banned in Norway,” Peter Frolich, a Conservative member of parliament’s standing committee on judicial affairs, told AFP. [...]
In a 2012 report, a commission tasked with drawing conclusions from the attacks had called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons, one of its 31 recommendations.
• In second 4th quarter report, government says real (inflation-adjusted) annualized gross domestic product was 2.5% the last three months of 2017: That‘s down from the 2.6 percent tallied in the first GDP report for the quarter last month. A third report will be released next month. For all of 2017, real GDP grew 2.3 percent compared to 1.6 percent in 2016.
• Report—Many of California’s 400 crops could suffer losses from climate change:
According to the report, California’s farming industry is “highly sensitive to climate change” and crop losses could have a ripple effect on the country’s food supply and economy.
“Impact on agricultural production due to climate change would not only translate into national food security issues but also economic impacts that could disrupt state and national commodity systems,” the report published in Agronomy Journal states. “While California farmers and ranchers have always been affected by the natural variability of weather from year to year, the increased rate and scale of climate change is beyond the realm of experience for the agricultural community.”
• Report says solar and wind could supply 80% of U.S. electricity:
[...] but it will require a significant advancement in energy storage technologies or hundreds of billions of dollars invested in renewable energy infrastructure.
The researchers looked at 36 years’ worth of hourly sun and wind data in the continental US in order to get a better understanding of the unique geophysical barriers faced by renewable systems in the US. [...]
This new report is not the first time that scientists have claimed that a four-fifths renewable energy grid is possible in the US. A 2012 report commissioned by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory claimed that the US could meet 80 percent of its electricity needs with renewable energy by 2050.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Ben Carson makes himself at home, at work. And you pay for it. The collusion nexus & "engagement maximization." Joan McCarter remembers the Moonies, who are back, somehow. Another gov't shutdown looms. Gop needs Dem help fixing their tax scam!
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