Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Trumpcare, you're gonna love it:
• Tennessee House votes for bill allowing adoption agencies to deny services to same-sex couples based on bigoted religious views:
The legislation — HB 836, sponsored by Rep. Tim Rudd, R-Murfreesboro — has been opposed by LGBTQ advocates, most vocally the Tennessee Equality Project.
The Senate version, sponsored by Sen. Mark Pody, R-Lebanon, is scheduled to be heard in judiciary committee on Tuesday. The House bill passed on a vote of 67 to 22, with three members not casting votes. [...]
"We have children across this state looking for loving homes," said Rep. John Ray Clemmons, D-Nashville, who spoke in opposition to the bill. "Why are we wanting to do anything to prohibit a loving couple or a family of any denomination, any religion, any moral conviction from being able to care for a child and take it in and provide for it?
• An encounter at the Smithsonian’s African America with MAGA hat-wearing visitors.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Seven Republicans vote against renaming a post office after the late Rep. Louise Slaughter and her late husband, Bob. Several justified their vote by saying the House was wasting its time with such business, but three who voted “no” on this renaming have voted for previous post office renamings in the past:
“While I didn’t know Rep. Slaughter or her husband, I am sure they were fine, patriotic people dedicated to public service,” Roy said in a statement. “I don’t think politicians should be spending valuable time naming post offices after other politicians.”
• Remember that Texas gang shooting in 2015 when nine were killed and more than 20 injured? Nobody is going to be charged or otherwise held accountable:
McLennan County District Attorney Barry Johnson said any further effort to prosecute the case would be a "waste of time, effort and resources."
"In my opinion, had this action been taken in a timely manner, it would have, and should have, resulted in numerous convictions and prison sentences against many of those who participated in the Twin Peaks brawl," Johnson said. "Over the next three years the prior district attorney failed to take that action, for reasons that I do not know to this day."
• Martin Shkreli said to be confined in solitary because of possessing a cellphone he was using to run his drug company from prison: He was convicted in 2017 of lying to investors and cheating them out of millions of dollars. Now serving a seven-year sentence, he could wind up in solitary for a long time for possessing the phone, considered contraband in the Fort Dix federal prison in New Jersey. If he is prosecuted and convicted, he could wind up with another year tacked onto his sentence.
• ADP Employment reports 129,000 new private-sector jobs created in March. The monthly report frequently does not closely mesh with the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The BLS report will be released Friday morning. Expectations are that it will announce that around 175,000 new jobs were created during last month’s survey period and that the February estimate—just 20,000 new jobs—will be revised significantly upward.
• Small, propeller-driven “bush plane” could be flying passengers commercially by 2021. Its range will be about 100 miles:
Worldwide, there are some 100 different electric-aircraft programs in development, according to an estimate by consulting firm Roland Berger GmbH. Zunum Aero Inc., backed by Boeing Co. and JetBlue Airways Corp., aims to bring a hybrid-electric commuter model to market by 2022, while Joby Aviation Inc., another JetBlue-backed electric firm, is working on a five-seat aircraft with a 150-mile range.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show:
Greg Dworkin has mixed election results, what polls say on Biden (and baggage), and a sad sign of the times. Joan McCarter notes Trump lashing his Gop to health care, and the latest on subpoenas & Senate nukes. Perv-a-Lago II: The Spy Who Rubbed Me.