Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Barring the Mueller report:
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos…
- Politicians are not celebrities, and we are constituents, not fans, by Mark E Andersen
- Trump colluded with Russia and obstructed justice. Right-wing won't care but independents just might, by Ian Reifowitz
- After Trump team lied about Mueller report, press has no reason to ever believe them again, by Eric Boehlert
- Sen. Bernie Sanders' Fox News town hall: a template for a Democrat in the foxhole, by Egberto Willies
- Trump's immigration plans are all about pain, fear, cowardice, bigotry, and punishment, by Frank Vyan Walton
- Election 2020: Who's got policies? Who's got platitudes? by Sher Watts Spooner
- Trump and Barr bring three decades of GOP criminality full circle, by Jon Perr
- After the Barr hoax, press has no reason to ever believe Trump team again, by Eric Boehlert
- Resurrection from the ashes, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Brookings study shows Green New Deal would mean tens of thousands of new jobs: But the 43-page analysis released Thursday notes that one big issue will be training people for these jobs. The research team, led by Mark Muro and Joseph Kane, said: "Occupations related to the clean energy transition offer a potent antidote to the inclusion challenges of the modern American economy. These are the types of professional opportunities the macroeconomy needs in a time of significant industrial transformation." Even though many of these jobs won’t require college degrees, they will come with middle- to high-income wages and be distributed widely throughout the economy. And, said the researchers, these jobs would provide an opportunity to obliterate institutional biases that have traditionally kept women and people of color out the workforce.
• Washington state Democrats weaken bill that would extend reproductive rights to undocumented immigrants and protect these rights for the LGBTQ community: The Reproductive Health Access for All Act has cleared the state House of Representatives and is now being considered by the state Senate:
“No one’s health should be compromised because of their immigration status,” Lili Navarrete, manager of the Raiz program, Planned Parenthood’s Latino community outreach effort, said Thursday in a statement. “This is the opposite of putting people first, especially with so much alarming rhetoric against immigrants today.” [...]
“When the House Democrats have a 16-seat lead, but they still don’t feel secure enough to vote in support of immigrant communities, we have to question if they will ever be willing to do so,” Gender Justice League co-executive director Tobi Hill-Meyer said in the statement. “The trans community knows what it’s likely to be cut out of a bill to make it more palatable. We need to be clear that removing protections for the most vulnerable is not an acceptable tactic.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Facebook masters the art of the news dump: On the Thursday before a major holiday weekend, the social media titan updated a post from last month about "Keeping Passwords Secure," italicizing what most users will never see: "Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users." Announcing bad news right before a holiday is a favorite Facebook technique.
On the Friday before Christmas, 2017, the company launched its tool that let users see if they had been exposed to Russian propaganda, perhaps assuming it is not how anyone would pass time on their long weekend. It first announced the tool was in the works the day before Thanksgiving. The night before the US midterm election in November 2018, it released a report saying it failed to do enough to prevent its platform being used to fuel political division and bloodshed in Myanmar.
• Three hives of bees survive the Notre Dame fire: The bees, some 60,000 in each hive, were about 100 feet from the source of the fire. Beekeeper Nicolas Geant told CNN that beeswax melts at 63 degrees Celsius and that "if the hive had reached that temperature, the wax would have melted and glued the bees together; they would have all perished."
• Census Bureau says Puerto Rico lost 4% of its population after Hurricane Maria.
• Workers excavating on an Indiana farm uncover mastodon bones: Mastodons, prehistoric relatives of modern elephants, went extinct in North America about 10 millenniums ago. The remains found on the east side of Seymour include part of a tusk, part of a jawbone with teeth, two upper leg bones, a vertebrae, a joint and about a third of the skull. “The weight of them is unbelievable,” [Land owner Joe] Schepman. “When the tusks were on the animal, they were about 9 feet long if you can imagine that.” It’s estimated the bones belonged to a male mastodon weighing around 12,000 pounds, in the range of modern African bull elephants, and that it died between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago when it was between 40 and 50 years old.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: More on the Barr Report II. Armando asks what Dems do next, as we review choice bits of the report. Prince & Bannon planned Seychelles meet, destroyed evidence. Michelle Wolf vindicated. 12 live investigations still out there. And it all comes back to FIFA!