Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is One weird trick for dealing with government-bashers:
• Senator wants Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s Lego movie comments reviewed:
The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee asked the government ethics watchdog on Monday to review comments by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin plugging "The Lego Batman Movie," a film one of his companies produced, for a possible ethics violation.
In a letter to Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub, Senator Ron Wyden said he was concerned that Mnuchin had violated his ethics agreement signed in January in his comments on Friday at the end of a live interview with the Axios news website.
• “Carlos the Jackal” sentenced to life term for third time. He was convicted and sentenced for a deadly 1974 grenade attack on a Paris shopping arcade. The attack killed two and wounded 32:
The Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is already serving two life sentences in France for murders and attacks he was convicted of perpetrating or organizing on behalf of the Palestinian cause or of communist revolution in the 1970s and '80s.
• Sierra Club analysis finds clean energy jobs outnumber fossil fuel jobs by 2.5 to 1: And those clean energy jobs outnumber coal and gas jobs by 5 to 1. “Right now, clean energy jobs already overwhelm dirty fuels in nearly every state across America, and that growth is only going to continue as clean energy keeps getting more affordable and accessible by the day,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. “These facts make it clear that Donald Trump is attacking clean energy jobs purely in order to boost the profits of fossil fuel billionaires.”
• Georgia state legislator proposes recognition of Confederate History Month with no mention of slavery: Republican Tommy Benton, who serves in Georgia's House of Representatives, isn’t happy with the state law that already recognizes April as "Confederate History and Heritage Month." He once referred to the KKK as a "vigilante thing to keep law and order." Benton’s proposal says April is when the Confederate states "began and ended a four-year struggle for states' rights, individual freedom, and local governmental control, which they believed to be right and just." Nowhere does it say anything about what the seceding states themselves pointed out was the key issue: chattel slavery.
• Dakota Access Pipeline filled with oil: The 1,172-mile pipeline is slated to deliver oil from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and Montana to refineries in Illinois. It can carry up to 570,000 barrels a day. Efforts to block the pipeline were launched last April by two tribes of Sioux because of fears of leakage that would taint drinking water. The pipeline, the tribes and their allies declared, crossed ancestral land that had been guaranteed by treaty to the Sioux:
“Oil has been placed in the Dakota Access Pipeline underneath Lake Oahe,” the company said. “Dakota Access is currently commissioning the full pipeline and is preparing to place the pipeline into service.”
The company did not say exactly when it expects to start making deliveries through the line.
• Some photos of Mount Etna, erupting.
• The Los Angeles Times writes up Indivisible, a prominent force in the resistance against the Trump regime:
What at first started with a small group of young progressives batting around ideas on how to move forward under a Trump administration has blossomed into a national movement, known as Indivisible. The mission centers on grass-roots advocacy targeting members of Congress inclined to work with the new administration and those who, in Indivisible’s view, don’t do enough to oppose it.
In keeping with the loose structure of other movements such as Black Lives Matter, Indivisible isn’t a hierarchical organization with a national headquarters and local chapters. Instead, it’s a collection of groups committed to the same goal, employing tactics and operating on principles shared by Indivisible’s founders online.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Remember when Republicans had to “show that they can govern?” Wasn’t that cute? Well, they can’t, and we discuss why. Manifort’s problems multiply, manifest. Devin Nunes: WTF with this guy? Russian corruption disrupts Russia, for a change.
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