Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Roger Ailes dies, and a celestial grip loosens...
• Join Daily Kos Elections tonight for a live-blog of the Montana special election results. Tonight at 10 PM ET (8 PM local time), polls will close in Montana, where voters will fill a vacancy for the state's lone congressional district created when GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke left to become Donald Trump's interior secretary. The candidates are wealthy Republican businessman Greg Gianforte, who was just charged on Wednesday night with assaulting a reporter, and Democratic folk singer Rob Quist, who managed not to commit any crimes the day before Election Day. Our crack Daily Kos Elections team will be live-blogging the results, so come join us then!
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• Don’t try this at school, kids: Rhode Island police have charged a 15-year-old high school girl they say gave homemade tattoos to two friends on school grounds.
• The more things change:
On Aug. 2, 1974, a week before President Richard Nixon resigned, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson took a skeptical look at the president’s generosity. He found that the Richard Nixon Foundation had made “only one charitable grant in its four-year existence: $7,500 to buy a painting of Richard Nixon.”
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• Say what, Gov. Brown? The California governor now says that on climate change the Trump regime “not as disastrous as we thought a few months ago”:
“President Trump is a realist – and there’s nothing more real than the atmosphere and the chemistry that determines our weather and our long-term climate,” Brown told reporters at a climate change conference hosted by the Netherlands in San Francisco on Wednesday. “I don’t know that he’s going to come aboard immediately – but I do know that with our efforts in California, joining with other states and other provinces in the world, that we will be successful in pushing this agenda.
• Worldwide, there are nearly 10 million jobs in renewable energy: Those include 3.09 million in solar, and 1.2 million in wind. That’s double the numbers of five years ago. More than half the total jobs are in hydropower, geothermal, liquid biofuels, biomass, and biogas.
• Millions paid so far to Madoff fund administrator, zero to victims:
A firm hired by the U.S. to distribute $4 billion to victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme has racked up $38.8 million in billings over four years. The investors are still waiting for their first checks, though.
• Ohio legislators ponder bill to give to aged coal plants permanent subsidy: A bill has been introduced to give two six-decade-old coal-fired power plants perpetual subsidies. The plants, owned by Ohio Valley Electric Corp., a utility consortium, can generate 2.4 gigawatts of electricity. Customers of American Electric Power, which owns the largest share of the plants, already pay a monthly $2 surcharge to support the OVEC plants.
• Mike Pence’s approval rating plunges as his involvement in Trump’s scandals come to light: The new poll from Fox News shows that Pence’s popularity has fallen from 50 percent in April to 42 percent now. His disapproval number has risen from 33 percent to 43 percent.
• Yale Psychiatrist says fellow doctors have an obligation to discuss Donald Trump’s mental health because “our survival as a species may be at stake”: Her name is Dr. Bandy Lee and she specializes in public health and violence prevention. She recently led a conference of mental health professionals discussing how they should respond to the situation.
• EPI: No evidence that automation leads to joblessness of inequality:
The media are full of stories about robots and automation destroying the jobs of the past and leaving us jobless in the future; call it the coming Robot Apocalypse. We are also told that automation and technology are responsible for the poor wage growth and inequality bedeviling the American working class in recent decades, and that looming automation will only accelerate and ratchet up these problems. [...]
What is remarkable about this media narrative is that there is a strong desire to believe it despite so little evidence to support these claims.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin bodyslams the news roundup. Trumpcare’s so bad, it brings Republicans to (fake) tears. Who’s planning (and forgiving) Kushner’s Shabbat jaunts? Was Comey duped by the Russians? GunFAIL’s legacy: inconsistency in how accidents are treated.
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