Today’s comic by Matt Bors is The white power hour with Tucker Carlson:
• Greenland is falling apart: A decade or so ago, some climate science deniers claimed that neither Arctic sea ice nor Greenland’s ice sheet was dwindling from global warming. This required them to ignore or mischaracterize the data, behavior they are quite adept at. On Monday, a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that Greenland, which, after Antarctica, is Earth’s second largest reservoir of fresh water, is falling apart. Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic puts the results into layperson’s language: “The paper casts the transformation of the Greenland Ice Sheet as one of the profound geological shifts of our time. Scientists measure the mass of ice sheets in ‘gigatons’—each unit equal to 1 billion metric tons, or roughly the same amount of water that New York or Los Angeles uses in a year. Greenland, according to the study, has lost 4,976 gigatons of water since 1972. That’s enough water to fill 16 trillion bathtubs or 1.3 quadrillion gallon jugs. That much water weighs about 11 quadrillion pounds. (A quadrillion is 1 with 15 zeros after it.)” The scientists conclude that “In the future, we expect the mass changes in the northern part of Greenland to become of greatest importance to sea level rise, because of the large reserve of ice above sea level and the potential for manyfold increase in ice discharge.”
• Myanmar court rejects appeal of two Pulitzer Prize-winning Reuters reporters serving seven- year terms for allegedly violating the nation’s Official Secrets Act.
• Alabama House of Representatives passes bill 102-0 to honor Helen Keller and Rosa Parks with monuments on the grounds of the state capitol: No funding was set aside for the monuments, but the legislation says they can be built with money from private or public sources and in-kind services. Given the extremely conservative nature of the Alabama legislature, the unanimous vote was a bit of a surprise since the blind and deaf social activist Keller was a democratic socialist and Parks a life-long civil rights activist.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Alaska legislature rejects ghost hunter and Islamaphobe for state commissions: Of the 88 nominees for the state’s boards and commissions, only seven were rejected, following the traditional deference to the governor’s choices. The legislature said no to the appointment of a man to the state’s violent crimes compensation board because he is a founding member of Alaska Ghost Hunting. It also nixed a man for the Real Estate Commission after uncovering his history of social media posts advocating violence against Muslims and his failure to satisfy lawmakers with the answers to many of their questions.
• Richard Nixon's approval/disapproval ratings in 1973: The Senate Watergate hearings began in mid-May. That disapproval rating held fairly steady until July 1974, when it surged shortly before Nixon resigned.
• AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumpka says no to Green New Deal: While a few individual unions have backed the GND, the AFL-CIO’s Energy Committee wrote a letter six weeks ago to Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stating that organization is willing to “discuss these issues in a responsible way,” but noted: “We will not accept proposals that could cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families. We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered.” Trumka backed that up Tuesday saying that the organization representing 12 million unionized workers won’t support the Green New Deal in its current form. In response to the March letter, the Sunrise Movement noted that “Working people's support for the Green New Deal will only grow as we continue building alliances and developing detailed policy at the local and national level."
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Impeachment has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice. Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter discuss. Trump doubles down on defiance. Russia's KY deal. Miners for Trump was an IRA fake. Political union: yes, it’s a real thing!