Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is Primary questions:
What you may have missed on Sunday Kos …
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The importance of fighting with someone on something, by David Akadjian
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Appetite for destruction: Biology, psychology, socialization, and the Republican mind, by Chauncey DeVega
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Incrementalism has outlived its usefulness, by Egberto Willies
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Marco Rubio is no moderate, by Jon Perr
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The courage of Autherine Lucy, by Denise Oliver Velez
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Democrats once resisted 'liberal' label, now fight to claim 'progressive' mantle. That's progress, by Ian Reifowitz
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The Daily Kos Elections guide to every key international election in 2016, by Daily Kos Elections International
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Young black men in Chicago: Out of work, out of school, and out of luck, by Sher Watts Spooner
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Essential reading: Jane Mayer's 'Dark Money’ by Susan Grigsby
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The machines that improve our lives can also ruin them, by DarkSyde
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Socialism, Fascism, and other philosophies conservatives don't understand, by Mark E Andersen
• President Obama seeks emergency funding for fighting Zika virus:
President Barack Obama is asking Congress for more than $1.8 billion in emergency funding to help fight the Zika virus. In an announcement Monday, the White House said the money would be used to expand mosquito control programs, speed development of a vaccine, develop diagnostic tests and improve support for low-income pregnant women.
Zika virus disease is mainly spread by mosquitoes. Most people who catch it experience mild or no symptoms. But mounting evidence from Brazil suggests that infection in pregnant women is linked to abnormally small heads in their babies — a birth defect called microcephaly.
Mauna Loa reading on carbon dioxide for January:
The last four complete years of the Mauna Loa CO2 record plus the current year are shown. Data are reported as a dry air mole fraction defined as the number of molecules of carbon dioxide divided by the number of all molecules in air, including CO2 itself, after water vapor has been removed. The mole fraction is expressed as parts per million (ppm). Example: 0.000400 is expressed as 400 ppm.
• Unconfirmed, but meteorite suspected in death of Indian man: The unnamed victim was a bus driver, and he was standing in the grass near the cafeteria of an engineering college in the state of Tamil Nadu when he was killed. Two gardeners and a student were injured, according to authorities. Explosives were suspected at first, but there was no evidence of that, just a small crater and a dark blue stone resembling a diamond found at the scene. If a meteorite did kill the man, it would be the first such recorded incident in 191 years. A list kept by International Comet Quarterly, a scientific journal, puts the last death by meteorite in 1825.
• “Buffalo soldiers” among the first national park rangers: U.S. Army soldiers were among the nation’s first park rangers. That included African Americans, whose segregated units had been formed after the Civil War and sent to fight in the Indian Wars. They got the name “buffalo soldiers” from the Cheyenne and other Plains tribes because Indians saw a resemblance between their dark, curly hair and the matted cushion between the horns of the buffalo. Between 1891 and 1913, the Army was the administrator of Yosemite and Sequoia national parks, helping create a model for park management still used today. Some 500 buffalo soldiers served in the two parks. Their duties included confiscating firearms, curbing poaching of wildlife, suppressing wildfires, ending illegal grazing of livestock on federal lands, stopping timber thieves, building roads, trails, and other infrastructure, tasks they carried amid ferocious racism. In the winter, the soldiers were garrisoned at the Presidio of San Francisco, serving in the Sierra only during the summer. It was a much-loved assignment, and one army officer called the Sierra Nevada the "Cavalryman's Paradise." Most of those who served were veterans of the Philippines wars. Their officers were mostly white men, but Charles Young was an exception. He was the third African American graduate of the U.S. military academy at West Point and served as the acting military superintendent of Sequoia National Park in 1903, making him the first black superintendent of any national park.
• January Arctic sea ice at lowest ever recorded: High air temperatures and a strong negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation were in evidence for the first three weeks of the month. Arctic sea ice extent during January averaged 5.2 million square miles, 402,000 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average. Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said temperatures for the month were more than 6 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit) above average across most of the Arctic Ocean.
• VW may face tough stance from Justice Department: Volkswagen may be forced to plead guilty to criminal allegations for cheating on its emissions. Two Bloomsberg reporters note that this wasn’t the case for General Motors Co. because of its vehicles fitted with faulty ignition switches that were tied to 124 deaths or for Toyota Motor Corp. for the unintended acceleration found to be the cause of at least four deaths. For almost a year, VW lied to the Environmental Protection Agency and California regulators before admitting that it had created a device to trick emissions testing.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin pores over data & analysis from that Other Big Game. The Authentic Frontier Gibberish of sOvErEiGn cItIzeNs. Ian Reifowitz discusses his piece on the fight over the “progressive” label, and how far we’ve come since liberal was a dirty word.
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