Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Can you stand the sight of… the Republican Vampire?!
• Doubling up prisoners in solitary can be lethal: It may seem like a contradiction, but when prisoners in solitary confinement are given a cellmate, one of them can wind up dead. For instance, there was the case of David Sesson and Bernard Simmons at Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois:
[U]nlike many in solitary, Sesson and Simmons wouldn't have a moment alone. The 4-foot-8-inch by 10-foot-8-inch space was originally built for one [...] The two men would have to eat, sleep and defecate inches from one another for nearly 24 hours a day in a space smaller than a parking spot, if a parking spot had walls made of cement and steel on all sides.
With a toilet, sink, shelf and beds, the men were left with a sliver of space about a foot-and-a-half wide to maneuver around each other. If one stood, the other had to sit. They could palm both walls without fully extending their arms.
• Radovan Karadzic will be 110 when he gets out of prison:
[T]he former Bosnian Serb leader, was convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, by a United Nations tribunal on Thursday for leading a campaign of terror against civilians that included the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 and the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo.
Mr. Karadzic, 70, was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Mr. Karadzic of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre, which aimed to kill “every able-bodied male” in the town and systematically exterminate the Bosnian Muslim population there. The bodies were dumped in a mass grave.
• McKibben—Fracking turns out to be no solution on climate change:
To the extent our leaders have cared about climate change, they’ve fixed on CO2. Partly as a result, coal-fired power plants have begun to close across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly with ones that burn natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane. Because burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow. But this new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much, much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2. But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is the rough equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t really at 17,000: Its computer program has been making a mistake, and your index fund actually stands at 11,000.
• Robert Reich: Trump’s and Cruz’s tax plans would make for the largest redistribution to the rich in U.S. history:
1. Trump’s proposed cut would reduce the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent – creating a giant windfall for the wealthy (at a time when the wealthy have a larger portion of the nation’s wealth than any time since 1918). According to the Center for Tax Policy, the richest one tenth of one percent of taxpayers (those with incomes over $3.7 million) would get an average tax cut of more than $1.3 million each every year. Middle-income households would get an average tax cut of $2,700.
• Protesters turn federal oil auction into circus:
About 150 activists disrupted a federal auction for offshore oil and gas leases on Wednesday at the New Orleans’ Superdome, taking over what’s normally a sedatemeeting to make a statement against fossil fuels. [...]
This protest countered a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management auction for two planned sales off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico on tracts located anywhere from approximately three to 230 miles off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The area, said to contain the say the eighth-largest carbon reserve on Earth, stretches across about 45 million acres. According to Politico, BOEM took bids on one of the two sales on Wednesday.
• Baker—Trans-Pacific Partnership advocates crank up their support:
Given the recent flood of op-eds and editorials on the wonders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama administration must be about to present the deal to Congress for approval. Otherwise, it's hard to see why so many pieces would spontaneously appear on the TPP. Since there is real money at stake, we can expect the debate to get pretty low and nasty, with the pro-TPP forces liberally substituting ad hominems and claims to expertise for serious arguments.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up polls & punditry. Everybody hates Trump. NC bigots ram their opinions down our throats, with some corporate Easter eggs thrown in. Blackwater’s evil genius is back. A “family values” southern conservatives is a dirty old man. Again!
On iTunes | On Stitcher | Support the show: Patreon; PayPal; PayPal Subscription