Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Thank you. Love, ISIS:
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- Democratic women seeking Senate seats in 2016, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Why Trump, indeed, by Ian Reifowitz
- The great Capitol Hill babysitting crisis: How systems can fail when everyone acts selfishly, by David Akadjian
- So many #NeverTrump groups, so little payoff, by Sher Watts Spooner
- History is a moving train: From Nixon and Goldwater to Donald Trump and the Age of Obama, by Chauncey DeVega
- Obama in Cuba, by Armando
- Disproportionate coverage of issues are killing us in more ways than one, by Egberto Willies
- How a Seventh-Day Adventist and peyote led to Supreme Court fights over contraception, by Susan Grigsby
- Just the facts, by Mark E Andersen
• Did Oklahoma corrections chief resign over botched executions?
Internal Oklahoma Department of Corrections emails obtained by BuzzFeed News are raising new questions about whether outgoing Director Robert Patton left his position voluntarily or was “forced out” following a failed execution attempt in September.
Officially, Patton, who had only been on the job 22 months when he resigned in December, left the department to “spend more time with his family.” But in emails to another corrections employee, an internal affairs agent who served as Patton’s security detail said she believed he was pushed out over a grand jury investigation into multiple mistake-ridden executions last year.
• 22 killed by suicide bombers in Nigerian mosque: One woman blew herself up inside a mosque in the northeastern city of Maiduguri Wednesday. Another blew herself up outside the mosque as survivors of the first explosion fled. Besides the 22 dead, officials said another 17 people were wounded. The city is the command center of Nigeria’s war on Boko Haram, a violent group that calls itself the Islamic State West Africa Province and is allied with ISIS. It has been using suicide and bomb attacks more ever more frequently. The Global Terrorism Index for 2015 named Boko Haram as the deadliest terrorist group in the world, surpassing ISIS. It has killed about 20,000 people and displaced 2.3 million since it began its murderous campaign in 2009.
• American Indians taking voting suppression cases to court: Ever since all Indians were given citizenship in 1924, there has been a plethora of attempts in various states to keep them from voting:
Earlier this month, Indian Country Media Network reported that Native American and Alaska Natives have flagged voting-related problems in 17 states, via litigation or tribal diplomacy with local officials. For example, in Alaska—which will hold its Democratic caucuses Saturday—Alaska Natives scored a victory in September 2014, when a federal judge concluded that state election officials violated the Voting Rights Act when they failed to translate voting materials for Alaska Natives in rural sections of the state. After nine months of talks, they reached a settlement to get election pamphlets translated into six dialects of Yup'ik and Gwich'in through 2020, granting them language assistance ahead of the caucuses this weekend.
• Check out this experimental expandable habitat for the space station:
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Obama pays tribute to victims of U.S.-abetted Argentine “Dirty War,” but no direct apology: At a monument on the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires, Thursday, the president acknowledged the U.S. role in the seven-year campaign of torture and murder waged against tens of thousands of leftists after a 1976 coup
by the Argentine generals. Freedom of Information Act inquiries have revealed details of the dirty war and U.S. support from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was also involved in secret machinations leading up to the 1973 Chilean generals’ coup. Those documents, as noted by Peter Kornbluh and Carlos Osorio in The Nation, said that after Kissinger was told “to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina,” he issued instructions: “Whatever chance they have, they will need a little encouragement…because I do want to encourage them. I don’t want to give the sense that they’re harassed by the United States.”
Ten weeks later, even after being informed that the generals would probably follow the example of the Chilean coup of terrorizing the population, including killings that included the murder of priests and nuns, Kissinger told the new Argentine foreign minister, “Look, our basic attitude is that would like you to succeed.” Years later, U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick toasted the Argentine generals for helping the United States “restore” democracy after the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, a nation that had had nothing approaching a democracy ever since U.S. Marines landed there in 1909.
• On
today’s “encore performance” Kagro in the Morning show: Back in time three years, to our newly-relevant March 25, 2013 episode, in which we read Peter Manseau’s
New Yorker piece, “Melancholy Accidents,” an article partially inspired by #GunFAIL, now expanded into a new book.
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