Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Sheriff Clarke's real, not at all fake medals:
Pr*sident Trump has 1366 days left in office if he stays through his full term.
• Pope Francis gives Trump a copy of his encyclical on the urgency of climate action: The pope is only one of those who will be pushing the pr*sident to stick with the Paris climate agreement that 195 nations have signed onto, making pledges on how much each will cut greenhouse gas emissions. Climate hawks have supported the agreement while viewing it as inadequate in its present form for keeping the global average temperature rise since the industrial age began to a maximum of 3.6° Fahrenheit. In addition to the pope, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Paulo Gentiloni will seek to persuade Trump not to pull out of the Paris pact. Business groups have also put the squeeze on Trump, with 280 investors representing more than $17 trillion in assets releasing a statement Monday saying climate change must be an “urgent priority” for all G-20 nations. There is little expectation that Trump, a notorious non-reader, will open the 38,000-word encyclical.
• Meanwhile, Francis wonders what he did for God to punish him so cruelly.
• Washington Post fails to identify contributor who praised Trump’s trip as a lobbyist for the Saudis:
The Post has repeatedly allowed Rogers to promote his lobbying clients’ interests without disclosure.
Rogers is the chairman of the BGR Group, a leading Washington, D.C., lobbying group. BGR is part of a vast network of American lobbying and public relations firms that work for the Saudi government. The Post itself has reported on Rogers’ role in promoting Saudi interests. An April 2016 article stated that Rogers “did not immediately return a request for comment” about his lobbying work for the Saudi government and that “Rogers is a contributor to the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog.”
• A New York legislator wants to change state law that bars women with unviable pregnancies from getting an abortion after 24 weeks of gestation unless her life is in immediate danger.
• Taxpayers charged $7 billion a year to support extraction of fossil fuels from public lands: A report from Oil Change International says the U.S. government continues to bolster fossil fuel production on public lands on and offshore by “direct subsidies, enforcement loopholes, lax royalty collection, stagnant lease rates and other advantages to the industry.” And that costs American taxpayers at least $7 billion a year in subsidies. The government also holds $35 billion in public liabilities for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. When the damage from climate change were factored in, the report said, the costs to taxpayers is far more. For example:
In the case of coal from the Powder River Basin, an area of active federal coal leases, every short ton of coal produced has a net cost to American taxpayers of $49 dollars. That means that Powder River Basin coal production alone—only a small sliver of fossil fuel production on federal lands nationwide—had a net cost to taxpayers of $17.8 billion in 2015, dwarfing the supposed economic benefits of allowing new fossil fuel leases on federal lands and waters.
• FOIA documents show that because of North Korea, Hawai’i is overhauling its emergency plans in case of a nuclear attack.
• Joe Lieberman is apparently out of the running for FBI chief. One objection of the critics to the possibility Lieberman would be chosen to run the bureau was his employment at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, a New York–based law firm that regularly represents President Trump:
That potential conflict was made even clearer Tuesday when it was reported that Trump has hired Marc Kasowitz, Lieberman’s boss, to serve as his private lawyer on issues related to the Russia investigation. A day later, in a rare acknowledgment that conflicts of interest actually exist, the White House has reportedly nixed Lieberman’s name from its list of potential FBI directors and is restarting its search from scratch.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter chronicle the progress of Trumpshambles from the Middle East into Europe. Trump leaks more NatSec secrets. The budget is out: half of it is cut & the other half is missing. Boehner, from retirement, finally averts a shutdown.
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