What’s coming up on Sunday Kos…
- Politicians are not celebrities, and we are constituents, not fans, by Mark E Andersen
- Trump colluded with Russia and obstructed justice. Right-wing won't care but independents just might, by Ian Reifowitz
- After Trump team lied about Mueller report, press has no reason to ever believe them again, by Eric Boehlert
- Sen. Bernie Sanders' Fox News town hall: a template for a Democrat in the foxhole, by Egberto Willies
- Trump's immigration plans are all about pain, fear, cowardice, bigotry, and punishment, by Frank Vyan Walton
- Election 2020: Who's got policies? Who's got platitudes? by Sher Watts Spooner
- Trump and Barr bring three decades of GOP criminality full circle, by Jon Perr
- After the Barr hoax, press has no reason to ever believe Trump team again, by Eric Boehlert
- Resurrection from the ashes, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Republican State Rep. joined on-line discussions about taking violent action against leftists:
A Washington state Republican politician took part in private discussions with rightwing figures about carrying out surveillance, “psyops” and even violent attacks on perceived political enemies, according to chat records obtained by the Guardian.
State representative Matt Shea, who represents Spokane Valley in the Washington state house, participated in the chats with three other men. All of the men used screen aliases – Shea’s was “Verum Bellator”, Latin for true warrior. The Guardian confirmed the identity of those in the chat by cross-checking phone numbers attached to the Signal accounts.
• U.S. coal production down again in 2018, but energy consumption way up: Overall consumption from sources of all kinds rose by 4% while consumption of natural gas rose 10%. Fossil fuels account for 80% of Americans’ energy use. Renewable energy consumption also hit a record high, with a 22% rise in the use of solar power. Wind and solar now make up the most of the new U.S. electricity generation as costs continue to decline. But while the growth in their use has soared, renewables still make up just a sliver of overall energy consumption. Chris Field, a climate scientist and director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, says these statistics from the Energy Information Administration shows the U.S. doesn’t have the policy levers needed to ensure that renewable fuels are chosen for new electricity-generating installations. “Renewables are increasingly rapidly, but not as rapidly as necessary to drive down total [greenhouse gas] emissions,” he said.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Families of Columbine High School shooting victims reflect on hope and healing on the 20th anniversary of the slayings:
“Columbine is something to the Columbine community that the rest of the world will never understand,” said Coni Sanders, daughter of Dave Sanders, the teacher who bled to death inside a classroom that day while desperate students tried to save his life. “I’m somewhat saddened over the years that Columbine became a euphemism for mass shooting. It’s become a fascination for murderers around the world.
“It used to be a flower,” she said wistfully. “It used to be a school. It used to be a community that now, if you say it even 20 years later, people will tell you where they were when they heard about it, what they remember about it, how they’re connected to it. It’s like a fantasy thinking back to what Columbine was prior to April 20, 1999, and I wish with all my heart that’s what it could still be. But it’s not.”
• Movement to build national support for a Green New Deal kicks off in Boston, “City of Revolutions.”
• More than five weeks after massacre in Christchurch, videos of the shootings are still on Facebook:
[37] days after a terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand, live streamed their attack on Facebook, the world’s biggest and most well resourced social media network is still hosting copies of the violent attack video on its own platform as well as Instagram.
Some of the videos, which are slices of the original 17 minute clip, are trimmed down to one minute or so chunks, and are open to be viewed by anyone. In one instance, instead of removing the video, which shows the terrorist shooting and murdering innocent civilians from a first-person perspective, Facebook has simply marked the clip as potentially containing “violent or graphic content.” A video with that tag requires Facebook users to click a confirmation that they wish to view the footage.
The news highlights Facebook’s continued failure to keep one of the most high profile pieces of white supremacist terrorist propaganda off its platform, and which originated on Facebook in the first place.
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