Midday open thread: Piece of TPP pact revealed, ND to challenge fracking rule, Bolton says bomb Iran

• Today's comic by Ruben Bolling is Super-Fun-Pak Comix - Percival Dunwoody and more:
  
• Wikileaks releases piece of secret Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership pact expanding corporate power:

  The TPP Investment Chapter, published today, is dated 20 January 2015. The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations.

  Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor said: "The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies."

• Texas may outlaw doctors talking about gun ownership with patients:

  Under a proposed bill currently being considered in Texas, doctors wouldn’t be allowed to ask their patients whether there are any firearms in their homes—and could be subject to punishment from the Texas Medical Board if they do initiate any conversations about gun safety in the office.

  The lawmaker who’s sponsoring the measure, Rep. Stuart Spitzer (R), is backed by the National Rifle Association and the Texas State Rifle Association. He believes that the federal government is inappropriately reaching into doctors’ offices to figure out who owns guns.

• John Bolton isn't subtle about his call to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran:

  The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.

  Rendering inoperable the Natanz and Fordow uranium-enrichment installations and the Arak heavy-water production facility and reactor would be priorities. So, too, would be the little-noticed but critical uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan. An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but by breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program by three to five years. The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.

• Brother of Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson mistakenly hits "Reply All" in nasty email reply:

  The email appears to have been accidentally sent to de Blasio’s spokesperson, Amy Spitalnick, as well as to Tucker Carlson. In the email, Buckley Carlson, who occasionally writes for the Daily Caller, makes several offensive comments about Spitalnick after she asked for a correction on a piece about the mayor.

  Buckley's email labeled Spitalnick a "self-righteous bitch" and in explicit sexual language implied that she was a lesbian.
• These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook March 25:
  

  GOP Rep claims Obamacare costing $5 million per enrollee. Turns out he's off by about $5 million, by cgvjelly

  Get this: science denier David Koch sits on boards of America's science museums. Let's kick him off!, by citisven

  INo, Fox (not) News, Just Plain NO on Your Wisconsin John Doe Propaganda, by Puddytat

• Reddit user WestCoastBestCoast94 creates ultra-detailed map of every road in the U.S.:

  The map reflects both the country's population density and its topography: The Northeast corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C. becomes one big mass of roads, while in very flat and/or less populated parts of the country, like the Midwest, the roads form clear grids. In the West you can see winding roads over the mountains and white spaces in the locations of Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, the Badlands, and other government-protected areas.

  WestCoastBestCoast94 also created individual maps for each of the states. Here's California.

• Yes, atop everything else, Rahm Emanuel is a terrible tipper.
• North Dakota may challenge federal fracking rules:

  The rules [slated only for public and tribal lands] include requirements for publicly disclosing the chemicals used by operators in hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, within 30 days of the completion of a well. Additional requirements include inspections of wells to ensure integrity of the cement barriers lining wells, reporting of the geology of the well site and regulations of storing fracking chemicals at well sites.

  [Lynn Helms, director of the state Department of Mineral Resources] said the new rules could impact an estimated one-third of spacing units in the Bakken and Three Forks formations in North Dakota. He said the largest negative impact could be on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, where nearly one-third of oil production in the state occurs.

• Naomi Klein: "Kick oil ... while the price is down":

  As part of the Guardian newspaper's recently launched "keep it in the ground" campaign, Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein appears in a new video on Wednesday in which she argues the current moment is ripe for the world to take advantage of the dramatic drop in global oil prices by kicking the fossil fuel industry "while it's down." [...]

  Her list of demands include: "No drilling in the arctic... No expansion of the tar sands...  more fracking bans like the ones in New York state and Scotland," and a call to support and broaden the calls for fossil fuel divestment worldwide while ramping up the needed and available solutions to the climate crisis.

• Team Blackness discussed the turnabout of Ted Cruz, the man that spent 21 hours filibustering Obamacare funding, will be signing his family up for it. Also discussed was a California ballot initiative to legalize killing gay people, the precocious maturity of Mo'Ne Davis, and the press conference of one of the University of Oklahoma SAE members that was caught leading a racist chant. Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show, three main topics today: emerging details about the Germanwings plane crash; the situation in Yemen and wider Arabian Peninsula politics, and; what the budget vote-o-rama tells us about the continuing fight over filibuster reform.