Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Tomahawks away!
• What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- The incredible edible Easter egg, by DarkSyde
- The Easter Sunday Colfax, the Louisiana massacre and the horrific SCOTUS decision that followed it, by Denise Oliver Velez
- America invests the least in itself of all developed countries because of tax cuts for the 1 percent, by David Akadjian
- Reality TV, the normalization of vulgar, by Susan Grigsby
- It’s spring. Time to save the planet, by Sher Watts Spooner
- The larger problem of Putin’s weaponized information attack on democracy, by Frank Vyan Walton
- Ending the school-to-prison pipeline: An interview with Virginia Delegate Mike Mullin, by Kelly Macias
- Kansas shows how much work we have to do, by Egberto Willies
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• Maybe it would be a good idea to keep Jesus out of it, too: A video clip has spurred New Jersey Republicans to drop state legislature candidate they had endorsed. He’s not dropping out of the race and says “There are human errors and even Jesus dropped the cross three times”:
The video clip is just 10 seconds long, but it was enough to cause Cape May County Republicans to pull support from the candidate they had endorsed for Assembly in what was supposed to be one of the most competitive districts in the state.
“Let me tell you right now,” the candidate, Brian McDowell, said at a Wildwood bar, slurring his words, to a woman who’s barely in the frame. “You should f--k me. It would really be good. Listen, you never know.” McDowell said the woman in the video is a friend of his whose identity he did not wish to reveal.
• So much for the so-called “nuclear renaissance” as Westinghouse files for bankruptcy. The first of company’s AP 1000 reactors, which were supposed to be quicker and cheaper to build, are years behind and billions more expensive than originally estimated. Westinghouse’s parent company, Toshiba, is also on the verge of bankruptcy.
• Neo-Nazis are ripping the furry world apart:
The [Rocky Mountain] Fur Con is an annual summit in Denver, Colorado, for “furries,” people who present themselves as animals, from donning full-body fur suits to adopting “fursonas” for their character. And just as in the rest of America, a lot of furries resemble Nazis lately.
In Colorado, this splinter group calls itself the Furry Raiders. In 2016 the Raiders sent fur flying when they reserved a large block of Fur Con hotel rooms, sparking a fight that has lasted a year and led to death threats, allegations of tax evasion, intrigue around a suspected sovereign citizen, and the discovery of a sex offender on the Fur Con board. On Monday, Fur Con leaders chickened out of the convention altogether.
• Tax Day protesters will call for Donald Trump to release his tax returns: The demonstration on Saturday in D.C. is expected to be the largest of more than 100 sister protests planned across the country.
• Oklahoma Indians win case against pipeline builder: Members of the Comanche, Caddo, Apache, Cherokee, and Kiowa tribes of Oklahoma have won a favorable ruling from a U.S. District Court in the case of Davilla v. Enable Midstream Partners,, L.P. The court ordered a natural gas pipeline operator to cease operations and gave it six months to remove its pipeline located on original Kiowa Indian lands.
• Most benefits of Republican tax plan would—Surprise!—go the rich:
According to the Tax Policy Center (TPC), in the first year of Speaker Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” tax plan, released in 2016, fully 76 percent of the benefits would go to the top 1 percent. A narrow slice of that group, the top 0.1 percent, would get about 47 percent of the plan’s total benefits, more than double the bottom 99 percent of households combined. The tax plan even manages to get considerably more regressive over time—by 2025 the top 1 percent would get 99.6 percent of the benefits.
In practice, this means that in 2017 households making more than about $700,000 would get an average tax cut of around $200,000. And households making more than $3.7 million would get an average tax cut of $1.2 million. The rest of us don’t fare as well as the rich. Households making less than $25,000 would get only $50 on average.
• Can China and United States avoid the Thucydides Trap?
Thucydides’s Trap is the severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one. Most contests that fit this pattern have ended badly. Over the past five hundred years, a major rising power has threatened to displace a ruling power sixteen times. In twelve of those, the result was war.
• If you can hear today’s Kagro in the Morning show, you haven’t been nuked! On today’s show: progressives running as Rs, how the Kochs learned to live with Trump, the grassroots effort that just might rein in gerrymandering, and how ex-Gov. Bentley reminded me I was right about Garland.