Tonight is finally the night! Alabama voters go to the polls to choose a new senator in a very rare December special election. The choices couldn't be starker: Democrat Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted KKK terrorists; and Republican Roy Moore, who was kicked off the state supreme court twice for ignoring the law to promote his extremist religious agenda and has been accused by at least nine women of sexually pursuing them while they were teenagers and Moore was in his 30s. Polls are all over the place, but in aggregate, they show an incredibly tight race, and a victory for Jones in a state this conservative would be cataclysmic for the GOP. We'll be live-blogging all of the results at Daily Kos Elections when polls close at 8 PM ET tonight. Join us! |
Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Dystopian gift shopping:
• Kaiser Foundation report shows people of color and low-income residents still not getting the support they need in wake of Hurricane Harvey. Among a boatload of problems, the report found:
Sixty-six percent of black residents surveyed said they are not getting the help they need to recover, compared to half of all hurricane survivors. While 34 percent of white residents said their FEMA applications had been approved, just 13 percent of black residents said the same.
• San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, the city’s first Chinese American in that post, is dead at 65: Lee collapsed from a heart attack while shopping. The president of the SF Board of Supervisors, London Breed, became mayor effective immediately:
“Ed was an excellent mayor of a great but sometimes challenging city,” [Senator and former SF Mayor Dianne] Feinstein said in a statement Tuesday. “His equanimity and quiet management style was effective and allowed him to solve problems as they occurred. My heart and thoughts are with Ed’s family and friends and the city I love.”
Lee won election to a full term in November 2011 and was re-elected in 2015. An early accomplishments was 2011’s “Twitter tax,” which cut payroll taxes for six years on a sketchy stretch of Market Street and lured thousands of tech jobs and workers to the city.
• “Feminism” is Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year”:
“No one word can ever encapsulate all the news, events, or stories of a given year,” Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster, said in a statement. “But when we look back at the past twelve months and combine an analysis of words that have been looked up much more frequently than during the previous year along with instances of intense spikes of interest because of news events, we see that one word stands out in both categories."
According to a release from Merriam-Webster, look-ups for the word feminism spiked early in the year following the 2017 Women's March, which happened a day after President Donald Trump's inauguration in Washington, in addition to satellite marches across the nation and in several countries around the world.
• Fourteen states, DC, sue EPA over failure to enforce smog standards: The lawsuit, led and announced by Attorney Gen. Xavier Becerra of California, states that the EPA’s failure to designate areas of the nation with unhealthy air by the Oct. 1 deadline could contribute to bad health because smog can cause or aggravate diseases including heart disease, bronchitis and emphysema. "Lives can be saved if the EPA implements these standards," Becerra said.
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MIDDAY TWEET
It should be noted that in 2016, Democrats only contested 89 of those 150 state House seats.
• Emmett Till’s cousin works to bring down Mississippi’s state flag with the Confederate flag embedded in it:
Edelia “Dr. Jay” Carthan, a native of Mississippi and an assistant professor at Tougaloo College, is at the forefront of the movement to remove the Confederate emblem of a cross and stars from the state’s flag (the last in the country to bear it).
The group she cofounded, Take It Down America, has held demonstrations across the South and at the U.S. Capitol. The group’s next planned action was at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson on December 9, but those initial plans changed when President Donald Trump announced he would attend the museum’s opening.
• Scientists call for cheetah to be put on Endangered Species list. The big cat has disappeared from 91 percent of its historic range. More than half the cheetahs in latest tally live in Namibia.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, it’s finally election day down in Alabama, and Greg Dworkin makes a rare Tuesday visit for the occasion. Eric Posman gives us his final thoughts on the subject, and peacearena brings us the local take on regular Oklahomans vs. fracking earthquakes.