Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Sweden attacks!
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- Why a terrorist attack is more likely with a weak President, by David Akadjian
- Trump crowds evoke for me our ugly legacy of racial terrorism and lynching, by Denise Oliver Velez
- ‘The United States is not safe for refugees,’ by Mark E Andersen
- The resistance is real, even in the red state of Texas, by Egberto Willies
- Healing the great American divide one painful fracture at a time, by Frank Vyan Walton
- Subversive: How the Black Panthers fed kids for free and set a model for the government, by Kelly Macias
- Trump travel expenses hurt more than just our wallets, by Sher Watts Spooner
- For Democrats to win back the House in 2018, the first step is believing they can, by Jacob Smith
- While Kansas tries to dump job-killing, budget-busting GOP tax policy, Democratic California booms, by Ian Reifowitz
- Tom Hayden’s final ‘Hell no,’ by Susan Grigsby
• This upcoming New Yorker cover won’t be very popular at 1600 Penn:
The scathing cover will accompany an investigation featured in the next issue that explores Russian President Vladimir Putin's influence on the presidential election, and the frightening return of a Cold War the United States is at risk of losing. The issue comes in the wake of a bombshell report on Thursday that cited White House officials requesting the FBI dispute evidence Trump aides communicated with Russian officials during the election. According to CNN, the FBI rejected that request.
• Officials investigating shitty swastika found in gender-neutral restroom: The Nazi symbol created with human waste was discovered over the weekend at the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the nation’s top art schools. A statement from school authorities stated that the level of "disrespect and vitriol is completely unacceptable." Police are investigating this as an act of vandalism and as a hate crime.•
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• Local official in Swedish town proposes paying city employees to take a paid hour off each week to have sex. But what will they do with the extra 57 minutes?
A local official in Sweden has a novel proposal to improve work-life balance and lift the local birthrate: give municipal employees an hourlong paid break each week to go home and have sex.
Sweden is already celebrated for its generous welfare state, including 480 days of paid parental leave, universal health care and a common ritual of coffee and pastry, known as fika, which is considered sacrosanct.
Per-Erik Muskos, 42, a councilman from the northern town of Overtornea, wants to add to those benefits, by offering the municipality’s 550 employees the right to subsidized sex.
• Axios reports that the Trump regime may delay infrastructure plan: The problem is that the Capitol Hill calendar is overflowing with a Supreme Court nomination, ACA repeal legislation, tax reform, next year’s budget, wrecking the environment, and spending fights. Thus, according to GOP sources, there is a back-up plan that would postpone consideration of the plan to launch a 10-year, trillion-dollar plan to repair roads, bridges and airports until 2018.
• Exxon chooses to leave a big chunk of its tar sands deposits in the ground:
In a press release, the company said that oil prices are so low that it’s simply not profitable to dig up and process the 3.5 billion barrels of fuel buried in one of Canada’s highest-quality deposits of oil sands. That’s a huge amount, as much as the entire petroleum consumption of the United States for six months.
Exxon has long resisted calls to erase these reserves from its books, insisting that it would dig up the tar sands someday, according to Inside Climate News. When a company erases an investment off the books, it’s effectively saying, “We bought something that’s now worthless.” This isn’t an easy thing to admit.
• No snowballs in the Senate during the February heat wave:
Nearly 3,000 daily maximum temperature records were set during the first half of the month. During the past week, 736 record highs were set with no record lows recorded. Thursday, Falcon Dam, Texas recorded a (yet unverified) temperature of 107 F—the highest temperature ever recorded in the U.S. in February.
• Republicans eager to take public out of public land decisions:
Congressional Republicans are set to kill a rule next week that has given the American public more power over how its 250 million acres of public lands are used. The rule was supported by their own party for many years.
The Bureau of Land Management (
BLM)is tasked with deciding on which parcels of land different activities like grazing, mining or drilling should be allowed. But in the past, many parties, like ranchers and hikers, had been largely left out of the decision-making process resulting in costly lawsuits. So the BLM came up with the Planning 2.0 rule, which
aims to increase "opportunities for early engagement by state and local government, Tribes, partner agencies, stakeholders, and the public."
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump camp caught leaning on the FBI. Now that Felix Sater is big news, who’s the next Russian to watch? No one could have predicted this, but easier gun availability is tied to more gun problems. AZ moves to outlaw protest. Was Trump’s Big Data just BS?
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