Today’s comic by Matt Bors is St. Louis cops on the beat:
Donald Trump has 1,217 days in office if he manages to complete his term.
• While EPA’s Pruitt keeps talking climate change, National Guard commander says it’s becoming more severe:
Climate change could be causing storms to become "bigger, larger, more violent," underlining the need to have a robust military response to disasters across the country, the top officer of the National Guard Bureau said Tuesday.
"I do think that the climate is changing, and I do think that it is becoming more severe," Gen. Joseph Lengyel told reporters, noting the number of severe storms that have hit the U.S. in the past month. The general might want to take U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt aside for a chat on climate change and disasters: Pruitt sat down for two friendly interviews on Fox yesterday to tout his idea for a red team/blue team "debate" on climate.
• Jake LaMotta, the real raging bull, dead at 95:
Jake LaMotta, the tough-as-nails middleweight champion with the granite chin who was immortalized by Robert De Niro in the revered Martin Scorsese drama Raging Bull, has died. He was 95. [...]
In preparation for the film, LaMotta schooled De Niro on the sweet science. "He would say, 'Hit me, don’t worry, don’t worry,' " De Niro recalled in a 2013 interview with Time magazine. "He was 55, but he was really tough. I didn’t realize until I got to his age [how hard it is to] still take a punch."
• Mueller interviews his boss on Russia investigation:
The Wall Street Journal reports Robert Mueller’s office has interviewed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about Trump’s firing of James Comey.
“The interview, which occurred in June or July, presents the unusual situation of investigators questioning the person directly overseeing their probe. Mr. Mueller as special counsel has a good deal of independence, but he ultimately answers to Mr. Rosenstein, because Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation. The special counsel’s handling of the interview could be a sign that Mr. Mueller’s team doesn’t view Mr. Rosenstein as a central witness in its probe, as the deputy attorney general hasn’t withdrawn himself from overseeing it since that interview. A key witness would likely have to take such a step.”
•
• Farmworkers finally getting some legal relief from the heat, but only in two states:
With laborers harvesting in some of the hottest regions of the country, at least four US farmworkers die from heat annually—20 times the rate in all non-military employees, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But such tragedies are preventable. Indeed, it was the death of 10 outdoor workers in 2005 that actually prompted California to institute a heat protection law. By mandating access to water, shade and heat-protection training for outdoor laborers, the regulations put the state on a precedent-setting path.
California’s heat standard has been praised as a model for the rest of the country, though only one state—Washington—has followed suit. Not even the federal government has a standard for preventing workplace heat illnesses, noted William Krycia of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA), who oversees its heat illness prevention campaign.
• Nominees for restaffing Science Advisory Board include several climate science deniers. One of these loons is astrophysicist Gordon Fulks. In an email reply to Sarah Emerson at Vice, who pointed out to him the Trump regime has been actively muzzling federal scientists, specifically those working at the EPA, he replied:
"I am sure that many scientists who have lived off of the Global Warming scam are concerned about their future," he told me. "Climate science was a sleepy little subject, until James Hansen and Al Gore turned it into a TRILLION dollar per year industry. Climate hysteria will disappear quickly if the vast cash underpinning it disappears." [...]
"I suspect that President Trump understands this and will cut budgets at the EPA, GISS [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies], and other places where the taxpayer has not received real value for his tax dollars. But cutting budgets is a far cry from firing scientists who dare to speak up or putting them in front of a firing squad as Joseph Stalin did. The mistreatment of scientists during the Obama era was far worse than anything that has came before or after."
• Pueblo Indians protest Santa Fe’s phony commemoration of Spain’s reconquest in 1692:
For the past three years, Native Pueblo activists have protested the annual reenactment of the Entrada, the supposedly “bloodless” conquest of Santa Fe in 1692 by Don Diego de Vargas following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. While supporters of the event call the reenactment a celebration of a peaceful moment between the Spanish conquistadors and the Puebloan people of northern New Mexico, protesters dismiss this as a false narrative. Instead, they point to the 70 Native warriors who were executed the following year and the thousands more who were killed or enslaved over the course of Spain’s colonial occupation. [...]
While the protest raised a host of questions surrounding free speech, whether the police used excessive force, and the city’s deliberate attempt to undermine the protest, more broadly, it forced a conversation about what it means for a group to celebrate its ethnic identity and heritage and how and when such displays are appropriate.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Zombie Trumpkins trudge on with Zombie Trumpcare. New evidence of domestic emoluments. Why wait for positive press? The RGA makes it’s own! Tom Price-Tag now <3s gov’t waste. Trumps grifting their legal fees. Meet Arthur, the new Koch brother.
YouTube | iTunes | LibSyn | Keep us on the air! Donate via Patreon or Square Cash