Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is The crisis:
• What you may have missed on Sunday Kos …
- The leak of Dr. Ford's letter wasn't by Feinstein or Dems—it was most likely the White House, by Frank Vyan Walton
- Laquan McDonald matters. So does the positive change his murder has sparked, by Ian Reifowitz
- International Elections Digest: Brazil poised to elect far-right president who praises dictatorship, by Daily Kos Elections
- Is the Blue Wave in the bag? Keep the Houston Oilers and Buffalo Bills in mind, by Egberto Willies
- Donald Trump is America’s tax cheater-in-chief, by Jon Perr
- It's not about impeachment, it's about the rule of law, by Laurence Lewis
- Why it's so hard to break the cycle of homelessness: An interview with Cincinnati Lytle camp members, by David Akadjian
- 2018 voting gender gap is becoming an abyss, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Don't want to be called a bigot, don't be a bigot, by Mark E Andersen
- Dear Colin Kaepernick, #TakeAKnee—then stand up and lead your supporters to the polls, by Denise Oliver Velez
• New Jersey attorney general wants to know why Florida gets exempted from Trump regime’s offshore drilling plans: Earlier this year, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced that more than 90 percent of federal offshore land would be opened up for oil drilling. While states can bar drilling up to three miles offshore, after that the federal government is in charge of the waters and sea bed beneath. But the same day he announced that he met with Florida Gov. Rick Scott and subsequently announced that the Sunshine State would be exempt from offshore drilling. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal wanted to know why Florida received this special treatment, so he has sued the US Department of the Interior (DOI) for failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking more information about why the Florida was exempted but no other state was.
• In obliterated Mexico Beach, one house specially built to withstand hurricanes succeeded amazingly. It’s surrounded by utter devastation.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Nafeez Ahmed—The U.N. alarming climate report wasn’t alarmist enough:
In an essay for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Molina along with Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate sciences at the University of California, San Diego, and Durwood J. Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development in Washington DC, explain that climate change is not worsening in a simple, linear fashion, but rather by compounding and accelerating: “Adding 50 percent more warming to reach 1.5 degrees won’t simply increase impacts by the same percentage—bad as that would be. Instead, it risks setting up feedbacks that could fall like dangerous dominos, fundamentally destabilizing the planet.”
The IPCC “fails to adequately warn leaders” about six climate tipping points that work in this way. One of the more well-known such tipping points is Arctic sea ice, which could disappear in the summer in just 15 years,
according to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme’s Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic report. The ice acts as a reflector of heat back into the atmosphere, so the more it melts, the more the Arctic waters absorb heat.
• 18 inches deep in Norwegian farmland, ground-penetrating radar finds a well-preserved Viking ship burial:
The find was described as “incredibly exciting” by Knut Paasche, an expert on Viking ships at Niku. The researchers worked with motorised high-resolution ground-penetrating radar developed by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Austria.
• Latino drivers angered over being stopped on the I-5 for drug searches. The Los Angeles Times first reported Oct. 4 how the majority of searches involved Latinos. Now there is a follow-up:
A Times analysis of more than 9,000 stops found that 69% of drivers stopped by the Domestic Highway Enforcement Team from 2012 through the end of last year were Latino and that two-thirds of them had their vehicles searched — a rate far higher than motorists of other racial and ethnic groups.
“It could have been [a white driver] in the right lane, a Latino in the middle and another white guy on the left, and they’d stop the Latino,” Salguero, 48, said of the sheriff’s team. “That’s racism.”
Sheriff’s officials have denied racial profiling and insisted the deputies base their stops only on a person’s driving and other impartial factors.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin reminds us there's an election coming. Trump hands the Middle East to Jared, and the Sauds are killing people like it's free. Republicans pine for the segregated days of yore, back before politics was invented. Boom! History-ed!