8 days remain until the last ballots are cast in the 2018 elections
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Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is Just another week in hell:
What you may have missed Sunday Kos…
• Cops had plenty of clues on pipe bomber:
In the hours before his arrest, as federal authorities zeroed in and secretly accumulated evidence, Cesar Sayoc was in his element: spinning classic and Top 40 hits in a nightclub where he’d found work as a DJ.
As he entertained patrons from a dimly lit booth overlooking a stage at the Ultra Gentlemen’s Club, where Halloween decorations hung in anticipation of a costume party, he could not have known that investigators that very evening were capitalizing on his own mistakes to build a case against him.
• Tyrone Gayle, Washington press secretary for Senator Kamala Harris, dead at 30: Despite his age, Gayle had worked for several leading Democrats, including as a driver for Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia in 2012 and serving as a spokesman for the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Sen. Harris’s communications director said Gayle died as a consequence of colon cancer.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Big Oil brings big bucks to fight against Washington state carbon fee ballot measure: Voters in the Evergreen State will give a thumbs up or down to a carbon fee in the upcoming election. The fee set by Initiative 1631 would be charged to large carbon emitters based on carbon content of fuels sold in the state. Those costs would ultimately be paid by residents, with the greatest amounts coming from increased charges at gas stations. Estimates put the annual cost of each household at $159 to $440 in the first year of the fee. Most of the $29.7 million raised in opposition to the initiative came oil companies. That’s the most ever spent on any initiative in the state. Supporters have raised less than half as much, about $14 million.
"If people from the ground up support taking on a challenge this significant, then we can do it at the national level, too," said Julie McNamara, energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "And of course that's of concern to oil and gas companies."
• Vice is running a video series telling the stories of some of the more than 2,000 wrongly convicted people who have been exonerated since 1989.
• Angela Merkel says she will not run for chancellor in 2021 and will step down as chairwoman of the Christian Democrats in December.
• Telling the stories of indigenous women who have suffered sexual violence:
Abigail Echo-Hawk came across an unpublished study in 2016, shortly after becoming director of the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI). It showed that, of American Indian and Alaska Native women living in Seattle surveyed in 2010, 94 percent reported they had been raped or coerced into sex. More than half were without permanent housing at the time.
Some within UIHI were concerned about how the public would receive the data, but Echo-Hawk pushed for a report. It was released in August.
[ITT:] Why were some people worried about releasing this data?
[Echohawk:] In the media—whether it be print, TV, movies—Native people are often portrayed as victims, as vanishing. And so there was some hesitancy that this kind of information would just add to that. [...]
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: We are once again Under the Cloud of a Mass Shooting.TM Could the Russians notch their belt for it? @DemFromCT has weekend news & a look ahead to the election. Trump's layabout "presidency." Ukraine warned us. Republicans made sure we “missed” it.