115 days remain until the November midterms
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Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Pablo: A Family Separation Theme Song:
• What’s coming up at Sunday Kos:
• West Side Story—revisited, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Trump-Putin summit: Vladimir gives Donald a performance review, by Sher Watts Spooner
• Where do we go from here? The Supreme Court has been stolen, by Armando
• Stop with the false hope. The Supreme Court is lost for a generation lest we …, by Egberto Willies
• Damn right I am a liberal, by Mark E Andersen
• Ken Starr, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and the eroding rule of law, by Hunter
• Trump would rather overturn Roe v. Wade than actually reduce the abortion rate, by Ian Reifowitz
• After normalization comes collaboration, by Susan Grigsby
• Interior Dept. plans auction of off-shore gas and oil leases in Gulf of Mexico: The Aug. 15 auction covering 78 million acres is being done despite the weak market response to recent leasing in federal waters. The leases are off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. This will be the third of 10 lease auctions slated for the 2017-2022 period. Vincent DeVito, an adviser to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, said the auction “is just one piece of the administration’s comprehensive effort to secure our nation’s energy future.”
• By the end of this year, Amazon expected to capture half of U.S. e-commerce market: A new survey by eMarketer puts that total at $258.2 billion, an increase of 30 percent from a year ago. The company ended 2017 with about 44 percent of the market:
In second place isn't Walmart, like some might expect, but eBay, according to eMarketer's research. EBay is expected to end the year with about 6.6 percent of the U.S. e-commerce market, Apple with 3.9 percent, and Walmart with 3.7 percent. Next in line are Home Depot, Best Buy, QVC Group, Macy's, Costco and Wayfair.
• Pennsylvania lays out plans to increase solar in the state 36-fold by 2030: The state has been a laggard compared with its neighbors when it comes to renewable energy plans. New Jersey and New York both call for 50 percent renewables by 2030, but Pennsylvania has only mandated 18 percent by 2020-21, with no further improvement in the years after that. But this week, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection released a draft proposal for boosting its solar installations to a capacity of 11 gigawatts. An element of that expansion, the authors say, would be policies designed to expand the reach of distributed and community solar, which they note will offer “broader social, environmental and economic benefits.” There are many models for community solar, but a key aspect of it is providing those benefits to people who cannot afford to install solar or live in apartments where solar isn’t practical or landlords are unwilling to do so.
MIDDAY TWEET
• $350,000 painting by abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell returned after 40 years. Motherwell hired the Santini Moving Company to store and transport his works during the 1960s and ‘70s. The man who returned the painting is the son of a Santini employee, who is suspected to have stolen the untitled painting in 1978.
• Centers for Disease Control join probe into sonic incidents in Cuba and China:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has joined the investigation into the sonic incidents that have injured U.S. diplomats and have confounded U.S. officials and scientists since first discovered last year in Cuba.
Ambassador Kenneth Merten, an acting principal deputy assistant secretary of State, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday that the CDC has joined a task force created by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that is investigating the unexplained health incidents.
• Trump’s choice for a guy to oversee election security? A guy who has disenfranchised tens of thousands of Americans by inaccurately purging them from voter rolls.