Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Trump's fourth term, no impeachment!
• Report shows solar power still expanding, but Trump tariffs hurt: 10.6 gigawatts of new photovoltaic solar was installed in 2018, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight 2018 Year-in-Review Report, a decrease of 2 percent over 2017. In the fourth quarter of 2018, 4.2 GW of solar PV was installed, 4 percent more than in the fourth quarter of 2017. The report, put together by Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), forecasts a 14 percent rise to 12 GW of new solar this year with a rise in annual installations to 15.8 GW in 2021. In 2022, the residential federal investment tax credit that has helped spur solar installations will fall to 10 percent. All told, U.S. solar installations totaled 62.4 GW at the end of 2018. That compares with a total of slightly less than 1.16 GW in 2008. Said SEIA’s president and CEO, Abigail Ross Hopper: “The solar industry experienced growing pains in 2018, in large part due to the unnecessary tariffs that were imposed on solar cells and modules, but this report still finds significant reason for optimism. The total amount of solar installed in America is on track to more than double in the next five years, proving solar’s resiliency and its economic strength. It’s clear this next decade is going to be one of significant growth.”
• Trump’s proposed budget would cut deep into renewable energy: The new slash-and-burn budget the Trump regime has presented will see many of the cuts he seeks at least partially restored by Congress, something that happened even when the House wasn’t in Democratic control. But the proposed cuts show what Trump and a lot of Republicans would be doing if they were totally unleashed. Besides whacking social services, the White House has proposed a fiscal year 2020 budget that would ax Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and the Department of Energy’s loan programs. For instance, the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy would get just $696 million, a far cry from the $2.4 billion funding it received in the 2019 budget.
• Bible signed with Donald Trump’s flamboyant autograph sold on eBay for $325. The Donald no doubt believes his signature on the flyleaf is at least as sacred as what else is written in those scriptures.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Pledging allegiance to "fiscal responsibility" is politically useless, and Democrats should avoid doing it.
• Scientists seeking to resurrect extinct woolly mammoth, find cell function in ancient remains:
New findings indicate that the resurrection of mammoths is not a fantasy, a research team including members from Kindai University is saying, after cell nuclei extracted from the 28,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth were discovered to retain some function.
When placed in the ova of mice, the nuclei developed to a state just before cellular division, according to a paper published Monday in the British journal Scientific Reports.
The team includes researchers from Japanese and Russian universities. It has been working for about 20 years on a project to use cloning to resurrect mammoths, an animal that has long been extinct.
• Joint effort by feds and New York get 100,000 backlogged rape kits tested: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. invested $38 million to get the kits tested, none of them in his own jurisdiction. Over the past three years, the evidence from these tests has resulted in more than a thousand arrests and hundreds of convictions. But estimates are that another 155,000 kits are still untested, letting rapists roam free to continue doing what they do. Some kits have been left on the shelf so long that even when suspects are identified they can’t be prosecuted because of the legal deadlines and other factors, according to authorities. Vance calls this a “an absolute travesty of justice,” noting “That backlog not only undermined justice and the perception, and reality, of equality — it also made every woman and every American less safe.”
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Everybody into the pool!
Greg Dworkin,
Armando and
Joan McCarter were all on hand today for Manafort's sentencing, more lessons from the college entrance cheating scandal, reactions to Pelosi, Brexit news, new nuclear option warnings & more.