Today’s comic by Matt Bors is The secret immigrant agenda:
• Oh goodie. Another climate science-denying appointment to high office: This time it’s Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia. The White House confirmed Tuesday that he will soon be announced for the top slot at the Department of Homeland Security. Cuccinelli went further than other deniers in showing just how deep his scientific illiteracy goes. As the Government Accountability Project has noted, he “has a history of not only discounting scientists but spending taxpayers’ money to actively attack them. In 2010, he began a witch hunt and accused climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of fraud. In the end, Cuccinelli’s crusade wasted hundreds of thousands of hard-earned taxpayer dollars.” Josh Israel noted after his losing campaign for governor in 2013 that he “frequently asking his audiences to exhale carbon dioxide together in unison just to ‘annoy the EPA’.” For a few years, Cuccinelli was the director of the right-wing FreedomWorks’ Regulatory Action Center, an organization dedicated to trashing government regulations in several arenas. In 2018, he was a featured speaker at the Heartland Institute, funded by the Koch brothers and dark money Donors Trust to attack climate science. There he said red-state attorneys general should become partners with the energy industry and others affected by government regulations. As attorney general, he said, three of his full-time staffers were specifically assigned to fight regulations.
• 21,000 women have ordered abortion pills in the past six months: Three-fourths of the orders come from states with strict forced-birther laws.
• Coast to coast in more than 500 cities Tuesday, thousands of people protested forced-birther laws: So far in 2019, more than 30 new abortion laws have been introduced, passed, or signed. Among them are the most drastic restrictions since Roe v. Wade legalized abortions across the nation 46 years ago. The worst, in Alabama, would bar any abortion and punish providers with up to 99 years in prison. The backers of such laws know these won’t pass constitutional muster as long as Roe remains the law of the land. But their point is to put forth challenges to that ruling in hopes the current Supreme Court will overturn the 1973 decision. Laura Simmons, Georgia state director of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said one of the organization’s focuses is changing the situation by electing more progressive legislators. “We know that if we would have had more women, pro-choice women in office, this wouldn’t have happened,” she said. “We’re going to stand up and fight back.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Sen. Lisa Murkowski questions whether renewables still need tax credits: Under discussion at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is the investment tax credit for solar and the production tax credit for wind. A compromise in 2017 continued the credits in exchange for ending the 40-year ban on exports of U.S. crude oil. The solar ITC begins phasing out next year, and the wind PTC begins phasing out in 2021. Murkowski asked whether the credits are still needed at a time when many renewable technologies "standing on their own now." Jason Hartke, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, said the question should be asked "in the context of the threat of climate change, which means we need to move a lot faster." Without the credits, many clean energy technologies wouldn’t have gained a foothold in the market, and that is still the case, he said.
• James Palmer at Foreign Policy—“America Loves Excusing Its War Criminals”:
The report that U.S. President Donald Trump is preparing to pardon a number of U.S. war criminals, both accused and convicted, has sparked rightful outrage. These are not ambiguous cases: Seven former platoon members have accused one of the men, Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, of routinely targeting women and children as a sniper in Iraq, as well as murdering a teenage captive in cold blood. Nicholas Slatten is a mercenary who is, so far, the only man convicted of a massacre of 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007. Trump has repeatedly expressed his support for torture and atrocity in war, though as with Trump’s previous pardons of murderers in uniform, many of those who, unlike the president, actually served in the military are particularly disgusted by the move.
• Republican senator says Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter should all “disappear”: In an op-ed column in USA Today, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley trashes these platforms. “Social media’s innovations do our country more harm than good. Maybe social media is best understood as a parasite on productive investment, on meaningful relationships, on a healthy society,” Hawley writes. “Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—they devote massive amounts of money and the best years of some of the nation’s brightest minds to developing new schemes to hijack their users’ neural circuitry. That’s because social media only works—to make money, anyway—if it consumes users’ time and attention, day after day. It needs to replace the various activities we enjoyed and did perfectly well before social media existed.” Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, have called for breaking up the big players in social media, but not for their elimination.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Ben Carson stepped in it yesterday, and it’s all on tape. The i-word parade gathers steam. Greg Dworkin parses polling data. IRS memo says Trumpsters are wrong on the tax returns, which we knew. Bridgegate is back! Godwin's Law finally repealed.