What’s coming up on Sunday Kos:
- Here we go again—Campaign press already obsessing over white working-class voters, by Eric Boehlert
- Sincere question for Mitt Romney: Why did you bother running for Senate if not to stand up to Trump, by Ian Reifowitz
- International Digest: Radical-right Hindu nationalists win landslide victory in Indian elections, by Daily Kos Elections
- The deluge of recent anti-trans policies has one goal: erasing trans people, by Aurora Morris
- Marching with Pride; armed with history, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Is the rise in tornadoes tied to climate change? Scientists aren't sure—yet, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Congress will investigate the unindicted criminal in the White House while also chewing gum, by Frank Vyan Walton
- How do we avert the inevitable plutocrat-driven civil war? by Egberto Willies
- What's behind the abortion bans? White supremacy requires white babies—lots of them, by Susan Grigsby
- America is in a moral decline, by Mark E Andersen
• Trump regime eager to sell drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge this year: The ecologically sensitive Alaskan ANWR, the nation’s largest wildlife sanctuary, is also presumably brimful of petroleum. Joe Balash, assistant interior secretary for lands and minerals management, told an oil industry conference in Anchorage, “That lease sale will happen in 2019.” This comes after a decades-long fight between eco-advocates and fossil fuel companies over the Beaufort Sea coast part of the wildlife refuge, a pristine area that is home to polar bears, caribou, and other Arctic wildlife just east of the North Slope fields where oil has been being pumped for decades. Drilling in ANWR was blocked until 2017, but this ended with the Republican tax scam, which includes a mandate to drill in the refuge. The Interior Dept. expects to sell leases for up to 400,000 acres.
• Photos of the 12 people murdered in Virginia Beach.
• CNN ran a seven-minute segment on climate justice: That ought not to make for a headline. It ought to be a common, everyday occurrence. But at least it’s progress:
Now that climate change is finally becoming a thing on cable news, networks also seem to be catching on to the existence of climate injustice. In the wake of another week of devastating storms, CNN host Don Lemon ran a seven-minute segment on Wednesday night about how climate change disproportionately impacts people of color.
Put simply, climate change is racist — not in the bigoted, call-you-mean-names-and-tell-you-to-go-back-to-your-country kind of way, but in the sense that it exacerbates existing inequities, making many people of color more vulnerable to climate catastrophe.
MIDDAY TWEET
• How a group became the first college students to build and launch a rocket into space.
• 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising that galvanized gay activism will get lots of attention this month:
If it’s Pride Month, there’s gotta be a parade. And there will be, in New York City and places around the country and world.
But this year, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising that fueled the fire for a global LGBTQ movement, there’s also a lot more. From symposiums to movie screenings, walking tours to art exhibits, and even an opera, a slew of institutions and organizations are filling June with events that commemorate that moment and its impact through the past five decades, and also using it as inspiration for the current generation of activists to keep pushing for civil rights.
• Meanwhile, Texas and 15 other states retain laws banning “homosexual conduct: This is the case despite the U.S. Supreme Court 2003 ruling in Lawrence v Texas, which overturned the state’s sodomy law along with those in other states. However, this year, Texas politicians once again failed to support a Democratic effort to remove a homophobic provision of the state penal code that has been unenforceable since that ruling. Under the law, it’s a Class C misdemeanor offense, which can be penalized with a $500 fine, if a person “engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex,” which has been on the books since 1973. The legislature also failed to update the Texas Family Code that still prohibits same-sex marriage outlawed by the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling. While that law and and other anti-gay laws in the Lone Star State and other states have been made unenforceable, this hasn't stopped cops from Louisiana to Minnesota for arresting people of the same sex for kissing in public or engaging in “lascivious” behavior.