Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Patriotic Americans send malcontent Trump back to where he's originally from:
• Business Insider interviews with a baker’s dozen of activists at Netroots Nation last week indicate a tough primary battle for the presidential nomination. Dopper0189, the co-founder of Black Kos, was one of those queried, along with two other Kosacks, Brillig and gizmo59.
• NYC landlords challenge rent-control law based on property rights argument backed by citation linking constitutional counting of slaves as 3/5ths human.
• Congressional hearing over drilling on public land elicits usual nonsense from Republicans: Senator Elizabeth Warren was the first 2020 presidential candidate to propose banning oil and gas leases on public lands. But now 18 Democratic candidates have signed onto the idea. Obviously, the fossil fuel industry and many elected Republicans think this is a horrible idea. Thus, at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Energy and Natural Resources on Tuesday—the committee’s first hearing in the 116th Congress on the environmental impact of fossil fuel production on public lands—the GOP questioning brimmed over with the usual malarkey. Among other things, Republicans asked a witness why it was cold in Arizona this May, with the implication that if it gets cold anywhere, claims that the Earth is warming must be bogus. Nicolas Loris, a senior fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation asserted that the climate crisis will only get bad at 4 or 5 degrees Celsius (7.2 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit). “If you have the 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, those catastrophic scenarios really go away,” he said. But, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced in an October report that 2 degrees of warming would result in what many referred to as “climate genocide.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Witness says “smear” videos made Planned Parenthood clinics targets and forced them to spent extra money on security: The organization’s attorney, Amy Bombse, argued for a summary judgment in a lawsuit asking damages and injunctive relief against anti-abortion activist David Daleiden and his group, the Center for Medical Progress. Daleiden, et al., posed as employees of a fake biomedical company so they could attend abortion providers’ conferences and meetings in 2014 and 2015. They then secretly recorded conversations and released the videos that a federal judge later labeled “deceptively edited.” Bombse said the videos spurred threats and physical attacks against Planned Parenthood clinics. These included the 2015 shooting at a clinic in Colorado Springs in which three people were killed and nine wounded. The killer, Robert Dear, called himself a “warrior for the babies.” Bombse said, “David Daleiden and his co-conspirators created a situation where Robert Dear or somebody like him was more likely,”
• U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team champions refute attacks on them as anti-Christian: Fundamentalist critics say a player who refused to wear an LGBTQ pride jersey in 2017, Jaelene Hinkle, was pushed off the team because of her religion. Backup goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris, was spurred to speak out: “Hinkle, our team is about inclusion. Your religion was never the problem. The problem is your intolerance and you are homophobic. You don’t belong in a sport that aims to unite and bring people together,” Harris wrote on Twitter. “You would never fit into our pack or what this team stands for.” She later added, “This is actually an insult to the Christians on our team.”
• Cast out from the F-35 program, Turkey could buy its next advanced fighter jets from Russia:
The U.S. decision was the culmination of two years of growing tension with Turkey, which launched efforts to to purchase four S-400 batteries in 2017. At various times, Washington suggested Turkey could face sanctions for purchasing Russian defense hardware.
In an official Rostec statement released Thursday, [CEO Sergei] Chemezov was quoted as saying Russia is prepared to help Turkey procure advanced fighter jets. But the jets on offer are hardly an analogue of the stealthy F-35. Rather, Chemezov is offering up the Su-35, a heavily souped-up version of the Su-27.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin leverages our procedure fixation to note that "Trumpism" is a global cancer. Republicans cower & cringe over Trump's racism. What's going on in House Dem heads in intraparty strife? Green's impeachment move was a missed opportunity.