What’s coming up on Sunday Kos:
- Beyoncé's 'Brown Skin Girl' made me cry for all the right reasons, by Rochaun MeadowsFernandez
- The profit in pesticides appears to be more important than the cost to our children, by Susan Grigsby
- Left and right have more than a difference of opinion—it's a difference of reality, by Frank Vyan Walton
- How to connect race and class to win against divide-and-conquer narratives, by David Akadjian
- The deeper meaning and history behind Trump's racist lie that the Squad 'hates America', by Ian Reifowitz
- No surprise: States with the most guns have highest rates of domestic violence gun deaths, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Winning 2020 requires humanity, introspection, truth acceptance, & fronting the Trump racism, by Egberto Willies
- No, both sides are not the same, by Mark E Andersen
- The Daily Kos Elections guide to the nation's ancestries and origins, by congressional district, by David Jarman
- When the silence protesting racist violence was louder than words, by Denise Oliver Velez
- When progressives pass ballot measures, Republicans try to repeal them—and make them impossible, by Stephen Wolf
• Experts say DOJ recommended mitigations for anti-competitive aspects of the T-Mobile-Sprint it okayed this week won’t work: Consequences? As with mergers of telecoms in other nations, this one is likely to raise prices and worsen customer service.
• FEC gives relief to candidates who aren’t wealthy by ruling they can use campaign funds for child care:
On Thursday, the Federal Election Commission ruled that M. J. Hegar, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, can spend campaign funds on child care for her two kids while she’s running for office. The ruling builds on the FEC’s determination last year that Liuba Grechen Shirley, who at the time was running for a House seat in New York, could do the same.
The reason these two women sought the FEC’s blessing is that campaign-finance laws prohibit candidates from drawing from their own political stockpiles for “personal use,” and legally, it wasn’t clear whether child-care expenses associated with campaigning fell under that category. Now, whether candidates have to take on child-care costs in order to run (as Grechen Shirley did) or keep paying for child care as they already had been (as is the case with Hegar), they can cover those expenses knowing that they aren’t running afoul of federal regulations.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Watch Rep. Jamie Raskin talk impeachment with MSNBC’s Ari Melber. (Fast forward to 10:30.)
• Right-wing coalition sues to block New Mexico gun law requiring background checks for gun transactions: The state’s new gun reforms require background checks for all transfers of guns except among close family members. This is similar to laws in 12 other states, although some of these only apply to handguns, or, as in the case of Washington, handguns and military-style semi-automatic rifles. Federal law has required background checks in transactions by licensed gun dealers for half a century, but sales between private parties are not covered. Estimates of private sales run as high as 20% of the total. That inadequacy is why states decided to step in with a broader background check requirement. The New Mexico reform also mandates confiscation of guns from domestic abusers. While the coalition is taking the legal route to fight the law—their lawsuit will most likely fail—all but a few of the state’s 33 county sheriffs have said they won’t comply with it. Sheriffs in some counties in Colorado, Washington, and New York took the same approach after those states passed background check laws.
• Donald Trump of “fire and fury” fame seems totally calm about North Korea at the moment: Even though intelligence sources say the nation has built perhaps a dozen nuclear weapons while Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been making big promises for summit talks that have conveyed a kind of legitimacy on dictator Kim Jong-un that his father and grandfather could only dream of. This week Kim was photographed checking out his nation’s new diesel-powered submarine, which could extend the range of its strategic missiles. North Korea also tested two short-range missiles. No furious tweets from Trump. Indeed, on Monday, he told reporters who asked about more talks with North Korea: “We just have a very good relationship and probably they would like to meet, and we’ll see what happens. There was a little correspondence recently. We had very positive correspondence with North Korea. When they’re ready, we’ll be ready.”