Sunday snippets is a regular weekend feature at Daily Kos.
• Sixth Circuit Court says tough beans to voter rights plaintiffs in Tennessee: A unanimous three-judge panel upheld a lower court ruling that found a voting rights group had no standing to sue over the lack of security of voting machines used in the Volunteer State. Shelby Advocates for Valid Elections—SAVE—filed suit in 2018 against the Tennessee Election Commission and Secretary of State Tre Hargett. They said obsolete software and equipment means elections in Shelby County, home to Memphis, are vulnerable to hackers who could alter the true results. U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker had previously dismissed their complaint, saying the plaintiffs had not proved neither injury nor imminent threat of injury.
• Trump threatens to cut NPR’s funding over Pompeo’s colliding with a reporter and failing at an attempted “gotcha” moment with an unlabeled world map.
• Despite climate plan, NY regulators greenlight rate hike to cover Con Ed’s natural gas pipeline and associated infrastructure: The state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) mandates 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To meet those goals, any new gas infrastructure built now would have to be retired well before the end of its useful life, or become “stranded assets.” Said Lee Ziesche, Sane Energy Project Community Engagement Coordinator, “Governor Cuomo’s administration is starting off 2020 by ignoring the CLCPA and supporting climate denialism. We have just 10 years left to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and Con Ed’s plan spends the next three years and hundreds of millions of our ratepayer dollars going in the wrong direction.” Expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure is happening in plenty of other places, too. And they are assisted in this by banks like Bank of America cranking up their PR departments to talk about how they are taking the climate crisis seriously even as they don’t put their money where their mouth is and continue to invest in the expansion of oil and gas production.
• Movement focusing on missing Native women add Native men to the roster: While the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement’s efforts have added men, the #MMIW acronym likely won’t be changed, said Sarah Deer, a University of Kansas professor who has studied violence against American Indian women. “Women suffer a unique intersection that, typically, men don’t,” said Deer, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, “and that is that sexism is used as a weapon.” A presidential task force on the missing that was established last year will hold its first meeting Wednesday.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Here’s a Chauncey DeVega interview with investigative reporter William Cohan: The best-selling author has written a Vanity Fair series laying out the evidence that Trump and pals are manipulating stock markets for personal gain.
• Coronavirus toll so far is 1,975 infected, 56 dead: 12 nations have reported cases. In the U.S. there’s been one case in Chicago and one in Orange County, California. One worry in China, where the virus started and has spread the most so far, is that millions of people who traveled to be with family for Lunar New Year celebrations will be returning home or to their work in the cities when the holiday ends on Thursday.
• $900 million in storm aid sits unused in Florida because an understaffed government department won’t get cracking, leaving local officials and hurricane victims in the lurch.
• The New York Times reports that officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps knew immediately that they had mistakenly shot down a passenger airliner: But, the newspaper says, they didn’t report this to President Hassan Rouhani for three days, allowing him and other Iranian leaders to assure the world that Iran had not shot the plane down. When they finally got around to telling Rouhani, he told them to go public or he would resign, according to the Times.