270 days left until the november election
Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Chagrin Falls - The Isle of Mansplaining
• American Indian candidates chase the money for election:
It’s time to look at the money. How much money are #NativeVote18 candidates raising?
Yes, I know, this is a silly metric. After all there is no relationship to governing and calling up people you don’t know and asking them for money. Yet this is the system in place. A candidate is more likely to be successful if she or he can raise a lot of money. [...]
The top Democrat for fundraising this cycle is Debra Haaland running in Albuquerque. She ended the year just shy of $200,000 in cash. Haaland, of course, and I can’t write it often enough, would be the first Native American woman ever elected to Congress. She’s running in a district that favors Democrats but she must win the primary first against seven other candidates. So far Sedillo Lopez, a former associate dean at the University of New Mexico Law School, has raised some $456,000 and reports $348,000 in cash on hand. Haaland has raised a total of $386,000 in contributions.
• Democrats fielding competing in districts they had abandoned for years:
House Democrats are stepping on the gas, with plans to target over 100 Republican-held congressional districts in the November midterm elections. [...]
Democrats are now fielding candidates in all but 12 of the 238 districts held by Republicans, according to [Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)], including in places like Alabama, where Democrats are competing in every single district for the first time in years. The idea is to expand the map as much as possible and hope to ride the potential wave.
• Map shows spread of unintentional opioid deaths.
•
MIDDAY TWEET
• One man is on a mission in the northern fjords of Norway: to clean up as much plastic as he can.
• Utility loses push to make ratepayers subsidize a West Virginia coal-fired power plant:
FirstEnergy Corp., a strong supporter of President Donald Trump’s pro-coal agenda, conceded defeat this week in its bid to shift the costs of one of its struggling coal-fired plants onto the backs of customers in West Virginia.
The company’s decision to withdraw its plan represents yet another loss for owners of coal-fired plants who had hoped a pro-coal president would keep their plants profitable.
FirstEnergy’s coal-fired Pleasants power station — located in Willow Island, West Virginia — has been struggling to compete with lower-cost sources of electricity in the unregulated market. To help revive the coal plant, FirstEnergy wanted to force its utility customers, who don’t have a choice of what type of fuel generates their electricity, to subsidize the plant.
• Poll shows the number of conservative-leaning states drops to 39:
The number of conservative-leaning states has dropped from 44 to 39, according to a new Gallup poll released Wednesday.
The survey, conducted over a number of polls taken throughout the year, found that 35 percent of Americans identified themselves as conservative, compared to 26 percent as liberal. This is a significant drop from last year when 46 percent identified as conservative.
• Twitter makes its first quarterly profit ever:
Twitter has posted its first quarterly profit in the company’s 12-year history, although a clampdown on fake accounts meant it lost users in the US and overall user growth stalled.
The San Francisco-based social network, which went public five years ago, made a profit of $91m (£65m) in the fourth quarter of 2017, compared with a $167m loss a year earlier, after cutting costs.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin knows right away: Rob Porter is the story of the day. Who is this jerk, and what's the source of his privilege? Would conservatives "boycotting" Republicans be enough to right their ship? Maybe, if they were just a political party and not MS-14.
RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!)
