Today’s comic by Jen Sorensen is Worse than idiocracy:
• Seriously, Senator? Constituent Barb Melson confronted Republican Sen. Joni Ernst at a “Coffee with Joni” event in Red Oak, Iowa, on Sunday, about Pr*sident Trump’s comment on “shithole” countries, asking about “the damage that Trump is doing to our neighbors around the world with his white supremacy talk.” Ernst said he enjoys support because “He is standing up for a lot of the countries.” Asked to “name a few,” she said “Norway” unironically, eliciting a laugh from the crowd.
• China’s investment in solar accounted for half the world’s $160.8 billion 2017 total: Bloomberg New Energy Finance said the country increased its total clean energy spending last year by 24 percent, to $132.6 billion, $86.5 billion of which went to solar. BNEF estimates China installed 53 gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity last year, about 20 more gigawatts than analysts originally projected. Australia expanded its renewables investment by 150 percent, to a record $9 billion. Analysts had previously projected that China’s solar market would decline after 2016, with 2017 installations estimated at around 30 gigawatts. Instead,
• Japan TV sends erroneous alert about North Korean missile attack.
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MIDDAY TWEET
• North Korea takes another poke at Trump’s nuclear button tweet:
A summary of the [Tuesday] commentary by North Korea’s official news agency described the tweet as “the spasm of a lunatic.”
“The spasm of Trump in the new year reflects the desperate mental state of a loser who failed to check the vigorous advance of the army and people of the DPRK,” the Rodong Sinmun commentary said, using the acronym for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “He is making (a) bluff only to be diagnosed as a psychopath.”
• On this day in 1901, Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African American to serve in Congress, died.
• Uranium company pushed lobbied hard for reduction of Bear Ears National Monument:
Energy Fuels Resources prepared maps of the areas it wanted removed from Bears Ears and distributed them when Secretary Ryan Zinke of the Department of the Interior visited the area last May, The New York Times reported. The firm's vice president and lobbying team -- which included a former member of Congress who once disparaged Native activism -- later met with Zinke's top staff to discuss the monument, The Washington Post reported.
Zinke has denied that mining interests played a role in his recommendation to reduce the size of the monument. But Energy Fuels happens to own a third of the uranium claims within the original Bears Ears designation, The Times reported.
The firm already operates the White Mesa Mill, which the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has opposed, and the Daneros Mine on the outskirts of Bears Ears. Overall, there are more than 300 uranium claims within the original monument boundaries, The Times reported.
• 2018 will be another big year for U.S. arms makers:
As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office. They raked in tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, while posting sharp stock price increases and healthy profits driven by the continuation and expansion of Washington’s post-9/11 wars. But last year’s bonanza is likely to be no more than a down payment on even better days to come for the military-industrial complex.
President Trump moved boldly in his first budget, seeking an additional $54 billion in Pentagon funding for fiscal year 2018. That figure, by the way, equals the entire military budgets of allies like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Then, in a bipartisan stampede, Congress egged on Trump to go even higher, putting forward a defense authorization bill that would raise the Pentagon’s budget by an astonishing $85 billion. (And don’t forget that, last spring, the president and Congress had already tacked an extra $15 billion onto the 2017 Pentagon budget.) The authorization bill for 2018 is essentially just a suggestion, however — the final figure for this year will be determined later this month, if Congress can come to an agreement on how to boost the caps on domestic and defense spending imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. The final number is likely to go far higher than the staggering figure Trump requested last spring.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Four cops shot, but the shooter was named Christian. The Greitens story takes a turn for the worse, and ensnares the Luetkemeyer family. DOJ is cooking terrorism stats, and Armando has something to say about it. Trump, in a house, keeps digging.
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