88 days remain until the November midterms
|
Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is A Calvinesque and Hobbesian look at Russian collusion:
• Trump regime eager to open up hundreds of thousands of Calif. acres to fracking:
Ending a five-year moratorium, the Trump administration Wednesday took a first step toward opening 1.6 million acres of California public land to fracking and conventional oil drilling, triggering alarm bells among environmentalists.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said it’s considering new oil and natural gas leases on BLM-managed lands in Fresno, San Luis Obispo and six other San Joaquin Valley and Central Coast counties. Meanwhile, activists in San Luis Obispo are pushing a ballot measure this fall to ban fracking and new oil exploration in the county.
• Rapist Brock Turner loses his ridiculous “outercourse” appeal. So he will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
• Another $1.1 billion added to cost of Georgia nukes: Four Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors were going to usher in a nuclear power renaissance we were told a decade ago. They were supposed to be cheaper, safer, and quicker to get up and running once their permits were approved. But, a year ago, the owners shut down the two nukes they were building South Carolina, with the project less than 40 percent complete. Owners South Carolina Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper estimated that the $11.5 billion they had originally said the pair of reactors would cost when completed had ballooned to $25 billion. And they would not be finished until 2021-22, more than three years after their originally slated completion date. Now, Southern Co. and its utility subsidiary Georgia Power, who are building the other two nukes in Georgia, have added another $1.1 billion to the cost of the pair after having taken over the project when Westinghouse went bankrupt. Total cost for that project is now set at $27 billion. Even though the reactors won’t switch on for years, ratepayers are already coughing up more than $100 a year to pay for this “construction work in progress.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Report says American elders are declaring bankruptcy three times as much as they used to: The Consumer Bankruptcy Project released its “Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy: Fallout from Life in a Risk Society,” which puts the blame on the ravaged societal safety net and policy changes that have left large numbers of older Americans with inadequate retirement savings and huge medical expenses. More than a third told researchers their bankruptcies were caused at least in part because they supported family members attending college by co-signing loans they now can’t pay back. Marc Stern, a lawyer in Seattle, told reporters: d“I never saw parents with student loans 20 or 30 years ago. When you are living on $2,000 a month and that includes Social Security—and you have rent and savings are minuscule—it is extremely difficult to recover from something like that.”
• Today is Smokey Bear’s 74th birthday:
Today marks the 74th birthday of America’s wildfire prevention symbol: Smokey Bear. On Aug. 9, 1944, Smokey was officially created to be the face of what would become the longest running public service advertisement campaign in the United States. At the time, our country’s forestlands were facing an epidemic of raging wildfires caused by the carelessness of people. Ironically, these were often the same people who came to those natural areas to admire the wild beauty of the landscape, and the wildlife that lived there. The first Smokey Bear poster was released In October of 1944, and it featured a warm and friendly looking black bear urging people that “Care will prevent 9 out of 10 woods fires!”
• Cherokee engineer finally gets some public recognition decades after her death: Mary Golda Ross, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and great-great-granddaughter of Chief John Ross who led the tribe during the forced removal of the “Trail of Tears” in the 1830s, is considered to be the first Native woman to work as an aerospace engineer. She is featured in the Google Doodle Thursday. Her niece told Oklahoma Today Magazine: “She was six feet tall but very quiet and unassuming. She did not demand anything. She just went in and did it in her very quiet way.” She first went to work after graduation for what is now called Lockheed Martin, not just as the first American Indian women aerospace engineer, but the only woman on the design team of cutting-edge aircraft and spacecraft. After retiring in 1983, she promoted organizations like the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. In 1992, the Society of Women Engineers set up a scholarship in Ross’s name, which supports women who want to become engineers.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin has more analysis of Tuesday's elections, Laura Ingraham's defection from the United States, and the ongoing Battle of the Suburbs. Nunes caught on tape. Todd Kincannon goes off the deep end. And just how new is this "new" kind of Dem?