Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Super-Fun-Pak Comix, feat. The Uncertainty Principal & more:
• Bill Green, Washington Post ombudsman who investigated Janet Cooke fraud, dead at 91:
Bill Green, a journalist and university official who spent one momentous year as ombudsman of The Washington Post, where [in 1980] he conducted an investigation into a story by reporter Janet Cooke about an 8-year-old heroin addict that won a Pulitzer Prize before it was exposed as a fraud, died March 28 at his home in Durham, N.C. He was 91. [...]
Mr. Green was an editor of small-town newspapers in his native North Carolina and later worked for the U.S. Information Agency and as a public affairs officer for NASA during the Apollo space program.
• Martin Sheen thinks O.J. Simpson didn't do it: He will executive produce a six-episode true-crime docuseries Hard Evidence: O.J. Is Innocent, based on the work of private investigator William C. Dear, former LAPD forensic psychologist Dr. Kris Mohandie and Rhode Island police Sergeant Derrick Levasseur. "The series intends to explore three questions," Sheen said. "What if there were enough evidence that proved O.J. Simpson did not murder his ex-wife Nicole or Ron Goldman? What if the real killer were still at large? And finally, what if a grand jury convened to reconsider the case based on new evidence?" Dear told Proma Khobla at Mashable that the series will present "a new theory and never before seen evidence to reveal a possible new suspect behind the case we all think we know."
• State Department apologizes for dumb #springbreakingbadly tweet:
The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs apologized for a tweet it sent out Wednesday that warned Americans of scams while traveling overseas.
“Not a ‘10’ in the US? Then not a 10 overseas. Beware of being lured into buying expensive drinks or worse – being robbed. #springbreakingbadly,” the tweet read.
It has since been deleted, but several media organizations had already captured the tweet, and Twitter users were quick to respond.
• Elon Musk will unveil the Tesla Model 3 tonight: But if you were really expecting to buy one for under $30,000 after tax incentives, well, sorry… The base price if $35,000, but federal incentives take it down to $27,500. However the features most buyers want will drive that price way up. Stuff like all-wheel drive, a larger battery for more range, and the auto-pilot feature. As for the federal credit, it only applies to the first 200,000 electric cars a manufacturer sells in the U.S. Tesla has already sold around 50,000 of the Model S and Model X here and will probably double that by the end of this year. Plus, the Model 3 won’t start rolling out of factory until the end of 2017—if Tesla meets its deadline, a big if given its record. So, by the time that “affordable” electric is available for a test drive, there may not be that many federal incentives left to bring the price down.
• President Obama has now commuted more sentences than last six presidents combined: He commuted the sentences of 61 more drug offenders Wednesday, bringing his total commutations to 248. None of these were the so-called pot lifers, however. Like 81-year-old Anthony Bascaro, a fellow with no prior convictions who has done 35 years for his minor role in a non-violent conspiracy to sell marijuana. And the president is still far from his goal announced as part of a clemency initiative in 2011. Former Attorney General Eric Holder said then that some 10,000 prisoners "were potentially going to be released." Among the reasons outlined by Brian Schatz at Mother Jones magazine? A “bureaucratic culture and broken process in which the cases of qualifying applicants often go unheard or are regularly rejected” against the recommendations of the Office of the Pardon Authority. About 95,000 of the federal prison system’s nearly 200,000 inmates are being held for non-violent drug crimes.
• Coal companies are going under, but the deluge of free money from taxpayers is unabated:
[A]s King Coal inescapably rushes towards bankruptcy, the companies are being showered by regulators and judges with extraordinary largesse. This is not a bailout like GM and Chrysler, (or even the banks), when the taxpayers took very large risks but gained a good shot at rescuing operating enterprises and the value they create. This bailout largesse to coal, largely driven by Republican politicians, is showering down on shareholders and management of enterprises which cannot and will not be rescued, just to postpone the moment at which they are reorganized, thus fattening management and shareholders before the evil moment.
And who pays? The general taxpayer for sure, but more spectacularly sick and retired mine workers and their communities.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin says not only does no one like Trump, his abortion stance has everyone fighting. And not just with him! Rosalyn MacGregor on the Flint water crisis. TFW you spend your life in politics, then find out that makes you “establishment,” so you suck.
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