Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is The view from Trump Tower:
• Alabama’s Supreme Court still all white. But, hey, at least they got a couple of women on board:
The state of Alabama's violent attacks on voting rights protesters in Selma helped drive the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Back then, the Alabama Supreme Court was an all-white body. Today, 50 years after the passage of the seminal civil rights law, it still is. Only two African Americans have ever served, and only after first being appointed by a governor. The state's other highest appellate courts, the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Court of Civil Appeals, have never seen a black judge, despite the fact that more than a quarter of the state's voting-age population is African American. (Only two African Americans have been elected to a statewide office in Alabama. Ever.)
According to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in an Alabama federal court by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and other voting rights advocates, that situation is by design, and a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act that the state helped inspire.
• Alexandra Petri offers 44 examples for how Hillary can get that presidential look.
• Extent of Arctic sea ice likely to reach second-lowest level on record in next couple of days: Currently, that extent is lower than in every year except 2007 and 2012. In about nine or ten days, the winter freeze will begin again. A key component of Arctic ice is its age. Older ice, the stuff that’s been around for years, has been steadily dwindling. Global warming is rising in the Arctic twice as fast as the rest of the Earth and that has meant more sea ice has melted each summer. Ice that survives one or more summer melt seasons is thicker and more likely to survive future summers. Scientists point out that the amount of this perennial ice has been dropping since the 1980s. In their 2015 Arctic Report Card, they wrote:
In 1985, 20% of the ice pack was very old ice, but in March 2015 old ice only constituted 3% of the ice pack. Furthermore, we note that first-year ice now dominates the ice cover, comprising ~70% of the March 2015 ice pack, compared to about half that in the 1980s.
• USDA shows drop in food insecurity, but situation still worse than before the recession: Report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows the percentage of American households on the brink of hunger has dropped from 14 percent in 2014 to 12.7 percent in 2015, a significant change. But that is still much higher than it was before the Great Recession. And it amounts to more than 45 million people.
In 2015, 87.3 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the year. The remaining 12.7 percent (15.8 million households) were food insecure. Food-insecure households (those with low and very low food security) had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources.
• EPI: Trans-Pacific Partnership will hurt blacks and Latinos even more than whites:
The White House is making one last push for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. However, growing imports of goods from low-wage, less-developed countries, which nearly tripled from 2.9 percent of GDP in 1989 to 8.4 percent in 2011, reduced the wages of the typical non-college educated worker in 2011 by “5.5 percent, or by roughly $1,800—for a full-time, full year worker earning the average wage for workers without a four-year college degree,”
• Joan Walsh reports on “Donald Trump’s Misogynist Ratpack.”
• Surprise! State AGs met with coal and electricity companies before filing against carbon rules:
Coal and electricity companies paid to meet with Republican state attorneys general just weeks before those top law enforcement officials joined in suing the federal government over the EPA’s Clean Power Plan,new documents show.
Coal company Murray Energy and electricity giant Southern Company, which owns several southeastern utilities and a number of natural gas companies, held private meetings with attorneys general at the Republican Attorneys General Association’s annual summit in West Virginia in August 2015. The meetings cost up to $125,000 per company, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, which uncovered the documents.
• On today's Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin sorted out the train wreck of the “Commander in Chief Forum.” What can stop Trump from launching nukes? McMullin accidentally picks a VP. Congressional Gop plans Dem punishments. Rudy & The Donald: a love story.
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