Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Why Trump banned transgender soldiers:
• National Geographic announces its Travel Photographer of the Year, and posts some of their favorite submissions.
• Mini-museum of EPA history being reworked by Trump administration:
A miniature museum that began as a pet project of former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy has come under scrutiny. It features the agency’s work over 4½ decades, with exhibit topics such as regulating carbon dioxide emissions and the Paris climate accord. The Obama administration championed such efforts, but President Trump’s policies are at odds with them.
Now the museum, which opened just days before President Barack Obama left office, is being reworked to reflect the priorities of the Trump administration, an effort that probably will mean erasing part of the agency’s history.
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• Trump’s proposed small business “pass-through” tax cut would mostly help the wealthy:
Some proponents say the tax cut would be a boon for small businesses. But most small businesses are small — despite what prominent congressional Republicans have said, very few small business owners pay the top rate of 39.6 percent. More than 70 percent of filers with pass-through income already face rates at or below 15 percent, so they’d get no benefit from the proposal (see chart). [...]
About 68 percent of the tax cut on existing pass-through income would flow to millionaires, including real estate investors, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and the like. Additionally, high earners would likely engage in tax avoidance by reclassifying their salaries as pass-through income to take advantage of the lower rate.
• ADP Research Institute says 178,000 new private sector jobs were created in July: The ADP report frequently fails to mesh with the government’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which also includes public sector jobs. In June, for instance, the ADP reported 158,000 new private-sector jobs. The BLS, whose report for July comes out Friday, concluded that 187,000 new private-sector jobs were created in June.
• Tens of thousands of former felons get their voting rights back in Alabama. But state authorities haven’t told them, and a federal judge says they don’t have to.
• Watchdog group says $457 million Pentagon-funded program to develop intelligence capacity of Afghan defense forces has failed:
The report, by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) said there was “no indication of improvement in overall intelligence operations” as a result of five contracts for training and mentoring, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, run by Legacy Afghanistan R&D and Afghanistan Source Operations Management (Asom). Only 47% of intelligence sites are ready to transfer to the Afghan government.
• Miami just had its hottest month on record.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, we’re once again beset by audio troubles, robbing us of our precious time with Greg & Joan. But there’s plenty of material out there, as Trump gives another loony tunes interview, calls the White House a dump & the State Department abandons democracy.
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