Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Bagful of weasels:
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- Daily Kos International Elections Digest: August edition, by Daily Kos Elections
- Cancer could not stop her activism but Trump’s ACA repeal could, by Egberto Willies
- Attempting to tear the heart out of the American dream, by Frank Vyan Walton
- The Obamacare repeal attempt that just won’t die, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Honor the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act by fighting to restore it, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Why ‘America First’ really means America last, by Jon Perr
- All the president’s disappearing men, by Propane Jane
- The White House is a dump, by Mark E Andersen
- It’s not the end of the world, by it might look like it, by DarkSyde
- The timing of Trump’s most white nationalist week yet is no coincidence, by Ian Reifowitz
• Barack Obama is 56 today: For those who have forgotten what it is like to have a real president, here are some photos.
• On this date in 1964, civil rights workers bodies found in Mississippi: Three civil rights workers who were part of Freedom Summer, the black voter registration project of the Congress on Racial Equality and Student Non-Violent Committee, disappeared June 21. Although other civil rights workers had vanished or found murdered over the years in the still-segregated South, this disappearance sparked nationwide outrage and a reluctant (but intensive) effort by the FBI to find them, in large part because two were white. More than 1,000 people were interviewed in the search. On Aug. 4, based on an interrogation, the bodies of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black Mississipian, were discovered in an earthen berm. The murderers were members of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1967, 10 men were tried in federal court for violating the three men’s civil rights. Seven were convicted. But the mastermind, Edgar Rice Killen was acquitted. In 2005, state prosecutors charged Killen and put him on trial again. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three consecutive terms of 20 years each. He is now 92 and doing his time at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
• Also on this date in 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Incident occurred and was soon transformed into an excuse for massive escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. When President Lyndon Johnson took the matter to the Senate to get a resolution authorizing him to take whatever action “necessary” in Southeast Asia, only two senators, Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK) opposed it. Eventual outcome: 58,318 American military personnel killed, Total estimates of all those killed in the 1955-75 war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, vary widely, from a low of 1.45 million to a high of 3.95 million. This does not include the millions killed in the Khmer Rouge genocide. Other consequences include estimates that up to 1 million Vietnamese are disabled or have health problems due to contact with the chemical defoliant Agent Orange. Americans who handled the chemical also have suffered in large numbers.
• Texas man shoots armadillo, bullet ricochets into face.
• Nearly two tons of ivory crushed in New York City’s Central Park today:
Nearly two tons of ivory was destroyed by a rock crusher in New York City's Central Park on Thursday, marking the state's efforts to stop the illegal ivory trade.
The statues, trinkets and jewelry represented the tusks of at least 100 slaughtered elephants and held a reported market value of more than $8 million dollars.
"These crushes raise awareness," John Calvelli, a spokesman for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which runs the city's zoos, told New York Daily News. "Crushing the ivory shows that the ivory has no value, so people can stop killing the elephants."
There were an estimated 26 million elephants worldwide in 1800. By 1979, that number had been reduced to 1.3 million. Now, about 400,000 African elephants remain, with some 20,000 poached for their tusks last year, more than were born. Some experts expect them to be all but extinct in the wild within a couple of decades or even sooner.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Subpoenas start moving. Trump takes a 17-day weekend, his “first” vacation as “president.” Armando can’t sit still for Trump’s idiocy on his calls with the Mexican president & Australian PM. Don, Jr., King of Trump Tower, kicks the Secret Service to the curb.
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