Today’s comic by Matt Bors is It's Amazon's future, we're just living in it:
• On this date in 1919, Jackie Robinson was born.
• New study says fracking depletes up to 51 percent of streams in Arkansas:
Each well uses approximately 5 million gallons of freshwater from small streams over a two-to-five-day period when the frack is done, said lead author Sally Entrekin, a biologist at University of Central Arkansas. That’s enough water to fill every bathtub in a city of 250,000 people.
“Little is known about how much water can be withdrawn from these streams without impacts on fish and other aquatic species,” Entrekin said in an interview. While the researchers didn't look at drinking water specifically in this paper, most of the state’s drinking water comes from streams, rivers, and lakes.
MIDDAY TWEET
• ADP report tallies 234,000 new seasonally adjusted private jobs in January. ADP’s numbers often don’t mesh with the government report on unemployment in both the private and public sectors. For instance, last month ADP reported 250,000 new private jobs had been created in December, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported just 148,000 total new jobs. Of the January total, ADP reported 212,000 were in the service sectors. The BLS report for January will be released Friday morning. The consensus of experts at Bloomberg is that it will show a net gain of 175,000 jobs.
• California Senate passes workaround on eliminated deductions in GOP tax scam:
The California Senate on Tuesday passed a bill intended to help Californians evade the consequences of the recent federal tax overhaul.
Senate Bill 227, authored by Senate President pro tem Kevin de Leon, allows California to earn tax deductions by contributing to California Excellence Fund, a fund within California’s budget that contributes directly to state-funded higher education institutions.
“It is my duty to do everything within my power to protect the taxpayers of CA against a very capricious, mean-spirited tax policy that unfairly targets Californians,” de Leon tweeted Tuesday afternoon.
• Trump’s bumpersticker line in SOTU has Confederate flag-flyers jumping for joy. “Americans are dreamers, too”: As Judd Legum at Think Progress noted, “It was a message that was quickly embraced by white nationalists, who paired the phrase with stock photos of white people.” Legum followed that with some photo examples from Richard Spencer, David Duke, and GAB, a social network beloved by white supremacists.
• The Federal Government Is Unraveling—but the State of Our Cities Is Strong: Jimmy Tobias delivers some dispatches from the urban resistance, from Philadelphia to Seattle and beyond.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter round up headlines and impressions of the SOTU. Summary: Not good. Nunes is “hide-lighting” his “memo.” Joan keeps her laser focused on Ryan’s complicity, with a side-eye at ID Gov. Butch Otter’s nullification of the ACA.
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