277 Days Until the November 2018 Election
Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Trump's new lawyer: Harvey Richards, Lawyer for Children:
• San Francisco to expunge or reduce thousands of marijuana-related convictions: District Attorney George Gascón said the city will apply California’s pot legalization laws to past criminal cases, expunging or reducing misdemeanor and felony convictions going back decades. Thousands of people have marijuana convictions branding them with criminal histories that can hurt their chances of getting jobs and make them ineligible for some government benefits. Proposition 64, passed by state voters in November 2016, legalized the recreational use of marijuana for those 21 and older and permits the possession up to one ounce of cannabis.
• Inquiries into fake accounts cause Twitter followers to vanish.
• Chinese company plans to build solar panel factory in the Jacksonville, Florida: The Shanghai-based JinkoSolar, the world’s second largest solar-panel maker, employs 15,000 people in eight factories in China, Malaysia, Portugal, and South Africa, as well 16 foreign subsidiaries. The plans call for a $410 million investment in a factory and headquarters in the city. The Jacksonville City Council is providing a $23 million incentive package to generate what the company says will be 800 new jobs, 400 this year and the rest by the end of December 2019. The state will provide another $31 million in incentives and grants. Construction is slated to begin in June and be finished by the end of this year.
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MIDDAY TWEET
• U.S. ranks 21st in “Democracy Index”:
A DECADE has passed since Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, put forward the idea of a global “democratic recession”. The tenth edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index suggests that this unwelcome trend remains firmly in place. The index, which comprises 60 indicators across five broad categories—electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—concludes that less than 5% of the world’s population currently lives in a “full democracy”. Nearly a third live under authoritarian rule, with a large share of those in China. Overall, 89 of the 167 countries assessed in 2017 received lower scores than they had the year before.
Norway remains the most democratic country in the ranking, a position it has held since 2010, and western Europe accounts for 14 of the 19 “full democracies” that make up the ranking’s top tier. Nonetheless, the region’s average score slipped slightly in 2017, to an average of 8.38 points out of 10.
America sits in 21st place in the ranking, level with Italy. It remains a “flawed democracy” for the second year in a row.
• Employees at Florida Goodwill store find loaded grenade launcher amid donations.
• Watch Daily Kos staff writer Kelly Macias report from Puerto Rico on Cheddar TV: Four months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, huge problems still persist across the island. In his State of the Union address, Pr*sident Trump said the U.S. stands with the island territory, but do his actions match his words? Macias will be posting a report at Daily Kos on her visit to Vieques, P.R., this weekend.
• In Fox News interview, McConnell says 2017 was glorious:
“2017 was the best year for conservatives in the 30 years that I’ve been here. The best year on all fronts. And a lot of people were shocked because we didn’t know what we were getting with Donald Trump.”
• Six Indian runners brave sub-freezing temperatures in Nebraska run to spotlight violence against Native women:
Aric “Dusty” Armell, a citizen of the Winnebago Tribe, organized the run also to celebrate the completion of a sacred fire that he lit on the Winnebago Reservation on January 1, 2017.
The 43-year-old planned to extinguish the fire Wednesday evening and take coals from it to the Flandreau Reservation where the Santee Sioux people plan to light a fire of their own, incorporating coals from Winnebago’s fire.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: A virtual blizzard of BS this morning! Greg Dworkin and Armando help shovel. Trump brags about breaking history again. Nunes faks his way through this “memo” thing. Sanctions ignored. Constitutional crises everywhere. And how did Hope Hicks do it?
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