243 days remaining until the November election
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Today’s comic by Matt Bors is No chaos!
• Ryan Zinke says Interior Department should be a partner with oil companies: Secretary Zinke told an audience of oil and gas industry executives Tuesday that “Interior should not be in the business of being an adversary. We should be in the business of being a partner.” That didn’t sit well with environmental advocates who have noted from the beginning of the Trump regime that the government is being far too chummy with the fossil fuel industry. “The Department of the Interior is tasked with protecting our public lands and waters for the public good, not easing the way for corporate polluters to drill, frack, and mine them for their own profits,” said Lena Moffitt of the Sierra Club in a statement.
• For Women’s History Month, Tucker Carlson rolls out series on “crisis” facing men:
“We hear a lot about female empowerment in this country, and, of course, we’re totally for that — we’re for empowering all Americans. But for some reason, you almost never hear anything about how men are doing in America,” Carlson began.
• ADP reports 235,000 new private sector jobs were created in February: ADP’s reports are released two days ahead of the government’s report each month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The count in these two reports often do not match. With revisions, ADP reported a net gain of 493,000 new private sector jobs for December and January, while the BLS reported a gain of just 376,000 new jobs in both the private and public sectors for the same period. Of the total for February, ADP reports that 198,000 were in the service sector of the economy. At 50,000 new jobs, ADP estimated the largest gain was in the leisure and hospitality category.
MIDDAY TWEET
• White supremacist sues city manager of Charlottesville over refusal to issue permit for “anniversary rally” to commemorate deadly Unite the Right rally.
• Storm again reveals wreckage of beached ship in Maine: The fierce Nor’easter that battered the New England coast over the weekend uncovered the ship first seen by locals in the southern Maine city in 1958. Leith Smith, an archaeologist with the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, said recent research suggests the wreckage may have been from a ship called "The Industry," which dates back to 1769. That was one of many coastal trading vessels called “pinks.” "It was the 18-wheeler of the day," Smith said.
• Higher interest rates could be a bigger threat to growth of renewables than Trump regime’s energy policies:
While the U.S. president is tinkering with rules to give coal a leg up over wind and solar, it’s higher interest rates that threaten to scale back the flow of cheap financing that helped funnel $2.9 trillion into renewables in the past decade
The U.S. Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Bank of England all are shifting towards tighter monetary policies, and investors in renewables are starting to think about how higher borrowing rates will hurt the economics of their projects. Most vulnerable are developers that rely on non-recourse bank loans for most of their project costs, including some U.S. rooftop-solar installers. [...]
“Renewables have benefited greatly from quantitative easing and low cost of capital,” said Anthony Gordon, managing member of Gordon Energy Partners and the former managing director of energy and infrastructure at Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC. “The flood of cheap money has helped get enough projects built that the technology has matured. But this very success may have us on the cusp of a correction.”
• Daily Kos staff writer Kelly Macías appears on Cheddar TV: Discussion focused on Gary Cohn's departure from the White House and what it means for the administration as well as how Democrats fared in the Texas primaries Tuesday and what impact it may have in November. You can watch it here.
• Videos of children receiving their first guns rile critics. In 30 states, children can possess a rifle or shotgun:
To firearms aficionados, introducing children to guns at an early age, and under adult supervision, ensures that they will use them responsibly and be more mindful of the privilege it is to own and operate one. “We do not have youths participate in any shooting sports without immediate supervision by a trained instructor who has gone through, at the state level, 12 to 15 hours of training, and at the national level, up to three days of training,” says Todd Kesner, director of Montana State University’s 4-H Center for Youth Development. “They need to know what they’re operating is not a toy.”
Critics, on the other hand, see these videos, and the many gun manufacturers who make and market youth-specific firearms, as some of the most corrosive elements of American gun culture.
• Three American Indian Democrats are vying to be the first Native woman in Congress: Perhaps all three could serve. They are Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) of New Mexico’s 1st District, Sharice Davids (Ho-chunk Nation) of Kansas’ 3rd District, and Amanda Douglas (Cherokee) of Oklahoma’s 1st District.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Oh, well, you know, there's Greg Dworkin’s Chaos Agent theory, the TX primaries, the tariffs, Michael Cohen suddenly in the middle of everything, and... OK, FINE, TRUMP MIGHT HAVE SENT DICK PICS TO STORMY DANIELS. Are you happy now? We sure were!
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