I have too much last-minute work for snark today, so this is just a pretty straightforward telling of the good news for today. Yes, we know there’s a lot of bad news out there every day. You can find that everywhere. But when we need to know that in some corners of the world, not everything is dust and ashes, we come here every morning to regroup and remind ourselves that slow and steady wins the race, the pendulum swings both ways, or whatever saying you find consoling. We need a place where we can see that our efforts to resist make a difference to others. And this is that place, our small retreat of well-being, where we know that progress is happening.
James Comey is now a best-selling author:
Fired FBI director James Comey’s memoir that details his private meetings with U.S. President Donald Trump sold some 600,000 copies in all formats in its first week, its publisher said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of best-selling political books.
What goes around, comes around. You have to read the analysis to get the finer points of the delicious irony involved here. Definitely popcorn-worthy.
Dems meet with CamAn head:
House Democrats met with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie Tuesday and afterward implored Republicans to help them dig deeper into manipulation of personal information from millions of U.S. Facebook users and other data during the 2016 election.
"We need interviews, documents and hearings without delay," said Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform panel in a joint statement after the closed-door meeting.
The Democrats said their more than two-hour interview with Wylie showed that Congress "must do more to learn how foreign actors collect and weaponize our data against us, and what impact social media has on our democratic processes."
Dr. Jackson may never head VA:
According to multiple outlets, Jackson’s confirmation, which was set to take place this week, has been postponed, possibly indefinitely. CBS News reports that Senator Jon Tester, the ranking democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs committee, is “reviewing allegations” that have come out from current and former White House medical staff. Among them: accusations of a “hostile work environment,” “excessive drinking on the job,” and “improperly dispensing meds.” According to CBS, Tester’s office began to hear such allegations over the weekend, from both current and former employees. In a joint statement, Tester and Senator Johnny Isakson, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said they would "continue looking into these serious allegations and have requested additional information from the White House to enable the committee to conduct a full review."
This story makes me really mad, because there are allegations he was drunk when he was tending to President Obama. I can’t wait to see how the Rs spin that.
Mick Mulvaney admits he is for sale to highest bidder.
Yes, we lost a special election in AZ, but it was a 14-point shift left.
And speaking of special elections:
In a Tuesday night special election race on Long Island, Democrats flipped a long-Republican State Assembly district to mark their 40th Trump-era takeover of a GOP-held seat. The seat had been held by a Republican since 1978.
The New York State Assembly is firmly in Democratic hands, and control of the New York state Senate is caught up in intra-caucus weirdness, so the flip has no particular concrete result. But it does serve as a further sign of the strong wind at Democrats’ backs downballot in the Trump era, with their candidate Steve Stern running 11 points ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin in the seat and 15 points ahead of Barack Obama’s 2012 margin.
Incidentally, many MSM media outlets are trying to downplay this by saying Republicans have held this seat for 30 years. The math says it’s 40 years. Go Dems!
Ending DACA is illegal: (It’s a good thing I don’t eat popcorn for the early-morning tweetfest that is sure to come.)
A federal judge ruled Tuesday against the Trump administration's decision to end a program protecting some young immigrants from deportation, calling the Department of Homeland Security's rationale against the program "arbitrary and capricious."
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates in Washington wrote that the decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, "was unlawful and must be set aside."
Memorial to those lynched opens:
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening Thursday, is a project of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, a legal advocacy group in Montgomery. The organization says the combined museum and memorial will be the nation's first site to document racial inequality in America from slavery through Jim Crow to the issues of today.
"In the American South, we don't talk about slavery. We don't have monuments and memorials that confront the legacy of lynching. We haven't really confronted the difficulties of segregation. And because of that, I think we are still burdened by that history," said EJI executive director Bryan Stevenson.
The site includes a memorial to the victims of 4,400 "terror lynchings" of black people in 800 U.S. counties from 1877 through 1950. All but about 300 were in the South, and prosecutions were rare in any of the cases. Stevenson said they emphasized the lynching era because he believes it's an aspect of the nation's racial history that's discussed the least.
Medicare to require transparency:
Medicare will require hospitals to post their standard prices online and make electronic medical records more readily available to patients, officials said Tuesday.
[...]
Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the new requirement for online prices reflects the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to encourage patients to become better-educated decision makers in their own care.
“We are just beginning on price transparency,” said Verma. “We know that hospitals have this information and we’re asking them to post what they have online.”
This is good news because AI price comparisons can be made and this kind of transparency may drive down consumer prices. But read the whole article, this isn’t quite as big as it could be.
There goes the “good guy with a gun” theory:
The reports released Tuesday state that Broward County deputies were seen ducking behind cars and using trees for cover.
Coral Springs officers detail what appears to be mass chaos. The police officers state while they were trying to find the shooter and victims, several Broward County deputies were hiding.
One Coral Springs police officer’s report says while he was running into the school he passed a deputy who claimed to know where the shooter was.
Professor allowed to have First Amendment rights:
A California professor who made national headlines by calling former first lady Barbara Bush an "amazing racist" just after the former first lady's death will not be punished for her comments, her university's president announced Tuesday.
California State University, Fresno President Joseph I. Castro said that after a careful review and a discussion of the matter with the university's legal counsel, it was determined that English professor Randa Jarrar "did not violate any CSU or university policies."
"Professor Jarrar’s conduct was insensitive, inappropriate and an embarrassment to the university. I know her comments have angered many in our community and impacted our students," Castro said in a statement. "Her comments, although disgraceful, are protected free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."
Yes, the timing was bad and her remarks may have been in poor taste, but she is allowed to have and express her opinions on any subject.
Inter partes patent review process upheld:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday gave its stamp of approval to a government review process prized by high technology companies as an easy and cheap way to combat “patent trolls” and others that bring patent infringement lawsuits.
Not so fast, Bibi:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday he was suspending a plan to send thousands of migrants to three Western countries, putting the brakes on a decision he had announced only hours earlier.
Netanyahu said on his Facebook page that the deal would be re-examined. He had come under heavy criticism for the agreement by members of his coalition and citizens of a south Tel Aviv community where a large migrant community lives.
Under the plan, made with the United Nations Refugee Agency, Israel was to send at least 16,250 African migrants to Canada, Italy and Germany. Netanyahu had said earlier Monday that the agreement was the result of an "unprecedented understanding" with the UNHCR.
Drinking baking soda, the MCG scientists think, tells the spleen - which is part of the immune system, acts like a big blood filter and is where some white blood cells, like macrophages, are stored - to go easy on the immune response. "Certainly drinking bicarbonate affects the spleen and we think it's through the mesothelial cells," O'Connor says.
The conversation, which occurs with the help of the chemical messenger acetylcholine, appears to promote a landscape that shifts against inflammation, they report.
In the spleen, as well as the blood and kidneys, they found after drinking water with baking soda for two weeks, the population of immune cells called macrophages, shifted from primarily those that promote inflammation, called M1, to those that reduce it, called M2. Macrophages, perhaps best known for their ability to consume garbage in the body like debris from injured or dead cells, are early arrivers to a call for an immune response.
Folks, that’s all the good news I have energy and time for. Keep fighting the good fight. I’m going to see if baking soda will calm my indigestion from this much popcorn. See you next week!