Donald Trump has 964 days left in office if he completes his term
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Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is NFL players must honor the flag for which so many have died:
• The Prosperity Plea—Paying attention to the Poor People’s Campaign:
In April, for the first time since 2000, the country’s unemployment rate dropped below 4 percent. Over the past year, GDP growth has been chugging along at a 2 to 3 percent rate. Amid this happy news, however, the Poor People’s Campaign wants the country pay attention to those who have been counted out. William J. Barber II—a reverend and civil rights activist, who is a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign—wrote recently in The Atlantic, “The nation’s economic growth, especially since the Great Recession, has overwhelmingly benefited the wealthiest among us.” The top one percent controls nearly 40 percent of the America’s riches, according to the Federal Reserve—a historic high—while the bottom 90 percent share about half that. The percentage of families that own their home has plummeted to nearly its lowest point on record. Among black people, the latest jobs tally found the unemployment rate to be nearly twice that of whites; for people with disabilities and those who have been incarcerated, unemployment and poverty are widespread. By the Agriculture Department’s most recent count, one in every six American families with children struggle to afford the food they need.
• “Flip the Script” course equips women to stop rape:
“I paid for the drinks,” he said. “I thought you wanted to go out and have fun.” He continued to kiss her.
Ms. [Berta] Felix slapped him, jabbed her elbow in his stomach, and marched into her house.
She reacted the way she did because she had just completed a new 12-hour sexual assault-reduction course at Florida Atlantic, called Flip the Script. Among other lessons, Flip the Script teaches that acquaintances, not strangers, pose the greatest risk; how to recognize the warning signs of coercion that often precede assault; and how to respond effectively.
• Republicans want U.S. out of an arms verification treaty:
Republicans on a key House of Representatives committee are trying to cut funding for a pair of Air Force surveillance planes that are critical to the United States’ participation in a 1992 arms-verification treaty.
Experts said that depriving the Air Force of funding for the four-engine OC-135s is part of a Republican effort to force the US to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty, in which President George H.W. Bush's administration negotiated with Russia and dozens of other countries at the end of the Cold War.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Trump regime rescinds rule requiring states to track vehicular greenhouse emissions:
The U.S. Transportation Department is repealing a rule, finalized in the closing days of the Obama administration as part of the fight against global warming, requiring states to track greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles on the nation’s highways. [...]
A coalition of states in 2017, including California, Massachusetts, Iowa and Washington, had sued to force the Trump administration to continue to enforce the rule, which they agreed to do, pending a formal process to rescind it.
The administration said it was reversing the Obama rule because it “imposed costs with no predictable level of benefits.”
• In 31 tweets, Kathy Griffin discusses her use of the Trump mask a year ago.
• By 2030, a third of incarcerated Americans will be 50 or older:
After two decades of steady growth, fueled by harsh Drug War sentencing policies, the portion of the incarcerated population over the age of 50 rose to more than 243,000 by 2013. According to an analysis by the Osborne Association, by 2030, fully one in three imprisoned people will be at least half a century old—born around the time of Reagan’s first election, and probably incarcerated under the types of tough-on-crime policies that are now widely repudiated as inhumane. [...]
Not surprisingly, these seniors’ enfeebled state comes with recidivism rates much lower than their younger counterparts’. The Osborne report cites low security risk as a reason to make parole procedures more generous and grant “compassionate release” on medical grounds, because “the costs of incarcerating an aging prison population can be reduced without threatening public safety.” But the system has little mercy for imprisoned elders: A New York Times investigation revealed that, over the past four years, “the Bureau of Prisons approved 6 percent of the 5,400 applications received, while 266 inmates who requested compassionate release died in custody.”
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin joined our live first hour, rounding up news on Trump's morning rager, VA's Medicaid expansion, those crazy CA primaries & more. In the second hour: The origins of Trump's Putin crush, his unsecured phone risks & clarity on his greatest crime.
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