Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is Born into a policy of cruelty:
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- Tragedy and resiliency: It's been nine months since Maria hit Puerto Rico, by Denise Oliver Velez
- My answers as an atheist to apologetics questions from a religious friend, by David Akadjian
- GOP Holocaust analogists furious over Nazi border policy comparisons, by Jon Perr
- New Jersey's complete Democratic takeover point out the cancer within, by Egberto Willies
- Trumpism is a cult, by Mark E Andersen
- Will Trump's bald-faced lies and reversal on family separation 'law' open the media's eyes? Finally, by Ian Reifowitz
- A kidnapped Maryland man called 911 for help. Police charged him with a crime instead, by Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Poza
- International Elections Digest, by Daily Kos Elections
• House majority blueprint boosts war budget, gouges domestic budget: The deal worked out by Democrats and Republicans in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 would set spending for the military at $716 billion in fiscal year 2019 ($647 billion plus $69 billion in war funding) and non-military at $597 billion in 2019. Over the next decade, however, the gap between the military spending and the domestic budget grows. Come 2028, the House budget would jack up military spending to $736 billion in basic military spending (without war funding), an increase of 13%. Non-military spending would be cut by 7 percent compared to 2019, to $555 billion.
• During the presidential campaign, the National Enquirer sent stories and images it was preparing to publish about Trump to his lawyer, Michael Cohen: Respectable publications don’t do this, but that’s hardly a description of the Enquirer, which since the election has been, like Fox News, a shameless propaganda outlet for the Trump regime.
• Tesla’s 9% workforce layoff is bad news for the solar end of its business: The cutbacks of several thousand employees mean a major downsizing for the residential solar business it bought into two years ago for $2.6 billion. The key losses will include about a dozen installation facilities being shuttered and the ending of the retail partnership with Home Depot that one inside source said produced about half the solar sales. The battery side of Tesla’s solar operations will also be affected by the downsizing, sources told Reuters. Tesla’s solar sales have fallen sharply this year. Last year, it averaged about 200 megawatts in sales each quarter. In the first quarter of 2018, it sold just 76 MW. In a statement to Reuters, the company said, “We continue to expect that Tesla’s solar and battery business will be the same size as automotive over the long term.”
• Supermassive star thousands of times larger than our sun may be the reason globular clusters of ancient stars have different chemistry than other stars in the Milky Way.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Right-wing Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer died Thursday, age 68: Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by education, had been fighting cancer of the small intestine for months. He announced June 8 in a farewell note at the Post that he had lost that battle. He was a Cold War liberal in the 1960s but, like many others, including the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, became a neoconservative over time. He was one of the most avid backers of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, an action he said would amount to a “Three-Week War” to topple Saddam Hussein. None of the weapons of mass destruction that provided the neoconservative-heavy Bush administration with its key rationale for that war were found. More than 4,500 American military personnel and perhaps 600,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, died as a result of the war. Krauthammer trashed anyone who opposed the invasion or questioned U.S. evidence and motives for it, and he downplayed U.S. torture of terrorism suspects. He never apologized for either.
• Astroturf group uses six restaurant workers to speak publicly against paying tipped workers a minimum wage: It’s the Restaurant Workers of America, funded by … restaurant owners. The Columbia Journalism Review notes: “Though the group’s members describe themselves as liberal and anti-Trump in various quotes and on Twitter, one of its members is actively running as a conservative independent for a position in the Maine House of Representatives—a fact noted nowhere in publications quoting her.”
• From the Economic Policy Institute:
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, The Trumps, seeking to defuse the border situation, can't help making things worse. But still claim the opposite. Paula Writer has observations on that. The collusion story moves on to the Nat’l Enquirer. A few guesses on where the weekend might take us.
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