103 days remain until the November midterms
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Today’s comic by Matt Bors is It's not the economy, stupid:
• Trump regime announces it won’t demand compensation from industries for damage they cause of to public land: This latest handout to oil drillers, miners, and others is a move to accelerate development on public land. A memo from the Department of Interior to Bureau of Land Management officials states bluntly: “The BLM must not require compensatory mitigation from public land users.” Care to guess who pays for mitigation costs if, say, Chevron makes a mess on public land? In an email, Center for Biological Diversity Government Affairs Director Brett Hartl said: “This is the latest dismal action by (Interior) Secretary Zinke and the Trump administration to put special interests ahead of our natural heritage. It is deeply out of touch with the values of all Americans that support a healthy environment and vibrant wildlife communities.”
• In another story there have been so many of in the past 20 years, NY Daily News axes half its staff: Kyle Pope, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review notes that this latest bloodletting shows that “America’s local news has reached its death spiral phase.” There’s little doubt about the negative impact of the cuts, which leave just 44 people on the Daily News editorial staff:
And that is the dirty secret amid all of the hand-wringing about what’s happening to local news in America: As we dither and debate the future, the quality of the thing that we so badly want to save is getting worse and worse. At some point not terribly far in the future, even those of us who believe powerfully in the need for a vibrant local news landscape are going to be hard pressed to make a case that many of these outlets should be saved. [...]
For those of us in journalism, that means a couple of things: First, let’s stop framing this as our problem, as if anybody outside of our ranks should offer special condolences for our plight. Broad swaths of Americans are suffering economically; we are no better or different. According to the last print issue of CJR, the national median salary for a reporter in the US is $34,150; the number of reporter jobs dropped 50 percent from 2005 to 2017. We are in no better shape than in any of the other myriad occupations that have suffered in this unequal and imbalanced economy. If anything, we need to identify ourselves with other Americans facing similar plights; arguing that we are unique, or uniquely important, gets us nowhere.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Falcon 9 launch goes smoothly, as does recovery of first stage rocket in the harshest weather conditions ever attempted: SpaceX launched 10 Iridium satellites Wednesday in the seventh and next-to-last launch required to complete the communications company's new constellation. The Falcon 9 rocket took off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base at 4:39 AM PT. Fog kept ground cameras from following the rocket’s ascent. While the first stage landed without incident on the drone ship known as Just Read the Instructions, the attempt by a second boat equipped with a huge net failed to catch the rocket's fairing. So far, no launch has accomplished a fairing capture.
• Environmentalists intervene in California settlement that allows wealthy residents to keep the public off a pristine beach.
• Native woman of the Seabird Island Band of Stó:lō First Nation takes on “civility”:
Civility is an invention that has been weaponized against indigenous people since settlers first started coming to indigenous lands. The rhetoric Europeans used, the language settlers used, the words presidents used against indigenous people argued that Indians were savages. And we indigenous people have lived with this narrative of savagery bleeding into our classrooms, televisions, and lives every day.
As Charles Dickens wrote in his essay "The Noble Savage": "I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth."
• The Congressional Progressive Caucus has released The People’s Budget: A Progressive Path Forward: The Economic Policy Institute gives the Fiscal Year 2019 budget a comprehensive look. Among the many proposals:
Despite the worrying trend of decelerating productivity growth, the United States has allowed its stock of public capital to decay. To reverse both of these trends, The People’s Budget includes a nearly $2.0 trillion investment in infrastructure over FY2019–2028 (see Table 2). Updating the estimates of the American Society of Civil Engineers for inflation, this infrastructure investment would cover roughly 90 percent of the infrastructure funding gap—the funding necessary to close the nation’s investment shortfall while offering a sustained, continuing dedicated source of funding specifically for infrastructure investments (ASCE 2016).
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: A double shot of Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter for Wednesday. The Blue Wave builds (but do please pause for a minute to realize what that means). Lordy, there are a lot of tapes! Babysitting Susan Collins. And Brett Kavanaugh was an inside job!