What’s coming up on Sunday Kos:
- This isn't the first time right-wingers used 9/11 as a weapon. Remember Limbaugh's lies about Obama, by Ian Reifowitz
- Donald Trump will be re-elected president of the United States without a real conversation, by Egberto Willies
- Country is changing—the music genre, that is, by Chris Reeves
- Congress needs Trump’s tax returns to investigate $400 billion pass-through scam, by Jon Perr
- The threat of White Power and Nationalism rises while Conservatives gaslight and ignore the danger, by Frank Vyan Walton
- 'Democrats must nominate a white guy in 2020.' Oh, really? by Sher Watts Spooner
- The other mayor running for president: A conversation with Wayne Messam, by Armando
- Cutting off Puerto Rico's Medicaid is not a 'fiscal cliff.' It will push people off a cliff—to die, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Hemispheric heat wave of 2018 impossible without climate change, study says:
A study presented this week at a scientific conference in Vienna now shows that last summer's extreme heat was an "unprecedented" hemispheric event that would not have happened without heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution, the researchers said, and that it lasted longer and was more widespread across the Northern Hemisphere than previously realized.
All summers will be like last year if the world warms 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, said the study's lead author Martha Vogel, an extreme-temperature researcher with ETH Zürich Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science. Even with 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere will experience a summer as hot as the summer of 2018 two out of every three years, she said.
• Democratic Rep. Dave Loebsack of Iowa’s 2nd CD announces retirement: Loebsack is in his seventh term representing the district, which went for Trump by 4 percentage points in 2016 after being strongly Democratic in other recent presidential elections. It is one of the 55 initial 2020 targets announced by the National Republican Campaign Committee in February.
• Critics say FCC’s new rural broadband plan isn’t all that new:
The FCC on Friday received a wave of largely positive press for a new broadband proposal the government claims will revolutionize telecom markets and help drive fiber and fifth-generation (5G) wireless to rural America. But industry watchers say the agency’s proposal is light on actual details, and much of the plan isn’t actually new. [...]
Some industry watchers are skeptical given the agency has spent much of the last few years chipping away at rural and tribal broadband programs, slowly but steadily eliminating numerous consumer protections, and actively trying to obscure the broadband industry’s biggest and most obvious problem: a lack of serious competition.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Analysis shows Trump tax scam gave 10,260,263 American families a tax hike.
• Constraining the political clout of the 1/10th of 1% with a 10% surtax:
It’s well-known by now that the richest 1 percent of American households have essentially doubled the share of national income they claim since the late 1970s. Less well-known is that inequality has even risen within the top 1 percent, with the top 10 percent of that overall group—or the top 0.1 percent—accounting for half of all income within the top 1 percent. [...]
We propose a 10 percent surtax on all income over the top 0.1 percent threshold. For simplicity, the income threshold should be defined by a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income (AGI). The threshold for the tax should be determined by the IRS to have only the top 0.1 percent affected in the first year, then it should be indexed by overall inflation. In the last year of IRS dataavailable (2016), this top 0.1 percent threshold was $2.3 million. The surtax would apply to all income above AGI, including dividends and realized capital gains.
Our preliminary estimate is that such a surtax would raise roughly $75 billion in its first year of implementation and roughly $800 billion in its first decade.
• IRENA reports accelerated switch to renewable sources of electricity would save $160 trillion over the next 30 years: The report found that “new jobs associated with the transition (i.e. renewable generation, energy efficiency and energy flexibility) significantly outweigh the jobs lost in the fossil fuel sector.” There would be 11 million net new jobs gained.
• Cummings to issue subpoena for Trump’s financial records on Monday: House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings of Maryland plans to issue a subpoena for 10 years of Donald Trump’s financial records from accounting firm Mazars USA.
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.” |