What’s coming on Sunday Kos:
- If Trump really cared about Jews, he'd resign and just go away, by Ian Reifowitz
- The Republican Party is laying the foundation for minority rule, by Egberto Willies
- All white men who own property and have a certain level of income are created equal, by Mark E Andersen
- The only response anyone should ever give to the question: 'How do we pay for it?', by David Akadjian
- Trump and his cohorts just don't understand what America truly is, by Frank Vyan Walton
- When will the media finally admit that the Trump economy hasn't been so 'great'? by Sher Watts Spooner
- Why are Trump's political donors so ashamed to be publicly known? by Laurence Lewis
- D.C. media's dirty little secret: It has no idea what's happening inside Trump's White House, by Eric Boehlert
- 1619. The 400th anniversary of the real founding of America, by Denise Oliver Velez
• CDC health and climate scientist files whistleblower complaint: He’s George Luber, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and one of the leading experts on the effects of the climate crisis. He said he filed the move Friday to gain whistleblower protection because of what he said was retaliation for not keeping his lips zipped about the Trump regime’s continuing efforts to end climate research.
• NYT looks at how Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg became leaders in the 2020 money race.
• Turbines on Wyoming wind farm to be replaced with machines that are much more efficient: Over 45 years, and especially in the past 20, wind turbine technology has advanced markedly, with bigger and more efficient machines dominating the market. In the early 1980s, the average commercial turbine, of which there weren’t very many, had a tiny capacity of 75 kilowatts. Now the largest commercial turbines have a capacity of 9.5 megawatts. And some companies are talking about future offshore turbines of 20 megawatts. In Wyoming’s case, the Portland, Oregon-based PacifiCorp plans to replace 68 600-kilowatt wind turbines at the Foote Creek I wind farm with 13 2- and 4-megawatt turbines having the same total capacity of 41 megawatts, enough to provide electricity to 19,500 homes. “Just imagine buying a new cellphone today versus in ’98,” PacifiCorp spokesman Spencer Hall said, referring to when the wind farm’s first turbines were installed. “It’s becoming a thing where we can’t even get labor on some of them, there are so many projects going on.” Of all the states, Wyoming has the most wind resource potential even though it now generates the vast amount of its electricity with coal.
MIDDAY TWEET
• U.S. has issued a warrant to seize the Iranian tanker ordered released by a judge in Gibraltar: The oil tanker—Grace 1—was seized by the British Royal Navy last month off the coast of the overseas territory held by the British since 1713. The justification was suspicion that the tanker was violating European Union sanctions on oil shipments to Syria. The seizure spurred Iran to seize a British tanker, the Stena Impero, in Straits of Hormuz, a relatively narrow passage out of the Persian Gulf through which about a fifth of the world’s petroleum travels. The U.S. move is certain to worsen tensions between Tehran and Washington. Since the Trump regime withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement and reimposed economic sanctions on Iran, those tensions have risen. In response to the sanctions, Iran has openly breached two provisions of the agreement that the Islamic Republic had agreed to in exchange for removing sanctions.
• Amazon’s creepy army of “FC Ambassadors” rushed to defend Jeff Bezos on Twitter Wednesday. That’s “FC” for “fulfillment centers”:
This isn’t the first time these accounts have attracted attention. Earlier this year, the accounts descended on Twitter with coordinated anti-union talking points. The FC Ambassador program made its debut last August and also seemed to coordinate talking points about how great it was to work at Amazon. The program backfired most recently after a Twitter thread of FC ambassadors went viral, with many people saying the tweets were dark or dystopian (others raised doubts about their legitimacy).
• New “low-yield” tactical nukes are being produced and all will be delivered by September to U.S. Trident submarines: Critics say the W76-2 warhead could make nuclear war more likely at a time when the U.S., Russia, and China are all upgrading their nuclear arsenals, tensions between India and Pakistan are growing, the North Koreans are launching ever-better ballistic missiles that some experts believe could be capable of carrying nukes, and there is talk of transferring nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia that could lead to nuclear weapons being built there as a counterpose to Iran, which is capable of building a nuclear warhead but hasn’t done so.