19 days remain until the last ballots are cast in the midterms
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Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Under a Trump presidency, how can poor Lucky Ducky possibly win?
• Document shows Trump regime is seeking obscurity for its internal discussions about how to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act:
In a private September guidance sent to offices around the country, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, recommended that employees with its ecological services program – which administers the Endangered Species Act – take a less transparent approach when responding to certain Freedom of Information Act requests from the public.
The guidance contains a list of records that “should be considered for withholding in full or in part” from the public, including draft versions of policies and rules; internal PowerPoint presentations and webinars; deliberative email communications and meeting notes; and others.
Such records should be carefully reviewed and possibly withheld, the guidance suggests, if they might hamper the defense of the government’s decisions in certain court cases and cause “foreseeable harm” to the federal government by sowing “public confusion” or subjecting officials to public scrutiny and thereby creating a “chilling effect” on internal decision-making processes.
• The iPhone’s new explicit content filters block sex ed searches but not porn subreddits or white supremacy sites:
As first reported by sex education platform O.school and tested by Motherboard, the filter blocks longstanding educational sites like Scarleteen and O.school, but allows sites like The Daily Stormer, an extremist neo-Nazi white supremacist platform that publishes articles about how women “secretly want to be raped.” Teen Vogue, meanwhile, is blocked.
• Corporate orders of renewable energy smashes records in 2018:
According to the latest figures from Business Renewables Center, a membership program at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), corporate buyers in the U.S. have now purchased a total of 4.81 gigawatts of renewable energy so far this year — and are expected to top 5 gigawatts by December.
The total number of commercial and industrial renewable energy deals will be even higher, as RMI's numbers refer only to contracts for large, off-site renewable energy projects. That means rooftop solar projects deployed by the likes of Ikea and Target are not included in the RMI deal tracker, which was updated this week at the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance conference in Oakland, California.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Gay, lesbian, and bisexual Californians more likely to delay seeking health care than straights: This is true whether it’s seeing a doctor or even visiting an emergency room, and holds even when insurance coverage is the same as for straight Californians, according to a study released Wednesday. The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that in the past 12 months, about 20 percent of gay and bisexual men and 29 percent of lesbians and bisexual women delayed seeing a doctor, but only 18 percent of straight women and 13 percent of straight men said they have delayed care. Study co-author Susan Babey said this reluctance to seek medical care is often related to previous experiences of discrimination. “Sexual minorities who have had a bad experience with a medical provider because of their sexual orientation may try to avoid repeating it,” Babey said in a statement. Sean Cahill of The Fenway Institute — an advocacy group for LGBTQ health care — told Martin Macias Jr. of Courthouse News that physicians and health center staff need more training to understand the way sexual and gender identity intersect with race, ethnicity and other factors.
• Good grief. Human horse-blinders are being marketed to keep office-workers from being distracted.
• Former Facebook security chief says U.S. not ready for 2018 elections: Alex Stamos told NBC News that the U.S. has not done enough to shore up its vulnerabilities to election attacks and has not prepared to deal with whatever fresh techniques hackers may launch to mess with the midterms, now just 19 days away. He likened what happened in the 2016 election to what happened at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the terror attacks of 9/11/2001, but says the hacking attacks did not spur an aggressive reaction to prevent a repeat. “There's been small improvements in campaign security,” Stamos said. “But we have not seen the kind of massive upgrade in campaign infrastructure that you would need to stand against a professional hacking agency like that.” This situation is worsened by Donald Trump’s elimination of the cybersecurity czar in May. Sitting and former U.S. officials told NBC News last summer that the Trump regime has no solid plans to shield our elections from cyber attacks.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The Khashoggi story isn’t going away just yet. Greg Dworkin explains the mechanics of Gop's planned switcheroo on preexisting conditions. Does opening up to "the other side" work? Doubt about Chinese hardware hacks. ALEC for judicial clerks.