An aerial view of the landscape near Uummannaq, Greenland, and the fastest moving glacier on the planet. (United Nations/Flickr cc 2.0)
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The last debate –> Fox News’ Chris Wallace moderates the final presidential debate tonight in Las Vegas at 9 p.m. NPR offers some things to watch for, including “Will Trump commit to accepting the results of the election?”
The warmest year –> 2016 looks almost certain to become the warmest year on record. Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, tweeted that the year so far has been, on average, 1.25 degrees warmer than the world’s pre-industrial average temperature. 2015 currently holds the record for warmest year. Before that it was 2014.
Podesta emails show evidence of illegal use of super PACs –> Lee Fang and Andrew Perez for The Intercept: “The fact that political candidates are closely coordinating with friendly Super PACs — making a mockery of a central tenet of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — is one of the biggest open secrets in Washington. Super PACs are only allowed to accept unlimited contributions on the condition that the money is spent independently of specific campaigns… But newly disclosed hacked campaign documents published by WikiLeaks and a hacker who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 reveal in stark terms how Hillary Clinton’s staffers made Super PACs an integral part of her presidential campaign.”
The slow drip of emails has also put Clinton in a tight place with environmentalists, writes Ben Adler for Grist. One email had an account of a 2014 meeting with a construction union in which Clinton said “I want to defend natural gas. I want to defend repairing and building the pipelines we need to fuel our economy. I want to defend fracking under the right circumstances,” continuing: “I’m already at odds with the most organized and wildest” of the environmental movement. “They come to my rallies and they yell at me and, you know, all the rest of it. They say, ‘Will you promise never to take any fossil fuels out of the earth ever again?’ No. I won’t promise that. Get a life, you know.” Podesta defended Clinton’s agenda: “She’s put out an extremely robust agenda that goes beyond what President Obama has pledged,” he told Grist’s Adler.
Wall Street gets ready for a big Dem win –> The banks are considering the possibility that Democrats will retake the Senate and may even retake the House. “Markets have performed very well under the gridlock of the last several years, so theoretically a sweep by one party or another could disturb that status quo,” writes Julie Verhage for Bloomberg Markets. A Democratic Congress could also pave the way for tighter regulation of banks.
“It’s about like the Dred Scott decision” –> Donald Trump advisor and investor Anthony Scaramucci wants to rip up a Department of Labor regulation, put in place earlier this year, that requires financial advisors to act in their client’s best interests. “We’re going to repeal it,” Mr. Scaramucci said, according to Investment News. “It could be the dumbest decision to come out of the US government in the last 50 to 60 years… It’s about like the Dred Scott decision.” The Dred Scott decision said a person descended from slaves could not be a citizen.
Spilling the beans –> On Election Day, voters in Florida will be voting on a ballot initiative that would give utility monopolies constitutional protection but has been falsely touted as a pro-solar amendment. And industry groups have admitted to it, behind closed doors. The Miami Herald: “The policy director of a think tank hired by Florida’s largest electric utilities admitted at a conference this month what opponents have claimed for months: The industry attempted to deceive voters into supporting restrictions on the expansion of solar by shrouding Amendment 1 as a pro-solar amendment.” The policy director at the Koch-brothers funded James Madison Institute said the amendment, which, The Herald reports, has received more than $21 million in utility industry financing, is “an incredibly savvy maneuver” that “would completely negate anything they (pro-solar interests) would try to do either legislatively or constitutionally down the road.”
I’m not there –> The Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, has given up leaving messages on Bob Dylan’s answering machine. They say they haven’t heard back from this year’s winner, and don’t know if he plans to attend the award ceremony.
Morning Reads was compiled by John Light and edited by Theresa Riley. See a story that you think should be included in Morning Reads? Tell us in the comments!
We produce this news digest every weekday. You can to receive these updates as an email newsletter each morning.
