Good morning! Be careful out there — it’s Friday the 13th. Fear of this date has been given a scientific name — paraskevidekatriaphobia.
On February 13, 1960, the first of the Nashville sit-ins took place at three whites-only downtown lunch counters, providing a model of nonviolent resistance that would endure throughout the civil rights era. And in 1991, the US Air Force dropped two “precision-guided” bombs on a civilian air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing 408 Iraqis. The US military said it targeted the structure because it fit the profile of a military command bunker.
Time to go –> For four months, longtime Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has been embroiled in a public corruption scandal involving his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes. At The Oregonian,
Homeland insecurity –> The plain fact that the executive branch has the authority to prioritize immigration enforcement has congressional Republicans in a tizzy. Leaders of the House and Senate are attacking one another, and the Department of Homeland Security could run out of funding if Congress doesn’t authorize the agency’s budget in the next two weeks. Scott Wong and Rebecca Shabad report for The Hill that on Wednesday, Speaker John Boehner “used a news conference to lash out at Senate Democrats, telling them to… stop blocking a House-passed funding bill — a day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) conceded the Senate was stuck and said it’s up to the House to get Congress out of this jam.” AND: The WSJ reports that on Thursday, Boehner refused to rule out the possibility that the agency could face a shutdown.
“Decade-long mega-droughts” –> According to Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian, a new study predicts, “The US south-west and the Great Plains will face decade-long droughts far worse than any experienced over the last 1,000 years because of climate change.”
A rare prosecution –> reports for Roll Call that “Tyler Harber, a GOP campaign operative, pleaded guilty Thursday to illegal coordination of federal campaign contributions in the Justice Department’s first criminal prosecution of that kind.”
Big speech on race and policing –> FBI Director James Comey gave one at Georgetown University on Thursday, and you can read a transcript at the link. Most media outlets are calling it “brave,” but at The Intercept, Juan Thompson writes that Comey appeared to be too eager to defend the police. “Among the oddest of Comey’s remarks was that citizens should give more deference and attention to police,” writes Thompson. “Since when do police in the US get too little respect?”
Domestic terror –> At Slate, David S. Cohen and Krysten Connon report that “personal targeting of abortion providers is rising precipitously,” and offer “10 ways that laws and law enforcement should protect clinic workers.”
Be careful what you wish for –> Sally Kohn writes at The Daily Beast that, “had Republicans not stood in the way of [Elizabeth] Warren running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [in 2011], she would have never instead run for Senate in Massachusetts… and she would have likely been relegated to the dusty obscurity of the Washington bureaucracy—making a difference every day in the lives of the American people by retooling the consumer financial market but without the spotlight and bully pulpit of her Senate perch.”
Big deal –> Apple struck a deal with First Solar to supply enough “electricity to power all of Apple’s California stores, offices, headquarters and a data center, [Apple CEO Tim] Cook said Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco,” according to Bloomberg Business’s Tom Randall. “… It’s the biggest-ever solar procurement deal for a company that isn’t a utility, and it nearly triples Apple’s stake in solar.” AND: Mathew Carr, also at Bloomberg Business, reports, “European utilities shut more coal and natural gas power plants in 2014 than in any year since at least 2009 amid falling demand for electricity and tougher pollution curbs.” The decommissioning was equivalent to “about five nuclear power plants.”
People and faith –> At Medical Daily, the differences between religious people and non-religious people when it comes to happiness, health, wealth and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints.
Sweet home Alabama –> Most Alabama probate judges complied with a court ruling striking down the state’s ban on same-sex marriages, but those in a handful of mostly rural counties continued to defy the order, reports Campbell Robinson for the NYT. But on Thursday, Federal Judge Callie Granade offered some clarity when she “enjoined the probate judge in Mobile County, Don Davis, from refusing to issue licenses to gay couples seeking to wed… [This] was seen by lawyers for the gay couples who brought the case as a clear signal to probate judges around the state what their duties were.”
R.I.P. –> David Carr, the veteran NYT media journalist, died at age 58 after collapsing in the Times’ newsroom on Thursday night. As Joan Walsh writes at Salon, “Carr was an admirable and inimitable writer and reporter, but he was also uncommonly generous to colleagues with praise and encouragement; hilarious, affectionate. A recovering addict and hustler turned alt-newsweekly editor turned media critic, he was an unlikely Timesman, but he helped reinvent our notion of a Timesman. And the Times will be forever better for it.”
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