Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is PharmaGon: Your antidote to profit-based killing:
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos:
- Trumps 2020 polling numbers are a disaster. Why doesn’t his press coverage reflect that, by Eric Boehlert
- Don't forget to celebrate black workers this Labor Day, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Republicans want more GOP women in office. Good luck with that, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Bret Stephens is not the problem. The New York Times is, by Laurence Lewis
- Endangered orcas' fate is tied to a series of dams 400 miles inland, by David Neiwert
- Progressives, how do we decide? Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or Joe Biden? by Egberto Willies
- I will not mourn an evil man, by Mark E Andersen
- Review: 'Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland', by Ian Reifowitz
- It's time we admit that we're dealing with a death cult, by Frank Vyan Walton
• On this date in 1967, the Senate confirmed by a vote of 69-11 the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Trump regime plans to reduce troop count in Afghanistan to 8,600:
The Pentagon has not disclosed the number of troops it plans to leave in Afghanistan if administration negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad reaches a deal with Taliban representatives in Qatar. However, defense officials speaking on condition of anonymity have floated the 8,600 figure before. The Pentagon's official current troop number is 14,000, although defense officials have said the true figure is closer to 13,000.
Trump also suggested some U.S. counterterrorism forces would remain in Afghanistan after a withdrawal. “We’re going to keep a presence there,” he said in the radio interview. “We’re reducing that presence very substantially, and we’re going to always have a presence. We’re going to have high intelligence.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Author of tell-all book about Jim Mattis complains that Pentagon has held up reviewing it to benefit the former defense secretary’s own book, which is being published next week.
• Foreign oil investors are fleeing Canada, with more than $30 billion in divestitures the past three years:
The drumbeat of exits, rare for such a stable oil-producing country, adds an extra layer of gloom for an industry that accounts for about a fifth of Canada's exports. The energy sector — centered around Alberta's oil sands — has struggled to rebound since the 2014 crash in global oil prices, with capital spending declining for five straight years and job cuts pushing the province's unemployment rate above 6%. Alberta is forecast to post the slowest growth of any region in Canada this year.
The situation isn't likely to improve anytime soon, with key pipelines like TC Energy Corp.'s Keystone XL and Enbridge Inc.'s expansion of its Line 3 conduit bogged down by legal challenges. The lack of pipelines has weighed on Canadian heavy crude prices for years, sending them to a record low late in 2018.
• Majority of Americans in Quinnipiac Poll says climate change is an emergency: But there is a vast partisan difference. While 56% of registered voters say they believe climate change is an emergency, 84% of Democrats and 63% of independent voters saying so, 81% of Republicans say climate change is not an emergency.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump forgets Poland, plans to cash in, while the big hurricane looms. Meanwhile, his personal assistant at the WH is fired, and intel types can't believe his G7 stunts, nor his surrender/extortion of Ukraine. White nationalists plot media infiltration.