Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
AP’s Today in History for March 5th
The Boston Massacre; Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech; The Soviet Union’s dictator Josef Stalin dies; Comedian John Belushi found dead; Country singer Patsy Cline killed in a plane crash.
Breakfast Tune Lauren Carder- Walking After Midnight Cover
Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below
Wear red, down tools and buy local for International Women’s Day
Alexandra Topping, The Guardian
Wear red, down tools and buy local: that is the action women in the UK are being urged to take on International Women’s Day as part of a global strike to highlight gender rights and abuses.
The “one day without a woman” mobilisation is urging women to take the day off “from paid and unpaid labour” on Wednesday, only buy local and wear red in solidarity with the global women’s movement.
In London, where it will be budget day, there will be a protest outside the family court in Holborn at 9.45am, followed by a “speak out” outside parliament, said Nina Lopez, a coordinator for the Global Women’s Strike.
The movement in England is adopting a broom as its symbol – because together the bristles are strong – and is inviting women to make a loud noise at 6pm in coordination with other women around the world. …
The U.S. Government’s Privacy Watchdog Is Basically Dead, Emails Reveal
Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept
THERE’S A LITTLE-KNOWN federal agency whose job is to ensure U.S. spy agencies protect privacy and other civil liberties even as they work to defeat terrorists and criminals, and to blow the whistle when that doesn’t happen. But the agency, known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, is down to just a single voting member — which means it has been stripped of nearly all its powers, according to emails obtained by The Intercept.
The board was created by Congress in 2004, at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, to help the executive branch balance national security priorities with individual rights. After Bush administration officials heavily edited PCLOB’s first report, one member resigned, and Congress in 2007 turned it into an independent agency and expanded its writ to include oversight of congressional action. Still, the board remained obscure; some members of Congress seemed unaware of its existence even as documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden produced more privacy scandals.
PCLOB is supposed to have five members, no more than three of whom come from the same political party; to employ a full-time chairperson; to have regular access to the 17 intelligence agencies; and to publish unclassified versions of its evaluations of U.S. espionage powers.
But with just one part-time board member left, after another member’s term ended last week, the agency has very few formal powers to police the so-called “deep state” until President Trump nominates a new board, the emails reveal. Without the statutory quorum of three members, PCLOB “may not initiate new advice or oversight projects” or offer advice to the intelligence community, according to a list drawn up by Jen Burita, PCLOB’s public affairs and legislative officer, and shared by email with several congressional staffers who had raised questions about the impact of the attrition among board members. …
EPA Chief and “Polluter’s Tool” Pruitt Lied to Senate About Private Email Use
Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams
Pruitt is now the fifth member of Trump’s cabinet to be caught having lied during confirmation hearings.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings when he said he had never used his private email account for official business while serving as attorney general of Oklahoma.
The revelations became public last week, but picked up traction on Thursday after Attorney General Jeff Sessions was also caught having lied during his testimony.
The court-ordered release of tens of thousands of Pruitt’s emails, published as part of a lawsuit filed by the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), expose not just the former Oklahoma lawmaker’s cozy relationship with the fossil fuel industry—they also show that many of his official emails were copied to his personal account, contradicting his testimony to the Senate Public Works Committee, whom he told, “I use only my official OAG [office of the attorney general] email address and government-issued phone to conduct official business.” …
In Unionization Campaign, Black Workers at Nissan Are Challenging Use of Temporary Labor
Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org
Workers who’ve waged a years-long struggle for a union at the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi are about to get some star power.
On March 4, Senator Bernie Sanders, NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, actor Danny Glover, and even a professional football player or two are expected to show up in solidarity with the workers.
The rally will certainly boost the profile of a campaign that has already mobilized faith, civil rights, and student groups in support of the plant’s 5,000 employees, about 80 percent of whom are African American. But major labor battles like this one are not won in a day. …
Climate Change “Debater” Ryan Zinke Confirmed as Interior Secretary With Help of 17 Democrats
Sam Knight, The District Sentinel
President Trump’s Secretary of the Interior was confirmed on Wednesday by the Senate.
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) was approved by the upper chamber in a 68-31 vote, with 17 members of the Democratic Caucus backing his nomination.
…
Zinke, an avid outdoorsman, claims to be for the preservation of parks, in the mold of NPS-founder, former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. He has stated repeatedly that he opposes the privatization of public lands, but has voted twice in the past year to make that process easier. …
Civil war in the Vatican as conservatives battle Francis for the soul of Catholicism
Catherine Pepinster, The Guardian
When Pope Francis was elected nearly four years ago, on 13 March 2013, he was escorted – like every pope before him – from the Sistine Chapel to the Room of Tears. It is the place where a new pope pauses for a moment – and no doubt many of them do shed a few tears, thinking of the momentous responsibility upon their shoulders – before stepping out on to the balcony of St Peter’s to greet the world as the new leader of the Roman Catholic church.
When Francis, known until then as Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, first appeared that night, he appeared remarkably sanguine, joking that the cardinals had gone to the ends of the Earth to choose the next pope. If he’d had any inkling of what these last four years would be like, he would surely have wept in that Room of Tears.
While hugely popular across the globe with Catholics and non-Catholics alike, Francis has struggled against fierce opposition from the Vatican establishment to haul the Roman Catholic church into the 21st century, fought to reform its government, tried to persuade cardinals to revise their thinking on the divorced and remarried, and been openly opposed by rebel prelates. …
Iditarod dog race start line moved again in Alaska due to lack of snow
Associated Press in Anchorage, Alaska
For the second time in three years, the Ititarod dog race will have its official start in Fairbanks, Alaska instead of Anchorage, due to insufficiently wintry conditions.
The ceremonial start of the race was still staged in the state’s largest city on Saturday, where trucks had brought in snow overnight.
A few hundred miles north, the Alaska Range – a mountain span that includes Denali – has little snow and open-water conditions. That prompted race officials to move the competition’s official start. …
- 7 Bad Ideas Plaguing the Democratic Party
Les Leopold
- Did Obama Pave the Way for More Torture?
JOHN LAFORGE
Something to think about over coffee prozac
Don’t Panic. Radio Alerts About Zombie Outbreak Were Fake (Probably)
Good people of Indiana, you can put the chainsaws and clubs down.
Nina Golgowski, Huffington Post
Indiana residents can breathe easy after emergency radio alerts of a zombie attack were deemed to be the product of a hack.
The broadcasts, which were “replayed frequently” on a Winchester station around noon on Wednesday, warned of the flesh-eating attack as well as a related disease outbreak from dead bodies, authorities in Randolph County announced on Facebook.
“There is no local emergency,” the sheriff’s department assured in a statement. “We have contacted the radio station and notified the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. Again there is no emergency or disease outbreak in Randolph County.”
After hearing the repeating broadcasts on station WZZY 98.3, the county’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management team reached out to the state’s DHS to see if it was a planned training exercise. Once determining that it was not, the station, as well as its sister stations, were taken off the air until they could regain full control, the sheriff’s department said in an earlier release.
Not everyone was buying it, however.
“Stay vigilant, folks, odds are the zombies would go straight for the sheriff’s department Facebook account first,” one Facebook user cautioned in the post’s comment section.
One woman who said she heard the broadcast from her car said it followed two to three emergency alert sounds. The subsequent verbal alert was described as rushed and “a little difficult to understand.”
“Nice try, but you do NOT have your PROFESSIONAL radio voice down good enough!!!” she added.
As for how the public can prepare for a real zombie outbreak, should one ever occur, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers advice on their website. They even have a comic book titled “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic,” because, I mean, you just never know.
The radio station did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Huffington Post.
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