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.
This Day in History
President Andrew Johnson impeached; The Nazi Party holds its first major meeting; Manila liberated during World War II; Britain’s Prince Charles, Lady Diana Spencer engaged; Lauryn Hill’s Grammy feat.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Breakfast News
China Is ‘clearly militarizing’ The South China Sea
China is “changing the operational landscape” in the South China Sea by deploying missiles and radar as part of an effort to militarily dominate East Asia, a senior U.S. military official said on Tuesday.
China is “clearly militarizing the South China (Sea),” said Admiral Harry Harris, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, adding: “You’d have to believe in a flat Earth to think otherwise.”
Harris said he believed China’s deployment of surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island in the South China Sea’s Paracel chain, new radars on Cuarteron Reef in the Spratlys and its building of airstrips were “actions that are changing in my opinion the operational landscape in the South China Sea.”
Soon after he spoke, U.S. government sources confirmed that China recently deployed fighter jets to Woody Island. It was not the first time Beijing sent jets there but it raised new questions about its intentions.
Italy asks U.S. to explain report that NSA spied on Berlusconi
Italy’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday called on the United States’ ambassador to “clarify” reports from an Italian newspaper and WikiLeaks that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2011.
The report ran in the weekly newspaper L’Espresso in collaboration with the secrets-exposing organization WikiLeaks.
“The Italian Foreign Ministry has summoned the U.S. ambassador, John Phillips, to clarify the news appeared (in) the press, according to which the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and some of his close collaborators would have been subject to wiretaps in 2011,” a ministry statement reads.
The L’Espresso report came as WikiLeaks also publicized documents that it says shows the NSA had intercepted Italian diplomatic cables about a 2010 conversation between Berlusconi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as communication from a Berlusconi adviser in 2011.
Nevada’s solar workers and customers reel as new rules ‘shut down’ industry
The conversation at SolarCity’s hollowed-out warehouse in Las Vegas felt like it came after a funeral, and in a sense it did, with workers cycling between sadness, disbelief and anger at the untimely death of the rooftop solar industry.
The cause, as seen by workers drifting in to clean out their belongings, was state-assisted suicide, after the Nevada regulator imposed costly new rules for residential solar customers.
The decision to replace economic incentives with new higher fees pulled the carpet out from under an industry that provided 8,700 jobs in the state last year, according to the Solar Foundation, and stranded some 17,000 homeowners who have already gone solar with a financial liability on their rooftops.
Three companies, including SolarCity, announced they were quitting the state, laying off about 1,000 workers.
Increased flooding in US coastal cities caused by climate change, study says
Rising sea levels are putting increasing pressure on US coastal cities, with a new analysis showing that human-driven climate change is to blame for three-quarters of the coastal flooding events over the past decade.
The Climate Central research shows that coastal flooding days have more than doubled in the US since the 1980s, the primary drivers of which have been the warming of the atmosphere and oceans. The findings are based on a separate study, released on Monday, that found the Earth’s seas are rising at a pace unseen in the past 2,800 years.
Between 2005 and 2014, a gauge at Kings Point in New York showed there were 157 days where the water reached above an established “nuisance” level – double the total of the previous decade. A total of 96 of these flooding events are attributed to changes in the climate.
Snake island: Massachusetts to establish colony of venomous rattlesnakes
A colony of venomous rattlesnakes is to be established on an uninhabited island in Massachusetts in a bid to save a species that has been virtually wiped out in the state.
Massachusetts’ division of fisheries and wildlife has devised a plan to release timber rattlesnakes onto the island to build up a viable population. But some residents fear that the rattlesnakes, which are capable of swimming, will escape the island and maraud across areas frequented by people and their pets.
The plan will involve taking eight young snakes – each measuring four to five feet – from a captive breeding program and releasing them onto Mount Zion, an island in the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. The island, which is 1,350 acres in size and 3.6 miles in length, is uninhabited and is considered prime rattlesnake territory as it has undisturbed forest and boulders for shelter, with plenty of chipmunks and mice to feast upon.
Breakfast Blogs
First One All Writs Act, Then Another, Then Fourteen emptywheel aka Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
Now President Obama Must Play It Cool While the Republican Party Walks Off a Cliff Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics
Georgetown Law Professors Say Students Are “Traumatized” by Criticisms of Scalia, Demand “Remedies” Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
CIA and Pentagon Proxies Fight Each Other In Syria Dan Wright, ShadowProof
The GOP Thinks It Has To Destroy Constitutional Government In Order To Save It Steve M., No More Mister Nice Guy Blog
Pew Asks Stupid Misleading Question About FBI Apple Fight, Gets Stupid Misleading Answers Mike Masnick, Techdirt