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
The Chernobyl nuclear accident; John Wilkes Booth, President Lincoln’s assassin, killed; Guernica bombed in the Spanish Civil War; Vermont enacts same-sex civil unions; TV star Lucille Ball dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Breakfast News
Lawsuits challenging changes to North Carolina’s election law failed to show it hampered the ability of minority voters to exercise political power, a federal judge ruled Monday in dismissing the cases.
US district judge Thomas Schroeder ruled against the US Justice Department, the North Carolina NAACP chapter and named voters, who claimed the law was passed to discriminate against poor and minority voters in violation of the Constitution and Voting Rights Act.
While North Carolina had a sordid history of freezing black voters out of the political process, Schroeder said, the plaintiffs did not show that the law hampered the ability of minority voters to exercise electoral politics.
Saudi Arabia approves ambitious plan to move economy beyond oil
Saudi Arabia has approved an ambitious strategy to restructure the kingdom’s oil-dependent economy, involving diversification, privatisation of massive state assets including the energy giant Aramco, tax increases and spending and subsidy cuts.
King Salman bin Abdulaziz announced cabinet backing for the Saudi Vision 2030 plan in a brief televised announcement on Monday in which he called on his subjects to work together to ensure success. Shares on the Riyadh stock market rose sharply.
Under Salman, who came to the throne in early 2015, economic strains have been the backdrop to rising tensions with regional rival Iran, the threat from Islamic State, the wars in Syria and Yemen, and a sense that the kingdom’s decades-long relationship with the US is fraying.
FCC to let cable company Charter purchase current rival Time Warner
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is letting the third-largest cable company in the US buy the second-largest: chairman Tom Wheeler has recommended that the body approve TV and internet distribution giant Charter’s plan to purchase Time Warner as well as the smaller Bright House Networks, so long as the new company abides by several conditions.
A draft approval of the agreement is being circulated among the commissioners and will likely be voted on soon. Perhaps the most immediately significant of those to consumers is that the new company will not charge usage-based prices or impose data caps on its customers for seven years.
Ammon Bundy’s lawyers take his anti-government land use claim to court
Lawyers for Oregon standoff leader Ammon Bundy have argued that federal officials lack authority to prosecute the anti-government protesters in a new court motion that offers a glimpse of the constitutional debate activists hope to bring to a high-profile trial.
Bundy, who led an armed occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge, has long claimed that the federal government has no right regulating public lands in the west, and now his legal team is bringing that argument directly to US prosecutors, who have filed a slew of serious felony charges against the activist.
The new motion, which lays the groundwork for a request to dismiss the criminal case against Bundy, presents an argument that legal experts have rejected as an inaccurate interpretation of the US constitution – that the federal government has unlawfully claimed ownership over the wildlife refuge and other public lands.
Harper Lee’s article for FBI magazine on infamous killings found
The discovery of an earlier manuscript from the US novelist Harper Lee was the publishing sensation of last year but now her biographer, Charles J Shields, believes he has found another previously unknown Lee text – a feature article about a notorious real-life quadruple murder.
The piece was written for the March 1960 issue of the Grapevine, a magazine for FBI professionals, just months before she was to publish her classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. It was unsigned, but Shields’s detective work uncovered evidence which appears to confirm its true authorship.
Breakfast Blogs
Tamir Rice Was a Tragedy Brought About in Our Name Charles Pierce, Esquire Politics
NSA Failed to Fully Inform FISC Even After It Started Fact-Checking Itself emptywheel aka Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel
The Vast Conspiracy of Forgetting, Ctd. driftglass at his blog
Spy Chief Complains That Edward Snowden Sped Up Spread of Encryption by 7 Years Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept
House Reps To James Clapper: No, Really, Stop Ignoring The Question And Tell Us How Many Americans Are Spied On By NSA Mike Masnick, Techdirt