Today’s comic by Mark Fiore is The Kushner Kables:

•  What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …

• Dear white Trump voters with an opiate addict in the family: your president embraces this dude, by Denise Oliver Velez
• How conservative propaganda works in America: the signal and the noise, by David Akadjian
• American Sociopath, by Propane Jane
• De Blasio and Trump see urban crime differently. Guess whose data on NYC street stops vindicates, by Ian Reifowitz
• Yes, I am a Social Justice Warrior, by Frank Vyan Walton
• Maine saved a river that Trump wants to destroy, by Susan Grigsby
• Where will you be on August 21, 2017, by DarkSyde
• Naomi Klein is right, Trump partially our own fault—how do we win again, by Egberto Willies

•  Rightwing provocateur James O’Keefe hit with $1 million federal lawsuit: He and his group undertook a video sting of Democratic activists shortly before last November’s presidential election. The videos purported to show efforts by Democrats to provoke violence at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies. While decrying O’Keefe’s tactics, two Democratic operatives—Robert Creamer and Scott Foval—left their posts as a result of the videos. In a civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington Thursday, Creamer, his Strategic Consulting Group and a related firm called Democracy Partners accuse O'Keefe and others of conspiring to violate federal and District of Columbia laws that forbid the secret recording of private conversations.

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•  Alleged “dark web” gun runners arrested: Although many dark web markets have been closed for several years, authorities are still trying to catch up with dealers who sold illegal goods. On Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had arrested two Atlanta men for allegedly selling weapons on the dark web to customers around the world. According to the indictment, the two operated under the handle CherryFlavor. ATF claims they legally bought 9mm pistols from legitimate gun vendors in the United States, and shipped them to customers in France, the Netherlands, Australia and elsewhere. Authorities in Australia found one of the pistols smuggled inside a karaoke machine in transit. Another was found a gun inside a DVD player. 

•  Chauncey de Vega writes: Liberals, put down the "covfefe" and pay attention: Trump is playing the role of Mr. Burns, and we're all Homer.

• Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement is far from over: All he did on Thursday was announce his intent to withdraw the United States from the 195-nation agreement. But while the psychological and political impact of his words reverberated around the planet, they did not have any legal force:

International law makes clear that U.S. presidents cannot simply delete signatures like the one on the Paris Agreement. The U.S. entered into the Paris Agreement under the full force of the law, and the global community can only recognize withdrawal under the terms specified in the agreement text. Article 28.1 of the Paris Agreement states a party cannot give notice of withdrawal to the U.N. Secretary General until “three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force.” Since the Paris Agreement entered force on November 4, 2016—mere days before Trump’s election—the earliest date that the U.S. could even give such legal notice would be November 4, 2019. That notification would then take a year to enter into effect, meaning that Trump cannot legally withdraw the U.S. from the Agreement until November 4, 2020, the day after the next U.S. presidential election.

• And, of course, Trump’s Paris withdrawal announcement was filled with flat-out lies: Case in point:

3. China “can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us.”

The implication here is that China plans to continue increasing its emissions. But a studylast year found that Chinese emission have peaked and were forecast to fall by 1 percent in 2017. The accuracy of official Chinese data is often called into question, with good reason. But a handful of independent studies over the past three years have corroborated the decline in Chinese emissions.

Backing this up, China has aggressively moved to invest in renewable energy over the past few years. In January, the country set aside $360 billion for clean energy investment over the next four years and canceled plans for 103 new coal-fired power plants. As a result, China’s own coal mining regions are suffering thousands of job losses.

• In case you can’t get enough of Trump on climate science denial, here are all 115 of his tweets on the subject.

• Nebraska beef producers sue over requirement that all cattle be branded: They complain in a federal complaint that the state Brand Act is costly and obsolete. In 1941, when the legislature decided to investigate stolen cattle, livestock operations “were often located in large, open, rural settings with limited human oversight,” according to the 13-page complaint. Ranchers say that modern methods, ear tags and electronic identification devices (EIDS) have reduced theft risks they once could only try to prevent by branding.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Arliss Bunny drops by to alert us Monday’s Hopping Mad interview with DKos political director Carolyn Fiddler. She sticks around for a wide-ranging discussion of world leadership, then helps hatch a plan for progressive global economic domination.

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