Julia Conley, Staff Writer - Raw Story / Common Dreams
Stephan:
In my opinion the Republican Party which has subordinated itself to the overwhelmingly White MAGAt world has made a major miscalculation. In doing this they have alienated the young, the majority of women, and people of color. The 2024 election will turn, I think, on how big the turnout of those three populations is. Why, because if you add progressive White men they represent the majority of Americans. If you think about it for a minute the very idea that a convicted rapist criminal under several dozen felony indictments in four jurisdictions is the leading candidate of a political party sounds like something out of Mad Magazine (if you are old enough to remember that publication). And yet that’s where we are. America has become a very strange country.
A pollster at Harvard University pointed to a persistent sense of precarity in the lives of young voters as a key reason behind new data that shows Americans aged 18-29 have significantly more progressive views than young people did even five years ago.
Data analyzed by the Harvard Youth Poll, which releases survey results focused on young voters every spring, found that a clear majority take a progressive outlook on what John Della Volpe, director of the poll, called the “big four” political issues that respondents are asked about: LGBTQ+ rights, economic inequality, climate action, and gun violence.
Sixty-two percent of voters between 18-29 (those born between 1994 and 2005) believe the federal government should provide residents with basic necessities. Just 52% believed the same in 2018, and only 44% did a decade ago.
Fifty-four percent say they reject the idea that same-sex relationships and marriage equality are morally wrong, and 63% support stronger restrictions on access to guns—having come of age in an era that saw gun violence overtake vehicle accidents as the leading […]
One of the major failures of the Democratic Party, to my mind, is they have not figured out how to make Americans aware of all the wellbeing fostering things Joe Biden has done in his first term. Mostly, they haven’t even tried. I consider this to be a major failure because, on the basis of objectively verifiable data, and in spite of the reckless Republican opposition, Biden has achieved many dramatic wellbeing fostering good news achievements. Nowhere is this made clearer than how, at a time when North America is facing an unprecedented level of forest fires, Biden recognized the contribution fire fighters have made to the nation’s wellbeing. I would be surprised if 10 per cent of Americans even knew about this. And even fewer seem to realize that Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has left the Democratic Party and become an independent, accompanied by a small group of other senators, is now actively seeking to sabotage what Biden has done.
A U.S. Forest Service firefighter crew arrives at the scene where flames from the Caldor fire threaten to jump highway 50 in Meyers, Calif., on Aug. 31, 2021. Credit: Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty
At the height of fire season and amid record shattering temperatures, a bipartisan group of senators led by Kyrsten Sinema (I-Az.), has framed a new bill related to firefighter pay as a boon for the wildland workforce. In reality, the bill would result in a major pay cut to federal firefighters who saw their wages increase under President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.
The 2021 law included a temporary but significant increase in firefighters’ take-home pay: 50 percent or $20,000, depending on a worker’s pay grade. That boost is set to lapse in September, and lawmakers have introduced the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act to soften the blow. The bill would split the difference between the pay wildland firefighters received prior to 2021 and their increased wages of the last two years.
There are tens of thousands of federal firefighters spread across the U.S. Forest Service, […]
One of the trends that made America the world leader in the post-WWII era was the result of shared intention by both parties to improve public primary and secondary education, and to help colleges and universities. Many of the technologies that have shaped our world arose from this and gave us our status in the world. Now we have a party, the Republicans, actively working to dismantle public education, and at the university level, we have this.
Ron DeSantis has rolled back the rights of Florida’s LGBTQ+ community. Credit: The Washington Post / Getty
With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state.
Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus. At its first meeting in late January, the revamped panel voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place.
Over the ensuing weeks, board members have dismissed the college’s head librarian and director of diversity programs and denied tenure to five professors who had been […]
One of my major dislikes of the Republican Party is the way they treat the Biden family. Think about it. On December 18, 1972, just weeks after being elected the junior senator from Delaware, Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident when a tractor-trailer struck their vehicle while they were out shopping for a Christmas tree. In 2015, Beau Biden, Biden’s eldest son, and Iraqi war veteran, died of brain cancer at the age of 46. Even before that happened Biden struggled to support his younger son Hunter who had become lost in Crack and alcohol addiction. None of this had anything to do with politics, it was just a decades long saga of family tragedies. If those same events had happened in your family, or you witnessed them happening to the family of a friend, do you think a little compassion might be the appropriate response? As we can see each day this has not been the Republican response. Instead they have used these tragedies to seek political advantage, and no one more than Marjorie Taylor Greene who, for me, is the manifestation of what my mother would have termed, slut.
MAGAt Republican smug Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene Credit: Getty
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin blasted House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer in a letter Thursday for allowing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to show Hunter Biden’s nude photos during a hearing last week, saying the committee is “rapidly being reduced to the level of a 1970s-era dime store peep show.” Raskin is demanding that Comer deal with it and restore some dignity to the committee with a public rebuke of Greene and “a statement condemning her actions as an affront to the dignity, propriety, and decorum of the Committee.”
“It is incumbent upon you to make clear that Rep. Greene’s use of pornographic images at a public hearing clearly violated House rules and to ensure that we are not subject to repeated incidents or similarly unacceptable actions in future hearings,” Raskin wrote. “If this was acceptable for Rep. Greene, you are establishing it as acceptable for all Members.”
Comer responded predictably by basically telling Raskin to shove it, and then changing the subject. He accused Raskin of trying to spare […]
Allison Parshall , Science Journalist - Scientific American
Stephan:
Here is an aspect of climate change I had not previously heard of, or even thought about. What is happening as we dither over climate change is that everything on the planet is undergoing change, and none of it is increasing wellbeing.
An aerial view of Chicago shows business center skyscrapers and busy streets near Lake Michigan. Credit: Prasit photo / Getty
The streets, sidewalks and roofs of cities all absorb heat during the day, making some urban areas up to six degrees Fahrenheit hotter than rural ones during the day—and 22 degrees F hotter at night. These “urban heat islands” can also develop underground as the city heat diffuses downward, beneath the surface. And basements, subway tunnels and other subterranean infrastructure also constantly bleed heat into the surrounding earth, creating hotspots. Now that underground heat is building up as the planet warms.
According to a new study of downtown Chicago, underground hotspots may threaten the very same structures that emit the heat in the first place. Such temperature changes make the ground around them expand and contract enough to cause potential damage. “Without [anyone] realizing it, the city of Chicago’s downtown was deforming,” says the study’s author Alessandro F. Rotta Loria, a civil and environmental engineer at Northwestern University.
The findings, published on July 11 in Communications Engineering, expose a “silent […]
