Molly Schwartz, Digita Media Fellow - Mother Jones
Stephan: More good news from the Biden administration. Biden is committed to canceling all Trump environmental policies replacing them with policies that promote wellbeing.
Biden signs Executive Order to change American climate change policies. Credit: Adam Schultz/White Houses/Planet Pix/ZUMA
After four long years of the crisis being officially ignored, stopping climate change is back on the White House agenda.
President Joe Biden’s first two weeks in office have been filled with a flurry of executive orders that aim to put the United States back on course to cut carbon emissions and resume a place of global leadership on climate action. They present a stark contrast to the first hundred days of then President Donald Trump’s term, when he immediately set to work unraveling the Obama administration’s environmental policies, starting with the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a known climate change skeptic, to head up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“He appointed people who were the very antithesis to the agencies that they led,” Rebecca Leber, Mother Jones’ environmental politics and policy reporter, tells Jamilah King on the Mother Jones Podcast. “President [Trump] himself really promoted this idea of climate denial and anti-science theory.”
Stephan: Finally, a president who is willing to address America's gun psychosis obsession. Am I being partisan and unfair to say that? Consider, 41,000 men, women, and children in America died of gunfire during the 365 days of 2020. Twenty died on the last day of the year. There is no other developed nation on earth with numbers anything like that. What would you call it? And please don't say 2nd Amendment rights. The Founders would never have permitted this kind of gun violence; they meant something very specific in the 2nd Amendment, and it had nothing to do with what is happening in the country today.
Biden in his office
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Joe Biden on Sunday called on Congress to institute “commonsense gun law reforms,” including widespread firearm sales background checks and a ban on assault weapons — highlighting an “epidemic of gun violence” in the US on the third anniversary of the deadly Parkland school shooting.
“Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” Biden said in a statement.”
This administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call,” the statement reads. “We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer.”
The call from Biden comes three years after a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, leaving 17 people dead. The tragedy led many of the survivors to speak out against gun violence and confront lawmakers about […]
Stephan: Little seemingly mundane things like this tell us the culture is changing, an accommodation of trends is occurring that will produce a larger effect.
Closeup image of a woman holding and choosing credit card to use
The credit cards that dominate the spending habits of so many consumers, from companies that range from Mastercard to Visa and even Apple with its Apple Card, are slowly changing the look and feel that consumers have come to expect from these card products.
Credit cards are increasingly taking on a vertical orientation.
This comes as apps like TikTok and Instagram acclimate the world toward a vertically scrolling feed, and it also reflects how most consumers use their credit cards anyway — by inserting them into chip readers vertically, for example.
Here’s something I bet most you didn’t see coming: TikTok and Instagram are such pervasive cultural forces in the world today, they’re starting to quietly influence the design of — credit cards, of all things.
In recent days, PayPal released new debit and credit card vertical designs for its Venmo app, which a company executive said was partly inspired by the vertical orientation of those popular social media apps. Daniela Jorge, vice president of design at […]
Stephan: Like many of you, I suspect, I was appalled at the lack of courage and ethics on the part of those Republican senators who voted to acquit Donald Trump on a bogus technicality. But then in listening to final comments from McConnell and others I came to share the view of Jonathan Chait who wrote this piece. So, I guess we now wait to see what district attorneys in Georgia and New York do. One thing I am clear about is that history is going to condemn Trump and all his enablers for their lack of integrity. Of course, they don't care. What they care about is power and money, and for them only the here and now matters; that history will see them as loathsome hardly matters, they will be dead.
Donald Trump limped his way to acquittal in his second impeachmenttrial, with 57 senators voting to convict him of inciting insurrection. But it is an ominous sign that not only did many of the senators who did vote to acquit base their position on a technicality — Trump was supposedly ineligible for impeachment as an ex-officeholder, as opposed to not guilty of the crime — they conspicuously pointed toward the court system as a venue for further prosecution.
In front of the bars, for now. Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/
“The ultimate accountability is through our criminal justice system where political passions are checked,” said Republican senator Thom Tillis, who voted not guilty, “No president is above the law or immune from criminal prosecution, and that includes former president Trump.” Mitch McConnell, who likewise voted to acquit, announced, “Impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice. … We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
Stephan: I suggest to you that the big takeaway from the Trump era and the first year of the pandemic is this: A bit more than a third of Americans are either unable or unwilling to deal with facts. Their lives are controlled mostly by their fears, ignorance, and resentments. They don't care about democracy. They don't care about facts. They have little or no conception of what the future holds in store, and don't want to learn. They are easily manipulated through disinformation that plays to their fears and resentments. They don't care about integrity. And, in the case of the pandemic, their distrust of vaccines, or even wearing masks, means that the other two-thirds of the country will be put at unnecessary risk, while many of the frightened resentful third will be dying at a disproportionate rate.
Credit: istock
Almost a third of U.S. adults are undecided on whether they’ll get the COVID-19 vaccine and are taking a “wait and see” approach, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed.
The poll, released Friday, found that 31 percent of adults are going to “wait until it has been available for a while to see how it is working for other people” before getting the coronavirus vaccine.
Many who are hesitant to get the vaccine say their fears stem from how fast the vaccine was developed and potential side effects, despite the available vaccines being approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
There are even some health-care workers who are hesitant to get the vaccine, with officials in New York acknowledging it has been difficult convincing some frontline workers to take the vaccine.
However, the survey found that those who said they would “wait and see” for the vaccine could be convinced to get it sooner if a health-care provider they trusted or friends and family got the vaccine.
The survey found the group of those who want to wait is politically and racially diverse as well as younger, […]
