Stephan: Seventy percent of Americans want to vote on Abortion rights. Why? I think because they saw Roe overturned, and then saw what happened in Kansas and they want to take the issue out of the hands of Republican politicians and put it into the hands of voters where a woman's right to control her own body can be protected.
Credit: Ringo Chiu/AFP / Getty
Seven in 10 Americans, regardless of party affiliation, want to be able to vote on an abortion measure on their state ballot, according to a new Ipsos/USA Today poll released Wednesday.
Driving the news: The poll was conducted after Kansas became the first state in the post-Roe era in which U.S. voters cast a ballot on abortion — they decided last week to reject an amendment that would have gotten rid of abortion protections in the state’s Constitution.
✎ EditSign of the court that the ability to regulate abortion was “returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Details: The idea to vote on abortion was supported across party lines, with 73% of Democrats, 77% of Republicans and 67% of independents.
By the numbers: If there was an abortion-related state ballot measure, the poll found that 54% of Americans would vote in favor of abortion legality, whereas 28% say that they would vote against it.
Stephan: Although it hasn't gotten much attention, in Red states, there is a major effort underway by Republican legislators and MAGAt supporters to frighten physicians so that they don't even think about ending a pregnancy. I predict the result will be that healthcare, which in Red states is already greatly inferior to healthcare in Blue states will get worse. and even more alarming few OB/GYN physicians will choose to practice in Red states. The result, the lives of fertile women and girls in Red states will be even further compromised.
Credit: Mother Jones / Getty
In 2010, a group of anti-choice activists sent several complaints to Iowa’s medical board, demanding the agency end a popular telemedicine abortion program. Run by Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the program helped patients in rural clinics access safe medication for ending their pregnancies without traveling hours to a city. The anti-choice activists claimed, inaccurately, that not having a doctor physically present to hand people the pills was a threat to patients’ safety. At the time, the medical board wasn’t swayed. It closed the complaints without taking disciplinary action against Planned Parenthood’s physicians.
But that changed after Republican Terry Branstad, an abortion foe, reclaimed the Iowa governorship that November. In Iowa, as in many other states
✎ EditSign, medical board members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. Over the next couple of years, Branstad nominated replacements for all 10 members, installing an anti-abortion doctor who became board chair. Another Branstad appointee, a Catholic priest, had campaigned against the Planned Parenthood program, once arguing
✎ EditSign in a board meeting that the medical board ought to “uphold […]
Mika Rantanen, Alexey Yu Karpechko, ANtti Lipponen et al , - Nature
Stephan: This is a peer reviewed study published in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world. This is the best most up to date knowledge we have on the arctic. The report tells us it is melting far faster than was anticipated. I remind you of two things: The first is Schwartz' Law of Climate Change: whatever is predicted will happen faster than predicted, and in reality will be worse than predicted. Second, please remember every single Republican in the Senate voted against the Democrat's climate remediation bill. The Republicans still cannot get past their political whoring to prepare humanity for the catastrophe that is happening.
Melting arctic ice Credit: Kerem Yucel / AFP
Abstract
In recent decades, the warming in the Arctic has been much faster than in the rest of the world, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Numerous studies report that the Arctic is warming either twice, more than twice, or even three times as fast as the globe on average. Here we show, by using several observational datasets which cover the Arctic region, that during the last 43 years the Arctic has been warming nearly four times faster than the globe, which is a higher ratio than generally reported in literature. We compared the observed Arctic amplification ratio with the ratio simulated by state-of-the-art climate models, and found that the observed four-fold warming ratio over 1979–2021 is an extremely rare occasion in the climate model simulations. The observed and simulated amplification ratios are more consistent with each other if calculated over a longer period; however the comparison is obscured by observational uncertainties before 1979. Our results indicate that the recent four-fold Arctic warming ratio is either an extremely unlikely event, […]
Stephan: Here is another report on the unpopularity of the Electoral College, this one about a poll which gives us some objectively verifiable data. I personally support the elimination of the Electoral College. It is a relic created in the 18th century to keep the slave states on board with the Constitution, just like the Democrats made a deal with Manchin to get his vote. The President should be determined by the popular vote, and everyone about the age of 18 should have a vote. Period.
People hold signs reading “count every vote” during a worker’s rally in Copley Square in Boston just before Joe Biden was declared the President-Elect in Boston on November 7, 2020. Credit: John Tlumacki / The Boston Globe / Getty
More than 6 in 10 Americans say that the Electoral College should be abolished and replaced with a popular vote model for selecting the president and vice president, a new poll shows.
In a Pew Research Center survey that was published last week, 63 percent of respondents backed instituting a popular vote model over the current Electoral College system — the highest rate the organization has seen in support of instituting a popular vote system since at least the year 2000. Only 35 percent of the poll’s respondents preferred keeping the Electoral College in place.
The poll was conducted from June 27 to July 4.
The results of the survey showed a noticeable partisan divide on the question of the Electoral College. While 80 percent of Democratic-leaning respondents backed transitioning to a popular vote model, just 42 percent of Republicans […]
Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times - The New York Times
Stephan: Democracy is always about compromises, but not this study in corruption. All of this should be changed, making the entire system publicly funded, and private donations illegal.
That said I don't think the impact of a pipeline is going to be as big a deal as one might think. Why? because the conversion out of the carbon era is going faster than predicted. The pipeline, if it actually gets built, which I don't see as a sure thing, will have a short lifetime. It is the damage done to the environment in the pipeline building is the real issue.
David Seriff lives near the route of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. “We’ve been fighting for a long time,” he said. Credit: Melissa Golden for The New York Times
BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA — After years of spirited opposition from environmental activists, the Mountain Valley Pipeline — a 304-mile gas pipeline cutting through the Appalachian Mountains — was behind schedule, over budget and beset with lawsuits. As recently as February, one of its developers, NextEra Energy, warned that the many legal and regulatory obstacles meant there was “a very low probability of pipeline completion.”
Then came Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and his hold on the Democrats’ climate agenda.
Mr. Manchin’s recent surprise agreement to back the Biden administration’s historic climate legislation came about in part because the senator was promised something in return: not only support for the pipeline in his home state, but also expedited approval for pipelines and other infrastructure nationwide, as part of a wider set of concessions to fossil fuels.
It was a big win for a pipeline industry that, in recent years, has quietly become […]
