Stephan: You are probably seeing or reading reports on the water disaster going on in Jackson, the capital city of Mississippi. A sordid tale of Republican corruption, incompetence, and racism running over decades. Well, in contrast, here is some good news from Democrat run California. The growing disparity between Republican state government and Democrat state government is becoming more and more pronounced, and the implications for the Red and Blue states in the future as climate change becomes a bigger and bigger issue is going to be very dramatic.
California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom Credit: Gage Skidmore
As climate control discussions intensify, California lawmakers have moved to pass a flurry of aggressive pieces of legislation to advance efforts to mitigate global warming.
On Wednesday, August 31, lawmakers passed several climate-related bills “including a record $54 billion in climate spending, a measure to prevent the state’s last nuclear power plant from closing, sharp new restrictions on oil and gas drilling, and a mandate that California stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2045.”
According to The New York Times, the passing of the bills came after a years-long legislative session in Sacramento, Calif. Per the news outlet, the victory serves as a win for profile and begun drawing speculation about a possible White House run.”
Shortly after the bills were passed, Newsom released a statement sharing his reaction to the progress lawmakers have made in tackling the country’s climate crisis.
“Together with the Legislature’s leadership, the progress we make on the climate crisis this year will be felt for generations and the impact will spread far beyond our borders,” Newsom […]
Stephan: This article addresses a trend that I see, but that has received almost no attention or commentary. The political stupidity of the MAGAt Republican anti-choice movement. Why don't Republican men shut up? They spew out the most egregious nonsense about women, their bodies, pregnancies, and abortion. It amazes me that the MAGAt party just doesn't seem to understand that they are alienating woman right and left. In a sense though, I hope they keep at it because they are making the chances the Democrats will retain control of both the House and the Senate more probable.
MAGAt Republican Representative Matt Gaetz arrives on stage during the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty
Long after the time had passed for male GOP officials to stop, to just stop, pretending they know or understand anything about female anatomy, reproductive organs, medical emergencies and basic preventative health care, they have continued to talk. They have continued to talk and talk and talk even when the massive blowback after the Dobbs decision proved it was an error; Kansas proved it was an error; and after the surprise election of Pat Ryan in a New York special election proved it was an error. Every time a Republican man opens his mouth to talk about women’s bodies, ten new female voters get their wings. Yet somehow, they cannot seem to stop themselves!
It is surely the very textbook definition of “privilege” to find yourself unbothered by protests, polling numbers, and voter registration data. Justice Samuel Alito actually laughed in the face of outraged females who called out the bad history, bad economics, and bad medicine in […]
Jonathan Oosting and Yue Stella Yu, - Bridge Michigan
Stephan: The Republican Party no longer supports democracy. The proof of that statement shows up in something they do almost every day. But this one is a doozy. Nearly three-quarters of a million Michigan voters signed a petition to put a vote on abortion on the ballot, as was done in Kansas. And what happened? Two MAGAts on an obscure board are blocking it because they do not want women in Michigan to be treated as the equals of men.
Welcome to the great “kerning” debate of 2022, the biggest fight over a seemingly tiny petition issue since a font size challenge in 2012 nearly derailed an eventually successful push to repeal the state’s emergency manager law.
SPONSOR
The stakes were big then, and they’re bigger now after the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned Roe v. Wade.
Legal access to abortion in Michigan is tenuous, maintained only by court orders temporarily suspending enforcement of a 1931 ban set to take effect when the high court overturned nearly 50 years of protections this summer.
The Reproductive Freedom for All proposal aims to enshrine abortion rights in the Michigan constitution and overturn the 91-year-old law that makes performing an abortion punishable by up to four years in prison.
Stephan: Here we have the best population projections. Note the United States is going to be one of the seven most populated nations on earth.
The world’s population will cross 8 billion in November, according to recently released projections from the United Nations. And more than half of all people live in just seven countries.
China has the world’s largest population (1.426 billion), but India (1.417 billion) is expected to claim this title next year. The next five most populous nations – the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Brazil – together have fewer people than India or China. In fact, China’s population is greater than the entire population of Europe (744 million) or the Americas (1.04 billion) and roughly equivalent to that of all nations in Africa (1.427 billion).
As recently as 2015, half the world’s population was concentrated in just six countries – the same as above, with the exception of Nigeria, which was then the seventh most populous country and has since passed Brazil to move into sixth place. Recent population growth, however, has been faster in the rest of the world than in these nations, meaning that the top six now hold slightly less than half […]
Stephan: The negative consequences of the largely MAGAt anti-vaxxer movement just never seems to end. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who should be alive are dead today for one reason, they didn't get vaccinated because of the lies spewed out for months by the anti-vaxxers. I am still getting from the MAGAt media bogus reports about the Wuhan laboratory in China, or how Dr. Fauci is, take your pick, a secret agent, or a tool of the pharmacy corporations. The MAGAts live in a fact-free world, and they just never give up with their fantasies of how they are being victimized. One of the negative results of this nonsense is that life expectancy in the United States, as described in this report, is the worst it has been in decades.
People visit the “In America: Remember” public art installation on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 18, 2021. More than 650,000 small white flags commemorated all the Americans who had died due to COVID-19 to that point. Credit: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty
U.S. life expectancy estimates have fallen to the worst levels since 1996, according to a new federal report, marking the second straight year of plummeting estimates in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Health officials say the drop in life expectancy from 2019 to 2021 — falling by 2.7 years to 76.1 – is now the country’s worst two-year decline on record since 1923, according to provisional estimates published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
“The declines in life expectancy since 2019 are largely driven by the pandemic,” the agency said in a news release. “COVID-19 deaths contributed to nearly three-fourths, or 74%, of the decline from 2019 to 2020, and 50% of the […]
