New Laws in Michigan
I worked as a paid deep canvasser in a massive campaign for Michigan United before the 2020 election season. In our first round of canvassing, we interviewed residents who were likely to have voted for the orange loser, and the group’s statisticians used the data we created to reveal those issues that could move voters from voting R to voting D. In our second round of canvassing, by using those topics and methods, we moved 50K voters to our side of the ballot. As I said, a massive campaign.
Michigan United sent me an email which I am quoting at length here. Because of new laws that took effect on February 13, 2024, Michigan is now a haven for all Michiganders, including workers, women, and LGBTQ people. Michigan is also a safer place because of new gun laws. Here's what we wrought:
Labor Rights:
In a groundbreaking move, Michigan has ended the "right-to-work" law. The law means protecting workers by increasing labor rights and union participation rates. This historic decision makes Michigan the first state in 60 years to remove the "right to work" law. Michigan also has a new prevailing wage law, ensuring that all workers involved in state-funded construction projects receive equitable union wages.
LGBTQ Rights:
Michigan has taken great strides in becoming a more inclusive and affirming state. Michigan has new laws in place to ban discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in housing, jobs, public accommodations, education, and housing. Michigan has also outlawed harmful conversion therapy, preventing self-harm and suicide among LGBTQ individuals.
Reproductive Freedom:
Michigan is a shining example of reproductive freedom for all. Michigan has expanded abortion access and reduced barriers to reproductive healthcare by removing regulations for clinics providing abortions, removing the ban on colleges and other post-secondary schools from providing abortion service referrals, and decriminalizing doctors and nurses who prescribe abortion medications. However, there are still barriers, including a law for a 24-hour waiting period for an abortion. These impressive changes increase access to reproductive care, ensure decisions are made between patients and their doctors, and ultimately save lives.
Gun Safety:
On a solemn note, today marks the anniversary of the tragic Michigan State University shooting, where three young lives were horrifically taken. In response to this and other preventable tragedies, Michigan has three new gun safety laws:
- Universal background checks are now mandatory for all gun purchases.
- Safe gun storage laws are in effect, preventing access to firearms by children.
- Red flag laws are now in effect, safeguarding vulnerable individuals and those displaying violent tendencies from obtaining firearms.
Together, these new gun laws aim to protect the people of Michigan and create a safer environment.
Please donate to Michigan United here.
Another way to support our LGBTQ+ community
You can become a member of the Queer Liberation Library, a free digital library, on Libby. Apply to become a QLL Member here.
Queer Liberation Library (QLL) is fighting to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community. [QLL]
The Five R’s of the Resistance:
- Resist: Protest on the streets, call senators and representatives, etc.
- Rebel: Run for office, GOTV (Get Out The Vote), support a progressive.
- Revolt: Change the laws, change the culture, build your communities.
- Rely: Trust that millions of others are fighting the good fight.
- Rest: Take care of yourself, we are in this for the long term.
WineRev’s Good and Goofy Notes
Watch for WineRev’s G&G notes in the comments to see what others went through, struggled with, and surmounted in the past. His G&G comments are mini Good News Roundups. You can find all his comments here, even today’s, once he posts it. Tech Tip: You can search for >>> in Roundups to quickly find his comments.
WineRev, last Sunday, in which he writes his own ode:
OK things are OFFICIALLY, tech-Geek, utterly Windows Upgrade…..WEIRD this morning. 2thanks has the diary, appearing without the usual dancing, playful Gnus. In 2 different spots s/he explains about needing to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and the Red Light Emergency GLITCH reading possibilities.
Well, the Glitches are here.
According to my screen there are already 121 Recommends…...less than 20 minutes after the Posting time. Also, I myself canNOT actually Recommend, nor can I Tip Jar (which has a 65 count.)
Finally, although the Posting time and Date read February 25 and 6:10am CST, the Tip Jar and following 86 (!) comments are all dated August 27, 2023.
This concludes the Trouble Report to Tech Support. So now its time to send the bag of Cheetos down the laundry chute to the basement, restock the fridge with Mountain Dew, offer up a set of replacement ink cartridges for the Shirt Pocket Pen Collection living within the Plastic Protector, and turn loose……….the Coders! For it only by invoking the “command line” “C-double prompt” circuits of the Machine Code Tap Dance Company (nicknamed “Borg Minus 6.2”) that this may be addressed.
Meanwhile the Gnuville Breakfast Brunch is serving up South Carolina Grits, Nikki Haley style, as she (and we?) celebrate (?) her losing by LESS than the 30 or 35% margin the final polls projected. As you sip coffee, tea, or mocha-cocoa, or take that first, Sunday morning swig of you Mimosa, marvel at the pollsters claiming a 33 point loss coming for Haley and the late, actual results showing a 20 point loss. Missed it by 13 points or more? By more than half the actual result? And you call yourselves Pollsters? If I were the MSM I’d have my accountants go to their Pollsters with the news, “Hey! Your February Fees? Yeah, well we’re going to pay you, of course, but we’re just going to move the decimal point in your bottom ‘Pay This Amount’ one notch to the LEFT and send a check for that. It’s close, right? It’s just a number, right? It’s just a lousy little dot on the screen/page, right? So that monthly fee of $137, 944.72? Yep…...enjoy the check for $13, 794.47…...aw hell, Let’s be friends! We’ll round that sucker up to a clean $14,000 so its easier to track and you can splurge on a ‘Large’ down at Caribou Coffee. Regards!”
Everyone else, C’mon in to the Lounge of Laughs, tune in, log on, Fi your Wi, and lets see what we can do about comments, replies, and other interactive stuff. If the dates hold, today’s History Corner will not only come Across the Miles to you, but also Across the Months, from August to February, reaching across the Earth’s orbital plane to comment with you with peri-Heliotic Pixel streams. Good Sunday morning, all!
Did you read the last paragraph?
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
That’s for sure.
Last week, I tried to explain my tech-awful morning with a quick metaphor involving a machete. In addition to what WineRev said, at one point I saw TWO instances of that August diary in my published Diaries List at the same time!
Science
Hoo Boy!
Rewriting the Laws of Physics
Irontortoise, member of Daily Kos:
There’s a revolutionary new paper from Oxford University out today in Nature Nanotechnology that challenges one of our basic understandings of how things are supposed to work in the field of electromagnetism — the idea that like charges are supposed to repel each other while opposite charges attract. Phys.org has a much more readable review of the paper:
It's not only opposites that attract: New study shows like-charged particles can come together
"Opposites charges attract; like charges repel" is a fundamental principle of basic physics. But a new study from Oxford University, published today in Nature Nanotechnology, has demonstrated that similarly charged particles in solution can in fact attract each other over long distances. Just as surprisingly, the team found that the effect is different for positively and negatively charged particles, depending on the solvent.
Besides overturning long-held beliefs, these results have immediate implications for a range of processes that involve interparticle and intermolecular interactions across various-length scales, including self-assembly, crystallization, and phase separation.
Please share good science news with us! (Especially JSWT, health, environment.)
A good place to look for science news if you are waiting for the Sunday Roundup is the archive of Overnight News Digest. On Saturdays, the OND always focuses on science, though not all of it is devoted to what I would call Good Science News.
Need more good news?
… arhpdx posted a list of good news sites toward the top of a recent Roundup, or you can find that same list in my comment: Good News Sources. Thank you, arhpdx and Mokurai!
[On a desktop, you could open that comment in a new Tab by clicking the timestamp, and then you could Bookmark that page or save it to your Favorites.]
Our map of Gnuville: 858 of us have shared our global locations!
To leave your mark, please Reply in the comments to tljdk or the map-building comment. Please indicate only your general location, NOT street number and street. (Please persist, we are volunteers.)
Image: Screenshot of the Google Map of the world showing locations of members of Daily Kos's Gnuville (the Good News Roundup group) on 14 May 2023. You can use the map’s zoom arrows to resize the view and focus on your pin to find neighbors. Please note that the Google Map, though convenient to operate, is visually inaccurate because, among other issues, it enlarges North America and shrinks Africa [Maps present a distorted view of the world by kos].
If you join us regularly, are you Following us? More than 450 Kosacks Follow us.
Tech Talk for Kosacks
- Load-More Workaround: On a desktop or laptop, to banish the Daily Kos Load More buttons, click this link, which opens the main Daily Kos page and shuts off the Load More buttons at the same time. You must Reload any open Daily Kos pages. After that, you’re good to go, but you may need to come back here and click that link again in a few weeks. According to the DK Help Desk, the “Load More” option also resets the user back to the display of the old-style, React comments. Since I upgraded to Windows 10, the Load-More Workaround no longer works for me. I will no longer continue to post that paragraph in every Sunday Roundup.
- Got a Daily Kos tech question? Let us know. No question is too basic.
Where Ever is Herd
Morning Good News Roundups at 7 x 7: These Gnusies lead the herd at 7 a.m. ET, 7 days a week:
- Mondays The GNR Newsroom (Jessiestaf, Killer300, and Bhu)
- Tuesdays arhpdx and niftywriter
- Wednesdays: 2nd MCUBernieFan, 3rd WineRev, 4th karij. 1st and 5th: lemay50, Andrew F Cockburn, DoctorStrange.
- Thursdays Mokurai
- Fridays chloris creator, regular links to the White House Briefing Room.
- Saturdays GoodNewsRoundup, the one and only!
- Sundays 2thanks — A brief roundup of Roundups, a retrospective, a smorgasbord, a bulletin board, an oasis, a watering hole, a thunder of hooves, a wellness, a place for beginners to learn the rules of the veldt. For instance, we do not welcome grammar-police comments in Roundups.
hpg posts Evening Shade diaries at 7:30 p.m. ET every day. After a long day, Gnusies meet in the evening shade and continue sharing Good News, good community, and good actions. Find Evening Shades here or on the Trending List.
For more information about the Good News group, please see our detailed Welcoming comment, one of the first comments in our morning diaries.
How to Resist: Do Something …
Fundraisers for Gnuville, USA:
GoodNewsRoundup:
bilboteach (as described in detail here.)
3/2 Total $42.2K. Up almost $2K in 2 weeks! Thank you all for your support!
Please donate to re-elect Joe Biden!
(Updates usually on Sunday)
Action Steps from Gnusies
Six of our Good News writers regularly post a panoply of fantastic action steps in their Good News Roundups. If you don’t see a way to become active that suits your personality, your funds, or your time, please review their most recent diaries for many different options to volunteer and/or donate:
On Daily Kos:
We welcome comments in Roundups every day regarding:
- National or local Good News.
- Links, stories, music, videos, quotes, tweets. (No tweets or images of the saffron chlamidiot, please.)
- Your resistance activity.
In my Sunday smorgasbord Roundups, I especially welcome the following types of comments:
- Who won YOUR week?
- Questions about Daily Kos tech issues or our map.
- Good News Roundups and you.
- How are you resisting?
- How are you supporting Democratic candidates?
- Please let’s stick to Good News today, no mews or databases.
In the comments of all Roundups, we do not welcome Grammar Police or Debbie Downers.
Top Image: Edward Song created the top image of 3 cavorting gnus using an AI tool, Dalle.
A Lot About Me
I have skills useful for Democratic campaigns. A couple of weeks ago, immediately after a campaign event, after being totally impressed by her, I had an exciting meeting with Alyshia Dyer, who is running for Washtenaw County Sheriff, and her campaign manager. Ultimately they asked me to submit a proposal to create a database from the backend of the NGP VAN.
For those who do not know, the VAN is the program that keeps databases of voter participation and demographics, and the VAN helps direct volunteers and paid staff to make calls and knock doors. If you’ve ever done either of those activities and used your phone to do it, you’ve seen one aspect of the VAN. If you've worked with printed pages, those were created with the VAN as well. The backend is the place in the VAN where candidates make decisions. It helps candidates answer questions like these: Where should we canvass? Whom should we call? Where should we hold an event? Whom do we invite?
However, the VAN is an old and clunky program dating back to 2010. For many institutional reasons, Democrats continue to use it.
A little more about me, a partial summary of my life as a nerd:
- I read dictionaries when I was a child.
- I took a typing class at a local high school at age 11.
- Instead of playing solitary computer games, I wrote macros to create and increase cross-platform productivity for myself and co-workers.
- I taught myself to program using the Windows program AutoHotkey.
- I added programming of my computer keyboard to make text editing much quicker.
- I wrote programs to sling text and data from one program to another.
- I’ve mentored people to improve their productivity on their Windows computers, a gift of time.
- Before the 2020 election, two groups in Michigan paid me to deep-canvass by phone and by knocking doors.
- I wrote a program to extract information specific to campaigns from the old and clunky VAN.
About two years ago, my wife and I sold our house so we could live near our daughter and her wife. Since then, we have been collecting our Social Security benefits and slowly spending down our savings to pay for her expensive medications and treatments. We’ve reached the threshold of savings now that I need to increase my income to cover her medical expenses.
It’s simple, I need more income, and I don’t want to ask for money. I need to invite and create more income flowing toward me from a place of understanding that I can do what I love, and prosperity is flowing toward me. I dreamed a golden river reflecting an amber sunrise flowed slowly, calm, and majestic, down to my castle by the sea. Maybe you, dear Reader, could help me?
I have skills useful to Democratic campaigns. All my life skills and joys seem to be reaching toward the climax of this year. I can help campaigns find out which precincts their volunteers should spend time in, which phones they should call, which doors they should knock.
Ultimately, I finished the database-creation project for Alyshia Dyer on time, and the campaign manager was very satisfied, very happy. He said he’d be willing to put in a good word about me if anyone called him for a reference.
If you know of any Democratic candidate who needs help creating databases from the backend of the VAN, please let me know about them and/or let them know about me. You can reach me by kosmail or email.
I’ve begun the process of reaching out through my local networks. I’ll say more about Alyshia Dyer’s campaign in a later diary, I plan to create an ActBlue page soon, and I haven’t yet written an email to the campaign manager finalizing our verbal agreement about my commission.
I have skills useful for Democratic campaigns.
Our Roundup is almost open!
Thank you for fighting for truth and justice with all us Gnusies! 40% of our Readers don’t visit every day, 50% of us do, and 10% are here for the first time! We all do what we can. For 5 years, we’ve shared positive news, laughed, organized, resisted, rebelled, revolted without being revolting, relied, rested, mentored, created, crossed rivers, chewed our cud, puffed methane out both ends, and laughed. Here’s looking at you, kid, and standing upwind! Beginners, you are cordially invited to comment!
As always, please share more Good News than I can find or provide.
This is a group diary, and by my power I declare this Good Gnus Salo(o)n open! Let the good-news sharing and community building begin!
Power with, not power over ❤️ ✊ ❤️
2thanks (he, him)