Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Perhaps the most important individual roadblock to Jordan's candidacy is not Don Bacon or Mario Diaz-Balart, both of whom would like Jordan's head on a stick. Neither is it any of the famous Republicans From Biden Districts. It is an 80-year old conservative from Texas named Kay Granger. She's the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. When she went against Jordan on Tuesday, it was a genuine temblor in the calculations. Granger is Establishment personified. It is not a leap to speculate that Granger has become frosted at Jordan's annual attempts to fck with the Appropriations process for transitory political gain. He is too eager to use the threat of a shutdown to get what he wants. And, as the last few days have demonstrated, Jordan has all the political savvy of a jackhammer. Granger simply may be fed up with his act. She voted against him again on Wednesday, as did two other Texas members of the Appropriations Committee, Tony Gonzales and Jake Ellzey.
Basically, there is a power bloc in the House now dedicated to getting the House to function as a proper legislature again instead of a vehicle for Fox-fed fantasies and imaginary grievances. That may point them, finally, toward some sort of deal that allows interim Speaker Patrick McHenry to exercise the powers of the office at least until the current continuing resolution expires in November. But any deal like that will require some Democratic votes, which is bound to raise the hackles of the Angry Children's Caucus. Already on TV, shortly after the balloting had left it without a Speaker, people on TV were already talking about whether an interim Speaker would be vulnerable to a motion to vacate the chair. It's hard not to just give up.
A 600-plus-page report from the National Academies of Science includes 80 recommendations for how the U.S. can achieve its target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
Meeting the Biden administration’s goal for the United States to be a net-zero greenhouse gas emitter by 2050 is a monumental challenge that must be tackled at an even more daunting pace. But the nation’s top scientists envisioned that future and laid out a plan for realizing it in a report released on Tuesday.
In a sweeping 637-page document, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine made 80 recommendations for how the United States can justly and equitably pursue decarbonization policies. It includes recommendations for everything from establishing a carbon tax to phasing out subsidies for high-emissions animal agriculture and codifying environmental justice goals.
“This report addresses how the nation can best overcome the barriers that will slow or prevent a just energy transition,” said Stephen Pacala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University and chair of the committee that authored the latest findings, which build on an earlier report released in 2021. He added that only about a quarter of the recommendations require congressional action, with many being targets at private institutions and federal agencies. There is also a recognition that some changes are unlikely to happen immediately.
ELECTIONS MATTER
After yearslong litigation, a state Supreme Court flip and a decision reversal, North Carolina Republicans unveiled new congressional and legislative drafts as well as a county board of commissioners map this afternoon. Critically, the maps are not subject to gubernatorial veto.
As was suspected based on the struck-down 2021 maps, the new maps heavily favor the Republican Party, which holds a supermajority in both houses of the Legislature. The current congressional map — which was drawn by court-appointed experts and was only in place for the 2022 midterms — had seven Republican districts, six Democratic districts and only one competitive district. This remedial map yielded a 7-7 split in congressional delegates following the 2022 election. There are two newly released congressional map drafts.
According to Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for Cook Political Report, the first version has 11 Republican districts and three Democratic districts, lacking a competitive district entirely. It also seems to double-bunk two of the state’s three Black representatives in Congress, Reps. Don Davis (D) and Valerie Foushee (D). The second version has 10 Republican districts, three Democratic districts and only one competitive district. Democratic Reps. Kathy Manning, Jeff Jackson and Wiley Nickel would all be eliminated and Davis would be drawn into a hard-to-win district with a substantially diluted Black voting population.
Paul Krugman thinks we dodged that bullet but nobody’s noticed
These measures suggest that underlying inflation is already most of the way back to the Fed’s target of 2 percent, and falling fast. The war on inflation looks almost over, and we won.
Now, if you say that, you get some hysterical pushback, much of it politically motivated: A key part of the Republican case against President Biden is the claim that he is responsible for runaway inflation, and partisans aren’t willing to let go of that argument. I’ve had some, well, interesting correspondence lately — for example, emails saying that by highlighting data suggesting that the inflation surge is over I’m a worse propagandist than Joseph Goebbels. Whatever.
Anyway, to the extent that there’s a real argument here, it involves the widespread use by economists of measures that attempt to extract underlying trends from the noise. Never mind these fancy numbers, say the critics; the prices real people actually pay are still soaring.
The truth, however, is nearly the opposite. At this point, U.S. inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index is largely driven by prices people don’t pay — owners’ equivalent rent, an “imputed” estimate of what homeowners would be paying if they were renting their houses. An alternative measure, the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, which doesn’t include this imputation, shows inflation roughly down to target...
Progressive activist and independent presidential candidate Cornel West received a maximum campaign donation from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, West's latest fundraising report shows.
Crow made the $3,300 donation in August, weeks before West abandoned his bid for the Green Party nomination to run as an independent. Crow has called West, a self-proclaimed “non-Marxist socialist” and longtime professor at Princeton University, “a good friend.”
...Crow’s close ties to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have come under scrutiny in recent months after a ProPublica report in April detailed gifts, travel, and other items of value provided by the Texas billionaire to Thomas and his family.
"My heart breaks," one biodiversity advocate said Monday as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that 21 species would be removed from the endangered species list due to their extinction.
The agency said it had conducted "rigorous reviews of the best available science" and determined that the animal species are no longer in existence, having been protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) starting in the 1970s and '80s, when they were already in very low numbers—or potentially already extinct in some cases.
"These plants and animals can never be brought back," said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). "We absolutely must do everything we can to avert the loss of even more threads in our web of life."
Records unearthed by a University of Virginia professor shed new light on states’ vocal opposition in the 1950s to tribes claiming their share of the river. Today, many are still fighting to secure water.
As the case dragged on, it became clear the largest tribe in the region, the Navajo Nation, would get no water from the proceedings. A lawyer for the tribe, Norman Littell, wrote then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1961, warning of the dire future he saw if that were the outcome. “This grave loss to the tribe will preclude future development of the reservation and otherwise prevent the beneficial development of the reservation intended by the Congress,” Littell wrote.
Both warnings, only recently rediscovered, proved prescient. States successfully opposed most tribes’ attempts to have their water rights recognized through the landmark case, and tribes have spent the decades that followed fighting to get what’s owed to them under a 1908 Supreme Court ruling and long-standing treaties.
The possibility of this outcome was clear to attorneys and officials even at the time, according to thousands of pages of court files, correspondence, agency memos and other contemporary records unearthed and cataloged by University of Virginia history professor Christian McMillen, who shared them with ProPublica and High Country News. While Arizona and California’s fight was covered in the press at the time, the documents, drawn from the National Archives, reveal telling details from the case, including startling similarities in the way states have rebuffed tribes’ attempts to access their water in the ensuing 70 years.
The New York Times predictably describes Landry as “a brash conservative” and “a confrontational litigator” like he’s the maverick lead in a legal drama. However, as attorney general, Landry catered to his party’s far-right MAGA base by fighting Gov. Edwards and the Biden administration in court over vaccine and mask mandates for even health-care workers, as well as sensible environmental regulations.
He was also a veritable pro-bono counsel for right-wing misinformation — leading a lawsuit that resulted in keeping the Biden administration from asking social media companies to remove content that violated their own terms of service.
Landry is a bad guy who will put the hammer to marginalized people. Yes, Louisiana is a solid Republican state and Edwards — an anti-abortion Democrat — was an outlier. But man did the Democratic Party lie down and die. Some of the races weren’t even contested. At least force the Republican candidates to spend money on campaign office space. Democrats must fight against the self-fulfilling prophecy that non-Republicans votes don’t matter.
There is also a national warning for Democrats that a horrible Republican candidate on the merits isn’t enough to inspire turnout against them. Let’s start knocking on those doors and getting everyone engaged. No lectures, either, just listen.
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