Welcome
Greetings to all you Gnusies, Gnewbies, occasional drop-ins, silent regulars, and first-timers! Come sit with us to find and share messages of hope and to celebrate all the ways good people are triumphing over the evil-doers in power. The task we have set ourselves here in Gnuville is to search out hope no matter how difficult the situation might be. Fortunately, hope can always be found, and we’re finding more and more of it.
This is a collaborative effort! After you read a Good News Roundup, we encourage you to add your own good news finds in our comment section, The Best Comment Section on the Internet™, where sanity reigns and pie fights are forbidden.
Let’s go!
Introduction
I was originally going to open by recounting my struggles with sadness after the death of three people I care about. The theme was that the way to deal with grief is to feel it fully and then move forward, which I then applied to our national grief over what the Treasonweasel administration has done to our beloved nation. But then I found a better version of the same theme.
Eleven Films recently put out a heart-wrenchingly powerful video that uses singer-songwriter Kasey Anderson’s song “The Dangerous Ones.” I’m sure you’ve seen it, but in case you haven’t, here’s a link. Though the video ends hopefully, most of it is just too dark for a Good News Roundup, so I decided not to include it. However, I got hooked on the song, and the closing lyrics are a perfect way to express my message today:
you can curse and you can cry
you can scream yourself to sleep every night
or you can open up your eyes and take a look outside
every wall is gonna crumble every tower’s gonna fall
the earth is gonna rumble the siren’s gonna call
so you better look alive, alive, read the black not the white, forget the reds and blues
so quit looking for a way out start looking for a way through
a shot’s been fired but the war ain’t won
these white boys with money better learn how to run
the wall hit your back, the blood’s on your tongue
and you and me, baby, we’re the dangerous ones
“So quit looking for a way out, start looking for a way through.”
The way through is voting and Getting Out the Vote. So get up and get involved!
Today’s roundup will give you a couple of terrific voting guides for important Senate and House races and a list of the many ways you can help to get out the vote. They’re designed to be easy, and most of them are really fun.
As we work to energize other voters, it’s important for us to keep informed about the actions of the malefactors we’re fighting against. Though not all of us have the stomach to keep up with the day-to-day crimes and horrors, fortunately others do, and many of them are fellow Gnusies who are tireless in tracking down the weasels and shining a light on their slippery doings (looking especially at you, NNNE —thank you!) I, for one, refuse to watch any of the RNC smoke and mirrors extravaganza this week. But I, and you too, can keep fully informed about what’s going on without suffering through MSM bloviators or online gloom’n’doomers by sticking with the Gnusies. Thank goodness — and thank Goodie! — for the Good News Roundup! ❤️
And now on to today’s good news! There’s a whole lot of it.
Good political news
Our cup of schadenfreude runneth over!!
To start us off, in case you missed it, here’s a terrific ad from Act TV that both Mark Sumner and NNNE highlighted on Saturday. We know these assholes are shameless and can’t be embarrassed, but this should have an effect on Rethug voters while all the rest of us point and laugh.
Republican convention draws 17 million TV viewers, down 26% from 2016
Someone’s gonna lie about this!
From the LA Times:
The first night of the Republican National Convention averaged 17 million viewers on Monday, a sharp drop of 26% from 2016.
The audience figure from Nielsen was also below the opening night of last week’s Democratic National Convention, which averaged 19.7 million viewers . The audience for the Democrats on the first night of their convention was down about 24% from 2016.
Trump campaign has to work overtime to counter the President's message on mail-in voting
Awww, tRump campaign staff having to work extra hard, how sad for them. And even sadder, the Rethug sheep won’t hear anything but Dear Leader repeating the message over and over that voting by mail will cause the Dems to win. It appears to be one of his favorite talking points this week.
From CNN:
While President Donald Trump continues to attack mail-in voting, the massive political machine trying to get him reelected is working hard to assure Republican voters that mail-in ballots are safe to use this fall.
For months, the Trump Victory Fund -- the joint operation between the President's campaign and the Republican National Committee -- has been coordinating with local party officials to train field operatives and volunteers to spread the word about how to vote by mail. Much of that effort involves combating misinformation that has come directly from the President.
In North Carolina and Florida, voters have
received notices from Trump Victory with Trump's photo on it urging them to "securely and safely request your absentee ballot." The New Mexico state GOP recently sent out a mailer to voters encouraging them to
"join President Trump and vote by absentee ballot." And in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state where any registered voter can apply for a mail-in ballot under a law passed last year, Trump campaign officials and local party chairs are making sure Republicans across the state are aware of the option. (There's even a pop-up window on the Trump campaign website urging visitors to "request an absentee ballot.")
Prominent Republicans throw weight behind Biden as Trump's convention opens
Excellent timing!
From Reuters:
More than two dozen former Republican U.S. lawmakers, including former Senator Jeff Flake, endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president as the Republican National Convention opened on Monday, a rebuke to President Donald Trump by members of his own party.
The 27 former members of Congress joined a “Republicans for Biden” initiative organized by the Biden campaign to encourage Republican support for the Democrat, the Biden campaign said. They cited Trump’s “corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course” as reasons for the move, according to a Biden campaign statement.
“I was a Republican long before the president ever called himself one, and I’ll be a Republican long after identifying as such is no longer useful to him,” Flake said in a 16-minute video explaining his decision to endorse Biden and vote for a Democratic presidential nominee for the first time.
“Given what we have experienced over the past four years, it’s not enough just to register our disapproval of the president. We need to elect someone else in his place, someone who will stop the chaos and reverse the damage.”
Of course, Flake is a flake, but it’s better (to use LBJ’s deathless phrase) to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.
Meadows: Kellyanne Conway’s departure is ‘big blow to us’
“America loves her.” (Say what?!?)
From Politico:
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows acknowledged Monday that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s upcoming departure from the administration represented a “big blow” to President Donald Trump’s team.
“It’ll be a big hole, a big blow to us,” Meadows said in an interview on “CBS This Morning.”
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“Kellyanne is going to be missed. America loves her,” Meadows said Monday. “We certainly will miss her here at the White House. But listen, this is all about making a priority for family. That’s what this president’s about, and that’s what Kellyanne Conway’s about.”
RNC Greeted With Projections Condemning Republicans for Abandoning Jobless Workers
From Common Dreams:
On the eve of the 2020 Republican National Convention, a progressive advocacy group representing 15,000 unemployed workers on Sunday projected onto a Charlotte, North Carolina hotel the photos and stories of jobless workers struggling to meet basic needs after the GOP allowed the $600-per-week unemployment benefit boost to expire last month, slashing the incomes of some 30 million Americans.
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Republican officials who arrived in Charlotte Sunday evening may have spotted the massive projections on building of the Hilton Garden Inn, a hotel located just blocks away from the convention site.
A couple of good laughs:
This is a screengrab of CNN while Pam Bondi was giving a speech denouncing Biden for nepotism. Twitter went wild, of course.
And this is one of my favorites of the past few days:
And finally, some fittin’ music:
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and
Cap has provided us with an indispensable (and funny as hell) couple of voters’ guides. Enjoy!
I’ll give you his intro. You’ll need to open the links to get the info on the races.
There is nothing more important for the future of American democracy than the destruction of the more-than-slightly-fascist-curious Republican Party of 2020. This page is designed to help you in that fight.
[Senate:]I know you’ve watched Mitch McConnell’s Senate enable crime after Constitution-shredding crime, so it’s time to take the power away from this Shitty White Supremacist Death Cult, and never, ever give it back.
[House:] In the U.S. House of Representatives, we’ve got a historic freshman class to defend, yes, but even after the 2018 Blue Wave, we’ve still got a few more authoritarian enablers to fire.
Donald Trump and his lackeys are turds in the bowl of democracy, and for reasons laid out in the U.S. Constitution, the handle only works every few Novembers, so we have to flush as many of these creeps as possible while we have the chance.
Keep checking back, we’ll be adding more races as we go along. Come meet our candidates; whether challenger or incumbent, they’re all mighty damn impressive.
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Good news from Portland
Record $925 million verdict upheld in ViSalus unlawful recorded robocall case
From The Oregonian:
A federal judge has upheld a record $925 million in damages awarded in a class-action case against a Michigan-based marketing company that a jury in Portland found had engaged in unlawful telemarketing.
ViSalus Inc. placed nearly 2 million recorded robocalls to potential customers across the country offering deals on weight-loss products, dietary supplements and energy drinks.
Lori Wakefield, a Molalla woman who had once been a promoter for the company but later quit, brought the class-action suit, arguing the outfit’s prerecorded calls violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
Each violation called for a $500 penalty, and a jury in April 2019 determined the company made 1,850,436 unlawful automated calls to residential or cellphone numbers.
U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon found the large award was based on simple math.
“Here, the jury found that ViSalus committed a stratospheric number of TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) violations. It is no surprise that the TCPA’s constitutionally valid minimum penalty of $500 for each violation has catapulted ViSalus’s penalty into the mesosphere,” Simon said in his opinion.
Of course, ViSalus is whining that they’re “in no position” to pay such a penalty and that it would be a “death sentence” for the company. Wah, wah, wah, wah…
Portland’s first Black woman cop now ‘ the inspiration’ for a new PCC criminal justice scholarship
From The Oregonian:
Veteran federal prosecutor Kelly Zusman has heard the demands of many demonstrators to defund or abolish police.
She wondered instead what she could do to build better police forces, finding ways to have them mirror the communities they serve.
That led to a new scholarship created to encourage students of color to pursue criminal justice as a major at Portland Community College.
“Watching all of the protests and listening to a lot of people talk about what they want to get rid of,” she said, “I thought there has to be some positive stuff we could do.”
And when the college asked if Zusman wanted to name it after someone, she said she found the right person: Carmen Sylvester, the first Black woman hired by Portland police. It was 1973.
“Carmen became the inspiration,” Zusman said. “Her courage to become a Portland Police Bureau officer when so few women or African Americans were doing so and the work that she did on patrol and with the schools underscored how important it is for law enforcement to be part of our own community.‘'
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Good news from around the nation
Major Trump federal voting Pennsylvania lawsuit effectively shut down
From CNN:
The judge, Nicholas Ranjan of the US District Court in the Western District of Pennsylvania, decided Sunday that Trump's federal lawsuit against the Secretary of the Commonwealth over the use of drop boxes, poll watching and other voting processes should be put on hold, while state court cases about voting move forward.
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The Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth has separately tried to end all court cases related to how the state votes quickly, so as not to confuse voters. The state official has agreed to receive mail-in ballots up to three days after Election Day. That request to set voting terms and end the court challenges is pending with Pennsylvania's highest state court.
Judge Blocks Florida Order Requiring Most Schools to Re-Open by Aug. 31
From Education Week:
In a significant development in the debate over reopening schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Florida state judge on Monday issued an injunction that blocks a state order that required most school districts in the state to open their campuses five days a week by Aug. 31 or face a significant loss in state aid.
Leon County Circuit Court Judge Charles W. Dodson said that the defendants in the lawsuit—Gov. Ron DeSantis, Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, and the Florida Department of Education—"arbitrarily prioritized reopening schools statewide in August over safety and the advice of health experts."
The temporary injunction is a victory for the Florida Education Association, the NAACP and its Florida state conference, and several teachers and parents who filed two lawsuits to block Corcoran's July 6 order. The plaintiffs had argued that the state order violated a provision of the state constitution requiring safe schools.
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Dodson rejected arguments from the state defendants that because no school district had joined the suits and that 60 districts had submitted "brick-and-mortar" reopening plans, the districts themselves supported the state order.
"But the school boards have no choice," Dodson said in his opinion in Florida Education Assoication v. DeSantis. "If an individual district chooses safety, that is, delaying the start of schools until it individually determines it is safe to do so for its county, it risks losing state funding, even though every student is being taught."
Utah Wingnuts Called For High School 'No Mask Monday' Protest. Hero Teens Said 'No Thanks, Jerks!’
From Wonkette [but of course you knew that from the headline]:
Masks on and hats off to the plucky teens of Enterprise High School (Home of the Wolves) in Enterprise, Utah, population 1,862. Last week, a bunch of messages on Facebook called for parents to send their kids to school in defiance of a statewide mask mandate, to teach those socialist tyrants in Salt Lake City the meaning of Liberty. Instead, KSL-TV reports, students at the high school responded by networking with each other to make sure they all wore masks to school [on August 24th].
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A whole bunch of kids reached the not-unreasonable conclusion that if a large number of their peers eschewed the slavery masks, that could lead to an outbreak, and then a school shutdown. EHS Senior Dallee Cobb, whose track and field season was cut short in the spring when the schools went online, really didn't want to see that happen again. She's also on the cheer squad, so before Saturday's f'ball game (in front of a lineup of players and cheerleaders wearing masks), she called on adults to please not screw up another school year if you don't mind, OK?
How the World’s Largest Garbage Dump Evolved Into a Green Oasis
From the NY Times:
A little less than two decades ago, the last steaming load of garbage arrived at Fresh Kills Landfill. A packed-high barge turned slowly out of the Arthur Kill — that long, dishwater-brown tidal strait that separates Staten Island from New Jersey — and then docked at the Sanitation Department’s pier, an event celebrated less as a matter of ecological stewardship at the time than a triumph of not-in-my-backyard politics.
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Today, Fresh Kills has been rebranded as Freshkills, and the park that is now at the site of the old dump is poised to accept visitors: the North Park will open in spring 2021, the rest by 2036.
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The core problem would be adapting the site to the trash — no less than 150 million tons of garbage had been dumped at Fresh Kills (roughly the equivalent of the amount of plastic currently floating in the ocean). The trash would be capped with plastic, then slowly covered with millions of tons of clean soils, the soils planted with native grasses. The four garbage mountains would be transformed into four soft green hills straddling the convergence of creeks. Tree planting (started by arborists, accelerated by seed-carrying birds) would occur in coordination with the careful engineering of what you might call the dump’s natural excretions, the methane and the leachate.
In this way, over the course of 20 years, the parks and sanitation departments worked together with Field Operations to restore or encourage tidal wetlands, to generate forests, scrublands, and the wide-open fields of grasses. The Sanitation Department refines the methane and pipes it to Staten Island homes for cooking and heat, which makes a cup of tea in a warm room on a cold day in the Arden Heights neighborhood a little miracle of noxious composting.
Super Rare Wolverines Haven’t Been Seen For a Century in Mt. Rainier—Now They’re Back in a Family Way
This one’s for you, Wolvie!!
From Good News Network:
The picturesque Mount Rainier National Park is once again home to wolverines, as a nursing mother and two kits were recently spotted by camera stations within the park.
“It’s really, really exciting,” said Mount Rainier National Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins. “It tells us something about the condition of the park—that when we have such large-ranging carnivores present on the landscape that we’re doing a good job of managing our wilderness.”
The nursing mother, called Joni, and her kits were discovered by scientists from the Cascades Carnivore Project, (CCP) who were responsible in 2018 for setting up the camera stations which led to the sighting of the three fur balls scampering across a meadow into a forest in a video posted on the NPS Twitter account.
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New feature: Today’s charismatic microfauna
karij introduced us to the charming elephant shrew in her roundup a week ago, and also introduced us to the wonderful category of “charismatic microfauna.” I loved that so much that I decided to add the category to my roundups. Meet the golden mouse!
From Wild Florida:
Ochrotomys nuttalli
The strikingly beautiful golden mouse is semi-arboreal and has a prehensile tail. The fur is golden or orangish cinnamon on the upperparts, while the underparts and feet are white, sometimes tinged with gold.
These tiny mice are especially common in dense woodlands with vines and heavy brush or palmettos, and habitats with thick undergrowth near water. Golden mice are quite arboreal, often nesting and foraging above the ground. They build feeding platforms in vines and Spanish moss where they feed on seeds, nuts and berries.
The golden mouse sometimes builds its nest in a clump of Spanish moss or use an old bird’s nest. They breed throughout the year and females give birth to two or three young in a litter.
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Good news from around the world
Green is the new black: how biotech is making fashion more sustainable
From Positive News:
Earlier this year, as fashion brands released their summer collections, H&M brought out a dress that raised eyebrows. Not because the frock (pictured above) was particularly risqué, but because it was made from biodegradable pulp.
The material, Circulose, is the creation of Swedish startup Re:newcell, which is part of a new breed of biotech brands dedicated to making fashion more sustainable.
It works like this: Re:newcell takes worn-out clothes to its plant in Kristinehamn, Sweden, where they’re de-buttoned, shredded, stripped of dye and plastics and turned into a slurry, explains chief marketing officer, Harald Cavalli-Björkman.
What’s left is cellulose – “a biodegradable organic polymer that all green plants are made out of”. This slurry is dried to produce thin sheets of pulp, which are then turned into natural textile fibres. “The process is very efficient. One kilo of used cotton becomes one kilo of new Circulose textile fibres,” says Cavalli-Björkman.
For the H&M dress, Re:newcell’s first commercial product, the team blended the pulp with wood fibres sourced from sustainably managed forests. Cavalli-Björkman says there more partnerships with well-known fashion brands are in the pipeline for 2020, and it hopes to be producing large enough volumes of its pulp to make the entire garment.
The article goes on to describe other green fashion innovations, including synthetic spider silk made with genetically modified microbes, non-toxic dyes made from algae, corn-based footwear, and polyester made from methane instead of petroleum.
4ocean has removed 10 million pounds of trash
From Future Crunch:
Andrew Cooper and Alex Schulze are two c̶o̶l̶l̶e̶g̶e̶ ̶b̶r̶o̶s̶ surfers who grew up on the Florida coast. A few years ago, they saved up their money for the trip of a lifetime to Bali, only to discover beaches covered in plastic. When they asked a local lifeguard why the otherwise beautiful shoreline wasn’t kept clean, they were told it had been cleaned hours earlier. The trash they were wading through had only just washed ashore.
Most people either ignore the plastic crisis or complain about it on Facebook. A few though, roll up their sleeves. The two friends decided to start an ocean cleanup company called 4ocean. They didn't have any startup capital, so they decided to fund it by selling bracelets, and promising to remove a pound of trash for each one sold. They then used proceeds to employ cleanup crews in Florida, Guatemala, Haiti and Indonesia.
Since 2017, they've pulled almost 5 million kilograms of trash out of the ocean.
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Hot lynx
www.theatlantic.com/… The Atlantic Daily has some links to articles that explore the shooting of Jacob Blake as a wake-up call, the “moral failure” of incremental reform, and how our anger can help build a better country.
www.scientificamerican.com/...GDP Is the Wrong Tool for Measuring What Matters. “It’s time to replace gross domestic product with real metrics of well-being and sustainability.”
www.dw.com/...Elephant baby boom in Kenya — numbers double over three decades. Kenya is a rare success story in the fight against poachers in Africa.
news.bbc.co.uk/… Monday was the 53rd anniversary of a cool story about zoo penguins visiting an ice rink in London during a heat wave. The staff at the rink were so impressed with their behavior they invited them back, along with all the other penguins and the seals as well.
How YOU can help us win
Many thanks to Yosef 52 for his indefatigable work in bringing us the info we need to GOTV. Most of what I wrote below is copied from him.
Write to infrequent Democratic voters:
Postcards to Voters — they provide lists of addresses and a required script (three brief items) which you can add to if you like. You provide the cards, write them, address them, and stamp them. This is the most personal way to write to voters. Cost: postcards and 35¢ stamps. PtV sells their own postcards on Etsy (the ones I use cost $15 for 100, with $5.70 shipping).
Postcards to Swing States — they provide colorful retro cards with one of two messages (you get to choose which one), you add the address, a few personal comments, and a stamp. Cost: 35¢ per stamp.
Vote Forward — they provide addresses and a download of a letter template for each voter, you print out the letters, provide the greeting and some personal messages (and decorations if you like), envelopes, and stamps. Vote Forward’s “Big Send” is scheduled for sometime in October (the date has changed because of the USPS ratfuckery), when millions of letters will go out to infrequent voters. Cost: paper, envelopes, 55¢ stamps.
Text Democratic voters:
Text Out the Vote via the DNC.
The MoveOn Text Team
Be a Poll worker:
Work Elections
Donate to help other Democrats vote:
Let America Vote PAC — they work on many fronts to support voters and voting rights
Progressive Turnout Project — they engage Dem voters in several ways, including a virtual phonebanking program
Vote Save America — they allow you to “adopt” a crucial state (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin) and then give you tools to directly support the work of organizers, volunteers, and candidates in that state
Spread the Vote — they help voters get IDs in the states where those are required. They say on their website, “77% of the people we work with have never voted before and 100% of our clients cannot vote without us.”
Vote For Our Lives, a project of the Parkland kids’ March For Our Lives, is focused on young voters.
Donate to Biden/Harris: JoeBiden.com
And if you need more inspiration, go straight to Goodie’s phenomenal series, “100 Days of Loving Joe Biden.” You’ll come away loving him more than you ever imagined.
Donate to our priority Senate candidates:
Sen. Doug Jones (D. AL)
Dr. Al Gross (I. AK)
Mark Kelly (D. AZ)
John Hickenlooper (D. CO)
Jon Ossoff (D. GA)
Theresa Greenfield (D. IA)
Paulette Jordan (D. ID)
Dr. Barbara Bollier (D. KS)
Amy McGrath (D. KY)
Cal Cunningham (D. NC)
Adrian Perkins (D. LA)
Sen. Gary Peters (D. MI)
Sen. Tina Smith (D. MN)
Mike Espy (D. MS)
Steve Bullock (D. MT)
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D. NH)
Jaime Harrison (D. SC)
MJ Hegar (D. TX)
Donate to our priority House candidates:
See Ballotpedia’s list of U.S. House Battlegrounds and Ballotpedia’s list of State Legislative Battleground Chambers.
Be informed and keep your friends informed:
Election Protection — a Twitter-centric hub of voting info, including registration, absentee ballots, polling places, and protecting voters at the polls. An easy way to keep your Twitter network active in the election.
❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
Thanks to each and every Gnusie for your smarts, your hearts, and
your faithful attendance at our daily Gathering of the Herd.
❤️💙 RESIST, PERSIST, REBUILD, REJOICE! 💙❤️
