A Liberal Lives In Wisconsin

     It's been a long, slow, well-deserved death for New Mexico's coal industry. Since America began waging its war against climate change in earnest, three coal plants have poisoned New Mexico's air. The Escalante Generating Station was the first to close its door completely in August 2020. In 2013, Units 1, 2, and 3 of the Four Corners Generating Station closed. Two more units, four and five, are scheduled to be closed by 2031.      Earlier this summer, Unit 1 of the San Juan Generating Station closed after nearly 50 years in operation; Units 2 and 3 had closed in 2017. 40-year-old Unit 4 closed earlier this month after contentious debate over its future: a new carbon capture project will take its place, and, rather than pollute the environment, the plant will make it cleaner. With this, San Juan Generating Station's days producing coal are over.      This leaves Units 4 and 5 at Four Corners as the only active coal units in a state that, u...

       Few people know the names of their representatives, let alone their stories, and, especially in cases like that of Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, it is truly tragic, for Pocan's is especially inspirational.      Born and raised in Kenosha, he received his degree in journalism from UW-Madison 1986 and opened a printing company soon afterward, joining the AFL-CIO. An openly gay man, he was beaten and taunted in a brutal attack after his graduation, which led him to become active in progressive political causes, the LGBTQ being a prime example.      Elected to the Dane County Board of Supervisors in 1991, he soon moved up the political ladder. Elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly to replace Tammy Baldwin in 1998, he won 75 to 95 percent of the vote in every subsequent election whether or not he faced a Republican challenger. While in the Assembly, he focused on criminal justice and budget issues. He is widely credited with moving Wiscon...

     To mark 18 months since the Capitol insurrection, I started Insurrection Detection, a project to highlight and report on developments in the January 6th cases and hold people accountable for their actions. The project was developed as an offshoot of my efforts from this project, "Remember the Sixth," stemming from a need to dedicate the insurrection a project of its own. However, one update worth posting to the "Remember the Sixth" section of this is the 12 longest sentences handed down in the insurrection cases so far. Things have changed quite a bit even since July and will change as the months (and years) drag on. However, as it stands today, these are the 12 longest sentences:      1. Thomas Webster: 10 years in prison      A former Marine and NYPD officer, Webster was convicted at trial of five felonies and two misdemeanors for pushing against a barricade before tackling a police officer, choking him with his own mask, and attemptin...

     September 1st, 2022, will go down as a glorious day in history for the planet. Three weeks ago, Hawaii's last coal plant, the AES Hawaii Power Plant in Oahu, closed for good. This is just the first step in a decades-long vision Hawaii is implementing to transition to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, bringing down the high cost of energy in the islands by combating climate change in a state that is suffering its ill effects much more severely than most others.      Hawaii, however, is far from the first state to ditch coal: Rhode Island, New York, Maine, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Oregon have previously done the same, which makes Hawaii the ninth state in the nation to be completely free from coal. Six other conservative states have just one coal plant remaining apiece and numerous others with liberal governments have pledged to phase out coal.      Within the next year, it is almost certain that a minimum o...

     The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago was the worst legal week of Trump's life of that point, and, after an initial few weeks of embarrassing legal blunders, Trump finally caught a break when he sued the DOJ before Aileen Cannon. The judge he appointed handed him a string of victories, appointing a "special master" to review documents and essentially putting the investigation on hold. This week, and particularly Wednesday, things changed for the better for the American people.      Judge Cannon's partisan rulings have now earned criticism from a wide variety of liberal and conservative legal scholars and authorities, including Bill Barr and a plethora of former Bush officials. Judge Dearie, a Reagan-appointed New York federal judge, was the only judge the two sides could agree on to be special master, and he promptly made it clear he wasn't happy with Trump or Cannon. Moving surprisingly quickly, he asked for both sides to lay out their arguments and chastised ...

       On September 12th, 1962, John F. Kennedy gave his famous address before Rice University, in which he declared, "We choose to go to the Moon... not because they are easy, but because they are hard." On May 25th, 1961, Kennedy had previously stated his goal, before Congress, of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth before the decade is out."       Much of Kennedy's presidency dealt with U.S.-Soviet relations, from the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to the Bay of Pigs Invasion to the Peace Corps to the Nuclear Missile Crisis, and, ultimately, his assassination in 1963. Kennedy's vision of a lunar mission was in response to the perception that the United States was losing the Space Race to Russia's Sputnik program, which had seen cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbit the Earth in April 1961. Although Kennedy had been opposed to the space program as a senator, he became an advocate of manned spaceflight during his administrati...

     Jimmy Carter's defining presidential legacy remains his foreign policy. From negotiating peace between Israel and Egypt to negotiating the SALT II Treaty, Carter took pride in never firing a single missile and instead leading with diplomacy. Among Carter's most impressive achievements came when he dismantled one of the few remnants of American imperialism in Latin America.      On September 7th, 1977, he signed the Panama Canal Treaties, which returned the Panama Canal to the nation it was located in effective December 31st, 1999, at 11:59 P.M. The canal remains the most significant source of global commerce, and this landmark treaty improved life for Panamanians while improving America's global reputation.

     After a decade of GOP-controlled state legislatures watering down the power of unions in the 2010s, the 2020s have seen organized labor hit a level of support not seen since the Great Society. In 2021, support for unions hit 68 percent, the highest level since 1967. Just days ago, it was revealed that support for unions among Americans had hit 71 percent, the highest level since 1965. This support has led to concrete action, with union movements taking hold in massive corporations like Starbucks, Target, Trader Joe's, Chipotle, Amazon, Apple, and countless others.      Unions aren't the only issue for which there is record support in the present moment. In the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Highland Park; the signing of the historic Bipartisan Safer Communities Act; and the disastrous decision by SCOTUS to cater to the gun lobby above the United States Constitution; American support for gun control measures hit 68 percent, up from j...

     Although the corporate media was hesitant to report it, inflation declined from 9.1 percent to 8.5 percent in July of 2022. Core inflation, a critical indicator of the cost of living, has been slowly but steadily declining over the last several months to the point that it is now beneath six percent. The difference between core inflation and headline inflation, e.g. the aforementioned 9.1 and 8.5 numbers you see in the headlines (hence the name), is the cost of food and fuel.      As for fuel costs, Americans have seen considerable relief since gas prices peaked on June 14th, 2022, at just over $5 per gallon. Over the course of the last 82 days, gas prices have fallen to just over $3.75 per gallon nationwide, a decrease of nearly $1.25 between Flag Day and Labor Day. Just two states-- Hawaii and California-- still have an average gas price of $5 per gallon or greater. In 37 states, the cost of gas is $3.99 or less per gallon. In three more states, the p...

     Earlier this summer, America fully regained all the jobs that were lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the problems stemming from the labor shortage have yet to subside, I see that for the possibilities it presents in the long term over the challenges it presents in the short term. For example, while employment has been fully restored nationwide, only 20 states have fully restored employment to what it was before the pandemic struck. Each of these 20 states have created jobs to the tunes of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands above what they were in February 2020, which has now more than balanced out the impact of jobs yet to be regained in the other 30 states.      Another example of this is the gender disparity that existed in restoring employment. While men fully regained the jobs they lost during the pandemic a number of months ago, women were still down about 100,000 jobs. This latest jobs report means that both men and women have now ...

     American manufacturing declined by roughly 50 percent between 1980 and 2020. As it would turn out, COVID taught the United States an important, albeit painful, lesson about the importance of restoring Made-In-America manufacturing and ensuring strong supply chains. A lot of progress had already been made on these fronts under President Biden, from a program expanding apprenticeship opportunities to the Ocean Shipping Reform Act to a national action plan on trucking to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and so much more. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, however, were a one-two punch of historic legislation to ramp this progress up a notch. Without adding a penny to the deficit, these bills provide tax incentives and direct investments to create or retain a combined total of 12 million jobs over the course of the next decade, nearly all in manufacturing. Thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act, America was able to create 650,000 manufac...

     Today, President Biden is giving a speech on preserving American democracy from the threats it is currently facing, threats at a level we haven't seen since the Civil War. One key way to save democracy, something Joe Biden has made and will continue to make clear, is by proving that it can still deliver tangible results for the American people, that this Great Experiment is still something worth defending and preserving with our very souls.      It didn't seem, at first, like Democrats were in a good position to do it. The myth of Democratic disarray is an astounding one to me: sure, we are a big tent party, and, sure, that does have its pros and cons, but it is definitely far better than the alternative, the MAGA Republican Party that punishes anyone who disagrees with their Orange Julius Caesar of a cult leader. In fact, even with a 50-50 Senate and the narrowest House majority in modern history, President Biden has delivered more consequential econo...