Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet:
Red States Enjoying Green Money
The Wall Street Journal’s Phred Dvorak writes about a new infrastructure spending analysis from his newspaper: “Republican-leaning states are attracting most of the clean-energy investments spurred by the Biden administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that passed the U.S. Congress without any Republican votes.”
Of course, this makes sense. Many red states are in areas with plentiful sun and wind. Local officials are happy to have the projects and the jobs they create. Dvorak explains, “Wind and solar-power development has been strong in red-leaning Sun Belt states because many of them get larger amounts of sun and wind, and have more land available than more densely populated, blue-leaning areas such as the Northeast, industry experts say.”
This story brings to mind an article from The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer earlier this month. Foer argues that President Joe Biden plans to campaign heavily on the infrastructure projects made possible by the legislation passed in his first term. Foer spells out how Biden has grand ambitions for this work:
“Overseeing these investments will allow Biden to fulfill the two grandest ambitions of his presidency. The first ambition is both lofty and self-interested. He has long argued that democracy will prevail in its struggle against authoritarianism only if it can demonstrate its competence to the world. That means passing legislation. But he believes that non-college-educated voters, the neglected constituents he wants to take back from the Republicans, hardly know about the big bills emanating from Washington with banal names. And they won’t believe in their efficacy in any case, unless they can see the fruits of the legislation with their own eyes.
Biden intends to deluge this group with relentless salesmanship—christening new airports and standing next to local officials as they break ground on new factories and tunnels. When he daydreams in the Oval Office, he imagines omnipresent road signs announcing new government projects in his name. In his mind, there will be Biden Rest Stops as far as the eye can see.
His second ambition is far trickier. He doesn’t just imagine scattered projects. He wants to comprehensively change the economy of entire regions of the country. By geographically concentrating investments—in broadband, airports, semiconductor plants, universities—he can transform depressed remnants of the Rust Belt into the next iteration of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. By seizing the commanding heights of the industries of the future, he can reindustrialize America.”
Given that the House Republican majority will make it nearly impossible to govern over the next two years, Biden going on the road to tout these investments makes sense—even if it is with someone like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
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San Francisco Police Use Marijuana to Harass Black People
The San Francisco Chronicle analyzed more than three years of data about police stops in the city and found that officers “regularly claim they suspect marijuana or smell a suspicious odor to justify needless searches of Black people in the city.”
The results are stark but not surprising, given recent coverage of how police officers target groups of people with pretextual stops. The Chronicle’s Susie Neilson and Justin Phillips lay out what the paper found:
“In San Francisco specifically, Black people were about six times as likely to be stopped by police as white people in 2020, and 10 times more likely to be searched as a result of a stop. And while white people were more likely to be in possession of illegal substances when searched, Black people are more likely to be subjected to physical force by police, according to a state-level advisory board tasked with reducing police bias.
San Francisco’s disproportionate stop-and-search rates make it an outlier even in California, where Black people are disproportionately stopped by every law enforcement agency reporting data to the state, as a previous Chronicle analysis found.”
In the January 18, 2023, edition of this newsletter, I mentioned that California State Senator Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) is trying again to pass legislation banning many kinds of pretextual stops. The Chronicle’s research provides another example of why that legislation is necessary.
Debt Ceiling Fight Is an Attack on Democracy
New York’s Jonathan Chait says what needs to be said about the current national debt limit situation: the House Republicans’ position is dangerous to the world economy and an attack on democracy.
“Republicans, on the other hand, lost ground in the Senate and have not won the presidency. They wish to use their narrow control of one chamber now to force the entire elected government to accede to sweeping domestic change that almost nobody campaigned on, or even mentioned, last fall.
The Republican Party is plotting a series of cuts — to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — without even going through the pretense of obtaining a mandate. Rather than campaign on a platform of shrinking social-insurance programs, they ignored this question almost entirely, failed to win either the presidency or the Senate, and have responded to this defeat by attempting to force through their radical program anyway by exploiting a quirk in federal law.
This is not just a threat to the global economic system or to the welfare state. It is a challenge to democracy itself, an attempted domestic-policy coup.”
Republicans could campaign to cut Medicare, Social Security, and other federal spending and see how it works for them. Instead, when a Democrat is the president, they create this crisis to try to get Democrats to take the blame for cutting popular programs. (I hope President Biden doesn’t fall for it.)
As I mentioned in the January 16, 2023, edition of this newsletter, my preference is for President Biden to declare that the national debt limit is unconstitutional under the taxing power of the 1787 Constitution (see Federalist 30, for example) or the 14th Amendment’s public debt clause in Section 4.
But legal scholar Rohan Grey makes a convincing case in this piece by The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey that minting the trillion dollar platinum coin may make the most sense—and actually is a less radical and disruptive idea than many of the extraordinary measures and accounting gimmicks the U.S. Treasury is using at this moment to keep the nation from defaulting on its debt.
The Putin Power Myth
Puck’s Julie Ioffe explains how the oil price cap designed by the Biden Administration is (surprisingly) working to keep Russia pumping oil while limiting how much Vladimir Putin’s regime can profit from it.
In the end, as Ioffe writes, Putin has destroyed an energy business it took three generations of Russian leaders to create. And now that Europe has been forced to find alternatives, that business isn’t likely to return even after the war Russia started in Ukraine ends.
“It was the Kremlin’s prophecy of what they were sure the winter of 2023 would bring to Europe: a brutal reckoning for their support of Ukraine and betrayal of their energy overlord, Russia.
It turned out, it was mostly hubris. A warm winter, low energy prices, and Europe’s rapid turn away from Russian energy have revealed that the balance of power wasn’t quite as durable as the Kremlin had predicted. Moreover, the now nearly two-month G7 and E.U. price cap on seaborne exports of Russian oil has produced surprising results, further cutting into the Kremlin’s energy dominance of the West. (To recap: It was a measure designed by the Biden administration to simultaneously incentivize Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers, to both keep pumping oil so as to not create an energy crisis at a moment when the world was in an inflationary spiral all while preventing the Kremlin from manipulating prices to fund its ruthless invasion of Ukraine.)”
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Abortion, Every Day
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care.
Today’s most important story is from an Indiana Senate candidate making the mistake of sharing the quiet part out loud. As Valenti explains, “An Indiana Republican running for U.S. Senate wants to institute a travel ban on women. In a radio interview last week, U.S. Rep. Jim Banks indicated that he would support legislation that stopped women from leaving the state for abortion.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard a Republican candidate or elected official say something like this. So let’s be clear: a significant part of our nation is heading down this road. It will start with laws punishing organizations and employers that provide funding for women to go to different states. Then we will see other laws to punish women. But piece by piece—starting with the states and moving to the federal government—this is part of their goal.
University of California Admissions Rates for Every California Public High School
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Nami Sumida has created this database showing the admission rates for University of California schools for every public high school in the state. You can search by high school to see how students do at each of the UC system’s nine undergraduate campuses.
The Earth’s Core Is Not Following a Bad Movie Plot
Earth’s inner core’s rotation is slowing down and stopping. But don’t worry; it’s all part of a pattern. As Science Alert’s Clare Watson explains, “Before anybody panics and searches for a copy of a terrible 20-year-old science fiction movie predicting such an event in hopes of inspiring a solution, it’s not the first time record of such an event. It’s not even the first in recent history.
“We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s,” geophysicists Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song of Peking University in Beijing write in their published paper.”
Scott Rolen Elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame
The Baseball Writers Association of America elected former third baseman Scott Rolen to the Hall of Fame. Rolen made history with his election, becoming the person with the lowest first-year ballot percentage (10.2 percent) to eventually get the 75 percent vote required. It was his sixth year on the ballot.
While it pains me to write positively about a former St. Louis Cardinal, Rolen absolutely deserves this honor. (Here is his player biography from the Society for American Baseball Research.) His career WAR (wins above replacement) of 70.1 is the ninth-best among all third basemen in history.
In case you don’t know about WAR in the baseball context, here’s the MLB website’s definition, “WAR measures a player’s value in all facets of the game by deciphering how many more wins he’s worth than a replacement-level player at his same position (e.g., a Minor League replacement or a readily available fill-in free agent).”
Only eight players with more than 70 WAR haven’t gotten into the Hall of Fame. Four have a connection to the performance-enhancing drug era in the 1990s and early 2000s. (I think three of those—Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez—should get in, perhaps a conversation for another day.) Two of the others are from the 19th Century.
Rolen was a great player, and the Baseball Hall of Fame needs more representation from the third basemen who have played the game.
It’s the White Card!
REF SHOWS WHITE CARD ⬜️🇵🇹 Referee issues white card to Benfica and Sporting medical staffs after both ran to aid of a fan who had fainted in the stands during a Portuguese Women’s Cup match. White cards are used in Portugal to praise acts of fair play.
— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) 4:36 PM ∙ Jan 23, 2023
In soccer, referees use yellow and red cards to discipline players. Two yellow cards, or one red card, will lead to a player’s ejection from a match and a likely suspension for one or more future games.
This video shows the first time a match official issued a new kind of card: a white card to commend an act of fair play. It is a new initiative of Portugal’s National Plan for Ethics in Sport to encourage fair play.
Per Sky News: “The card was shown during a women’s cup match between Sporting Lisbon and Benfica on Saturday after medical staff from both clubs rushed to help a fan who had fainted in the stands as Benfica led 3-0 during the first half.
Referee Catarina Campos then showed the card to both teams.”
I love this idea. But how is this not a green card? A traffic light inspired the creation of the existing yellow and red cards! The comparison is sitting right there!
Tom Holland’s Umbrella
Twitter has an “unofficial” Tom Holland Umbrella Law that requires people to retweet this joyous video of Tom Holland performing Rhianna’s Umbrella on Lip Sync Battle.
I didn’t see it on Twitter, but I am taking the fact I heard this song in a coffee shop while writing this newsletter as coming close enough to the rule. Thank you, Tom Holland. And enjoy!
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