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 now moi, 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. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
In 2022, Charlsebridge Press published Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story to transform the story of this holiday that so many Americans take for granted. The inspiration for this children’s book came from the idea of hosting a “Decolonized Thanksgiving,” and it creates a new story that puts Native peoples—and nature—at its heart: Two children from the Wampanoag tribe learn how Weeâchumun (corn) persuaded the First Peoples to help the newcomers (the Pilgrims) survive in their new home.
“I think it will play an important role in a larger, Native-led movement to educate the American public about Native Peoples, our histories, and the contributions that we make to this country. It’s very important to underscore that this book is reaching children. I strongly believe that children are the pathway to the social change their parents learn. When children learn, their parents learn. For children who read this book as their first exposure to Thanksgiving, Keepunumuk will shape their baseline understanding of the Wampanoag peoples and all Native Americans by extension.” —Alexis Bunten (Unangan and Yup’ik), co-author of Keepunumuk and co-founder of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program
Musical interlude for Thanksgiving Eve:
COP27, the UN climate summit, kinda fizzled. There was good action (for the first time!) on a Loss and Damage fund for developing nations who are suffering from climate impacts. But there was NO MENTION of weaning ourselves off the world’s fossil fuel addiction.
Michael Mann says — "Don't despair. It's never about a single COP"
Yes, this year's summit, like every summit, fell short of what is needed. But the overall trajectory is progress. This is not the time to give up on the world's only functional framework to tackle climate change.
Many evaluate climate policy progress on a pass/fail basis, as if it’s a COVID test. But that’s not the way it works. Let us consider what transpired at COP26 a year ago in Glasgow. Sure, climate advocates (including me) didn’t get everything we would have liked. There was no language to phase out fossil fuels, only the weaker language of “phasing down”. There was no agreement to end the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure, despite the finding by the International Energy Agency that such infrastructure is incompatible with limiting warming below the dangerous 1.5C (3F) planetary warming level.
But we made substantial progress. The critical thing is that we remained in the fight. While we didn’t make the 1.5C exit ramp of the carbon emissions highway last year, we were able to get off (at least potentially) at the next available (2C) exit. A recent peer-reviewed study in the leading journal Nature shows that we can keep warming below 2C if the Glasgow pledges are kept and implemented on time. 2C is the level of planetary warming that the 2015 Paris agreement established as a safety limit, though it acknowledged that limiting warming to 1.5C is preferable given the risk of escalating damage from extreme weather events and, in particular, the threat posed to low-lying island nations already threatened with inundation from melting ice and rising sea level.
Cory Doctorow has a very good rundown of the Crypto Meltdown, and how the SEC tried to investigate the now-crashed firm...
Earlier this year, the SEC sent a letter to FTX seeking answers about its business practices – a letter that sought to determine whether FTX was as scammy as it appeared. The SEC never got the answers it sought, thanks to the intervention of eight Members of Congress – the "Blockchain Eight," four Dems and four Republicans – who wrote to Chairman Gary Gensler demanding that he back off:
...SBF's reputation as a boy-wonder genius investor wasn't the result of the returns to Alameda, but rather, the seemingly limitless funds that Alameda could tap into for more failed investments. Those funds, we now know, were stolen from FTX's retail customers. This is exactly the kind of thing that an SEC investigation could have revealed.
The vast sums of (real) money the crypto industry pumped into electoral politics is closely related to its bull run – campaign contributions muzzled finance watchdogs, which let the industry defraud the public, which gave it more money for campaign contributions.
This is a completely foreseeable outcome of unlimited campaign finance, especially the "dark money" finance that the 2010 Citizens United decision unleashed. CU removed the final barrier to massive influence campaigns by the ultra-rich, who poured money into the political system
Meanwhile, rich folks running for office seem to have a problem figuring out where they live. It was tough for Mitt Romney in his run for President, it derailed Dr. Oz in his carpetbagging Senate run in Pennsylvania, and now it’s dogging Hershel Walker:
Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Herschel Walker is the beneficiary of a tax break meant for permanent Texas residents—a possible violation of both Texas law and residency rules for voting and political candidacy in Georgia, CNN reported Wednesday.
Records reviewed by the network show Walker benefited from Texas' homestead tax exemption, shaving approximately $1,200 off his 2021 tax bill on his $3 million home in the Dallas-Ft. Worth suburb of Westlake. The Texas Tribune reports the former NFL star is expected to apply for the discount again this year, and would likely save about $1,500.
Reacting to the report, incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock—who will face Walker in a December 6 runoff after neither candidate received 50% of the vote in this month's midterm election—asked on Twitter, "How can Herschel Walker represent Georgians when he doesn't even claim our great state as his primary residence?"
Taylor Swift broke Ticketmaster. Now, her fans may rise up to REALLY break Ticketmaster’s monopoly on concert sales:
Taylor Swift fans had their time wasted and pockets emptied by Ticketmaster. Now they’re calling to break up the company’s live events monopoly – and joining the movement to crack down on monopolies, period.
he anti-monopoly movement is having a moment. Gone are the days of associating evil market dominance with Standard Oil or Carnegie Steel, Bill Gates’ petulance during deposition, or how it feels to desperately mortgage Marvin Gardens because you landed at the hotel on Park Place.
As now-Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan asserted five years ago in her seminal work, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” our government’s outdated enforcement standards “fail[ed] to register” monopolistic harm. Since then, millions more Americans have been awakened to the sinister power of monopolies in our economy – and the exciting political opportunities to rein them in.
New York will instate a two-year moratorium on new fossil fuel-powered cryptocurrency mining operations as the state works to balance its economic development and climate goals.
Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday signed the controversial measure into law that would create the first-in-the-nation temporary pause on new permits for fossil fuel power plants that house proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining, which is a process used in the transaction of digital money. Hochul, who had punted on the issue for months after the Legislature passed the bill in June, was elected to a full term Nov. 8.
...“I am signing this legislation into law to build on New York’s nation-leading Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, the most aggressive climate and clean energy law in the nation, while also continuing our steadfast efforts to support economic development and job creation in upstate New York.”
I’m still not sure they’ll actually go this route, after the GOP lost a bunch of state houses on election day, including swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Is there any point in SCOTUS breaking with 250 years of precedent if they GOP doesn’t hold the levers of power to pull off the coup? But if you’re still worried, Josh Marshall’s TPM has a primer:
The legislators are arguing that a reading of the federal Constitution — a once-fringe idea called the independent state legislature theory — empowers state legislatures to govern federal elections to the exclusion of state courts, neatly eradicating a critical check on the lawmakers’ power. The state judiciary is particularly indispensable in redistricting disputes, since the Supreme Court barred partisan gerrymandering cases from being heard in federal courts.
But the independent state legislature theory, if accepted by the right-wing majority, would not be confined to redistricting. It rests on a super literal reading of two clauses of the Constitution: The Elections Clause giving state legislatures the power to dictate the “times, places and manner” of holding elections, and the Electors Clause giving state legislatures the power to appoint presidential electors in the “manner” they choose.
Proponents of the theory read the word “legislature” in both clauses to exclude all the other machinery of government around the lawmakers. In maximal interpretations, that means no state court authority over election-related laws passed by the legislature, no governor’s veto, no rule-making by the secretary of state, no voter-passed election initiatives, no restraints from the state constitution, no independent redistricting commissions.
Republicans’ House majority in the next Congress climbed to 220 on Tuesday, when Republican Kevin Kiley defeated his Democratic opponent, Kermit Jones, in the tight race for California’s 3rd Congressional District.
...In California’s 13th District, Republican John Duarte is currently leading his Democratic opponent, Adam Gray, by fewer than 600 votes with 99 percent of the vote in.
If the three final districts go the way they are currently leaning, Republicans would control 222 seats, while Democrats would hold 213 seats. This would be the mirror image of the slim House majority that Democrats obtained in the 2020 election.
In the meantime, there’s one more race to be won: The GA Senate runoff. Having 51 Senators will make a HUGE difference in moving things through the Senate faster — like appointments to the EPA, FERC, the Postal Service, and of course, all those Judges. We need WAY more pro-climate and anti-fascist judges on the bench, STAT!
All we have to do is win one last race:
Also, The Environmental Voter Project has regular phonebanks to do GOTV on pre-identified green low-propensity voters.
What are your holiday plans? Is protecting Democracy something you’ve got on your agenda for this weekend? Tell us in the comments!