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Overnight News Digest for January 8 (This is Fine edition) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-08
..Barring some major catastrophe for the Conservatives AND an incoming Liberal leader who somehow has name recognition and a plan for a party that’s been slowly eroding over the past decade, the current mood is that the Conservatives will win the election with Poilievre as prime minister…
...The faction surging ahead is the Conservative Party, led since 2022 by Pierre Poilievre, a politician who looks like if Toad became an incel because Princess Peach didn’t put out after he helped save her from Bowser’s Castle. Poilievre wants to transform Canada into the “blockchain capital of the world,” defund the CBC, cut personal income tax, fan the flames of immigration anxiety , and chitchat with Jordan Peterson about racism. Last year, he was formally told to shut up in the House of Commons after he suggested that the foreign affairs minister was “pander[ing] to Hamas” because she insufficiently supported Israel.
..This week, Trudeau announced that he would be stepping down as prime minister and as leader of the Liberal Party as soon as it picks his replacement. Parliament is now prorogued (suspended), as we Canadians like to say, until March 24. The current government will remain in power, but the work of Parliament is now screeching to a halt. This is different from merely dissolving Parliament, an act that would trigger an immediate election. Doing it this way means the Liberals have more time to actually run a leadership race to find Trudeau’s replacement. Perhaps they’ve learned a little something from watching American Democrats this past summer
Every few years, Americans across the country are beleaguered with a Herculean task usually reserved for the sainted: They must think about Canada. On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped down as the country and party leader, marking the end of a decade in power. (That’s a long time, but it’s still short of his dad’s 15 cumulative years in office.)
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments
That's where the U.S. gets most of its offshore oil. Environmental groups applauded President Joe Biden’s decision on Monday to enact a sweeping ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling along most of the U.S. coastline. But the ban had one glaring omission: It didn’t include the western Gulf of Mexico, where the country extracts most of its offshore oil. Aimed at safeguarding the environment and easing the harm caused by climate change, the ban will prohibit future oil and gas leasing in federal waters off the East and West coasts, in parts of the Bering Sea near Alaska and across the eastern portion of the Gulf. The exact boundaries haven’t been announced, but federal regulators generally define the eastern Gulf as the waters extending from the south tip of Florida to the Alabama line. That would leave the waters off Louisiana and Texas open to drilling. ...But some environmentalists weren’t as enthused. “That’s great, but is the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico just a sacrifice zone, then?” asked Don Boesch, a marine scientist who served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which investigated the 2010 disaster. “That’s where all the [Outer Continental Shelf] drilling takes place and greenhouse gas emissions come from.” The Gulf accounts for 97 percent of all oil and natural gas production in U.S. offshore waters. The vast majority of this production happens near Louisiana and Texas — not the Florida coast, which would be protected by Biden.
Although New York City's congestion pricing program is less than a week old, there are early signs that it is already accomplishing its primary goal of reducing Manhattan’s gridlock, which is among the worst in the world. The MTA and the city's transportation department are closely monitoring traffic data to see how driver behavior has changed since Sunday, when tolls were first imposed for cars entering Manhattan south of 60th Street. But Shirley Matthews, whose job as a traffic director on Varick Street just north of the Holland Tunnel usually requires her to corral thousands of unruly New Jersey-bound drivers into an orderly line, said she’s never seen Manhattan’s streets so calm. “We’re shocked. I never expected to see this, and I’ve been in New York almost 45 years,” said Matthews. “It’s a pleasure to not have to explain to the drivers that you have to wait your turn.”
..If Meta were to take the harder line it invoked four years ago, it could expect to find itself in Trump’s crosshairs on social media and shut out of the rooms where rivals like Musk are making decisions about tech’s future. But Meta’s repositioning is hardly a foolproof business plan. Just take a look at X, the site Musk acquired in 2022 when it was called Twitter. Musk remade the site in his own image, reinstating White nationalists and other offensive accounts that had been banned under Twitter’s safety guidelines. Advertisers, wary of their products appearing alongside hate speech, rushed to the exits. Millions of users, similarly unhappy about the return of neo-Nazis on the platform, also left for competitors like Bluesky and Meta’s Threads. … In 2022, Meta lost nearly $240 billion in market value in a single day — the biggest one-day drop in company value in the history of the US stock market at the time — after it reported a slight decline in daily active Facebook users and an 8% drop in quarterly profit. That hits Zuckerberg where he lives, because he’s the biggest individual shareholder, says Cory Doctorow, a journalist, author and activist with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. But more importantly, stock swings hit the rich-but-not-billionaire-rich class of Meta executives. “Zuckerberg is insulated from the consequences of making bad choices until he’s not — until things reach a breaking point… and then he tends to panic,” Doctorow told me. “Tech calls these panics ‘pivots,’ but they’re just the outcome of being the CEO of a company that posts anemic growth or even a contraction and sees the Street just go nuts on you.”
Community solar is gaining momentum nationwide, but uptake is low among those who could benefit most. This grassroots NYC project aims to change that. An industrial waterfront in Brooklyn, New York, is transforming from a gritty area of abandoned warehouses and crumbling piers into a hub of clean energy activity. A terminal for assembling giant offshore wind turbines is well under construction, and plans are taking shape for a $100 million center where startups can test new climatetech solutions. Now the shoreside stretch is set to add a clean energy project to its portfolio: a unique solar initiative driven by the local community. Construction will begin early this year on the 725-kilowatt array, which is spearheaded by the grassroots organization UPROSE and will span the roof of a former military supply base. The project is expected to reduce the energy bills of some 150 participating households in Sunset Park — a mainly working-class neighborhood of Asian, Latino, and immigrant communities. Revenue from selling power to the grid will go into a community wealth fund that allows residents to invest in local programs, including potentially more solar. “For me, this is more than just renewable energy; it’s a model of how we take control over our climate future, our economic future,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE.
..On Monday, Starmer warned publicly that Musk’s baseless accusations “crossed a line”, adding: “Once we lose the anchor that truth matters, in the robust debate that we must have, then we are on a very slippery slope.” ...For the time being, particularly under Trump, there is little that we in the US can do to constrain Musk except by boycotting Tesla and X. Canada and Britain and other European nations, meanwhile, should, at the very least: Enact laws and regulations to prohibit non-citizens (like Musk, although he does have Canadian citizenship) from financing activities that could affect their elections.
Maintain, if not strengthen, laws and rules against hate speech, and ensure that they are applied to social media companies, such as Musk’s X.
Refuse to contract with Musk’s Space X and its Starlink satellite division, or with Musk’s other corporations (Tesla and the Boring Company).
Disengage from any joint ventures or technology transfers involving Musk, including xAI, his artificial intelligence company. Musk is not the first person in history to be seduced by the thrill of unconstrained power, although this may be the first time so much power is concentrated in one unelected megalomaniac.
Winning an election is easier than it looks: all you have to do is convince a bunch of different groups that you will use power to achieve their desires. Bonus points if you can convince groups with mutually exclusive goals that you'll deliver for them – the coalition of "people who disagree about everything" is hard to assemble, but it sure is large! ...Reagan promised the Christian right a bunch of culture war stuff – bans on abortion, punishment for uppity women and racial minorities, prayer in school, segregation academies, etc – that his financial backers frankly didn't give a shit about. By all means, let working class evangelicals homeschool their kids and teach them that the Earth is 5,000 years old, it doesn't matter to Wall Street, who will reap a giant tax-cut and also send their kids to private schools with rigorous curriculum. Bankers' wives and daughters will always be able to afford to fly out of state (or across the border) for abortion care, they will never die of AIDS in the charity wing of a community hospital, their daughters won't be trapped by bans on no-fault divorces. For the past 40 years, American oligarchs and would-be oligarchs have entered into enthusiastic coalitions with virulently racist, sexist and homophobic groups, and maintained peace within their coalition by passing punitive, cruel laws that the rich can buy their way around. For many self-styled libertarians, the most important liberty is "not paying taxes" and this subordinates all other liberties, such that a "libertarian" will vote for a coalition whose platform promises to ban abortion, birth control, "interracial" marriage, and queer sex, so long as it also promises tax cuts. It's a weird kind of pro-freedom ideology that happily trades away (others') freedom for (your own) tax cuts. ...Immigration isn't an issue like abortion: oligarchs can support abortion bans and still procure abortions when they need them. It's much harder to support an immigration ban and still procure precarious, low-waged workers for your business. It will take many years for American-born workers to be so brutalized and broken that they capitulate to the working conditions that American guest workers and undocumented workers accept, and bosses are impatient. ...Big, diverse coalitions of people who normally oppose each other are great for winning power, but they're very bad for wielding power. Trump's majorities in Congress and the Senate are razor-thin, and while the Democrats had to suffer under the Manchin-Synematic Universe, the GOP's Klown Kar of Krazies has dozens of swivel-eyed loons who will happily blow up "must-pass" bills just for shits and giggles.
..The complaint states that Kennedy voted by mail and his ballot was received by the Westchester County board of elections on Nov. 2. The primary residence listed on the ballot was to a home in Katonah — an address about 45 miles outside of New York City that has been central to previous court challenges from Democratic-leaning groups arguing Kennedy did not actually live there and should not be eligible to be on the ballot in the state when he ran as an independent candidate. ...A New York judge ruled in August in favor of a legal challenge launched by another left-leaning Clear Choice Action, a Super PAC aligned that works to limit the impact third party candidates have on presidential election outcomes. That filing claimed Kennedy presented a false New York residence, the same one he allegedly used to vote and on the petition he submitted to state election authorities to gain ballot access. The complaint argued Kennedy, who is married to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actress Cheryl Hines, lives in California. Kennedy had argued he’d been renting a room from a childhood friend in Katonah, but that friend’s spouse testified that Kennedy had only spent one night at the residence. Once the New York courts ordered Kennedy removed from the state ballot, it touched off a series of challenges by Kennedy’s camp — even after he suspended his flagging presidential campaign in August 2024 and endorsed Trump.
Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple and Steve Earle are among the special guests gracing Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, the forthcoming album from The Waterboys. The record is a concept album about the life of Hollywood legend and counter-culture icon Dennis Hopper, whose storied CV includes Easy Rider, Blue Velvet, Apocalyse Now, Cool Hand Luke, True Romance, True Grit and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
“[Hopper] was at the big bang of youth culture in Rebel Without A Cause with James Dean; and the beginnings of Pop Art with the young Andy Warhol,” says Waterboys frontman Mike Scott in a statement explaining the reasoning behind his decision to write a 25-song album dedicated to Hopper, adding “The arc of his life was the story of our times.” “He was part of the counter-culture, hippie, civil rights, and psychedelic scenes of the ’60s. In the ’70s and ’80s he went on a wild 10-year rip, almost died, came back, got straight and became a five-movies-a-year character actor without losing the sparkle in his eye or the sense of danger or unpredictability that always gathered around him.” ...The album's first single, Hopper’s On Top (Genius), will be released on Friday, January 10, and celebrates Hopper's directorial debut on the classic 1969 cult film Easy Rider.
…I hear people talk about Dylan as “raw” and “authentic”, which are strange adjectives to apply to someone whose whole musical persona is so self-consciously artificial. That includes his voice! I was shocked when I first heard Girl from the North Country and Lay Lady Lay and realized that Dylan can sing like a perfectly normal person when he feels like it. Did he become so iconic in spite of being so listener-hostile, or because of it? And when you find out that he’s portraying a character, does that make him less believable, or more believable? "The history of American popular music is, in large part, a history of illusions and masks, of whites pretending to be black, of women pretending to be men, of sophisticated stage performers pretending to be rubes (and, of course, vice versa)… "The most curious aspect of all of this pretense is that so many times the illusion works. And it works authentically. It does not work as a trick that fools its audience but as an artfully constructed connection to a past and a tradition that can only be accessed through, because it is wholly constructed out of, commercially structured experiences (music produced for profit and distributed as commodities)." Shank thinks that Dylan’s folkie fans were so upset when he went electric because he no longer seemed interest in connecting to “an imaginary noncommercial youth of the nation, where the wounds of racism, slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching could be imagined never to have taken place.” Don’t Think Twice points back to this innocent past, and even though such a past never actually existed, the song itself is still real.
Are you harking back to an innocent past that never actually existed tonight? Tell us all about it in the comments!
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists 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 (RIP), 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 since 2007, 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.
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