Friday, September 9, 2022

And another day of the decades-long saga of how the GOP went crazy, proposed names for the arbiter, WA state’s conversion therapy ban, the reason why there is a student-loan debt crisis, and why American lives are getting shorter comes to a close:

“The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history.” — Noam Chomsky 

Deaths

US: 1,075,338 (+551)

World: 6,514,558 (+2279)

Cases

US: 97,026,001 (+66,836)

World: 613,032,223 (+510,291)

It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy. Since the 1950s, the GOP has repeatedly mined fear, resentment, prejudice, and grievance and played to extremist forces so the party could win elections. -- Stop voting for Republicans. They are using you.

US, Trump team propose names for arbiter in Mar-a-Lago probe. The Justice Department and Donald Trump’s legal team proposed candidates Friday for the role of an independent arbiter in the investigation into top-secret documents found at the former president’s Florida home, but the two sides differed on the scope of duties the person would have.

U.S. appeals court upholds Washington state's conversion therapy ban. A U.S. federal appeals court on Tuesday unanimously upheld Washington state’s ban on conversion therapy for children, rejecting a therapist’s claim that it undermined his free speech and targeted him because he is Christian. — Once again, trying to use “Christianity” to do irreparable harm to others. Leave the pews.

What the Student-Loan Debate Overlooks. President Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan offers younger Americans the same benefits that Boomers have been afforded all along. Many factors have contributed to the explosion in student debt, but one dynamic is almost always overlooked: the erosion of the commitment to affordable public higher education as an engine for upward mobility that benefits the entire community. Contrary to the stereotype conjured by critics, the number of debtors from public colleges today (about 22 million) exceeds the number from private and for-profit colleges combined (about 21 million), according to federal data. One reason so many of those students from public schools are in debt is that they have graduated in an era when states have shifted more of the burden for funding higher education from taxpayers to students—precisely as more of those students are minorities reared in families on the short side of the nation’s enormous racial wealth gap…Older generations of college students didn’t have as much debt not because they were more individually virtuous but because they benefited from a collective social investment in their education. Many of those arguing against debt forgiveness, Siqueiros told me, seem to be conveniently forgetting all of the ways the government provided “benefits to Baby Boomers.” — There’s a reason why we’re in a student debt crisis. It was all by design.

Supreme Court temporarily blocks ruling that required Jewish university to recognize LGBTQ group. Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a brief order granted an emergency request made by Yeshiva University, which claims that recognizing the group would be contrary to its sincere religious beliefs. Sotomayor has responsibility for emergency applications arising from New York.

New York declares a state of emergency over polio. State health officials hope the declaration will help boost vaccination rates in counties where poliovirus has been detected in wastewater.

Why are American lives getting shorter? The average life expectancy for all groups has gone down since 2019, from 79 years to about 76. For white and Black Americans, it’s the lowest it has been in over 25 years. And the preprint’s authors found that while other rich countries began to recover from the pandemic last year, the US has continued to decline…All estimates show that life expectancy in the US has continued to decline, even as almost all rich countries have bounced back from lower life expectancies in the first year of Covid. “[The US] is one of the richest countries on the face of the planet,” said Laudan Aron, a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute and one of the co-authors of the June paper. “The fact we cannot translate our economic wealth into protecting our population and ensuring that everybody has a fair chance to live a long and healthy and productive life is a real failure.”

Washington Supreme Court OKs virtual life term for teen. One year after saying virtual life sentences are unconstitutional for teenage killers, the Washington Supreme Court changed course Thursday in a split ruling that drew irate dissents from four justices. The 5-4 decision was a striking departure for a court that in recent years has steadily embraced research showing that juveniles’ brain development typically makes them less culpable than adults, and which has made significant efforts to undo the impact of racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.