Wisconsin At ‘Huge Tipping Point’. The stakes in Tuesday’s election:
In addition, ironclad Republican majorities in the Wisconsin Legislature, abetted by favorable district boundaries, have largely limited Evers to blocking the GOP’s bills with an unprecedented number of vetoes. Meanwhile, GOP gerrymandering helped Republicans come within inches of obtaining a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature in November.
The policy implications of this gridlock have been significant. Among other things, Wisconsin is the last state in the Midwest not to use federal money allotted under the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid to include all families at or near the federal poverty level. The federal government picks up 90% of the tab for any state that chooses to guarantee Medicaid to people with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level.
Wisconsin’s Democratic Party has transferred millions of dollars into Protasiewicz’s coffers in the hopes that her ascent will strike down an abortion ban from 1849 that took effect after the overturning of a federal right to abortion last June. Attorney General Kaul has sued to stop the law from taking effect, but pending clarity on that law, the state’s reproductive health clinics have stopped providing abortions.
Democrats are also counting on a more liberal high court to invalidate state legislative and congressional maps that Republicans have gerrymandered to their advantage.
Given the potential for new maps, Joe Zepecki, a Wisconsin Democratic strategist, described a Protasiewicz win as “an opportunity to have an opportunity.”
Secret Weapon To Battle Climate Change: Animals?:
Protecting existing populations and restoring others to their natural habitats often improves the natural capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide within ecosystems, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. Robust populations of just nine species, such as sea otters or gray wolves, or genera, including whales, could lead to the capture of 6.41 gigatons of CO₂ annually, the researchers found. That’s about 95 percent of the amount needed to be removed annually to ensure global warming remains below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The researchers argue that these essential species disperse seeds, facilitating the growth of carbon-sequestering trees and plants. Others trample or eat the vegetation that would otherwise rob those trees of space and nutrients. Predators prey on herbivores that, without predation, might adversely impact that essential fauna.
“Ecological science has had a long history of overlooking the role of animals as an important driver of the biogeochemistry of ecosystems,” Oswald Schmitz, an ecologist at the Yale School for the Environment and an author of the study, told Grist. “What we say is that we know animals can change the vegetation makeup of ecosystems, and a lot of ecosystem ecologists say vegetation is important for ecosystem function and carbon cycling, then surely the animals must be important, too.”
Wanna Learn About Warren Zevon W/O Reading A Full-Length Bio? I found this piece very instructive. Plus, the album is that good. An excerpt:
Christmas, 1956: A mobbed-up professional gambler arrives unannounced at the home of his wife and 9-year-old son. He’s bearing a gift of a Chickering upright piano, taken as winnings from an all-night poker game and presented to the boy as his very first musical instrument. Mom isn’t having it, perhaps because dad refuses to maintain more than a sporadic presence in their lives. She calls the piano a “headache machine,” and orders her husband to remove it from the house. Her husband’s name is William, but his intimates call him Stumpy. Stumpy Zevon—a name straight from the paperback crime novels his son would grow to love—takes the carving knife that Beverly has set out for the Christmas turkey and hurls it toward her head. He misses by mere inches. She flees the house, and Stumpy soon leaves again, too, telling his son he won’t be back this time. Surely, young Warren is traumatized. But at least he has a piano.
Music and violence, creation and destruction, remained entwined for much of Zevon’s life. He took to the piano quickly after that Christmas, and later the guitar, building a reputation as a prodigy that eventually, improbably, reached the awareness of Igor Stravinsky, perhaps the greatest classical composer of the 20th century, a Russian-French expat then living in L.A. Thirteen-year-old Warren took a few lessons in music composition and appreciation at Stravinsky’s home. In yet another heavy-handed symbolic twist in the myth of Zevon’s self-immolating genius, it was at one of these initial encounters with the highest echelon of musical achievement that he first drank alcohol, the substance he would come to believe fueled his creativity, even as it ravaged him.
Zevon and Stravinsky. I Did. Not. Know. So many great songs on that album. Couldn’t decide between these two:
Pundits posit that ‘Carmelita’ and ‘heroin’ are one and the same.
Always nice to know that when I don’t have that much to write about, I can fill the space with great music.
What do you want to talk about?