Новости за 11.11.2022

It is said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. For Kevin McCarthy, who had a lot riding on his party claiming a historic midterm victory that would restore a substantial Republican majority in the House, his most formidable adversary turns out to be the American electorate, who turned out in numbers sufficient to blunt the vaunted “red wave” and keep Democratic losses to a minimum. Many House races remain uncalled; it’s possible that when all is done and dusted, McCarthy might... Читать дальше...

Proposition 122, the initiative seeking to legalize the use of “natural medicine,” has narrowly passed, with 52.3 percent in support and 47.7 percent against it, with 92 percent of votes reporting. The measure allows people 21 and older to grow and consume psychedelic mushrooms. It also allows the creation of state-regulated centers where people can make appointments to consume psilocybin, the compound derived from psychedelic mushrooms.

Earlier this week I wrote about a carbon trading scheme floated by international climate envoy John Kerry for financing renewable energy development in developing countries. As we learned on Wednesday, it’s going to be called the Energy Transition Accelerator, or ETA—not to be confused with the Energy Transition Accelerator Financing Platform, or ETAF, launched last year at COP26 by the International Renewable Energy Agency, the United Arab Emirates, and the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development.

In this week’s midterms, the climate may have been an unexpected winner. That’s not just because far-right climate deniers, delayers and petrosexual culture warriors fared worse than anticipated on Tuesday—after all, while the “red wave” failed to materialize, a Republican-controlled House could still block a lot of climate policy. Rather, several quiet signs from Tuesday’s results and exit polls suggest that climate could be a more winning issue for the Democrats than is conventionally assumed. Читать дальше...

A Florida Republican did the unthinkable on Tuesday: He won Miami-Dade county. Once a bastion of Democratic support and home to 1.5 million voting-age Latinos, the locale is rightly seen as a Sunshine State bellwether. Once purple, Florida is now solidly red.

I have hesitated to write about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter before now for a few reasons. There were plenty of other important stories out there: the midterm elections, the Supreme Court’s current term, and the ongoing criminal investigations into former President Donald Trump. Writing about one billionaire’s strange quest to buy, and then not buy, and then be compelled to buy a social-media website felt trivial.

Democrats’ surprisingly strong showing in Tuesday’s general election—the most successful midterm for a Democratic president in modern history—has rightly left many in the media’s pundit class with egg on their face. After weeks of breathless prophecies of a “red tsunami” on the horizon, what resulted might be better described as a “red ripple.” As of Friday morning, Republicans appeared poised to retake the House with just the slimmest of majorities, and Democrats are on track to hold onto, if not expand upon, Senate control. Читать дальше...

In a cycle with 35 Senate elections, control of that chamber comes down to a best of three: The races in Arizona and Nevada remain too close to call, while the Georgia Senate race is headed to a December 6 runoff. 

Apparently, Democrats actually focused more on so-called pocketbook issues than Republicans in the final months of campaign.