(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . From the GNR Newsroom, its the Monday Good News Roundup [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-12-18 Its the most wonderful time of the year! So Happy holidays from all of us at the GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu). Its a week before Christmas, but the gifts are coming to you early, so please enjoy some good news compliments of us! Yeah, amazingly the GOP’s policy of telling half the population “We don’t see you as people, only as baby factories to produce the next generation of workers for us to exploit” isn’t really going over well with the female demographic. This is what you wanted GOP, you knock on the devil’s door enough times, don’t be surprised if he finally answers. The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a Washington state law prohibiting licensed health care professionals from practicing “conversion therapy” – a scientifically discredited practice intended to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – as it applies to minors. Critics say the practice – which attempts to convert people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning – into straight or cisgender people, causes serious emotional harm and can have deadly results. Conversion therapy is fucking torture and it needs to be outlawed everywhere. Throughout the 2010s, batteries got cheaper and cheaper, cheering the businesses and climate activists that want to convert vehicles to electric and bolster renewable power plants with flexible energy storage. That march of progress slipped on the banana peel of Covid supply-chain disruptions: Price declines slowed in 2021, and prices went up in 2022, per the analysts at BloombergNEF. That’s the wrong direction for a technology that’s supposed to benefit from learning curves and increased scale. But the Covid years were a strange time, and the global lithium-ion battery industry seems to have shaken off the malaise. Global pack prices fell 14% this year to a record low of $139 per kilowatt-hour, according to BNEF. Lithium prices softened, components got cheaper, and massive new battery factories opened up. Demand for batteries grew an astonishing 53% this year, but even that fell short of some manufacturers’ expectations, which pushed prices down further. That’s some good news, it looks like things are getting back to normal in regards to the prices of batteries. Zelenskyy Visits, MAGA Extremism and Dysfunction on Full Display Now - It is mid-December, and Congress still hasn’t passed a budget for the 2024 fiscal year which began on October 1st, the Defense bill, Ukraine and Israel funding or an immigration/border bill; and the House hasn’t passed the many appropriations bills which were supposed to be critical to allowing us to get to a budget deal in Mid-January when the current stop gap agreement expires. The House did, however, just expel a corrupt Congressman, and is about to vote to authorize a formal investigation into Joe Biden, without any evidence of course. So there’s that. President Zelenskyy visits Washington tomorrow to try to unlock the stalled Ukraine funding package. This is existential now for Ukraine, and for the broader credibility of the West. But Republicans do not care. By making wild and impossible demands in their border/immigration package, the Republicans in this MAGA era are once again ending up on the side of Putin and global autocrats against the interests of the US and the Western world. Corrupt, venal, unconcerned about America and democracy - the whole world will be reminded this week, again, that the Republican Party’s descent into illiberalism and extremism has become an extraordinary threat not just to freedom and democracy here, but everywhere in the world. More good news from our sibling good news aggregate Hopium. It makes me happy there are so many of these nowadays. We definitely need them. A new round of rail grants from the Biden administration could be planting the seeds for an interstate railway system that may someday rival the interstate highway system, some advocates say — and not just along the high speed rail corridors that will be its crown jewel. Last week, the Biden administration said it would award a staggering $8.2 billion to 10 major rail projects across the country, including funds to complete long-sought high-speed lines linking the greater Los Angeles region to both San Francisco ($3.1 billion) and Las Vegas ($3 billion). A third high-speed line between Raleigh and Richmond also won $1.1 billion, which will complement a $729-million capacity upgrade between Richmond and D.C., helping to complete connections between the nation's northeast and southeast corridors. Yeah! Everybody loves trains! Way better than cars. The project was unprecedented in its ambition and its success. The Trust ultimately raised $60 million to purchase the Veazie, Great Works and Howland dams in 2008. In 2012, the Great Works Dam was the first to go, followed by the Veazie in 2013. The Trust was unable to convince the community of Howland to remove its dam, and so a compromise was reached in which a fish bypass was added to the dam to allow an open route for returning fish. As a result, nearly 2,000 miles of habitat was opened for salmon and other species. We can repair the damage done to the earth if we come together and work at it. WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Donald Tusk, a leader of a centrist party, returned as Poland’s prime minister for the first time in nearly a decade after a vote in parliament on Monday, paving the way for a new pro-European Union government following eight years of stormy national conservative rule. Tusk, a former EU leader who served as European Council president from 2014-2019 and has strong connections in Brussels, is expected to improve Warsaw’s standing in the bloc’s capital. He was Poland’s prime minister from 2007-2014. Tusk’s ascension to power came nearly two months after an election which was won by a coalition of parties ranging from left-wing to moderate conservative. The parties ran on separate tickets, but promised to work together under Tusk’s leadership to restore democratic standards and improve ties with allies. The change of power is felt as hugely consequential for the 38 million citizens of the Central European nation, where collective anger against the Law and Justice party produced a record-high turnout to replace a government many believed was eroding democratic norms. The tyrants who try and deny democracy will always fall before the will of the people. Now and forever. Google just lost its first antitrust trial, as a San Francisco jury returned a decision that Google harmed rival Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite, in the $48 billion dollar app store Android market. Google is facing multiple antitrust cases in different parts of its business, this is the first trial to reach a decision. So what happened? And what does it mean going forward? This is big, and could mark the beginning of the end for the big techbro conglomerates. One can only hope. The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a challenge to a precedent enabling states to enact laws prohibiting anti-abortion activists from approaching someone entering an abortion clinic. In 2000, the high court ruled that the First Amendment did not prohibit such a law in Colorado. Several of the Supreme Court’s conservatives have publicly cast doubt on the decision’s viability, concerns they again raised in the majority opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion last year. Backed by anti-abortion and religious interests, a Catholic “sidewalk counselor” sought to have the precedent overturned by appealing her challenge to a Westchester County, N.Y., law to the high court. Angry dipshits need to learn how to mind their own business. And this will help with that. Last Friday, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved two gene therapies—one by Bluebird Bio, the other by Vertex Pharmaceuticals—for sickle cell disease. The Vertex one, called exa-cel, is also the first approved therapy in the United States that uses the gene editing tool CRISPR. The US isn’t the first to take the plunge on Vertex. Britain gave it the world’s first approval in November, followed by Bahrain earlier this month. While exa-cel is not a cure, as NPR reports, the hope is that it “will be a one-time treatment that will alleviate symptoms for a lifetime.” More great medical news. What could go right is always a great source of info. t the turn of this century, New York Times reporter Tina Rosenberg had uncovered a massive scandal but couldn’t convince her editor to publish her research: The price for HIV medication had soared. Thousands of patients in the Global South were dying because they could not afford the expensive treatment. “What people didn’t know was that the Clinton administration was colluding with the pharma industry to keep the prices artificially inflated,” the Pulitzer Prize-decorated Rosenberg says. Her editor at the New York Times Magazine agreed that the practice was scandalous but still, he was not willing to “print yet another depressing AIDS story!” Rosenberg didn’t give up. Instead, she wrote a feature about a country that defied the pressure, produced the life-saving medication in its own labs and distributed it for free, effectively halving the death rate: Brazil. See this is why I write the GNR, we’re making a real difference here. Common Ground’s workers fought for a vision of prosperity at odds with the popular definition of success, in which entrepreneurs accumulate vast fortunes through others’ labor. At co-ops, workers decide how to run the business and keep the profits, which is shown to lead to better pay and working conditions, and increased productivity over traditional businesses. But like most working people, baristas typically lack access to the capital needed to buy a business or the resources and training required to manage it. In response, a growing number of cities are recognizing the benefits of worker cooperatives by investing millions of dollars in their growth. Baltimore, though, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing large corporations, but has yet to invest in supporting worker cooperatives through financing or training. Instead, Common Ground’s workers found the embrace of Baltimore’s thriving cooperative ecosystem, which had grown significantly in recent years and was prepared to provide the resources the transition would require. For the past decade, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), a local cooperative incubator, along with its national partner Seed Commons, has provided 100 cooperatives with technical assistance. Seed Commons has also loaned out more than $53 million dollars through its revolving loan fund, for which the incubator does not require personal collateral and asks for repayment solely from business profits. Corporations don’t care about us, the fact that its just an accepted thing that they lay people off at the end of the year is proof enough of that. That’s why we have to look out for one another. We have to keep saying it because its the truth: the Economy is doing great, despite people who refuse to believe it. I’ve had to deal with that nonsense myself recently. Its frustrating, but don’t stop pushing that rock up the hill. Geothermal power is having a bit of an unexpected moment. After two decades of slow growth, most energy experts wrote the technology off as an unrealistic way to generate large amounts of electricity. In an era dominated by incumbent energy sources such as natural gas and cheap emerging technologies including solar, geothermal was expensive and, more importantly, geographically limited. Few saw it ever generating more than 1% of America’s electricity. But recently there has been a series of breakthroughs in enhanced geothermal systems, an advanced method of generating electricity from the earth’s heat. If these developments continue, geothermal could generate between 10 and 20 percent of the country’s electricity in the coming decades, according to recent studies from the Department of Energy and Princeton. The good news of more Geothermal power. Friends, There are three story lines I’m focused on as we close out the year: The Strong Democratic Performance Since Dobbs - It’s The Most Important Electoral Data Out There Now The Remarkably Robust American Economy Gives Biden A Strong Foundation For His Re-Election Trump’s Historic Baggage Is Being Overly Discounted in Current Analysis About 2024 Three things to keep in mind for next year. We got a strong position going into the next election cycle. Lets make the most of it. And on that note, lets call it a day for this weeks GNR. I’ll be back for Christmas, hope to see you there. 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