Extra! Extra! 10/9

Hi, all, and happy Sunday!

This is slightly shorter than usual because I’m swamped, to be honest. But I hope you’ll enjoy these little bits of beauty, courage, and hope in the midst of all of the…opposite.

Thank you so, so much to those of you who pay for your subscriptions. I truly appreciate the support—and the help with the INSANE amount of money I realize I’ve spent on different postcarding campaigns for my depot. I think I’m in the thousands of dollars zone. Yikes. I could only do that because of you.

Oh, and if you aren’t a subscriber and you can be please consider upgrading at the bottom of this email. Call it a contribution to the postcarding fund!

Thanks!

Jess

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Katie Darling for Louisiana @katie4louisiana

Louisiana ranks 50th in crime, 48th in education, and 46th in health care. I’m running for Congress to stop this race to the bottom because our children deserve better.

Celebrate This! 🎉

A Montana judge struck down as unconstitutional three laws that restricted voting in the state, saying there was no evidence of the widespread voter fraud that the 2021 Republican-sponsored laws ostensibly were targeting.

A key GOP donor is backing the Democratic candidate running for an open seat in Washington state after a House Republican was ousted over his vote for a Trump impeachment.

A federal court of appeals has ruled yet again that former Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis – who refused to provide marriage licenses to gay couples after marriage equality was legalized – does not have qualified immunity.

The most-polluting coal plant in Australia will close more than a decade sooner than originally planned. It’s responsible for more than 3% of the country’s emissions alone, and will now close in 2035.

IKEA is committing to sustainability, with plans to make home deliveries fully electric by 2025.

According to an analysis published Thursday by the nonprofit Environment America Research & Policy Center and the research organization Frontier Group, American wind and solar power has grown dramatically since 2021.

Australia is dedicating nearly a third of the country’s land to protecting endangered species, part of a new goal to achieve zero animal extinctions in the next decade. In an announcement yesterday, Australian Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek said the nation is “the mammal extinction capital of the world” and laid out a 10-year plan to reverse that title.

The FDA just approved a new drug to treat ALS that was created with funds raised from the “Ice Bucket Challenge.” $2.2 million of the funds that were raised from the challenge went into funding the development and trial of the new drug.

Supreme Court justices declined to hear a challenge to a federal ban on “bump stock” devices which enable semi-automatic weapons to fire like a machine gun. 

The Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s decision that MyPillow CEO and Trump ally Mike Lindell defamed Dominion Voting Systems.

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, approved legislation last week to ban a hazardous group of “forever chemicals” from being used in cosmetics and textiles. The laws represent some of the country’s strictest restrictions on the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of some 9,000 chemicals more commonly known as PFAS.

Lauren Boebert is in a statistical tie with her Democratic opponent!

NASA astronaut and Marine Corps pilot Nicole Mann became the first Native American woman in space this week.

President Biden pardoned all people convicted of marijuana possession under federal law and said his administration would review whether marijuana should still be a Schedule 1 drug like heroin and LSD.

A lieutenant of longtime former Proud Boys chairman Henry “Enrique” Tarrio became the group’s first member to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot

New scientific research published yesterday found that enzymes found in the saliva of wax worms can degrade one of the most common forms of plastic waste. Gross! But good news nonetheless. 

A new type of manmade coral reef has been deployed off the coast of Antigua and Barbuda in the hopes of restoring the ocean ecosystem there and reversing some of the effects of climate change, which has killed almost all of the islands’ coral reefs. 

A new Cook Political report shows 10 House race rating changes with 7 in favor of Democrats. 

Engineers at Purdue University created the whitest-ever paint, which could help reduce or eliminate the need for air conditioning. It has a “cooling power of 10 kilowatts… more powerful than the central air conditioners used by most houses.”

An all-electric airplane just completed its first successful test flight. The Eviation Alice plane holds nine passengers and flew for eight minutes before landing.

Watch This! 👀

This is the anthem we need right now!