euronews: 'Faithless elector': Supreme Court will hear case that could change how presidents are chosen

The answer to the question could be a decisive one: are the electors who cast the actual Electoral College ballots for president and vice-president required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states? Or are they free to vote as they wish? [...]

More than half the states have laws requiring electors to obey the results of the popular vote in their states and cast their ballots accordingly. The problem of what are known as "faithless electors" has not been much of an issue in American political history, because when an elector refuses to follow the results of a state's popular vote, the state usually simply throws the ballot away. [...]

States are free to choose their electors however they want, the court said, and can even require electors to pledge their loyalty to their political parties. But once the electors are chosen and report in December to cast their votes as members of the electoral college, they are fulfilling a federal function, and a state's authority has ended.

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99 Percent Invisible: How To Pick A Pepper

Sarah Taber is a crop scientist based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and she says the great recession scrambled the familiar labor paradigm, in which migrant workers would arrive in the US looking for work on farms. Increasingly, potential foreign workers are staying put in their home countries to work in places like call centers. And Sarah points out that the children of immigrants who came to the US and went into agriculture are not following suit. [...]

After a decade of testing, Walker finally found a machine that showed promise called the Moses 1000. But even after discovering her dream harvester, Stephanie’s work still wasn’t over. Finding the machine was actually the easy part. Walker also had to deal with a larger problem, one inherent to agriculture that, despite the successful automations of the past, still makes many crops — including asparagus, cherries, apples, saffron, and chocolate — difficult to harvest with a machine. [...]

This means if you want to automate a harvest, you can’t just find a great machine. You have to make your plants more standardized, like cars. So for the past five years, most of Stephanie’s work has been about breeding a whole new plant, one that is designed specifically to be picked by a machine.

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SciShow: Are Electric Cars Really More Environmentally Friendly?

Some people say that buying an electric car is a great way to fight climate change - but if they use electricity that is made by burning fossil fuels, are they really more environmentally friendly than gas powered cars?

The Daily Wire: Will Trump Win? The Latest On Trump’s National And State-By-State Approval Ratings

Historically, presidents have fared well in re-election campaigns when they maintain approval ratings above 50%. This president, to be sure, has never had such an approval rating at any point throughout his presidency. But President Trump oversees a soaring economy, with record-low unemployment rates, and has a hardened base of core supporters. One must also never forget the sheer power of incumbency: Since FDR, only Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were elected and then subsequently not re-elected four years later. [...]

The Daily Wire will be tracking Trump's state-by-state approval rating as the general election nears. Here is the latest Trump approval rating information from across all the various swing states.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Movement To Skip The Electoral College May Take Its First Step Back

As we’ve written previously, states that join the National Popular Vote compact agree to cast their electoral votes for the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide — not necessarily the candidate who carries the state. And the compact only goes into effect once states worth 270 electoral votes (a majority in the Electoral College) have joined, thus ensuring that its signatories have enough electoral votes to guarantee that the national popular vote winner becomes president. Currently, 15 states plus the District of Columbia, together worth 196 electoral votes, have ratified the compact.

Four of those states, including Colorado, joined the National Popular Vote movement just this year, but it remains a controversial issue — for example, it recently failed to pass in Maine and was vetoed in Nevada. And opponents in Colorado were upset enough about its passage that they are now actively trying to repeal the law. Earlier this month, the organization Coloradans Vote said it submitted more than 227,198 signatures to the Colorado secretary of state in an effort to subject the law to voter referendum in the 2020 election. With that number of signatures, chances are very good it will make the ballot, making it the first time voters in any state will vote directly on the National Popular Vote compact. [...]

So the real question becomes whether voters will reject the legislature’s law and make Colorado the first state to exit the National Popular Vote compact. And polls suggest it would be a competitive election! Nationally, 53 percent of Americans said the popular vote should determine the president, and 43 percent said the Electoral College should, according to an April/May NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Unsurprisingly, given that almost every state government to pass the National Popular Vote compact was completely controlled by Democrats, there is a wide partisan gap on the question: 79 percent of Democrats preferred the popular vote, while 74 percent of Republicans favored the Electoral College.

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Politico: Pass the Duchy: Luxembourg’s grand plan to legalize cannabis

Luxembourg, however, wants to go further and become the first country in the European Union to make cannabis completely legal. Its health ministry is slated to unveil a proposal to start the legislative process this fall, and the goal is for it to become law within two years. [...]

One of the main advocates is Health Minister Etienne Schneider, who cites health reasons as the most important driver. He said young people are already getting weed on the black market, coming into contact with drug dealers who provide cannabis of unknown quality, and getting access to more potentially dangerous drugs. [...]

A possible playbook for Luxembourg is the U.S. state of Colorado, the first in the country to legalize recreational cannabis. Legalization advocates say that they chose to frame the issue so that voters view pot the same the way they view alcohol — a substance that is widely available and socially acceptable. [...]

"In Germany, there is a consensus that there is a reason why medical cannabis is allowed and that there are patients who benefit from it," Goetz said. "So there's no reason for prohibiting that. But there is definitely not a consensus yet on legalizing it for recreational use."

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Vox: Denver may become the first US city to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms

The initiative would not legalize magic mushrooms; they’d remain illegal under state and federal law. And it wouldn’t decriminalize or deprioritize the distribution and sales of psilocybin mushrooms — all of that could still be pursued by police. [...]

Advocates for the measure argue that decriminalization would shift law enforcement resources away from pursuing nonviolent offenses. They claim that psilocybin is safe, nonaddictive or close to nonaddictive, and that a growing body of evidence suggests the drug has therapeutic benefits for illnesses ranging from depression to end-of-life anxiety to addiction. [...]

Still, decriminalization alone may have its benefits. A 2009 report from the libertarian Cato Institute, written by Glenn Greenwald, concluded that decriminalization freed people from the “fear of arrest” when they sought help for their addiction and “freed up resources that could be channeled into treatment and other harm reduction programs.”

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Ministry Of Ideas: Progressive Souls

Religious people have played an important role in progressive politics in the us for its entire history. Contemporary leftists should look to build bridges and include religious voices in the pursuit of a more just and sustainable society.

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CityLab: What Cities Are Getting Wrong About Public Transportation

If you peruse this data-dump every year, you’ll probably notice something: Despite the tireless efforts of transit planners, bike-lane boosters, and other actors in the mobility arena, the mode-share percentages don’t seem to budge much in the any given growing city as they add more people, despite massive investments in transit infrastructure. Take Dallas, Texas, for example: In 1996, that city opened the first stage of its light-rail network, which has since grown into the largest system in the U.S., at a total cost of something around $5 billion. But the share of commuters in the city who ride transit has remained below 6 percent since 1990. [...]

A weighted-index does not quite get at why only 30 percent of Seattleites took sustainable transportation in 2015 when 91 percent of its jobs are within 10 minutes of what the report considers “frequent service,” where any stop is serviced an average of 5 times an hour between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. But there’s a mismatch in accessibility: Only 10 percent of Seattle residents were reachable within 60 minutes by walking, biking, or public transit. Even the city’s successful rapid-transit options only reach 7 percent of its population. [...]

But making progress on these indicators does not necessarily mean having to overhaul your public transit options or build new systems from scratch. Consider Minneapolis and its progress on biking. If you factor in improvements in bike infrastructure, the population living near frequent transit jumps 9 percent, rising from 64 to 73 percent. “We only included protected bike lanes as a way to travel by bike in the transportation network,” says Chestnut. “It goes to show that number of people who have access to frequent transit can be improved without having to put in vast sums of money.”[...]

Another avenue where each city has room for improvement is with providing better transit service to people living in low-income households that earn less than $20,000 a year. Los Angeles may not reach as much large of a share of its total population with frequent transit in its car-centric sprawl, but where it does reach matters to a larger share of low-income households that rely on it compared to say, Atlanta. The indicators make that task appear not as difficult as you might think: Transit networks do reach where low-income people live; it is just that service needs to be more reliable.

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Vox: Colorado could save $2.5 billion by rapidly shutting down its coal power plants

That only exacerbates what is already a terrible economic climate for coal in the state. Last month, PacifiCorp, which owns coal plants in Colorado (among other states), revealed that, according to its own analysis, 13 of its 22 coal plants are uneconomic — as in, currently losing money. An analysis commissioned by the Sierra Club showed that it would be cheaper to replace 20 of the 22 plants with wind. [...]

Meanwhile, renewable energy continues its inexorable decline in prices, and there too, Colorado is at the center of the action. Xcel Energy, the utility that provides much of Colorado’s electricity, recently announced plans to go entirely carbon-free by 2050. [...]

Whether Colorado can achieve Polis’s goal of completely decarbonizing its electricity system by 2040 is a complicated question. But if running existing coal plants is no longer economic, then maybe the place to start is shutting down the eight utility-scale coal plants that currently supply about 40 percent of the state’s electricity and replacing them with a mix of renewable energy, storage, and natural gas. [...]

To summarize: Phasing out coal in Colorado and replacing it with a mix of renewable energy, efficiency, and natural gas is cheaper than continuing to run it and can be done with no impact on power reliability. That alone means there’s no reason to keep those plants open.

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Vox: How the Parkland shooting changed America’s gun debate

According to the Giffords Law Center (which supports stricter gun laws), 26 states and Washington, DC, enacted a total of 67 new gun control laws this year — more than triple the number of stricter gun laws enacted in 2017. The 2018 measures include a higher minimum age to buy guns, restrictions for domestic abusers, “red flag” laws that let law enforcement take away guns from people deemed a risk, and new urban gun violence reduction programs.

Some of these passed in states with Republican leaders. In Florida, the GOP-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Rick Scott approved legislation that raised the minimum age to buy guns and added a waiting period for firearm purchases, among other changes. In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed gun control laws that included expanded background checks and a “red flag” law.

At the same time, there was a decrease in the number of new laws loosening access to guns. So Parkland didn’t just apparently inspire more support for gun control; it also led to less support for new, less-restrictive gun laws. [...]

When it comes to overall support for stronger gun laws, there was a significant spike shortly after Parkland: Based on Gallup’s surveys, support for stricter gun laws in March 2018 hit 67 percent, up from 55 percent in October 2016 and 60 percent in October 2017 (after the Las Vegas mass shooting). But that support dropped by October this year to 61 percent — still higher than it was previously, but not that far off historical levels. [...]

The problem, then, has never been whether a majority of Americans support gun control. The problem, instead, is what’s known as the intensity gap: Essentially, even though more Americans support gun control laws, those on the side opposing stricter measures have long been more passionate about the issue — more likely to make guns the one issue they vote on, more likely to call their representatives in Congress, and so on.

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Vox: Colorado passes Amendment A, voting to officially abolish prison slavery

More than 150 years after the ratification of the US Constitution’s 13th Amendment, Colorado has officially abolished slavery. Coloradans voted Tuesday for Amendment A, a measure removing language in the state constitution that allowed prison labor without pay.

Colorado is one of more than a dozen states whose state constitution technically still allows involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment. The state’s language closely resembles a contested passage that remains in the US Constitution 13th Amendment, which outlawed chattel slavery, but allowed those convicted of crimes to be forced into labor.[...]

The Tuesday result makes Colorado one of the first states to remove this language from its constitution. Governing magazine notes that bills “with similar goals failed this year in Wisconsin and stalled in Tennessee.”  

But this wasn’t the first time that such a proposal has appeared on Colorado ballots. In 2016, with the backing of state politicians and various local advocacy groups, a similar measure called Amendment T aimed to remove the “slavery as punishment” language from the state constitution. But the amendment was rejected by the state’s voters, a development experts like University of Colorado Law professor Melissa Hart blamed less on overt racism and more on the confusing way the amendment was written.

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CityLab: The Fight for LGBT Rights Has Moved to the Suburbs

But same-sex couples and transgender people are increasingly living outside of these traditional “gayborhoods.” Many of the national battles over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights have grown out of everyday conflicts between these new suburbanites and their straight-identified neighbors.

The movement of openly gay couples away from older cities defied the perceived connection between heterosexual family life and the suburbs that dates at least to the 1940s. [...]

At the time, local businesses and homeowners worried about attempts by neighboring communities, including Denver, to annex new land. Many middle-class residents of Jefferson County saw themselves as defenders of a particularly suburban way of life that was threatened by annexation from the central city. They identified that lifestyle with low taxes, good schools, racial homogeneity, happy marriages and, above all, the well-being of children.

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CityLab: Why New York City Is Getting Its Money Out of Fossil Fuels

On Tuesday, New York City announced it would divest pension funds from fossil fuel interests, joining New York State, a cadre of other U.S. cities, and some private universities who say they will pull investments from companies that extract coal, gas, and oil. De Blasio also announced the city’s plans to sue five major oil companies for their role in damages brought on the city by climate disasters. [...]

The money on the table is significant. New York state’s common retirement fund is the third-largest in the nation, worth $200 billion, and provides pensions for more than 1 million New Yorkers. The fund has stakes in 50 oil and gas companies, with $1 billion tied to ExxonMobil alone. New York City’s pension fund, which pays for city employees like police officers, firefighters, and teachers, is also a huge bucket, worth $191 billion. Currently, $5 billion is currently tied up in fossil fuels. (For comparison, San Francisco’s has invested $1 billion; and Seattle’s, $17.6 million.) [...]

But it’s become as much an economic strategy as an environmental one. “Quickly, that advocacy opened the black box of the business model of the fossil fuel industry, and drew the attention of investors who said: Wait, there’s a whole financial conversation as well,” Dorsey said. As founder of 350.org Bill McKibben sees it, the future of energy—and, by extension, the financial markets—lies elsewhere. [...]

Divestment has been criticized by some as an empty, primarily symbolic move: Each million- or billion-dollar divestiture can have only marginal ripple effects to a $5 trillion dollar fossil fuel industry. Multi-billionaire Bill Gates called divestment a “false solution” in 2015, arguing that pouring funds into renewable energy sources—to ignite innovation in those sectors—would be more effective. Since then, however, he has divested his $187 million stake in BP oil.

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Business Insider: The 2016 electoral map looks very similar to 2012 — but already a few big differences are forming

The 2016 Electoral College map is looking very similar to the map from 2012, but already a few major differences are evident.

As of Monday, four states have flipped from 2012, when President Barack Obama faced off against Republican nominee Mitt Romney: Nevada, Iowa, and Ohio from blue to red, and North Carolina from red to blue. In addition, the 2nd Congressional District in Maine flipped from blue to red, providing an extra electoral vote.

If that map were to hold, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would top Republican nominee Donald Trump by a 312-226 total - a slightly tighter race compared with Obama's 332-206 victory in 2012.

But it's not so safe for Clinton just yet. In Colorado and Pennsylvania, Clinton is polling slightly below where Obama finished in 2012 - with Colorado amounting to a virtual toss-up, and Pennsylvania not too far behind. In North Carolina, where Romney won by 2 points in 2012, Clinton's lead is as slight as can be over Trump. [...]

The best piece of news for Trump is his semisubstantial lead in Ohio. That state has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1964; the last time the state voted against the national winner was in 1960, when it went in favor of then Vice President Richard Nixon instead of former President John F. Kennedy.

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