Sunday, December 4, 2022
Saturday, December 3, 2022
Opinion: The pieces are in place to turn Colorado's clean energy transition into an economic boom - The Colorado Sun
Colorado lawmakers will return to the Statehouse in January with an enormous opportunity to lower energy costs and improve electricity reliability for Coloradans. Yes, inflation will likely still be high, but so are the opportunities for Republicans and Democrats to work together on the energy issues facing our state.
Thanks to new federal legislation, billions in federal dollars and private investment are going to flow to the state, and our elected officials in the General Assembly, along with Gov. Jared Polis, will be in an ideal position to turn Colorado’s clean energy transition into an economic boom for the entire state.
The Inflation Reduction Act and last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law are designed to reduce energy costs for households and businesses. Electricity costs have a lot to do with where we get our energy from, and more local clean energy means Coloradans will be protected from the price volatility associated with fossil fuels.
State lawmakers and Gov. Polis will be tasked with making sure as many homes, schools, and businesses as possible use the money in the Inflation Reduction Act to adopt clean and energy efficient technologies that keep energy costs low. The demand created by the use of these dollars will make it easier for developers and utilities to launch new clean energy projects in Colorado. Meanwhile, our elected officials can make sure the state’s power providers are taking advantage of the 10 years of tax-credit certainty for new solar and wind projects, which will allow for even more steady growth of low-cost renewable energy.
Lawmakers in the General Assembly have already demonstrated the ability to find common ground on the state’s energy issues.
Two years ago, Colorado passed bipartisan legislation designed to strengthen energy affordability and reliability. The state has set the wheels in motion with the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority to build out new and updated transmission infrastructure that will function as a renewable energy highway. And by modernizing local energy infrastructure and working with other states across the West to better connect our electricity system, our state is on a promising path.
Better coordination with neighboring states will not only be key for delivering low-cost, reliable power when and where it’s needed most, but also give Colorado the ability to sell and export excess energy, adding a new revenue source to our economy and keeping the lights on at a lower cost during extreme weather.
This recent state law also opens the door for new and improved economic opportunities in rural communities. Connecting clean energy from hard-to-reach places with power centers that can send it across the state will translate into local jobs as we build out the transmission lines needed to link the two.
These jobs will provide paychecks to workers and families as part of Colorado’s larger clean jobs trend. As of 2021, the advanced energy industry accounted for 66,000 jobs in the state. Regardless of what side of the aisle they’re on, lawmakers should find it easy to galvanize around creating even more jobs. In the coming year, Colorado leaders can quicken the buildout of new renewable energy projects and much-needed transmission infrastructure to spur new jobs and secure safe, reliable power for all.
What’s more, the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law will spur additional investment in making our communities and our power grid more resilient to wildfires, severe weather, and other emergencies. New funding for clean back-up power sources like microgrids, energy storage technology, and even stored-up clean power in electric school bus batteries can help keep the power on for households and critical services during any situation.
We can already see how this will work. Xcel Energy, which covers millions of energy customers across Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and the Midwest estimates the Inflation Reduction Act will help cut the price tag of a new Minnesota solar project by about 20 percent and provide local jobs to a community with a closing coal plant. There’s no reason Colorado can’t benefit in similar ways.
Today, Coloradans are facing rising energy costs due to the price of natural gas, which is particularly high now but always volatile. But with bipartisan cooperation, forward-thinking energy policies, and the incoming federal investments to help support them, our lawmakers can lower costs and make sure all Coloradans can tap into the benefits of a clean energy economy.
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December 03, 2022 at 03:30PM
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Opinion: The pieces are in place to turn Colorado's clean energy transition into an economic boom - The Colorado Sun
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JPost at 90: What I’ve learned - opinion - The Jerusalem Post
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JPost at 90: What I’ve learned - opinion The Jerusalem Post"Opinion" - Google News
December 03, 2022 at 05:20PM
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JPost at 90: What I’ve learned - opinion - The Jerusalem Post
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Friday, December 2, 2022
Your Opinion: 'Digital tyranny' - Jefferson City News Tribune
Frank Rycyk, Jefferson City
Dear Editor,
I appreciate the recent Associated Press article published by the News Tribune with the headline, "Consumer groups want grocers to ditch digital-only deals."
I am happy to see that somebody is doing something about pressure to use smartphones and the internet. The article points out "25 percent of people 65 or older don't use the internet." Consumer groups are sending letters to stores, requesting change.
Also, I heard reports of an airline which will sell tickets by internet only. Is this anti-senior?
Perhaps lawyers can come to the rescue. Is this a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act? I hate to think of old age as a disability. Such a designation way, however, prove useful in minimizing "digital tyranny."
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December 02, 2022 at 05:34PM
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Your Opinion: 'Digital tyranny' - Jefferson City News Tribune
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Governor Stitt Applauds Attorney General O'Connor's Opinion Defending Religious Liberty - Oklahoma.gov
Governor Kevin Stitt issued the following statement following Attorney General John O’Connor’s opinion that the non-sectarian and non-religious requirements of the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act likely violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore should not be enforced:
“Attorney General John O’Connor’s opinion rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma. Ultimately, government takes a backseat to parents who get to determine the best learning environment for their child.”
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December 02, 2022 at 05:40AM
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Governor Stitt Applauds Attorney General O'Connor's Opinion Defending Religious Liberty - Oklahoma.gov
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Thursday, December 1, 2022
Opinion: Leonard Pitts Jr.: We owe them much better than this - Boulder Daily Camera
Joe Engel died last week.
It’s unlikely you will know the name, especially if you don’t live in Charleston, South Carolina, his hometown since 1949. Joe never wrote a great novel or made a scientific breakthrough. His accomplishment was less gaudy, yet no less significant.
Joe lived to tell.
I met him in 2005 — the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II — on an assignment to write about an interfaith pilgrimage to Holocaust sites in Poland. We visited murder factories whose names still bespeak the immensity of evil: Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek.
And Auschwitz, where Joe was sent in 1942 at the age of 14. A little over a million people died there, but somehow he did not. “Every morning,” he said, “you could see hundreds of skeletons. Not human beings, just skeletons. Bones. The only thing you saw was bones and a big nose. We used to pick ’em up and they used to take ’em to the gas chambers.”
One time, I asked him a question — don’t remember what it was — that probed a memory too painful to revisit and his lively eyes turned soft and sad. “It’s no picnic talking about it, you know,” he said in gentle admonishment.
I apologized. “It’s all right,” he assured me. “I don’t mind. I want the people to know, especially the young people, to prevent another Holocaust.”
There are, according to a nonprofit reparations group called the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, just 280,000 survivors left worldwide, a tiny handful of aging men and women, fragile lives winking out like fireflies under a summer twilight. Soon, there will be no one left to say, on firsthand witness, This is what happened, this is what it was like.
It was a duty Joe took seriously. He spoke in schools, led at least five pilgrimages of return and was known to sit on a bench in Charleston with a sign around his neck — “Holocaust Survivor” — waiting for someone to ask. One night at a restaurant in Poland, he lifted a glass and said, in his immigrant’s English, “Don’t you ever forget me, so long as you gon’ live. You tell this story for us, because we not here to tell this story.” He was looking dead at me when he said it. It gave me chills.
And it fuels frustration with an era when so many seem hellbent on forgetting, on spurning the lessons for which Joe and so many more paid so dearly. The Nazis systematically murdered 11 million people — 6 million of them Jews, the rest homosexuals, communists, labor unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled — for the “crime” of worshiping, thinking or being, different. That’s a September 11 attack every day for 10 years.
And for what?
As Joe said, “We survivors thought, after the war, there’s no more wars. That’s the end of everything. But you can see now what’s going on. People still killing people and everything. Things didn’t change.”
We were at Auschwitz when he said that. I recall feeling that we — the generations after his — had let his generation down. The feeling has only intensified in the years since, as Jewish cemeteries are vandalized, as synagogues are attacked, as a pop star spews anti-Semitic bile, as migrants are caged and their children taken, as a church in Joe’s hometown endures a racial massacre, as hate crimes rise, as states restrict the remembrance of atrocities and as some of us pretend all of this isn’t what it is.
Joe’s frustration at what did not change stays with me. As does his belief in the importance of telling the story anyhow. But above all, I can’t escape a conviction that we owed him — we owed all of them — much better than this.
And that we still do.
Contact Leonard Pitts Jr. at lpitts@miamiherald.com.
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December 01, 2022 at 08:01PM
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Opinion: Leonard Pitts Jr.: We owe them much better than this - Boulder Daily Camera
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Opinion: What Merriam-Webster gets wrong about 'gaslighting' - CNN
Editor’s Note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” and the forthcoming “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.” She cohosts the history podcasts “Past Present” and “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
Merriam-Webster has named “gaslighting” its word of the year.
The decision to crown “gaslighting” in 2022 may feel a little late. The term became the go-to way of describing former President Donald Trump’s devotion to creating false realities through repeated lies all the way back in 2016. As one of the first people to apply the term to Trump’s rejection of reality (in a viral piece for US News & World Report in March 2016), I’ve paid attention as the word entered the political lexicon and broadened until it became, essentially, a synonym of “lying.”
But in that broadening, something has been lost. A particular moment spurred me to think of Trump’s habitual dissembling in gaslighting terms. A week before I wrote that column, video appeared to show Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski roughly grabbing Breitbart writer Michelle Fields, forcing her out of his way after a press conference. (After battery charges were filed by police, the state’s attorney decided there was not enough evidence to pursue criminal charges. Lewandowski denied touching Fields.)
The incident was filmed and the video widely circulated. Yet when I came home and turned on the news that night, there was Trump, denying that it had happened. I was so confused that I hopped online to make sure I hadn’t mistaken what I had seen (I was not yet acclimated to Trump’s steady stream of lies).
The disorientation I felt in that moment reminded me of gaslighting, a term derived from the 1938 play “Gas Light” (later turned into a film), which depicted a husband psychologically torturing his wife to the point that she questions her own grasp of reality. In the cases of both “Gas Light” and the Lewandowski incident, the core question was one of men menacing women. Those connotations made the term especially apt for Trump, who has faced dozens of allegations of sexual harassment and assault (which he has denied) and regularly attacked women in his speeches.
But that aspect of gaslighting did not make it into the popular understanding of the word. The team at Merriam-Webster argues that it caught on because it describes a particular type of lying that defined the past several years in US politics: “The idea of a deliberate conspiracy to mislead has made gaslighting useful in describing lies that are part of a larger plan.” That it has roots in domestic abuse is relegated to part of what Merriam-Webster describes as the word’s “colorful” origins.
This loss of context for a single word might not feel urgently important – after all, words evolve as they work their way from novel to commonplace to, eventually, trite (as the word “gaslighting” now feels after years of overuse). But in a culture where histories of abuse are regularly erased – even five years into the #MeToo movement – the erasure feels significant.
Gaslighting describes a particular type of psychological abuse, where the abuser repeatedly undermines and contradicts the victim’s perception of the world, to the point where she questions her own experiences and memories. In the play “Gas Light,” the goal was to swindle the woman out of money. But the broader purpose is to make women uncertain and dependent, to render them unreliable narrators of their own experiences — especially experiences of abuse, harassment and assault.
Gaslighting, then, is a fundamental element in the infrastructure of a culture that does not believe women. That’s why the phrase “believe women” became such a powerful rallying cry during the #MeToo movement — not because women cannot lie or make mistakes, but because undermining women’s credibility had been a key tool of abuse.
While women are gaslighting’s main victims, its consequences extend much further. The space where domestic abuse most quickly disappears is around public violence, in particular mass shootings. Studies show that domestic violence is deeply entwined in mass shootings: The majority of perpetrators have histories of domestic violence. Domestic homicide or attempted homicide often precedes mass shootings (as was the case in Uvalde and Sandy Hook) and domestic violence-related mass shootings are deadlier than other mass shootings.
And yet when it comes to public debate about mass shootings, addressing domestic violence is seldom near the top of the list. That’s possibly because mass shootings, though relatively common in the US, are rare compared to rates of domestic violence: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 41% of women and 26% of men experience intimate-partner violence. Domestic violence in the United States is so common, it seems, that it quickly disappears from public consciousness.
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The #MeToo movement focused less on domestic abuse than workplace abuse, ranging from sexual harassment to rape. As the movement emerged, many men were shaken that so many of the women they knew had experienced abuse. And yet even in a moment when abuse of women commanded national attention, a counter-movement quickly emerged asking whether #MeToo had gone “too far” (despite the relatively small number of abusers who experienced any sort of lasting consequences).
Sustained attention to abuse of women – and the patriarchal norms and structures that underwrite it – requires constant reminders of the way it shapes culture, politics and even language in the US. Yes, gaslighting is just one small word that has been stripped of its origins in domestic abuse. But it is a word that named a particular form of abuse, and gave women a way to talk about attacks on their credibility, that empowered them to claim their experience. That makes it a word whose origins deserve to be fully recognized. While gaslighting as a synonym for lying feels hackneyed in 2022, as a description of efforts to undermine women’s credibility, it is as relevant as ever.
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December 01, 2022 at 07:23PM
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Opinion: What Merriam-Webster gets wrong about 'gaslighting' - CNN
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