Hi friends,
Though I am a legendary weather wimp, I’m enjoying the lovely frosting on the tree limbs.
I hope you have a bucolic view out your window and a hot drink to keep you cozy. If there is any justice, you are working (or not working) from home. NYC schools are remote today.
Of the 13 percent of active voters in NY-3 who have cast early ballots, 44% are registered Democrats and 19% are unaffiliated voters. The issues that seem to be front and center are immigration, the war in Gaza, and the dysfunction in Congress.
Organizing for Democracy has trained and mobilized a cohort of organizers ages 16-25, who have already contacted 20,000 young people in NY-3. It’s worth noting that voters between 18 and 29 proved to be decisive in every swing district that Democrats won in the midterms.
It’s not too late to support youth organizing to flip the seat to blue!
Although Ohio voters amended their state Constitution to ban partisan gerrymandering, the 2022 midterm elections went forward with maps that had been ruled unconstitutional. The unsuccessful effort to require a supermajority to amend the state constitution has also fired up abortion rights advocates.
That’s a 35% increase (roughly 3,000 additional 18-year-old registered voters every month).
It’s true that we don’t know how young people will vote. It’s also true that civic engagement with the issues is a social good.
My favorite political candidate, Lena Greenberg, participated in a televised candidate forum on Friday with their opponent, the incumbent City Councilor of Burlington’s fifth ward.
How refreshing to hear candidates talk about the issues that affect people’s lives. After properly bursting with parental pride and admiration, I also had time to reflect on the civility of this event, in which the incumbent agreed with Lena more than once on the issues and both candidates comported themselves with professionalism and zero rancor.
It didn’t hurt that their gracious moderator, Yamuna Turco, Miss Vermont 2023, is lovely and genuinely interested in politics.
Watch the Ward 5 political forum for politics as it should be.
If passed, the new publicly-funded social housing authority could
create 26,000 affordable homes using union labor, funded in part by an initial $5 billion dollar injection from New York’s budget and the issuance of bonds. . . .
[S]ocial housing [is] a wide-ranging term used to describe development that prioritizes permanent affordability, democratic resident control, and social equality. It is often owned by public entities, residents, or mission-driven nonprofits, and can accommodate both renters and homeowners.
Call on your state legislators to support the creation of the Social Housing Development Authority. We need affordable housing!
Connecticut’s Governor Ned Lamont has announced plans to eliminate about $1 billion in medical debt for state residents with incomes that do not exceed $124,800/year for a family of four or whose medical debt amounts to 5 percent or more of their annual income.
As Governor Lamont noted:
"They should not have to suffer twice -- first with the illness, then with the debt."
Unsurprisingly, the state is working with RIP Medical Debt.
Give a gift from the heart to someone who already has everything they need: donate to RIP Medical Debt.
As cases go before the Supreme Court on weighty matters like a president’s claim of immunity from criminal prosecution, you will hear the justices refer to history and traditions as they consider the arguments.
How refreshing to hear that the Hawaii Supreme Court rejected a claim that the Second Amendment protects a person from prosecution for carrying a gun in public without a permit, on the basis of history and traditions that pre-date the Bill of Rights.
The opinion states that
“The history of the Hawaiian Islands does not include a society where armed people move about the community to possibly combat the deadly aims of others.”
Under 1986’s Hawaiian Spirit Law, the state mandates that state officials and judges treat the public with “aloha spirit”, described as the coordination of the heart and mind to foster connectivity and peace that calls for contemplation and presence of five life-force traits: “akahai” (kindness, expressed with tenderness); “lōkahi” (unity, expressed with harmony); “oluʻolu” (agreeableness, expressed with pleasantness); “haʻahaʻa” (humility, expressed with modesty); and “ahonui’” (patience, expressed with perseverance).
May the life-force traits be with you!
with love,
L