political environment tends to get bad for new presidents

usually stays bad through mid-term elections - Clinton, Obama, Trump all lost the House

they're likely to lose House in 2022

but potential for shrinking pandemic/revived economy is wild card

Biden at COP26: "Will we seize the enormous opportunity before us? Or will we condemn future generations to suffer? This is the decade that will determine the answer. The science is clear -- we only have a brief window before us ... climate change is already ravaging the world."

Voters in Maine have rejected a proposal for a new power corridor carrying Quebec hydroelectricity to New England, dealing a blow to Hydro-Québec’s ambitions to become a key supplier of clean energy in the U.S. Northeast.

Le projet d’interconnexion a suscité énormément d’opposition de la part des citoyens, des environnementalistes et aussi des entreprises qui exploitent des centrales au gaz naturel dans le Maine et qui risquent de perdre beaucoup d’argent.
 
Au terme d’une campagne référendaire corsée, les citoyens se sont présentés nombreux pour voter, surtout pour se prononcer sur le projet d’Hydro-Québec et de son partenaire américain, Central Maine Power (CMP), responsable de la construction de la ligne de transport.
 
Les votants interrogés par le quotidien Portland Press Herald étaient pour la plupart contre le projet de ligne de transport. « Je n’aime pas comment fonctionne notre politique énergétique et je n’aime pas que CMP soit liée à des entreprises étrangères », a dit par exemple John Santoro, un citoyen de 60 ans.
 
Un autre, Timothy Callnan, 70 ans, a dit au même journal qu’il s’opposait tout simplement à ce qu’on coupe des arbres.
 
La suite des choses reste imprécise. Le projet d’interconnexion a obtenu tous les permis et toutes les autorisations requis de la part des autorités réglementaires, y compris le permis présidentiel nécessaire pour importer de l’énergie aux États-Unis.

5 things we learned from Republicans’ big night
 
If Tuesday’s elections were the first concrete readings of political conditions since Joe Biden became president, Democrats may be headed straight into a hurricane.
 
A slim, come-from-behind victory in bright-blue New Jersey would qualify as good news for Democrats from this election — and that’s bad news for them looking forward. Democrats’ House and Senate majorities look more vulnerable than ever. And for Republicans, the results from New Jersey, Virginia and in local races elsewhere fueled their already-rosy outlook for the 2022 midterms.
 
Glenn Youngkin took down Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and the GOP appears poised for a full sweep of the three statewide offices on the ballot for the first time in more than a decade. Republicans are also on the brink of taking back the state House after only two years of Democratic control.
 
Then there’s New Jersey, where Republican Jack Ciattarelli led Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy for most of Tuesday night, though Murphy is hoping to salvage a narrow victory — a year after watching Biden carry his state by 16 points — with votes from late-reporting blue counties.

The Republican Party, after hemorrhaging women and independent voters during the Trump era, saw Youngkin over-perform with independents and dramatically improve the party’s standing with women. Far from simply juicing the GOP’s pro-Trump base, he proved a Republican could assemble a broader coalition of right-leaning voters who may have scorned the former president — but who are willing to forget him.

McAuliffe spent his entire campaign yoking Youngkin to Trump. He hit hard on the pandemic, and like many Democrats, he believed the Texas abortion ban would turn Democratic voters out.
 
Abortion, McAuliffe said this summer, “will be a huge motivator for individuals to come out and vote.”
 
It wasn’t. Fewer than one in 10 voters said abortion was the most important issue to them, according to exit polls. Just 14 percent said the same thing about the coronavirus.
 
What did matter were education and the economy — both issues on which Youngkin had the edge. The Republican raised fears about so-called “critical race theory” and pummeled McAuliffe for saying during a debate, “I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

Yes, Michelle Wu won Boston’s mayoral election. And in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive prosecutor, won a second term.
 
But even in Democratic-rich swaths of the country, the electorate was hewing closer to the center than the left. In Buffalo, N.Y., India Walton, a democratic socialist who had defeated the city’s Democratic mayor, Byron Brown, in the primary, appeared to be losing to Brown’s write-in campaign.

Perhaps most significantly, in Minneapolis, voters overwhelmingly rejected a measure to overhaul the city’s police department. The measure, which had exposed Democrats to criticism that it aimed to “defund the police” at a time when the city was experiencing a surge in violence, would have replaced the department with a “Department of Public Safety” and eliminated minimum staffing requirements.

And that was on top of the victories for moderates that were already baked in — but finalized on Tuesday. Eric Adams, a moderate Democrat, won the mayor’s race in New York City. And in Ohio, Shontel Brown won the special election to fill the seat vacated by former Rep. Marcia Fudge, after defeating Nina Turner, a prominent progressive Democrat, in the primary earlier this year.

Progressive Democrats can make a credible case that they aren’t the problem. Bernie Sanders isn’t the president. Joe Biden is.
 
But in the aftermath of Tuesday’s results, the pressure to pass any kind of infrastructure and social spending plans will intensify, as Democrats fear a repeat blowout in the midterms next year. The resulting drift of the party is not likely to go to the left, but to the two centrist senators in the middle of those negotiations.
 
As one strategist put it in a text message late Tuesday, “Tonight really empowers [Joe] Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi says her chamber's social spending bill will include paid family and medical leave after all.
 
“The Ways and Means Committee crafted a policy that will finally give workers and their families the peace of mind of knowing that when disaster strikes, they can rely on paid leave to avoid total crisis. We do this responsibly, fully paying for the means-tested program.”
 
— Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.)
 
Timing details: Pelosi told members that the Rules Committee plans to meet today on the broader social spending bill. She added that Democrats have been discussing "the substance of the changes of the legislation" with the Congressional Budget Office to find out how much of the bill is paid for "as soon as possible." (Moderates have demanded a score before voting.)
 
How much will it cost? The leave provisions would cost around $200 billion, a source familiar with the conversations said, in line with what the president initially proposed. It would cover all workers wishing to take paid time off to deal with the birth of a newborn, care for a family member, or deal with an illness or injury, among other things, beginning in 2024.
 
(...)

In short: Republicans continue to benefit from the deep changes Trump inflicted on our politics, without paying any price for his legacy of white nationalism, presiding over the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the pandemic, and attempting to violently overthrow our political system.

Bientôt trois mois que Marjorie Taylor Greene n'avait plus fait parler d'elle. Tantôt qualifiée d'élue « pro-Trump », tantôt de « controversée », cette élue de la Chambre des représentants des États-Unis fait aujourd'hui l'objet d'une amende de 48 000 dollars, soit plus de 41 000 euros, pour ne avoir pas porté son masque dans l'enceinte du bâtiment. Selon CNN, c'est la vingtième fois que Marjorie Taylor Greene est condamnée à une amende pour non-port du masque : 500 dollars ( 441 euros) la première fois, 2 500 à chaque fois supplémentaire, selon les règles de la Chambre.

Au mois de mai, elle avait provoqué une nouvelle controverse en comparant les obligations de port du masque à l'obligation pour les Juifs de porter l'étoile jaune sous le nazisme.

WASHINGTON (AP) — An independent Pentagon review has concluded that the U.S. drone strike that killed innocent Kabul civilians and children in the final days of the Afghanistan war was not caused by misconduct or negligence, and it doesn’t recommend any disciplinary action.

The review, done by Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami Said, found there were breakdowns in communication and in the process of identifying and confirming the target of the bombing. Said concluded that the mistaken strike happened despite prudent measures to prevent civilian deaths.

U.S. authorities issued a federal rule mandating Covid-19 vaccinations or at least weekly testing for workers at U.S. companies with 100 or more employees. Workers must be fully vaccinated by Jan. 4 or submit to testing.