About 9 years ago, California passed a law banning single use plastic bags because they were a major pollution nuisance. Those were replaced with allegedly recyclable, multiple use heavy plastic bags. The law didn’t work. The NYT writes:
Then came the reusable, heavy-duty plastic bags, offered to shoppers for ten cents. Designed to withstand dozens of uses, and technically recyclable, many retailers treated them as exempt from the ban.
But because they didn’t look much different from the flimsy bags they replaced, lots of people didn’t actually reuse them. And though they came emblazoned with a recycling symbol, it turned out that few, if any, actually were recycled.
The unhappy result: Last year, Californians threw away more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed, according to figures from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.
Now the legislature is just going to pass a law to ban all plastic bags at store check-outs. People can buy paper bags or bring their own. The pandemic caused fears that reusable bags would spread the virus, and that led to vastly increased use of the thick plastic bags. Basically, people were using the thicker bags just once. The average time shoppers used a plastic bag was just twelve minutes.
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New York Magazine reports about Faux News:
Frequent viewers of conservative media are well acquainted with [former FBI informant] Alexander Smirnov. Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity have said that his allegations are key to what they describe as the “Biden crime family” — the narrative that Hunter Biden accepted millions of dollars in bribes from the energy company Burisma to give to his father in exchange for then-VP Biden making a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma go away. According to the watchdog group Media Matters, Hannity alone featured 85 segments in 2023 on the allegations. (Republican politicians also trusted the source: Last July, Representative James Comer and Senator Chuck Grassley released an FBI record detailing the unsubstantiated allegations, describing Smirnov as a “trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme.”)Fox News viewers have heard plenty about the lesser charges Hunter Biden is facing, including possession of a firearm as a drug user and tax evasion. But after prosecutors provided evidence that the corruption allegation was false, there was no mention of the story on Hannity on Thursday — or anywhere in Fox News’s prime-time programming, for that matter. (Chuck Grassley’s office has also stood by his public release of the unsubstantiated allegations.)
In June 2020, Smirnov told his FBI handlers that he had two meetings in 2015 in which Burisma executives told him that they hired Hunter Biden as a consultant to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Smirnov claimed that Burisma paid Hunter Biden $10 million for his trouble. But prosecutors state that Smirnov never provided any evidence for this explosive allegation.
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The NYT reports that operatives in the TTKP (Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party) are planning a massive attack on what is left of abortion rights once DJT gets back in power:
Allies of former President Donald J. Trump and officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights if he returns to power that would go far beyond proposals for a national ban or the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.
Behind the scenes, specific anti-abortion plans being proposed by Mr. Trump’s allies are sweeping and legally sophisticated. Some of their proposals would rely on enforcing the Comstock Act, a long-dormant law from 1873, to criminalize the shipping of any materials used in an abortion — including abortion pills, which account for the majority of abortions in America.
“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” said Jonathan F. Mitchell, the legal force behind a 2021 Texas law that found a way to effectively ban abortion in the state before Roe v. Wade was overturned. “There’s a smorgasbord of options.”
“I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Mr. Mitchell said of Mr. Trump. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”
The New York Times reported on Friday that Mr. Trump had told advisers and allies that he liked the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban but that he wanted to wait until the Republican primary contest was over to publicly discuss his views.
National abortion ban legislation would affect only a small fraction of abortions, given that nearly 94 percent happen in the first trimester, before 13 weeks of pregnancy, and would present obstacles for women who experience severe complications later in pregnancy.
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