Bob Menendez’s Lawyers Seek Lenient Sentence

Playbook: “The simplest and most important reason for the country’s expected return to a peaceful transfer of presidential power is that Trump actually won this presidential election, unlike the last one. As a result, he and his Republican allies have not mounted a public campaign of lies in an effort to mislead his supporters into thinking that he won, and they haven’t lobbied Republican elected officials to try to get them to throw the election to him anyway, as they did after the 2020 election.

Seth Masket: “A substantial chunk — let’s say 90% — of the story about the working class leaving the Democratic Party over the past 50 years is a story about race. To simplify, it’s about working class whites starting in the 1970s, and Latinos more recently, being mobilized against the Democratic Party due to resentment toward Blacks.” Also: “We have never had a consensus definition of ‘working class.’ It could mean people without a college education, or lower-income people, or people in specific types of jobs like manufacture or service, or something else.

President-elect Donald Trump has invited members of the House Freedom Caucus to meet with him at Mar-a-Lago Jan. 10, Punchbowl News reports. The HFC, a group of conservative hardliners, yielded to Trump and helped elect Mike Johnson speaker last week.

In October, a group of Medicaid providers warned Colorado lawmakers that they were in trouble. One after another, the providers — from hospitals, mental health clinics and community health centers — described a budgetary collision that’s played out for more than a year: Hundreds of thousands of Coloradans lost Medicaid coverage after the pandemic ebbed, resulting in less money for the clinics’ already-thin operations.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It was made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago region. It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them—including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet—is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm. The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year—the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Explosions roared through the canyons lining the Klamath River earlier this year, signaling a new chapter for the region that hugs the Oregon-California border. In October, the removal of four hydroelectric dams built on the river was completed—the largest project of its kind in US history. The blast of the final dam was just the beginning.