Amid a GOP assault on democracy, a few bits of good news...

A federal bankruptcy judge dismissed an effort by the National Rifle Association to declare bankruptcy on Tuesday, ruling that the gun rights group had not filed the case in good faith.

The ruling slams the door on the NRA's attempt to use bankruptcy laws to evade New York officials seeking to dissolve the organization.

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The bankruptcy trial had paused other legal challenges the NRA had been facing, but this decision returns the group to its confrontation with the New York attorney general, who is seeking to shut it down over alleged "fraud and abuse."

  NPR

The U.S. Interior Department approved the country's first large-scale offshore wind project Tuesday, a final hurdle that reverses course from the Trump administration and sets the stage for a major shift in the energy landscape.

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The $2.8 billion project, known as Vineyard Wind 1, will consist of 62 turbines spaced about a mile apart, each standing about 837 feet above the water's surface. Cables buried beneath the ocean floor will connect the power from these turbines with the New England grid onshore.

The project is expected to produce enough renewable electricity to power 400,000 Massachusetts homes every year while also saving ratepayers billions of dollars and reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions in the state by about 1.68 million metric tons.

Lars Pedersen, Vineyard Wind's CEO, recently told public radio station WBUR that he expects offshore construction to begin next year, with renewable energy flowing to the grid by the end of 2023.

  NPR

This next one is not a done deal, but it's encouraging.

It's a tough time to be a young person. COVID-19 has robbed many of them of experiences and plans. Their unemployment rate remains high. College enrollment is down.

To address those concerns and bolster preparedness for a warming world, President Biden wants to retool and relaunch one of the country's most celebrated government programs: the Civilian Conservation Corps.

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Created in 1933, in the wake of the Great Depression, the CCC put millions of young men — yes, just men — back to work. They moved from East to West, to places they'd never been before, building roads, bridges, telephone lines, campgrounds and dams — infrastructure that's still in use and, at times, maintained by smaller conservation corps crews such as Spofforth's today. The original CCC ended in 1942, disrupted by World War II.

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The original Civilian Conservation Corps employed roughly 3 million young men in its nine-year run. The corps fought wildfires and helped in disaster relief efforts after hurricanes. It built more than 100,000 miles of roads and trails, 318,000 dams and tens of thousands of bridges. It strung telephone lines across mountain passes, connecting the country.

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"Just like we need a unified national response to COVID-19, we need a unified national response to climate change," Biden said while introducing his climate team.

While his is not the first effort to bring back a federal conservation corps, Biden has put the program center stage like never before. One of his first executive orders called for the creation of a modern CCC to "mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs." His interior secretary, Deb Haaland, sponsored a bill with a similar goal while representing New Mexico in Congress

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Biden's Civilian Climate Corps, while modeled after the original CCC, would likely differ in a few significant ways.

The first: scope. Biden wants to spend $10 billion on creating his Civilian Climate Corps — a sliver of the $2 trillion proposed in his American Jobs Plan. Adjusted for inflation, that's a far cry from the money Roosevelt poured into the original CCC and less than many progressive groups have been advocating for.

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The jobs, though, would be offered to a far broader group of people. For all the nostalgia the CCC brings up among progressives, there's the reality it was racially segregated, closed off to women and paid almost nothing.

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Biden's executive order directed the Interior and Agriculture departments to submit a report laying out how a program could form under existing statutes. (The report is overdue and has not yet been released.)

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Most of the jobs would be short term, with the goal of launching corps members into environmental and outdoors-focused careers.

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Montana Conservation Corps crews are already doing some of the work envisioned in Biden's climate proposal — reducing wildfire risk and building artificial dams to help retain water higher in watersheds.

That kind of work would increase exponentially if Biden's proposal passes, said McKinney, president of the corps. But the bigger benefit might be in what it could do for America's youth.

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Biden is the most unapologetic, big-government Democratic president in decades. It's a stance supported by an array of circumstances: the enormity of the pandemic, former President Donald Trump's embrace of big spending projects and deficit-funded tax cuts, and a progressive shift within the Democratic Party.

"Well, we've been living in the shadow of Reagan's America. And now it's back to the future. We're going to start to live in the shadow of FDR," said Jonathan Alter, a journalist and historian who wrote a book about Roosevelt's famed first 100 days.

  NPR

Biden makes the right choice for Interior

In a historic decision, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has chosen Deb Haaland, a congressional representative from New Mexico and a Native American, to lead the Interior Department, an agency that for much of the nation’s history played a central role in the dislocation and abuse of Indigenous communities from coast to coast.

Mr. Biden’s transition team announced the decision Thursday. If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Haaland would be the first Native American to lead a cabinet-level agency. She would oversee a sprawling department responsible for some 500 million acres of public lands, including national parks, oil and gas drilling sites and endangered species habitat.

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Ms. Haaland was not seen as Mr. Biden’s initial choice to run the agency. In the days after the presidential election, he was believed to have been leaning toward Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico and a longtime friend who has spent his career pushing to conserve wilderness, according to people close to the transition team.

  NYT

Udall would have been good, too.

On Thursday, Mr. Udall offered his full-throated support for the choice. “President-Elect Biden has chosen an outstanding leader,” he said. “She will undo the damage of the Trump administration, restore the department’s work force and expertise, uphold our obligations to Native communities, and take the bold action needed to tackle the accelerating climate and nature crises.”

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A child of military veterans, she attended 13 public schools before graduating from high school, then started a salsa company and worked as a cake decorator before putting herself through college and law school using both food stamps and student loans.

Over the past two years, Ms. Haaland has served on the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the Interior Department. Under the Trump administration, the current and former Interior secretaries, David Bernhardt and Ryan Zinke, have used the agency to make it easier to mine and drill on public lands, while also weakening protections on endangered species. Just this week, the Interior Department finalized two rules that limit protections to animals and plants under the Endangered Species Act.

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“The sad fact is that we have a president who is intent on selling off our public lands to his friends for fracking and drilling,” she said in a speech earlier this year. She noted that under Mr. Bernhardt and Mr. Zinke, the Interior Department slashed the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, national monuments in Utah that are adjacent to Navajo nation territories and a Hopi reservation, opening up the land to mining and drilling.

In her new role, Ms. Haaland could be tasked with restoring protections to the monuments. That land, she said, “is now open to leases and desecration by extractive industries, which will exacerbate climate change and destroy countless sacred sites and erase our history.”

She would also be responsible for executing one of Mr. Biden’s most controversial proposals: his pledge to ban all new hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on public lands. Already, fossil fuel groups are pushing back, urging Senators to block her confirmation on Capitol Hill.

This could be a fight. If they don't confirm her, they'll be okay with Udall. But they may get enough pressure to confirm her after smearing her in her hearing.

If she is confirmed by the Senate, her departure from the House could briefly make it more difficult for Mr. Biden to advance his legislative agenda, since it would narrow the Democrats’ already razor-thin majority until a special election could be held in her Democratic-majority district.

For that reason, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was said to have been urging Mr. Biden not to select Ms. Haaland.

Apparently, Nancy is losing some of her clout. Time for her to be sidelined anyway.

But we definitely do not need a Republican House.