Good news in Politics

I just thought I'd share some links to items of good news in politics that have come into my inbox in the last few days:

1) On Wednesday, the Massachusetts house passed the Global Warming Solutions Act (a brief news story can be found here). "The bill empowers the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs to regulate green house gasses from all sources across the commonwealth" and "mandates a reduction of 80% below 1990 levels by the year 2050." The senate already passed a different version of the bill and the governor is expected to sign it, so it is very likely that Massachusetts will become (at least) the sixth state to have such a bill (California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington, and Connecticut already have similar legislation, and there may be others I am not aware of.)

2) Today the MA Senate passed a "Green Jobs Bill," which had also previously passed the house. The bill creates a center and grant programs to support job creation and job training in green energy. Some aspects of the bill are along the lines of Van Jones' work of targeting low income and minority workers to get training in "green collar" jobs.

3) In other good news, the FCC ruled today that Comcast was in violation of Net Neutrality in disrupting users person to person file transfers and ordered them to stop this practice. I am not at all an expert on this issue, but as I understand it, the ruling was the first major test of whether the FCC could and would interfere when an internet provider selectively blocks or slows traffic. Here's an article about it for more information.