This week was not great for progressive politics. Last Tuesday night, Democrats lost the governorship in Kentucky, placing my ancestral state’s Obamacare exchange and Medicaid expansion in potential jeopardy. Voters defeated an equal rights measure in Houston, and the Virginia Senate remained under Republican control after a hard-fought campaign. So I was feeling pretty angsty about the future of America until I opened my “Stuff Government Does” Evernote a couple of nights ago and remembered all the positive things governments around the country did last month. There are a lot of good reasons to be upset about the direction of politics and policy in this country. But let's have a weekend of optimism. Here's your monthly rundown of the areas where we made improvement in October.
Marijuana now legal in Oregon: It was a year ago that Oregon voters approved a ballot measure legalizing recreational pot, and as of October 1st, dispensaries could officially start selling. That makes Oregon the third state to move on from the war on weed. Hopefully, California and Nevada will join them in 2016.
Speaking of marijuana, you may have read that Ohio voters rejected a legalization initiative last week. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that much: the measure was so poorly constructed that even Willie Nelson spoke out against it. So don’t sweat it. They’ll do it better next time.
Stricter limits on ground-level ozone emissions: Also on October 1st, the EPA issued a new rule requiring all US counties to keep their ground-level ozone measurements below 70 parts per billion. Atmospheric ozone protects us from the sun; apparently, ground level ozone is the main ingredient in smog and causes emphysema and cancer. So good for the EPA (though according to their own scientists, they should have gone even further). Looking at this map, it looks like this rule isn’t coming a moment too soon for California, nearly all of whose counties are not in compliance.
By the way — and I’ll write about this more in December — but what a year for the EPA! Limits on CO2 from power plants, heavy trucks, limits on methane, and now smog. The protections enacted by the EPA are the most important reason that we need a Democrat to succeed Barack Obama as president.
Digital privacy in California: I gripe a lot about how governments at all levels today have done far too little to adapt policy to the existence of things like smartphones and cloud services. Fortunately, on October 8th, California brought itself into the 21st century with regard to civil protections against search and seizure. Under the bill signed by Jerry Brown, law enforcement will be prohibited from compelling businesses to turn over any metadata or digital communications, including emails, texts, and Google documents, without a warrant. It also bars law enforcement from searching or tracking the location of mobile phones without authorization from a judge.
It’s hard to believe that in most of the country, if it’s not written in ink on paper, your correspondence isn’t necessarily privileged. Until the federal government becomes legislatively functional, if you like your digital privacy, move to California. 
State employees can use the sharing economy: Speaking of bringing California into the 21st century, another bill the governor signed into law last month requires state agencies to permit their employees to use Lyft and Uber and to stay in Airbnb lodging when traveling on state business. Up until today, they were required to stay in “commercial lodgings.” It’s another step in reducing government’s suspicion of technologies that are making people’s lives easier.
This has been a great fall in California. It’s too bad practically every other state in the union is under Republican leadership.
DoD withdraws support for the University of Phoenix: Student debt is drag on lives of millions of people and on the economy as a whole, and for-profit colleges are the main culprits. Of those, the University of Phoenix is by far the worst, holding $35.5 billion in student debt — over $25 billion more than the second-place creditor.
But the University of Phoenix suffered a massive blow on October 9th when the Department of Defense announced that it will no longer allow service members to use federal money to attend any of the subsidiaries of the Apollo Education Group, of which the aforementioned institution is a part. This group of for-profit colleges is no longer allowed to recruit on DoD property anymore, either.
It’s pretty sketchy that for-profit schools, whose degrees are of questionable value, have ever had access to taxpayer money, so good for DoD for shutting out a large chunk of them.
Federal loans can be used for bootcamps: For-profit colleges can no longer take DoD money; under a new Department of Education pilot program, coding bootcamps and other non-traditional education programs now can. The program is specifically designed to steer low-income students “away from predatory for-profit schools."
Men with non-degree certificates in computer / information services currently earn 72% more per year than men with a traditional associate’s degree. This shows that learning to code in a physical or online environment that focuses on practical skills is way more likely to get you a decent-paying job than anything you’d learn at Devry. This new policy will increase access to well-paying jobs for more people.