Last Call For Hill's College Plan

Hillary Clinton is pushing student loan debt relief, a major point with many folks my age and younger, as well as making college more affordable with Preisdent Obama's community college plan.

Hillary Rodham Clinton will propose an expanded government program Monday to address what she calls the crisis of student debt, her campaign said Friday.

A revised plan to make college more affordable and relieve the crushing debt students often accrue is a major plank of her policy platform and a key demand of young voters as well as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton is not expected to go as far as some on the left want by calling for “debt-free” college. She is instead expected to present a detailed, and expensive, plan to increase funding for public colleges and universities.

Clinton’s campaign press secretary Brian Fallon said the policy proposals will come in a speech in New Hampshire on Monday. Fallon did not provide details of the plan.

But sources familiar with the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly said the proposal centers on an incentive system for states to expand investments in higher education. With grants from the federal government, participating states would be able to lower the cost of attendance at public colleges and universities.

Clinton is also expected to include President Obama’s proposal for free community college as a part of her platform. That $60 billion proposal calls for states to cover a quarter of the cost for more than 10 years.

As I keep saying, all of these really great plans from Democrats about college and debt relief and higher education will never, ever, ever pass a Republican Congress.  Until we get rid of the GOP, these proposals are dead on arrival.

Perhaps we as voters should fix that.

Church Meets State In Head-On Collision

Meanwhile, back home in my old neck of the woods in Lincolnton, North Carolina, it seems the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners suddenly have a real problem with religion in local government.

The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners had always opened government meetings with Christian prayer. About two months ago, officials decided that in order to avoid legal trouble, they’d have to let everyone participate. 

That didn’t last long. 

On Monday, commission chairman Carrol Mitchem, who had previously announced he wouldn’t “bow to minorities” and that he “ain’t gonna have no new religion or pray to Allah” at board meetings, held true to his word and walked out on the first person to address the North Carolina government meeting with a Muslim prayer, the Lincoln Times-News reports. 

“That was very upsetting. It was upsetting,” Dustin Barto of the Foothills Interfaith Assembly, who had led the Muslim prayer, told WSOC-TV. 

By the end of the meeting, all prayer was banned at board meetings and will be replaced with a moment of silence. Commissioner Alex Patton initiated the motion which was easily voted into effect. 

“To me, the final straw was when our chairman got up and walked out,” Patton told WSCOTV, adding that the commission needs to focus on pressing matters like the economy and education. 

The issue of prayer at the meetings had generated months of controversy, the station reported. 

Previously, Mitchem had vowed to keep Christian-only prayers at the meetings.
“I don’t believe we need to be bowing to the minorities,” Mitchem had told WBTV. “The U.S. and the Constitution were founded on Christianity. This is what the majority of people believe in, and it’s what I’m standing up for.”

This is what freedom of religion really means in America: the freedom to inflict Christianity by law upon the rest of the people, but any other religion (or distinct lack of one) is not tolerated.  I'm glad that Lincoln County finally got rid of the prayer sessions, but the journey to get there was spiteful, ignorant, and discriminatory to say the least.

The sad part is I don't see the Supreme Court stepping in to stop this nonsense anytime soon, and in fact I'm pretty sure there's at least four justices who will make it worse whenever possible.

The Noise Machine Is Drowning The Iran Deal

Weeks of ridiculous Republican rhetoric on Iran, ranging from Lindsey Graham's Neville Chamberlain idiocy to Mike Huckabee's statement that President Obama was "leading Jews to the ovens" has turned the public decidedly against the proposition.

A majority of Americans opposes a recently reached international accord lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for new limits on its nuclear program, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.

Nearly six in 10 Americans, or 57 percent, oppose the nuclear deal, while 28 percent voice support for it in the national poll released Monday, in a 2-to-1 margin against the deal. 

Republicans strongly oppose the deal brokered by the Obama administration, 86 to 3 percent, while Democrats support the top second-term foreign policy agenda item for President Obama, 52 to 32 percent. 

A majority of Americans disapprove the way Obama is handling the situation in Iran (56 percent), compared with 35 percent who approve. A majority (58 percent) also thinks the deal makes the world less safe.

It's a good thing polls don't make foreign policy, but Republicans have, at least in the short term, turned this major win with Iran into a real problem for President Obama and the Democrats.  Several other polling outlets have reported similar numbers, and in every case Americans are very skeptical of the nuclear deal.  President Obama took to the airwaves yesterday to once again make the case for the deal.

President Obama took on critics of the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers in an aggressive speech on Wednesday, saying they were the same people who created the “drumbeat of war” and played on public fears to push the United States into the Iraq war more than a decade ago.

“Let’s not mince words: The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some sort of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon,” Mr. Obama told about 200 people in a speech at American University. “How can we in good conscience justify war before we’ve tested a diplomatic agreement that achieves our objectives?”

Mr. Obama, opening a new, more overtly political phase of his public campaign for the accord, portrayed the coming vote in Congress to approve or reject the deal as the most consequential foreign policy decision for lawmakers since Congress voted in 2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. He implored them to “shut out the noise” and back the deal.

Delivered in stark terms that surprised some foreign policy analysts and left no room for questioning whether the agreement is good for American security — “It’s not even close,” Mr. Obama declared at one point — the president’s speech was a striking display of certitude about a diplomatic deal that has split the American public and presented a dilemma for lawmakers, including many in his own party.

Mr. Obama criticized Republicans who are pressing forward with legislation to block the accord, which is on track for a vote in September. Opposition to the agreement, he said, stems from “knee-jerk partisanship that has become all too familiar, rhetoric that renders every decision made to be a disaster, a surrender.”

He said hard-liners in Iran who chant “Death to America” were “making common cause with the Republican caucus.”

Republicans went berserk over that last statement, accusing the President of calling them, and the majority of Americans against the deal, traitors to the country. In reponse to the president,   Republicans now say they will pass a bill implementing more sanctions on Iran after the 60 days is up, almost certainly collapsing the deal by default.

We'll see how this goes, as Sen. Chuck Schumer is the highest ranking Democrat yet to abandon the deal but you'd better believe that Republicans are going to do everything they can to wreck this deal and start a war with Iran.

StupidiNews!

• Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, the number 2 Democrat in the Senate, says he will vote against the Iran nuclear deal.
• A new study finds American teenagers get up too early in the morning to begin school and are not getting enough sleep to stay focused as a result.
• Ferguson, Missouri is expecting protests and marches to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown on Sunday.
• Apple has taken a significant chunk out of the watch market as sales of watches in the US have dropped more than 10% from last year.
• Adult streaming video service Pornhub has launched a premium version of the site for $9.99 a month, with 100,000 additional titles for viewing.

Last Call For Good News, Bad News On Climate Change

Politico environmental reporter Michael Grunwald finds President Obama's clean power plant plan to be both better -- and worse -- than he expected it to be.

Environmentalists, journalists, administration officials and industry flacks have all hyped the Clean Power Plan as the strongest climate action in history, but the 1560-page text provides plenty of evidence for my case that it’s merely the fourth-strongest climate action of the Obama era. I found a few nuggets that were even weaker than I expected, including a remarkable footnote suggesting that states can do nothing to reduce emissions for nine years and still comply with the rule. 

Still, I have to admit the overall plan is actually stronger than I expected yesterday, and much stronger than the toothless draft plan I ridiculed in May. So before I resume harping about the plan’s unambitious goals for the grid, and the various ways its defenders and critics are exaggerating its impact, let me discuss how the EPA fixed the draft’s most glaring absurdities, because these changes have been largely overlooked. The media have focused on modest tweaks to non-binding national goals—emissions are now expected to drop 32 percent by 2030, versus 30 percent in the draft, and coal is expected to provide 27 percent of our power instead of 31 percent—but those aren’t the changes that matter. 

What matters are the changes to binding state targets, and those changes are not modest. They also have serious political implications. The original draft took it easiest on states with the heaviest reliance on dirty fossil fuels—states that nevertheless complained the most about Obama’s supposedly draconian plan. The final rule cracks down much harder on those states, while taking it much easier on states that are already moving toward cleaner sources of electricity. 

Check out this excellent chart compiled by my colleague Alex Guillen. North Dakota would have been required to cut emissions just 10.6 percent to comply with the draft rule, the least of any state; it will have to cut emissions 44.9 percent to comply with the final rule, the most of any state except for similarly fossil-fueled Montana and South Dakota. Coal-rich Wyoming, Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana were also among the biggest losers in the revised plan. Meanwhile, the states that are already greening their grid—led by Washington, Oregon and New York—were the biggest winners in the final rule. 

That is a radical change. The EPA acknowledged in the plan that it “rectifies what would have been an inefficient, unintended outcome of putting the greater reduction burden on lower-emitting sources and states.” As EPA air quality chief Janet McCabe explained to me in an interview: “We got a lot of comments making the same point you did.” But it hasn’t gotten attention, perhaps because coal-state politicians cried wolf so loudly about the draft. It’s the result of a decision to calculate emissions according to a uniform measurement for every power plant rather than a weirdly calibrated analysis of what’s reasonable for individual states. 

But whether or not the new approach is more technically or legally defensible, getting tougher on dirtier states could have a dramatic effect on results, because states like Kentucky and West Virginia were always unlikely to do any more than the legal minimum, while states like California and Massachusetts are unlikely to stop their transitions to cleaner energy once they achieve compliance.

So yes, when Mitch McConnell is calling on states to refuse compliance with the plan, they don't have to do anything until 2024 at the earliest anyway.  And that means AG Jack Conway here in Kentucky, who is fighting the plan hard, really isn't fighting anything because Kentucky doesn't have to actually do anything for nine years.

That's kind of the dirty secret of the EPA plan, it doesn't actually do anything as far as forcing compliance for nearly a decade.

And another decade of carbon pollution is certainly not going to help things.

Last Call For Following Jindal Down The Drain

On Monday Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal (who spent this afternoon at the Clown Car Kids' Table) ended that state's Medicaid contract with Planned Parenthood, not even bothering to wait for the results of the investigation he demanded.

Today, Alabama GOP Gov. Robert Bentley followed Jindal's shining example of stupidity.

Gov. Robert Bentley announced today he was terminating an agreement between the Alabama Medicaid Agency and Planned Parenthood. 

Bentley's office sent out copies of the termination letter to Planned Parenthood Southeast in Atlanta. 

The letter does not say what services Planned Parenthood provides for the Medicaid Agency. That information was not immediately available. 

The governor's office released a statement from the governor. 

"The deplorable practices at Planned Parenthood have been exposed to Americans, and I have decided to stop any association with the organization in Alabama," Bentley said. 

"As a doctor and Alabama's governor, the issue of human life, from conception to birth and beyond, is extremely important. I respect human life and do not want Alabama to be associated with an organization that does not." 

The letter says that the Alabama Medicaid Agency is exercising its ability to terminate its provider contract with Planned Parenthood with a 15-day notice. 

The letter says that if Planned Parenthood opposes the decision it has 60 days to apply for a fair hearing.

That 15-day notice means that Alabama will actually cut off their agreement before Louisiana does, as it has a 30-day cutoff agreement.  Go figure.

Anyhow, it's not like Louisiana and Alabama have high teen pregnancy rates or anything.  Oh wait, they do: Alabama is just ahead of Kentucky at #15, and Louisiana is #5, so naturally cutting off funding for poor women from affordable contraception services will totally improve that ranking.

For comparison, Louisiana has the same teen pregnancy rate as Costa Rica and Jamaica with 69 pregnancies per 1,000 teens and at 62 per 1,000, Alabama has the same rate as our happy neighbors to the south, Mexico.

So sure, this seems like a good way to reduce the instance of possibly unwanted pregnancies that might end in abortion or something.

Good job!

The Turtle's White Flag

Looks like my state's senior Senator is killing talk of "shutting down the government" early, but what happens when Mitch McConnell loses control of his caucus again?

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday said he would begin negotiations with Democrats to prevent a government shutdown in September. 

The majority leader vowed there would not be another shutdown on his watch — but it could be difficult to avoid, given the long list of thorny issues he will have to tackle this fall.

Funding for the government is set to run out at the end of September, and Democrats and the White House want to increase defense and nondefense spending. 

Some Republicans are also demanding new defense spending, and many GOP lawmakers and Republicans running for president want to defund Planned Parenthood. The debt ceiling is also going to have to be lifted later this year. 

As usual, McConnell has been playing his cards close to the vest. But his main goal is to minimize drama and maintain the Senate Republican majority in 2016. Messy fiscal fights could increase the chances Democrats win back the upper chamber. 

The Kentucky Republican hasn’t told colleagues of his endgame plans, but they suspect he is angling for a yearlong spending measure that would allow him to sidestep a fight over busting the caps set by the 2011 Budget Control Act. 

“Whatever minimizes the drama, because Mitch is not a big fan of drama,” said a Republican senator who requested anonymity.

Mitch wants this battle out of his hair.  I'm betting the four GOP senators running for the White House aren't going to be much help in the new Trump Party.  BooMan calls it what it is: capitulation.

He’ll need the Democrats to go along with his plan, in both the Senate and the House. And he’ll have to let his own caucus vote on a bunch of riders to do things like ban spending on Planned Parenthood, kill Obamacare (again), declare Iran the second coming of the Third Reich, and obliterate the Environmental Protection Agency. But, since the only way the Republicans could conceivably prevail on any of those issues is to shut down the government and pray for a miracle, McConnell doesn’t really give a shit about them. He’s not interested in another government shutdown that yields nothing but aggravated voters and higher disapproval numbers for his party. 

However, he’s going to have to contend with 17 presidential contenders braying at him to fight, fight, fight, as well as constant bellowing about what a sellout he is and how Washington Republicans never keep their promises. The only thing he has going for him, besides reality, is that he’s not Speaker Boehner. He can hide behind Democratic filibusters, for example, and he doesn’t have 150 members who make Michele Bachmann look statesmanlike. Boehner will deliver a conservative heat-fever wish list of a budget and then have to turn around and sell McConnell’s nothing burger to his caucus.
And, of course, the House Republicans won’t go for it. At all. So, Boehner will have to go hat in hand (again) to Nancy Pelosi and beg her to deliver her caucus. 

Pelosi, of course, wants nothing more than another government shutdown, provided that she can avoid taking much blame for it. So, her inclination to give Boehner some kind of fig leaf to disguise his humiliation will be limited. And, yet, with all these presidential candidates claiming that if we just elect them things will magically get done the way that conservatives want them done, Boehner will have a tough sell to explain why a Republican-led House and a Republican-led Senate cannot accomplish even one item on their insane wish list. 

What McConnell’s trying to do is preemptively accept a harsh reality, but he’s going to have very few supporters and they’ll be quieter than church mice.

We all know where the game ends: the budget passes that President Obama and Nancy Pelosi want. The question is how much damage is done to the place on the way through bat country.

The Fight To Vote, Con't

President Obama is using the 50th Anniversary of the Voting Rights Act today to call on Republicans who control Congress to act to restore it.  The GOP Congress won't.  The great part is the people who are losing their vote because of Congress's inaction have no recourse to remove the lawmakers who continue to disenfranchise them, too.

President Obama will call for the restoration of the Voting Rights Act on its 50th anniversary Thursday, the White House said.

Obama will hold a teleconference to commemorate the landmark legislation and call for its renewal, following a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that voided one of its central provisions. 

Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who rose to prominence in the 1960s as a civil rights leader, will participate.

The event will allow Obama to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans, many of whom argue some provisions of the 1965 law went too far. It will take place on the same day as the first GOP presidential primary debate.

Asked about the timing of the event, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that “one person’s irony is another person’s serendipity.”

“Maybe there will be an opportunity for Republican candidates to discuss the right for every American to cast a vote,” he added.

As we learned in this week's Sunday Long Read, the Republican battle to destroy the Voting Rights Act has been a fifty year battle, and at this point they have won the right to disenfranchise millions. Unless the legislation's provision for keeping tabs on the 150 year effort to steal the vote from black voters over the years, it will only happen again and again.

Good for President Obama and AG Lynch to fight for this publicly, and call the Republicans out on this.

StupidiNews!

• Tennessee officials say a man drew a hatchet and pepper spray to injure three moviegoers in Nashville Wednesday afternoon, he was killed when charging a SWAT team with an air pistol.
• New Hampshire Republicans have cut a third from the state's funding for Planned Parenthood clinics in response to several videos of employees discussing fetal tissue donations.
• Malaysian officials are confirming that wing debris washed up on Reunion Island matches part numbers for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared over the ocean last summer.
• Four years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster mothballed the country's nuclear power plants, Japan is bringing the first reactors back online with additional safety standards.
• Google says it will push the "largest software update in history" to correct a critical text messaging flaw in Android smartphones that could give hackers instant control over phones.

Last Call For The Education Of Kansas Voters

The Sam Brownback GOP Disaster in Kansas continues as massive austerity cuts to public schools has now left districts without enough licensed teachers to fill jobs, as experienced teachers are leaving in droves.

While the tax cut experiment didn’t create jobs, it did destroy the Kansas budget, and one major consequence of that has been massive funding cuts for Kansas schools. Several districts ended the school year early for lack of funds. Education funding levels are so low, and unequal across school districts, that judges have ruled them unconstitutional and the case is currently pending at the state Supreme Court. 

Kansas’ teacher pay is among the lowest in the nation. The Kansas legislature has removed teachers’ tenure protections, tried to make it possible to criminally prosecute them for teaching offensive material, and attempted to weaken collective bargaining. Teachers are retiring in fear that the state will soon target their retirement benefits, one superintendent from a nearbyMissouri school district said. 

There are double the normal openings for school staff in Kansas, teachers are quitting and retiring at high rates, and new teachers aren’t looking to start careers in Kansas. The Independence, Missouri School District has billboards to lure teachers from over the border, and they’ve seen an doubling in applicants with Kansas addresses, even as applicants from Iowa and Arkansas have held steady. 

A piece of legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) now allows several Kansas school systems to hire unlicensed teachers to fill the gap.

Republicans got exactly what they've been calling for nationally in Kansas: major teacher pay cuts, retirement benefit cuts, tenure system loss, weakened teachers' unions, all of which were supposed to magically improve the system, get rid of "lazy bad teachers making too much money" and make super smart kids.

Surprise!

Kansas education is a wasteland, teachers are fleeing and giant corporate lobbyist ALEC wants to turn schools into factories churning out ignorant, compliant workers.

All part of the plan.

We're Gonna Drive On Through Electric Avenue

Meet Mary Nichols, the woman who helped LA clean up its smog problem over her long career as an environmental force in California state politics.  California could be the first state to require all new vehicles sold be electric if Nichols, the state's top clean air regulator, has anything to say about it.

And she does.

Sergio Marchionne had a funny thing to say about the $32,500 battery-powered Fiat 500e that his company markets in California as “eco-chic.” “I hope you don’t buy it,” he told his audience at a think tank in Washington in May 2014. He said he loses $14,000 on every 500e he sells and only produces the cars because state rules re­quire it. Marchionne, who took over the bailed-out Chrysler in 2009 to form Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, warned that if all he could sell were electric vehicles, he would be right back looking for another govern­ment rescue. 

So who’s forcing Marchionne and all the other major automakers to sell mostly money-losing electric vehicles? More than any other person, it’s Mary Nichols. She’s run the California Air Resources Board since 2007, championing the state’s zero-emission-vehicle quotas and backing Pres­ident Barack Obama’s national mandate to double average fuel economy to 55 miles per gallon by 2025. She was chairman of the state air regulator once before, a generation ago, and cleaning up the famously smoggy Los Angeles skies is just one accomplishment in a four-decade career. 

Nichols really does intend to force au­tomakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency’s heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regula­tions today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California’s famous highways. “If we’re going to get our transportation system off petroleum,” she says, “we’ve got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now.”

In that speech in Washington, Mar­chionne was talking up the little-bit-better option. He touted the improved efficiency to be wrung from traditional engines and gasoline-electric hybrids. But Nichols isn’t scared of auto executives and has never ac­cepted their vision of what’s possible. (Gen­eral Motors said catalytic converters, an early advance in tailpipe pollution control that Nichols promoted in the 1970s, could kill the company. They’re commonplace today, and GM’s not dead yet.) 

Even if most people outside California have never heard of Mary Nichols, she’s the world’s most influential automotive regu­lator, says Levi Tillemann, author of The Great Race, a book on the future of automo­bile technology. “Under her leadership, the Air Resources Board has been the driving force for electrification,” Tillemann says.

As goes California, home to one-seventh of America's population and the cars to go with it, so goes the nation. And Mary Nichols is calling the shots.  I'm betting Republicans are going to go berserk over this, particularly California Republican (and professional car thief) Darrel Issa.  We'll see what happens, but when it comes to putting pressure on the rest of the auto industry, California has a big axe to swing.

Trials And Tribulations In Cincy

Didn’t take long for this to happen, did it?

Some of the contents of Sam DuBose’s car at the time of his death have been identified. 

WLWT has confirmed through CPD’s search warrant inventory document that four bags and a jar of marijuana were in Dubose’s car at the time of the July 19 traffic stop that ended in former UC Officer Ray Tensing fatally shooting DuBose. 

However, multiple sources have told WLWT officers found a little less than 2 pounds of marijuana. 

No officials were immediately able to confirm the amount of marijuana found. 

According to reports, the marijuana was found in the car’s center console, under the front passenger seat and on the floor behind the driver’s seat. 

Police sources said the street value for the amount of marijuana found in DuBose’s car is anywhere between $2,000 and $5,000 depending on the quality and the demand. 

Police said any marijuana weighing more than two pounds is considered a felony. 

Officers said the search warrant was obtained two days after the deadly shooting.

Because a police state that murders people certainly isn’t above planting evidence after the fact, even if having pot was worth justification for Sam DuBose’s summary execution by Ray Tensing, or that it had anything at all to do with Tensing pulling the trigger. Because of course a black person killed by a white cop had pot on them, right? Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Sam DuBose, yadda yadda forever and ever amen. Always do, ya know.

So now thanks to the Cincinnati media that bungled this story from day one, accepting the police report that Tensing was being dragged and didn’t think to question it until after the bodycam footage surfaced, we have the same media accepting this police report, a warrant executed two days after the shooting, by cops that we already know lied to the media in the first place. It’s not like they’d have any motive to make DuBose look like a felon or anything.

The stenography goes unquestioned again around here. Good job, guys!

StupidiNews!

• US Air Force officials in Florida say two airmen were killed during a parachute training accident, the airmen were part of the 24th Special Operations Wing based at Eglin AFB.
• A California man has plead guilty to felony hate crime charges after telephone threats to the offices of the Council on American-Islamic Relations after last year's Charlie Hebdo massacre.
• GOP Govs. John Kasich and Chris Christie made the cut for FOX's prime-time GOP debate Thursday, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and 2012 runner-up Rick Santorum did not.
• Netflix is allowing its employees as much parental leave as necessary for the first 12 months after a birth or adoption, a new standard among already generous Silicon Valley companies. 
• Major League Baseball's streaming media division has cut a $600 million deal with a new partner: the National Hockey League, for streaming out of market games over six years.

Last Call For The Late, Great Planet Cruz

President Obama today revealed tough new emissions rules on power plants to drastically lower carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The Obama administration will formally adopt an ambitious regulation for cutting greenhouse-gas pollution on Monday, requiring every state to reduce emissions from coal-burning power plants and putting the country on a course that could change the way millions of Americans get their electricity. 

A retooled version of the administration’s Clean Power Plan, first proposed a year ago, will seek to accelerate the shift to renewable energy while setting tougher goals for slashing carbon emissions blamed for global warming, according to administration officials briefed on the details. 

The new plan sets a goal of cutting carbon pollution from power plants by 32 percent by the year 2030, compared with 2005 levels — a 9 percent jump from the previous target of 30 percent — while rewarding states and utility companies that move quickly to expand their investment in solar and wind power. 

Many states will face tougher requirements for lowering greenhouse-gas emissions under the revised plan. But state governments also will be given more time to meet their targets and considerably more flexibility in how they achieve their pollution-cutting goals, according to two senior officials knowledgeable about the rule. For the first time, the officials said, the plan also includes a “reliability safety valve” that can buy states additional time if needed to avoid disruptions in the power supply.

That's what one party is doing about climate change.

This is what the other party in American politics is doing about it.

Sen. Ted Cruz on Sunday said facts don’t support climate change, in a speech that described the notion as a front for power-hungry politicians who want to control Americans’ lives. 

During an appearance before some of the most influential conservative donors in the country, the Texas Republican said there is no factual basis for scientists’ research that shows the planet is changing. The 2016 White House hopeful said none of the research is worth the paper it is printed on. 

“If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming,” Cruz said in California’s Orange County. “The satellite says it ain’t happening.” 

Instead, Cruz said, government researchers are reverse engineering data sets to falsify changes in the climate. “They’re cooking the books. They’re actually adjusting the numbers,” Cruz said. “Enron used to do their books the same way.”

One party wants to save the planet.  The other party is accusing scientists around the world of a massive political conspiracy to destroy the world economy or something.  It's insanity.

Don't ever tell me there's no difference between the two parties ever again.

The Revenge Of Shutdown Countdown

Forbes's Stan Collender pegs the chances of Republicans shutting down the government on October 1 at 60% now that Planned Parenthood is the new ACORN, and if anything, he belives that number to be low.

Republicans are vowing with ever-increasing vehemence to vote against legislation – including a CR — that includes funding for Planned Parenthood and that means that a continuing resolution that simply extends existing funding at current levels won’t be acceptable to the GOP majorities in the House and Senate. The House and Senate Republican leadership could cobble together a coalition with the moderate members of their own caucus and Democrats, but they would do so by placing themselves and their members in extreme political peril. 

This will be more of a problem in the Senate where the four senators running for the GOP presidential nomination will likely fight each other to lead the filibuster that prevents a CR that funds Planned Parenthood from being debated. Given the very little time left before the start of the fiscal year, that filibuster alone could lead to at least a quick shutdown (Fiscal 2016 starts on a Thursday so a short-term shutdown over the two days leading to the weekend plus Saturday and Sunday is certainly possible). 

Even if cloture in invoked and the Senate adopts a CR with Planned Parenthood funding, it will still have to be compromised with the continuing resolution that comes from the far more socially conservative House Republican majority that is far less likely to accept it. 

In addition, a CR that doesn’t include funding for Planned Parenthood will be filibustered by Senate Democrats. 

And the White House has already promised to veto a continuing resolution that cuts funds for Planned Parenthood, and almost no one thinks the votes will exist in either house to override it even if the government closes down as a result. 

All of this justifies the increase from 40 percent to 60 percent of the chances of a shutdown this fall. If anything, 60 percent may understate the odds of it actually happening.

I personally think this number is closer to 90% if not more.  Given what Oliver Willis calls the continuing "Trumpification" of the GOP, whoever gets to shut down the government at this point wins and breaks out of the pack like Trump has.  Senators Cruz, Rubio, Paul, and Graham will be tripping over themselves trying to make it happen.

The nutjobs in the House will run Boehner over to take advantage of that opportunity.  It'll be a madhouse and the Republican voters will be egging them on the whole way.  State are local Republicans will say "Hey, we're finally sticking it to those assholes in Washington!"  And as long as Grandma's Social Security and Medicare checks keep coming (and there's 0% chance that will stop) they won't care.

Ted Cruz proved in 2013 that you can blow things up and get rewarded for it.  Why wouldn't Republicans do it now?