StupidiNews!

• Pakistani Taliban forces attacked an air base, resulting in 29 dead, including 16 Pakistani soldiers and airmen.
• Nevada's state water agency has approved a $45 million deal that would provide surplus water for Southern California now, with the option to buy it back later.
• The final Senate Republican move to block the international nuclear deal with Iran has failed a vote, meaning the deal will go forward as a major victory for the Obama administration.
• Greek voters will go to the polls on Sunday to decide a replacement government for outgoing PM Alexis Tsipras, but final predictions are too close to call.
• American Airlines has resumed service after a computer glitch Thursday knocked out hundreds of American flights out of Chicago, Dallas, and Miami flight hubs.

Last Call For Meet The New Boss

A military coup d'etat today in the West African nation of Burkina Faso leaves the question of planned October elections very much up in the air.

Presidential guard officers in Burkina Faso have seized power in a coup, with reports of more than 10 deaths amid protests in the capital, Ouagadougou. 

A close ally of former President Blaise Compaore has been named the country's new leader, state television reports. 

French President Francois Hollande condemned the coup in the former French colony. 

Those killed were shot dead by presidential guard forces in the capital, a civil society group said. 

The claim by the influential Balai Citoyen group could not be independently verified.
Other reports said protesters had been assaulted and detained. 

The coup leaders have imposed a night-time curfew across the West African state, and have ordered the closure of land and air borders, AFP news agency reports. 

The headquarters of Mr Compaore's Congress for Democracy and Progress (CDP) party were ransacked in Ouagadougou as news of the coup spread, it adds. 

Mr Hollande called for the immediate release of interim President Michel Kafando and Prime Minister Isaac Zida, who were detained at a cabinet meeting in the president palace on Wednesday. 

Their transitional authority was due to hand power to a new government after elections on 11 October.

The Presidential Guard was Compaore's brute squad of about 1,300 soldiers, and fearing that a newly elected President would disband the unit, the Guard took over.   It's an ugly mess for sure, and a major blow to democracy, but again, there's not much anyone can really do about it.

Needless to say, after twenty years of Compaore's nasty rule, it looks like the new boss is the same as the old boss.

The Daily Struggle Of Planned Parenthood

Considering all the idiocy surrounding these Planned Parenthood attack videos, it's nice to see the media actually go to a Planned Parenthood clinic and see what they actually do, which is provide basic health services to women who need them, as they do in Akron.

This clinic sees nearly 7,100 patients a year, most of them young and poor. The clinicians administer 3,400 pregnancy tests, write 2,900 prescriptions for birth control and provide 13,200 screenings for sexually transmitted infections to the women and men walking into a boxy building between a restaurant-supply store and a used-car dealership. Inside the clinicians’ office, a ­pamphlet on the wall reads “Bomb Threat Checklist.”

Like nearly half of Planned Parenthood’s facilities nationwide, Akron doesn’t perform abortions. Three of the organization’s 27 centers in Ohio do; the nearest is in Bedford Heights, where protesters regularly picket. When pregnancy tests come back as unwanted positives, those patients are referred to Bedford Heights, 26 miles away. 

That referral had now become enough of a metaphorical tie to the organization’s more controversial mission that one patient had come in and said, angrily, “I saw those videos,” and one employee’s husband found himself defending his wife’s profession to colleagues who had never before shown an interest. Earlier that morning, at the weekly staff meeting, Stephanie Kight, the Ohio state director, told the workers that a large antiabortion demonstration was announced for the coming weekend in front of the clinic. 

“I don’t think we should wear our uniforms that day,” said Har­riet Schaefer, the clinic director. “To be safe.” 

“We’ll get back to you with a security briefing — parking and whatnot,” Kight told the staff, and she moved to the next part of the meeting, a presentation by education manager Constance Dunlap about the stigma of working for an organization that performs abortions. 

Employees should think about the risks of disclosing their workplace, Dunlap said. They also should think about the emotional risks of not telling people. Dunlap said that her own parents did not know where she works. They are in their 80s and devout Baptists. 

“My dad thinks I’m a teacher,” she said, and the meeting ended and it was time to open the clinic.

Here is what they do, day in, day out.  Help women get basic health services because there aren't any other Medicaid providers that will take new patients in Akron, and the local non-profit clinic has a six-week waiting list.

And this is what Republicans are going to shut down the government over, so they can make that a three-month waiting list instead.

But there's no War on Women.

Bureaucratic Clock Watchers

The intersection of the era of zero tolerance lockdown schools and rampant red state Islamophobia is an ugly, ugly place.

Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday. 

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case. 

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock. 

In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.

America is a great country, it just happens to have some truly awful people living there.  Some of them, unfortunately, are in positions of considerable authority and influence.

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front. 

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for. 

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’” 

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward. 

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said. 

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’” 

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back. 

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.” 

Because of course it was.

However, sometimes these stories have a happier ending.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a pleasant surprise for Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Muslim teenager who was arrested at his high school in Irving, Texas after officials determined his homemade clock could be a “hoax bomb.” 

Hayes brought in astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who works for the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the Department of Physics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mohamed has described as his “dream school.” 

“I just want to say, you are my ideal student,” Prescod-Weinstein told the teen. “A creative, independent thinker like you is the kind of person who should be becoming a physicist. As a theoretical physicist, I would love it if you took an interest in the mathematical side, although you’re clearly very adept with your hands and at building things.” 

She then extended an invitation for Mohamed to visit MIT and get a tour of the Kavli Institute and the school’s Center for Theoretical Physics. She added that her former advisors at Harvard also wanted him to take a tour of their astrophysics facility. 

“You are the kind of student we want at places like MIT and Harvard,” she said. 

Hayes then asked his young guest if he would take the school up on the invitation. 

“That’s a fact right there,” Mohamed said.

Indeed, young Ahmed received invitations to check out everything from Facebook and Reddit's HQ to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to yes, even the White House.

America, this time you did it right.

StupidiNews!

• At least five are reported dead after a magnitude 8.3 earthquake rocked Chile late Wednesday night, officials say up to 1 million people were evacuated from affected areas.
• Missouri Republicans were unable to override Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of a measure that would have ended union shops and cut dues.
• At least 5,000 Syrian migrants have entered Croatia looking for help and a path to Germany as neighboring Serbia's border with Hungary remains closed by Hungary's military.
• A nearly $275 billion deal to create the world's largest brewery giant faces anti-trust regulators in the US, where the combined market share of AB InBev and SABMiller would be 58%.
• A major cybersecurity firm is accusing Russia's government of being behind a seven-year campaign of malware against other governments with software known as "the Dukes".

Texas Secession Two-Step

Meanwhile, the right-wing nullification/secession train rolls on down the tracks towards 1861.

Texas already seceded once — in 1861, by popular vote in a statewide election. 

But the Texas Nationalist Movement wants a repeat a century and a half later, and thinks the March GOP primary is the place to start. 

The Nederland-based Texas independence group is circulating a petition aimed at getting a non-binding vote onto the GOP primary ballot over whether “the state of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.” 

Their goal? 75,000 signatures from registered voters by Dec. 1 — more than the 66,894 the Texas Secretary of State’s office says the group needs to get the language on the ballot. 

Even if the Texas Nationalist Movement gets enough signatures, such a vote would be little more than symbolic. Academics agree that Texas cannot secede from the United States, and point to a post-Civil War Supreme Court ruling, Texas v. White, as evidence. 

But that hasn’t stopped the Republican Party of Texas from rolling its eyes at the secessionists. Texas GOP communications director Aaron Whitehead said the Republican party certainly doesn’t welcome outside groups trying to doctor the party ballot. 

“Historically the executive committee of the Republican Party has chosen what goes on this,” Whitehead said, “and it’s party preference that it stays that way.”

Really?  You've got Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum openly calling for revolt against Supreme Court rulings they don't like, GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell openly calling for states to simply ignore EPA rules on power plants, and House Republicans led by John Boehner openly suing the Obama administration over the implementation of Obamacare.

Republicans are calling for nullification of the federal government on several fronts.  Why is secession suddenly out of bounds for you?  These guys are simply taking existing Republican rhetoric and turning it into action.

“The end game for us is to have a binding referendum on Texas independence, much like the people of Scotland had in November of last year,” Patrick Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, told the Tribune.

When you talk constantly about taking "your" country back, this is what you get.

The Walkering Dead, Con't

Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker (currently polling around two percent in the primaries) is going all in on destroying America's unions in order to save his collapsing campaign.

Seeking to revitalize his presidential campaign, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday fired a new shot at labor by proposing to prevent federal workers from collectively bargaining, create a national right-to-work law and eliminate the National Labor Relations Board. 

In a plan released by his campaign, Walker also called for requiring all unions to hold periodic votes so workers could decide whether they should continue to exist. If elected, he also would cancel President Barack Obama's Labor Day order that federal contractors provide paid sick leaveand work to end policies requiring some salaried workers in the private sector to receive overtime — saying in some cases they should get time off instead. 

"We must take on the big-government union bosses in Washington — just like I took them on in Wisconsin," the GOP governor said at a town hall meeting on the shop floor of construction equipment maker Xtreme Manufacturing. 

"Federal employees should work for the taxpayers — not the other way around."

At on point during his speech in Vegas he called collective bargaining itself an "expensive entitlement".  Walker's ideas are pretty bonkers, but hey, this is the 2016 GOP primary we're talking about here.

The real problem is how blithely the article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dismisses Walker's radical destruction of unions as ever passing.

Many of Walker's ideas — such as dissolving the labor relations board and establishing a federal right-to-work law — would require changes to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Such changes have little chance of becoming law, said Joseph E. Slater, a labor professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio. 

The last major change to the act was in 1959. When Democrats had large majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, they tried to make the law more favorable to unions but couldn't get their changes passed. Walker's ideas would likely pass only if Republicans controlled the U.S. House and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate — and even then it would be difficult, Slater said. 

"It's really just red meat for the base," Slater said. "None of that's going to actually happen. I'm not certain you could get even 60 Republicans (in the Senate) to vote for that."

It's cute that people still think that whatever red wave that would sweep any Republican into power in 2016, wouldn't keep the House and Senate in GOP hands, and that Republicans wouldn't dare eliminate the filibuster and merrily turn back 80 years of laws.

That would be almost amusing if it wasn't so amazingly tragic.

StupidiNews!

• Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is blaming the West for the country's civil war and refugee crisis, claiming the problem has been solely caused by countries supporting Syrian rebels.
• The week-long Seattle Teachers' Union strike has ended with a tentative contract giving teachers and support staff a 10% raise, but also a 20-minute longer school day.
• After months in exile, Yemen's government has returned to Aden as Saudi-backed forces have succeeded in driving out Houthi rebels earlier this summer.
• Hewlett-Packard will cut up to 33,000 additional jobs as the PC maker will split into two separate companies serving enterprise and consumer customers. 
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that after years of resisting, the company is working on a "dislike" button for posts where users want to express sadness or empathy.

Last Call Fof a Yooge Headscratcher

Greg Sargent is a bit baffled at the latest WaPo poll showing Republicans thinking The Donald is a great guy.

The new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds Donald Trump way ahead of his rivals with 33 percent support among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. But perhaps the most remarkable finding in the poll is how highly Republicans and GOP-leaners rate Trump on a range of personal attributes: 

1) Republicans say by 64-35 that Trump is “qualified to serve as president.” By contrast, Americans overall say by 60-37 that he is not qualified. 

2) Republicans say by 60-35 that Trump is “honest and trustworthy.” By contrast, Americans overall say he is not honest and trustworthy by 59-35. 

3) Republicans say by 53-45 that Trump understands the problems of people like them. By contrast, Americans overall say he does not by 67-29. 

4) Republicans say by 54-42 that Trump “has the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president.” By contrast, Americans overall say he doesn’t have those things by 63-33. 

That’s remarkable. And by the way, a recent Quinnipiac survey also found majorities of Iowa Republicans give Trump similarly positive personal ratings.

He goes on to argue that Hillary's 20-plus years in the spotlight in politics makes the fact Democrats like her and Republicans don't somewhat more explainable.  But Trump?  Guy's a reality show host.

But Trump is largely known to Republicans not as a longtime high profile public official who has long been thought about for the presidency, but as a “brash” (as everyone’s favorite euphemism has it) billionaire who suddenly burst on to the political scene, names big buildings after himself, fires people on television, and regularly insults groups that include millions of Americans. Yet majorities of Republicans think he’s honest and trustworthy, understands their needs and problems, and is temperamentally suited to the presidency. 

This may mainly reflect the fact that Trump gets a lot of media attention, so he’s getting far more exposure among Republican voters than his rivals are. That media attention regularly broadcasts images of Trump spewing vaguely Republican-sounding talking points (most of the time, anyway) about things like immigration and China (in addition to all of the insults), which could be helping to create generally positive attitudes towards him. Or perhaps Republican voters just like the show Trump is putting on as he publicly torments the GOP establishment and “tells it like it is” (a quality Republican voters keep telling reporters they admire in him). 

Or here’s one other, rather more ominous possibility: maybe Republican voters are beginning to regard Trump as a possible nominee. 

Okay, that can’t be right. 

Or can it?

Why not?  Trump is the perfect candidate for the GOP in 2016, as far as representing the people who belong to the party: a merging of the racist, xenophobic white FOX News base with the obnoxious Wall Street country club ethos.

It's not confusing at all.

Clerks 3: The Firing

The whole mess over Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis and her refusal to issue marriage licenses has at least one lawmaker here in the Commonwealth asking questions about whether or not the state's 120 County Clerk offices need as much funding if they're not going to do their jobs.

“While there are very many accommodations available, the very simple accommodation I have proposed is to remove my name and my title as the clerk of Rowan County completely off the marriage license,” Davis said. “These licenses can be issued under another authority, including perhaps the Commonwealth of Kentucky or Gov. (Steve) Beshear himself.” 

There doesn’t appear to be much objection to granting her accommodations, but one lawmaker said the authorities that take over issuance of marriage licenses would likely claim the $35 filing fee for themselves. 

“That’s the first thing that will come up, is the money issue,” said state Rep. Dennis Keene (D-Wilder). “Be careful what you wish for.” 

Keene said most of the state’s 120 county clerk offices are “always strapped for cash,” so cutting that revenue stream could lead to salary reductions, layoffs or other budget adjustments. 

“If they choose not to perform those duties, they should not be paid,” he said. 

Keene said the Kentucky County Clerks Association, which has endorsed the removal of clerks’ names from marriage licenses, is a powerful lobbying organization that would no doubt fight any attempts to cut funding to their offices. 

“I can guarantee a lot of clerks would be jumping up and down over that,” Keene said.

Somehow I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of support for using state taxpayer money to pay state workers to not work around here,  We'll see what happens when lawmakers come back to work in Frankfort, but budget cuts for County Clerk's offices seems like they might be in the cards.

You can start with Rowan County.

I Guess America Missed That E-Mail

So last week the Justice Department cleared Hillary Clinton with "Emailghazi" or whatever stupid fantasy the right-wing goofballs are peddling this month, as they found she indeed had not broken any laws by deleting emails on her server.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had the right to delete personal emails from her private server, the Justice Department told a federal court. 

Lawyers for the government made the assertion in a filing this week with the U.S. District Court in Washington, part of a public records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that seeks access to Clinton’s emails. 

Clinton, the former secretary of state and front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has been dogged by questions about her use of a private email account for government business.

She has said that she sent and received about 60,000 emails during her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were personal and deleted. The others were turned over to the State Department. 

The FBI has been investigating the security of Clinton’s email setup, which she said she used as a matter of convenience. She has since acknowledged that her use of a private email server to conduct government business was a mistake and apologized this week.

But of course the Village has a narrative to push that Clinton is a criminal and as always Democrats must be attacked and it's working.

While Clinton maintains the lead, her support has dropped 21 points among Democrats since July. She has lost ground with most demographic groups, but the sharpest drop has come among women and particularly white women. In July, 64 percent of white women said they supported Clinton; today, it is 31 percent, the same level of backing as Sanders, whose support has doubled among this group. 

A majority of Americans (55 percent) say they disapprove of the way Clinton has handled questions about her use of a private e-mail account while serving as secretary of state. An almost identical percentage (54 percent) say that she has tried to cover up facts. Asked whether Clinton stayed within government guidelines or broke the rules by using a private server, 51 percent say she broke the rules, while 32 percent say she did not, with the remainder offering no opinion. 

The public is divided on the question of whether the e-mail issue is a legitimate one in the coming election, although today, unlike four months ago, slightly more say it is not legitimate. 

On all those questions, there is a big difference in the responses of Democrats vs. Republicans and independents. A majority of Democrats (55 percent) approve of how she has handled the controversy, while a third do not. More than 7 in 10 say the e-mails are not a legitimate issue in the coming campaign.

Well gosh, the Justice Department just said she didn't break any rules, but of course that will never get reported to the American people.

Guess they missed the e-mail.  They have a narrative to sell, remember?

Exoneration!, shout her defenders. Much ado about nothing! A media-created story is debunked! 

Except, not really. That she had the ability and right to delete e-mails was never, really, in question. At issue is the process by which she did it -- and who got to make the final calls on what got sent to the State Department and what didn't. Yes, the way Clinton went about it was within her rights. But, Clinton is not just any government official or even any Secretary of State. She is someone who is, still, the heavy favorite to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. As such, she is held to a different standard than someone who, well, isn't the heavy favorite to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Held to a different standard and has been for more than twenty years now.

As I keep saying, America's current group of Village newspaper editors and cable/network news directors were all looking to be the person who busted the Clintons twenty years ago.

That hasn't changed a bit today.

StupidiNews!

• Authorities in southern Utah say 8 are dead and 5 more missing after flash flooding along the Arizona border washed two vehicles away through canyons.
• The man suspected of fatally shooting a professor at Delta State University in Mississippi yesterday has been found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
• China is building a third airstrip in the disputed island territory between it and Japan, raising questions about Beijing's air power being used in the area.
• Australian meteorologists say the El Nino effect in the Pacific this year could reach record ocean temperatures, possibly causing massive heat waves in the Southern Hemisphere.
• The owner of former Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox faces new embezzlement charges in Japan in connection with the loss of millions of dollars in the digital currency.

Last Call For The War On Women, Con't

So if there are still any questions about the true purpose of the highly coordinated smear job on Planned Parenthood, well, House Republicans put those questions to rest this week.

Congressional Republicans say they are determined to shut Planned Parenthood down, regardless of whether it broke any laws.

In more than two months of investigations, members have yet to turn up evidence that Planned Parenthood acted illegally, the same conclusion reached by a half-dozen state investigations. The Department of Justice has so far declined to launch a formal probe. 

Several Republicans acknowledged this week that they may never find proof of wrongdoing at Planned Parenthood — but said it doesn't matter.

“I don’t know whether we’re ever going to be able to answer that question, whether it was illegal for them to do what they were doing,” Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho) said during the House’s first hearing on the topic Wednesday. "I don’t know if it was illegal … but it was immoral, what was seen on that video."

Republicans have long been fierce critics of Planned Parenthood, which is the nation’s largest provider of abortion services. Under the law, the organization is banned from using federal funding for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or medical necessity.

Stirred by outrage over secretly recorded videos at Planned Parenthood, Republicans opposed to abortion rights say it’s time to end federal funding for the group once and for all.

“The issue is not whether there’s been a crime committed or not,” Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas.) told the same group at the hearing. “This issue is whether or not taxpayers should fund Planned Parenthood. That’s the issue before this committee.”

So now do we understand what the goal was now all along?  Changing laws involving abortion in order to shut clinics down is one thing, but now Republican anti-choicers are freely admitting that using laws to stop abortions no longer matters.

It doesn't matter to Republicans if you break the law, they'll take reproductive health care away from women anyway.

Any more questions?

Off To The Red State Races

Democrats are trying to win the Senate back in 2016 and that means contesting red state Senate seats, and hoping for more Claire McCaskill/Heidi Heitkamp/Joe Donnelly style wins against an increasingly damaged Republican brand.

Arizona, Arkansas and Missouri look like unlikely pickups for Democratic Senate candidates to win in 2016. But Democrats are preparing for the unlikely. 

You don’t need to look any further back than 2012, when despite a favorable GOP climate, mistakes by two favored Republican candidates kept Republicans from winning control of the Senate. 

Last week, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recruited former U.S. Attorney Connor Eldridge to take on Republican Sen. John Boozman in Arkansas — a state where Democrats lost the last two Senate races. But Democrats say Eldridge has the kind of background that could appeal to voters in the deep red state in the case of an opening, and say his entrance into the race could expand the map as the party seeks to win the majority next November. 

Eldridge joins two other Democratic recruits who could forge paths to victory in the right political environment: Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona and Secretary of State Jason Kander in Missouri. Both are adept politicians who face strong GOP incumbents in states that lean Republican in presidential years, but could swing the Democrats’ way in the event of unforced Republican errors. 

“It doesn’t always work, but if you put the pieces together and put the race on the map, only good things can happen,” said Ben Ray, a Democratic operative who helped Sen. Joe Donnelly to victory in Indiana in 2012, when Republican Richard Mourdock’s ill-advised rape comments helped Donnelly win an otherwise dark red state.

Yes, Democrats need to win seats like Marco Rubio's in order to win back the Senate.  But they also need to challenge Red State Republicans, and they figure given how awful the 2016 GOP nominee for the White House is going to be, they might be able to pull off some upsets.

An unpalatable GOP presidential nominee could also shift the tide towards Democrats, giving them an opening down the ballot. With businessman Donald Trump — who has broken nearly every convention in running a presidential campaign as he’s offended significant segments of the electorate — as the Republican front-runner, there’s a chance that could happen. 

“If it’s Trump, you’re going to get a lot of people who are very upset about his candidacy. If they go with someone more mundane, the disappointment for others could very well carry into the general election,” Marsh said. 

In other cases, Democrats might be able to benefit from slowly “chipping away” at an otherwise popular Republican’s credibility by tying them to Washington and a Congress which has been repeatedly panned by the public – a strategy already embraced by D.C. outsiders like Kander and Eldridge. 

A similar strategy paid off for Republicans in 2014 as they took the Senate majority for the first time since 2006. The GOP seized upon President Barack Obama’s unpopularity and an electorate dissatisfied with the status quo.

Look how badly the four GOP senators are doing in the 2016 White House race too.  None are doing better than single digits, where the outsiders, Trump, Carson, and Fiorina have a combined majority of the vote.   Going after seats in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states is a good idea.  How much worse would things be if Republicans had beaten McCaskill, Heitkamp, Donnelly and yeah, even Joe Manchin?

Abbott, Tossed Fellow

Well, things certainly escalated quickly today.  Australia's right-wing dipstick of a Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has lost his party's vote to remain leader and is no longer the country's PM.  The new boss is hopefully less of a jackass, but it doesn't look like by much.

Australia's 29th prime minister is Malcolm Turnbull, who ousted Abbott with the help of the Abbott's deputy, Julie Bishop, 54-44 in a vote of the parliamentary members of the governing Liberal Party, Monday night Australian time. In a late-night press conference, Turnbull, also a member of Australia's conservative party, said he came to power "seeking to persuade, rather than to lecture"—highlighting one of the chief criticisms of Abbott as an inflexible scold who failed to explain complicated policies to the Australian people. 

For those even remotely familiar with Australian politics, you'll know the last few years have been a bloodbath in the corridors of power, with fierce factional divides in both parties, Labor and Liberal, making the prime ministerial office the most treacherous room to occupy in the country. Three sitting prime ministers have now been toppled and replaced by their own parties, partly due to disagreements over climate change, terrible polling, and the management of Australia's resource-dependent economy. But Abbott's fall—in power for less than two years—is extraordinary: for a man who said he would bring stability back to the top job, he served in the position for a shorter time than the two previous prime ministers that he helped topple, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd (both members of the opposition Labor party). Pressure on Abbott had been building for months. 

Turnbull used to be a proponent of a cap-and-trade program, and he once called Tony Abbott's position on climate change "bullshit" because he Abbott was vehemently opposed to a market-based solution. Abbott himself has previously doubted the science behind climate change, then ran a brutal scare campaign against a carbon tax, arguing it would trash the economy. But it's unlikely, at least in the short-term before another election, that climate will be back on the agenda anytime soon: carbon pricing has cut to the quick of Aussie politics and become a symbol for deep ideological divides, something Turnbull is likely loathe to stir up, early in a new prime ministership. Commentators in Australia say Turnbull madeprivate undertakings not to rock the boat too much, as he locked up the votes to contest the leadership. 

Sure enough, Turnbull said at his first press conference that the government's position on climate change will stay the same for the moment. The current policy of government investments in carbon abatement (called "Direct Action"), rather than a market-based system "is one that I supported as a minister in the Abbott government, and it's one I support today," he said, describing it as "very well designed," and a "very, very good piece of work." Still, he did leave the door open to tweak the policy as he begins discussions with his new ministers.

We'll see where Turnbull ends up on the question of climate change, but four PMs in the space of less than three years makes me think that Australia's in a lot worse shape than a lot of people are aware of. Getting Canberra back at the forefront of the climate change fight is going to be vital in the years ahead.