Daily Kos

Carrie Kirby at The Atlantic writes—Why Students Want to Lower the Voting Age:

Oliver York has heard it all—and the 16-year-old political activist is always ready with a well-researched answer.

He has heard critics refer to him and his cohorts as pawns of liberal San Francisco supervisors looking for a few extra votes. He’s heard that if given suffrage, teens would just mimic their parents’ voting patterns. That reminds him of the historical argument against women’s suffrage.

“‘You'll just vote the way your husbands vote.’ They said for workers, ‘You’ll just vote the way your overseers vote.’ I think there are some references on this sheet here,” says the teen, who wears a blue plaid shirt and rimless glasses. He leans over to proffer a fact sheet on the local initiative to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in municipal and school board elections.

Jillian Wu, also 16 and sitting across from York in an office in San Francisco’s Beaux Arts City Hall, locates the pertinent fact on the sheet: In the Scottish independence referendum, in which 16- and 17-year-olds voted, 44 percent of the teens voted differently than their parents. [...]

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Whitman For Governor Rollout Woes Continue Unabated:

For a candidate whose first foray into elective politics was met with an enviable raft of prominent endorsers (Mitt Romney, former Governor Pete Wilson, and John McCain) and a ton of free media, the past two weeks have been absolutely brutal for California Republican Meg Whitman. The alleged frontrunner for the GOP nomination for Governor in the Golden State, her introduction to the political stage has been pure amateur hour.

It started with a Sacramento Bee investigative story, which outlined an almost comically sparse voting history for the first-time candidate. The same weekend as that revelation became known, Whitman was blasted in a straw poll at the state GOP convention by state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner.
Then, last week, Whitman tried to explain her proclivity for electoral absenteeism, and dug herself in deeper, making the rather silly excuse that she was too busy raising a family to register to vote.

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Tweet of the Day

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin notes Trump's ahead in FL, OH & PA, while Clinton holds her leads but loses ground among Ds. (MSM: “Disaster!”) Gallup gallops away from the horse race. Mass shooter profiles are becoming very familiar. Joan McCarter notes we may have Boehner to kick around a little longer, so John takes his time cleaning up the barn. Gop House ready to Benghazi Planned Parenthood. David & Joan discuss the need for all of you out there to report on voter suppression shenanigans like those popping up in NC & MD. What's happening near you? Email joan@dailykos.com! Find us on iTunes | Find us on Stitcher | RSS | Donate to support the show!

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High Impact Posts • Top Comments

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

Subscribe to ye olde gentleman cartoonist here.

Yeah, he's not wrong.

Donald J. Trump predicts a “major collapse” in the Republican campaign and a “depression” for the television industry should he prematurely exit the presidential race. [...]

“There’d be a major collapse of the race, and there’d be a major collapse of television ratings,” he said from his office in Trump Tower. “It would become a depression in television.”

Mr. Trump said that a presidential campaign without him would become so “boring” that he would struggle to pay any attention to it.

“I wouldn’t even be watching it probably, and neither would anybody else,” he said.

Which is precisely what the Republican Party had been going for in their efforts to limit the number of debates and generally shorten the primary season, this time around. But then Donald Trump messed it up, and the debates are getting damn fine ratings, as debates go, and more voters than ever before are tuning in to see just what the Republican Party candidates stand for, and every Republican strategist in the nation has been popping antacid tablets like they were M&M's for months now.

Anyhoo, Donald Trump says Donald Trump is the biggest thing in politics right now. Just in case you were wondering about that, and I know you probably were.

Dear conservatives: Your entire movement is an exercise in self-parody.

[Drudge Report founder Matt Drudge] said that the Obama administration began referring to the Islamic State as "ISIS" so that the group would be confused with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the former chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

"We never heard of ISIS until recently," Drudge told [prominent conspiracy peddler Alex Jones]. "Do you know it was designed to be confused with Darrell Issa?"

Yes, that must be it. What other possible explanation could there be.

While The Donald is prepping to hit the airwaves, Ted Cruz is pressing his ground game in every county of four early voting states, reports Nick Corasaniti:

For every county in the first four voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the Cruz campaign has locked down county chairs in charge of not just lending their names to the campaign, but of spearheading outreach and organizing efforts. [...]

The focus on the ground game should come as no surprise, as the Cruz campaign has been heavily focused on building leadership teams, including in the United States Virgin Islands, and even sending operatives as far as Guam and Samoa to look for potential support. It has also focused on building issue-based teams in the early states, such as their “99 Iowa Pastors” initiative, which seeks to tap into the networks to build more grass-roots support.

Cruz reportedly thinks that "the only way we will turn our country around is through a grass-roots uprising of the American people." More like turn it around and drive it over a cliff.

This is a tough story to wrap your mind around, so let's try to break it down in the simplest way possible. It's a tragic mess of injustice of the highest magnitude.

Four Latino men from Chicago are serving sentences of 45 years to life for three different crimes committed 20 or more years ago.

Roberto Almodovar, now 40 years old, was convicted 21 years ago, when he was 19, for killing two different people in Chicago.

Robert Bouto, now 39 years old, was convicted 22 years ago, when he was just 17, of killing a popular 15-year-old boy.

Armando Serrano, 43, and Jose Montanez, 48, were convicted 22 years ago, when they were 21 and 22, of killing a 27-year-old man.

For decades, each of these men have proclaimed their complete innocence. A major investigation commissioned by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel was launched into these cases and others. The results determined that all four of these men are very likely completely innocent of the crimes they were convicted for.

This would seem to be an enormous—albeit tragic—victory. Exhaustively thorough reports were leaked to Buzzfeed detailing each investigation and the final conclusions that these men were framed for murders they didn't commit.

Preposterous right?

It is preposterous, until you learn who was refusing to reopen their cases or vacate their sentences. Then it all makes sense.

Anita Alvarez may be the worst, most corrupt prosecutor in America. The Washington Post's Radley Balko agreed. Read on.

Huffington Post has discovered the identity of at least one of the editors of the videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress showing what the CMP and Republicans say is Planned Parenthood doing something bad. Not only have they identified the editor, they've discovered how long it took to get at least one of the videos out: 11 months. Which makes for a lot of editing time.

Video editor Ryan Gonzalez spent at least 11 months working on the footage, according to his Facebook page and a friend of his who is familiar with the editing process. The friend requested to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Gonzalez worked on the videos with David Daleiden, a self-described "citizen journalist" who started the Center for Medical Progress and who previously worked for the anti-abortion group Live Action. […]

On July 14, after the center released the first hidden-camera video, Gonzalez posted the link on Facebook, saying, "This is the first part of a project I've been editing since last August and haven't been able to talk about until now."

It's been well-established that everything CMP has released—the short-form videos, the supposed complete, raw videos, and the transcripts—have been extensively edited. So much so that one of the independent analysts hired to review them said "'the manipulation of the videos does mean they have no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries' unless C.M.P. provides investigators with its original material, and that material is independently authenticated as unaltered."

I guess it takes roughly 11 months to do that much work, or maybe that's only the case if you're an amateur doing a laughably hack job at the editing. Or perhaps Gonzales and Daleiden were just biding their time, waiting to get the go-ahead from Republicans who clearly knew they were in the works.

Sign the petition to Republicans: Don’t mess with Planned Parenthood. Stand up for women, not your extreme right-wing base.

Asked about whether or not it's time for Congress to reconsider the research ban on gun violence it instituted on the Centers for Disease Control, House Speaker John Boehner deflected, admitted that Republicans will do nothing to stop gun violence, and said if Democrats want to complain about it, they should have done something when they were in the majority.

WASHINGTON -- If Democrats really cared about gun violence, they would have done something about it when they were running Washington, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) charged Wednesday. […]

Boehner said the topic [of CDC research] has not come up in his talks.

"I don't think there’s been any discussions at this point. It's not been part of the discussions," he told reporters on Capitol Hill before expressing sympathy for the nine people killed and nine more wounded in last week's massacre in Roseburg, Oregon.

"We've seen far too many of these," Boehner said, before putting the onus on Democrats.

"In '09 and '10, we had Democrat majorities in the House and Senate. We had a Democrat president. And this clearly was not a priority for them. The president can rail all he wants," Boehner said, referring to President Barack Obama's angry denunciation last week of Congress' failure to address the issue.

"We've seen far too many of these," but it's not my problem, says Boehner, the highest ranking elected Republican in the land. He added, when specifically asked about background checks, "I'm not the expert on each of the individual policies, but I would like to see us work together on finding effective ways to reduce these horrific incidents." As a reminder, Senate Democrats did try, with the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill, to do something, by extending background checks to gun shows and Internet sales. Republicans killed it with a filibuster.

Then there are the bills Democrats introduced in the House that were shuffled off to committee, never to be heard from again. So spare us your sympathy for the dead, Boehner. You can't shove the blame away on someone else.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir From the party that's constantly hollering about Freedumz!, this is hypocrisy at its worst. Nationwide, more than a third of Republicans say that Islam should be illegal in the United States, according to a new PPP poll provided exclusively to Daily Kos Elections. Nearly half—a 44 percent plurality—say Christianity should be our official religion.

So what about that pesky freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution? You know, that whole "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof?" Well, PPP asked about that too. And guess what? Just one in 20 Republicans admit to wanting to actually eliminate freedom of religion, even though so many of them had just espoused positions that would do exactly that!

Since we already know they don't want freedom of religion for all people, we must interpret this to mean they only want freedom of religion for some people—presumably themselves, at least. This dangerous attitude—freedom for me, but not for thee—is exactly what the Constitution should be used to guard against. It is, in a nutshell, un-American, and yet, as history sadly shows, all too American, indeed.

Lest you think this is solely confined to Republicans, smaller numbers of both Democrats and independents also admitted to wanting to outlaw Islam (15 percent of Democrats, 20 percent of independents) and make Christianity our official religion (28 and 24 percent, respectively).

Overall, for all respondents, the share that supports freedom of religion in deed, not just in word, barely clears the halfway mark: Just 53 percent of voters oppose making Christianity the official religion of the United States, and only 56 percent think Islam should be legal. We're lucky the First Amendment was enshrined into our founding principles so long ago, because quite a lot of people—but especially Republicans—are eager to chuck it.

Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The most recent Spotlight can be seen here. More than 24,000 environmentally oriented diaries have been rescued for inclusion in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a diary in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.

No longer considered an extreme event! Mega Icebergs are wreaking havoc in the Southern Ocean written by Pakalolo: "Scientists have sent out an urgent message to the world. We need to study West Antarctica's glaciers, and in particular the Thwaites glacier, fast. 'It is hard to find tipping points in physical systems likely to be activated in the near future, with the possible exception of Thwaites,' Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University. Our understanding of predicting sea level rise depends on the infusion of resources per the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. There is now widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers. Until recently, the glaciers and the ice sheets of Antarctica have been in harmony. They had formed a stable system with forces of outflow and back pressure in balance for hundreds of thousands of years. Warming ocean water and changing ocean and wind currents have upset this balance by increasing the flow of the land based glacier and by causing the decay of the ice sheet itself. A weakened, deteriorating and calving ice shelf is no longer able to slow the speeding of the glacier's ice into the sea. Inland basins connect Thwaites Glacier to other major glaciers in the region and it is the accelerating ice from Antarctica's inland that will raise sea levels. The calving ice shelves are introducing fresh melt water to the ocean, but they are not adding to sea level rise as a floating object will displace the same volume of water as it weighs."

Nestle v. Cascade Locks, Part lll written by Robocop: "In 2008, Nestle began a campaign to gain essential control over the water at Oxbow Springs near the town of Cascade Locks, a small village in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. It continues in its dogged pursuit in spite of public protests and lawsuits brought against it by, among others, Food & Water Watch, which has been fighting Nestle throughout the country over the issue of their water grabs in various small communities. The fight has survived through two governorships, those of Ted Kulongoski and John Kitzhaber, both of whom supported Nestle, and the current governor, Kate Brown, who has tacitly supported the company by remaining silent on the issue. Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) had decided that Nestle could trade for its legal right to Oxbow Springs, which was upheld by a judge. The trade was that Nestle would make tons of money selling bottled water from the Springs and in return provide 50 $10 an hour jobs to the struggling community whose current rate of unemployment is at 19%. Under the terms of this 'trade' Nestle would get a discount on the water they buy, paying less for it than local residents."

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The Daily Bucket: A Falcon Who Rescued Himself written by Lenny Flank: "Well, I had a bit of a birdie adventure this weekend ... Sunday night, I was walking to the downtown bus center in Nashville to catch a ride to the Walmart. As I walked towards the Tennessee State Museum, on 5th Avenue, I saw a group of people gathered on the sidewalk looking at something, and somebody nearby told me there was a hawk on the sidewalk. I expected to see a Redtail eating a pigeon or something. Instead there was a full-grown Peregrine Falcon, staring intently at all the people surrounding it, very pissed off. When someone leaned forward with a cellphone for a picture, the Falcon fluttered along the sidewalk, unable to get airborne, and let out an angry screech. It was obviously injured. Immediately, I noticed two things: it had a tuft of ruffled feathers on the side of its head, and neither of its wings looked like they were drooping. So I assumed that it had probably flown into something, and that if it had a broken wing, it didn't seem to be a bad break. It could probably be rehabilitated."

Below the orange spill you'll find more excerpts and links to green posts.

In an unprecedented move, 6,000 inmates will soon be released from federal prisons in what the Washington Post calls history's "largest one-time release of federal prisoners." This change is due to last year's decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to lower sentencing guidelines for drug crimes and apply the change retroactively.  

Remarkably, this release is only the beginning. The Sentencing Commission has stated that about 8,550 inmates will qualify for release over the next year, and has estimated that their sentencing reforms could mean the release of 46,000 of the 100,000 federal prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. According to the Post:

The policy change is referred to as “Drugs Minus Two.” Federal sentencing guidelines rely on a numeric system based on different factors, including the defendant’s criminal history, the type of crime, whether a gun was involved and whether the defendant was a leader in a drug group.

The sentencing panel’s change decreased the value attached to most drug-trafficking offenses by two levels, regardless of the type of drug or the amount.

An average of about two years is being shaved off eligible prisoners’ sentences under the change. Although some of the inmates who will be released have served decades, on average they will have served 8  1/2 years instead of 10  1/2[.]

The inmates will be released between October 30 and November 2, 2015, but they aren't home free quite yet. See more below.

Hillary Clinton has announced that she is "not in favor" of the Trans-Pacific Partnership based on what she has learned about it. With that stance, she has become the third Democratic presidential candidate—after Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O'Malley—to oppose the 12-nation trade agreement. Alice Ollstein reports:

Speaking to PBS on Wednesday, presidential contender Hillary Clinton announced her long awaited stance on the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership — a massive free trade deal the U.S. just negotiated with 11 other nations. “I am not in favor of what I have learned about it,” Clinton said, noting that the text of the agreement itself, though final, remains secret to the public.

Clinton outlined her concerns about the deal Wednesday in an interview with Judy Woodruff. “I’m worried about currency manipulation not being part of the agreement,” she said. “We’ve lost jobs to the manipulations that countries, particularly in Asia, have engaged in. I’m worried that the pharmaceutical companies that have gotten more benefits and patients and consumers fewer. I think there are still a lot of unanswered questions, but for me, it comes down to those concerns.”

Video below the fold.