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Deidre Fulton writes—Big Bank 'Greenwashing' Exposed as Major Climate Week Sponsors Fund Fossil Fuels:

Big bank sponsorship of Climate Week 2016, which kicked off Monday in New York City, "amounts to little more than greenwashing," according one environmental organization, given financial institutions' business-as-usual investment in fossil fuels.

Indeed, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) charges three major sponsors—Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of the West (BNP Paribas)—with "helping [to] drive the climate crisis" through their ongoing funding of extreme fossil fuels such as coal and tar sands oil. 

Citing its own 2016 report, Shorting the Climate, which was released in June, RAN notes that between 2013 and 2015, those three entities put $9.89 billion into coal mining companies, $30.7 billion into the largest coal power producers, $74.91 billion into companies building LNG export terminals in North America, and $77.3 billion into companies exposed to extreme oil. Furthermore, among the 25 major global banks analyzed in Shorting the Climate, JPMorgan Chase was the number one investor in two extreme fossil fuel subsectors: liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals and extreme oil.

Bank of America is a "Platinum Sponsor" of Climate Week, while JP Morgan Chase and Bank of the West are listed as "Affiliate" and "Supporting" sponsors, respectively.

"Given their current investments in climate-wrecking activities, their sponsorship of 'Climate Week NYC' amounts to little more than greenwashing," said RAN climate and energy program director Amanda Starbuck on Monday. "If these banks aspire to be climate leaders, they must accelerate their exit from coal, and commit to getting out of extreme oil and fracked-gas terminals as well."

Climate group 350.org separately took Bank of America to task on Monday for "playing a key role in financing dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure like the Dakota Access Pipeline"—even as it announces "new environmental operations goals" such as moving to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2020. [...]

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 BLAST FROM THE PAST

At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Scott Brown adds another line to his resume:

Sen. Scott Brown is a very important man, and at Thursday night's debate with Elizabeth Warren, he added another resume item you might not have known about. Not only does Brown meet secretly with kings and queens, not only does Secretary of State Hillary Clinton call him all the time, but he's also "one of the ranking members on the Armed Services Committee."

This has the benefit of being a step or two closer to the truth than his claim that Hillary Clinton calls him "all the time" when they'd spoken twice, and not in more than a year. But a step or two closer to the truth still puts it about five steps from reality. There's one ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and that's John McCain. You'd have to spread the idea of ranking members, plural, pretty thin to get to Scott Brown, who is the sixth Republican member on the committee.

Brown is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Airland, but with 68 subcommittees in the Senate as a whole, being a subcommittee ranking member is not exactly a unique identifier.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: From the dumpster fire of Trump’s birther “presser,” to the dumpster explosion in NYC. Greg Dworkin & Armando debate the FL polls. Pence named Cheney as his VP role model, but what choice did he have? Republican friendships shatter over Trump. (onoz!)

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If there is one universal truth about systems and structures by which the world operates is that almost everything of sufficient size claims to represent the people. Whether it’s “We the people ...” this, or “People’s Republic of ...” that, or “National Liberation Front of” whatever, almost every group operates under the pretense of power from the populace to forward the cause of democracy, freedom, liberty or prosperity. And some of the most despotic regimes and worst offenders of human rights on this planet claim to be “fair,” even if it’s a cockamamie idea of fairness based on a predetermined order that requires some people stay in chains for the greater good.

But there are many types of chains in this world, as well as varying definitions of friends and loneliness, especially in a modern world of social media. And in the dynamic between individual and society, the threads which bind and hold can be amorphous. Some of those chains come with smiling faces and the idea of symbolic economic vitality. But those symbols are many times empty in meaning, and might come with interest payments. When I wrote a piece a while back about the public’s fascination with the end of the world, one of the ideas bandied about was a desire to go back to zero. The notion that a fantasy about global destruction grabs people because it offers a world where every individual is “free” from rules and all of their past regrets. But therein lies the rub, since some of the chains in this world are the ones we fasten to ourselves, because of trauma and a past we can’t confront.

Created by Sam Esmail, USA network’s Mr. Robot received much critical acclaim in its first season, given that both its main character and the audience is left unsure as to what the nature of reality actually is. Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek, who just won an Emmy last night for this performance) is a computer programmer who works for the Allsafe cybersecurity firm. But he also engages in vigilante hacking, going after cheating husbands and child pornographers. This ultimately brings him to the attention of a hacker named Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) and a group of hacktivists called fsociety. They’re targeting a huge multinational conglomerate, which also happens to be Allsafe’s biggest client, named E Corp —a.k.a Evil Corp—  and want Elliot’s help in order to achieve social equality. E Corp has the too-big-to-fail breadth of an AIG mixed with Google, and the ethics of Enron at the upper echelon. However, where all of this ultimately leads has huge implications for not only the world, but Elliot’s own identity and his distance from society.

As season two has progressed, the world is trying to deal with the aftermath, while Elliot is so far no longer battling corporations but trying to find firm ground inside a troubled mind.

The following tales are examples of this week's Election Roundup of 43 down ticket tales covering Sunday 9/11 through Saturday  9/17.

(FL-Sen) All O' A Sudden, Guns Could Turns Some Races From Red T' Blue. By mikethegunguy

I knew that Marco Rubio was unfit t' be President (as if th' current Republican candidate could pass a fitness test) when he visited th' Ruger gun factory back in January 'n declared that he believed in th' 2nd Amendment 'cause a gun was th' only thin' that stood between our safety 'n an imminent ISIS attack. Ruger then presented Rubio wit' a Hawkeye bolt-action huntin' rifle that would be about as effective fer defendin' against a terror attack as me usin' me pen knife against Godzilla or Kin' Kong.

(PA-16) Th' ULTIMATE Red t' Blue Contest: PA-16 By silver spring

If Christina Hartman wins th' race fer PA-16 this November 'twill be th' ultimate Red t' Blue win. No Democrat has EVER represented Lancaster 'n most o' surroundin' Lancaster County in th' U.S. House o' Representatives. I went through th' entire set o' districts that Lancaster has been part o' since th' 1828 election below, PA-4, PA-8, PA-9, PA-10 'n PA-16.  Some representatives�� names appear twice, as th' district number 'n/or party affiliation o' th' hand changed.

(AK-Var) Come Down th' Ballot - see wha' Young Scallywags are Doin' By RosyFinch

'tis a local diary from a wee city in Alaska. Here in Juneau (in 2014: 32,406 scallywags live here), we be seein' young scallywags steppin' up in public service. Here are a handful o' scallywags runnin' fer cabin or workin' fer th' community in other ways ('n they aren't th' only ones).

Sunday 9/11 through Saturday  9/17

Tales: (43)
Senate: (13) posts, (7) states
House: (7) posts, (3) states, (5) districts
State and more: (21)
General: (1)
Tools: (1)

A judge on Friday sentenced six former Rikers Island correctional officers to state prison for their role in the beating of an inmate in 2012. Five of the men were found guilty in June 2016 of first degree gang assault, attempted assault in the first degree, assault in the second degree, falsifying business records, official misconduct, and an effort to cover up the attack. A sixth man was found guilty at a later bench trial. The inmate, Jahmal Lightfoot, was set upon by the guards after Eliseo Perez, the former assistant chief for security at the prison, decided to teach Lightfoot a lesson:

The beating took place in July 2012, after Perez locked eyes with Lightfoot during a search of the jail and Perez said: “This guy thinks he’s tough. When you get him to the intake area, take him to the intake search pen and knock his fucking teeth out.” 

Lightfoot was taken to a search area that had no video surveillance. Two officers pinned his arms and legs to the floor while another three kicked him the face dozens of times, fracturing his eye sockets.

The officers wrote in a report that Lightfoot had attacked one of the guards with a sharpened piece of metal and they had used force to restrain him.

The former officers—Perez, Alfred Rivera, Tobias Parker, Jose Parra, David Rodriguez, and Gerald Vaughn—were given prison sentences ranging from four and a half to six and a half years. Two other officers who were not directly involved in the attack were sentenced in June to conditional discharges and 500 hours of community service. They were convicted of “official misconduct for their roles in efforts to try to cover up the attack.”

Welcome back to our daily roundup of Donald Trump campaign news, otherwise known as the slow-motion end of either the Republican party or the republic itself. We're still awaiting judgment on that one.

This weekend's coordinated Republican presidential campaign effort was an attempt to bury Donald Trump's admission that our sitting president is, in fact, an American citizen under a new avalanche of misinformation (misinformation is a two-dollar word meaning "lies") about how Donald Trump wasn't really too into that whole birther thing after all, it was just your collective imaginations.

In reality, said no less than four Trumpian visitors to the Sunday shows, (1) it was all Hillary Clinton's fault (it provably wasn't), and (2) Donald Trump had considered the matter settled once the president released his "long-form" birth certificate (Donald Trump provably didn't consider it settled), and (3) that Donald Trump was just doing America a bang-up favor by heroically taking it upon himself to "resolve" all those other racist voters' concerns about Obama's legitimacy for office for once and for all (it provably did no such thing, according to even the most recent polls of actual Republican partisans.)

It was a tour de force, which is a five-dollar phrase meaning three ring circus under a burning tent, clowns running everywhere. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler on Gov. Chris Christie's blatant, repeated lies on the subject: "This is why Americans hate politics. A sitting governor goes on national television and when he is called out for an obvious falsehood, he simply repeats the inaccurate talking points over and over."

Yes, well, that is what Gov. Chris Christie is known for.

As for the rest of today's news, it's been a tour de force all right. It’s been a tour de force and then some.

It was one year ago—September 19, 2015—that Carlos Garcia was shot and killed by Nick Julian IV. Julian lived with his parents in Tampa, Florida, next door to Yaileen Ayala. Garcia and Ayala had divorced six months earlier and Garcia had shown up late on this night to get his two children for a weekend visitation. Garcia and Ayala were arguing while his car stereo played loudly, when Julian confronted Garcia about the music.

Julian became the focus of the argument. He had initially come out of his house—concerned that Garcia’s music would wake his girlfriend and her daughter—without his gun. According to Julian, he returned to the house but heard the music playing loudly again, so he went back outside. Julian went back into the house for a third time. That time, retrieved his .45 automatic weapon, and left again to confront Garcia. Julian’s father says he saw his son running back toward his porch with Garcia chasing him. That’s when he heard the shot. It was Julian who called 911 to report the shooting:

"Yes, ma'am. I just had a man attack me in my front yard," Nick Julian IV told a 911 operator on Sept. 19, 2015.

"He attacked me and I had to use force," said Julian. "I was afraid for my life." 

"Well who used the gun?" the operator said.

"I did," Julian said.

In the background, Garcia's ex-wife screamed: "Why would you do this?"

" 'Cause he charged me and I was in fear of my life," said Julian, then 26.

But Julian made another call that night—to the U.S. Concealed Carry Association (USCCA), one of several organizations in the U.S. which helps people strengthen their self-defense claims. The USCCA provides its members with “a 24-hour hotline, an attorney on retainer, bail money and a wallet-sized card instructing members on what to say after a shooting—starting at just $13 a month.” 

It's Monday, September 19, and Day 218 since Justice Antonin Scalia died and Mitch McConnell decided no nominee would get any Senate attention: No meetings, no hearings, no votes. It's also Day 187 since Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama to fill that vacancy. 

The Senate came back in this afternoon with hopes of having a temporary spending bill agreement. They don't.

Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday that negotiators haven't reach reached a deal on Zika money or the larger funding bill.

"We've made progress. I'm encouraged by the headway that we have made," he said. "[But] there is still work to be done."

Democrats have pledged to stop any CR that blocks Planned Parenthood clinics in Puerto Rico from accessing the Zika funds. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), whose state has been hard hit by the mosquito-spread disease, said late last week that he thought they were close to an agreement that would provide $1.1 billion to fight the virus.

They had intended a cloture vote sometime Monday on moving forward with that spending agreement. That may or may not happen.

 They're supposed still negotiating a short-term spending bill, and who knows what's happening there. So let's spend our time appreciating Harry Reid, who doesn't give a shit for what Donald Trump might say about him.

Meanwhile, this is brewing in the background, ready to blow up in the lame duck session:

Senate Democrats are blasting their Republican colleagues for not only blocking the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, but also 53 other judges in the lower courts, calling their obstruction “unprecedented” and “irresponsible.”

“These are supposed to be nonpolitical positions,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary, said. “I’ve been here longer than anybody else, I’ve never seen anything so irresponsible.”

It's not just the Supreme Court, and all the other judges. It's funding to fight Zika. It's infrastructure spending. It's gun safety. It's every goddamned thing that the government needs to be effective. But the war on the judiciary is definitely the most radical, most extreme thing any modern majority party has done. 

Please donate $3 today to help turn the Senate blue. The future of the Supreme Court—the future of everything!—depends on it.

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President Obama is not playing coy about how he feels in this election, with the lead birther on the ballot looking to roll back Obama’s progress. Speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner over the weekend, Obama said it would be “a personal insult, an insult to my legacy” if African Americans don’t turn out to vote for Hillary Clinton in November.

“My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot,” Obama said, his voice rising to a shout as he went well beyond what sources familiar with the speech said was a tamer version of the riff in the prepared remarks. “Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration, that’s on the ballot right now.” [...]

“Hope is on the ballot,” he said, laying out the choice. “And fear is on the ballot too.”

Obama’s vehemence is being seen as a sign of the urgency of turning out black voters to ensure a Clinton win, and there’s surely an element of that. But Obama has also been uncharacteristically blunt about how he sees Donald Trump, saying for instance that “I don't think the guy's qualified to be president of the United States. And every time he speaks that opinion is confirmed.” And, of course, there’s the birther thing, which Obama also riffed on at some length at the CBC Foundation event, saying that “ISIL, North Korea, poverty, climate change—none of those things weighed on my mind like the validity of my birth certificate.” Combine that years-long personal insult, the insult Donald Trump offers to the dignity of the presidency, and, yes, the importance of high African American voter turnout this November, and you can see why the president was so impassioned.

"Our progress is on the ballot." Can you give $3 to help Hillary Clinton protect President Obama's legacy and keep moving us forward?

Fifty days remain until the election. Click here to make sure you're registered to vote. And while you're at it, make sure your family and friends are registered too.

Different estimates continue to roll out surveying the hundreds of millions of dollars of damage caused by HB2. Here's the latest from WIRED:

Adding all that up, the total cost to North Carolinians so far from HB2 protests is slightly more than $395 million. That’s more than the GDP of Micronesia. And the bulk of it is from sporting organizations, who even five years ago would likely not have waded into political territory like this. 

The basics included in that total are as follows:

• NBA, NCAA, and ACC event losses: $197.4 million
• Tourism hit: $109.4 million
• Paypal and business boycotts: $88 million
• Legal fees to defend HB2: $176,000 (and rising)

Heck of a job, McCrory! No wonder he’s a little press shy lately.

If you’ve spent any time perusing maps of different presidential elections, you’ve probably noticed that, historically, the map would often change wildly from one election to the next. Even in recent history, we’ve seen some presidential maps that seem almost inconceivable right now. Can you imagine a map where the Republican wins California, Illinois, Oregon, and Vermont, but the Democrat wins Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia? It may have happened in your lifetime; that describes Jimmy Carter’s victory in​ 1976.

So when the map stays almost entirely stagnant between two presidential elections, that’s very unusual, historically. The difference between 2008 and 2012 was, in fact, the least​ change that’s ever occurred between two presidential maps, with only two states flipping (Indiana and North Carolina, from blue to red). Starting in the ‘00s, we’ve entered an era of much greater polarization and negative partisanship, where the parties are more ideologically distinct, there are fewer swing voters, and most states’ votes are extremely predictable, leaving only a dozen or so swing states.

It’s distinctly possible that we could see even less change than that between 2012 and 2016, though. For much of the year if you looked at state-level polling, it looked like only one​ state was on track to flip (North Carolina, back to blue). In fact, that’s still the case if you look at Huffington Post Pollster’s state-by-state averages; if you take the two states that they currently see as tied (Iowa and Ohio) and award them to Hillary Clinton, North Carolina is the only state where the party that lost in 2012 is currently leading.

However, the Daily Kos Elections​ model is a little more pessimistic, methodologically, than the HuffPo averages. Because we add in the effect of the “fundamentals” to account for the uncertainty of how the remaining month and a half will go (and because the fundamentals act as a negative, given the difficulty of what Clinton is trying to do: run for a third term for the party in power, against the backdrop of so-so economic numbers), we see her odds of winning North Carolina (despite her small lead in the polling average) as slightly below 50-50 (closer to 40 percent). And our model sees two other states likelier to flip than North Carolina, unfortunately both in the wrong direction: Iowa and Ohio. Those are the two states that have really gone the wrong way for Clinton in the polls in the last few weeks, with multiple polls in each state giving Donald Trump a lead, and that, more than anything else, has had a negative impact on Clinton’s overall odds in our model (especially in Ohio, thanks to its 18 electoral votes).

Mike Pence hasn’t been the most relevant, news-making vice presidential nominee ever, but this should make you sit up and take notice of just who Donald Trump chose. Because Pence has a role model for the vice presidency:

“I frankly hold Dick Cheney in really high regard in his role as vice president and as an American,” Pence said on ABC’s "This Week."

Pence said that, like Cheney, he hoped to be “a very active vice president.”

And since Trump wants to be a very inactive president who turns over all the work to his vice president, Baby Dick here could get his chance. If that doesn’t make Pence feel relevant in a very scary way, then nothing will.

Russ Feingold, running to win back his old Senate seat from Republican Ron Johnson, says it's time for comprehensive immigration reform. Johnson, not surprisingly, doesn't—and takes his cue from the guy at the top of the Republican ticket.

Johnson has become a loud advocate for securing the border first and worrying about those already here later. Feingold, by contrast, wants sweeping reforms that include creating ways for people already here illegally to become American citizens.

Johnson, the incumbent Oshkosh Republican, has been pushing for securing the border since he became chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee last year, echoing what has become a key Republican talking point as the campaign season rolls on. […]

Johnson also has said Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's plan to remove people living in the country illegally if they've committed crimes beyond their immigration offenses is in the country's best interests. He has stopped short of supporting Trump's plan to build a wall along the southern border, though, saying strategic fencing is a better option.

Not at all shockingly, Johnson's positions have earned Russ Feingold the endorsement of Latino groups. "(Hispanics) are a growing constituency in Wisconsin and Johnson is motivating them to turn out against him," Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces De La Frontera Action, said in a statement. It's not just voting against Johnson. Feingold has a solid record of supporting President Obama on his executive actions to protect DREAMers and their families, and in supporting a path to citizenship.

Can you give $3 to help Russ Feingold put this one away?

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