Much has been made of the fact that Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement makes the United States an international pariah and a business disaster, that it will undermine national security, that his excuses were a series of flat-out lies, and that his real reason was the typical pettiness of his tiny, fragile ego, but the degree to which Trump is Making America Worst cannot be overstated. With Trump, the United States is now one of three countries not signed on to the Paris Agreement.

But it’s even worse. Nicaragua didn’t sign on because it believes the Agreement isn’t aggressive enough. Nicaragua is on track to beat the Agreement’s targets.

Welcome back, Saturday Campaign D.I.Y.ers! For those who tune in, welcome to the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. Each week we discuss issues that help drive successful campaigns. If you’ve missed prior diaries, please visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide.

This week we are talking about your campaign finance report. Whether you are running for state house or US Senate, you will need to complete and turn in finance reports to your state or federal entities. These reports show who you have accepted donations from, and how your campaign spent those resources. 

Your campaign finance report is reviewed by a lot of people beyond the regulatory agencies and avoiding common pitfalls in your report can help keep you on message and your campaign moving forward.

It’s been a few months since we’ve done an “AARGH” edition of Nuts & Bolts, linked to major campaign mistakes. Mishandling of your campaign finance report, though, is one of the most frequent moments that becomes a problem for small and large campaigns. While there are lots of pitfalls we’re going to talk about the most basic and avoidable issues this week.

There’ll be an eclipse this summer across the US, and we’ll have more on that tomorrow, on Sunday Kos. But for now, finally, perhaps Tabby’s Star isn’t quite as rare an occurrence as it appears:

Osborn and co-authors discovered that every 808 days, the light from PDS 110 is reduced to 30% for about two to three weeks. Two notable eclipses observed were in November 2008 and January 2011.

“What’s exciting is that during both eclipses we see the light from the star change rapidly, and that suggests that there are rings in the eclipsing object, but these rings are many times larger than the rings around Saturn,” said Dr. Matthew Kenworthy, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory.

NASA will be sending a spacecraft to skim close by the sun, through it’s upper corona in fact, next year: 

“Parker Solar Probe is going to answer questions about solar physics that we’ve puzzled over for more than six decades,” said Parker Solar Probe Project Scientist Nicola Fox, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “It’s a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface. And we’re very proud to be able to carry Gene’s name with us on this amazing voyage of discovery.”

• Speaking of signs, nothing momentous is happening, astronomically, on Sept. 23, 2017.
• It may or may not feel like summer, but it’s not yet summer. That happens on Tuesday, June 20, for those of us in the US.
• For the world’s biggest airplane, designed to launch people into space from the high stratosphere, size matters:

Tell me again about how the gender wage gap is because women leave the workforce to stay home with the kids, or whatever the excuse du jour is:

Right out of college, young men are paid more than their women peers—which is surprising given that these recent graduates have the same amount of education and a limited amount of time to gain differential experience. While young men (age 21–24) with a college degree are paid an average hourly wage of $20.87 early in their careers, their female counterparts are paid an average hourly wage of just $17.88, or $2.99 less than men. This gap of $2.99 per hour is particularly striking as young women have higher rates of bachelor’s degree attainment (20.4 percent) than young men (14.9 percent). This difference would translate to an annual wage gap of more than $6,000 for full-time workers.

And the gap has widened since 2000.

This is the 503rd edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) usually appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the May 31 Green Spotlight. More than 27,100 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.

OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES

Pakalolo writes—Climate change wars are coming and a deranged Trump building his many walls will not stop it: “ ‘I’m very strongly of the opinion that walls are never a solution. You cannot build walls to stop people when they want to go to safety.’ Major General Munir Muniruzzaman, chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council On Climate Change (GMACCC).Our Earth is a miraculous and beautiful place where conditions are perfect for life to thrive. These conditions reflect how our climate system interconnects with everyone and everything. Man made greenhouse gases are rapidly changing the life sustaining conditions for most species (including humans). These conditions have allowed humans to build the civilization which we enjoy today. We are now experiencing rapid and abrupt changes to the climate. People are already migrating due to drought, heat, floods and stronger storms that are disrupting the climate system and putting most people on this planet at grave risk for mass extermination. The planets water and food resources are in peril from our fossil fuel emissions. People will migrate if they are able, the survival instinct is strong.”

webranding writes—Lets Build Some Infrastructure: “I've had these three ideas in my head for ages. I am not nearly the first to mention them and we’re not talking rocket science here either. If we want to create a ton of jobs and also build infrastructure there are three things that can be done yesterday if the Republican Congress would just do something. Rural, Internet Access. [...] Next Gen Cell Phone Network [...] Solar On Every School, Post Office, Public Building This is kind of my ‘big’ idea, but I don't feel it is that stunning or complex in the making. Put solar on every public school, post office, library, you name it. Heck, seems it would pay for itself with the building not paying as much for power, if at all.  If Congress doesn’t want to pay for it, issue bonds and let the cities pay back what they would have just paid in power bills. Then the power that all the school generates, you know over the summer break when the buildings are not being used to capacity, could go to the communities where they are located.”

LadyJeand writes—DONALD TRUMP WAS NOT ELECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF PITTSBURGH! “Donald Trump told the world today that he was elected by the people of Pittsburgh, not the people of Paris.Like most Pittsburghers, I resent that remark. We did NOT elect Donald Trump! Pittsburgh is a Democratic town, and has been for more than 80 years. We know who our friends are here, and we know, that, for the most part, they aren’t Republicans. [..] Donald Trump is a jagoff, a term used, here in Pittsburgh, for lowlifes, scumbags and Cleveland Browns fans. [...] We understand about climate change out here, since we have three rivers that like to flood, and some of us older folks grew up in the ‘good old days’ when the air was full of smoke from the mills, and you spent your winters in dark-colored clothes, because anything bright showed the grime. (The snow turned gray after 24 hours in the winter. Those were the days.)”

Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation ventures to Ohio, a traditionally swingy state that took a hard right turn in 2016, and where the GOP dominates the state government. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new data sets; you can also find all of our calculations from 2016 and past cycles here.

Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton 52-44 in Ohio last year, a huge improvement for the GOP from Barack Obama’s 51-48 win over Mitt Romney four years before. The GOP holds a massive 66-33 majority in the state House (one Democratic-held seat is vacant, and Daily Kos Elections assigns open seats to the party that last held them), and an even-stronger 24 to nine edge in the state Senate. The entire state House is up every two years, while half of the Senate was up in 2016 and the remaining seats will be up in 2018.

The GOP briefly lost control of the state House in 2008, but they won it back in the 2010 GOP wave. Team Red soon got to draw a map that would protect their majorities, and they made the most of their opportunity by narrowly winning three-fifths veto-proof majorities in 2012 despite Democratic House candidates winning more votes statewide that year. Even as Romney was narrowly losing the state in 2012, he still carried 19 of the 33 Senate seats and 60 of the 99 state House districts. Unsurprisingly, Trump did even better, taking 23 Senate districts and 66 House seats.

We’ll start with a look at the state House, where Trump flipped 13 Obama seats while surrendering seven Romney seats to Clinton. Trump dramatically improved on Romney’s performance in many predominantly white working class areas, including the traditionally Democratic Mahoning Valley around Youngstown, and there were some massive swings to the right in several House seats. The biggest swing toward Trump was in HD-90, a GOP-held seat which is located along the Kentucky border. While Romney won the seat 52-46 and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown managed to narrowly carry it during his 51-45 statewide win in 2012, Trump took the seat 69-28. Trump improved on Romney’s performance by at least a 10-point margin in 53 additional seats.

By contrast, Clinton improved on Obama in only 21 state House districts. Her biggest improvement over Obama was in HD-27 in the Cincinnati area, which swung from 61-38 Romney to 50-44 Trump. However, Republican state Rep. Tom Brinkman Jr. had no trouble winning re-election 64-36. Clinton improved on Obama by at least a 10-point margin in four other seats.

One thing compounding the pain of the 2016 election—on top of, y’know, the actual consequences of losing—was the way that the loss seemed to come out of nowhere. Polls, for the most part, showed Hillary Clinton winning, both at the national level and in the key states that decide the electoral college. And predictive models—which by definition aren’t any better than the polls that get fed into them—as a result showed that Clinton had very high odds of winning overall, thanks to leading outside the margin of error in enough states to get over the 270 mark in the electoral college, meaning that the only way Donald Trump could win would be through catastrophic error throughout the polling industry. And yet, here we are today!

To their credit, the nation’s pollsters have been have been studiously trying to figure out what went wrong since then, in an effort to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Pollsters, after all, are social scientists, and on the rare occasion that the experiment goes awry and burns down the laboratory, the proper response is to track down the source of error and account for it, not to say “This was a one-time fluke; nothing to see here.” People who are going around saying “I’ll never trust another poll again; polls are broken,” whether they’re Republicans crowing in unexpected triumph or Democrats trying to rationalize their loss, are doing themselves a disservice, because the polling field, like any other scientific endeavor, is always self-correcting, adding lessons learned from its mistakes to its body of knowledge.

The polling industry’s professional association, the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), recently held its annual convention, and the New York Times’ Nate Cohn—who, in addition to his work at poll aggregation, has also worked directly with innovative new polling techniques, like 2016’s NYT/Siena voter file-informed polls of swing states—reported back on Wednesday with an excellent summary of the self-diagnosis that went on at the meeting.

Possibly the biggest problem (and one that I’ve talked about myself in 2016 post mortems) is the surprisingly large role that education level had in predicting voter behavior in 2016. Pollsters typically weight for factors like race and age. In other words, they make adjustments post-sample, in order to make sure that the sample population matches, percentage-wise, the race and age distribution of the actual population they’re sampling. (The other alternative is quota-style sampling, where the pollsters seek to find the right number of people from each race, age bracket, and so on; that was prevalent in polling’s early days in the mid-20th century but isn’t done any more.) Weighting for education didn’t used to be important, because education didn’t have much of a relationship with how people voted until recently, and that correlation really shot up in 2016, to the extent that college education was almost as associated with voting Democratic as being non-white.

Leading Off

● Texas: Like their brethren in North Carolina, Republican legislators in Texas have been embroiled in racial gerrymandering lawsuits almost since the moment they passed new redistricting plans following the 2010 census. Earlier in 2017, a federal district court panel ruled that the GOP’s 2011 congressional and state House maps were intentionally discriminatory against black and Latino voters. Because Republicans had already redrawn those maps in 2013, following court rulings that blocked the 2011 districts from ever taking effect, there will be an expedited July trial over the current maps.​

​With the Supreme Court dealing Republicans a major blow in North Carolina (see our North Carolina item below), there’s a good chance Texas Republicans will also suffer a courtroom defeat that could lead to yet another set of new maps in 2018. In late May, the district court invited Republicans to voluntarily redraw their maps, and some Republican congressman reportedly even begged GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session in order to do so. However, the governor has refused to budge, raising the risk of the court stepping in and drawing the lines itself.

It's not clear why Abbott's being so stubborn. It's possible Republicans view a redraw as an admission of wrongdoing—or that they're hoping for a better outcome at the Supreme Court. Yet whatever the reason, this intransigence is potentially to the detriment of Abbott’s own party, since a court-drawn congressional map could have a devastating impact on Republicans and potentially cost them several congressional seats in 2018.

As we explained previously, March’s court ruling only specifically faulted a handful of seats, but since so many surrounding seats would have to be redrawn to correct the problematic districts, the possible range of outcomes is very broad. If plaintiffs prevail and GOP legislators ultimately redraw the lines, Republicans could limit Democrats to a gain of just two or three seats. However, if the court implements new lines of its own, that number could rise to something more like a five-seat pickup for Democrats, in what Republicans have aptly called their “Armageddon” scenario.

Among Donald Trump's cabinet members, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has thus far dominated the pr*sident's time. By Politico's count last month, Tillerson had met with Trump 22 times, while Environmental Protection Agency destroyer Scott Pruitt didn't even get a mention in the tally (graphic below).

Pruitt's Oval Office stock may have risen slightly in the run-up to Donald Trump's cynical political ploy to shore up his base by trashing the planet. But what's clear is that Tillerson, who reportedly argued against pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, didn’t spend much of his early political capital with Trump laying the groundwork to salvage the Paris accord.

How Tillerson and Trump were wiling away those hours became a lot clearer with journalist Michael Isikoff's inside account of the early days at the State Department as Team Trump took over. During that time, former Obama administration holdovers and career diplomats at State waged an all-hands-on-deck battle to beat back Trump officials' efforts to ease Russia’s sanctions.

Team Trump had immediately set about the task of rolling back sanctions and other punitive measures President Obama put in place after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and later prosecuted an extensive campaign to hack the 2016 election.

“There was serious consideration by the White House to unilaterally rescind the sanctions,” said Dan Fried, a veteran State Department official who served as chief U.S. coordinator for sanctions policy until he retired in late February. He said in the first few weeks of the administration, he received several “panicky” calls from U.S. government officials who told him they had been directed to develop a sanctions-lifting package and imploring him, “Please, my God, can’t you stop this?” [...]

Tom Malinowski, who had just stepped down as President Obama’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, told Yahoo News he too joined the effort to lobby Congress after learning from former colleagues that the administration was developing a plan to lift sanctions — and possibly arrange a summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin — as part of an effort to achieve a “grand bargain” with Moscow. “It would have been a win-win for Moscow,” said Malinowski, who only days before he left office announced his own round of sanctions against senior Russian officials for human rights abuses under a law known as the Magnitsky Act.

"Grand bargain," a term recently used to describe bipartisan negotiations between two Americans from separate branches of government, now more accurately relates to efforts by an American president to align himself and by extension, our nation, with a hostile and corrupt foreign power that plotted to subvert our democracy.

Possibly because somebody in the office lost a bet, Vox watched and categorized the entirety of Fox News's "coverage" of the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion that the Republican rollback of healthcare reform would cause 23 million Americans to lose their health insurance. Fox is in a bit of a pickle on this one, because the people most likely to lose their insurance are the same sort of people who watch Fox News.

Under the Vox breakdown, the first CBO score was met primarily with insistence that freedom was more important than someone having stupid ol' health insurance. That apparently didn't do much even for Fox News viewers because by May, the effort had turned to demonizing the Congressional Budget Office for saying such things out loud. As usual, the effort mostly relies on Fox News viewers being dumb as posts, but Fox has been doing this for a very long time and we're not going to dispute their own estimation of their viewers. Here's Fox & Friends talking tree stump Brian Kilmeade saying not to worry, viewers about to be gouged by the Republican plan, because reasons:

But then you factor in the fact that this is a three-phase plan. The second phase is when [Health and Human Services Secretary] Tom Price is supposed to theoretically sit there and put in regulations that’ll make this more of a conservative project.

And theoretically, Fox pretends to be a news network. Doesn't make it so. And the notion that Tom Price will be following up at some future date with a “conservative” plan that gives people more insurance seems to require more than the usual Fox-required suspension of disbelief.

Fear not, though. Fellow stump Steve Doocy wants you to know that it doesn't matter if you, out there in the viewing audience, lose your health insurance because you aren't the damn point here:

But here’s the thing: What if it’s — the hope for everybody is this is actually better. Reduces taxes and stuff like that.

And ultimately, when it comes to politics, this is going to redeem Speaker Paul Ryan. Plus, it’s going to give President Trump his first big — and it is big — legislative win.

Donald Trump's bizarre speech to NATO last week was yet another opportunity for America's fact-checkers to do that thing they do, patiently explaining that even though this orange-hued fellow keeps huffing about the members of NATO owing us some cash, that is not even remotely how this works.

But Trump is really talking about indirect funding. Since 2006, each NATO member has had a guideline of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense spending. At a 2014 summit, responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine, NATO members pledged to meet that guideline by 2024.

That's it. That's the whole story, right there. NATO members have agreed that by 2024, two presidential elections in America-years, each country would hike defense spending to 2 percent in order to boost European defenses. A few are there, and most aren't. There's no penalty if the goal isn't met. It won't affect American defense spending much, if at all, because we here in America would consider a defense budget of only 2 percent of our GDP to be an affront to our American Way Of Life and quite possibly treasonous to even propose. But the other NATO member states are, understandably, rather twitchy about Russian military aggression on their doorstep and have decided they'll be boosting their own spending as deterrent.

From this, Donald Trump has spun the fanciful tale that the members of NATO have been holding out on us, 'Merica, and seems to be under the impression that the other NATO leaders ought to be cutting us a check—and even more than that, that other NATO countries are for some reason obliged to meet the 2024 spending goals retroactively, based on his say-so, and write additional checks for each past year they haven't met the future goal.

This is self-evidently stupid. It has also become, for Donald Trump, a confusion-turned-conspiracy roughly equivalent to that surrounding Agenda 21, the nonbinding United Nations statement on sustainable development quickly made famous in certain deeply gullible conservative circles as allegedly being everything from an insidious plot to overthrow American government to a plan to overthrow civilization itself and live in mud huts alongside our favorite cattle. Whether Trump is peddling this new anti-NATO notion as "misleading" tactic to rile up his base or whether he is stone-cold stupid and honestly cannot grasp the situation is, as always, up for debate.

 June 2 is National Gun Violence Awareness Day. While gun control advocates across the country try to bring attention to the issue of mass shootings, it’s critically important for us also not to lose sight of the fact that hundreds of American women are likely to be killed by their armed partners each year. These murders can often be the catalyst for the numerous mass shootings that take place in public as well. 

"We as Americans think that we are safer in the United States from violence, terrorism and other dangers," said Allison Anderman, the managing attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "But I wonder if American women know that we are 16 times more likely to be shot and killed by our counterparts in other countries."

In April, the nation was reminded of this deadly statistic when Cedric Anderson went into the San Bernardino, California elementary school where his wife, Karen Smith (who was black), worked and shot and killed her, an 8-year-old student and then, himself. Though they’d only been married for a short time and Karen had recently left her husband. This tragedy also highlights the ways in which violence (while not limited to race, class and gender) disproportionately impacts black women. Sadly, Smith’s death at the hands of an intimate partner is not unusual.

African-American women only make up about 13 percent of U.S. women, but comprise about half of female homicide victims — the majority of whom were killed by current or former boyfriends or husbands. 

According to Justice Bureau statistics, African-American women are victimized by domestic violence at rates about 35 percent higher than white women.

"Black women are really impacted around violence as a whole, where we're talking about domestic violence, trafficking, or sexual violence," [said Tiffany Turner-Allen, program director at UJIMA, the National Center on Violence in the Black Community]. "The numbers skew very high."