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Jonathan Chait/NY Magazine:
Everything Conservatives Said About the Paris Climate Agreement Is Already Wrong
Why was the right so certain that India and China would continue to ramp up their carbon emissions regardless of what they said in Paris? Because, they insisted, dirty energy was and would remain the best path for them to raise their standard of living, which was and is well below American levels. National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing in December 2015, dismissed plans to steer the developing world onto a cleaner energy path as “a naive belief in the power of global shame over the sheer economic interest of developing countries in getting rich (and lifting countless millions out of poverty) through exploiting cheap energy — you know, the way Western countries have done for a couple of centuries.”
But this analysis has proven incontrovertibly false. Rather than lagging behind their promised targets, India and China are actually surpassing them. According to Climate Action Tracker, India, which had promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 33–35 percent by 2030, is now on track to reduce it by 42–45 percent by that date. China promised its total emissions would peak by 2030 — an ambitious goal for a rapidly industrializing economy. It is running at least a decade ahead of that goal.
Maybe the best explanation is that Trump is screwed so in his infinite wisdom and consistent with past behavior, he’s decided to screw all of us.
“Remember, there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans”™.
Jesse Ferguson/Politico:
Democrats’ Secret Weapon: Romney Voters
Highly educated Americans were often skeptical of advertising with overstated or undocumented claims, but were very open to evaluating Trump on his own words and deeds.
They didn’t like what they saw from Trump the candidate, and they most likely do not like what they see from Trump the president. As a thought experiment, can you think of a single thing that Trump’s Republicans have done that appeals to Romney-Clinton voters? They disapprove of House Republicans’ calamitous health care repeal, and are especially angry about what it could mean for people with pre-existing conditions. While it’s common knowledge that the public is heavily opposed to the repeal bill, strong opposition is much higher among voters who backed Clinton in 2016 versus those who backed Obama in 2012 (61 percent versus 52 percent), according to this week’s Morning Consult/Politico poll. These voters are equally frustrated by the Republicans’ attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. They’re heartbroken by the stories of the “Dreamers” who immigrated to the United States as children and are now being deported. They’re tired of having climate change waved away as a “hoax.” They’re embarrassed by the way Trump has behaved on the international stage. And they’re deeply disturbed by the unfolding scandal surrounding the Trump team’s ties to Russia—and perhaps even more concerned about the administration’s quickly unraveling attempts to cover it up. (In a May 24 Quinnipiac national survey, 66 percent of college-educated white voters said they are concerned about Trump’s relationship with Russia.)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology officials said U.S. President Donald Trump badly misunderstood their research when he cited it on Thursday to justify withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. …
"We certainly do not support the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris agreement," said Erwan Monier, a lead researcher at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and one of the study's authors.
"If we don't do anything, we might shoot over 5 degrees or more and that would be catastrophic," said John Reilly, the co-director of the program, adding that MIT's scientists had had no contact with the White House and were not offered a chance to explain their work.
Politico on a Steve Knight (R-CA 25) town hall:
In the end, however, that just might not save him from his AHCA vote.
“It’s very hard to be a Republican in California right now,” said David Goss, a 36-year-old Republican constituent who was wearing a “Stands with Steve Knight” shirt.
Health care is “all anybody cares about. They don’t look at all the other good stuff that Steve Knight has done. All they want to focus on is this one thing.”
Geoffrey Skelley/Crystal Ball:
Just How Many Obama 2012-Trump 2016 Voters Were There?
Different sources offer varying estimates of Obama 2012-Trump 2016 voters. The ANES found that about 13% of all Trump voters cast a ballot for Obama in 2012. Meanwhile, the CCES found a slightly smaller figure of around 11%. Lastly, the UVA Center for Politics poll found that about 15% of Trump voters claimed to have backed Obama four years earlier. Using these percentages (not rounded) and Trump’s overall 2016 vote total, estimates of the raw number of such Obama-Trump voters range from about 6.7 million to 9.2 million. That’s a wide range, and considering the caveats regarding voter recall of past votes, it is important to be clear about the relative uncertainty of these figures.
Nonetheless, these surveys offer additional evidence about a critical part of the 2016 equation: the millions of voters who switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Given the extremely close margins in some states, particularly the Rust Belt trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, these voters played a crucial role in handing over the White House to the GOP.
In Washington state, a healthcare repeal lesson learned the hard way
Republicans in the state of Washington didn’t wait long in the spring of 1995 to fulfill their pledge to roll back a sweeping law expanding health coverage in the state.
Coming off historic electoral gains, the GOP legislators scrapped much of the law while pledging to make health insurance affordable and to free state residents from onerous government mandates.
It didn’t work out that way: The repeal left the state’s insurance market in shambles, sent premiums skyrocketing and drove health insurers from the state. It took nearly five years to repair the damage.
Two decades later, the ill-fated experiment, largely relegated to academic journals, offers a caution to lawmakers at the national level as Republicans in the U.S. Senate race to write a bill to repeal and replace the federal Affordable Care Act.
Brian Beutler/TNR:
Ivanka Trump’s Political Brand Is Dead
Either she never cared about issues like climate change, or she’s a massive failure as a White House adviser.
Ivanka has succeeded in this endeavor by accepting, consciously or subconsciously, that her father is a narcissist, and then striving to excel at all the things that Donald Trump thinks he’s good at, so that he sees her as his truest reflection.
Against that backdrop, which interpretation of Ivanka Trump’s performance in public life seems more plausible: that she tried very hard to negotiate with her father on climate change—to use The Art of the Deal on him as it were—and failed miserably, or that she’s cynically severed any connection between her image and reality in order to maximize profit?
There’s a practice called greenwashing, whereby polluting companies devote relatively minor resources to environmental causes to reap public relations windfalls. The Trump game, applied to public service, is even more disingenuous than greenwashing because Ivanka has literally sacrificed nothing, not even a modest sum.
Doctors and nurses must find compassion for themselves, not just their patients
I love being a doctor. It’s what I always wanted to do, this work so rich in content and even richer in meaning. There is gratitude, comfort and undeniable privilege. Still, on many days I feel emotionally barren, fearing that the day has just begun and I have nothing left to give. I am not alone: my stories compete with those of the harried intensive care doctor, the rushed GP, the sleepless surgeon, the overwhelmed emergency physician, and practically every nurse I know. But it does get me wondering how long it is possible to keep absorbing the setbacks and vicissitudes of our patients’ lives and pretend that none of it affects us. Is the magnitude of a life’s work enough to outweigh the depersonalisation of the self?
“Can’t you slow down?” my sweet friend asks. “Take time off or something?”
And park my worries where? Hand my patients to whom? Say what to the management? Importantly, nothing would change on one’s return except a larger pile of work. No doctor has the capacity to take on the additional work of a stressed colleague with sympathy and understanding and without judgement at what is widely perceived to be a personal susceptibility even though the evidence screams otherwise.
I blow off steam by blogging. I’ve found it’s far superior to yelling at Chris Matthews to shut up and let his guests finish a sentence.
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
The anti-Trump right is becoming a breed of its own
Most of the conservative Republicans opposed to President Trump are writers and policy specialists. Few are politicians — or, perhaps more precisely, few of the conservative politicians who see Trump as a danger to the nation are prepared to say so in public.
So does this mean that the writerly anti-Trump right is ineffectual? Not at all. But we may be approaching a time when the gutlessness of the GOP’s leadership moves these restive conservatives to abandon their traditional loyalties altogether. It would not be the first time that a group of thinkers opened the way for political realignment.
Greg Sargent/WaPo re Paris accords:
Trump is about to do something terrible and destructive. The GOP must own the consequences.
The projected consequences have already been spelled out by many others. Beyond whether Trump succeeds in unwinding our climate policies, making it harder for us to meet our commitments to the deal, the withdrawal will send a signal to the world that the United States does not see global warming as a long-term challenge and no longer has any intention to lead on it. It could squander the position from which we can monitor global progress in combating that challenge. It could weaken other countries’ commitment to the deal. Though early signs are that Europe and China remain committed, it’s possible that developing countries could be less likely to act. All that would be bad for the planet. Last I checked, the United States remains firmly grafted to that aforementioned planet.
Why are people still losing their minds over Hillary?
Her boiling anger at the press and at various out-of-nowhere campaign developments doesn't make her worse than Gore, Kerry, Romney, and McCain — it makes her one of them.
And that really only leaves one thing that is just so very different about Hillary Clinton. Let's see if you can guess what it is.
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