Steve Kretzman at Oil Change International writes: Less PowerPoint. More Power:

After that paranoid, delusional babble in the Koch-sponsored Rose Garden last week, it has been truly impressive and relieving to witness the diversity and depth of support for the Paris Accord, and for strong climate action across the board. As many have observed, Trump has united and energized the global climate movement like never before.

Incredibly, but not surprisingly, we are told that climate science was not a factor in Trump’s decision. While this is obviously dismaying, it’s also quite revealing. For decades, climate policy fights have often boiled down to dueling spreadsheets and PowerPoints. Now, in an accidental moment of clarity, Trump has confirmed what an increasingly large section of the climate movement has been saying for a while now: don’t bring a spreadsheet to a knife fight.

These people in Washington now do not want to talk about carbon budgets, stranded assets, the percentage of fracked gas that is leaking, the economic viability of carbon-sucking unicorns, or a million other aspects of climate policy. Which is good, because few of us want to have those debates with them either. Don’t get me wrong, our people power will still be data-driven. We will model transparent, data-driven energy and climate policy, and we will make sure our power builds on that – rather than skipping the facts overall, as is the current fashion.

The question for us – as climate and democracy and justice advocates – is not primarily which policy path leads to how many degrees of warming using what assumptions under whose scenarios. The critical question right now is this: How do we build more political power, and how do we win? Less PowerPoint. More power.

It’s time, in short, to fight. There is no way to solve climate without confronting – and defeating – the fossil fuel industry. We are in a battle with oil, gas, and coal, and we’re going to have to win. There is no way to solve climate without having this battle, and the faster we can win, the faster we can get on with the important work of managing the decline of the industry, while taking care of communities and workers and even investors in the transition. [...]

What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …

• A brief burp in time, by DarkSyde
• Right-wingers scared of California single payer resurrect a health care lie debunked seven years ago, by Ian Reifowitz
• Loving Day: 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, by Denise Oliver Velez
• Trump really is making America angry and racist again, by Frank Vyan Walton
• Republicans betray their gray-haired base with Trumpcare, by Jon Perr
• Obamacare is in danger of laying the path for Trumpcare, by Egberto Willies
• We need a leader, and instead we have a carnival barker, by Mark E Andersen
• With apologies to Cole Porter on his birthday:  You’re the Trump, by Sher Watts Spooner
• International Elections Digest: Labour surprises in United Kingdom as Tories lose their majority, by Elections

TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES • SUNDAY TALK

QUOTATION

“We live in a time of transition, an uneasy era which is likely to endure for the rest of this century. It will be a period of tensions, both within nations and between nations, of competition for scarce resources, of social, political, and economic stresses and strains. During this period we may be tempted to abandon some of the time-honored principles and commitments which have been proven during the difficult times of past generations. We must never yield to this temptation. Our American values are not luxuries, but necessities—not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”
                   ~President Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address, January 14, 1981

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At on this date in 2002—Mixed messages:

The Bush Administration announced that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies thwarted a "dirty bomb" attack on the US. However, I'm confused. President Bush said: 

The defense department's resident hawk, Paul Wolfowitz, said: 

He did indicate some knowledge of the Washington, D.C., area but I want to emphasize again it was not an actual plan.

So, not only does Bush not mention anything about a dirty bomb plot, but Wolfowitz actually stresses that there is no plan. So, at best we have someone, who perhaps consorted with known terrorist, that has "some knowledge" of the DC area. If he truly is a threat, then bravo. But given the known facts, does his capture really merit the victorious headlines today? […]

What gives? How can the US arrest someone from planning an attack when there is no actual plan? Just another attempt by the Bush Administration to divert attention from explosive hearings on Capitol Hill?

Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation takes on South Carolina, a solidly Republican state where Democrats still do hold some conservative seats. 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 carried South Carolina 55-41, a swing to the right from Mitt Romney’s 55-44 win in 2012. The GOP has held the state House since the 1994 Republican wave, and they captured the Senate in 2000. Team Red has an 80-44 lead in the House and a 28-18 edge in the Senate (one Democratic-held House seat is vacant, and Daily Kos Elections assigns open seats to the party that last held them). The entire House is up every two years, while the Senate is only up in presidential cycles.

We’ll start with a look at the House. Trump carried 86 of the 124 seats, taking three Obama seats while losing two Romney districts. Unlike in neighboring North Carolina and Georgia, ticket splitting actually benefited Democrats here. Seven Democrats hold Trump seats, while only state Rep. Kirkman Finlay is the one Republican in a Clinton seat. Of those seven Democrats, four represent seats that also backed Romney, while another Democrat holds a Romney-Clinton district.

The Democrat in the reddest House seat is Michael Anthony, who won his eighth term 55-45 even as his HD-42, which is located south of Spartanburg, went from 55-44 Romney to 60-37 Trump. Those other three Democrats in Romney/Trump seats also represent districts that swung right and gave Trump at least a 19-point margin of victory. Finlay, the one Republican in a Clinton seat, won a third term 59.5-40.5 as his HD-75, which is located in the Columbia area, moved from 56-43 Romney to 48-45 Clinton.

Democrats haven’t had much luck in statewide races in South Carolina recently, and the GOP-drawn House map was designed to make it even tougher for Team Blue to flip the chamber. One way to illustrate the GOP’s advantage is to sort each seat in each chamber by Clinton's margin of victory over Trump and see how the seat in the middle—known as the median seat—voted. Because both chambers have an even number of seats, we average the two middle seats to come up with the median point in the chamber. In the House, the median seat backed Trump 59-37, quite a bit to the right of his 55-41 statewide win.

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.

There are tens of thousands of races for office all over the country. Every cycle, several of these races will exist as a ballot line with only one choice for elected office. These races, which can be partisan or non-partisan can leave the candidate wondering what to do next. When your victory is assured on filing day, finding the motivation to get out and campaign can be pretty difficult. This week, though, we’re going to talk about how to make the most of a race where you have no opponent.

Arctic amplification of climate change is changing the north every year and polar bears have become the symbol for that shift. Here’s another way the rising temperatures make life hard on these magnificent specimens of megafauna:

Rapid global warming has sped up the movement of sea ice off Alaska's coasts, and already at-risk polar bears are paying a price, a new U.S. study says.

Most sea ice moves throughout the year and the iconic white bears are on a perpetual walk to stay within their preferred habitat, said U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist George Durner, lead author of the study.

Tomorrow on Sunday Kos we’ll talk about more methane, permafrost, and the wholesale passing of deep, noxious, subterranean gas.

• Hottest planet evah!

• A 100 million year-old bird fully preserved in amber has been found.

• Young Earth Creationist nutbag Greg Gianforte apologizes for assaulting a reporter after lying through his teeth publicly about who started the fight.

• A shout out to my buddies Dudley and Bob morning show on KLBJ in Austin: you never know where a DK science writer might live in this day and age, or what radio show s/he listens to in the morning, when you’re ripping on the site.

Did you have fun during “Infrastructure Week”? Did you think about infrastructure policy day in, day out? You know who didn’t think about infrastructure policy much this week? Donald Trump, Mr. Infrastructure Week himself. Or, if he thought about it, it sure hasn’t shown up in his public appearances:

It all began on an odd note on Monday, when the president vowed to privatize air traffic control — hardly an urgently desired infrastructure improvement — and then signed a set of air traffic control “principles” in what can only be described as a pantomime of a bill signing.

In hindsight, that might have been the most substantive component of Infrastructure Week. The president visited Cincinnati, Ohio on Wednesday to deliver a campaign rally-style pitch for his proposed infrastructure plan, though he offered none of the specifics that would bring said plan into focus. Instead, he veered off topic for long enough to praise the king of Saudi Arabia and rant about Democratic opposition to his health care plan. 

And no wonder:

… the most common theme in the Trump administration’s approach to infrastructure is pure obfuscation about how it will be paid for. If you’re not willing to say forthrightly how you’re going to pay for infrastructure investments, you really cannot be serious about it. As the old adage goes, “show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value”.

The recently released Trump federal budget plan guts infrastructure, period. [...]

The problem holding back increased investment in American infrastructure is simple: politicians are simply unwilling to increase public spending in a transparent way. This must be overcome—America needs a significant investment in public assets, and it needs this investment to be transparent, subject to democratic accountability, and long-lived.

The sketch of the new Trump infrastructure effort included in their budget shows clearly that they do not get this. Instead, the plan is more obfuscation and magical thinking. They claim their plan will lead to $1 trillion in new investments. Yet only $200 billion in new federal spending is specified (and again, this must be balanced against the enormous cuts to public investment already embedded in their overall budget plan). Where does the rest of the funding come from? In a word, nowhere. 

We need infrastructure investment. But the word “investment” is kinda important.

This is the 504th 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 June 3 Green Spotlight. More than 27,160 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

SemDem writes—You Probably Missed It: Saudi Arabia Now Has Full Control of America's Largest Oil Refinery: “If the time traveler would have done his job and saved humanity from Trump, and this deal went through under a President Hillary, I’m quite sure this would be the scandal of the year. (Beats the email thing hands down.) Port Arthur would roll off your tongue like ‘Benghazi’ as the GOP—and thus the media—would be raising hell. [...]  What just happened? Trump supporters were assured that he was going to take a tough line with the Saudis. Besides his continuous rantings over how Saudi Arabia ‘blew up the WTC’ and liked to kill people, Trump also swore that the oil-rich Arab kingdom would provide the United States with free oil for a decade. Yes, he actually promised that. That would have occurred right after Mexico sent us a check for the wall. And before you say that Trump couldn’t have stopped the deal, not only could he have, but his “top energy advisor” and first pick for Energy Secretary, oil billionaire Harold Hamm, stated that Trump wouldn’t stand for foreign ownership of oil refineries.”

KennethPouchet writes—Global warming. A concrete and terrible case: Florida: “Right now, science and politics don’t favor the optimists. The disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is speeding up, providing increasing evidence we are headed for the worst-case scenario of sea level rise — three to six feet (or more) by 2100. The impacts are already visible in South Florida. ‘Tidal flooding now predictably drenches inland streets, even when the sun is out, thanks to the region’s porous limestone bedrock,’ explains Bloomberg. ‘Saltwater is creeping into the drinking water supply.’ [...] Faster sea level rise and less adaptation means the day of reckoning is nigh. Dan Kipnis, chair of Miami Beach’s Marine and Waterfront Protection Authority — who has failed to find a buyer for his Miami Beach home for nearly a year — told Bloomberg, ‘Nobody thinks it’s coming as fast as it is.’ But this is not just South Florida’s problem. The entire country is facing a trillion-dollar bubble in coastal property values. This Hindenburg has been held aloft by U.S. taxpayers in the form of the National Flood Insurance Program.”

The Hawaiian coffee farmer who was the subject of a “remarkable” concurrence from a federal judge last month—“the government’s decision to remove [Andres] Magana Ortiz shows that even the ‘good hombres’ are not safe”—has won a last-minute reprieve from deportation. 

Despite being a a well-respected businessman, taxpayer, and dad of three U.S. citizens, ICE ordered Magana Ortiz to leave after nearly three decades in the U.S. According to NBC News, Magana Ortiz had already boarded a plane to Honolulu to turn himself in to federal immigration agents when he found out he was given an additional 30 days in the country to attempt to sort out his legal status through a family petition, something he has been attempting to do for a year now. 

It’s a momentary relief for Magana Ortiz and his family, but their fight isn’t over just yet:

"This is a temporary reprieve as the Department of Homeland Security considers Mr. Magana Ortiz’s wife’s Petition for Alien Relative," said Hawaii Sen. Mazie K. Hirono in a statement.

“I call on the Department of Homeland Security to process the Magana Ortiz family’s application to bring Andres out of the shadows as quickly as possible to keep Andres together with his wife and kids,” she said.

Magana Ortiz was relieved to hear he'd have a few more weeks with this family.

"All I can say is that I'm pretty happy," he said after the hearing. "It was very stressful. But I got a little bit of relief."

Judge Stephen Reinhardt’s passionate concurrence defending Magana Ortiz went viral last month, with the federal judge rebuking Donald Trump and his administration for attempting to deport the dad despite his ongoing effort to gain legal status through his family members.

In several states, crisis pregnancy centers—forced-birther storefronts with a record of manipulating women with lies about their options, including abortion—receive government money to spread their propaganda. That’s not the case in California, which passed a law in 2015 requiring that the centers prominently post a notice about the availability of abortion and birth control to women who seek their assistance.

But that hasn’t stopped Dr. George Delgado of the CPC called Culture of Life Family Services in San Diego from spreading the word about a controversial procedure he claims can reverse two-step medication abortions when a woman changes her mind after the first step. Physicians interviewed by Nina Liss-Schultz at Mother Jones view the procedure with suspicion and concern. 

Medication abortions require the use of two pills in sequence: mifepristone, which ends the pregnancy, followed by misoprostol, which expels the fetus. Women typically take the first pill in a doctor’s office and the second at home. That doesn’t apply in the 19 states and counting that require a woman to take both pills with a physician present, which means telemedicine for the procedure is outlawed. Even so, about one third of women who terminate their pregnancies early in gestation now choose a medication abortion. 

Delgado says the procedure can be stopped and the abortion “reversed” if a woman decides after taking mifepristone that she’s changed her mind and wants to carry her pregnancy to term. Not taking the misoprostol and getting injections of the hormone progesterone can accomplish that, says Delgado, who began undertaking the technique with another doctor in 2007, developed a protocol for it in 2009, and claims some 300 women have ended their abortions as a result. He also co-founded the Abortion Pill Reversal group, which, despite its deeply anti-choice foundation, ironically argues that women should have a choice to end an abortion already underway. 

Several states have sought to require that abortion providers tell women about the possibility their abortions can be reversed, but only three states have passed laws to that effect. One of those, Arizona’s, was nixed by the courts. The leading medical association of obstetricians and gynecologists had said of the Arizona law that “claims of medication abortion reversal are not supported by the body of scientific evidence.”

Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass of Kentucky writes—Happy 225th Birthday, Kentucky - and Shame on 152 Years of Post-War Confederacy:

The Bluegrass State is officially the 15th state of the union, but only because Congress wanted to balance slave states with non-slave states, so it gave the 14th spot to Vermont.

Like fellow border slave states Maryland, Missouri and Delaware, Kentucky never joined the Confederacy or voted to secede. Unlike the other border states, Kentucky responded to being forced to give up its slaves by becoming the only state to join the Confederacy AFTER the Civil War ended.

Treason in Defense of Slavery is so popular in Kentucky still that you can meet many people—even educated ones—who will insist that Kentucky did, indeed, secede from the Union.

Note that Governor "Trump Is Great for Kentucky" never mentions any of that currently relevant history in this press release.

The most patriotic moment of former FBI director James Comey’s testimony this week came when he attempted to jolt the nation awake to the subversive force that in many ways has already stormed our shores.

“They’re coming for America,” Comey said of Russia, “and they will be back.”

In fact with each passing month since the November election, an unsettling picture of the kaleidoscope of Russia interference last year has come more clearly into focus. Initially, we learned of how ferociously “fake news” infected our digital digest, largely at the direction of a Russian bots and trolls. That was November. Then in early January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified 25-page report detailing the intelligence estimate of 17 agencies that Russia had engaged in a widespread and highly sophisticated propaganda effort to hack political targets (both Democratic and Republican), create misinformation campaigns, and drive coverage of those campaigns. And yes, they were doing it all to benefit Donald Trump.

In March, we got a couple more bombshells: Obama administration officials were so freaked out by team Trump that they scrambled to preserve intelligence about the Russian meddling by dispersing it widely across the government; and James Comey told us for the first time that the FBI was investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia and had been doing so since last July. (Good god, since last summer!)

The New York Times provided April’s head turner: the CIA had briefed top Congressional lawmakers—the Gang of Eight—about Russian efforts to help Trump win the election as early as last August. Though the FBI had already opened an investigation by then, it had not yet concluded Russia was working in support of Trump. However, the drip, drip, drip of leaked DNC and Podesta emails in the fall would begin to change minds within the agency.

By the time former CIA chief John Brennan was up in May, what could be left? Plenty. Brennan described a harrowing few months at the agency last summer when he saw intelligence suggesting possible collusion between Trump and Russia that he felt was “worthy” of further investigation by the FBI. Brennan found the intel so unsettling that, beyond briefing lawmakers, he contacted his Russian counterpart in the intelligence community last August and told him to knock it off.

Those are the basic threads leading up to this week’s leaked National Security Agency report detailing Russian efforts to go beyond external influence campaigns and reach directly into US voting systems themselves.

A new study of police in Oakland, California, demonstrates what systemic racism looks like. It might be invisible if you examine it one interaction at a time, but Stanford University researchers used body-cam footage to demonstrate that police used more respectful language toward white people than black people during traffic stops. 

An analysis of 981 traffic stops made by 245 Oakland officers in April 2014 found that officers were more apt to use terms of respect such as “sir,” “ma’am,” “please” and “thank you” when dealing with white motorists when compared to black ones. They apologized to white people more frequently for having to stop them, and expressed concern, telling them to “drive safe.”

After stopping black people, officers more often used terms deemed to be disrespectful, calling them by their first names, “bro” or “my man,” and instructing them to keep their hands on the wheel, the study found. [...]

The study found that white people were 57 percent more likely to hear an officer say something judged to be highly respectful, while black people were 61 percent more likely to hear an officer say something judged to be extremely disrespectful.

For many people of color, this study will confirm what they’ve experienced and known to be true. If you’re white and you’ve wondered why it is that some other people’s traffic stops escalate so quickly when you never have trouble staying friendly and polite, consider that the starting point of respect may be very different for you than it is for others.

What’s striking is that the study doesn’t highlight dramatic, attention-grabbing abuses. It’s about constant, seemingly minor differences in the way people are treated that add up. As Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told the San Francisco Chronicle:

“In a traffic stop, if an officer is kind, courteous and discreet, that traffic stop is less likely to result in a loss of life,” she said. “Oftentimes when we talk about race and racism, we talk about individualized actions between people. But what Dr. Eberhardt’s study is really pointing to is the ways people’s individualized actions point to a systemic set of practices that has impacts on people’s lives.”

And while interactions with police carry life-and-death implications in a way that most others don’t, heightening the stakes of each interaction, consider that this respect differential is almost certainly not unique to police. If we put body-cams on cashiers and waiters and doctors and teachers and the strangers we encounter on the street, we’d probably find similar patterns. There’s no way it doesn’t wear on a person, like water dripping on a stone.

When it comes to family values, the conservative state of Texas does not reign supreme. Back to back Republican governors, a general contempt for science and health care, and the predominately conservative state legislature already spelled more uninsured residents than any other state in the US. Now the Lone Star State has won another deadly title: Texas has the highest death rate among expectant mothers in the entire developed world:

The task force formed in 2013 to study and combat what state lawmakers already perceived as a rising maternal mortality rate. Then last summer, the University of Maryland study found that Texas had the highest maternal mortality rate in the U.S. The study also found that the U.S. rate was higher than all other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries reporting maternal mortality data, except for Mexico. That study offered no explanation for the reason.
Further research would help understand, "is it hemorrhaging, is it post-partum depression, is it aftercare?" said Kolkhorst. "Are there things we could do pre-birth that would help with post-birth?”

Yes, it’s all those things and so much more. It’s pretending abstinence-only education works better than birth control, it’s political grandstanding over a bathroom bill while pregnant women die from lack of care. It’s the maiming of Planned Parenthood, the scapegoating of single moms, the demonization of the poor and the working middle-class. It is the well-funded vilification of people like Wendy Davis or Cecile Richards, who dare try to intervene in the inevitable, morbid death spiral and save the lives of innocent men, women and children. It is the pride felt and expressed by so, so many conservatives who are perversely pleased, who literally relish, the prospect of cutting off millions of scared, suffering patients from the hope and relief provided by comprehensive health care.

It’s the elevation of dishonesty above decency, the baffling worship of ignorant halfwits and incompetent cranks whose only success was being born wealthy. It is the fealty to blatant affectation and murderous thugs, it is the praise of needless cruelty. Most of all it is the constant, shameless lying, the endless mendacity, and the obsession with profiteering flowing down from the most senior officeholders in the land that has taken over one of the two major parties in the United States today and is now busy running it, and the nation, straight into the ground.