The News From Paris

The negotiations at the UN Global Climate Change Conference in Paris were scheduled to conclude today. But this morning, Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister and chair of the talks, announced that they will extend into Saturday (some expect they'll go through Sunday).

The good news is that, in a new draft agreement that was released yesterday, there was positive movement on a big issue.

One issue that had divided nations earlier in the conference appeared to be largely resolved, with a consensus emerging around acknowledging the need for a more aggressive temperature goal in the draft, according to one source. Though current proposed text sticks with the target agreed at a previous climate conference of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, it also says countries should “pursue efforts” to hit the more ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Graham Readfearn brings us the reaction to this from Australian Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who has been researching the impacts of global warming and greenhouse gases on coral reefs since the mid 1980s.

Hoegh-Guldberg says he is “shocked” at even the prospect of a deal being struck this weekend in Paris.

“I thought that we might have had a Copenhagen moment - but people seem to be coming from a position of working with the system, instead of gaming it.”

What delights Hoegh-Guldberg even more is that under the current draft of the Paris agreement, there’s a statement that calls for countries to keep global warming “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C”.

That statement, he says, matches almost word for word a call that Hoegh-Guldberg and other world leading coral scientists made in the lead up to the Paris talks.

“I thought that request was a little extreme,” he admits.

“But now it’s there in the text.

Andrew Restuccia reports that the remaining issues to be negotiated are: "financial support for poor nations and transparency of the domestic actions the countries will take to trim their emissions of carbon dioxide." He also indicates that the two countries who are at odds with the consensus on those issues are China and India. Secretary of State Kerry has held bilateral meetings with both countries and today, President Obama personally called Chinese President Xi Jinping in an attempt to reach agreement.

Whatever the outcome of these final negotiations, it seems clear that we are on the cusp of an historic moment for the planet that will arrive sometime this weekend.

Donald Trump as Angry Adolescent

As a family therapist, I occasionally worked with adolescents who struggled because they were at a point where they were ready to mature past their parent's level of development. For whatever reason, some people simply fail to grow up.

That is essentially how Mark Bowden describes Donald Trump based on an interview he did with him for Playboy magazine back in 1996. Here are a couple of the pertinent excerpts:

Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression...

He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force...

Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom...The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.

Yep, that pretty well describes a lot of 13 year-olds I've met over the years.

Perhaps it is the "recovering therapist" in me talking, but I think that describes The Donald better than anything I've read about him so far. And that last paragraph probably sums up his supporters pretty well too.

It also explains why every time I've read/heard someone take a thoughtful approach to discussing Trump's outburst-of-the-moment by diving into why they are not feasible, practical, constitutional, etc., my first reaction is to roll my eyes and move on. To do otherwise assumes that he has actually given them serious thought. He obviously hasn't.

Personally, it's hard for me to even imagine having a parent like that. But for anyone to suggest that he should be the leader of the free world is completely preposterous.

"Quagmire" Used to Describe Putin's Intervention in Syria

Yes, Ilya Arkhipov and Henry Meyer went there with an article titled: Putin's Quagmire in Syria Proves Obama Prescient. They describe an excursion that was meant to last a few months now stretching into the possibility of years.

With the mission in its third month, Putin is pouring materiel and manpower into Syria at a pace unanticipated by lawmakers already struggling to meet his spending goals. The plunging price of oil is sapping revenue and prolonging Russia’s first recession in six years...

On the financial side, Putin's original investment of $4 million per day has now doubled to $8 million per day - or $3 billion on an annualized basis. From a military perspective, Michael Crowley has more details about how things are getting bogged down.

“The Syrian regime has had tactical gains, but Russian air strikes have not been a game-changer in terms of allowing the Syrian army to move in” and hold territory, said Chris Kozak, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that closely tracks the Syrian battlefield…

But that ground offensive has mostly sputtered, thanks to what sources called poor coordination with Syrian and Iranian forces, leaving the battlefield map little changed.

If any of that feels familiar, it's because it is not that different from what the U.S. experienced with our military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It should be a lesson to folks like Senators McCain and Graham who want us to get involved in yet another quagmire. But no, I'm not going to hold my breath.

I am reminded of the fact that it was only two months ago that Steve Kroft suggested to President Obama that Putin was challenging his leadership in Syria. Here's how he responded:

When I came into office...Syria was Russia’s only ally in the region. And today, rather than being able to count on their support and maintain the base they had in Syria, which they’ve had for a long time, Mr. Putin now is devoting his own troops, his own military, just to barely hold together by a thread his sole ally…

Well Steve, I got to tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we’ve got a different definition of leadership.

Way back in the 1950's the great Pete Seeger wrote a song with the refrain, "When will they ever learn?" It's pretty clear who has/hasn't learned this lesson about quagmires in the Middle East.

The GOP Will Sink or Swim With the White Nativist Vote

This morning Greg Sargent did a good job of laying out the different electoral strategies of the Rubio and Cruz campaigns.

Marco Rubio has sought to project an optimistic, inclusive aura that seems designed not just to unite Republicans but also to appeal (at least on the margins) to Latinos and millennials. By contrast, while Cruz says publicly that he wants to win over Reagan “Democrats,” the more plausible interpretation of his approach is that it’s built around the idea that the electorate is hopelessly polarized and that maximizing conservative and GOP [white] base turnout is the route to victory.

The only thing I'd add is that, with his increasingly extremists statements during the primary, Rubio is likely going for what Eric Fehrnstrom described as Romney's "etch-a-sketch" strategy of hoping that voters will wipe the slate clean when it comes time for the general election.

On the other hand, the Cruz strategy reminds me of something Adam Serwer wrote way back in 2011 in the lead-up to the 2012 election.

The Republican Party had a choice after 2008. They could continue to rely on a dwindling but still decisive share of the white vote to prevail, or they could try to bring more minorities into the party. While I'm not entirely sure how much of the decision was made by party leaders and how much is merely the unprecedented influence of Fox News, but whether it's pseudo scandals of the past two years, from birtherism to the NBPP [New Black Panther Party] case, the GOP's nationwide rush to ban sharia and institute draconian immigration laws, or characterizing nearly every administration policy as reparations, the conservative fixations of Obama's first term indicate that the GOP will end up relying at least in part on inflaming white racial resentment to close the gap.

Sounds positively prophetic right now, doesn't it?

Of course, the Republicans lost the 2012 presidential election and immediately performed their infamous "autopsy," which found that they needed to do a better job of reaching out to women and people of color. We all know how that's been going.

Frankly, I don't think it matters what the Rubio or Cruz campaigns plan for this election. Back in the 1970's the Republican Party decided to go with a Southern Strategy and built their electoral base on a platform of white resentment. Since then, they have only reinforced that with everything from Reagan's "welfare queens" to Bush's Willie Horton ads. At this point, they can't abandon that base with any plausible effort to make their party attractive to people of color. The GOP will sink or swim with the white nativist vote.

The Source of Division

Barack Obama is currently serving his second term as President based largely on uttering these words back in 2004.


His attempts to bridge the red/blue divide have been met with obstruction from Republicans and often with outrage from those in his own party.

But in a truly Rovian way, we have been constantly subjected to accusations that this President is "divisive." Karl is the one who has always suggested that it is a good strategy to go after your opponent's strongest point.

I've been thinking about that as we watch Republicans:

* Insist that we blame all Muslims for the actions of the radical few,

* Consider the idea of rounding up 11 million undocumented people and deport them,

* Blame BlackLivesMatter for a made-up "war on cops,"

* Spread lies about Planned Parenthood selling "baby parts" and fail to acknowledge that it led to a shooting spree at a clinic in Colorado Springs, and

* Attend rallies with people who suggest that homosexuals should be killed.

Those are simply a few of the highlights we've witnessed so far during this 2016 presidential primary.

It all reminds me of another Rovian trait the Republican Party has embraced...one that Steve Benen documented so thoroughly back when he was still writing at the Washington Monthly:

Karl Rove has a special, some might call it "pathological," quality as a political pundit. More than anyone I've ever seen or heard of, Rove identifies some of his own ugliest, most malicious, most pernicious qualities, and then projects them onto those he hates most.

In other words, the people who are accusing President Obama of being divisive are doing everything they can to divide us.

Now is perhaps a good time to remind ourselves of some wisdom from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Living in Fear

No one does a take-down better than Charles Pierce. Yesterday he took aim at a discussion on Morning Joe (he calls the hosts "Squint and the Meat Puppet"). Apparently while pontificating about President Obama’s “tepid” response to the events in Paris and San Bernardino, the group engaged in some pearl-clutching about how the President’s response had failed to calm their children’s fears about terrorism. Pierce's point was that "it is the height of journalistic cowardice to attack the president behind your children." By way of contrast, he offered this:

Every day, there are kids on the west side of Chicago who go to school with gunfire in the background. There are kids in the Mississippi Delta who go to school hungry, and who are sick with preventable diseases. There are kids in Appalachia who are sick because good dental care is unavailable to them. There are kids in Israel, and on the West Bank, in Somalia, and all over the world who get up every day with actual war being made all around them.

The juxtaposition of the pundit’s “journalistic cowardice” with children who actually suffer from fear and deprivation every day reminded me of a Charles Barkley skit on SNL a few years ago about "White People Problems." I don't mean to make light of the pain and suffering felt by the loved ones of those killed and injured in Paris and San Bernardino. But perhaps the hosts and guests on Morning Joe could point out to their children that they are no more likely to be killed by a terrorist than they are to be crushed to death by collapsing furniture.

Seriously, this fear-mongering has gotten out of control.

Kareem Abdul-Jabar captured it all really well.

The terrorist campaign against American ideals is winning. Fear is rampant. Gun sales are soaring. Hate crimes are increasing. Bearded hipsters are being mistaken for Muslims. And 83 percent of voters believe a large-scale terrorist attack is likely here in the near future. Some Americans are now so afraid that they are willing to trade in the sacred beliefs that define America for some vague promises of security from the very people who are spreading the terror. “Go ahead and burn the Constitution — just don’t hurt me at the mall.” That’s how effective this terrorism is.

I’m not talking about ISIS. I’m talking about Donald Trump.

This is not hyperbole. Not a metaphor. Webster defines terrorism as “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal; the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.”

If violence can be an abstraction — and it can; that’s what a threat is — the Trump campaign meets this definition. Thus, Trump is ISIS’s greatest triumph: the perfect Manchurian Candidate who, instead of offering specific and realistic policies, preys on the fears of the public, doing ISIS’s job for them.

The only thing I'd add is that it isn't just Trump. It also comes from other Republican candidates who tell us lies about how the "the world is on fire" and it "has never been a more dangerous place." And it comes from pundits who wring their hands about a President who hasn't bought into the fear-mongering enough for their tastes (and ratings).

What we're witnessing is the collapse of an entire political party that has run out of ideas and is holding on to the last shred of itself by blowing up as much fear as possible. Donald Trump is merely the one lighting the fuse.

How Gun Control Plays Out in Red State Elections

Wendy Davis, former Texas State Senator and gubernatorial candidate, has written an article for Politico that is gut-wrenching in its honesty. The title and tag line capture her angst: "Why I Caved on Guns When I Ran for Governor of Texas: I was part of the reason we can't make progress on the issue. And I regret it every day."

Perhaps it is cathartic for Davis to write a piece like this. But I have a hunch that her motives went beyond a self-serving attempt to salve her own conscience. That's because most of the article is devoted to exposing her own thoughts as she made the decision to support concealed carry during her campaign. And in doing so, she tells us a lot about why passing common sense gun safety laws has been so difficult.

As baffling as this would appear to an outside observer, I know why we keep ending up here. I know why because, even with my history of supporting sensible gun laws, I was cowed by the political realities of my state. Me, a Democrat who wasn’t afraid of making waves when it came to strapping on a pair of pink sneakers as a state senator and filibustering an anti-abortion bill for 13 hours. I might be doggedly progressive most of the time, but when it came to staking out my position on the open carry of handguns in a red state, none of that mattered.

For those who think this only happens because of financial support candidates receive from groups like the NRA, Davis points out that she has consistently received and "F" rating from them.

Instead, Davis names two things that led to her decision:

1. She wanted her campaign to be about things like education funding, equal pay for women and access to healthcare. If she took a position against concealed carry, she knew it would completely dominate the conversation.

2. The "Ann Richards Rule" in Texas reminds everyone that the former governor lost her 1994 re-election bid to George W. Bush primarily because she vetoed a concealed carry bill.

In the end, Davis lost the governor's race anyway. But she certainly wouldn't have done any better if she had opposed concealed carry. Regardless of other strengths and weaknesses she had as a candidate, Davis has done a good job of describing how the issue of gun control plays out in red state elections.

The question in those states comes down to whether or not those who support common sense gun safety laws are willing to allow that issue to crowd out all other priorities, and if they are willing to lose elections over it. That's a tall order. But it is obviously one that a lot of folks are beginning to grapple with.