Not truly committed to address climate change

I wrote yesterday that Monday set a record for the hottest day. That record was broken on Tuesday and Wednesday tied Tuesday’s record. And, as an Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported, Thursday broke the Tuesday/Wednesday record. The new record is 17.23C (63.01F). The record was broken three times this week. Jingxing, China reached 43.3C (110F). Several places in Germany hit 37C (99F). And other hot spots around the globe.

Robert Watson, a scientist and former chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said governments and the private sector “are not truly committed to address climate change." Nor are citizens, he said. “They demand cheap energy, cheap food and do not want to pay the true cost of food and energy,” Watson said.

Joan McCarter of Kos discussed a press release from Bedminster. She tells Democrats to listen up.

If former President Donald Trump considers the results of the last session of the Supreme Court “massive wins,” then how much more proof is necessary to show he broke it? Trump packed the court and is crowing about it. “These wins were only made possible,” he says, due to the fact that he got three illegitimate, dark money-backed nominees jammed through, thanks to the Senate machinations of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Fixing that isn't stooping to his level. It’s not “politicizing” or “packing” the court. It would save the court.

Mike Luckovuch posted a cartoon to Kos it shows a classroom during “Show and Tell.” A young boy is showing off his starfish. A young girl is ready to show her marionette. And behind her is the nasty guy carrying a folder labeled “Top Secret.” I have brief notes on another cartoon. It’s on Twitter, so I can’t say who created it. The text says of the nasty guy, “He has the right to remain silent. He doesn’t have the ability.” In a pundit roundup on Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Lee Drutman of the Washington Post, saying the fix for our broken two-party system is more parties.

There’s a better way to represent the country’s diversity and offer more citizens a hopeful, engaging vision for the future: create more parties. But real, vibrant, healthy parties. Not top-down one-shot presidential candidacies, built only on the passing winds of celebrity and whims of wealthy donors. Not parties whose completely open primaries leave them vulnerable to populist outsiders. We need parties that do the hard work of candidate-vetting and gatekeeping and organizing and coalition-building that political parties are uniquely able to do; parties that organize from the bottom up, giving disaffected voters a voice, a collective identity and a long-term institution for building real power.

I agree, though for me to vote for a new party there must be ranked choice voting. Republicans are so bad my top goal is to keep them from office and the only way to do that now is by voting for Democrats. Dworkin also quoted Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, also of WaPo, discussing a Georgia teacher who read aloud from a book that includes gender identity, but is charged with violating policy banning discussions of race.

This disconnect captures something essential about state laws and directives restricting classroom discussion across the country: They seem to be imprecisely drafted to encourage censorship. That invites parents and administrators to seek to apply bans to teachers haphazardly, forcing teachers to err on the side of muzzling themselves rather than risk unintentionally crossing fuzzy lines into illegality. “Teachers are fearful,” [accused teacher Katherine] Rinderle told us in an interview. “These vague laws are chilling and result in teachers self-censoring."

In the comments Denise Oliver Velez posted cartoons. The first one is by Rob Rogers. It shows the outside the Supreme Court and above it are the words, “We hereby declare an end to racism!” The mother of a black family outside says, “Someone forgot to tell the police, the courts, the prisons, the schools, the healthcare system, the polling places, the corporations, the Republican Party...” Ruben Bolling of Kos comics posted a Tom the Dancing Bug comic with the chart showing how to curate a campus. A grid of portraits each with a caption “Admitted because we value athletics. Admitted because we value geographic diversity ... we value leadership ... legacy tradition ... cultural diversity ... first generation students ... unusual perspectives ... sexual orientation diversity ... artistic talent” and a few more. There’s a big red “X” over “Admitted because we value racial diversity” with a text block “Disallowed by order of the Supreme Court.” And beside that, “This is the only factor not allowed to be considered. Because race is so unimportant in our society.” Back on May 22 Kos of Kos discussed a Christian nationalist who regrets the results of Christian nationalism. He starts with a quote from conservative Barry Goldwater that appeared in John Dean’s 2006 book Conservatives without Conscience.

Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.

Then Kos turns to an op-ed Susan Stubson wrote for the New York Times. She’s from Wyoming and the wife of Tim Stubson, former congressional Republican candidate and former member of the Wyoming House. She says Wyoming is a friendly, neighborly state (Matthew Shepard would disagree). She decries that Wyoming is a maternity desert and its hospitals are struggling (because of Wyoming Republicans). She objects to the ugly exchanges between the House Freedom Caucus and the rest of the Republicans. Kos summarized:

Stubson’s problem isn’t that she’s upset at the Christian right for swallowing up her party. She’s upset that it’s a different kind of Christian. It’s not her kind. Hers is an ideological objection. She was so fine with the previous version of Jesus Republicans that she didn’t even realize they were Jesus Republicans. ... Yesterday, we ran a story on a Tennessee county commission where the new nuts in charge have decreed that their decisions have to be “reflective of the Judeo-Christian values inherent in the nation’s founding.” This has torn this conservative community apart. “What’s happened here is the Sumner County constitutional conservative Republican group, they don’t believe in government,” said Baker Ring, a Republican who is serving his fourth term on the county commission and is not aligned with the new majority. “They’re opposed to government. But now they are the government.” That’s conservatism in a nutshell, and always has been.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted a story (alas, he didn’t include a link to the original) about Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, Democrat. Evers replaced Scott Walker, who acted like a dictator, though Evers still has to deal with a Republican controlled legislature. Evers, a former public school educator used his broad partial veto authority.

Evers crafted the four-century school aid extension by striking a hyphen and a "20" from a reference to the 2024-25 school year. The increase of $325 per student is the highest single-year increase in revenue limits in state history.

In looking over my list of what’s in my browser tabs for me to write about I see a great number of items are on Twitter. Maybe I can get to them someday. Maybe they’re lost. I see one way to uncover some of them is through the Thread Reader App. It can turn a Twitter thread into a webpage not chopped up by the character limits of individual tweets. But finding a person and their threads on the app depends on whether they or a reader requests a thread be pulled into the app. Alas, Leah McElrath, the Twitter writer I had followed most consistently (as in nearly daily), isn’t on the app. The one I next most frequently follow is Michael Harriot and his threads (though not his humorous chatter) is pulled in. Here’s one of them. Harriot begins by saying, “Almost every form of popular music & art [was] created by Black Americans.” Then he noted that about a third of enslaved people practiced Islam and hid their spirituality in their music. He has a clip of three white dudes singing the spiritual “Let us break bread together on our knees.” They don’t recognize the phrase, “With my face to the rising sun,” has Muslim origins. Harriot concludes:

BUT here’s how privilege works. When white people use hip hop as a footstool to make rock or country or popular, more “accepted” music They’re still making “race music” They just don’t have to make it FOR or WITH Black people. They get to sell Black music without the Black CULTURE That’s the privilege. And it’s not fair to limit ANYONE’S artistic expression, even white artists. The problem is, that we live in a world where our unique history of race limits some people’s expression. And those limitations are what PRODUCE the art and make it emotionally relatable to the WORLD But the privilege is not that white people can make the art they want. It’s that they can do it without the limitations that actually created it.