It's hard to tell just why the GOP is going nuts with the just-announced climate agreement with China. I guess they're working so hard to delegitimize the WH that it's tough to swallow a setback.
Christopher Flavelle:
Obama Outmaneuvers Republicans on Climate Change
Coral Davenport:
The historic announcement by President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China that they will commit to targets for cuts in their nations’ carbon emissions has fundamentally shifted the global politics of climate change. The agreement has given a fresh jolt of optimism to negotiations aimed at reaching a new international climate treaty next year in Paris, where the American and Chinese targets are expected to be the heart of the deal.
“For the world’s biggest emitters to be coming together and announcing concrete numbers, serious numbers, sends a signal to the world,” said David B. Sandalow, who was Mr. Obama’s assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs until May 2013. Nearly two decades ago, the world’s first climate change treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, failed to stop the rise of planet-warming carbon pollution in large part because of a standoff between China and the United States, which never signed the deal.
Rebecca Leber:
Republicans are furious that President Barack Obama has cut a historic deal with China to lower both countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just spent his reelection campaign claiming that China would never curb its emissions, so the U.S. shouldn’t either. Many other Republicans have argued the same. And yet China just proved Republicans wrong by committing to reach a peak level of carbon pollution by 2030—the first time the world’s largest polluter has set a deadline for lowering emissions.
Republicans won’t admit they were wrong, of course. They've already moved on to their next talking point. Remarkably, the party that’s become synonymous with climate-change denial has avoided any mention of it this time. A statement from McConnell's office stressed only that Environmental Protection Agency regulations hurt coal jobs:
TPM:
Obama's Climate Deal With China Enrages GOP In Congress
If Ds want to win future voters, start making the case for the future. Make the party stand for something beyond reelection.
— @DemFromCT
Coral Davenport:
President Obama’s landmark agreement with China to cut greenhouse gas pollution is a bet by the president and Democrats that on the issue of climate change, American voters are far ahead of Washington’s warring factions and that the environment will be a winning cause in the 2016 presidential campaign.
I guess the WH is taking my advice.
Something to keep in mind when Mitch McConnell rants about coal jobs: Pew has some new data on where the public stands on various envoironmental issues: foe building Keystone but against fracking and very much against allowing power plant emissions.
About two-thirds (64%) of the American public favors stricter limits on power plant emissions to mitigate climate change, while a 31% minority oppose stricter limits on emissions.
WaPo follows this year's political con artist:
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who turned his stunning victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses into a thriving talk show career, is reconnecting with activists and enlisting staff to position himself in a growing field of potential Republican presidential candidates.
This week, Huckabee is leading more than 100 pastors and GOP insiders from early primary states on a 10-day overseas trip with stops in Poland and England.
Looks like mike huckabee is stealing a play out of the Palin playbook, becoming a full time grifter-making money off a "run" for prez
— @jamespmanley
A few days back, the
CT Post had a great look at the Gov race won by incumbent democrat Dannel Malloy in terms of the effect of gun legislation on the race. Former state Senator state Senate Minority Leader John McKinney (R-Newtown) lost the nod to Tom Foley.
Connecticut Republicans stuck to their guns in the governor's race -- and paid dearly for it.
While the GOP made gains in the rest of the country and retook control of the U.S. Senate, the streak of Republican futility in the state continued.
Back-to-back losses by Tom Foley, who bore the brunt of attack ads by gun-control advocates over his endorsement by the state's largest Second Amendment group, left many inside the party second-guessing its choice to be the nominee for governor.
They wondered whether state Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, who received an F grade from the National Rifle Association for helping to negotiate Connecticut's gun-control law after the Newtown massacre, would have posed a more difficult matchup for Democratic incumbent Dannel P. Malloy.
But some privately acknowledged that the Republican Party did not want to risk alienating gun owners in a tight race by having McKinney, whose district includes Newtown, at the top of the ticket. Foley's NRA grade was B-minus
The day after Malloy's re-election, the party's critics said that coddling the pro-gun wing of the GOP was a fatal miscalculation.
Read this not just as an indictment of coddling the NRA; read it also as a great example of "winners are geniuses and losers do everything wrong". Remember that when you discuss Democratic losses from last week.