"Republicans Fear Losing, Democrats Fear Winning"

Bob Dylan's "Watching The River Flow," with Mick Jagger on vocals, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood on guitars, Charlie Watts on drums and Bill Wyman on bass.

by Gaius Publius

Just sitting on this bank of sand, watching the river flow.

At the start of the year I wrote:

There's something greatly troubling about what the media-fronted #Resistance has morphed into, but I'm having trouble writing about it (it's lightly touched here: "A Nation in Crisis, Again"). Partly the problem is the marshaling of pages of proof; partly the problem is the unstoppable train wreck that's coming. Perhaps I should write about the train wreck instead.

This is about the train wreck, or two of them.

The Kavanaugh Confirmation

It looks like Democrats are going to allow Brett Kavanaugh to be confirmed, that their "resistance" will be minimal, as it has been all along. To explain, let's look at this in the New York Times. Jonathan Martin writes:

Few politicians have a greater stake in Judge Kavanaugh’s fate than these 10 [red-state] senators who are trying to appeal to red-state voters back home, and whose re-election bids will determine whether Democrats win control of the narrowly divided chamber in November. [emphasis added]

According to the article, they think their problem is political, not moral; and they think the voters they have to appeal to are "red-state" (meaning conservative) voters "back home." Or at least they say they think this when talking to the press.

Which according to Martin leads to this craven calculation for Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, whom I fully expect to vote yes when the confirmation reaches the Senate floor:

And for three of the most moderate Senate Democrats — Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana — the nomination represented an opportunity for them to vote yes on Judge Kavanaugh and demonstrate independence from their party and deny Republicans an issue in the fall campaign. The three had previously supported President Trump’s first nominee for the court, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

This leads the writer to this conclusion:

Democrats may not want him on the bench for a host of reasons, but Judge Kavanaugh narrowly winning confirmation would be politically tolerable to many of them...

As Ryan Grim tweeted in response to this article:

Republicans fear losing
Democrats fear winning https://t.co/R1tVmTyQcU

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 19, 2018

The entire Democratic caucus supports Minority Leader Schumer's effort to keep Manchin, Heitkamp and Donnelly safe in the next election, which means, in reality, protecting them from having to vote no on Brett Kavanaugh. The whole of the caucus, to a person, is in on this scheme.

There are so many actions Democrats could be taking and aren't. They could be filing for Kavanaugh's impeachment in the House, for example, for lying under oath during his 2006 Senate hearing. They could be releasing all the rest of their nearly 200,000 pages of "committee confidential" documents.

They could be aggressively pursuing the information received from this whistleblower, who says he represents federal employees willing to come forward and talk about Kavanaugh's dealings with his mentor, disgraced Judge Kozinski. Amy Goodman said, "The employees wanted to talk about Kavanaugh’s work as a clerk for disgraced former 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who resigned in 2017 after being accused by at least 15 women of sexual misconduct. But Sanai never heard back."

But Democrats would rather protect three corrupt senators than keep Brett Kavanaugh, the "one ring to bind them," from joining and creating what will be the most radical Supreme Court in our history.

So, what to expect? Look for an accelerated schedule amid much Democratic complaining; ineffective but showy "resistance" from elected liberals; and unless Trump, the public or Ms. Blasey Ford pull their irons from the fire for them, Democratic collusion in a successful confirmation vote the week of October 1 — or faster if Republicans can manage it.

All they want is the win, and they don't care how it looks for them when they get it. Democrats, on the other hand, want to look good in defeat, since that's preferable to them all than abandoning Joe Manchin and his friends.

Also look for both parties to pay a very high price for this when the nation wakes up to what's been done to them — but not nearly as high as the price the nation will pay.

What can we do? Nothing. Watch the river flow.

Climate News

While we're looking at the flow of things, let's add in three climate stories ripped from the most recent headlines. It took less than a minute to find them.

First, this:

Miami’s Existence Is Threatened With As Little As 18″ Of Sea Level Rise

...Miami may not be a major US urban center in a handful of decades.

There are several elements in the equation, but Miami’s existence could be untenable with as little as 18 inches or as much as 15 feet of sea-level rise. The operative question is how much of the city will still exist as a working urban area with citizens, but Miami will be at high risk with only 18 inches of sea-level rise.

It's a very good piece. A number of causes are cited, ten in all. Here are just two: "50% of Miami’s population of 5.5 million lives beneath 6 ft of sea level" and "Miami-Dade County’s low-lying real estate is worth tens of billions of dollars. But it’s already lost hundreds of millions since 2000 due to sea level rise. 10% of Miami’s real estate value could be a write-off by 2045."

When the exodus occurs, it will be in a panic. Best not own Florida land when tide turns against it.

Second this, from Newsweek:

NASA Has Discovered Arctic Lakes Bubbling With Methane—and That’s Very Bad News

...In a NASA-funded study published in Nature Communications, scientists have now discovered a source of methane that has not been accounted for in climate models—methane coming from “thermokarst” lakes.

These lakes form when the permafrost thaws at a faster rate and deeper into the ground than normal. The thawing creates a depression, which then fills with rain water, ice and snow melt. The water then speeds up the rate of the permafrost thaw at the shores of the lake.

The process—abrupt thawing—could speed up the release of methane into the atmosphere.

"Within decades you can get very deep thaw holes, meters to tens of meters of vertical thaw," Katey Walter Anthony, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a statement. "So you're flash thawing the permafrost under these lakes. And we have very easily measured ancient greenhouse gases coming out."

Flash-thawing methane-rich permafrost is a recipe for absolute disaster. Atmospheric methane is extremely potent as a greenhouse gas (GHG) but very short-lived — it resolves to atmospheric CO2 and water, each a greenhouse gas but bound for pound less damaging, in less than two decades. But in its first year, each methane molecule is hundreds of times more powerful than a molecule of CO2. Decades of continuous "flash thawed" methane bubbling up in volume would wreck us.

Finally, it looks like the Paris climate agreement, already behind schedule, was using too high a bar to measure against. Thanks to more sophisticated ways to incorporate methane from melting permafrost into climate models, the amount of "headroom" we have — how much GHG we can still emit and meet the Paris warming target — is even smaller than scientists anticipated:

Paris climate targets could be exceeded sooner than expected

..."Permafrost carbon release from previously frozen organic matter is caused by global warming, and will certainly diminish the budget of CO₂ we can emit while staying below a certain level of global warming. It is also an irreversible process over the course of a few centuries, and may therefore be considered a "tipping" element of the Earth's carbon-climate system that puts the linear approximation of the emission budget framework to the test," explains Thomas Gasser, a researcher with the IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program and lead author of the study published in Nature Geoscience.

This is the first time that such a tipping process is adequately accounted for in emission budgets, and according to the researchers, doing so shows that the world is closer to exceeding the budget for the long-term target of the Paris Agreement than previously thought.

Until we stop billionaires from controlling our world, there's not much we can do.

See what I mean? Watching the river flow, or the trains collide.

GP