I Keep checking Trump's Twitter Feed For Defenses Of Paul Gosar And Jim Knoblach

Paul Gosar is a crackpot dentist, multimillionaire and teabagger representing nut-country in Arizona, AZ-04. The district is massive, albeit mostly empty. It stretches from the exurbs east, north and west of Phoenix, down to Yuma up to Lake Havasu, through the Mohave Valley to Bullhead City to the Utah border. Prescott and Kingman are what passes for population centers. The PVI is R+21, by far the worst in the state. Trump won the district 67.7% to 27.5%.

Most members of Congress consider Gosar a joke. He kept trying to get Eric Holder charged with murder for some paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory, "Operation Fast and Furious." Needless to say, Gosar is a member of the Freedom Caucus.

The video up top features his 6 brothers and sisters telling his constituents not to vote for him and to elect his Democratic opponent instead. SIX brothers and sisters. How embarrassing is that? Do they invite him and Maude to Thanksgiving dinner?

And that wasn't even the most horrible thing that happened in Trumpland this week. Remember Michele Bachmann, another far right extremist? She was caught embezzling money and bribing people and all kinds of things but was allowed to get off scott free in return for retiring from Congress. She representing the St. Cloud area on Minnesota. And the state Rep. from there is Jim Knoblach, at least as bizarre as Bachmann. Yes, of course, like Bachmann and Gosar, he's more a fascist than an actual Republican. But that isn't why he was in the news Friday.

He "abruptly ended his re-election campaign Friday as MPR News prepared to publish detailed accusations from his daughter of inappropriate behavior toward her since childhood... Knoblach, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, declined to be interviewed after being approached more than a week ago. In a written statement, Knoblach called the allegations 'indescribably hurtful' and said he would work toward healing his family." Maybe Trump could appoint him to Brett Kavanaugh's Circuit Court seat once Grassley rams Kavanaugh through the Senate and onto the Supreme Court. Let's keep those seats reserved for Republican perverts in the hands of Republican perverts.

"I love my children more than anything, and would never do anything to hurt them. Her allegations are false," Knoblach wrote. "I and other family members have made repeated attempts to reconcile with her in recent years, but she has refused."

The timing of his exit could make his St. Cloud-area seat, already a top target for Democrats, impossible for Republicans to hold, barring some kind of court intervention or a write-in campaign by a substitute candidate. Knoblach was seeking a ninth term and was being challenged by Democratic candidate Dan Wolgamott, also of St. Cloud. Knoblach plans to serve out his term.

Knoblach's daughter, Laura, alleges that the prominent legislator inappropriately touched her for most of her life, behavior she confided to close friends, family and authority figures at her school and church for more than a decade.

She said she decided to tell her story to MPR News after exhausting other means to hold her father accountable, including a 2017 investigation by local law enforcement. No charges resulted. She provided MPR News with extensive documentation about her attempts to get help.

Laura Knoblach, 23, said she first remembers her father, an eight-term state representative, touching her when she was 9 years old. He came into her room after she'd gone to bed and climbed in and laid down behind her.

"He would put his arm around me and not let me get up or get away and he would lick my neck or bite my ear," she said in an interview with MPR News.

These visits to her room, or similar kissing across her arms and neck and biting her ears while they watched movies on the couch, happened so often throughout her childhood and teenage years it became a defining part of her relationship with her father, she said.

There were other routine behaviors, she said, including more than 30 instances where her father approached her from behind and pressed his body against hers in the kitchen of their home, pinning her against the refrigerator or dishwasher and using his weight and strength to keep her from getting away.

On one occasion as a 15-year-old girl, she said her father held her down and asked her if she liked the kissing and playing, and that she responded yes because she felt afraid and like she had no choice.

Susan Gaertner, Jim Knoblach's attorney, said while her client denied the allegations, he "does not want to drag his family through six weeks of hell."

Gaertner suggested Laura Knoblach disagrees with her father's political beliefs and her actions are politically motivated.

"There have been family conflicts, as is true of any family, some of them have been quite difficult," Gaertner told MPR News. "You add a layer of family conflicts to politics, and that makes the situation even more difficult."

But Laura Knoblach said the inappropriate behavior continued from ages 9 to 21, including an incident in 2015, when she was 20, where she said her father pinned her against a car and licked and kissed her neck.

In December of 2016, after she moved away from her family to Boulder, Colo., she posted to her Facebook page that her family had tried to "silence" her about the behavior she described but that it was important to speak out. After a burst of media attention and pressure from her family, she said she removed the post, but that an uncle of Laura's contacted the police.

In January of 2017, the St. Cloud Police Department and Sherburne County Sheriff's Office opened an investigation into the case and two officers traveled to Boulder to interview Laura Knoblach.

Two months later, the case was closed and the Sherburne County Attorney's Office declined to press charges because there was "insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jim Knoblach had committed a crime."

...Knoblach was first elected in 1994 but left the House to wage an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2006. He returned to the Legislature in 2014 and is among the most powerful figures at the Capitol.

He's the chair of the House Ways and Means committee, where every request for more funding or proposals to slash programs must flow through.

Powerful men-- and the women they owned-- refused to believe her. Sound familiar? It's part of the DNA of conservatism and very much a dominant-- and very ugly-- feature of the Republican Party, especially with Trump at the top of the dung heap.

Endangering Military Recruitment To Stay True To Trumpist Bigotry

Unless...

Right-wing extremists and anti-immigrant fanatics Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Steve King (R-IA) offered two amendments Thursday to prevent undocumented immigrants from serving in the U.S. military. Gosar's amendment was defeated 210-211, 30 Republicans crossing the aisle to vote with every single Democrat. King's amendment failed 207-214, with 33 Republicans voting with the Democrats.

Despite representing a district with a large, established and growing immigrant population centered in Austin and San Antonio, Lamar Smith was one of the radical anti-immigrant Republicans to vote for both extremist amendments. We reached out to Tom Wakely, the military veteran and progressive Democrat running for the seat Smith's been in for way too long. He didn't seem as surprised as he was saddened at his opponent's knee-jerk votes.

"If anybody still needed a reason as to why Lamar Smith endorsed Donald Trump, I feel like this anti-Hispanic vote would certainly qualify," he told us. "What's the goal in turning away young men and women who are willing to fight for the United States of America based solely on their immigration status? They're subscribing to the ultimate duty to our nation. We've seen plenty of GOP leaders break away from Trump's rhetoric, but their actions speak louder than their presumptive nominee's words. I personally didn't think that would be possible, yet here we are. Both Lamar Smith and I are from San Antonio, a city known for its proud Hispanic and military backgrounds, and I can't possibly imagine the majority of our constituents agreeing with our Congressman on this vote."

Smith doesn't even try to portray himself as "moderate." He's been in cahoots with the extreme right every since leaving Sacramento for DC. John Katko, who represents a blue district in a Central New York around Syracuse, knows if he can't present himself as "moderate," he doesn't have any chance to win in November. And he still voted for Gosar's scheme. Eric Kingson, the most likely Democrat to face Katko in November, told us today that "the vote is yet another symbol of the dangerous anti-immigrant attitude of the right. To deny a young adult the opportunity to serve and give back the nation that they know as home is cruel and unusual, not to mention terrible military policy. The fact that Rep. Katko failed to vote against the amendment is yet another symbol that he is no moderate, despite his desperate attempts to portray himself as so. He has failed to speak against the dangerous, anti-democratic, blatantly racist rhetoric coming from Donald Trump, and that to me is very troubling. This vote fits the trend of Katko siding with the rise of xenophobia in the Republican party."

Ruben Gallego, a progressive freshman from Phoenix who saw active duty in Iraq as part of the U.S. Army, made the point during the debate that the military needs these recruits and that "we shouldn’t let political posturing stand in the way of our military’s requirement goals." Many Democrats remarked during the debate that Republicans were jeopardizing national security to align themselves with Trump's anti-Hispanic and anti-immigrant campaign positions. That's isn't likely to end well for anyone concerned. Please help replace Katko, Smith and other radicalized anti-immigrant Trumpists with progressives like Eric Kingson and Tom Wakely by tapping on the thermometer:

Far Right Ready To Make Twofer Move-- Shut Down The Government And Oust Boehner?

Weepy John Boehner is Catholic (as well as alcoholic) and he's crowing up a storm about how he invited Pope Francis to address Congress and how historic that is. And he's correct, and I think most Americans would agree. But some in the House Republican conference definitely do not-- even if they haven't all announced, the way Arizona neanderthal Paul Gosar has, that they're boycotting the Pope over something or other they don't agree with him on-- in Gosar's case, I believe, clean air and water, which Gosar opposes. Some will just stay away and hope they don't get compared in the media to deranged psycho-bigot Ann Coulter-- or Gosar.

Inviting Pope Francis to speak at a joint meeting of Congress, however, isn't why right-wing extremists and libertarians are banding together to try to dump Boehner, again. Even while Republicans, especially a gaggle of vulnerable freshmen in swingy districts, are begging Boehner not to allow the government to be shut down by Ted Cruz and his House allies, the extremists are determined do just that, despite the number of seats it will cost the GOP in 2016. 

In the Senate, New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte, up for reelection, is urging her colleagues to ignore Cruz and pass a spending bill immediately. In the House, between 60 and 70 Republicans are taking a similar tack. The freshmen signing on to a letter to Boehner saying so include Ryan Costello (PA), Elise Stefanik (NY), Mimi Walters (CA), Daniel Donovan (NY), John Katko (NY), Carlos Curbelo (FL), Cresent Hardy (NV), Bruce Poliquin (ME), Martha McSally (AZ) and Tom MacArthur (NJ), all of whom except Walters and MacArthur are likely to be defeated if the GOP shuts down the government again.

Writing for The Hill Wednesday, Scott Wong reported on the palpable fear on Capitol Hill that the wingnuts want to shut down the government and dump Boehner.

Talk that conservatives might use a government-funding showdown to overthrow the powerful Ohio Republican has triggered a flurry of behind-the-scenes jockeying among lawmakers eager to move up the leadership ladder.

And that has lawmakers wondering more than ever if Boehner’s days as Speaker are numbered.

“That’s what tells you there’s something afoot. You know there’s some drops of blood in the water, because all the sharks are starting to circle,” said one conservative lawmaker who backs Boehner's ouster.

Conservatives have threatened to shut down the government on Oct. 1 if Congress doesn’t strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood. Boehner thinks a shutdown would be disastrous for the party in an election year, but he also knows conservatives have vowed to move against him if he teams up with Democrats to fund the government.

Publicly, Boehner is projecting confidence, repeatedly telling reporters in recent weeks he has “widespread support” from his GOP conference. But even behind closed doors, Boehner has had to contend with nagging questions about his political future.

At a private fundraiser for a GOP lawmaker last week, a donor asked Boehner whether he was worried about a possible conservative insurrection.

“Look, this group of guys is not going to knock me off my stride,” Boehner replied, according to a source in the room.

“The Speaker isn't going anywhere,” added Boehner spokeswoman Emily Schillinger. “He's focused on the American people's priorities and how we can accomplish them."

A number of Boehner’s close friends and allies have dismissed the coup talk as overblown, insisting he has a firm grip on his conference. Neither they nor anyone they’ve talked to have received phone calls from GOP colleagues seeking support for an imminent leadership race, the allies added.

Rep. Thomas Rooney (R-Fla.) predicted Boehner would “win easily” if a floor vote were called to remove the Speaker in the middle of his third two-year term.

And House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who is part of Boehner’s close-knit circle, attempted to turn the tables on members of the conservative Freedom Caucus, denouncing them as “right-wing Marxists” who have empowered House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) by undermining Boehner.

  “The right-wing Marxists have teamed up with Pelosi. They’re the ones who always team up with Pelosi. They are the Pelosi Republicans,” an infuriated Nunes said in an interview. “The Freedom Caucus is an arm of Pelosi.”

But the reality is that Boehner may need to rely on Pelosi in some capacity if conservatives do bring forward a motion to “vacate” the Speaker’s chair-- a procedural move to effectively boot Boehner out of power.

Pelosi is playing coy about how Democrats might respond to such a motion. All 188 Democrats could team up with roughly 30 Freedom Caucus members to overthrow Boehner and send the House into chaos. But that alliance seems unlikely since Democrats are worried about the prospects of a Tea Party Speaker who could emerge from the dust.

Fox News' Capitol Hill correspondent, Chad Pergram, tweeted his impromptu chat with Steny Hoyer about Democrats' role in this Wednesday afternoon:

Some Democrats have already said they would be inclined to vote to save Boehner's speakership rather than see some teabagging crazy person from the Freedom Caucus take over the chair, but in all likelihood it will be Nancy Pelosi who will make that decision if Boehner needs Democratic help to save himself, something that would send the extremists into a further frenzy of no-holds-barred nihilism and recrimination. Ironically, one of the crazies trying to supplant Boehner is Daniel "Taliban Dan" Webster, who will probably lose reelection next year to progressive Democrat Bob Poe. Others hoping to replace Boehner are Tom Price (R-GA), Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Peter Roskam (R-IL), none of whom are favorites of the radicals doing the heavy lifting to get rid of Boehner.

The editorial board of the Washington Post seemed less sympathetic to Boehner's plight than Hoyer, calling on him to rein in the sociopaths in his own party, something he's obviously incapable of doing.

The leader best positioned to spare us this season of costly uncertainty is Mr. Boehner. Yes, President Obama makes the task harder by insisting on “dollar for dollar” equality in increases in domestic and military spending, contrary to most Republicans’ preferences. And, yes, a lot of the chaos in the House is beyond Mr. Boehner’s control, in that it reflects pressure on the GOP caucus from a party base gripped by the delusion that the majority they sent to Congress should have been able to shift policy far to the right despite Mr. Obama’s veto power.

Still, as Mr. Boehner himself undoubtedly realizes, the ultras in his caucus are not only acting contrary to the national interest, but they are also acting contrary to the Republican Party’s own long-term political interest. By demonstrating the impossibility of overcoming a Democratic filibuster on defunding Planned Parenthood, Mr. McConnell’s plan may help House holdouts see reason. If it does not, however, the speaker must guarantee continued government funding, even if it means passing a bill with support of Democrats. No doubt that might trigger an internal rebellion and put his speakership at risk. A leader would take the chance.

Also in the Post, Greg Sargent warns Republicans that they're being scammed by GOP presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who have been insisting that if Republicans shut down the government, voters will blame the Democrats.

It’s worth noting, however, that when conservatives say this-- particularly those running for president-- they’re not actually talking about Democrats. Rather, they’re talking about GOP leaders-- or, to put it another way, they’re talking to conservative voters about GOP leaders.

Republicans who want to use the coming government funding fight to defund Planned Parenthood-- a strategy that GOP leaders have denounced as hopeless folly-- like to argue that the GOP won’t take the blame if the government does shut down. Senate Dems would filibuster, or President Obama would veto, any government funding bill that defunds Planned Parenthood. So Republicans can argue that Obama and Dems are refusing to fund the government because of their commitment to keeping Planned Parenthood in business, even after the fetal tissue videos shocked the country. . . .

But Rubio, Cruz, and company surely remember they made this argument two years ago. They also surely know the history confirms that government funding fights politically and structurally favor presidents over Congresses, and that Dems won’t cave this time, either. They know GOP leaders will ultimately keep the government open again by passing funding with the help of Democrats, if necessary. We are usually told (until he caves) that Speaker John Boehner won’t dare do this because it will unleash conservative fury that will cost him his job. Yet this time, intimations to that effect are taking on a sad quality: House conservatives are threatening to get behind Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in a coup attempt; and even though McCarthy has said it’s utter nonsense, those conservatives won’t let go of the idea.

So Rubio, Cruz, and other conservatives know how this will end. And that’s what this whole ruse is really about.

Their argument that Democrats will take the blame for a shutdown isn’t actually about somehow spooking Dems into fearing this fight or persuading GOP leaders to adopt this shutdown strategy and stick to it. They know GOP leaders won’t actually do that. Rather, their argument is targeted to conservatives voters: it’s designed to keep alive the illusion that there was indeed a way to win the battle if only GOP leaders had the stomach to see it through to the end.

Enhancing the hall of mirrors effect in play here, this is exactly what makes it possible to simply repeat the same argument two years later. The fact that Republicans lost previous government shutdown fights, which should ideally cast doubt on that argument and strategy, is-- poof!-- easily transformed into more fodder for the idea that Republicans only lose these fights due to a failure of will. Republican Congressional leaders have become the preferred pummeling dummies for presidential candidates who want to persuade conservative primary voters that they have cracked the code that has tormented them for years: Why can’t the GOP succeed in rolling back the Obama agenda?

This is a painfully obvious trick. Yet it actually seems to work. Senator Cruz, for instance, is circulating audio of an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show, in which Hannity said:

“This is a big part of the message that is keeping you in the top tier of candidates, which is that you are taking on the idea that Republicans do not fight. They don’t fight on immigration. They don’t use their constitutional authority on health care. Again and again. And I would argue they won’t end up doing it on Planned Parenthood, either. But you’re the guy saying, ‘These are our values, these are our promises.’ And yet they won’t stand with you.”

You’ll be startled to hear that Senator Cruz wholeheartedly endorsed Hannity’s analysis.

Today, in his Wall Street Journal column, Karl Rove was decrying a government shutdown as a waste of tme. No Rove isn't turning RINO. But he recognizes a scam when he sees one. "Some in the GOP," he wrote, "say that unless Planned Parenthood is defunded, they’re willing to shut down the federal government-- which would be a disaster for the pro-life cause."

Only 41% of Americans support cutting off taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, and 51% oppose it, according to an Aug. 25 Quinnipiac University poll. Only 22% favor a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding; 69% oppose the idea. When pollsters asked who voters would blame more for such a shutdown, 41% said Republicans in Congress and 33% President Obama and Democrats.

These numbers help explain why the nation’s largest, most influential pro-life group, the National Right to Life Committee, doesn’t support a government shutdown. “Quite frankly, I think Planned Parenthood is a vile organization, and I resent the fact that they get any tax money,” NRLC President Carol Tobias told the New York Times. “But realistically, with President Obama in the White House holding that veto pen, I don’t know that any government shutdown could accomplish what we want.”

...Pro-life leaders understand that the 2013 government shutdown damaged the Republican Party. The GOP’s favorable rating after the 2012 election stood at 43%, according to Gallup, but dropped during the shutdown to 28%—a record low for either party.

Supporters of the 2013 shutdown claim otherwise. After all, they argue, by the 2014 election, the GOP’s Gallup rating had climbed back to 42%, and Republicans won nine additional Senate seats and added 13 House seats. But those victories were despite the shutdown, not because of it. No new senator or representative campaigned by promising more shutdowns.

If right-to-life leaders oppose a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood, why are some Republicans so intent on trying to force one? A few presidential hopefuls seem to want a shutdown to burnish their credentials with primary voters. But they cannot explain how they will get the votes to pass the defunding measure or overcome a presidential veto. Without such a plan, this is simply self-promotion.

At least 31 congressmen have signed a letter circulated by South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney saying that they will not vote for any budget that funds Planned Parenthood. They, too, lack a strategy to get a defunding measure signed into law. Some of these congressmen would use a failure to defund Planned Parenthood as an excuse to get Republicans to vote with the Democrats to kick John Boehner out as speaker. Since the Republican signatories are from safe districts-- they received an average 66% of the vote in 2014-- they are perhaps not bothered by the damage a shutdown will do to the GOP in battleground states or marginal districts.

UPDATE ONE: Boehner To Resign

He'll give up the Speakership and his House seat the day before Halloween. More to follow.

Not Dealing With Climate Change Is Now A Tenet Of The Republican Party Agenda

One of the uglier moments of Wednesday night's GOP debate-- chock full'o'ugly moments-- was when rabid climate-change denier Marco Rubio decided to make his presence known by making a tasteless joke about California's devastating drought. It took about three hours before the CNN moderators brought up climate change as a topic of discussion-- which must've lasted for less than five minutes-- and, predictably, Rubio was the first to jump in... to denigrate it entirely. The only other two who had anything to say on the topic were two reactionary governors, Walker and Christie. All three basically said the same thing: that government efforts are too expensive and can't accomplish anything anyway.

Rubio asserted, baselessly, that the EPA's efforts to regulate carbon emissions from coal plants "will do absolutely nothing to change our climate." Showing he can be every bit as backward and ridiculous as Rubio, Christie chimed in that all the efforts "will not do a thing to lower the rise of the sea … [or] solve the drought here in California." This is their way of pretending to not be complete climate-change deniers-- a position that is completely anathema to millennnials. Very convenient compromise... for the GOP's coal-industry campaign contributors. GOP cluelessness on climate change, of course, doesn't have to wait for a formal debate on CNN. The party's position is well-represented by failed CEO Carly Fiorina, who is so much more concerned about birds than you would have ever guessed:



And, of course, for all the whining and lying Fiorina and the other Republicans do about how environmental regulations will destroy jobs and the economy, in California, which has the most comprehensive regulations in place, the economy is growing far more rapidly than in any other state, in part because of the opportunities created by the regulations and the new businesses coming online to deal with them.

Meanwhile, yesterday a small gaggle of Republicans-- most representing endangered seats in blue-leaning districts-- opposed the crazy, corrupt Republican leaders to call for government action against climate change. Two of them, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo, are in Florida districts already suffering from the rising oceans caused by climate change. The other Republicans who are stepping away from their crackpot conference on this are Chris Gibson (R-NY), Robert Dold (R-IL), Pat Meehan (R-PA), Ryan Costello (R-PA), Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Richard Hanna (R-NY) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY).

Perhaps there's a connection to Pope Francis' visit to Congress next week, since his powerful encyclical on climate change was sent to every Republican in Congress.

It is unclear how the Republican leadership will respond. The party has vowed to defeat Barack Obama’s plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants, the pillar of his plan to fight climate change.

The House speaker, John Boehner, has sidestepped the issue of climate change, saying: "I am not a scientist." A number of Republican presidential candidates including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas deny the existence of climate change. Others, such as former senator Rick Santorum and former governor Jeb Bush have called on the pope to steer clear of the issue-- although Bush later softened his language.

Democrats and campaigners had been quietly cultivating moderate House Republicans for months to try to neutralise the highly partisan profile of energy and climate change issues.

The pope, and his framing of climate change as a moral issue-- rather than an economic or scientific concern-- provided the perfect opportunity, according to Alan Lowenthal, a Democratic member of the House from California and a leader of the Safe Climate Caucus.

"Behind the scenes there are Republicans who understand they cannot be in denial and we are being supportive of them," he said in an interview last June around the time of the pope’s pastoral letter on climate change. "They care what the future is. They just find it difficult to be out there all alone, and maybe this will give them the courage to move forward."

By any standards outside of those of Republicans in Congress-- where a majority denies the human contribution to climate change, or opposes action on climate change-- the resolution would be seen as exceedingly timid.

It calls on the house to "study and address the causes and effects of measured changes to our global and regional climates."

The formulation is bound to outrage some because there is no doubt that climate change is caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The resolution also limits the potential scope of any action, saying efforts to deal with climate change should not impose any costs on the economy.

But after five years in which Republicans have blocked all efforts to deal with climate change, it’s a start.

Locked away behind the London Review of Books paywall, is a David Runciman review of 3 new books on Climate Change-- Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change by Nicholas Stern, Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet by Dieter Helm, and Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet by Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman, all published in the U.S., respectively by MIT, Yale and Princeton: A Tide of Horseshit.

It’s hard to come up with a good analogy for climate change but that doesn’t stop people from trying. We seem to want some way of framing the problem that makes a decent outcome look less unlikely than it often appears. So climate change is described as a ‘moonshot problem’, though of course it isn’t, because the moon presents a fixed target and climate change offers anything but-- how will we know when we’ve landed? Or it’s a ‘war mobilisation problem’, though of course it isn’t, because there is no clear enemy in view (the enemy is us). Or it’s a ‘disease eradication problem’, like ridding the world of smallpox, though of course it isn’t, because getting rid of a disease is good news all round, whereas tackling climate change creates losers as well as winners. These analogies are intended to capture the scale of the challenge-- it’s going to be a major effort-- while keeping alive the thought that we can succeed. The problem is that climate change is nothing like anything we’ve encountered before. Just because we did all those things doesn’t mean we can do this one.

...The unmissable wake-up calls will almost certainly arrive too late to be effective: once we discover the planet is serious about making our lives hell we will have no time left to do anything about it. In climate politics too, displacement activities abound. Further delay, rather than adding to the urgency, creates barriers in the way of decisive action, since any decisive action makes a mockery of our reasons for delay. We don’t even have the luxury of waiting for resource scarcity to send an unmistakable signal that time is short. In the topsy-turvy world of climate politics, Malthusians turn out to be the optimists, because they believe that limited resources must soon produce the crunch point that will bring us to our senses, unpleasant as that will be. Peak oil will force the painful transition to a low carbon economy, or so it’s hoped. But that’s wishful thinking: technological ingenuity means that there are still vast amounts of untapped fossil fuels to be extracted, allowing us to delay the moment of truth long past the point when it could make any difference. The shale gas revolution is just the latest stage in this process. As Dieter Helm says, "there is enough oil, gas and coal to fry the planet many times over." Waiting for the oil to run dry is like waiting for new information to run dry so the book can finally get written: it’s not going to happen.

...Neither uncertainty nor irreversibility diminishes the urgency: there is a big difference between driving around the horseshit and drowning in it. Stern reckons there is still a twenty-year window in which the most significant risks can be ameliorated by a concerted shift towards a low-carbon economy. But uncertainty and irreversibility-- that is, the thought that it might both be too soon and too late-- make the space for decisive political action ever more squeezed. Stern has changed his mind about some things, including the value of legally binding international agreements, collective targets and other big-picture, cost-benefit-driven proposals for effecting change. The evidence of the past few decades is that an emphasis on the growing risks of inaction doesn’t incentivise collective action; if anything, it discourages it. No nation can solve climate change on its own. But attempts to bind the nations of the world together to get a solution big enough for the scale of the problem haven’t worked. Stern takes the defection of Canada from the Kyoto agreement as emblematic of this: if Canada can’t stick to its commitments, who can? Maybe Canada, given its location, has been distracted by the fact that it’s one of the places where the bad news about climate change is liable to arrive last; but Australia, which has much more at stake in the short run, is also wriggling out from under the weight of its obligations. Yet in other countries, significant steps have been taken: Brazil, South Korea, Bangladesh, even Ethiopia have all moved towards lower emission targets (and in Ethiopia’s case this is from a base of very low emissions to start with). Where there is progress, it tends not to be driven by a desire to ‘solve’ the wider problem of climate change; rather, domestic pressures, local incentives and tangential benefits are the motivating factors. Low-carbon policies can be adopted for all sorts of reasons: to reduce pollution, to secure aid, to kick-start development, to rebalance the economy, to drive innovation, to disrupt entrenched monopolies. Governments are much more likely to stick to commitments made to domestic interest groups than to international bodies. These interest groups rarely have the long-term sustainability of the planet at heart. This is climate politics by the back door.

Stern doesn’t believe that a continuing focus on the costs of taking action is getting us anywhere, even if the costs aren’t as great as we might think (which has long been his view). Nor does he think that we have to be able to make our sums add up in order to be confident that what we’re doing is worth it. Talk of pain today, gain tomorrow only breeds more fatalism. Instead, he wants to encourage talk of unplanned-for benefits and unanticipated breakthroughs. The pursuit of a low-carbon economy doesn’t have to be presented as a sacrifice needed to forestall something worse. It could trigger a big improvement on where we are now. The theme of Stern’s book is that there isn’t a choice to be made between sustainability and growth or sustainability and development. A sustainable economic future will have to be dynamic and flexible by definition, drawing on the full range of human ingenuity to achieve the best possible outcomes. If we keep exploring the options and pushing the boundaries, even if we don’t have the final answer in view, we might find we have something that looks like an answer before we know it. And not just to the problem of climate change: Stern thinks we could stumble across all sorts of ancillary benefits as well, including poverty reduction, a more equitable distribution of global wealth and greater international co-operation. These things tend to look like forbidding obstacles when you face them head-on. So don’t. Come at them via another route.

Needless to say, there are serious risks to this approach. One is that it fuels the popular mistrust of climate politics. A striking feature of climate scepticism is its propensity to generate conspiracy theories: people who don’t believe in global warming also tend to suspect that it’s part of a plot to foist government intervention on recalcitrant citizens. In the United States there is particular suspicion of climate change as a Trojan horse for world government: invent a problem that needs co-ordinated global action and-- hey presto!-- the UN suddenly has a stick to beat the rest of the world with. Goodbye national sovereignty, hello global tyranny. Stern seems to be admitting that the conspiracy theorists are half-right. National governments are unlikely to embrace co-ordinated action on their own, so co-ordination has to be smuggled in without anyone really noticing. The difference is that Stern doesn’t think it’s a conspiracy. He views it as a happy accident. His hope is that governments pursuing their own agendas will discover unexpected synergies that bind them together. Moreover, it doesn’t have to be national governments that make the connections: cities, where a lot of the most innovative policy-making is taking place, offer the chance to forge new kinds of alliance (Rio-LA-Barcelona is a better bet for collective action than Brazil-USA-Spain). Similarly, unelected experts and officials can join the dots at places like the World Economic Forum in Davos, where they can explore what there is to be learned from one another. For Stern this is all in the spirit of openness and experimentation: collaboration achieved through a series of constructive encounters facilitated at high-level meeting places around the world. But for anyone whose antennae are attuned to elite attempts at circumventing electoral politics, it’s going to stink. There doesn’t have to be an actual conspiracy to get the conspiracy theorists going. The mere mention of Davos is usually enough.

Popular suspicion of a hidden agenda will only become a serious problem if what Stern is proposing works: there would have to be actual progress towards a radically different model of energy consumption before most people started to wonder how we got there and whether they’d voted for it. The bigger risk is that it won’t work. Relying on happy accidents opens the door to unhappy accidents as well. Germany was making excellent progress on its own initiative towards a low-carbon future when in 2011 it suddenly decided to pay attention to what was happening in Japan; more specifically, to what had just happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The disaster at Fukushima sent German national politics into a convulsion of anxiety and unscrupulous horse-trading, the result of which was a rapid retreat from nuclear power and a return for the short term to a reliance on fossil fuels. The hope that cumulative small steps will get you to the big prize can easily be punctured by chance mishaps. Without a binding long-term agreement to fall back on, the final outcome remains a hostage to fortune.

Stern is very aware that the progress some cities and some countries are making towards a more sustainable, low-carbon future is not enough. There needs to be more concerted action, and soon: any delay makes the barrier of irreversibility harder to overcome. At the same time he is conscious that harping on the urgency and scale of the problem tends to be counterproductive, because it makes individual actors feel relatively powerless. Why bother? Small progress keeps alive the idea that real progress is possible but it also encourages the false hope that small progress is all we need. In that sense, Stern is stuck: make the scale of the action required match the scale of the problem we face and people will give up; downplay it and they won’t try hard enough. Stern’s way of squaring the circle is to look for points where manageable goals-- particularly at the domestic level-- have the potential to morph into transformative outcomes. He wants more investment in R&D, more pooling of knowledge, a greater emphasis on trust-building rather than legal obligations, no more talk of game theory and a much bigger emphasis on what has been achieved rather than on what hasn’t. He wants to make it sound doable. The danger is that he makes it sound too easy and too idealistic at the same time.

Republicans aren't likely to read Stern's book or any of the others for that matter. They're not scientists. Or interested in science. They are interested in Pope Francis' visit to America and his pronouncements about Climate Change-- interested as in furious. One sick wing-nut, Arizona flat-earther Paul Gosar, himself a Catholic (who represents the 4th CD, the exburbs north of Phoenix and the entire western part of the state bordering California, Nevada and Utah, a very backward and socially primitive R+20 district that gave Romney 67% in 2012), announced he is boycotting the Pope's congressional address. "I have both a moral obligation and leadership responsibility to call out leaders, regardless of their titles, who ignore Christian persecution and fail to embrace opportunities to advocate for religious freedom and the sanctity of human life," he wrote. "If the Pope plans to spend the majority of his time advocating for flawed climate change policies, then I will not attend. It is my hope that Pope Francis realizes his time is better spent focusing on matters like religious tolerance and the sanctity of all life." And Gosar's not the only deranged Climate Change denier angry at the Pope.

In Philadelphia, there's a lot of anger directed towards the Pope from the hopelessly brainwashed as well.

Nearly four months ago, Pope Francis decried global warming as a man-made catastrophe requiring immediate ecological activism and blamed modern materialism for turning the planet into "an immense pile of filth."

Yesterday, a few folks in Philly didn't mince words in their opinions of the pollution-busting pleas the pope made last May in his encyclical, Laudato si'.

Paganism, declared one. "What is environmentalism but nature worship?" said Gene Koprowski, marketing director of the Heartland Institute [a dangerous, anti-American Koch brothers front group].

Anti-American and dangerous, said another.

"The pope does seem to be enamored with solutions that are not pro-American in the slightest," said Dom Giordano, a WPHT (1210-AM) talk-show host and Daily News op-ed columnist.

Unholy lies, said a third. "The truth is our lodestar, and yet the truth has been shut down," said Elizabeth Yore, a child-advocacy lawyer and Heartland representative.

Although Pope Francis' controversial comments on everything from climate change to divorce to abortion have energized progressives and lapsed Catholics, they also have rallied conservatives among the fold who are concerned that their leader is too left-leaning.

The papal pooh-poohing has become louder locally as the region gears up for Pope Francis' first U.S. visit next week.