I have yet to see an expression of fear or edginess on the part of any of the recipients of these bombs, or their surrogates. Democrats are concerned about civilization, the future, our children, our planet, education, the environment. Attacks on these key elements of society cause concern, and Democrats fight those attacks. Democratic values don’t include being afraid. Nobody is afraid.

To be clear, over the last three years, Donald Trump has publicly compiled an enemies list, that includes President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Vice President Obama, George Soros, Maxine Waters, Director Brennan, AG Holden, and several others. This enemies list has been converted into a hit list, and a fake bomber, or an utterly incompetent bomber (not sure which is better), has taken on the obvious task of attempting to terrorize those individuals. For now, I’ll assume that the lack of a bomb in Elizabeth Warren’s mailbox is the slowness of the postal system around Boston this time of year.

There is an attack going on, but not one that will do anything but elevate paragraphs about Trump’s hatred and his enemies list to an earlier position in the eventual Wikipedia page on his regime.

Dianna Anderson, author of Problematic: How Toxic Call-Out Culture Is Destroying Feminism has pinned down some of the problems with the fake claim being made by Trump, in this twitter stream:

Roseanne’s tweet about Trump “saving kids” has to do with a fake claim from Trump Internet that arrests for human trafficking are up since Trump took office. There are a few things wrong with that. (a short [?] thread).

— Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 31, 2018

Roseanne’s tweet about Trump “saving kids” has to do with a fake claim from Trump Internet that arrests for human trafficking are up since Trump took office. There are a few things wrong with that. (a short [?] thread).

— Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 31, 2018

Second, the specific number Trump folks like to cite is about 6k, compared to ~2k under Obama (these are all numbers from memes about this). The 2k number from Obama is Homeland Security Investigation arrests. The number for Trump is … well. ?????

— Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 31, 2018

But all that matters is that Trump Has a Bigger Number Than the Black Guy, and they aren’t going to check their sources anyway. Most of the way folks appear to have arrived at that number is by looking at the number of trafficking arrests *worldwide*.

— Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 31, 2018

They also have culled the number by combining a bunch of different reports of ICE arrests (which are not human trafficking arrests) and arrests re: child sex abuse cases (again, NOT human trafficking).

— Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 31, 2018

They also have pulled in, as near as I can tell, numbers of arrests for sexual solicitation, which also artificially inflates Trump’s number, while comparing it to Obama’s *actual* HSI trafficking numbers.

— Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 31, 2018

So. Now you know where in the hell that claim comes from. It is, as Dear Leader would say, Fake News.

— Dianna E. Anderson (@diannaeanderson) March 31, 2018

Syria is run by a horrible dictator. He is the kind of dictator that makes you want to bring back assassination of foreign leaders. The idea of putting him down is hardly an extreme one, once you know what he does and has done.

There was a moment in time, in 2013, when Obama tried to stand up to Assad, but failed to push back when Assad pushed him. Assad read the US system better than most foreign dictators do, it seems. You see, in the United States, a president can’t just go to war. Congress authorizes war. Once that authorization is done, it is quite possible for a president to abuse the authorization, sure. A president can send all sorts of troops around the world for purposes of security, sure. But you can’t go and kick Assad’s ass for using chemical weapons without an authorization form Congress.

So, Obama asked Congress to authorize going to Syria to kick Assad’s ass. They declined to do so.

Meanwhile, at that time, Donald Trump made the following statements:

Those were tweets, so we know it is what he really meant.

Trump does this thing that no president has ever done before. He obsesses on the fact that he won, as though it was the only thing he ever won in his entire life, and he blatantly and frequently blames things on President Obama, his predecessor. And, as far as I can tell, none of those accusations has been close to accurate. None of those accusations has even been in the general ballpark of reality. (Plus, of course, he takes credit for things his predecessor did, but that’s a whole nuther story.)

Now that Trump is president he is blaming President Obama for not invading Syria, but he should really be blaming Congress because it is Congress that made that decision, not President Obama.

Those are the facts.

What to do with Syria? I don’t know. My immediate inclination is to go in there, blow Assad off the map, take over the country and install solar energy systems so that Syria can be a major supplier of electricity to nearby countries and SE Europe, make improvements to the agriculture, cut off a big chunk in the general vicinity of Israel and join that with part of Lebanon, part of Jordan, and part of Egypt, to make a large backwards C-shaped country into a weapons-free peaceful Palestinian state. Then, take another bit if Syria, a bit of Turkey and a bit of Iraq and make a peaceful weapon’s free Kurdistan. Then world peace. But that’s just me.

By the way, the Trump administration is sending more and more troops into Syria. But, of course, the other guys in Syria are the Russians, and they support Assad. So, how is this going to work out, with a Putin puppet in the White House, and a killer madman in charge of Syria?

Here is some interesting reporting and commentary from Rachel Maddow on this issue:

Or, was it like this?

Check out this maximally LOL item at Slate for all the details.

The climate change connection to Brexit is unclear and mostly negative. It is simply true that we benefit from international unity when addressing a global problem, and the EU is a powerful forward looking entity that could address climate change more effectively than the collection of individual nations in the EU otherwise might. With the UK out of the EU, AGW may be somewhat harder to address.

Or, maybe not so much. The EU is still only one entity among several dozen, so having this small shift may not be that big of a deal.

But the Brexit-Climate Change link with respect to intergenerational politics is important and interesting. Dana Nuccitelli nails this down writing in The Guardian. See the graph above.

Dana talks about the similarity of difference across generations in attitudes about Brexit as well as climate change, and shows how these patterns, similar in both cases, are tied to the phenomenon of “intergenerational theft.” The ascending generation prefers expansion, ballooning of economic systems, putting off dealing with long and even medium term consequences. The younger generation takes it in the neck.

The problem is of course that younger generations will have to live with the consequences of the decisions we make today for much longer than older generations. Older generations in developed countries prospered as a result of the burning of fossil fuels for seemingly cheap energy.

That’s all true and important.

But I was also interested to hear President “No Drama” Obama’s remarks on Brexit. He sees this a more of the pressing of a pause button on a process that is not going to be stopped, and less of a cataclysm.

Is he right? Or is he just trying to put off panic?

Here are his remarks:

What do you think?

A candidate is the presumed nominee when she or he obtains the required number of pledged delegates to be at 50% plus a fraction in the total pledged delegate count. This is because a candidate must have a true majority to win the nomination when the delegates are all counted up at the convention, and the pledged delegates are required to cast their lot with the candidate they are pledged to, assuming that candidate exists at the time of the convention.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have not reached that bar. Therefore, neither is the presumed nominee for their party.

But then there are the unpledged delegates. Unpledged delegates can vote for whomever they like at the convention, and therefore, anything can happen. However, it is the practice among unpledged delegates to “endorse” or otherwise show support for a particular candidate. News agencies may use that statement of support to place that unpledged delegate in the column for a particular candidate.

Using this form of math, Trump did not reach a true majority of delegates a couple of weeks ago for two reasons. First, the Republicans have very few truly unpledged delegates. (The Republican and Democratic systems are not parallel or comparable, but the Republicans do have a certain number of delegates who can do what they want when the convention rolls around.) But then, one day, a bunch of unpledged delegates from one of the Dakotas made a statement. They said that they would definitely cast their ballot for Trump in the Convention. This was just enough to put Trump over the top, by adding together the pledged delegates that were pledged to him, and this small number of “unpledged” but now “pledged-ish” delegates.

That is still not clenching the nomination, because even though those Dakota delegates went beyond support or endorsement, to the level of actually promising to vote for Trump, they really still don’t have to vote for him.

But, the press took this as an event, and decided to go with it, and Trump became the actual nominee.

That may seem like a digression in a post about the Democratic primary, but it is relevant because the press has this thing they do where they balance or equalize. Therefore, even though the systems are not truly comparable or parallel, and the event in the Dakotas was actually meaningless, the press did in fact go with the “Trump is the presumed nominee” thing, and therefore, one should expect, even in the absence of a logical underpinning to the argument, the press to do the same in the Democratic party. That is only a small part of the story, but it is part of the story.

I should reiterate that unpledged delegates (in the Democratic party, unofficially called “Super Delegates”) are unpledged even when they pledge. That is a simple fact. But, there are nuances. For example, I know one Super Delegate that on principle will not declare for a candidate until the convention. But I also know that this individual liked Bernie Sanders. I suspect that this means that under some conditions, this delegate would vote for Sanders, but maybe not. I know another Super Delegate who has endorsed Clinton, and another who has endorsed Sanders, publicly. However, I do not assume that either one of them will absolutely vote for that candidate. An endorsement is not a pledge. If Bernie Sanders is found sitting in a hot tub full of fruit jello with the leader of North Korea on a yacht owned by the Koch Brothers, making a deal to trade nuclear warheads, that the delegate that endorsed Sanders will not cast a ballot for Sanders at the convention. But the pledged delegates from the same state will be forced to by the rules. (This is why we have Super Delegates. This is also why we can expect the Republicans to add a higher percentage of unpledged delegates when they rewrite the rules for the next primary season.)

The Dakota delegates, however, did something different. They did not endorse, or show support, but they pledged. However, their pledged is, in fact, legally irrelevant.

And now, we come to 2008. It could be said not too inaccurately that a point in time came during the 2008 nomination battle between now President Obama and Hillary Clinton, when it became apparent that Obama was going to win, the press said so, and Clinton took two days or so off and came back into the ring no longer fighting Obama, but now as part of his tag team.

And, it could be said not too inaccurately that this same moment came in the present election about now. Staring a few days ago, various members of the press began to note that this moment was upon us, and to imply that it would be unfair to Hillary to have given this moment to Obama in 2008, but not give it to Clinton now. I think the belief 48 hours ago might have been that this moment would definitely be on us by the end of the voting process in today’s primaries, but then another thing about the press came into play. The press has to treat everybody and every event like they are all identical blue Smurfs but they also have to do things first, to beat out their rivals, to scoop. In fact, this “moment of clinch” could have been after the Puerto Rico primary, or even earlier. And it was absolutely going to happen after Tuesday. So, AP jumped out of the gate and made it happen Monday, and this is now the True Reality.

So, let us review.

Hillary Clinton is the presumed nominee because she has almost enough pledged delegates plus a gazillion unpledged delegates.

However, part of the impetus for declaring this is that Trump got that courtesy two weeks ago.

But, Trump was the only person running in that race, and Clinton still has an opponent.

Still, numerically, Clinton can’t not get the nomination because she has many hundreds of Super Delegates and Sanders has only a few dozen.

On the other hand, Super Delegates are unpledged. UNpledged. We argue all along that they should not be counted. Then suddenly we count them. Is that fair?

One could say, however, that it is fair. At some point it becomes fair because the numbers become so tilted. If the hundreds of Super Delegates that have endorsed Hillary decided to randomize their preference using a coin biased in favor of Sanders, there would still be more than enough to put Clinton over the top.

It is only fair to Clinton that she gets the same treatment as Obama.

It is only fair to Sanders that she not.

And on and on it goes.

So, is there a good reason that Hillary Clinton is now regarded as the Democratic Party nominee for the office of the President?

Yes.

And no.

A good part of the reason that both answers are valid is because the press has painted themselves into a corner located between a rock and a hard spot and have only a Hobbson’s choice. That is a bad reason. Another reason is fairness. That is a good but not overwhelmingly good reason. There is no reason that the process one year needs to be the same as other years, since presidential election years are so different in so many ways. Another reason is math. While we wish to keep the Super Delegate count separate and let the pledged delegates do their job, at some point the Super Delegates should probably be considered as a factor, if not counted precisely. (See this, “Fixing The Super Delegate Problem,” for an alternative way of doing this whole thing.) That is probably reasonable and fair. If the numbers are big enough. But there is no objective criterion for when the numbers are big enough. So maybe not so fair.

So here is where the honest conversation part comes in. There really is no considered, informed, honest position on this that ignores the complexity and dismisses other opinions out of hand.

I hope you read this post on Tuesday, June 7th, because starting the next day it is not going to matter too much.

President Barack Obama said Donald Trump “doesn’t know much about foreign policy…or the world generally” in response to Trump saying Japan and South Korea should obtain nuclear weapons.

Once that process starts, everything changes. Suddenly there is more polling in downstream states. Starting before the first primaries, but then ramping up as we head towards states that matter (and no, Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter despite what you may have been told). Same with campaigning. We’ve seen a few debates, there’s been a lot of speeches, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. And other things (fund raising, more endorsements, etc.)

I thought I’d start out a discussion on the historic context by producing the simple graphic above. This is the course of polling (from Real Clear Politics) for the Clinton-Obama race in 2008 up to about now in the process, along side the Clinton-Sanders race this year. The graphic is rough, I just threw it together, but it kind of speaks for itself.

But in case the meaning is not clear, it means this: The primary season has not started yet. It starts in a few weeks.

I made a new graphic to underscore the meaning of the graphic above. Here, I took the 2008 primary season and the 2016 primary season RCP polling data for the two main candidates and ROUGHLY scaled them together. That moment when everything changes for 2008 is about now, or about the beginning of the actual primaries. Will that be what happens this year?

The truth is, the party in the White House tends to lose house seats with every midterm election. Over the last half century there have been only two exceptions to that. Also, the second midterm for an 8 year presidency tends to do a bit worse than the first.

In addition to that for the most part, a president’s popularity rating drops from the first day of the first term through the subsequent years in office. George Bush’s popularity rating probably had the largest and steepest drop. Bill Clinton managed to increase is popularity rating (and his 1998 midterm was one of the only exceptions to the rule of loss as well).

The following graph shows the relationship between presidential approval rating and House loss (data from Gallup). There are two things to note.

First, despite the misleading headlines, President Obama’s approval rating was not abysmal compared to the spread across presidents. On the low side, yes, but not the lowest by any stretch of the imagination. Second, and even more interesting, the number of House seats lost during this midterm is far less than predicted using all the other races as a guide.

By political standards, that’s actually a victory.

What about the Senate? See this.

Michael Mann: ‘The most aggressive and promising climate plan’ from ‘executive branch in years’

Michael Mann is director of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center, and a genuine hero, who has been attacked by the climate denial nexus, which has tried to destroy his career. And he is fighting back. His brief statement on President Obama’s climate speech needs to be read in its entirety, but here are some key points…

President Obama acts on climate change by enforcing the law

The centerpiece of the plan is the announcement that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, in addition to the rules already in draft form that are set to regulate emissions from new power plants. The White House released a video to explain the importance of these steps in addressing climate change by decarbonizing the economy.

Climate change: time for action, at last?

Ultimately, we need a comprehensive energy and climate policy that prices carbon pollution and levels the playing field for renewable sources of energy that are not degrading our climate and planet. But given that we have an intransigent congress (the current House Science committee leadership continues to deny even the existence of human-caused climate change), the president has been forced to turn to executive actions. His call for carbon emission limits on *all* coal-fired power plants, not just newly built plants, is a bold step forward. It will go some way to stemming our growing carbon emissions, and the impact they are having on our climate.

Artful and Delphic: Obama on Keystone Pipeline Is All Things at Once

As media tries to make sense of Obama’s obscure remarks on Keystone, the president becomes both an opponent and supporter of the project.

The photo, from NOAA, is a human settlement in/on a marsh in Florida. How much sea level rise, and what kind of storm, will it take to make those houses into nice fishing grounds?