The Daily Parker

Washington Post political reporter Philip Bump lays it out:

[T]he effects of the increased heat are much broader than simply higher temperatures. In an effort to delineate what scientists expect to see as the world warms, I spoke with Alex Halliday, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Direct effects of higher temperatures

Increased health risks. One of the most immediate effects of higher temperatures is an increased threat of health risks such as heat stroke. As noted above, this is probably the most easily understood risk.

Drought. There will be more droughts. For one thing, higher temperatures will lead to faster evaporation of surface water. For another, they will mean less snowfall, as precipitation will be more likely to fall as rain. In some regions, like much of the Southwest, flows of water through the spring and summer are a function of snow melting in the mountains. Reduced snowpack means less water later in the year.

Wildfires. Higher temperatures and drier conditions in some places will also help wildfires spread and lengthen the wildfire season overall.

It gets better from there. So its nice to know that the world's second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases plans to reduce regulations to allow even more emissions.

Paul Krugman highlights how the politics of the Republican party are mainly about privileged white men feeling like they're losing their privilege:

There have been many studies of the forces driving Trump support, and in particular the rage that is so pervasive a feature of the MAGA movement. What Thursday’s hearing drove home, however, was that white male rage isn’t restricted to blue-collar guys in diners. It’s also present among people who’ve done very well in life’s lottery, whom you would normally consider very much part of the elite.

In other words, hatred can go along with high income, and all too often does.

At this point there’s overwhelming evidence against the “economic anxiety” hypothesis — the notion that people voted for Donald Trump because they had been hurt by globalization. In fact, people who were doing well financially were just as likely to support Trump as people who were doing badly.

I very much ran with the nerds during my own time at Yale, but I did encounter people like Kavanaugh — hard-partying sons of privilege who counted on their connections to insulate them from any consequences from their actions, up to and including abusive behavior toward women. And that kind of elite privilege still exists.

But it’s privilege under siege. An increasingly diverse society no longer accepts the God-given right of white males from the right families to run things, and a society with many empowered, educated women is finally rejecting the droit de seigneur once granted to powerful men.

And nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially if it comes with the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.

This basic dynamic explains almost every revolution in history, including the American one in the 1770s. This time it's white men, but it could be any elite group who start losing power. The Post makes a similar point:

Jennifer Palmieri, a Democratic strategist and author of “Dear Madam President,” a book about reimagining women in leadership roles, said the nation’s fast-changing culture can be unsettling and indeed frightening to men in power.

“A lot of white men don’t know what it’s like to feel threatened, powerless and frustrated,” said Palmieri, former communications director for Clinton’s campaign. “As we go through the reckoning of this lopsided power balance, there’s going to be a lot more of this.”

The Republican Party has long identified with more traditional white males, such as former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But strategists say it is now turning more toward combative male candidates in the mold of Trump, with allegations of misconduct interpreted by many within the party not as liabilities but as unfair political attacks.

“We’re a party of angry, older white men at a time when our country is going through tremendous demographic change,” Republican strategist John Weaver said, predicting that the GOP would suffer the consequences in future elections.

So when white voters tell pollsters and reporters that they fear a tide of "those people" coming over the border, they feel afraid of losing their birthright. Not the traditions and culture, necessarily, but the parts of those things that put them on top because of the accident of birth.

The American Bar Association had concerns about Brett Kavanaugh 12 years ago:

Democrats for three years had been blocking President George W. Bush’s 2003 nomination of Kavanaugh to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. They argued he was biased, as shown by his work as a lawyer for Bush’s presidential campaign, for an independent counsel’s investigation into President Bill Clinton and for other conservative causes.

Republicans kept pushing to make Kavanaugh a judge on the powerful appeals court, year after year. In his defense, they cited multiple reviews by the ABA’s judicial review committee that found him “well qualified” — the big attorney association’s highest possible endorsement, meaning Kavanaugh had outstanding legal abilities and outstanding judicial temperament.

But in May 2006, as Republicans hoped to finally push Kavanaugh’s nomination across the finish line, the ABA downgraded its endorsement.

The group’s judicial investigator had recently interviewed dozens of lawyers, judges and others who had worked with Kavanaugh, the ABA announced at the time, and some of them raised red flags about “his professional experience and the question of his freedom from bias and open-mindedness.”

But the GOP hasn't been in favor of unbiased judges since...well, let's see, they're really only in favor when Democrats hold the White House. Interesting.

I fear they're going to get uglier before they're out of power. It's human nature.

Brett Kavanaugh's hearing yesterday dominated the news. Here are some reactions:

• My favorite: Alexandra Petri demanding HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH.
• My least favorite: Mona Charen correctly identifying it as a show trial but incorrectly identifying the aggrieved party.
• Sarah Holder makes the case for a local investigation of Kavanaugh's conduct.
• Emma Green found herself baffled by Rachel Mitchell's questions.
• Andrew Sullivan notes that everyone lost yesterday.
• Aaron Blake says the GOP's nightmare might not be over.
• Chris Jones called it a circus of human pain.
• Josh Marshall points out that Kavanaugh is still a very powerful judge.
• The Guardian also weighed in, as did The Economist, 

Then, today, the committee voted along party lines to advance Kavanaugh to the whole Senate; Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) demanded the FBI investigate the allegations; and protesters confronted Flake in the Capitol.

Republican David Brock, who worked with Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the Clinton impeachment, urges the Senate to vote "No" on Kavanaugh's nomination:

Twenty years ago, when I was a conservative movement stalwart, I got to know Brett Kavanaugh both professionally and personally.

A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh's own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to [Vince] Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.

Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign. And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he's changed his stripes.

I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense. He made up his mind nearly a generation ago — and, if he's confirmed, he'll have nearly two generations to impose it upon the rest of us.

Meanwhile, it looks a lot like the Christine Blasey Ford held her own against what Josh Marshall calls "Grassley's Catastrophe."

We're 40 days from the mid-terms.

The two most prominent Republican women who write for left-leaning major newspapers are not happy with the Brett Kavanaugh saga. First, Michelle Goldberg says the current GOP elite are "pigs all the way down:"

Let’s start with Kavanaugh’s high school, Georgetown Prep, also the alma mater of Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court pick. There’s now a wealth of reporting painting the private school as a bastion of heedless male entitlement. Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge — who Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s first accuser, says was in the room when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her — has written extensively of his drunken teenage debauchery.

There’s no equivalent culture in which girls reap social capital for misbehaving. You rarely see women in politics or law who flaunt college reputations as party girls; the women who make it are expected to show steely self-control. In the rarefied social world that produces so many of our putative leaders, a young man who frequently gets blackout drunk, as Kavanaugh reportedly did, is a fun guy. A young woman who does so is a mess.

Watching all this unfold is radicalizing for reasons far beyond Republican mistreatment of Kavanaugh’s accusers. His story shows, in lurid microcosm, how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. Women who struggle ceaselessly to be smart enough, attractive enough, ambitious enough and likable enough have been playing a rigged game. As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.

Over at the Post, Jennifer Rubin says, if Kavanaugh is a partisan hack, he should be questioned like one:

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh shed any hint of judicial temperament on Monday night. He went right to the most partisan outlet, Fox News, which has been likened to “state TV.” He seemed a bit ill at ease in his role as victim during the softball interview. He teared up. He said he wouldn’t be chased out of the confirmation process. In doing so, he debased himself and the highest court.

By going to Fox News before appearing again before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he sank to the level of political partisan. As he claimed his growing list of accusers were . . . were what? — All loons? All partisans? — he made clear that he is not acting like an innocent man nor a judge. An innocent man and one of fine judicial temperament would demand an investigation to clear his name. An innocent man and a man steeped in due process and fair play would denounce reprehensible stunts such as trying to blame a completely innocent person using nothing but an old yearbook and Zillow. Such a man would not make a mawkish plea for sympathy, but rather, insist on a rigorous investigation of the facts.

Democrats should make clear that, in his hunger to sit on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has further politicized an already broken confirmation system and has done damage to the court. His indifference to transparency and fact-finding in favor of hardball political theatrics alone should be grounds for rejecting his nomination.

Because it turns out, making blatant partisanship part of the nominating process for a lifetime appointment makes the body itself blatantly partisan. We have the Republicans to thank for that, more than the Democrats, whose partisanship extended to bouncing Robert Bork because—wait for it—he was too partisan to sit on the Court.

The Republican Party can barely get through a morning without demonstrating their disdain for the voters who put them in office. And in their desperation to stay in power, they're destroying the system they're sworn to "protect and defend." Which may be part of their plan.

Lots of stuff crossed my inbox this morning:

• Researchers at Northwestern University believe they have evidence of four distinct personality types.
• Other researchers have found "huge perceptual differences [of Chicago] based on age, education level and especially race and ethnicity."
• Via Schneier, a look at the effects of publicly shaming companies for bad security.
• With 50 days to go until the election, James Fallows adds a time capsule about Brett Kavanaugh.
• Josh Marshall wonders whether Christine Ford will get better treatment than Anita Hill.

Back to my wonderful, happy software debugging adventure.

James Fallows says the Republican effort to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court without adequately weighing some key evidence risks a multi-generational error:

During his confirmation hearings for the D.C. Circuit Court 12 years ago, Kavanaugh denied under oath that he had participated in certain specified partisan fights. Two senior, hyper-cautious Democratic senators – Patrick Leahy, and Dianne Feinstein – have, along with others, now come out with statements that Kavanaugh was lying under oath in 2006, and is doing so again now.

Was he? This matters.

Every modern-era judicial nominee has mastered the art of dissembling, and pretending to have a completely open mind and a “I just call the balls and strikes” objectivity about every controversial issue.

But actual lying is something different. Clarence Thomas’s interlocutors believed that he was lying about Anita Hill, and the intervening years makes it more likely they were right. This is the first time I’m aware of, since the Thomas hearings, in which Senators opposing the nomination have come out to say: this nominee is lying under oath. It is worth knowing the truth before the now-or-never vote is cast.

The second question involves finances.

Brett Kavanaugh has some major financial gray-areas in his recent past. The very large credit-card debts, suddenly paid off?

Maybe this all is nothing. But the Senate is ramming through a vote before anyone knows what’s there.

Only 51 days until the election.

James Fallows will spend the next 54 days (until the next Congressional election in the US) talking about the 51 people who each have the power to stop President Trump:

The 51 senators who now make up the GOP’s governing majority represent about 30 million fewer constituents than do the 49 Democrats and independents. And thanks to gerrymandering and similar factors, a 1-percent GOP edge in House of Representatives voting in 2016—just over 63 million total votes for Republican candidates, versus just under 62 million for Democrats—translated into a 47-seat majority in the House.

I mention these disproportions to introduce a Time Capsule series for the 55 days between now and the 2018 mid-term elections. It will focus on the 51 people who have disproportionate power. Unlike the other 330+ million Americans, could do something directly to hold Donald Trump accountable for what nearly all of them know is his reckless unfitness for office—but who every day choose not to act.

Those 51 are, of course, the Republicans who make up Mitch McConnell’s current Senate majority.

But 55 days before the election, not a one of these 51 people has dared act. Not after the “anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times; not after Bob Woodward’s Fear (and the dozen previous books to similar effect); not after … anything.

Encouraging to me is that polling now suggests at least two of those 51 could lose their seats in November.

Before diving back into one of the most abominable wrecks of a software application I've seen in years, I've lined up some stuff to read when I need to take a break:

• DARPA claims to have developed a microchip, that goes in your brain, that can control a swarm of drones. You read that right.
• The Republican Congress are set to float a budget bill that would add $2 trn to our national debt (only $2,000 bn to my UK readers) over the next 10 years, a move that Thomas Friedman calls "heating up our economy by burning all the furniture in the house."
• Chicago might get a cute little park by Union Station if the latest in a series of development proposals goes through.
• James Fallows asks, is Bob Woodward like Walter Cronkite?
• Bruce Schneier warns about a security hole in Wemo smart plugs, which I use. Which is patched. So I will right now go order my plugs to patch themselves.
• Finally, if you need to use the System.Drawing namespace with .NET Core 2.0, Scott Hanselman has your back.

OK. Firing up Visual Studio, reaching for the Valium...