Q:  Would any GOP Senator today get the kind of funeral and remembrance that Edward Kennedy has?

A:  That is increasingly unlikely.

Certainly all GOP Senators who vote against the upcoming climate and clean energy bill will be consigning themselves to be dustbin of history.  Given how rapidly climate impacts are accelerating, by the 2020s the entire country — even most Republicans — will realize how tragically mistaken were those who blocked serious action and who demagogued against those trying to avert catastrophe.  Those conservatives who want to be fondly eulogized by the status quo media and centrist opinionmakers have maybe a decade left.

Dick Cheney himself may live long enough to be seen by even his last 3 or 4 remaining admirers as a leading agent of humanity’s self-destruction (see “Has anyone in U.S. history made more Americans less safe than Dick Cheney?“).  And I can’t even imagine the kind of funeral President George W. Bush will get if he lives to, say, the 2030s, when the consequences of his all-out effort to stop domestic and international action on climate change have initiated the grim time in American history I’ve labeled “Planetary Purgatory.”

But there are also important lessons for Democrats here, too.  Although an indisputable liberal lion, Kennedy repeatedly reached across the aisle to achieve what was achievable.  As the Post reported this weekend in, many Democrats say

… what made Kennedy successful was knowing when to compromise, when to agree to terms that fell short of expectations but left room for later gains. “He had this unerring sense of what was the critical bottom line for the people most in need — what the key goal was you were making progress on and why you were at the table to begin with,” said Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster and strategist has brief but must-read op-ed, “Where’s the GOP’s Ted Kennedy?“:

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For only the second time in postwar history, Japanese voters cast out the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party in elections on Sunday, handing a landslide victory to an untested opposition that must tackle severe economic problems and point Japan in a new direction.

Voters flocked to the main opposition Democratic Party, a broad coalition of former socialists and ruling party defectors who promised to ease Japan’s growing social inequalities and reduce its traditional dependency on Washington.

However, the victory seemed less an embrace of the opposition and its policies than a resounding rejection of the conservative incumbents, whom voters blame for this former economic superpower’s stubborn decline and increasingly cloudy future.

The big news for climate science realists is that the Democratic Party of Japan has a much stronger target than the one the ruling conservative center-right LDP had.  The DPJ “aims to lower the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions 25 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels,” whereas the LDP only proposed an 8% cut.

[I can't imagine the climate target played much of a role in the election, given how badly the economy was doing, but I'd welcome any comments from people who know Japanese politics.]

Bloomberg News has the backstory, from a late July story, “DPJ to Raise Target for Japan’s Greenhouse-Gas Cuts” on one of the party leaders, Katsuya Okada (pictured above):

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Bottles of perfume and cologne are shown in New York. Several organizations, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, are questioning the safety of chemicals used in fragrances.  This CAP guest post was first published here.

Perfume fragrances are considered trade secrets, so companies don’t have to reveal what’s in them””which could be any number of synthetic chemical compounds. Even “unscented” products may contain masking fragrances, which are chemicals used to cover up the odor of other chemicals. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration isn’t required to review cosmetics for safety before they’re sold in stores, but organizations such as Consumer Reports and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics are trying to uncover what’s behind these mystery fragrances.

One of the trade secrets in perfumes and colognes is phthalates. Phthalates are used to help fragrances linger in perfumes, lotions, and other products, and they take the stiffness out of hairspray. But these chemicals could pose dangerous side effects. A recent Center for American Progress report shows that phthalates are linked to reproductive problems in men and women, including premature births, genital abnormalities in boys, and reduced sperm count.

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