Land open to oil and gas drilling by during Presidents Bush (left), Obama (center), and proposed by Trump (right)

Where Coastal States Stand on Offshore Drilling

Orange: Opposes, Blue: Governor is in Favor, Tan: Undecided

At the End of the George W. Bush Administration

Blue: Open to Oil and Gas Drilling, Yellow: Not Yet Open, Orange: Under Protection

At the End of the Obama Administration 

Blue: Open to Oil and Gas Drilling, Yellow: Not Yet Open, Orange: Under Protection

Trumps Proposal

Blue: Open to Oil and Gas Drilling, Orange: Under Protection

Where Is America’s Offshore Oil?

Economically Recoverable Oil and Gas

nytimes

Turnover In Trump's White House Is 'Record-Setting'

"While some turnover is expected and possibly beneficial, excessive turnover portends problems," writes Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "[President Trump] has valued loyalty over qualifications and suffered from a White House that has functioned in a chaotic manner. Both features have made it difficult to retain staff and have contributed to the governance difficulties he has encountered."

npr

REAL ID needed for flying for some states

dhs tsa real id airport enforcement

How The House And Senate Bills Affect Higher Ed

last week tonight with john oliver on the equifax breach

sheetcaking

How America's Idea Of Illegal Immigration Doesn't Always Match Reality

more info on the statistics on npr

who benefits under trump and the republicans health care plan

Both Obamacare and the recent Republican replacement proposal use refundable tax credits to help people buy their health insurance. That is part of the reason the new G.O.P. bill is under fire from conservatives, who see it as a new entitlement program.

But the structure of the tax credits is really different. Obamacare calculated the credits based on the cost of insurance in a given area and how much the purchaser could afford to pay. The Republican plan hands out tax credits on a flat basis, according to age. (Both plans cut off subsidies at a certain income level, on the assumption that high earners can pay their own way.) That means that the government subsidy you might get under the different plans would depend on a number of factors – age, income, address.

Analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated these subsidies for every county in the United States across these three variables. The result, shown in the maps above, reveals stark contrasts in federal support, particularly for lower-income Americans.

The biggest losers under the change would be older Americans with low incomes who live in high-cost areas. Those are the people who benefitedmost from Obamacare.

For some people, the new tax credit system will be more generous. The winners are likely to be younger, earn higher incomes and live in areas where the cost of health insurance is low.

Obamacare's subsidies were structured to limit how much low- and middle-income Americans could be asked to pay for health insurance. Under the G.O.P. proposal, many of the people whose tax credits would fall sharply would be likely to end up uninsured. For people with few resources, a gap of several thousands of dollars between their tax credit and the cost of coverage would be impossible to make up.

That's why many policy experts believe that the new system would result in fewer Americans having health insurance.

But if you put Obamacare out of your mind, this program still represents a very large outlay of federal money to help Americans buy health insurance. Before Obamacare passed, those buying their own insurance did not receive government subsidies. And the tax credits in the Republican bill would go to people regardless of whether they even paid taxes -- another reason conservatives oppose it.

nytimes

women's marches around the world

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/21/world/womens-march-pictures.html

Mexico

Antarctica

 Sydney, Australia

Bangkok

Chicago

London

Nairobi

New York

Oslo

 Paris

Vancouver

Washington, DC

mean tweets

SNL Trump vs. Clinton debate

first lady singing stevie wonder, beyonce, and missy elliott

U.N.'s Project Everyone- Tell me What you Want

The U.N.'s Project Everyone — a group founded by filmmaker Richard "Love Actually" Curtis — has put out a video with the original recording but a new girl power emphasis. In the video, British girl group M.O, Canadian YouTube star Taylor Hatala, Nigerian-British singer Seyi Shay and Bollywood actress Jacqueline Fernandez lip sync and dance to the song against backdrops with signs calling for "equal pay" and an end to violence against women.

The video is part of the Global Goals campaign, a U.N. initiative to promote the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. npr

Obama Names LGBT Landmark As National Monument

President Obama is designating a new national monument around the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement.

The Stonewall National Monument in New York City will be the first addition to the National Park System specifically highlighting the history of the LGBT community.

The monument covers nearly 8 acres in New York's Greenwich Village including a landmark gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. In June of 1969, patrons at the bar fought back against police persecution — an event that's widely seen as a watershed in the campaign for LGBT rights.

"Raids like these were nothing new, but this time the patrons had had enough," Obama said in a White House video announcing the new monument. "So they stood up and spoke out. The riots became protests. The protests became a movement. The movement ultimately became an integral part of America." npr

donald trump on mexicans

Donald J. Trump was seven minutes into an address on Thursday on the loading dock of a shuttered lighting plant here in New Hampshire, reading from prepared remarks, when he turned his attention to Mexico. That country’s leaders are smarter than those in the United States, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said.

Then, as the sound of a plane overhead drowned out his voice, Mr. Trump went off his script.

“In fact,” Mr. Trump said, pointing his finger toward the sky, “that could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to attack.” nytimes

4 Things To Know About Hillary Clinton's Approach To Foreign Policy

As a former senator and secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has a long foreign policy track record. That record suggests she'd be more hawkish than President Obama — and many of her fellow Democrats. But don't expect her to go overboard. She knows all too well the political price that can come with military intervention.

Here are four things to know about Clinton's approach to foreign policy:

(We've previously broken down Donald Trump's and Bernie Sanders'approaches to foreign policy.)

1. She's experienced
2. She's more hawkish than President Obama
3. She might not be that hawkish
4. She's concerned about alliances

1. She's experienced

If Clinton is elected, she'll have more foreign policy experience than any president since George H.W. Bush. She traveled extensively as first lady and as a senator and logged nearly a million miles visiting 112 countries as secretary of state. "Hillary Clinton is really the rare candidate with a long track record," said Elizabeth Saunders, a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The former secretary will try to make that background an asset in the campaign, arguing the country can ill afford a president who needs on-the-job training. "Our new commander in chief will walk into the Oval Office and find a world of hard choices and tough problems," Clinton told an audience at Stanford this spring. "So the stakes could not be higher."

2. She's more hawkish than President Obama

Clinton is less reticent when it comes to deploying military force than President Obama. While she hasn't advocated large-scale ground operations, she has pushed for the creation of "safe zones" in Syria, and she was a strong advocate for the U.S. military intervention in Libya. "Her default preference seems to be for action," Saunders said. "People have described her as having a preference for being 'caught trying.' She'd rather do something and be criticized for it than be criticized for doing nothing at all." That distinguishes Clinton's foreign policy approach from Obama's, whose instinctive caution has been summed up by the phrase, "Don't Do Stupid [Stuff]."

3. She might not be that hawkish

If Obama's caution is, in part, a reaction to the excesses of the George W. Bush era, Clinton's more aggressive posture might reflect a reversion to the mean. But don't expect her to go overboard. After all, she paid a political price for backing Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, as well as the Libyan intervention in 2011, which left a violent vacuum in which four Americans were later killed in Benghazi.

"Given the fact that many of her decisions to use military force have come back to haunt the United States generally and Hillary Clinton specifically, she may well have to temper some of those hawkish instincts in the service of prudence. And the reality is that we have very bad options," said veteran Middle East diplomat Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Clinton has criticized some of the more hawkish proposals from Republican candidates for indiscriminate bombing of ISIS. "Proposing that doesn't make you sound tough. It makes you sound like you're in over your head," Clinton said at Stanford. "Slogans aren't a strategy. Loose cannons tend to misfire. What America needs is strong, smart, steady leadership to wage and win this struggle."

4. She's concerned about alliances

Compared to her remaining presidential rivals Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Clinton is a committed internationalist. "For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations have understood that America's alliances make us stronger," Clinton told the Stanford audience in March. "Turning our back on our alliances or turning our alliance into a protection racket would reverse decades of bipartisan American leadership and send a dangerous signal to friend and foe alike."

Erstwhile Republican White House hopeful Carly Fiorina complained that all of Clinton's globetrotting as secretary of state produced little in the way of concrete agreements. But the Council on Foreign Relations' Saunders says that's too simplistic. "Diplomacy is important but it's not always dramatic," Saunders said. "Most high-level diplomatic travel by the president or secretary of state is really about tending to relationships." npr

NYTimes Nuclear Winter RetroReport

donald trump lacks experience

everybody hates you: Ted Cruz And The Senate: Now We've Got Bad Blood

Even though the thought of Donald Trump at the top of the ticket is making a lot of Republicans in Congress queasy, they're not exactly flocking to the guy in second place to save them — Ted Cruz. Cruz did not have a single endorsement from any of his Senate colleagues, until this week when Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah committed his support. Marco Rubio, on the other hand, has landed 14 Senate endorsements.

That's because the bad blood between Cruz and his colleagues runs so deep.

It's Getting Awkward

Probably the most awkward question you can ask Republican senators these days is why they're still giving Ted Cruz the cold shoulder when it comes to endorsements.

"Well, I think you know the answer to that," said Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.

"I'm going to let you ... speculate about that," offered Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

"I think it's pretty obvious," said Dean Heller of Nevada, without elaborating further.

What each of these senators is tiptoeing around is common knowledge in Washington: Ted Cruz is probably the most disliked member of the Senate.

South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who dropped his own presidential bid, even joked about it at the Washington Press Club dinner last month.

"If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you," Graham said to a ballroom full of reporters.

Cause, Baby, Now We've Got Bad Blood

How did the relationship go so wrong? Well, the romance never took off.

During Cruz's very first year in the Senate, he and a group of House Republicans helped force a 16-day government shutdown. At the time, in 2013, he crowed about it. But his Senate Republican colleagues were fuming. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said Cruz had led them on with a promise to defund Obamacare.

"You know, we've been asking from the beginning: What's the end game? How does this end? How do you achieve what you're purporting to achieve on defunding Obamacare? And I never got an answer to that," Ayotte told reporters when the government was reopening that October.

And then there was the time Cruz flirted with the idea of defunding the president's executive action on immigration. He fumbled a procedural maneuver on the Senate floor, which forced his colleagues to come to work on a Saturday. Not the kind of smooth move that will earn one's way into senators' hearts.

"You should have an end goal in sight if you're going to do these types of things," said Utah Republican Orrin Hatch that weekend in December 2014. "And I don't see any end goal that can be won — other than just irritating a lot of people."

And then, of course, there was the time Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar.

"He is willing to say things he knows are false. That has consequences for how this body operates," said Cruz during a nearly 20-minute speech on the Senate floor last July. The spat was over renewing the Export-Import Bank.

But this year, Republicans anguishing over the rise of Donald Trump can see that Cruz has pulled way ahead of Marco Rubio, who has the most Senate endorsements. Maybe it's time for the rift between Cruz and his colleagues to heal.

Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana compared it to marriage.

"Occasionally my wife has said something to me, or I to her, that we wish we had not said later. At the time, we're thinking, 'Oh, my gosh.' But we've worked through that, and we forget it, and we move on because there's something far more important than an occasional harsh word," said Cassidy.

Utah's Lee became the first senator to endorse Cruz, on Thursday. Maybe others will follow. Even the guy who joked about murdering Cruz on the Senate floor is coming around.

"Increasingly more clear to me that Ted Cruz is the most viable alternative to Donald Trump," Sen. Graham said this week. "I think a Trump candidacy would be a disaster for the Republican brand. I think John Kasich and Rubio are more electable than Ted, but Ted's running effectively as an outsider in an outsider year."

But, of course, no outsider wants too many love notes from Republican senators. npr

California To Permit Medically Assisted Suicide As Of June 9

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed landmark legislation last October that would allow terminally ill people to request life-ending medication from their physicians.

But no one knew when the law would take effect, because of the unusual way in which the law was passed — in a legislative "extraordinary session" called by Brown. The bill could not go into effect until 90 days after that session adjourned.

The session closed Thursday, which means the End of Life Option Act will go into effect June 9.

"We're glad to finally have arrived at this day where we have a date certain," says Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel.

"It's a historic achievement for California, and for a limited universe of people dealing with a terminal illness," Monning says. "It could indeed be a transformative way of giving them the option of a compassionate end-of-life process."

Disability-rights advocates fought hard last year against passage of the legislative act, and they continue to voice concern.

Marilyn Golden, senior policy analyst with the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, says it would be impossible to know, for example, if a depressed patient went to many doctors — who all denied the request for lethal medication — before finding one who agreed to write the prescription.

"We are looking ahead at measures to protect people from abuse," Golden says, "and to explore and inform doctors, nurses and pharmacists that they don't have to participate."

As written, the law requires two doctors to agree, before prescribing the drugs, that a patient has six months or less to live. Patients must be able to swallow the medication themselves and must affirm in writing, 48 hours before taking the medication, that they will do so.

California is the fifth state to permit this option at the end of life. It joins Vermont, Oregon, Washington and Montana.

Across the state, some patients with advanced cancer welcomed the news.

"It gives me a great peace of mind to know that I will not be forced to die slowly and painfully," says Elizabeth Wallner, in a release from Compassion & Choices, an aid-in-dying advocacy group. Wallner, 52, of Sacramento, is a single mother with stage 4 colon cancer that has spread to her liver and lungs.

"It gives great comfort to know that the agonizingly traumatic image of me suffering will not be my family's last memory of me," she says.

Monning says he's grateful to people who worked for passage of the law, some in their final days:

• Brittany Maynard, an Orange County, Calif., woman with brain cancer, moved to Oregon to take advantage of laws there that allowed her to get lethal medication. Before she died in 2014, she recorded a video that was shown during hearings on the End of Life Option Act in Sacramento.
• Jennifer Glass, of San Mateo, Calif., helped to launch the campaign in 2014, then died of lung cancer last year.
• Christy O'Donnell, 47, of Los Angeles, died of lung cancer last month.

"I really believe," Monning says, "we use today to mark and dedicate the memory of some true champions." npr