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Ryan Koronowski outlines the main talking points from Obama’s climate speech at Georgetown University, which will take place later this afternoon:

The plan, according to senior administration officials, has three pillars: cutting carbon pollution in America, leading international efforts to cut global emissions, and preparing the U.S. for the costly impacts of climate change. President Obama will frame action as a moral obligation to do what we can for “the world we leave our children.”

Executive action remains one of the only serious avenues left to cut greenhouse gas emissions — a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that the U.S tax code is not currently doing it, and congressional action still looks unlikely. Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, said in his briefing Monday that the president’s view “reflects reality.” Carney said “we’ve seen Congress attempt to deal with this issue and fail to.”

Brad Plumer calls the White House plan a “kitchen sink approach”:

The White House is asking the EPA to propose rules for those existing plants by the summer of 2014 and finish them by 2015. “It’s an aggressive timeline and everyone will have a strong opinion about it,” says a senior administration official. “And we’re focused on making sure there’s adequate time to engage key stakeholders here.” …

[T]he White House is pursuing a slew of complementary measures, too. For instance: The White House is hammering out an agreement with China and other countries to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a potent greenhouse gas used in everything from soda machines to many car air conditioners. The administration will also develop a plan for curbing methane emissions from natural-gas production. The Energy Department will set new efficiency standards for appliances and buildings. The Interior Department will try to speed up wind and solar development on public lands. Foreign-aid agencies will cease financing coal plants overseas (except when there are no possible alternatives).

Molly Redden, meanwhile, previews the coming legal battles over any EPA action:

“There is no end to the legal creativity of the regulated industry,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of environmental law at the Georgetown University Law Center. David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed. “Virtually every rule that the EPA adopts under the Clean Air Act,” which the Obama administration will use to regulate power plants, “is litigated. So the fact that it’s litigated doesn’t say a thing about the strength of polluters’ legal arguments,” he said.

And yet, as Simon Lazarus and Doug Kendall have pointed out for Grist, any challenge to new regulations would wind up before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where conservative appointees hold a majority. And the threat of a court decision against them has already cowed the EPA into delaying its rules for new power plants earlier this year.

Jonathan Cohn considers the implications for international climate policy:

The U.S. and other nations have agreed to finalize a climate agreement in 2015, at another upcoming summit. If, by then, the U.S. is on track to fulfill its previous pledge, other nations might be more inclined to agree to more reductions of their own. Many experts believe that round of international negotiations represents the next, and maybe the last, great chance to avoid some serious and potentially devastating changes to the climate—among them, more severe weather like droughts, floods, and storms.

Philip Radford hopes the speech marks a beginning rather than an end:

[T]o truly meet his obligation to future generations, this must be the foundation – not the final act – of his climate legacy. The current Congress has made it clear that it will be on the wrong side of history, so it is absolutely vital for the President to use his authority to reduce power plant pollution, move forward with renewable energy projects on public lands, and increase energy efficiency. What the President will propose today is just a part of what it’s possible to do without Congress, and to solve the climate crisis, the solutions will have to be equal to or greater than the problem.

(Photo: A man poses for a picture with a kitchen sink at the Climate Camp on Black Heath on August 26, 2009 in London, England. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

Quick… Reset again!! RT @AP: BREAKING: Putin: Snowden is in transit zone of Moscow airport, Russia will not extradite him.

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) June 25, 2013

Movie Of The Week: Edward Snowden in “The Terminal” pic.twitter.com/6W5eCwOVFS

— Hunter Walker (@hunterw) June 25, 2013

Mark Adomanis predicts Russia will pay a serious price for refusing to hand over Snowden during his time in Moscow:

As should be clear, Russia doesn’t actually gain anything from helping Snowden, all it does is expose itself to the full wrath and fury of every part of Washington officialdom. Unless you’re defending a national interest of the first order, exposing yourself to the full wrath and fury of Washington officialdom is a really stupid thing to do.

There’s no obvious principle at stake in the Snowden case, no real “interest” that the Russians are trying to defend: they’re just acting like jerks because they think they can get away with it. This is a foolish decision. Russia has never been popular in Washington and the Obama administration was barely able to prevent the Magnitsky bill from becoming a full-fledged diplomatic disaster (it did so largely by soft-peddling enforcement). How willing do you think the Obama folks are going to be to “defend” Russia when Congress inevitably starts debating additional sanctions or punitive measures? Do you really think they’re going to expose themselves to an endless array of bad press on behalf of a country that engaged in such calculated and deliberate antagonism?

In contrast, Max Fisher suggests that China thought it was doing the US a favor by sneaking Snowden out of Hong Kong:

White House spokesman Jay Carney lambasted the Hong Kong government for apparently aiding in Snowden’s flight to Moscow, saying that the “decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the U.S.-China relationship.” … Take a moment, though, to consider how this might look from Beijing. Typically, when the United States and China argue about transferring a high-profile and politically sensitive individual between their custodies, it’s a Chinese dissident whom the U.S. wants to grant asylum. Those cases are often perceived as deeply embarrassing for China, although Beijing has increasingly learned to live with them. Perhaps Chinese authorities saw this as a rare reversal: an American political dissident looking for asylum in Hong Kong, which despite its special status is a part of China. In the Chinese government worldview, granting asylum would have been the real slap to the United States.

More Dish on Snowden’s search for asylum here.

On this issue, the left in France sounds … well a little like the American anti-marriage equality left of the 1990s. But with a new twist:

An important current of French thought, which has no real American equivalent, has maintained that while women deserve equal rights, these rights must not entail the supposed erasure of sexual difference. Historians and philosophers such as Mona Ozouf and Philippe Raynaud have seen a particular threat in American-style protections against sexual harassment, which they have labeled “sexual Stalinism.” The sociologist Irène Théry has called for a féminisme à la française that acknowledges the “asymmetrical pleasures of seduction.” The philosopher Sylviane Agacinski goes so far as to call sexual difference the true basis for sexual equality in law. …

This spring, precisely the same concerns have dominated the manifestos against “marriage for all” issued by groups of law professors and psychologists. And interviews with ordinary protesters have shown just how effectively the arguments of philosophers have filtered down to street level, with one figure after another explaining their opposition to the reform in the same way. To quote a popular protest banner: “Un père et une mère c’est élémentaire” (“A father and a mother is elementary”). And the 60 percent support for same-sex marriage has not changed the fact that a majority still favors banning child adoption by homosexual couples. In short, although religion and homophobia obviously fed into the recent protests, the rhetoric employed by the opposition has trickled down from the intellectuals (as one might, indeed, expect in France).

Fawn Johnson expects so:

[T]he House is slogging along on a piece-by-piece approach that does nothing but stretch out the debate until all that’s left are wisps of ideas on work visas, local police enforcement, and electronic verification of workers. Indeed, the House might not kill the bill outright, but the GOP players are passing the ball around until the clock runs out.

Drum thinks the bill “depends entirely on the House leadership”:

If they decide they want to pass immigration reform and get it off the table for good, they can do it in four weeks. If they don’t want to, they can pretty easily fritter away the time. So we’re back to square one: do Republican leaders desperately want to put this whole thing behind them, regardless of the howling from the tea partiers, or do they care more about the backlash from their conservative white base than they do about picking up Hispanic votes in 2016?

Morrissey’s view:

There are two ways in which this gets bypassed. One is for John Boehner to simply put the Senate bill up for a floor vote, but his GOP colleagues would strongly resist that — regardless of whether it would pass or fail. Either way, it creates risk for Republicans, and they’d be better off developing their own version for Boehner to float. The other is to pass a more conservative comprehensive bill and throw it to a conference committee, but the House is so far away from that possibility (as Johnson points out) that it would have to be a shell bill.

Bouie thinks Republians are in serious trouble if the bill goes down in flames:

Latino voters don’t trust the Republican Party. Both because of their policies—hence President Obama’s three-to-one margin among Hispanics in last year’s election—and because of their rhetoric. According to a recent survey from Latino Decisions—a group that tracks and measures Latino public opinion—strongly worded statements against comprehensive immigration reform from Republican senators (in particular, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama) harm the party’s standing with HIspanic voters. As Latino Decisions explains, “The results demonstrate that there is no ‘distancing from the party’ when it comes to the immigration reform bill and associated position-taking. It is perfectly reasonable that Latino voters view elected officials as spokespeople for their party, and either reward or blame them in similar proportion.”

Mataconis looks at a poll showing Rubio’s favorables dropping and a wider turning on him within the GOP:

it strikes me that the Republican/conservative (is there really a difference?) repudiation of a guy that they were all rallying behind just a few months ago is just another sign of the utter hopelessness of the GOP when it comes to immigration. One does not have to accept the Senate bill in full, indeed I’d argue that there are several provisions that I find problematic. However, the way legislating ought to work is that if you don’t like a bill then you propose alternatives and try to work out those differences through the legislative process. Instead, though, all I’ve seen from Senate GOP opponents of the bill are proposal after proposal designed more to appease their base with ineffective measures aimed at “border security” than to actually accomplish anything legislatively. In the House, meanwhile, it seems fairly clear that Republicans don’t want to act on immigration at all. In the end, it all points to reason to be pretty pessimistic about the future of immigration reform in the 113th Congress.

Ozgun Atasoy describes a research experiment that explored the question:

As one would expect, when people are better connected, they tend to unite around popular decisions. But research also suggests that social connection — fostered by Twitter, say — also makes crowds fundamentally less predictable. With social media connecting people to an unprecedented degree, it is possible that the sudden emergence of unexpected collective action will be a defining feature of this era.

Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts conducted large-scale experiments to investigate the effect of the strength of social influence on collective action. People were given a list of previously unknown songs from unknown bands. They listened to the songs and downloaded them if they wanted to. In the independent condition, people did not see other people’s choices. In the social influence condition, people saw how many times each song had been downloaded by others. The collective outcome in the social influence condition was more unequal. That is, popular choices were much more popular under social influence. When the researchers increased the strength of social influence by displaying the songs in a table ordered by popularity, the collective outcome became even more unequal.

After the events around Gezi Park unfolded, there were attempts at explaining why they happened. Events seem inevitable retrospectively. But the truth is most people did not know that the uprising was coming. But was it knowable? In other words, could a sophisticated observer accurately predict the events?

Salganik, Dodds, and Watts looked at the collective outcomes in eight different “worlds.” That is, eight separate groups of people downloaded songs under social influence. The collective outcomes in different “worlds” were different. Even though people in different “worlds” were indistinguishable and they did the same task under the same conditions, the collective outcomes were different. When the researchers increased the strength of social influence, the collective outcome became even more unpredictable. That is, the difference between the popularities of a given song in different “worlds” increased as the strength of social influence increased. Apparently, in collective decisions there is an inherent unpredictability that cannot be resolved by carefully examining the initial conditions and decision makers. Stronger social influence results in more unpredictability.

Max Fisher profiles the “spiritual leader” behind the violent anti-Muslim movement escalating among Buddhists in Burma:

[Ashin] Wirathu calls himself “the Burmese bin Laden” and was recently labeled on the cover of Time magazine as “the face of Burmese terror.” A prominent Burmese human rights activist, after a lifetime of fighting government oppression, now warns that Wirathu’s movement is promoting an ideology akin to neo-Nazism.

Already, the movement has expanded beyond this one self-styled radical Buddhist monk. It’s now expanding across Burma (also known as Myanmar) according to [a NY] Times article. The anti-Muslim sentiment has spread with alarming speed over just the last year, as Burma – which is finally opening up after years of military dictatorship – loosened its strict speech laws. It has prompted boycotts and sermons that can sound an awful lot like calls for violence against Muslims. Monasteries associated with the movement have enrolled 60,000 Burmese children into Sunday school programs.

Walter Russell Mead points out that no one in government is condemning the content of Wirathu’s sermons:

He frequently suggests there is a conspiracy afoot to turn Burma into a Muslim country, that Muslims will overrun “good” Buddhists, force them to convert to Islam, and steal their women and daughters and jobs. In his sermons, heard by thousands of people across the country, he describes violence against Muslims, like the massacre of children in Meiktila in March, as a show of strength.

Nevertheless, President Thein Sein lept to Wirathu’s defense, labeling him a “son of Buddha” and a “noble person” in an official statement. He made no mention of Wirathu’s hate-filled speeches, nor the rampaging mobs that burned and slaughtered their way through Muslim neighborhoods on several occasions earlier this year. As of this writing, celebrated human rights activist and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi—whose earlier criticism of violence against Burmese Muslims was pretty weak, at best—has neither defended nor attacked Wirathu.

(Photo: Wirathu attends a conference about the religious violence that has shaken the country at a monastery on the outskirts of Yangon on June 13, 2013. By Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images)

Nick Hanauer wants to raise it to $15:

True, that sounds like a lot. When President Barack Obama called in February for an increase to $9 an hour from $7.25, he was accused of being a dangerous redistributionist. Yet consider this: If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour — three times what it is now.

Felix is on board:

There are surely some US jobs which simply aren’t economic at $15 per hour, and those jobs will end up being lost. (In aggregate, as I say, raising the minimum wage is probably good for employment, but the extra jobs at employers taking advantage of all that extra spending aren’t going to be in the same places as the jobs lost at employers who can’t afford to pay that much.) But the point here is that the US has already done a spectacularly good job of exporting most of its exportable low-wage work. As Hanauer says, “virtually all of these low-wage jobs are service jobs that can neither be outsourced nor automated”. As a result, raising the minimum wage will result in many fewer job losses now than it would have done a couple of decades ago.

Dylan Matthews, who isn’t necessarily opposed to small increases in the minimum wage, thinks that a $15 minimum wage is a “terrible idea”:

The evidence we have on the effects of minimum wage increases, [economics professor Arindrajit Dube] notes, are “limited to a historical period where statutory minimum wages have ranged between roughly 35% and 50% of the national median wage.” Hanauer’s proposal would put the minimum wage at roughly 75 percent of the national median, which Dube notes would put it higher than any OECD country, including several European social democracies. “We just do not know what a $15/hour minimum wage would do based on the type of careful research designs that have become the hallmark of modern labor economics, and ones I strive to use in my work,” Dube writes in an e-mail.

Matthews’ bottom line:

There’s a case to be made that mild increases in the minimum wage are worth it, either because one doesn’t believe in employment effects or because one believes the wage increases it causes are worth it. But Hanauer’s proposed increase is recklessly large and even supporters of minimum wage hikes don’t think it’s a serious option.