This evening's music features west coast r&b singer Johnny Fuller.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Congress does not have votes to block Iran deal, says Nancy Pelosi

House minority leader says Republicans will not be able to veto the deal in the House, as Senate also seems secure

Barack Obama has enough votes to get the Iran deal through the House of Representatives, despite Republican efforts to block the historic nuclear accord, the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, has said.

With a Senate vote looking increasingly secure for the president, Pelosi’s comments suggest it is now extremely unlikely that Congress will halt the deal.

Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, said on Thursday in an interview with the Associated Press that she was confident House Democrats would have the votes if necessary to see the Iran deal through.

"The Danger of a Failed Iran Deal": Could GOP Rejection of Nuke Pact Lead to War?

Erdogan’s anti-PKK campaign seen backfiring at polls

As Turkey heads toward its second general election in six months, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s campaign against the surprise victor of the first ballot may backfire – again.

The pro-Kurdish HDP won 13 percent of votes in June, helping to deny a wounded ruling party the supermajority it sought to transform Erdogan’s office into the nation’s power center. Since then, Turkey’s leaders have redoubled their efforts to tie the HDP to Kurdish PKK rebels, designated terrorists by Turkey and the U.S. They sent the air force to bomb the guerrilla’s bases, reigniting a three-decade conflict.

The rising tide of nationalist rhetoric and the spreading conflict in Turkey’s southeast haven’t dented support for the HDP, according to two opinion polls published in the last week which put the party on 12.8 percent and 14.1 percent.

Both are above the 10-percent threshold it must cross to seat lawmakers in parliament.

“Escalating violence may chip away at support for the HDP in the west of the country,” said Naci Sapan, who analyzes Kurdish politics at the Tigris Communal Research Center in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. But the party will benefit from a widespread feeling in the Kurdish southeast “that the president rekindled violence” for electoral benefit, he said.

US Confirms Saudis Using Cluster Bombs in Yemen

US officials are confirming tonight what has already been widely reported, that the Saudi military is using cluster munitions in its war on Yemen, despite their strikes targeting areas with a heavy civilian presence and cluster munitions having a notorious reputation for killing civilians months and even years after use.

Saudi Arabia is not a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and has been provided with the weapons by the US, a provision that traditionally comes with at least an implicit admonishment not to use them except under very particular circumstances, to which the Saudi war against Yemen would certainly not apply.

This has raised the possibility that the US, which is openly endorsing the Saudi war, may have provided them with a secret “understanding” on the matter, though the Pentagon is at this point refusing to say whether they’ve even brought the use of cluster munitions up in conversations with the Saudis at all.

Children paying highest price in Yemen's brutal armed conflict

North Korea and South Korea Have Just Started Firing at Each Other

Tensions are on the rise again between North and South Korea, as the two nations have begun exchanging rocket and artillery fire across their border, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry.

Officials say this the first armed clash between the two countries in five years.

North Korea appears to have launched the first attack by firing a shell across the border. South Korean media reported it was likely that the North was aiming at a propaganda-blaring loudspeaker situated in a border town about about 35 miles north of Seoul in the western part of the border area.

The South then reportedly retaliated with tens of 155mm artillery rounds targeted towards the location where the shell originated, according to their defense ministry.

"Our military has stepped up monitoring and is closely watching North Korean military movements," the ministry said in a statement.

The South's Defence Ministry also said that the North has threatened "new military action" if the loudspeaker broadcasts are not stopped within 48 hours.

South Korea's presidential office announced that the National Security Council would hold an emergency session imminently.

Greek Prime Minister To Resign, Announce Snap Elections

In a move that came as a surprise to many, sources have told Reuters that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will announce Thursday that he will 'step down' from his post as soon as this evening and that new elections for control of the government will be held next month. ...

Though a call for snap elections was ultimately expected, many assumed they would not be held until after a confidence vote in Parliament. Tsipras' preemptive resignation was not widely foreseen, though the ruling government is compelled to give over power once the election is officially announced. Media outlets report that Tsipras will address the nation tonight to make his resignation official and make clear his reasons for doing so.

Left Platform (SYRIZA's radicals) are waiting for #Tsipras' announcemenents to announce new party - state TV

— Daphne Papadopoulou (@daphnenews) August 20, 2015

Conflict Mineral Ruling 'Sets Dangerous Precedent' on Corporate Personhood

In a ruling that rests on what one rights group described as "a warped interpretation of the First Amendment," a three-judge panel has said that corporations have a constitutional right to conceal information about whether minerals in their supply chains may have funded conflict.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Tuesday ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cannot force public companies to declare whether their products may contain "conflict minerals" from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) because it violates their right to free speech. Such disclosure rules only apply to advertisements, the three-judge panel ruled, 2-1.

The National Association of Manufacturers and other business groups have worked to overturn the disclosure rule since its inception.

And they are sure to be emboldened by Tuesday's decision, which the pro-democracy group Move to Amend said "sets a dangerous precedent" on corporate personhood.

"Rulings such as this one send the message that so-called corporate 'rights' actually trump 'We the People's' rights," stated Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, national director of Move to Amend. "In this case a corporation is hiding behind the First Amendment to avoid accountability for their actions, and the Court has ruled their right to secrecy is more important than the public's right to know."

This is an excellent article, well worth reading in full. Here's a taste:

Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders & the unacknowledged crimes of American justice

When Hillary Clinton met with the members of Black Lives Matter chapters in Massachusetts last week, they were very interested in hearing her speak about her personal transformation on race. In a later CNN interview, Daunasia Yancey and Julius Jones, BLM leaders who participated in the meeting, indicated that they needed to hear her personal narrative in order to trust her. They began talking to Clinton about what the movement “needs to do to change white hearts,” but she replied, “I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way that systems operate.”

This tension over capturing hearts and minds versus changing the operation of systems — and, in particular, over which must come first — is a long-standing one. In 1963, Martin Luther King argued,

“Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”

Feelings matter for politics. And if “white hearts” don’t change, they are always capable of reconfiguring systems to maintain white hegemony. Moreover, I think when Black millennial voters continue to express their hesitancy about voting, that part of their desire for measures that fully overhaul the current system has to do with a fundamental distrust of white politicians and their white constituents. ...

Hillary Clinton conceded to the Boston BLM leaders that their mistrust and skepticism are “historically fair,” “psychologically fair,” and “economically fair.” She also conceded that for the most part we should not expect “white hearts” to change.

Thus she sounds a King-ian note when calling for legislation, sanctions and systemic changes to do what moral suasion cannot do.

The problem is that nearly 50 years after the death of King, young Black people are not convinced that changing systems and laws without changing social consciousness will fix the problem either.

Donald Trump beware: apprentice Deez Nuts is top-polling independent

It may be Donald Trump who has raised this presidential campaign to new levels of frivolity, but in a poll that is arguably frivolous by nature one “candidate” has managed to go viral – and it turns out he’s a 15-year-old from Iowa. ...

Wednesday was a big day for Deez Nuts. First he won 9% of the vote as an independent in a Public Policy Polling poll of voters in North Carolina – which, on top of recent results of 8% in Minnesota and 7% in Iowa from previous polls, makes him what experts confirmed is the most successful independent candidate for president in two decades.

It was also the day of his high school sophomore orientation. ...

There are 585 registered candidates for president in 2016, including Sydneys Voluptuous Buttocks (independent), President Emperor Caesar (Democrat), Buddy The Cat (Democrat), Crawfish Crawfish (other), Bailey D Dog (independent), Buddy The Elf (write-in) and Lindsey Graham (Republican), none of whom – unlike Deez Nuts – received any support whatsoever in PPP’s North Carolina poll. ...

And while Trump was the headline figure – at 24% in the Republican primary race, double digits clear of his next rival, Ben Carson, at 14% – Nuts’s showing as an independent was the real surprise. Asked the question “If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, and independent Deez Nuts, who would you vote for?” respondents in North Carolina voted Trump 40%, Clinton 38%, and Nuts 9%.

Scientists figured out just how much of California’s drought can be blamed on climate change

Droughts happen. ... This most recent megadrought, historic as it may be in length and severity, is by no means unprecendented; and it is, say the authors of a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, primarily the result of national weather variations. ... But climate change, they found, made it measurably worse.

How much worse? Likely somewhere between 15 and 20 percent, said A. Park Williams, the study’s lead author and a bioclimatologist at Columbia University, in a statement, although it can be blamed for as much as 27 percent of the drought conditions experienced between 2012 and 2014. His team looked at data for precipitation, temperature, humidity, wind and other factors going back to 1901, and found that while rainfall patterns have remained random, temperatures have been steadily increasing with global warming. And that, they say, has been enough to have an impact on drought conditions.

He explained the phenomenon in more detail in an interview with the New York Times:

Since 1895, California has warmed by a little more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit. That increase sounds small, but as an average over an entire state in all seasons, scientists say, it is a large number. The warmer air can hold more water vapor, and the result is that however much rain or snow falls in a given year, the atmosphere will draw it out of the soil more aggressively.

Dr. Williams calculated that the warmer atmosphere over California is able to absorb about 8.5 trillion more gallons of water in a typical year than would have been the case in the cooler atmosphere at the end of the 19^thcentury. The air does not always manage to soak up that much, however, because evaporation slows as the soils dry out.

Also of interest:

Loss of Manufacturing Jobs Isn’t ‘Tectonic’–It’s a Policy Choice

Chitral floods: Why melting glaciers may not be the cause

It hurts to say it, but sometimes Donald Trump speaks the truth

Ukraine crisis: Soldiers accuse commanders of lying as both warring sides make repeated claims of victories and broken ceasefires

In Confronting Hillary, Did Black Lives Matter Miss Opportunity to Make Demands?

"Reconstruction" author Eric Foner talks Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and what's become of the GOP