First it was Wisconsin. Now it’s North Carolina that is redefining the term “battleground state.”  On one side:  a right-wing government enacting laws that are changing the face of the state. On the other:  citizen protesters who are fighting back against what they fear is a radical takeover.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions related to energy increased in 2013 for the first time in three years, possibly the first sign that a trend in declining emissions from energy consumption has ended for now. The U.S. Energy Information Administration released a report on Monday showing that 2013 energy-related CO2 emissions in the U.S. are expected to have increased 2 percent over 2012 emissions once all the data for the year are tallied.

For almost forty years Republicans have pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to convince working-class whites that the poor were their enemies. The big news is it’s starting to backfire.

A corner of the USA forever linked with the name of one of America’s foremost naturalists is changing as the temperature rises. Walden Pond’s familiar vegetation is not what it was in Thoreau’s day.

For years political scientists have wondered why so many working class and poor citizens of so-called “red” states vote against their economic self-interest. The usual explanation is that, for these voters, economic issues are trumped by social and cultural issues like guns, abortion, and race.

Far below the surface, the waters of south-east Asia are heating up. A region of the Pacific is now warming at least 15 times faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years. If this finding – so far limited to the depths where the Pacific and Indian Oceans wash into each other – is true for the blue planet as a whole, then the questions of climate change take on a new urgency.

The world may be warming more than twice as fast as thought because some key data has been overlooked, two scientists argue. But others think seasonal changes in the Pacific have led to an over-estimate of the warming.

An end to greenhouse gas emissions is possible by 2050, a report finds. But a decade before that, other researchers say, the world is set to cross a fateful threshold.

An old friend who has been active in politics for more than thirty years tells me he’s giving up. “I can’t stomach what’s going on in Washington anymore,” he says. “The hell with all of them. I have better things to do with my life.” My friend is falling exactly into the trap that the extreme right wants all of us to fall into

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-CA) found himself on Tuesday being added to the list of things that had been shut down because of Republicans in Congress.

In his complaints against the wing of the Republican Party that engineered the present government shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid derided his opponents as “Tea Party anarchists.” It’s hard to decide who should be more annoyed — the Tea Party or the anarchists.

As a child I was bullied by bigger boys who threatened to beat me up if I didn’t give them what they wanted. But every time I gave in to their demands their subsequent demands grew larger. First they wanted the change in my pocket. Next it was the dessert in my lunchbox. Then my new Davy Crockett cap. Then the softball and bat I got for my birthday.

This week’s government shutdown has consequences for all of us, costing an estimated $300 million each day that the government is closed for business. Many Americans have voiced their frustrations with the fallout from the shutdown on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hash tag #DearCongress.

This week on Moyers & Company in a rare television interview, Bill talks to visionary, author and farmer Wendell Berry to discuss a sensible, but no-compromise plan to save the Earth. Wendell Berry, one of America’s most influential writers who has written more than 40 novels, books of poetry, short stories and essays, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution.

Widening inequality thereby ignites what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American politics.” It animated the Know-Nothing and Anti-Masonic movements before the Civil War, the populist agitators of the Progressive Era and the John Birch Society

Boehner ushers a bill through the House that continues to fund the government after September 30 but doesn’t fund the Affordable Care Act. Anyone with half a brain knows Senate Democrats and the President won’t accept this — which means, if House Republicans stick to their guns, a government shut-down.

Congress will reconvene shortly. That means more battles over taxes and spending, regulations and safety nets, and how to get the economy out of first gear. Which means more gridlock and continual showdowns over budget resolutions and the debt ceiling.

Climatologists are puzzled that greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, while the atmosphere is warming more slowly than they expected. Now two scientists in the US think they know why.  hey say cooling waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean have played a large part in slowing recent warming, a finding which challenges those who argue that the slowdown means climate change is not as serious a problem as most climate scientists are convinced it is.

Rachel Maddow reports on North Carolina's success in improving voter turnout and ease of voting through the 2008 election and the sudden change in direction (and ruling party) when wealthy Republican backer, Art Pope, turned the tide in 2010 allowing a Republican take-over of the state government and a wave of regressive legislation, including voter suppression.

Bill talks with author and New York Times journalist Mark Leibovich about his latest book, This Town, in which he writes that money rules D.C., and status is determined by who you know and what they can do for you. Mark Leibovich covers Washington, D.C., as chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine.

They carried signs that demanded “Voting Rights,” “Jobs for All” and “Decent Housing.” They protested the vigilante killing of an unarmed black teenager in the South and his killer’s acquittal. They denounced racial profiling in the country’s largest city.

For tonight's Conversation with Great Minds - Thom is joined by Jeff Cohen. Jeff is the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College - where he is an associate professor of journalism.The former senior producer for MSNBC's "Donahue" program - he has appeared as a political commentator in national media and helped found both the media watchdog group FAIR -- Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting -- as well as the activism site RootsAction.org. Jeff's most recent book is "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media."

British scientists say estimates of the amount of iron dissolving into seawater around some of the world’s coasts may be drastically wrong. They say there is no standard, one-size-fits-all way to measure how much iron enters the water in different parts of the globe. Instead, they say, the amounts may vary by up to ten thousand times between one area and another, with profound implications for the impact of the iron on the oceanic carbon cycle.