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We pick up today where we left off at the end of yesterday's show, as news broke that a federal court in Texas had -- yet again (for either the 6th or 8th time, nobody can even keep it straight anymore) -- found the state's Photo ID voting restriction to be intentionally discriminatory against racial minorities. We're joined by journalist and author Zachary Roth, formerly of MSNBC, now of TheDailyDemocracy.org, to discuss what he describes as "the Rasputin of voting laws. It just refuses to die." A U.S. District Court Judge has struck down the strict Photo ID law passed by Texas Republicans in 2011 and an amendment to it passed this year (in response to previous rulings finding that the GOP law was written to disproportionately disenfranchise racial minorities).\xa0 The biggest questions now are:\xa0 Will the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative in the land, overturn the lower court? Will the stolen Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court do so? Will SCOTUS finally block all such discriminatory Photo ID laws nationally?\xa0 Perhaps the biggest question: Will Texas finally be bailed back in to the Voting Rights Act's provision requiring federal pre-clearance for all new voting laws in jurisdictions with a long history of racial discrimination? Then: we received a number of responses to our recent discussion with Middle East expert Juan Cole regarding Trump's flip-flop decision to remain in Afghanistan. We share some of those responses, and Cole's responses to them, in turn. Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest 'Green News Report' and a number of new green-related stories: the Interior Department's review of whether or not to shut down a number of national monuments, the Energy Department's review of whether renewable energy threatens the nation's power grid, and Hurricane Harvey, which is now forecast to barrel into the Texas Gulf coast with huge amounts of rainfall...