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Monthly Archives: July 2017

Jimmy Carter predicts US will eventually have single-payer healthcare system


4 / 15

The Hill
Robin Eberhardt
4 hrs ago

© Provided by The Hill
Jimmy Carter predicts US will eventually have single-payer healthcare system
Former President Jimmy Carter (D) predicted that the U.S. will eventually switch over to a universal single-payer healthcare system, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Carter, 92, made the remarks ahead of teaching his Sunday school class in Plains, Ga.
“When I was in the White House, I tried to get Medicare to cover everyone,” he said.
Carter’s speech comes as Republicans are struggling in their attempt to repeal and replace ObamaCare in the Senate. A procedural vote on their bill is expected on Tuesday.
Single-payer healthcare programs have been gaining traction among members of the Democratic party, with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), two potential 2020 presidential candidates, both backing the Medicare-for-all program.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also centered his 2016 presidential bid around universal healthcare, calling for a system that “makes healthcare a right, not a privilege.”
Carter was recently treated for dehydration after he was sent to the hospital while building houses for Habitat For Humanity. He was released the next day and continued his construction work that morning.

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‘Hang in There.’ Muslim Senate Candidate Gets Support From Republican Incumbent


Alana Abramson,
Time 12 hours ago

Like many political figures, Deedra Abboud is no stranger to online abuse. But because Abboud, a 45-year-old Arizona attorney, is Muslim, the digital vitriol she faces is especially nasty. “Towel headed piece of sh*t,” reads one recent comment. “Your first love is Satan (AKA Allah),” reads another. “No room for Muslims in our government,” says a third.
“It’s unfortunate that this is the type of discourse that has become acceptable in America,” says Abboud, who’s running to challenge Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. “We as a society have never stood up and said, ‘No, this doesn’t reflect us.’”
Abboud, who wears a hijab, converted to Islam in 1998 (she was previously a Southern Baptist.) Abboud started and served as president of the Arizona chapter of the Council of American Islamic Relations, and was the director of the Muslim American Society’s Freedom Foundation. Abboud graduated from Arizona Summit Law School in 2012, practicing immigration and estate law before shifting into politics.
To be sure, Abboud’s campaign is a long shot. Before facing Sen. Flake, she must defeat Army veteran Chris Russell in the Democratic primary next summer. Additionally, neither of Arizona’s Senate seats has been held by a Democrat in over 20 years. “Ultimately, the numbers in Arizona still work to the Republicans’ advantage,” says Samara Klar, assistant professor of political science at the University of Arizona. “We have more Republican [voters] than we do Democrats, so the simple numbers are going to make it more difficult for the Democrats.”
But on Tuesday, Abboud got support from a potentially surprising source: Sen. Flake, Abboud’s would-be general election opponent if both politicians win their respective primaries. “Hang in there,” Flake told Abboud via Twitter. “Sorry you have to put up with this. Lots of wonderful people across AZ. You’ll find them

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The Madness of Congress via Donald Trump


The past 7 years the neer do well Congress has essentially subverted the Government by blocking almost everything President Obama wanted to do and attempted to do. The first issue was rephrasing his healthcare bill as Obamacare rather than  Affordable Care Act. They insisted that there would be death camps, huge costs and with that logic (lies) many Americans did not enroll. In the background of all of this was the Alt Right led by Steve Bannon, Bill O’Reilly et al. It is unfortunate that the under informed chose to believe the lies due to Racism and cause the election of Donald Trump. The election of DJT has given us popinjay whose main objective is to roll back any thing President Obama has done no matter who is hurt in the process. The under informed have decided that Obama is responsible for the Racial divide, the inaction of Congress and job loss. Currently TOTUS is pushing for the repeal of Obamacare aka Affordable Health Care no matter what the cost to Americans health. Now the big push is on to influence the Presidents’ approval ratings by repealing Health care with nothing to put in it’s place, effectively placing the  health of many Americans in jeopardy. America under this Congress and TOTUS has regressed to pre civil war status where anything can be said or done with no fear of reprisal especially against people of color and  ethnic or religious sects. 2018 could be the year to make significant changes in Government but only if we become informed and vote. Get woke and vote!

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Trump’s Always Been a Con Artist. But Now He’s the Sucker.


PAUL WALDMAN
JULY 16, 2017
Foreign leader’s hostile and friendly look at the Trumps and see easy marks.

Some of us spent a good part of 2016 arguing that Donald Trump was a con man. He had spent much of his career pulling grifts on unsuspecting victims, whether it was the enrollees at Trump University, customers of the multivitamin pyramid scheme called the “Trump Network” (bet you forgot about that one), or small businesspeople from whom he bought goods and services and then stiffed on the bill. Now he was pulling his biggest con of all on the voters, and too many of them were getting fooled.
But guess what: Now Donald Trump is the mark. He’s the one being manipulated. He turns out to be the biggest sucker in town.
The thing about a con man is that in order to be successful, he has to have some understanding of human nature—what motivates people, where their vulnerabilities are, and how they can be manipulated. Which is what makes Trump’s success as a grifter somewhat unusual—he possesses little apparent human empathy, yet he made huge amounts of money taking advantage of people’s confidence in him and his alleged ability to make them rich. All it took was an understanding of that most base of motivations: greed, which he himself possessed in limitless quantity.
That may help account for Trump’s difficulty in translating his skills as a businessman (such as they were) to the task of governing. In business, everyone was motivated only by the pursuit of profit, something Trump understood well. But now he’s dealing with people who have a whole range of motivations, some of which are quite alien to him.
Without that ability to understand those he’s dealing with, it turns out that Trump is remarkably easy to manipulate. We’ve seen it again and again with foreign leaders. He talks about how tough he’s going to be with them over one issue or another, but when he actually meets them, he turns to putty in their hands, emerging to say what great folks they are and what a positive relationship he now has with them. Xi Jinping gives him an education about North Korea, Emmanuel Macron takes him to a military parade, the Saudis give him a gold medal, and he walks away beaming, all thought of extracting concessions forgotten.
How do they manage it? It doesn’t seem too hard, because they’re smart politicians who took Trump’s measure and realized he’s an easy mark. All you need to do is pay him a compliment or two (“Oh yes, Mr. Trump, your Electoral College victory certainly was impressive”), and he’ll do almost anything you want. Because he knows nothing about issues, you can shape his views to align with yours; he’s notoriously influenced by the last person he spoke to about anything. He seems terribly impressed by accomplished people, and desperate for validation and compliments.
And no one has played Trump quite like Vladimir Putin.
And no one has played Trump quite like Vladimir Putin. There are a dozen reasons why Trump has for so long had such a fanboy crush on Putin, but think how much pleasure it must give Putin that Trump won’t even accept the consensus of his own intelligence agencies that Putin’s government tried to help him win the White House. He has never said a critical word about Putin or his assault on American democracy, instead offering excuse after excuse about why it might actually have been some other country, or maybe Putin was really rooting for Hillary Clinton.
When the 2016 campaign was going on, the Russians seem to have looked at the overconfident, inexperienced ignoramuses who made up the Trump family and seen easy marks. As former intelligence official Rolf Mowatt-Larssen wrote in The Washington Post over the weekend, the meeting arranged by Donald Trump Jr. for himself, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort with a group of Russians peddling damaging information on Clinton had all the signs of a Russian intelligence operation meant to feel out a potential asset:
But everything we know about the meeting—from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded—is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting—and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities—may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election.
The changing stories from the Trump camp about who was there and what they discussed, and the excuse that this was all just standard operating procedure (“I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting,” the president said), show that they were too inexperienced to know how opposition research works and too dumb to know that the Russians were playing them. One can’t help but think that the Russian government looks at someone like Jared and says, “This guy could be a fantastic tool for us, if he doesn’t screw it up with his own stupidity.” Not only did Kushner omit that meeting (and others) from the form he filled out to get his security clearance—an omission that could constitute a felony—even the Russians were gobsmacked when he suggested that they set up a secret communication channel inside the Russian embassy so Trump’s inner circle could talk to the Kremlin without American intelligence agencies knowing about it.
It’s hard not to believe that as extraordinary as it is, Donny Jr. and Jared’s meeting with those Russians will be just one piece of a many-tentacled scandal. As the truth comes out, a particular picture of Donald

Trump and those closest to him is likely to come into focus. It’s one in which they’re not the master strategists or clever conspirators they fancied themselves to be, but bumblers and fools who were easy to take advantage of. In the end, the result will be both horrible—for American democracy—and in many ways comical.
And it shows yet again that while Donald Trump and his family are obsessed with “winning,” this president is turning out to be the one thing he never wanted to be: a sucker.

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What Exactly Is Single-Payer Health Care? Here’s a Simple Explanation


Excellent explanation of Sanders proposed health care.MA

POPSUGAR News Politics
July 23, 2017 by Eleanor Sheehan

After the GOP’s first Affordable Care Act replacement fail on March 24, Bernie Sanders said he would introduce a bill that proposes a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, a position he also maintained throughout his 2016 presidential campaign.
But what exactly does a single-payer healthcare program entail? Sanders’s definition aligns with how European countries have instituted public health care, though there are variations. “Bernie’s plan would create a federally administered single-payer health care program. Universal single-payer health care means comprehensive coverage for all Americans,” his campaign site still reads.
On a most basic level, single-payer means a healthcare system that is entirely financed by one party (the government), but care remains in the hands of private hospitals and doctors. Insurance would be a guarantee and a public right as opposed to being based on employment; unlike some insurance obtained by Obamacare, there would be no premiums or copays.
“Bernie’s plan will cover the entire continuum of health care, from inpatient to outpatient care; preventive to emergency care; primary care to specialty care, including long-term and palliative care; vision, hearing and oral health care; mental health and substance abuse services; as well as prescription medications, medical equipment, supplies, diagnostics and treatments,” Sanders’s plan details what does a single-payer healthcare system look like? The United Kingdom has a nationalized health service that provides free care to all of its citizens. Privatized health care still exists, but at a cost — if a citizen wants to pay for treatment from a doctor outside the public health system, they can; however, it is expensive. Allowing private medical practices to exist means that the healthcare provider receives payment directly rather than going through insurance.

Another stipulation, and perhaps a perceived pitfall, of a single-payer healthcare system is higher taxes. Sanders concedes that taxes would likely rise for a few brackets, but the middle class and businesses would ultimately benefit because they would not pay premiums or have to provide packages for employees.

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MYTHBUSTER


The real truth(s) about the burning of Rome and other stuff we have been lead to believe.MA

Candida Moss

The Daily Beast 6 hours ago
07.23.17 12:00 AM ET

Nero, the Execution of Peter and Paul, and the Biggest Fake News in Early Christian History
Christian tradition maintains that after Rome nearly burned to the ground, Nero engaged in a brutal crackdown on Christians which led to the executions of Peter and Paul.
On the evening of July 18, in the scorching summer of 64 CE, a fire started in a shop under the Circus Maximus in Rome. The fire quickly spread to nearby homes and businesses and the Circus itself. The fire burned for six days, ravaging the city. It left only four of Rome’s fourteen quarters untouched.
The reigning emperor, Nero, a man known for his cruelty and love of theater, scapegoated the Christians for the disaster. According to tradition and later historians, as a punishment, Nero devised grotesque executions for the Christians: he covered them in animal skins and had them torn apart by dogs, and he doused them in tar and used them as human torches to light the night sky for his dinner parties. It was in the wake of the fire, Christian tradition maintains, that the most important Apostles–St Peter and St Paul–were arrested and executed. But while the fire of Rome was a devastating historical reality, did Nero actually target Christians as a result?
Most of the historical evidence for Nero persecuting Christians comes to us from the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote between 115-120 CE, at least fifty years after the events he was describing. According to Tacitus, the people of Rome blamed Nero for the fire and Nero responded by deflecting blame onto the Christians. He writes, “Nero fastened guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on [the Christians who] were hated for their abominations.” Christians were rounded up, arrested, and interrogated for information about others in the city and, in the end, “an immense multitude” was convicted and executed.
In Roman biographies, Nero is known for murdering his own mother; he is certainly capable of this kind of cruelty, but this does not mean that Tacitus’s story is correct. In his recent Journal of Roman Studies article “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” distinguished Princeton classicist Brent Shaw has argued that Tacitus’s story is a later fabrication (full disclosure: I’m inclined to agree with Shaw because I argued something similar in my book Myth of Persecution).
Shaw points out that there are no references to Christians in the writings of any Roman historians prior to Tacitus. Cassius Dio, another Roman historian who discusses the Great Fire, never mentions the Christians at all, and other later Roman sources that do mention the fire are entirely dependent on Tacitus. Suetonius, the only other second-century Roman writer to mention the mistreatment of Christians by Nero, does not connect these punishments with the Great Fire. He says that they were punished for being a “new and evil superstition.”
Perhaps the most devastating piece of evidence is the use of the term “Christian.” The first followers of Jesus were Jews. By the time Tacitus was writing in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the second century they had adopted the name Christian and caught the attention of Roman authorities, but it’s not at all clear that Christians thought of themselves or were known as Christians in the 60s. Paul, for example, never uses the word.
As University of Exeter professor David Horrell has shown, the earliest use of the name “Christian” in writing seems to be the biblical book 1 Peter, which was written at the very end of the first century. Some have argued against Shaw that the Acts of the Apostles (the book of the Bible that tells the story of the actions of the apostles after the death of Jesus) states that Christians were first called Christians in Antioch in the 50s. But how accurate is Acts? Clare K. Rothschild, a professor in the Department of Theology at Lewis University, told  The Daily Beast that while “scholars typically date Acts anywhere from 56 to 140 CE… a comprehensive study by the late Richard I. Pervo … has persuaded many that Acts was composed closer to the year 115.” What all of this means, then, is that Christians weren’t Christians in 64 CE. They were Jews. Nero could not possibly have targeted a group that didn’t yet exist.

So what actually happened? Shaw argues that after the fire there were rumors of Nero’s involvement. Nero responded by punishing some arsonists, but these people were not actually Christians, even if they were likely innocent of the charges. In the fifty years that elapsed between the events of 64 CE and the time of Tacitus, those individuals punished by Nero came to be associated with the Christians, because, by the time of Tacitus and Suetonius, Christians were known as trouble makers.
What does this mean, then, for the deaths of Peter and Paul? Well, as I pointed out in Myth of Persecution, the earliest versions of the deaths of Peter and Paul don’t mention the Great Fire at all. In fact it takes centuries to connect the two Apostles to those events. The earliest reference to their deaths (a Christian document called 1 Clement) says that they were executed because of “jealousy.” Several scholars have argued that the word “jealousy” here refers to intra-Christian disputes, meaning that it was because of other church members that Peter and Paul ended up being arrested and killed. Shaw concludes his article by saying that neither the death of Peter nor that of Paul have anything to do with the Great Fire, adding that in both cases their executions had nothing to do with being Christian. He hypothesizes that they were in fact charged with disturbing the peace.
This doesn’t mean of course, that the Great Fire of Rome wasn’t historically significant even beyond the devastating effects of the fire. This is, as Sarah Bond of the University of Iowa has written, an important moment in the history of fire fighting. But much of what we think we know about the fire is the product of legends associated with a tyrannical emperor. To this day people use the expression “fiddled while Rome burned” to refer to Nero’s conduct – but violins wouldn’t be invented until the 11th century, and when the fire broke out he was 35 miles away at his villa. It’s a great turn of phrase, but it’s pretty shoddy history.

BREAKING NEWS: COLORADO SPRINGS HAS GONE TO THE DOGS


“Colorado Springs is so right-wing, its nickname in Colorado is “Hate City,” so this is REALLY amazing. “this comment from a resident of Colorado.

 

Article from Jim Hightower: https://hightowerlowdown.org/article/colorado-springs/

You’ll be gobsmacked by the populist victories won in this conservative Colorado town
July 19, 2017

BREAKING NEWS: COLORADO SPRINGS HAS GONE TO THE DOGS!

Believe it or not, that’s a good thing. More about those dogs later, but what has been happening politically and culturally this year in Colorado’s second largest city is astonishing, encouraging … even inspiring. Progressive/populist activists who’re organizing all across America to build grassroots movements strong enough to counter plutocratic rule and govern in the people’s interest now have a radiant model of success in one of the least likely places.

Since the 1990s, Colorado Springs has been shaped by an inordinate number of hard, hard, HARD right-wing institutions and forces, including:
•The national and international headquarters of more than 70 evangelical Christian outfits, many preaching fire-and-brimstone intolerance
•A swarm of rabid anti-tax, anti-union, anti-gay, anti-Obama Republican front groups funded by corporate extremists
•The US Air Force Academy and four other military installations employing 65,000 soldiers and civilians
•The Gazette, the city’s one daily newspaper, owned by Philip Anschutz, a multibillionaire buddy of the Koch brothers. The Gazette‘s Fox News-style editorial pages relentlessly push “alternative facts” and reactionary policies
•A paternalistic downtown establishment of politically connected developers who, incredibly, tout themselves as the “moderates”

Yet, like nearly all such neon-red spots splattered throughout our land, the Springs also is home to a hardy band of progressives, including environmentalists, unionists, women’s champions, scrappy entrepreneurs, LGBTQ activists, students and teachers, a sizeable immigrant population, social justice church groups, some sensible libertarians–and, importantly, a vibrant alternative newsweekly. The Colorado Springs Independent regularly links all the above and lives up to its name with a steady output of investigative journalism.

In 1993, after city leaders and The Gazette led a statewide campaign to legalize open discrimination against gays and lesbians, the Independent was launched as a unifying political vessel for diverse locals trying to advance progressive principles. In this turbulent sea of arch-conservatism, they had to be satisfied with only very occasional victories.

A little over year ago, however, John Weiss, founder and recently retired publisher of the Independent, began to think that more could be done. Through a listening tour with engaged locals, he found that on numerous economic and environmental issues—from willingness to spend more tax money on municipal services to outrage over big money’s perversion of local democracy—many townspeople were downright progressive-minded. (Full disclosure: Weiss is a good friend and also serves on the Lowdown’s board of directors.)

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders was bringing new, highly energized voters into play–he handily won the county’s 2016 Democratic caucus. Young people who had previously evinced zero interest in the old Democratic-Republican duopoly were rallying behind Bernie’s grassroots populism. And his revolutionary call to rein in America’s corporate oligarchs also sparked a fire in older, working-class people, including Repubs and none-of-the-above folks who’d given up on the idea that either party gave a damn about people like them. Weiss sensed a shift in Colorado Springs’ political zeitgeist– one that might open a path for new alignments and a progressive-populist movement.

But movements don’t just happen–until someone literally makes a move, inspiring others to join in, take action … and get moving. That’s what is happening in Colorado Springs.

In the midst of 2016’s national Trumpian tumult, Weiss and a core group of community allies started exploring strategies for a fresh political organizing effort in Colorado Springs. They pinpointed two decisive shortcomings in past efforts: One, progressive campaigns tended to be defensive, reacting to the extreme right’s framing of issues and then spending much of their time and money countering disinformation and dirty tricks. Two, while developers and the hard right maintained permanent staff and campaigns, progressives started every battle from scratch, scrambling to create new organizations, which were handicapped by lack of institutional memory.

MAKING THEIR MOVE
So this audacious band of populist allies decided to make a big move. They called on progressive forces throughout the Pikes Peak region–including Democrats, Berniecrats, Greens, and non-partisan issue advocates–to come together and build a permanent social change organization. Moreover, they reached out to fair-minded, commonsense moderates and sensible libertarians who were embarrassed both by religious crazies (whose intolerance sparked the town’s moniker: “Hate City”) and by the political toadies of the area’s corporate kingdom. These business-friendly cronies used city government to further enrich the elites while ignoring pressing needs for funding parks, mass transit, street lights, public bathrooms, and for saving drought-stricken trees.

Through the spring and summer of 2016, the allies met with more than 100 local organizations and activists and formulated a straightforward goal: to mobilize a broad coalition around progressive values and common-interest proposals and then to assemble the full-time staff, tools, and resources needed to initiate and win candidate and issue campaigns.

Last October, seven local activists–including local entrepreneurs and digital gurus as well as long-time civil rights and environmental organizers–formed Together for Colorado Springs (T4CS) with a can-do slogan: “Together We Can Move Mountains.” Working committees were formed to handle the nitty-gritty chores of turning the ideas into effective action.

After Trump’s surprise victory last November, Colorado Springs moderates and progressives–like folks across the nation–were eager to mobilize in response. These newly activated citizens were able to plug into T4CS, which announced itself in exactly the right fashion: by throwing a wang-dang-doodle of a party. After all, sustaining a grassroots, democracy-building movement requires more than non-stop political action. It also needs social and cultural events to round out its appeal, unite its members, and express its democratic spirit. So T4CS’s public launch last February put the party back in politics, with a joyous crowd of more than 600 coalition supporters jammed into Stargazers Theater for a night of funky music, tub-thumping speeches, and a renewal of hope–plus, of course, plentiful libations to lubricate the new movement.

STRAWBERRY FIELDS
The very next day, though, it was down to business, for city council elections were coming up in April, less than two months away. The council had long been a rubber stamp for development interests, and its constant subservience to both moneyed and religious royals had irked regular folks of all political stripes. As the elections approached, this cronyism became a defining populist issue as T4CS hammered on one especially galling example of rank favoritism: The Strawberry Fields caper.

If a homeless person had been caught stealing strawberries in Colorado Springs, at least one of the council members would have bellowed, “Thou shalt not steal,” and demanded jail time for the wretched miscreant. But when Lord Philip Anschutz–the second richest man in Colorado (and the 35th richest person in America)–wanted to get his hands on a 180-plus-acre public park known as Strawberry Fields, he didn’t need to steal anything. The city council stole it for him.

Even though this unique, natural space has been owned by the citizens of the Springs since 1885 and serves as a very popular recreation and nature area, the mayor and council seemed to expect praise when they announced in January 2016 that they’d cut a deal to let the billionaire take title to the people’s property. The clueless politicos gushed that Anschutz was willing to develop the “useless” land for the betterment of the city.

But Anschutz is no altruist. He is an imperialist who inherited an oil fortune and used it and his political connections to expand his holdings into railroads, media, pro sports teams, music events, telecommunications, movie theaters, and more. Along the way, he amassed a $12-billion fortune for himself. Far from wanting to help the local citizenry, Anschutz wanted Strawberry Fields so he could bulldoze nature and build an exclusive horse stable and event center on it to serve the wealthy swells (including Charles and David Koch) who pay top dollar for getaways at the nearby Broadmoor hotel and resort. That swank, sprawling 5-star facility happens to be owned by –who else?–Anschutz.

Piling outrage atop outrage, the “deal” that city officials approved required no money from the billionaire! Instead, he was allowed to trade some 370 acres of relatively worthless land that The Broadmoor owned elsewhere for the prime space owned by the people. For months after the deal was announced, the Springs boiled in fury. Thousands of locals signed petitions against it, and a subsequent poll commissioned by the Independent found that two thirds of the populace was opposed to the deal. But Anschutz used his financial clout and the PR power of his Gazette newspaper to pull the business establishment behind his proposed theft. So, in May 2016, despite huge public opposition, the city council sold out the people by a 6-3 vote.

THE CAMPAIGN
Unfazed by public opinion, Anschutz, The Gazette, the Springs’ corporate political network, and their hard-right Christian allies headed into this spring’s council elections with a business dream team and mountains of money, fully expecting to increase their control by winning all six of the seats up for a vote. Sure, the T4CS group had popped into view, but it was seen as just another collection of liberal losers. Here’s how the city’s district races matched up:

DISTRICT 1 Incumbent libertarian Don Knight, a retired Air Force officer and conservative Christian, had stepped on corporate toes by asking too many pesky questions, so Anschutz and local power brokers recruited the CEO of Champion Windows to try to knock him off. T4CS recommended Knight as the better of the candidates.

DISTRICT 2 An open seat in this district that went heavily for Trump pitted a right-winger against Dave Geislinger, a lawyer turned Catholic chaplain. Geislinger is himself conservative on many issues, but he idealizes Pope Francis and ran to help ensure that the city’s poor get a fair shake. At the last minute, Dave’s opponent dropped out, leaving the field open to add this relatively progressive Christian voice to the council. T4CS did not endorse Geislinger outright, but recommended him as well.

DISTRICT 3 This district includes The Broadmoor itself, and the establishment put up a developer who looked to be a shoo-in. Just before the filing deadline, however, Richard Skorman, a popular small business owner who lives near Strawberry Fields, entered the race with T4CS’s full-throated endorsement. Critically important: When Skorman filed, three other progressively inclined candidates voluntarily dropped out so that the progressive vote would not be split.

DISTRICT 4 Either the incumbent (a fervid Trump supporter) or the corporate candidate (a public schools privatizer) was expected to win. T4CS endorsed a long shot–transit activist Yolanda Avila, a Bernie backer who had grown up in this district’s low-income community. Another activist, a bronze star veteran, voluntarily stepped aside to consolidate the progressive vote.

DISTRICT 5 Here T4CS endorsed moderate Republican incumbent Jill Gaebler, an independent-minded, retired military officer who has championed pragmatic solutions and neighborhood issues–including opposing The Broadmoor’s Strawberry Fields scam. The right-wing establishment viciously opposed her re-election and bankrolled her opponent, a corporate executive.

DISTRICT 6 This district, dominated by tea party disciples and people even farther out on the fringe, was not contested by T4CS.

THE UPSHOT
On April 4, with T4CS, the energy of volunteers mobilized by Unite Colorado Springs, strategic use of polling and social media, and a little luck, the upstarts pulled off a stunning upset. Even though T4CS was outspent by at least 10-to-1 (their opponents’ war chest included some $385,000 in secretive “dark money” that many suspect came largely from Anschutz and/or the Koch Brothers), the people’s efforts prevailed. All three T4CS endorsees were elected by substantial margins, as were the two candidates it recommended. These five joined Bill Murray, a progressive holdover whose at-large seat was not up this year and, thus, a pragmatic-progressive coalition now holds a solid majority at City Hall. In its first move, the new council, over the objections of the pro-development establishment, selected Skorman as council president and Gaebler the mayor pro tem. By working together, the citizen uprising in the Springs has, indeed, moved mountains, shifting power from The
Broadmoor’s backrooms out to the grassroots.

GONE TO THE DOGS
Big political change is sometimes symbolized by small alterations in routine. When Yolanda Avila became not only the first Latina on the council, but also its first legally blind member, lobbyists backed off on trying to dazzle members with slick power-point visuals. In addition, when Councilwoman Avila took her place on the dais, she was accompanied by her guide dog, Puma, the council’s first canine. Well, thought a few members, why not bring my fido? Thus, Colorado Springs’s council meetings are now graced by the presence of up to four dogs, reducing the pomposity of the proceedings and giving them a bit more common-people’s feel.

Symbolism aside, change is as changees do, and this council is not hesitating to put its new clout to work for such needed policy changes as:

• No more giveaways of the people’s resources to corporate interests. (A lawsuit challenging the city council’s vote to swap away Strawberry Fields to The Broadmoor is wending its way through the courts, with a decision expected in 2018.)
• Welcoming the LGBTQ community into city government
• Working to close the city’s antiquated coal-burning power plant and transitioning to renewable energy sources
• Public funding of the arts
• Better disclosure of campaign donations
• Promoting in-fill and restraining gluttonous sprawl
• Investing in more open space for all residents to use
• Expanding people’s access to high-speed internet service

GET MOVING!
Resisting Donald Trump’s freak show in Washington is essential, but no more so than building democratic politics where we live. If the everyday people of Colorado Springs–a supposedly rock-solid bastion of plutocracy and theocracy–can come together and take charge, so can the rest of us. As Skorman, the Springs’ new council president put it: People “are frustrated with national politics, but they can get involved locally. …[They] aren’t going to let these local elections slide like they have in the past.”

Local offices have formidable power, and winning them creates real opportunities to make bold progressive advances. The Together group threw another party in May–this one to celebrate their remarkable April victories. But while everyone felt great about the election, the real joy at the event was knowing that they are on the brink of making significant positive differences in their city. As T4CS co-chair Dawn Haliburton-Rudy put it to the crowd: “Now our real work begins.”

John McCain Cancer Is ‘Godly Justice’ for Challenging Trump, Alt-Right Claims


Apparently there is no honor among the “alt-Right” especially if a member of  their ruling party is a person of integrity and not a blind follower. No matter that Mr. McCain is a loyal party member for all of the right reasons, his loss will harm us all as we have too few “statesmen” left in the Congress. MA

Alexander Nazaryan

Newsweek 15 hours ago

Most Americans met Wednesday night’s news that Arizona Senator John McCain was facing a dire diagnosis of brain cancer with shows of respect for the elder statesman and former prisoner of war. But to some on the extreme right, the longtime Republican is a traitor worthy of scorn, presumably because of his willingness to work with Democrats, as well as his criticism of President Donald Trump.
The attack on McCain–a war hero who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison—is faintly reminiscent of the early days of Trump’s presidential campaign. During a family values summit in Iowa in the summer of 2015, just a month after he’d announced his seemingly quixotic bid for the White House, Trump lashed out at McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
At the time, Trump was angry because McCain had complained that Trump “fired up the crazies” during an anti-immigration rally in Phoenix.
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Trump has in no way endorsed or encouraged the alt-right’s attacks on McCain, which have thus far been limited to the fringes of digital discourse. Trump sent a statement of support for McCain on Wednesday. “Senator John McCain has always been a fighter. Melania and I send our thoughts and prayers to Senator McCain, Cindy, and their entire family. Get well soon,” that statement said.
The attacks came regardless.
“The last president for McCain will be Trump. There’s some godly justice right there,” wrote one user on the “Politically Incorrect” message board of social media network 4chan, a hothouse of right-wing memes.
“I’m pretty sure that God is punishing him,” wrote another 4chan user. “God made it pretty clear that he supports New Right now.”
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“John McCain = a war mongering, never Trumper whom I dislike,” wrote a user on Gab, another social media network popular with the alt-right.
The attacks, for the most part, focused on McCain’s willingness to work with Democrats during his three decades in the Senate. Those attacks, some of which are too tasteless to mention here, speak to the utter debasement of civic discourse, particularly on the internet.

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Inside The ‘Shakespearean Irony’ Of Trump And Bannon’s Relationship


The article below is a snapshot of the book that tells how Trump got to the White House.  This was aired on NPR.The real power behind Trump who is as I suspected an unwilling President. MA

July 18, 20172:27 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air

Terry Gross

Devil’s Bargain
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
In August 2016, three months before the presidential election, Republican nominee Donald Trump was behind in the polls. Instead of staying on message, the candidate was engaged in a politically damaging fight with the parents of an Army captain killed in Iraq.
On Aug. 17, in an effort to change course, the Trump team appointed Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News, to lead the campaign. Journalist Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek says the switch would prove to be a turning point.
“[Trump] was headed toward a pretty serious loss, and Bannon brought his wealth of anti-Clinton knowledge into the campaign and managed to keep Trump focused on a target,” Green says.
Green argues that Bannon’s experiences with Breitbart gave him a framework for mobilizing disaffected young white male voters who were attracted to Trump. Without such guidance, Green says, “I don’t think that Donald Trump would have been elected president.”
Despite Bannon’s success in the campaign, Green says that the adviser’s nationalist vision remains largely unfulfilled. “The kind of tragic, Shakespearean irony of the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon relationship is that Bannon finally did find the vessel for his ideas who could get elected president … [but who] now doesn’t have the focus, the wherewithal, the self-control to even do the basic things that a president needs to do.”
Green’s new book, Devil’s Bargain, profiles Bannon and explains his role in Trump’s election.
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Interview Highlights
On Bannon’s role in the Trump administration now
Life in Trump’s inner circle is a constant roller coaster; you’re either going up or you’re going down. Earlier, Bannon fell out of favor when Trump decided that he was getting too much attention, and Jared Kushner kind of rose in his place, but now with the Russia scandal that’s embroiled so many members of the Trump family and inner circle, Bannon, almost by default, is kind of back in good standing. And, in fact, Trump sent him back from Saudi Arabia on the foreign trip that he took in May to go and set up the outside legal organization that was meant to hive off the Russia scandal and try to keep Trump himself as separated from that as possible.
On whether Bannon has any connections to Russia
Not that I know of. Bannon, in a sense, was lucky, in that he came into the campaign very late. He came in mid-August of 2016, which was after a lot of the Russia meetings, including the June 9[, 2016,] Russia meeting with [Donald Trump Jr.] that’s been so much in the news lately. So I don’t think that Bannon is involved in anything that I’ve heard of, although the one lesson we’ve learned with Trump in his campaign is that you can really never rule anything out, no matter how far-fetched.
Life in Trump’s inner circle is a constant roller coaster; you’re either going up or you’re going down.
Joshua Green
On how Bannon’s experience with angry video gamers later influenced his strategy as the head of Breitbart News
After Goldman Sachs, [Bannon] wound up as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong that didn’t actually produce video games, but what it did was to try and formalize a process called “gold farming.” And what that is, is literally they would hire people to play video games and win gold and prizes in the game that they would then turn around and sell to people in the real world so that they could be more powerful and more successful in these massive, multiplayer, online games like World of Warcraft.
This was a serious business, it had backing from Goldman Sachs, and right out of the gate, it made a lot of money. But what happened next was interesting. The players in the actual games, who tended to be young males, bridled at the idea that people were essentially cheating, that they were buying these weapons and things to get ahead in the game, and the players themselves tended to congregate on these message boards that were devoted to [massive multiplayer games], and they organized themselves and they basically went after the video game companies and said, “You need to stop this. You need to push out these gold farmers.”
And they had enough power that they basically ruined Bannon’s business. But the lesson he took away from that was that these rootless white males who spend all their time online actually had what he told me was “monster power” to go out and [effect] change, and that they operated at a kind of sub-rosa level that most people didn’t see. So when he moved over to Breitbart News a couple years later, one of his goals he told me was trying to track these people and radicalize them in a political sense, which is basically what wound up happening.
On Bannon joining forces with anti-Clinton operatives Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie in the Trump campaign
What was so interesting to me about the fact that Bannon and this group wound up in charge of Trump’s campaign come mid-August was that they had really spent the previous 20-25 years as professional anti-Clinton operatives, which, believe it or not, is a distinct professional category within Republican politics. There’s no real analog on the left — you can’t make a living anymore as an anti-Obama operative or an anti-George W. Bush operative, but there’s always an appetite among conservative donors, among conservative activists for anti-Clinton stuff, so you literally had people who had spent 20-25 years thinking and plotting about how to stop Hillary Clinton suddenly in charge of a half-a-billion-dollar presidential campaign led by a candidate who is more than willing to carry out those attacks.

Politics
All That White House Drama Might Be Sexy, But It’s Beside The Point
On the degree to which Trump subscribes to Bannon’s belief system
I think that Trump is driven mainly by opportunism, by a desire to pursue whatever is going to get Donald Trump positive coverage on cable news now. During the campaign when Bannon’s nationalism seemed to work for him that’s what he would espouse, but when that stopped working for him in February after he became president, he was happy to bring in people who nationalists abhor, people like Gary Cohn from Goldman Sachs. He was willing to listen to Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka, who are the furthest you can get from nationalists. So I don’t know that Trump really has any policy beliefs at all.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Dana Farrington adapted it for the Web.

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s

The Irony


The neer do wells have decided to repeal the ACA (Obamacare) since their replacement did not happen. The past 7 to 8 years afforded more than enough time to tweak the ACA but in their own incredibly stupid fashion the Dupublican Congress has used race baiting and fear to turn people against the closest we have come to universal heath care. The people who are covered under the ACA are happy and have voiced their opinion to their representatives and everywhere else they could. The worst part of this whole deal is that  many do not realize the ACA and Obamacare are the same, this lack of knowledge is steeped in the massive advertising against it by the most prominent members of the GOP. Now the GOP has been unable to replace and now want to repeal it to the detriment of millions. With this information why would the voters listen to anything the GOP or any other politician has to say about what they are doing for us? We have “leaders” in politics who have one (1) goal and that is to take care of themselves and what ever legacy they perceive as more important than doing the job they were elected to do. As an aside the Congress and staff would have been exempted from the proposed (and failed)  “new” health care bill. I would like to see more of us reading and viewing the real truth about our Congress and  vote for people who really want to serve. Party loyalty is a liability not an asset, vote for the truth , not a sound bite.

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