The old white men’s club writing “health care” legislation in the Senate is up to its gills in campaign contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
These fellows are even more up to their gills than the rest of the GOP conference.
MapLight has the stats.
Trump surpasses the record for swinish self-dealing he set the day before.
Shawn Boburg reports in the Washington Post about how Trump plans to cut housing aid to the poor–and maintain it for himself.
“Gestapo-style” raids on organizations mounting voter registrations drives: this is U.S. democracy, 2017 style.
Greg Pallast at Truthout recounts being roughed up by Handel’s security detail, among many other charming anecdotes that reinforce that today’s GOP knows it cannot win elections honestly anymore–and has no intention of losing.
Ira Chernus at Tom Dispatch reviews the De Young Museum’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love, and revisits what it was all really about:
“Perhaps it’s time to take a retrospective look at that Summer of Love moment, half a century ago, and reacquaint ourselves with the two kinds of radicalism of the time, one promoting a more humane idea of security and the other aimed at building a new kind of life that transcended the question of security altogether. Perhaps between them they might spark some truly new thinking about how to respond to the power and dominance of our national security state and to a way of life that shuts us down, locks us in, ratchets up our terrors, and offers us a vision of more of the same until the end of time.”
Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo:
“The Iron Law of Republican Politics is that the GOP moderates always cave. But the cave is never without a stage managed drama. And that appears to be the part of the story we’re now entering.”
When “moderate” Susan Collins runs for governor, her bullshit moderate act must be dispelled once and for all.
As he contemplates the steaming wreckage of his legacy?
Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea, after all, to propitiate and capitulate over and over again to the evil, seditious anti-democracy scofflaw Mitch McConnell?
His disgusting incitement of violence against Muslims is undoubtedly one cause of the murder of a 17-year-old Muslim girl in Virginia.
And, since Trump doesn’t think he can exploit this hate crime for political advantage,
not a word from the monster in the Oval office.
Abbey Zimet at Common Dreams notes the way that “Violence Occurs in the Silence.”
are all over the Senate “health care” bill.
Price is opposed even to employer-based insurance plans, and they will now be subject to lifetime limits.
Why are we not surprised?
The “health care” bill crafted by McConnell and his cenacle of saboteurs guts Medicaid even more than the House did in its own saturnalia of hate.
And remember, health care is provided by Medicaid to one in five Americans.
But exciting as it may be for the GOP to destroy the lives of millions of Americans, it’s the thrill of giving the wealthy more tax cuts that really floats its boat.
Lecture us about self-reliance, Sen. Sasse.
When I interviewed Mikhail Baryshnikov in 2010, he told me that by the time GW Bush was elected, “New York was not as attractive to me as it was in the ‘70s. It had become very conservative. The young people were pushed out because of economic pressures. They couldn’t just rent a little studio and be in Manhattan. You have to live somewhere in Brooklyn, or in Jersey or Queens, somewhere and travel for an hour sometimes from the suburbs in to wait tables, audition.”
In ’74 [the year he’d defected] what was your impression of New York? I asked.
“It was wonderful.”
“That it was still bohemian?”
“Of course,” he said. “You could go anywhere, you could buy a ticket to the opera. You could afford everything. It was all fun. It was a lot of fun.”
I should say that –that is not to say that he doesn’t continue to find NYC attractive, vide for one thing the Baryshnikov Arts Center.
