Check out our slate of Daily Kos-endorsed candidates

I won't kid you, I detested Ronald Reagan. The smarmy aww-shucks act set my teeth on edge. The twisting of old Winthrop sermons into explosions of jingoistic please-get-these-poor-people-out-of-my-shiny-city nationalism made me despair for my country. There was the constant blowing of the racism dog whistle, the stream of weapons flowing to wherever death squads were squadding, the mythology that lauded hard work while denigrating workers. The $#!@*ing way he said "well" as a space filler and wandered into nonsense while reporters were lauding him as "the great communicator."

While the moderators were chuckling over "there you go again," I was shaking my 19" B&W set in rage. I did not like the man.

Still, I understand why conservatives love him. I understand why, given the chance, we’d be flying into Reagan National Airport in Reagan, D.C., capital of these here Ronnie States of Reagan.

It's not because Reagan was the purest conservative ever to conflate Ayn Rand and Jesus. It’s because he carried them out of the wilderness in his Bonzo-lovin’ arms and set them on the throne. He didn’t just capture the country's leadership, he seized it's imagination. He rewrote the story. Redefined "American."

But can Bernie do the same?

​Life expectancies have gone up significantly in the last 50 years, and it’s natural to think that they’re just going to continue to go up. Globally, though, much of that gain has come in developing countries, thanks to very basic improvements like better sanitation, better nutrition, and in the last few decades, less war (the gains in developed countries are leveling off somewhat, since there’s only so much you can do to reverse the effects of old age). But alarmingly, recently we’ve seen some signs that some of those gains are starting to reverse​ in America, and it’s exacerbated by inequality. As gaps in income grow, so too do gaps in life span between America’s most and least affluent.

This got a lot of attention back in November, with a study by Angus Deaton (a Nobel laureate in economics) showing that mortality for U.S. whites age 45 to 54 was going up​, and had been since 1998. Some experts argued that this was mostly a statistical accident  (in other words, it reflected the fact that the median age within ​the 45-54 bin was going up in that period, because of the large number of Baby Boomers passing through that group, being replaced by the less numerous Gen Xers).

However, whether that was the explanation for the overall increase or not, the increase was limited to people with a high school degree or less. The death rate for the college-educated kept going down. Also, it matched results found in earlier studies, such as one in 2012 which found the trend especially present among white working-class women. While these studies didn’t point directly to causes, they suggested that higher rates of smoking, drug overdoses, and obesity among poorer whites was at the root of it.

And now another study, this time from the Brookings Institution, has confirmed that there's something going on with life expectancies, and it's increasingly related to inequality.​​

Bernie Sanders has made some very big promises when it comes to his legislative priorities: He says he’ll make college free, pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and institute a generous single-payer national health insurance program. And when he’s asked how he’ll turn these promises into reality, he says that he and his supporters will help bring about a “political revolution.”

That’s a phrase Sanders uses often, but what does he mean by it? Sanders has said that if he wins the presidency, his victory will be accompanied by a “huge increase in voter turnout”—one that he thinks might end Republican control of Congress. But Sanders acknowledges that the House and Senate could, in spite of his best efforts, remain in GOP hands come next January.

Given that likelihood, Sanders offers an alternate means for achieving his political revolution. He says he knows that a Democratic president can’t simply “sit down and negotiate” with Republican leaders and forge a series of compromises. Anyone who's observed the GOP’s behavior over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency would not dispute that, and in any event, no compromise with Republicans would ever lead to single-payer anyway.

So what then? How would a President Sanders get Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to pass any of his big-ticket items? This is the model he proposes:

What we do is you put an issue before Congress, let’s just use free tuition at public colleges and universities, and that vote is going to take place on November 8 ... whatever it may be. We tell millions and millions of people, young people and their parents, there is going to be a vote ... half the people don’t know what’s going on ... but we tell them when the vote is, maybe we welcome a million young people to Washington, D.C. to say hello to their members of Congress. Maybe we have the telephones and the e-mails flying all over the place so that everybody in America will know how their representative is voting. [...]

And then Republicans are going to have to make a decision. Then they’re going to have to make a decision. You know, when thousands of young people in their district are saying, “You vote against this, you’re out of your job, because we know what’s going on.” So this gets back to what a political revolution is about, is bringing people in touch with the Congress, not having that huge wall. That’s how you bring about change.

Sen. Ted Cruz strutted out onto the deck of the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina Monday to talk about giving our nation’s bloated war budget a big boost if he becomes president.

As if spending more than the next 14 countries combined isn’t enough.

Added to the strut was the bluster:

“Starting next year our sailors won’t be on their knees with their hands on their heads,” Cruz said, referring to the U.S. sailors who were held in Iranian custody after their [riverine boat] entered that country’s waters. “Our secretary of State will not be apologizing and thanking their Iranian captors. Instead, they will be standing on the decks of the mightiest ships the world has ever known with their heads held high, confident that the great country that they volunteered to serve has their back."

Tough talk. Gunslinger talk. 

But there’s no focus in Cruz’s proposal to shovel a bunch more money onto the giant pile that the U.S. Department of Defense already spends, no specific enemy. Just more spending in every category except, Cruz says, the Pentagon bureaucracy—the latter being a common promise of politicians that is never fulfilled.

The Texas senator wants to increase the Air Force to 6,000 planes, lift the number of military personnel to 1.4 million from 1.34 million, and build more battleships as part of growing the Navy to at least 350 ships. His proposal to increase the Pentagon’s budget—including the slush fund known as Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)—to 4.1 percent of gross domestic product during his first two years in office would raise the 2017 fiscal year budget to $738 billion, a 26 percent increase from what President Obama has proposed. That compares with the peak war budget of $699 billion in 2011. 

Cruz doesn’t want to raise taxes to accomplish this—golly, no. Rather, he wants to pay for it by dumping the Internal Revenue Service and four Cabinet-level departments: Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, and Commerce. Great idea, huh? Cruz, by the way, seems to be unaware that the largest single item in the Department of Energy’s $32.5 billion budget for 2017 is the $12.9 billion for nuclear weapons security. 

What does it take to overcome a tragedy like poisoned water?

The public health crisis over the lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, is a failure of the institutional level of government. The state failed when Gov. Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager for Flint, who figured he could save $200 a day with a new water source—and ended up poisoning the town’s water supply. Fixing the entire problem could cost as much as $1.5 billion by some estimates.

The city’s water source switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River in April 2014. The river water caused corrosion in lead pipes, and the leached lead raised lead in the city’s water supply to levels as high as more than 10,000 parts per billion in some homes. The Environmental Protection Agency says that for drinking water to be safe, lead levels need to be less than 15 ppb. The city went back to Lake Huron water last fall, but the problems caused by the corroded lead pipes remain.

On Feb. 17, a standoff started to develop over how and when to fix the city’s lead pipes. The Snyder administration hired a Flint-based engineering firm, Rowe Professional Services, to start the arduous process of replacing the city’s water infrastructure. Rowe will update the recent analysis of water pipes in the city and will launch a pilot program to replace 30 lead service lines into Flint homes  sometime in March. State officials have said they hope to restore drinking water to the city’s residents “in stages,” with a full assessment of the problem to be finished by mid-April.

The next day, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver rejected that timeline. She said she would not agree to allow the engineering firm and contractors that the state hired to do the work, and she wants the replacement to start within one week. "We're going to get this done—and done quickly—by any and every means necessary," Weaver said. “The people of my city have simply run out of patience, and I have a moral obligation to act.”

Since the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the issue of the unjustified shooting of unarmed persons of color has become a heated topic. Most often it’s argued that these shootings are prime examples of lingering deep-seated racism in our society in general and among police, but a new study of 259 shooting cases in the city of Chicago between 2006 and 2014 seems to indicate that these incidents are not necessarily motivated by the animus of white officers against black victims. Rather, the data shows that the race of officers involved in these shootings largely matches the general demographics of the departments themselves, but the shooting victims are far more likely to be black and/or to live in neighborhoods that are far less diverse and affluent.

As a result, many of the most often-suggested solutions to help reduce these shootings (such as focusing on the expansion of diversity within the departments) would likely do little to change the ultimately tragic results of these deadly encounters.

Penned By Nirej Sekhon, assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, this study offers many new insights into exactly what is and has been occurring in our cities and has contributed to the high rate of police killings, particularly of unarmed suspects.

One of the key tropes dismantled by the study, which was compiled using reports by Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), is that it’s very rarely the case that officers who resort to deadly force do so to prevent and intervene in an ongoing act of violence. Far more often these incidents happen when no crime (other than persons attempting to get away from officers) has occurred.

As we move through the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and as we watch Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders vie for the Democratic Party nomination, my thoughts turn to the person who became the first black woman to be elected to Congress in 1968, and was also the first black woman to run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1972.  I am, of course, thinking of Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm.

In one dynamic package, Mrs. Chisholm combined many of the intersectional elements we have in front of us in today’s Democratic Party. She opened the campaign doors for African Americans and for women. She also took on the establishment, refusing to be bowed or cowed by the weight of the innumerable powerful interests that shape our political landscape. The essence of her campaign slogan—“Unbought and unbossed”—has been adopted by many who came after her.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders owe her props.

I have written about her here before, for Black Kos, and have included some of that material in this essay.

Don’t worry. While I’m always ready to take a jump to the left, I’m not about to step to the right. And I’m certainly not going to sing.

This is just one of those weeks in which I feel compelled to remind you that many of the pundits wrote their columns, oh, say around Zero-dark-January, and though yesterday’s voting in both parties is of high interest today, few of the columns are going to reference the results. Though it’s easy to visualize a few of them phoning up the editorial desk to say “looks like Trump is going to pull it off, so open the red envelope.”

That said, let’s go straight to some of those which slip in after the horses had crossed the line.

Elizabeth Williamson looks at Hillary’s victory.

With about 80 percent of results tallied, Hillary Clinton was the projected winner of the Nevada Democratic caucus, a win the campaign, now headed to South Carolina for its Feb. 27 primary, attributed to support from African-Americans….

… Exit polls showed Mrs. Clinton had solid support among African-Americans, women and people who would like to see President Barack Obama’s policies continued. Mr. Sanders won among Latino voters, youth and independents, a sign of the challenges awaiting Mrs. Clinton as she looks to build momentum heading into Super Tuesday contests on March 1.

And… see? We kind of already knew these things. Which is why Sunday-morning recaps of Saturday night election results makes for pretty blah reading for people who sit up to watch every district trickle in. It’s more interesting to look at articles like this next one.

Jill Filipovik on Hillary and women voters

The poll numbers and primary results so far tell a simple story: Younger Democratic women are mostly for Bernie Sanders; older women lean more toward Hillary Clinton.

The mothers-versus-daughters narrative, long an election-year trope, is particularly pronounced now, and tinged with stereotypes on both sides. The idealistic but ungrateful naïfs who think sexism is a thing of the past and believe, as Mr. Sanders recently said, that “people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender” are seemingly battling the pantsuited old scolds prattling on about feminism.

Instead, the reality may be another kind of simple numbers game: More time in a sexist world, and particularly in the workplace, radicalizes women.

It’s an interesting argument; one that says Hillary’s support among older women isn’t generated by an obsolete view of society, but by simply a greater awareness of and experience with the obstacles, small and large, which women continue to face once they’ve stepped outside academia and settled into the workplace. It’s also a different take on the relative position of the candidates. Rather than painting Bernie as the revolutionary, here Hillary is the real #@!$-you to the existing system. Worth a read, especially in view of yesterday’s results.

Ok. Come on inside. Let’s look at the rest of ‘em.

Say what you will about Antonin Scalia, who died last weekend under mysterious circumstances (are we really supposed to believe that he slept with a pillow by his head?!)—the man loved the Constitution; in fact, he fetishized it.

And so, there can be little doubt that Scalia is rolling over in his grave at the prospect of Barack Obama nominating someone to fill his vacant seat on the Supreme Court.

Now, technically speaking, Obama is and will remain president for the next 11 months; but, more to the point, he is and will remain black.

In all of American history, there is zero precedent for a black president making appointments to the Supreme Court when his term is more than 3/5ths completed.

Any suggestion to the contrary is interpretive jiggery-pokery ... pure applesauce.

Wake up, sheeple!

What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …

• Ted Cruz wants to give the Pentagon an extra $155 billion when what's needed are significant cuts, by Meteor Blades
• No, Bernie Sanders is not a modern-day George McGovern, by Susan Grigsby
• Dear Bill Clinton: 'We are all 99.5 percent the same' will not protect people of color from racism, by Chauncey DeVega
• Living in Flint as the battle over lead pipes continues ... and how you can help, by Sher Watts Spooner
• Race In America: Keshia Thomas on saving KKK member and activism, by Egberto Willies
• No room for failure: How student debt impacts results, by David Akadjian
• Better than man, by DarkSyde
• Study shows Police Killings may be more about Blue on Black than Black and White, Frank Vyan Walton
• The gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor is growing instead of shrinking, by David Jarman
• How Republicans turned the unprecedented into the new normal, by Jon Perr
• The Wisconsin Uprising, five years later, by Mark E Andersen
• Is Bernie Sanders the new Ronald Reagan, by Mark Sumner
• Imagine Bernie Sanders wins the White House. Then what, by David Nir
• Before Barack, Hillary and Bernie - there was Shirley Chisholm, by Denise Oliver Velez

First it was a Democratic debate. Then it was a Republican debate. Now it's… an election? Look. I can understand that I sometimes have to wait on 60 Minutes until they can get a football game out of the way, but I'm asking you, can't politics do a better job of keeping my schedule in mind? This is the third week in a row when this post got bumped to… what time is it, anyway?

And here's something I just found out. The Caucasus? They're not even in the United States! They're over in Europe somewhere. Like… in the eastern part. So why are we even paying attention to how people are voting in the Caucasus? I mean, I'm not one of those "not invented here" guys but still… 

Caucuses? Not… But it sounds like… Oh. Really? Never mind.

Anyway, here's episode four. Denny gets out of the Human Quarter and goes to visit the one human who doesn't live in their little mellah. So we get a bit of a walking tour of Jukal Plex, and spend a little time with skynx. We also get a little closer to the core of this thing… though it might not seem that way at first.

As usual, there's superfragilistic art from Amy Jones, and you can zip over to the podcast version, which tonight is read by both actor Raymond Shinn and mystery writer Rett Macpherson.

Special bonus time: at the very end of this post is a reward for either 1) reading the whole thing or 2) being a cheater. 

Let's go see…

…