In July 2008, just over a month after surgery for brain cancer and still in the middle of chemotherapy treatments, Senator Ted Kennedy returned to the Senate floor to help the Democrats break the deadlock and end a Republican filibuster on a bill to destroy Medicare.

Universal health insurance had long been Kennedy’s signature passion and he was perpetually frustrated by the unwillingness of his Senate colleagues to adopt some version of it. Despite partisan differences, however, his colleagues admired Kennedy’s spirit and his commitment to the cause. When he returned to the Senate floor to cast that vote, Senators from both sides of the aisle gave him a standing ovation.

Kennedy died in August 2009, but not before having helped elect Barack Obama as president and urging him to make universal health care a top priority.

The Democrats have just unveiled their new slogan: "A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages."

It looks like they were trying to do a rift on Roosevelt’s New Deal, but ended up with something that sounded more like a pizza slogan.

This follows their much-mocked attempt to have people select a sticker from amongst the most idiotic options imaginable. One of those stickers sort of summed up the Democrat’s approach for going on three decades now: "Democrats 2018. I mean, have you seen the other guys?" Or take this gem: "She persisted. We resisted." Really?

It looks like the Democrat’s neoliberal establishment power base hasn't learned a thing, and they’re likely to pay the price in 2018. They're focusing on tactics, gimmicks, and ploys, at a time when people are fed up with politics as usual.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst...
— From "The War Prayer" by Mark Twain

Now in the summer of our love for the glory and greatness of the Republic, let us recall the soaring words of Mark Twain and his paean to war and its multitude of tender mercies. Let us give thanks to God and his various co-conspirators for making our nation an exceptional font of wisdom, wealth, and weapons. Let us praise the weapons makers with their bottomless thirst for profits and their pledge of allegiance to the continuation of war for which no price is too great to bear, no life too small to incinerate in the blessed pursuit of national security, global hegemony, and unchallenged control of the world’s most vital resources

In April of 2015, five pro-democracy activists stood up in the U.S. Supreme Court to denounce the justices for allowing unlimited sums of money to corrupt our politics. This action occurred on the one-year anniversary of the McCutcheon v. FEC ruling, in which the court ruled that the overall federal limit on individual campaign contributions violated the First Amendment. Coupled with the disastrous Citizens United decision, which gave corporations permission to spend unlimited amounts on ads and other political tools, these court rulings have silenced the majority of people while giving immense power to the moneyed elite to influence our government.

Now more than two years since they rose one by one to admonish the court for tilting our elections in the favor of the wealthy, on Monday these activists appeared for sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Originally facing sentences of 10–16 months in prison and $100,000 fines, they've had to appear in court several times over the years, incurring expenses and hardship as the government has prosecuted them with a zealousness that does not fit the charges.

Air strike on Sana'a in May 2015. Photo Credit: Ibrahem Qasim/Wikipedia

A day ago, a Saudi jet fired on a convoy of cars in Mawzaa district, Yemen. The strike is reported to have killed at least twenty civilians, many from the same family. These cars carried families who were fleeing renewed fighting near the city of Taiz in southwest Yemen. ‘Nowhere in Yemen is safe for civilians,’ said Shabia Mantoo of the UN’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR). This incident, like others before it, says the UNHCR, ‘demonstrates the extreme dangers facing civilians in Yemen, particularly those attempting to flee violence, as they disproportionately bear the brunt of conflict.’

On Tuesday, 50 Republican senators showed contempt for their constituents by voting to move forward on repealing our health care, with Vice President Mike Pence stepping in to break the tie.

Nine GOP senators later broke ranks in a late-night session to vote down the Senate’s toxic version of the bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) – which would have rolled back much of the Affordable Care Act and gutted Medicaid, ending coverage for 23 million – but there are more votes to come, including one that may simply repeal care and and strip coverage from 32 million.

The final version of the bill may be nothing more than a placeholder – a Trojan horse for setting up a Republican Senate-House conference committee that will use yet another secretive, undemocratic process to craft yet another version of health repeal.

Without the drummed-up fear that a black president would take guns away from law-abiding citizens, the National Rifle Association is turning toward vilifying and pillorying the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality in order to drum up gun sales. One of the platforms it now has at its disposal is NRATV. While the fledging network may not yet be among the choices in your cable television package, or available through existing streaming services, given the power of the gun lobbying organization, NRATV may soon be coming to screen near you.

Launched in October of last year, NRATV's declared mission is to provide "The most comprehensive video coverage of Second Amendment issues, events and culture anywhere in the world." The network offers such programing as NRANEWs, presented by Ruger, NRAWOMEN, presented by Smith & Wesson, NRACOUNTRY and NRAHUNTING, as well as an array of commentators.

"No is not enough, says Naomi Klein, so if no isn't sufficient, what might be? This week, ​Laura talks with author/activist Gar Alperovitz, co-chair of the Next System Project (a framework for imagining 'the next system' of governance, democracy, and security).

From the gloom of today he sees the principles of a Pluralist Commonwealth emerging. Then a video from Local Futures, counts down the many changes that can come from investing locally. All that and a commentary from Laura on the Diggers and feeding while rebelling."

— from TomDispatch

You wouldn’t know it, based on the endless cries for more money coming from the military, politicians, and the president, but these are the best of times for the Pentagon. Spending on the Department of Defense alone is already well in excess of half a trillion dollars a year and counting. Adjusted for inflation, that means it’s higher than at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s massive buildup of the 1980s and is now nearing the post-World War II funding peak. And yet that’s barely half the story. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in “defense” spending that aren’t even counted in the Pentagon budget.

Under the circumstances, laying all this out in grisly detail -- and believe me, when you dive into the figures, they couldn’t be grislier -- is the only way to offer a better sense of the true costs of our wars past, present, and future, and of the funding that is the lifeblood of the national security state. When you do that, you end up with no less than 10 categories of national security spending (only one of which is the Pentagon budget). So steel yourself for a tour of our nation’s trillion-dollar-plus “national security” budget. Given the Pentagon’s penchant for wasting money and our government’s record of engaging in dangerously misguided wars without end, it’s clear that a large portion of this massive investment of taxpayer dollars isn’t making anyone any safer.

— from Down With Tyranny!

Is it impertinent to say this? Not constructive enough? Or necessary to make the change the country needs? I've heard all three asserted lately.

I'd like to put three thoughts together for consideration as a set.

1. Chuck Schumer recently told George Stephanopolis that "we [Democrats] are united on economic issues." See 33:36 in this video.

Not sure what you think, but that seems the most absurd statement of the month. It's precisely economic issues — trade deals, service to corporate needs, bailouts of Wall Street instead of Main Street, forgiveness of crushing debts like student loans — that divide Democrats most deeply.

Israel, which has played a precarious role in the Syrian war since 2011, is furious to learn that the future of the conflict is not to its liking.

The six-year-old Syria war is moving to a new stage, perhaps its final. The Syrian regime is consolidating its control over most of the populated centers, while ISIS is losing ground fast – and everywhere.

Areas evacuated by the rapidly disintegrated militant group are up for grabs. There are many hotly contested regions sought over by the government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus and its allies, on the one hand, and the various anti-Assad opposition groups and their supporters, on the other.

With ISIS largely vanquished in Iraq – at an extremely high death toll of 40,000 people in Mosel alone – – warring parties there are moving west. Shia militias, emboldened by the Iraq victory, have been pushing westward as far as the Iraq-Syria border, converging with forces loyal to the Syrian government on the other side.

The other night, I was watching Mel Brooks' hilariously funny Blazing Saddles, possibly the most politically incorrect movie ever made. The n-word is used more often in the opening scenes than Donald Trump says "trust me" in a week.

Yet somehow, it isn't really offensive, because the movie is poking fun at us and our weaknesses as a society.

Every sexist and racist stereotype is gleefully invoked, parodied — and thereby, effectively demolished.

When it was over, I suddenly realized something: Sadly, that movie could never be made today. Not because we are more enlightened, but because we no longer are self-confident enough as a people and a nation to laugh at ourselves.

The Vermont brand has been built on a bucolic image of cows grazing on endless pastures . . . Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and other Vermont companies have used this idyllic imagery to sell their products. Gone are the days, however, when most of Vermont’s cows were grazing in spectacularly scenic landscapes. Now a majority of Vermont’s cows are locked up in . . . ‘confined animal feeding operations’ or CAFOs . . . grazing on concrete with a diet rich in GMO corn and pesticides. - “Vermont’s GMO Addiction: Pesticides, Polluted Water and Climate Destruction,” Regeneration Vermont

The most important thing we can do today as conscious consumers, farmers and food workers is to regenerate public health, the environment and climate stability. We can do this most readily by moving away from industrial, GMO and factory-farm food toward an organic, pasture-based, soil-regenerative, humane, carbon-sequestering and climate-friendly agriculture system.

Joshua Holland is a fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and a contributor to The Nation who focuses on the intersection of money in politics and inequality. He is also the host of Politics and Reality Radio. Before joining The Investigative Fund, he wrote for Moyers & Company and was a senior writer and editor at Alternet. He also authored The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). We discuss this video.

Bryce Covert is a contributor at The Nation, where she co-writes “The Score,” a monthly column on economics, and a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times. One of her recent columns is called “Women Won’t Have Equality Until Dads Stay Home.”

Folks, it's been another weekend of not-good fundraising:

Saturday: $63 from 3 people
Sunday: $50 from 1 person
Monday: $32 from 2 people

That's $145 over the last three days, must less than the $7,497 we still need to keep publishing for the next three months.

In fact, we can't even pay bills that are due today.

Once we stop being able pay people, we stop being able to bring you this web site.

It's that simple. If you come here every day to read and comment — if you'd miss us if we were gone — please give what you can to help us in our time of need.

$5, $1 ... no donation is too small, and every donation shoves us just a little bit closer to our goal.

Click here to donate, and thanks for listening, folks.

-- Jeff T.

— from Moyers & Company

Senate minority leader and Democratic Party honcho Chuck Schumer’s editorial in today’s New York Times boldly proclaims that the Democratic Party will start helping working people. That would be a nice change.

But what should be a welcome shift is instead emblematic of everything that’s wrong with how the Democratic Party is seeking to remake itself.

1. A party of swamp creatures. Schumer himself is deeply tied to Wall Street — and he makes no mention of breaking up the power of concentrated wealth on the street, or in the boardrooms of the biggest corporations. Why should we believe a party lead by him and people like him, tied to and financed by megadonors, will really fight for people and against corporate power?

A heat wave gripped Washington D.C. last week, its bright sun delineating each building’s sharp corners with Edward Hopper-like clarity. Commuters waited listlessly for trains and buses, fixed in their moments of misery like flies in amber.

If the city seemed like Hell, the resemblance was only heightened by the shadowy figures passing by in black chauffeured vehicles, their faces hidden by smoked glass as they glided through the city in air-conditioned comfort.

Some of those vehicles carried the Republican Congressional leaders who were finalizing the House GOP’s 2018 budget, which the House Budget Committee sent to the floor last Wednesday. If hell had a fiscal policy, it would look a lot like that document.

— from Alternet

President Donald Trump loves to brag about his Twitter following. As more revelations brewed around the Trump campaign’s possible involvement with Russia, Trump tweeted on June 17 about his overall social media following: 100 million strong, or so he claims, and Twitter of course being his favorite method of communication.

A quick glance at Trump’s actual number of Twitter followers tells a different story, however; while president brags of about 34 million followers, the truth is far different. According to an analysis by Socialbakers in June for CNN Tech, one analytics tool estimates that 11.6 million of Trump's 32 million Twitter followers are either dormant or accounts run by bots.

"The analysis run by Twitter Audit, which estimates how many of an account’s following is made up of real people, gave Trump a 40 percent audit score and found that about 20 million of his followers are fake. Status People, another site that rates the authenticity of Twitter followers, found that 5 percent of Trump’s followers are fake and another 91 percent are inactive.

Another reason for single-payer health care: The documentary What the Health shows how the lives and health of human beings are considered insignificant, and in many ways threatened, by the pursuit of profits in the meat and dairy and drug industries.

The corporate disdain revealed by this film is nearly beyond belief. And our 'trusted' watchdog agencies, both non-profit and government, are beholden to the biggest companies, accepting money in return for their silence about the dangers of animal and pharmaceutical products.

Some of the contentions in the documentary have been disputed, most notably the implication that sugar is not a major factor in diabetes, and that dairy is. Indeed there may be flaws in the documentary. But it clearly reveals the damaging behavior of the businesses and organizations that are contributing to human suffering.

— from Moyers & Company

Fish stinks from the head, as the ancient Greeks first said, and right now there’s a 250-pound flounder stinking up the White House and all those around the place.

Mark Shields said it well on the PBS NewsHour Friday night:

“Everybody, I can honestly say, with rare exception, who has been associated with this administration and this president has been diminished by it. Their reputation has been tarnished. They’re smaller people as a result of it. And that’s tragic.”

Six months in and we’ve reached a level of mayhem, compulsive lying and incompetence that defies the imagination. Just to mix the animal metaphors, there’s more bull running through Washington right now than the streets of Pamplona, and for our nation’s capital, that’s saying something.

There they go again.

Hillary was a two time loser. Weirdly, her people are still in charge of the Democratic Party. Clintonista militant moderates haven’t learned a thing from Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump — so they’re trying to sell Democratic voters on more of the same.

Remember what happened when Hillary ran on “never mind your crappy low wage job, vote for me because ‘first woman president'”? Now we’re supposed to get excited about center-right California Senator Kamala Harris because she ticks off two boxes on the identity politics hit parade.

Remember the ugly optics when Bill and Hillary took their excellent fundraising adventure to the Hamptons? Kamala 2020 is already doing the same thing.

Trump "has really good karma," said, on Friday, the president's third communications director inside of six months — a staffing fact that pointedly reflects just how "good" Trump's karma is, in terms of it being extraordinary, but in no way sublime. In fact Trump's karma is so extraordinary, it embodies his party's craven past and miserable fate.

Has destiny ever been more perfectly manifested?

In a laughable attempt to portray Trumpian, uh, complications as but the normal course of partisan events, the founder of the right-wing American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., tells the Washington Post: "In the 50 years I’ve been involved, Republicans have yet to figure out how to support each other."

— from Down With Tyranny!

Cover image from the New York Magazine feature story, "The Uninhabitable Earth."

We need new Cassandras to warn us of new disasters, even though they'll never be believed.
—Richard Clarke (paraphrased)

We aren’t doomed — we are choosing to be doomed by failing to respond adequately to the emergency.
—Margaret Klein Salamon

The recent, major New York Magazine article on the coming "uninhabitable earth" stirred quite a response, both positive and negative. The positive response was, in general, "Finally, someone telling the truth." The negative response was, in general, "But it contains these errors," and "Does it really help to scare people this much?"

The $600 billion annual cost of the US military budget eats up 54% of all federal discretionary funds. It’s no wonder we don’t have money to address the crisis of global warming, build effective public transportation systems, institute a Medicare-for-All health system, or provide the free college education that all our youth deserve.

You would think it would be easy to form a united front with activists from different movements who want to redirect our tax dollars. Students fighting for free education should understand that stopping just one weapons system, the expensive and unnecessary Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets, would fund the education of all college students for the next two decades. Nurses fighting for universal health care should understand that if we cut the bloated military budget, we’d have plenty of money for a national healthcare system like the Europeans have. Environmentalists paddling their kayaks to block oil-digging ships should understand that if we dramatically cut our military spending, we’d have hundreds of billions of dollars to propel us into the era of green, sustainable energy. Unions should recognize that the military is one of the worst creators of jobs in relation to money spent.

This week, we kick off the show with a brief tribute to the one and only Sean Spicer, may he rest behind a bush somewhere.

Then we'll be joined by mild-mannered health care wonk Harold Pollack from the University of Chicago to talk policy on the left and the right: Why the GOP's zombie bill never dies, and whether making a rapid transition to Medicare-for-All is a viable way to get to affordable universal coverage.