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“Our options are now between bad or
terrible.” |
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By Emily Atkin |
New Republic |
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 A young, fit U.S. soldier is marching in a
Middle Eastern desert, under a blazing summer sun. He’s wearing
insulated clothing and lugging more than 100 pounds of gear, and
thus sweating profusely as his body attempts to regulate the
heat. But it’s 108 degrees out and humid, too much for him bear.
The brain is one of the first organs affected by heat, so his
judgment becomes impaired; he does not recognize the severity of
his situation. Just as his organs begin to fail, he passes out.
His internal temperature is in excess of 106 degrees when he
dies. Read More |
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GOP Medicaid Cuts Hit Rural America Hardest, Report Finds |
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The new GOP-backed health bill might
leave millions of Trump voters uninsured. |
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BY PHIL GALEWITZ |
Moyers & Company |
|
|
 This post originally appeared at Kaiser
Health News.
Rural America carried President Donald Trump to his election
night upset last November.
Trump Country it may be, but rural counties and small towns also
make up Medicaid Country — those parts of the nation whose
low-income children and families are most dependent on the
federal-state health insurance program, according to a report
released Wednesday.
Medicaid’s enrollment has swollen to more than 72 million in
recent years, and the ranks of uninsured Americans has fallen to
9 percent in 2015 from 13 percent in 2013. That’s largely due to
the Affordable Care Act, which allowed states to expand Medicaid
eligibility with federal funds. Thirty-one states plus the
District of Columbia did so.
Read More |
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The King of Contempt |
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Donald Trump’s campaign against
America |
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By Lucian K. Truskott IV |
Salon |
|
|
 It’s hard to put a finger on where his
campaign of contempt for American institutions began, but Donald
Trump’s years-long allegation that President Obama wasn’t born
in the United States of America is as good a place as any. In
addition to the fact that it was a lie from beginning to end and
racist at its core, Trump’s birther campaign was elementally
contemptuous of Obama the man and the presidency itself and
shows breathtaking contempt for everything associated with the
very heart of our national political life.
Read More |
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Mental health professionals are battling
over the "Goldwater rule" — but the rest of us are not bound by
it
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By ANNA LIND-GUZIK |
Salon
|
|
|
 President Donald Trump has a personality
disorder that we’re not supposed to talk about, and that makes
me furious. The Goldwater rule, an ethical norm from the 1960s
that forbids psychiatrists and psychologists from diagnosing
public figures they haven’t been able to evaluate in person, has
gagged the most knowledgeable among us from speaking freely. A
man with no impulse control and no chance of improvement is
shooting his missiles all over, not to mention targeting
vulnerable populations at home. The world is in a panic while
the doctors worry that he’ll sue.
Read More |
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Gibberish Is the White House’s New Normal |
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The bad art of the non sequitur. |
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By Todd Gitlin |
Moyers & Co. |
|
|
Once
upon a time, there were presidents for whom English seemed their
native language. Barack Obama most recently. He deliberated. At
a press conference or in an interview — just about whenever he
wasn’t speaking from a text — his pauses were as common as other
people’s “uh’s.” He was not pausing because his vocabulary was
impoverished. He was pausing to put words into sequence. He was
putting phrases together with care, word by word, trying out
words before uttering them, checking to feel out what they would
sound like once uttered. It was important to him because he did
not want to be misunderstood. President Obama valued precision,
in no small part because he knew he lived in a world where every
last presidential word was a speech act, a declaration with
consequence, so that the very statement that the sky was blue,
say, would be scoured for evidence that the president was
declaring a policy on the nature of nature.
Read More |
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'Alt-right' groups will 'revolt' if Trump shuns white
supremacy, leaders say |
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Prominent members of the American
far right predict that waning influence on the president-elect
could trigger discord and vengeance within the movement |
|
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From
The Guardian |
|
|
Donald Trump will disappoint and disillusion
his far-right supporters by eschewing white supremacy, according
to some of the movement’s own intellectual leaders.
Activists who recently gave Nazi salutes and shouted “hail
Trump” at a gathering in Washington will revolt when the new US
president fails to meet their expectations, the leaders told the
Guardian.
The prospect of such disillusion and internecine squabbling may
console liberals who fear a White House tinged with racism and
quasi-fascism. All the more reassuring because it comes from
far-right influencers and analysts, not wishful progressives.
Read More |
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Abortion Privilege Under Trump |
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Under the new president, states
might become a patchwork of abortion rights, and many women
won’t be able to afford to reach clinics in time. |
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By OLGA KHAZAN |
The Atlantic |
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 |
|
|
When asked by CBS’s Lesley Stahl earlier
this week about his vision for the Supreme Court and abortion
rights, President-elect Donald Trump responded with a common
pro-life wish:
“It would go back to the states,” Trump said, if Roe v. Wade,
the court decision that legalized abortion, were overturned.
“Yeah, but then some women won’t be able to get an abortion?”
Stahl asked.
“Yeah, well, they’ll perhaps have to go, they’ll have to go to
another state,” Trump responded.
Read More |
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Trump Versus China: What’s Really at Stake |
|
Truth be told, Trump voters should be pressing him, and hard, to reverse his
promise to cancel the Trans-Pacific deal on day one of his presidency. |
|
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By John McLaughlin |
|
|
 The author, deputy director and acting
director of the CIA from 2000 to 2004 teaches at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
The economy of Asia is likely to drive the 21st century. Leaders
of most nations would believe the United States should maintain
and even expand its role there. And yet, the U.S. runs a very
high risk of doing exactly the opposite — turning away from the
region and ceding its leadership in Asia.
Read More |
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Farewell, America |
|
No matter how the rest of the world
looked at us on Nov. 7, they will now look at us differently. |
|
By Neal Gabler |
Moyers & Company |
|
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America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a
bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide. We
the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals,
our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common
purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however
tenuously, made a nation out of a country.
Read More |
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What is Humility?
|
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A easily misunderstood human quality that seems to have gone missing in our modern times. How to make it part of your life once again. |
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By Larry Laird - lairdslair.com |
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 I attend a small evangelical Lutheran church in Marion, Ohio called St. Paul's and have for over 60 years. I took my catechism there and was confirmed in this little church. On occasion, our pastor takes a much needed vacation and since we have no assistant pastor he calls on members of the congregation to lead a service in his absence. I have done so a couple of times in the past two years. What follows is the message I delivered on a Sunday in late August, 2016.
What exactly is humility?
The dictionary defines it this way -
Humility is the quality of being humble. In a religious context this can mean a recognition of self in relation to God or deities, acceptance of one's defects, and submission to divine grace as a member of a religion. Outside of a religious context, humility is defined as the self-restraint from excessive vanity, and can possess moral and/or ethical dimensions.
The Urban Dictionary puts it this way, in a more plain speaking Will Rogers manner
Humility is an admirable quality that not many people possess. It means that a person may have accomplished a lot, or be a lot but doesn't feel it is necessary to advertise or brag about it.
Are you a humble person? How can you know?
Read More |
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Making a Killing |
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The business and politics of selling
guns. How Fear Helps the Gun Business. |
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By Evan Osnos |
The New Yorker |
|
|
 Bars in the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia let out at 2
A.M. On the morning of January 17, 2010, two groups emerged,
looking for taxis. At the corner of Market and Third Street,
they started yelling at each other. On one side was Edward
DiDonato, who had recently begun work at an insurance company,
having graduated from Villanova University, where he was a
captain of the lacrosse team. On the other was Gerald Ung, a
third-year law student at Temple, who wrote poetry in his spare
time and had worked as a technology consultant for Freddie Mac.
Both men had grown up in prosperous suburbs: DiDonato in Blue
Bell, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia; Ung in Reston,
Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
Everyone had been drinking, and neither side could subsequently
remember how the disagreement started; one of DiDonato’s friends
may have kicked in the direction of one of Ung’s friends, and
Ung may have mocked someone’s hair. “To this day, I have no idea
why this happened,” Joy Keh, a photographer who was one of Ung’s
friends at the scene, said later.
Read More |
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How Do You Spot A Nonconformist? |
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You Can Start With Their Internet
Browser! |
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By NPR | www.npr.org |
|
|
 In
2009, one of the founders of the online eyeglass maker Warby Parker approached
management consultant Adam Grant about becoming an early investor. Grant says he
declined because the company's founders weren't working at their startup full
time; he also says it was the worst financial decision he's ever made.
Read More |
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There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish |
|
The environmental impact of plastic
waste is already staggering and getting much worse |
|
By Gregory Barber |
MotherJones |
|
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 Discarded plastic will outweigh fish in the
world's oceans by 2050, according to a report from the Ellen
MacArthur Foundation. That is, unless overfishing moves the date
up sooner.
The study, a collaboration with the World Economic Forum, found
that 32 percent of plastic packaging escapes waste collection
systems, gets into waterways, and is eventually deposited in the
oceans. That percentage is expected to increase in coming years,
given that the fastest growth in plastic production is expected
to occur in "high leakage" markets—developing countries where
sanitation systems are often unreliable. The data used in the
report comes from a review of more than 200 studies and
interviews with 180 experts.
Read More
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Getting to the Heart of David Letterman |
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The beloved king of comedy—and part
time Montana resident—talks about growing up and getting older. |
|
By Brian Schott |
The Whitefish Review |
|
|
 As of his final Late Show this past May,
David Letterman had hosted 19,932 guest appearances on 6,028
broadcasts across more than 33 years—and redefined late-night
and humor itself along the way. The man had earned some peace
and quiet. Judging from the searching, thoughtful interview he
granted to the Whitefish Review, he has found both—thanks, in
large part, to life on his ranch in northwest Montana.
In an interview with Jane Pauley prior to his retirement,
Letterman talked about the “white-hot adrenaline” he’d felt on
his early appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson:
“It’s like you’re sitting on the knee of the Lincoln Memorial
and Lincoln is talking to you. You know, it’s like, ‘Holy God,
it’s the guy on the $5 bill talking to me.’” That’s about what
it feels like to interview David Letterman.
Read More |
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How Supercharged Blue Heroin Ravaged
This Small Town In Ohio |
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By Mitch Stacy |
AP |
|
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 MARION, Ohio (AP) — The usual handwringing
over the heroin problem turned into panic in this small city in
May when a supercharged blue-tinted batch from Chicago sent more
than 30 overdose victims to the hospital and two to the morgue
in a 12-day stretch.
Like many places in America, Marion — an hour's drive north of
the capital, Columbus — has gotten used to heroin. Emergency
crews in the city of 37,000 have become accustomed to treating
an overdose patient about once a day for the past year or so.
But they were stunned when the unprecedented onslaught began on
May 20.
They say if it hadn't been for naloxone, an antidote carried by
paramedics, most of the survivors probably would have died, too.
They ranged in age from their late teens to early 60s.
Read
More |
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Jesus wept: How can you call yourself a Christian if you
voted for Donald Trump? |
|
Christian faith means many things to
many people. But I'm confused about how "love thy neighbor" led
us here |
|
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By Lily Burana |
Salon |
|
|
 One of the hallmarks of Christian faith is
charity, which is unfortunate for me, because, as a cradle
Christian (and, lately, a recovering agnostic), I’ve been
feeling less than charitable since Donald Trump won the
presidential election.
I don’t mean that I’m not in the spirit
of giving to charities — I’ll be writing out a whopper of a
check to the American Civil Liberties Union presently.
Read More |
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Is Depression a Kind of Allergic
Reaction? |
|
By Caroline Williams |
The Guardian
|
|
|
 Barely a week goes by without a
celebrity “opening up” about their “battle with depression”.
This, apparently, is a brave thing to do because, despite all
efforts to get rid of the stigma around depression, it is still
seen as some kind of mental and emotional weakness.
But what if was nothing of the sort? What if it was a physical
illness that just happens to make people feel pretty lousy?
Would that make it less of a big deal to admit to? Could it even
put a final nail in the coffin of the idea that depression is
all in the mind?
Read More |
|
|
 One
man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but
for real bona fide stupidity nothing beats teamwork. |
| - Mark
Twain |
| |
Lead,
follow or get out of the way.
-
Thomas Paine |
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Top of Page |
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Martin Luther’s Revolution
|
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The Reformation did a lot more than transform Christianity. |
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BY ELIZABETH BRUENIG |
Moyers and Co. |
|
|
 Theology is morality is politics is law — and whether or not
it’s immediately obvious, the world is steeped in theology. In
contemporary America, and especially in the more secular
precincts of Western Europe, it seems unlikely that one could
look at a property deed or a government budget and find, just
beneath its explicit reasoning, traces of old theological
disputes and their resolutions. But they’re there, and examining
them offers a view of what might have been, had history — in
particular, the Protestant Reformation, ignited 500 years ago
this October by a German monk named Martin Luther — unfolded
differently. Read
More |
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Trumpmania Cools in This Pennsylvania Town |
|
A Democratic mayor invited the Republican
insurgent to visit last summer. It seemed like a good idea at
the time. |
|
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By Albert R. Hunt |
Bloomberg View |
|
|
 A year ago this week, Lou Mavrakis
beamed as Donald Trump campaigned in economically-ravaged
Monessen, Pennsylvania, promising to bring back steel jobs and
punish China for unfair trade practices.
Mavrakis, the mayor of Monessen and a former steelworkers' union
official, invited Trump, who then became the first presidential
candidate to visit this once-flourishing western Pennsylvania
town since 1960, when John F. Kennedy dropped in. By showing up
in Monessen, Trump attracted national media attention as a
symbol of Republican hopes to appeal to struggling,
working-class, white Democrats.
Read More |
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There’s No News Right Now Because Trump Doesn’t Actually Do
Anything |
|
No - this truck wasn't actually
moving! |
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By Ben Mathis-Lilley |
Slate |
|
|
 Donald Trump is, by various accounts
including his own, currently obsessed with the idea of getting
something big and splashy accomplished before April 29, the
100th day of his presidency. The good news for Trump is that he
should have plenty of options. There are multiple pressing
issues at the forefront of the national consciousness right
now—health care, the budget/tax reform, North Korea—on which
significant executive action is possible. There are also a host
of issues that Trump discussed during the campaign that he could
move to the front burner if he so chose—trade fairness, the Iran
deal, business deregulation, the opioid crisis, veterans' health
care, Middle East peace. And there are subjects he promised
earlier in his term that he'd be addressing soon, like
improvements to American cybersecurity in the wake of last
year's Russia hacks, the alleged surveillance of his apartment
by Barack Obama, and the millions of illegal votes he says were
cast in the 2016 election.
Read More |
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America has never seen a party less caring than 21st-century
Republicans |
|
We pay our elected officials to take care of
our communities and our planet. Since Trump took office, the GOP
has set out only to destroy |
|
|
|
By Lindy West | The
Guardian |
|
|
 Last week I was taking an Uber (I know, I’m
sorry, it was a necessity) across an unfamiliar town when the
driver, whom I’ll call Randy, started telling me about this cool
dude named Jesus. Randy’s big opener, earlier in the ride, was
to gesture at a homeless man panhandling by the side of the road
and say: “Isn’t it terrible?”
“Yeah,” I agreed, though I was unsure whether he was referring
to homelessness as a blight or a form of state violence. “I
can’t believe my tax money pays for the president’s golf
vacations while people are freezing to death on the street. It’s
robbery.”
“True that,” he said, to my relief. “I hope this crazy country
gets itself figured out before things get worse.”
“Me too,” I said. “I would really like to keep living.”
“Yeah?” Randy pounced. “How would you like to live … forever?”
Read More |
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Truth, Lies and Democracy: Journalism in the Age of Trump |
|
Safeguarding the truth has never in living
memory been more difficult in the democratic world. |
|
|
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BY OLIVIA WARD |
Moyers & Co. |
|
|
 In June 1972, a story about a gang of
American burglars caught red-handed with their pockets stuffed
with hundred-dollar bills made journalistic history.
These were no ordinary smash-and-grabbers. They were the
Watergate burglars — five men in rubber gloves who bungled an
attempt to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee
at the Watergate hotel and office complex. One claimed to have
worked for the CIA.
When news of the Nixon administration’s campaign to destroy
their opponents through not-too-well-organized crime broke in
the Washington Post, a 26-month drama played out on the front
page of a paper that riveted the capital’s and the English
speaking world’s attention.Read
More |
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Maybe This Is How Democracy Ends |
|
The frightening rise of
authoritarian populism in the West is a very real, clear and
present danger. |
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By Mike Lofgren |
Moyers & Co.
|
|
|
 The election of Donald Trump has triggered
as much wonderment abroad as it has in the United States. David
Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of
Cambridge, has written in the London Review of Books a
provocative reflection on the nature of democracy in the age of
Trump: “Is this how democracy ends?” There is much to praise in
his essay, including his heavy qualification that we really
don’t know for sure if what we are seeing is the end phase of
mature Western democracies since we do not have the appropriate
historical precedents to be certain.
Read More |
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Democrats Must Become the Party of Freedom |
|
Re-embracing anti-monopoly will
reinvigorate American liberty and beat back Trumpism. |
|
By Barry C. Lynn |
Moyers and Company |
|
|
 This post originally appeared at
Washington
Monthly.
There are many competing interpretations for why Hillary Clinton
lost last fall’s election, but most observers do agree that one
— economics — played a big role. Clinton simply didn’t
articulate a vision compelling enough to compete with Donald
Trump’s rousing, if dubious, message that bad trade deals and
illegal immigration explain the downward mobility of so many
Americans.
As it happens, Clinton did have the germ of exactly such an idea
— if you knew where to look. In an October 2015 op-ed, she wrote
that “large corporations are concentrating control over markets”
and “using their power to raise prices, limit choices for
consumers, lower wages for workers and hold back competition
from startups and small businesses. It’s no wonder Americans
feel the deck is stacked for those at the top.” In a speech in
Toledo this past October, Clinton assailed “old-fashioned
monopolies” and vowed to appoint “tough” enforcers “so the big
don’t keep getting bigger and bigger.”
Read More |
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None Dare Call it Treason |
|
Trump's similarities to Putin are
evident, but will we call him out for what he really is? |
|
By Marty Kaplan |
Moyers & Company |
|
|
 This post originally appeared at
Jewish Journal.
In 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson, a man
named John A. Stormer self-published a book called None Dare
Call It Treason. It accused America’s left-leaning elites of
paving the way for a Soviet victory in the Cold War. The book
sold 7 million copies, but Johnson crushed Goldwater in the
election.
Now that the CIA has determined that the Russians intervened in
the presidential election to help Trump win, the Cold War
politics of left and right have been flipped. If Stormer rewrote
his book for 2016, its thesis might go like this:
Read More |
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Staying on the Firearms Story |
|
You can have your own opinions, but
not your own facts. |
|
By Eric Garland | Via Facebook |
|
|
 I
think I'm staying on the firearms story because there are two
parts of my identity that are stronger than any others: being a
Vermonter and being a professional analyst. The first means I
neither fear nor loathe guns, which are all over the Green
Mountains, but the second means that I can't stand bogus
arguments and lying about data. Well, that and mass murders.
Those are really getting annoying, too.
Read More |
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Your Wi-Fi Network’s Soft Underbelly
|
|
You probably don’t even think about
this easy way for hackers to sneak in. |
|
By Josephine Wolff |
Slate
|
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|
|
You probably don’t spend much time thinking
about your wireless router—until it stops
working, that is. Our inattention to routers
has been a security problem for years, most
recently last week when
Brian Krebs reported that
researchers at the Fujitsu Security
Operations Center had discovered hundreds of
routers were being used to spread a
financial fraud malware called Dyre.
Read More |
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|
Requiem for a Golf Course |
|
by Fred Altvater |
B9R Lessons |
|
|
 The
Golf economy today is a mixed bag, while some areas of the golf
business are very strong, other parts are suffering.
Part of the reason is that young people do
not seem to be taking to the game as the
older generation did. With the variety of
activities available to the X and Y
Generations, other sports seem to be more
attractive.
A slow walk around a golf course can’t compete with mountain
biking or zip-lines.
Read More |
|
|
| Fraud |
| Activists
began campaigning to change the understanding
of the 2nd Amendment in the late 20th century |
| By Larry Laird |
lairdslair |
| |
“One
of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the
word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special
interest groups that I’ve ever seen in my life
time. The real purpose of the Second was to
ensure that state armies—the militias—would
be maintained for the defense of the state.
The very language of the Second Amendment refutes
any argument that it was intended to guarantee
every citizen an unfettered right to any kind
of weapon he or she desires.”
---- Chief Supreme
Court Justice Warren Burger
Justice Burger said
in no uncertain terms, before gun lobbyists
and activists began campaigning to change the
understanding of the 2nd Amendment in the late
20th century, nobody considered it to be an
individual right.
In 2008, the right
wing contingent on the most recent Supreme Court
(the same people who said that corporations
are people) decided to throw away centuries
of juris prudence and extend the 2ndAmendment
as an individual protection for gun owners’
right to bear arms. During the case, United
States v. Emerson, the Supreme Court decided
that the 2nd Amendment is not a collective protection
for gun ownership in militias, but rather a
protection for individuals to own and operate
weapons. This decision flies in the face of
centuries of settled law and, like Citizens
United v. FEC is just another case where right
wing extremist wearing robes have perverted
our country’s longstanding understanding of
our laws.” |
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