caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

I'm not usually very good at predicting the future. I mean, I can see trends, and sometimes my brain works faster than I'm conscious of, resulting in gut feelings. But for some reason, today I feel like making a few very specific predictions about the next 3 years. Feel free to chime in with what you think as well.

Hell, it will be funny to look back on this in three years and be amazed at how crazy I thought the future would be.

We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

Today is the anniversary of the United States Coast Guard (in Lego) but I'm not here to talk about that.

Instead I want to discuss heroism.

Admiral Paul F. Zukunft, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, has personally informed each of the 13 Transgendered (that we know of) members of his service that he will not enforce Trump's tweeted orders to dismiss them.

"I will not turn my back. We have made an investment in you and you have made an investment in the Coast Guard, and I will not break faith."

I'm reading a lot of reaction to the push back by Abortion Rights activists against the policy articulated by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Ben Ray Luján not to withhold financial support from anti-Choice candidates (which I wrote about Monday), most of it from Corporatist Institutional Democrats and their centrist sycophants.

Their argument goes something like this-

"Hey you Hippies, you said you wanted us to get serious about the 'economy stupid' so we made up this crappy slogan 'A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages, Papa John's' and slapped together some tepid and ineffectual 'reforms' that don't bother our Plutocrat paymasters much and to prove our sincerity we're abandoning all that 'Social Justice' stuff that pisses off the angry white male Trump voters.

Remember, we're the less evil ones."

Where to begin?

We elected a Neo-Liberal's Neo-Liberal

His popularity is tanking faster than Hollande's did.

Persephone Smith is a 46-year-old veteran, who served in the Navy special forces as an Explosive Ordinance Disposal technician. She's also a transgender woman.

Smith is running for the City Council in Brooklyn.

With the governor of West Virginia switching back to being a Republican, this is what the political map of the United States looks like.

Is national health insurance Constitutional? It's an issue we supporters of single-payer need to take seriously because our opponents will almost certainly argue that it is not in an attempt to prevent passage and will also challenge the Medicare for All Act on constitutional grounds when it becomes law.

Our blindness to what these words are telling us is really astounding. My first time to fully comprehend the contradiction came from an experience while I was teaching at Harvard in 1969. The medical community in the Boston area put together a “Health University” which was a sixteen week course contributed by health care professionals at every level. At the end they distilled what the many discussions and brainstorming sessions had produced and came up with a set of wonderful proposals.

Well, that didn't take long.
Someone in the Trump Administration pondered pulling our troops out of Afghanistan, but it appears that it was never taken seriously.