caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Marcelas Owens created quite a stir six years ago as the "Obamacare Kid." At the time he was a chubby 11-year-old African-American boy in a black vest who watched President Obama sign the AFA into law.

Marcelas' mother died because she didn't have health insurance, Owens says. She was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension in 2006. Her illness caused her to miss days at work, which led to her losing her job. She was denied Medicaid because she had earned too much money working the previous year.

So Marcelas started attending Obamacare rallies and "gave a human face to an abstract political isse."

Marcelas stepped into a new role. While other kids his age could barely mumble while speaking before a class, he was speaking to crowds of up to 6,000 people at rallies. At one rally in Seattle, he met U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from the state of Washington.

And when the Affordable Care Act was passed, he was invited to the White House signing ceremony. He still talks about the experience with a sense of awe.

"I got a high five and fist bump from Barack Obama!"

So this is all old news and some of you may have heard this story and more.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thirteen years ago today, the United States invaded Iraq.
So it's not without a small amount of irony that this was one of today's headline.

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Tuesday March 20, 1906
New York, New York - A Reporter Tells of Travels with Mother Jones in West Virginia

From New York City, a reporter describes, for the Pittsburgh Evening Leader of Kansas, a journey with Mother Jones throughout West Virginia. The reporter describes a similar journey with Mother in 1901, back before Mother's break with John Mitchell, while she was still employed as an organizer for the United Mine Workers. Who sponsored this trip, the reporter does not say, nor is the identity of the reporter revealed, but what is made obvious is the love of the coal miners and their wives for Mother Jones, the Miners' Angel.

Stumbled over this discussion between Robert Scheer and Thomas Frank over at Truthdig: Scheer and Frank talk about Democrats shift away from addressing income inequality It's an audio but the transcript is provided.

I would say the major takeaway is that a triangulating centrist Democrat President is more effective at delivering Republican policies than a Republican President.

As the world knows by now, Hillary Clinton lit her credibility on fire last week in an interview with Mrs. Alan Greenspan:

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, Calif., told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”

She then tried to minimize the furor her outrageous lie caused by claiming she “misspoke,” and pretended she had meant their work on Alzheimer’s disease and stem cell research. Which she also mentioned in the interview, unfortunately for her.

“While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on H.I.V. and AIDS,” she said in a statement about two hours after her interview had been shown on MSNBC. “For that, I’m sorry.”

Sec. Clinton has been widely criticized for this statement, as well as for the “apology.” She has been predictably defended by her partisans, citing irrelevant Clinton Foundation work, making insulting false equivalency charges against her opponent, claiming that the problem is really sexism (the last refuge of a cornered Clintonite), telling us we just mustn't speak of it, pleading for sympathy because she must have been "tired," and of course by simple head-up-the-ass denial. Outraged commentary is appearing in many quarters, elsewhere we find mystification. And of course some concerned folks are advising us to get over it.

Well, we will not just get over it.

I am slowly migrating the content which I created over at the Great Orange Satan and some other websites here to C99.

This article is interesting now because we are coming close to the last budget cycle of the Obama presidency, his last chance to arrange a "Grand Bargain" to ingratiate himself to the 1 percenters that will pay for his Presidential library and line his pockets in his Post-Presidential earning years.

Effective March 10, the Michigan Secretary of State has altered the policy on transgender people changing the gender on our driver's license.

Under the new policy, a passport denoting current gender is enough proof to change the gender on the license. The old policy required proof that the applicant had undergone sex reassignment surgery.

The above title speaks for itself. It does not contain my interpretation of Sanders nor that of any Bernie Bro, or Berner or Millenial or Hobbit, either.

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Sunday March 19, 1916
From The Masses: Bob Minor Sends a Letter from Paris

A Letter From Bob Minor
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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features The King of the Blues, B.B. King. Enjoy!