Sunday, February 23rd, 2020
IGOR DERYSH, Staff Writer - Salon
Stephan: All day today as I was working on a paper I listened to CNN, FOX, and MSNBC to see how they would cover the Nevada Caucus. I was particularly interested in how they discussed healthcare, which I think is, or should be, a defining issue in the upcoming election.
Predictably FOX was a disinformation operation for people whose IQs seem to be roughly twice their waist size. I really find it amazing that anyone takes this propaganda spew seriously; yet I know millions do, and it is very depressing.
MSNBC was so blatantly corporatist I got to thinking why this should be the case? I think the answer may be that about 50% of their advertising is for pharmaceuticals. MSNBC lives on the largesse of the illness profit system.
Once again their open anti-Sanders bias was on full display. Out of some crypt in Arkansas, they located the body of James Carville and, in a display of full Frankensteinian reanimation, got him to talk and interviewed him. This was followed by Chris Matthews who to my astonishment compared a Sanders victory to Vichy France at the beginning of World War II. (Matthews really should retire before he makes a worse fool of himself than he does most days.)
CNN had the best day of it; its commentators did not overly embarrass themselves, and actually talked about relevant issues.
But the point none of them will really discuss with any intelligence or integrity is that facts are facts, and the facts are that replacing America's illness profit system with universal birthright Medicare-for-all healthcare will save hundreds of billions of dollars and save many tens of thousands of American lives. Here is an article on two good recent research studies on this, one from Yale, the other from Harvard.
None of this will come as a surprise to my regular SR readers, who are very familiar with these facts. I am publishing this report, now, because I hope each of you will talk to family and friends and get their heads screwed on right on the healthcare issue. The report has lots of click-throughs that will take you to the primary source material; that's why I picked it. 2020 may be America's last chance to get a functioning healthcare system devoted to... health and wellbeing.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks while introducing health care legislation titled the “Medicare for All Act of 2019” with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), during a news conference on Capitol Hill, on April 9, 2019 in Washington, DC.
Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty
Two new studies found that the Medicare for All plan proposed by candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., would cost less than the public option proposed by former Vice President Joe Biden and other moderates in the Democratic primary.
Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg have repeatedly argued that the Medicare for All proposal would be too expensive. They have instead proposed a public option or “Medicare for all who want it,” which they argue would be more fiscally sound.
“Sanders’ ‘Medicare for All’ plan “would cost more than the entire federal budget that we spend now,” Biden claimed during a debate earlier this month, which PolitiFact rated as false.
Biden has repeatedly demanded to know how Sanders plans to pay for the proposal. […]
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Sunday, February 23rd, 2020
Alex Henderson, - Raw Story
Stephan: This article presents some very revealing research about the cultures of Red and Blue states. You can draw your own conclusions.
Trumpers
Credit: Shutterstock
A recurring theme among far-right culture warriors — from President Donald Trump to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — is that Republican-dominated states represent “the real America” and a commitment to family values while Democrat-dominated states don’t. But a new report/study by the personal finance website WalletHub finds that red states are the most likely to engage in “sinful behavior.”
Although WalletHub’s report wasn’t political in nature, one can draw some political conclusions based on the data. In the survey, WalletHub analyzed all 50 states in the U.S. for “sinful” behaviors that included “anger and hatred, jealousy, excesses and vices, greed, lust, vanity and laziness.” And the ten states most likely to behave in a “sinful” way, according to that criteria, include Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi — all of which went for Trump in the 2016 presidential election and have a strong Christian right presence.
However, the state that made #4 on the list is most definitely
not a red state: California. Although California was very […]
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Sunday, February 23rd, 2020
Frank Schaeffer, - Alternet
Stephan: Given the data in the previous story, I think the correlation between hypocritical self-righteousness and fundamentalist evangelical "christianity" is obvious. These are the Trumpers. Perhaps they don't care about their cult leader's moral failings because in the quiet of their own hearts they recognize their own.
Evangelical Fundamentalist
Credit: Shutterstock
There is a great exodus taking place in Christian circles. Can it be called a loss of faith? I don’t think so. It is rather a loss of confidence in everything at once. Christianity has always been about “the Word,” but these days, words don’t seem to matter. They’ve lost their power to describe and convince in the face of horrible deeds, from climate-change denial to the persecution of trans people to the wholesale abandonment of Christ’s teachings in favor of abusive meanness. The hard-right white evangelical voter gave us Trump. The church sat silent as industrial oligarchs ruined the earth.
Christianity is improbable. When its cultural presence fades, be that through the Roman Catholic sex-abuse meltdown or because of the Trumping of white evangelicalism, all that’s left is disillusionment. Presuppositional theology—the sort of “apologetics” my late father Francis Schaeffer dealt in—only works if you accept the possibility that some of “this” (i.e., the entire claim of “historical” Christianity) might be true. Fewer and fewer people do these […]
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Sunday, February 23rd, 2020
Stephan: I was a Boy Scout, even an Eagle Scout, but only parenthetically a Boy Scout. I had the enormous good fortune to join Troop 3 at Calvary Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, run by Bill and Nancy Bumiller. They cared very little for the quasi-militaristic Boy Scout structure and focused instead on teaching boys woodscraft and survival skills. It changed the course of my life. But there was another troop nearby and I still remember the whisperings amongst boys from that troop about a scout master in the troop who was clearly a pedophile.
Robert Baden-Powell the founder of the Boy Scouts was an authoritarian closeted aggressively "Christian" gay man, who by numerous accounts contemporaries report loved to watch naked boys play at a swimming hole. So maybe, like the Catholic Church, sexual interaction with boys was baked into the organization's structure. Not that all gay men are pedophiles, that is a grossly unfair canard. But the data does suggest there seems to be a correlation between authoritarian explicitly religious homosexual men who choose to spend a lot of time around young boys and pedophilia.
Whatever the reason for it, that the Boy Scouts have been devastated by child sexual abuse is a reality that is now being faced, as this report recounts.
A ranger closes a Boy Scouts of America camp gate on May 9, 2018, outside Payson, Utah.
Credit: George Frey/Getty
The Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy Tuesday as the century-old institution faces spiraling costs from hundreds of sexual abuse lawsuits. The group’s bankruptcy filing in Delaware listed whopping liabilities that ranged between $100 million and $500 million and assets of $1 billion to $10 billion.* In response to the deluge of suits, the youth organization that says it currently serves more than 2 million youths began positioning itself for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as far back as December 2018, but the actual filing didn’t take place until this week.
By seeking bankruptcy protection, the outdoor and youth leadership group, which claims more than 110 million participants since its inception, puts a halt to the litigation and will give the Boy Scouts a window to negotiate settlements with those who have sued, potentially rolling all claims into a single final resolution. It’s a similar approach used by […]
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Saturday, February 22nd, 2020
Stephan A. Schwartz, Editor - Schwartzreport
Stephan:
I got a very nasty email today from a Trumper berating me about my "constant harping" on the criminality of Trump and his administration. "Sure, Trump has made some mistakes," she wrote, "but you are absolutely lying when you say that Trump is any more corrupt than any other administration. You should check Alex Jone's Infowar site to get the real information."
Well, SR deals with actual facts not the kind of disinformation propaganda to be found on Infowars or to be heard on Fox. So what are the incontestable facts? Here is a simple graph (covering less than the first two years of Trump's presidency, but you can already see the point) that can be easily checked by anyone with enough intelligence to do a Google.
As you can see going back half a century there is no prior administration, even the 2nd place Nixon administration, that even approaches the criminality of Trump and his minions. Equally important, in my view and as you can see, criminality is virtually the exclusive domain of the Republican Party. Republicans do not support democracy, nor do they respect and support integrity in office.
Today's edition of SR is focused on just a portion of the grifting and criminality that has come to light in the last few days. It's like reading a Batman comicbook,
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