There will be a town hall style debate on the new health care bill on Monday at 9:00pm on CNN. It will feature Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy on one side and Bernie Sanders and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar on the other. It should be a good debate since I doubt that any senator has studied the issue of health care more than Sanders. But unfortunately I don’t get cable TV and will have to read about it later.
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Bernie Sanders delivered what was supposed to be a major foreign policy address on Wednesday at Westminster College in Fulton, MO, the location of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. His speech starts at the 24-minute mark and ends at the 1:19 mark.
The prepared remarks can be read here. First, here are the positive elements.
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There are weird goings on in the state of Alabama. When Jeff Sessions was picked by Donald Trump to be attorney general, his senate seat fell vacant. Governor Robert Bentley picked the state attorney general Luther Strange (whom Trump keeps referring to as ‘big Luther Strange’) to replace him with a special election to be held along with the 2018 elections in November. But then Bentley had to resign in April because of a tawdry sex scandal (of course) and his successor Kay Ivey brought the special election forward to December 12 of this year, with the primary to be held on August 15 and in the event that no candidate got mote than 50% of the vote, a run-off to be held next Tuesday on September 26.
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In an interview with The Intercept, Bernie Sanders delivers some much needed perspective into the US foreign policy debates.
“I consider [Saudi Arabia] to be an undemocratic country that has supported terrorism around the world, it has funded terrorism. … They are not an ally of the United States.”
The Vermont senator accused the “incredibly anti-democratic” Saudis of “continuing to fund madrasas” and spreading “an extremely radical Wahhabi doctrine in many countries around the world.”
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It turns out that even the major players in the health industry don’t like the Graham-Cassidy bill.
Backers of the GOP Graham-Cassidy health-care bill — Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., plus President Trump via Twitter — maintain it doesn’t touch protections for those with pre-existing conditions. And Cassidy also says the legislation will cover MORE people than current law does.
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When US presidents get on their high horse at places like the United Nations and start moralizing and criticizing whichever nation happens to be the current enemy, it provides perfect examples of ‘psychological projection‘, the practice where people “defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.”
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Jimmy Kimmel excoriates the senator from Louisiana who is the co-author of the so-called Graham-Cassidy health care bill that the Republicans are trying to jam through Congress with minimal debate before the September 30the deadline. Cassidy had earlier promised Kimmel and millions of others that any bill that he proposed would provide a list of protections for people but what he is actually proposing has none of them. Kimmel delivers a righteous rant on the topic, explaining clearly why this bill is so bad and why it must be defeated.
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A new study finds that atheists behave more fairly toward Christians than Christians behave toward atheists. While this may be welcomed by atheists as signifying that they are less troubled by meaningless divisions, the study authors suggest that this may be due to atheists trying to overcome public perceptions that they have inferior moral qualities.
The economic game was a modified version of the Dictator Game, in which one person (the dictator) is asked to share a monetary reward with another person who can only passively accept what is offered.
A pilot study with 205 participants revealed that people believed atheists would treat Christians unfairly. But three experiments, which included nearly 1,200 U.S. residents, found almost the opposite was true.
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Matt Taibbi attended Donald Trump’s rally last month in Phoenix and said the occasion was one in which Trump’s descent into what looks like madness became quite marked. He noticed that unlike before, Trump seemed to struggle to hold on to the audience’s attention, unlike the way he had been able to do before during the campaign, largely because he seemed to be unable to read the crowd and respond accordingly.
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