WNC ProgressiveEdition

Creep-in-chief interrupted a call with the Irish prime minister to comment on a reporter’s looks

Posted at 9:46 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Jen Hayden
Irish reporter Caitriona Perry was in the Oval Office, along with a gaggle of Irish media, to cover a call between Donald Trump and Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar. Trump apparently noticed her and liked what he saw because the next thing you know, he’s interrupting the call with a foreign head of state to call her over. ...
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Sally Yates: ‘That’s not the standard of conduct that we’re looking for from our president’

Posted at 9:16 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Mark Sumner
On Tuesday, former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates took time out to praise Special Counsel Robert Mueller, saying that we should have “tremendous confidence” in Mueller, and that he was a “consummate professional.” “He is going to call it like he sees it. He’s going to do this the right way.” ...

More official tilt for proposed Lake Michigan-hugging golf course

Posted at 8:46 on June 28, 2017 by noreply@blogger.com James Rowen
The threat to pristine land next to and even inside a popular state park on the Lake Michigan shoreline is getting more serious.The Wisconsin Natural Resources Board agreed at a regularly-scheduled meeting Wednesday to allow The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to begin amending the master plan ...

Good news! Mayors resist Trump’s rotten climate policies with commitment to 100% renewables by 2035

Posted at 8:46 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Meteor Blades
Remember that decades-old phrase “think globally, act locally”? The message behind it made a big splash Monday. Activists are needed to turn the message into reality. While the Trump regime works diligently to turn its lethal, climate science-denying lunacy into federal policy, 1,400 American mayors have added their numbers to the resistance against it. In ...

Hint: Trump’s ‘re-election’ campaign isn’t about re-election. It’s about pocketing campaign cash

Posted at 8:16 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Hunter
It’s been five months or so and Team Trump hasn’t gotten around to staffing most of their own administration, but Donald Trump is already holding his first re-election fundraiser. It’s tonight. The lowest-tier tickets will set you back $35,000 per person. And of course, he’s holding it at the Washington D.C. hotel he, personally, owns—thus pocketing a tidy sum for having the event in the first place. ...

A DC hotel wouldn’t cancel a hate group event, so these are the signs that ‘greeted’ attendees

Posted at 7:46 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Gabe Ortiz
The Southern Poverty Law Center has for years now exposed the Federation for America Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) ties to white supremacists, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers, but that still didn’t seem to make the Phoenix Park Hotel think twice about hosting the hate group’s annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” ...

Abortion providers put themselves at risk of violence and sexual assault for simply doing their jobs

Posted at 7:16 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Kelly Macias
Abortion providers are at risk for all kinds of violence for doing their jobs and making sure that women have access to safe, legal abortions. We often hear about the fanatical pro-lifers who protest, stalk and harass people who work at clinics that provide reproductive health services for women. We know that they make these workplaces incredibly unsafe for these employees. But we don’t ever hear about how that work also ...

Trump, a self-declared ‘closer,’ chokes on Senate Republicans’ healthcare repeal effort

Posted at 7:00 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Kerry Eleveld
Media reveled Wednesday in Mitch McConnell’s “misery” at having to postpone the vote on his “...

Spotlight on green news & views: Lesson for Earthlings from woodpecker that destroyed its home

Posted at 6:46 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Meteor Blades
This is the 507th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) usually appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the June 24 Green Spo...

‘Kill the Bill, Don’t Kill Me!’: Americans with Disabilities Lead the Fight Against Trumpcare

Posted at 6:31 on June 28, 2017 by julia
Julia Conley, staff writer Protesters staged sit-ins at Senate offices across the country, demanding ‘No’ votes on GOP’s healthcare bill ...

Republican senators in five states will face AFL-CIO ad campaign against Trumpcare

Posted at 6:16 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Laura Clawson
Unions fought hard to pass healthcare reform in 2009 and 2010 (and before) and they’re part of the fight against Republican efforts to take us back to the bad old days by passing Trumpcare with a campaign targeting Republican senators in five states:...

Mitch McConnell is great at leading his team to destroy stuff, but can he actually govern?

Posted at 6:01 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Joan McCarter
Campaign Action Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has had phenomenally destructive success leading his conference over the years, keeping a tight rein on his members and forcing them to toe the party line in all of his outrageously undemocratic schemes. Like a blockade against a well-qualified, non-controversial Supreme Court nominee that left a vac...

Trump Teases a "Great Surprise" on Healthcare

Posted at 5:46 on June 28, 2017 by Melissa McEwan
[Content Note: Video may autoplay at link.] This fucking guy: [Donald] Trump claimed Wednesday that Senate Republicans have a “big surprise” on their healthcare bill, while also declaring the measure is coming “along very well.” “Healthcare is working along very well,” Trump said after meeting with baseball...

Black farmers in America continue to wait for their 40 acres and a mule that will never come

Posted at 5:46 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Kelly Macias
Black folk across the country are well familiar with the notion of “40 acres and a mule.” Referring to the federal government’s promise of reparations in the form of land to newly freed slaves, it was a promise that was short-lived. The idea was born out of a discussion between General William T. Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and 20 lea...

As White House Cracks Down on Press, Calls Grow for Journalists to Fight Back

Posted at 5:31 on June 28, 2017 by jake
Jake Johnson, staff writer “This is not how an elected government behaves in a true democracy.” —Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause ...

New Data on Wealth Mobility and Their Impact on Models of Inequality

Posted at 5:16 on June 28, 2017 by Mark Thoma
Daniel Carroll and Nick Hoffman of the Cleveland Fed: New Data on Wealth Mobility and Their Impact on Models of Inequality: Wealth inequality, the unequal distribution of assets across households, has been rising for decades. However, this statistic alone gives an incomplete picture of the inequality of hou...

Border agents raided this lifesaving medical camp. Now it’s forced to turn immigrants away

Posted at 5:16 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Gabe Ortiz
Following a Customs and Border Protection raid that resulted in the arrests of several undocumented immigrants, a lifesaving medical camp along the U.S./Mexico border said it “...

Mueller’s Russia probe has no formal deadlines, but midterm politics loom

Posted at 5:01 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Kerry Eleveld
Special counsel Robert Mueller has been on the job just six weeks and already his portfolio includes scrutinizing the financial connections between team Trump and Russia, examining the full breadth of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election (from bots to voting systems), exploring possible collusion between Trump associates and Russian operatives, and assessing Trump’s interference with the FBI investigation. In short, it’s an awesome task and while he has no formal...

Those lower Trumpcare premiums? They’d buy you very little

Posted at 4:46 on June 28, 2017 by rss@dailykos.com Joan McCarter
Campaign Action There was very little in the Congressional Budget Office score of the Senate’s version of Trumpcare that they could point to as good news. But there was one little sliver, that premiums for people buying their own insurance would be about 20 percent lower than under current law, the Affordable Care Act. There are just a ...

House Energy & Commerce Committee Approves Shameful “Polluter Protection” Bills

Posted at 4:46 on June 28, 2017 by jenna
Food & Water Watch Today, the House Energy & Commerce Committee rapidly approved several bills promoting dirty energy and rolling back environmental protections. The committee marked up t...