Good morning! Or what's left of it!

Here's your daily LTE roundup via the usual suspects!

Enjoy!

Posted by LoneStarMike

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Bernie2016/Hillary2016/Senator Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders 3,818,086 Presidential Campaign Page

Hillary Clinton 3,132,987 Presidential Campaign Page

Bernie Sanders 3,714,585 U. S. Senatorial Page

Tuesday, Bernie had 678,445 more likes than Sec. Clinton

Today, Bernie has 685,099 more likes than Sec. Clinton

(The gap widens and it’s the highest it’s ever been)

The first of today’s graphics. It’s oh-so-New York.

Dream about this

The Press Democrat LTE #1— Santa Rosa, California

I was greatly disappointed in the letter by Bob Marketos (“Stick to the Facts,” Tuesday), first because his supposedly factual reading of the letter by Jon Stiffler was sorely non-factual in itself. But here’s what really got me: “We all like dreams and unicorns, but it takes time and process to get things done.” Speaking of dreams and unicorns, here are a couple that history will corroborate.

In the 1970s, you could get a CSU or University of California education by paying tuition of $650 per year or less. Inflation adjusted, that is $3,714 in today’s dollars. Everywhere in unicorn-infested Europe, it is currently free. Is it a dream to think today’s students should get an affordable college education like we did in the ‘70s? I don’t think so. Especially when the money will come from a tax on Wall Street.

The rest of the modern world provides health care to its inhabitants as a right. Canada, Ireland, Germany, England and France provide top quality care to all residents without charge. The complaint that it can’t be free is true. Medicare for all would mean taxpayers pay into a single-payer system that would save the average person thousands of dollars per year. Where’s the unicorn?

Just because the neocons have returned us to the gilded age does not mean it is forever. Teddy Roosevelt and FDR proved that. If we all stand together, there is nothing we can’t accomplish. This is what it means to take our country back, like Bernie Sanders says and Stiffler wrote.

Facts and myths

The Press Democrat LTE #2— Santa Rosa, California

(Doesn’t mention Bernie at all, but it’s still a good LTE)

In his letter, “GMO myths” on March 29, Jeffrey Rapp fabricated several “myths” of his own.

Myth: “It is a fact that since the time of Luther Burbank we have been using GMOs.”

Truth: Luther Burbank lived from 1849-1925. The first recombinant DNA techniques were developed in 1973. (Note: Since the discovery of recombinant DNA techniques, the term GMO has come to refer to organisms which are genetically engineered in a lab using recombinant DNA technology. Prior to that, GMO referred to selective breeding.)

Myth: “(We) have been using GMOs to our great advantage and health.”

If by “we,” Rapp refers to Monsanto et al, there is some truth to this statement: Today more than 80 percent of GMO crops worldwide are “Roundup ready.” Monsanto’s Roundup is the world’s largest selling pesticide. The four largest biotech seed companies own between 70 and 80 percent of the U.S. corn and soybean markets. They also control more than half of the world’s seed supply.

Truth: There is no evidence that GMO food is healthy. In fact no safety studies are required by the FDA before approval. Animal feeding studies have linked GMO foods to multiple toxic effects.

Myth: GMO crops are “feeding millions of people in third world countries who might otherwise starve.”

Truth: Genetic engineering has not increased the yield over time of any commercialized crops.

Family Leave

Light on Dark Money

The Press Democrat LTE #3— Santa Rosa, California

In answer to a recent letter writer who claims Bernie Sanders supporters are not “sticking to the facts” and are making “misleading implications,” but then states that “there is no dark money allowed directly to candidates,” I take exception. First off, we need to define the term “dark money.” In January 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 in the Citizens United case. A 501(c)(4), the IRS tax code for a tax exempt “social welfare” groups can hide the identities of their donors from the public, reporting only to the IRS. These are deemed “dark money” groups. Immediately the sums pledged by donors soared from $13 million in 2009 to more than $900 million after the Citizens United decision.

Now anyone could spend any amount of money without revealing who they are and can pool vast resources to fund interlocking arrays of networks working in tandem to influence and ultimately control the courts, statehouses and Congress.

There definitely is dark money at play, and Bernie Sanders is the only one talking about it. That’s not misleading.

Speaking of Dark Money…

Bernie Sanders is an excellent choice for president

Poughkeepsie Journal LTE — Poughkeepsie, New York

Bernie Sanders has popular proposals, ranging from renewable energy and infrastructure jobs to Medicare for all to free public college to paid family leave, and has detailed how to pay for them, partly by getting Wall Street and the wealthy to pay their fair share.

Funded by many small contributions, Sanders can take on powerful interests and favor ordinary folks instead.

The rejoinders to Sanders’ popular plans are that they are:

1. Impossible to get through Congress

2. Unaffordable

The first says that we are stuck, the political system so captured by the powerful that little can be done except tweaks.

The second is nonsense. Many other nations have such programs. Our only problem is the first — powerful interests want the money spent on other things.

So the contest for the nomination, the soul of the Democratic Party, and what kind of country we will be, really comes down to this:

Do people come first, or does money and economic power?

Skip over excessive media coverage of Donald Trump’s gaffes and insults, conveniently distracting the public. Check out instead Bernie’s popular proposals to help the middle class at berniesanders.com — and his record of opposing the Iraq War, and favoring diplomacy over military intervention.

With growing momentum, polls suggest he is the Democrat most likely to win the general election.

Bernie Sanders is the best chance in most of our lifetimes to turn the flow of power back to people. Do not lose it.

The primary is April 19.

A closer view of Bernie’s ship. Hopefully he’ll be “Cruising to Victory.”

Americans must reject stacked deck of elections

The Express Times LTE — Easton, Pennsylvania

Make no mistake about it: America's political system is rigged. Republican officials know who they want to represent the party and it isn't Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Apparently the "Establishment" can write its own self-serving rules for each convention. They further manipulate a close race by doing everything in their power to create a brokered convention. Does that really surprise anyone?

The Democrats are every bit as slippery. The joker they slipped into their political deck of cards is what they laughingly call "Super Delegates." Each such delegate gets a single vote. However, theirs is the equivalent of 10,000 of yours or mine. Good luck, Bernie Sanders!

The Supreme Court also gets credit for the political morass it helped to create. The court allowed the wealthiest of the wealthy to maintain absolute control of our nation through their unlimited funding of superPACs. Of course mud-slinging, yellow journalism and the general manipulating of the press by the wealthy has long been an integral part of American politics. Is it any wonder Americans find it more and more difficult to find an honest leader, a true leader of the people?

I am every bit as frustrated as the rest of my American brothers and sisters. However, my solitary protest vote will not be cast for some self-serving blowhard.

We need to rebuild our country from its roots. We need to rebuild it using the principles upon which it was built by our forefathers. And we need to pull together for the common good before it is too late.

Excitement From Coast to Coast!

Sanders the only solid candidate

The Daily Iowan LTE — Iowa City, Iowa

Reagan dropped taxes on the upper bracket of the rich from 70 percent to 30 percent, supported policy that weakened unions, and raised debt with questionable foreign interventions. Clinton broke Glass-Steagall de-regulating the banks, signed NAFTA outsourcing jobs, and through his welfare reform further primed the prison pipeline. George W. Bush cut taxes for the rich while blowing trillions on Middle Eastern safaris. The Supreme Court Citizens United decision allows the rich to spend unrestrictedly in any national contest. And a bizarre cabal of zero-taxation zero-government policy makers has risen to power.

The results: The profits have risen straight to the top few percent, which has used it to buy up the media and the politicians and create think tanks to provide messaging to these mouthpieces. And so, education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and the worker are all under attack, health care remains private and unaffordable for many, and the cost of college is growing beyond students’ financial capacity — all for a parasitic group of super wealthy (many of which inherited its privilege).

Production has risen steadily since the 1940s, but since the 1980s, the working classes and poor have lost ground. Those working are working more hours for less, and while one earner supported a family in the 1950s, two earners today barely get by.

The U.S. needs to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour ($30,000/year), establish national health care, re-establish taxing the upper bracket of the rich (under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent), re-regulate the banks, fund education, demand United States businesses stay home, and stay out of other people’s countries except to offer aid.

For all these reasons, Bernie Sanders is the only solid candidate for president in 2016.

Come Out Of The Darkness And Into The Light

Posted by Don midwest

THE GLOBAL CONSEQUENCES OF HILLARY CLINTON’S PREDATORY PRAGMATISM

Clinton’s enthusiastic hawkishness first appeared during the beginning weeks of her tenure in 2009, wherein she supported General Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops to be deployed to Afghanistan. According to Bob Woodward’s book, “Obama’s Wars,” Clinton not only backed the troop surge but concluded that it was necessary. “I endorse this effort,” Clinton said. “It comes with enormous cost, but if we go half-hearted we’ll achieve nothing. We must act like we’re going to win.” A report by Neta C. Crawford for The Watson Institute of International Studies determined the number of direct civilian war deaths in Afghanistan for 2009 was 2,412. The total direct civilian war deaths in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2013 amounts to 14,075.

In 2010, Hillary Clinton visited Haiti as part of a public relations stunt that allowed her to see firsthand the devastation wrought by the earthquake that killed at least 100,000. This performance was primarily meant to demonstrate solidarity and show the international community that the United States would be there to help in reconstruction efforts. Yet, her visit came less than a year after the U.S. State Department, then led by Clinton, had pressured the government of Haiti into denying laborers a wage increase of $0.62.

Pregnant, on Medicaid, and Being Watched

IF YOU’RE RELYING on the public health care system, you’re living your life under surveillance, says Khiara Bridges, a law professor and anthropology researcher at the Boston University School of Law.

All sorts of incredibly invasive details about your life, including sexual experience, eating habits, and job history, are stored in databases that are accessible not only to your caregivers, but potentially to law enforcement, too, she says.

Bridges will be discussing her research on the routine and invasive monitoring of women who require certain public health care assistance on Friday at a Georgetown Law School conference titled “The Color of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of the Black Community.”

Her first book, Reproducing Race, featured four women at a New York City public hospital whom she followed from May 2006 to September 2007. These women were enrolled in the Prenatal Care Assistance Program, which serves uninsured and underinsured women, including undocumented immigrant women.

The women start by going through what she calls “information canvassing” in order to enroll — answering questions on topics “from sexual abuse, to intimate partner violence, to how often they ate, what they ate, how they make their money, how their partner makes their money.”

Snowden: Surveillance is about “social control,” not terrorism Former NSA contractor spoke to packed theatre on Panama Papers, Bill C-51, and more

Remember when the leader of dailykos didn’t give a shit about Snowden?

Posted in News, Top News

Snowden: Surveillance is about “social control,” not terrorism

“To whom do you owe a bigger loyalty: to the law, or to justice?”

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who gained international fame after leaking classified documents to journalists at The Guardian, reflected on his choice to risk his safety and his life to expose the actions of the American government, which included monitoring private phone calls and emails. “Eventually, you have to make an individual decision, a moral decision, a decision of conscience,” he said.

As the last entry in the Spring 2016 President’s Dream Colloquium on Big Data, Snowden spoke to a crowd of roughly 3,000 people at a packed Queen Elizabeth Theatre, with even more watching via live webstream. Charged with three felonies and unable to return to his home in the United States, Snowden is currently living in Russia on a three-year temporary asylum.

Shane Pointe, elder-in-residence of the Vancouver School Board and a member of the Musqueam band, began the night with a traditional Coast Salish greeting. Pointe had kind words to say about Snowden: “He’s a brave man who did a brave thing: He told the truth.”

CBC anchor Laura Lynch moderated the event and did not mince words as to the controversy surrounding the featured speaker. “To some he is a hero. To others he is a traitor.”