Morning Reads

As we continue our effort to keep you up-to-date on how money corrupts American government and politics, as well as other news of the day, we’re pleased to publish this daily digest compiled by BillMoyers.com’s Michael Winship


Three civilians shot, more than 100 arrested in Ferguson –> Among the protesters taken into custody were activists Cornel West, Johnetta “Netta” Elzie and DeRay McKesson. Details at Jezebel, The Guardian, Vice News, Mashable.

Nurses care for Bernie –> John Nichols at The Nation reports on National Nurses United’s big endorsement of Bernie Sanders yesterday — the first for Sanders from a major national union — and quotes union executive director RoseAnn DeMoro, “Most Presidential candidates take money from billionaires. Bernie wants to take money from the billionaires too – by taxing them to fund a civil society with the health care, the jobs, the housing, the education, and the environmental protections that people need.”

Meanwhile, the controversy continues over the disruption of a rally in Seattle on Saturday by two women who said they represented #BlackLivesMatter. Sanders was supposed to speak but was unable to do so. David Atkins and Martin Longman at Washington Monthly have differing views on the incident, while organizer and Sanders supporter Douglas Williams at The South Lawn blog writes an article headlined, “Black Lives Matter and the Failure to Build a Movement” (mature language). AND at the Stranger, Washington State Senator Pramila Jayapal — who addressed the Seattle event just before Sanders was supposed to speak — writes “Why Saturday’s Bernie Sanders Rally Left Me Feeling Heartbroken.”

FYI, here’s Sanders’ “Racial Justice” issues page. Last night, he spoke to 16,000 at a rally in Los Angeles.

ALSO, The New York Times: “Lawrence Lessig to Explore a Run for President as a Democrat.”

Why Scott Walker should change his first name to ALEC –> Historian and Talking Points Memo contributing editor Brian Murphy has written a thorough and thoroughly frightening examination of the Wisconsin governor’s passionate embrace of the conservative, big business-friendly American Legislative Exchange Council: “It’s possible that no American politician who holds office today has worked harder to successfully advance ALEC’s agenda than Walker. And no previous candidate for the White House has ever owed so much to ALEC at the outset of his campaign.”

“The Myth of a Better Deal” –> Harvard international relations professor Stephen M. Walt writes at Foreign Policy that magical thinking is no way to run a foreign policy, especially when it comes to the nuclear agreement with Iran. “It is not surprising that opponents of the deal are relying on unspecified miracles to make their case,” Walt declares. “It’s their standard operating procedure. As U.S. President Barack Obama correctly said in his Aug. 5 speech at American University, opponents of the deal are mostly the same groups and individuals who either dreamed up or helped sell the boneheaded idea of invading Iraq. It wasn’t just their fairy tales about Iraqi WMD and Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to al Qaeda that led Bush and the country astray, it was their utterly fabulist belief that invading Iraq would somehow transform the Middle East into a sea of pro-American democracies.”

AND a must read–> “The Surge Fallacy,” by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic: “The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it. Because of Obama’s troop withdrawal, and his general refusal to exercise American power, Iraq collapsed, ISIS rose, and the Middle East fell apart… For today’s GOP leaders, this story line has squelched the doubts about the Iraq invasion that a decade ago threatened to transform conservative foreign policy. The legend of the surge has become this era’s equivalent of the legend that America was winning in Vietnam until, in the words of Richard Nixon’s former defense secretary Melvin Laird, ‘Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975.'”

 

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