A sales tax goes out of business.

Don’t clap.

Another one—of the same shade—goes into effect. August 1.

July 2015 ended the 15-year sin tax we suckers voted for a decade-and-a-half ago. And the total take for the sin tax as of the end of last month was $135,421,613. Cash received.

That’s a lot of money for the pockets of Dan Gilbert, Jimmy Haslam and Larry Dolan, our sports owner welfare clients. They take it with a smile.

The information sheet sent by the County notes that the “account balance is $22,912,487. Wonder how they’re going to spend what’s left over?

The Plain Dealer, our main source of public information, doesn’t pound these figures home. Oh, they’ll tell you, as Mark Naymik did recently, that there’s a problem but it’s stated in a rather meaningless way. The TV stations are not much more than team cheerleaders. Empty news calories; Jim Donovan cheerleaders.

So we continue the charade.

August 1 started the new 20-year sin tax. The old tax, ended in July, collected from Cuyahoga taxpayers at $135-million. The first sin tax in 1990 collected $240 million, making the total take $375 million. That’s not peanuts from a Continue Reading »

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has rocketed past longtime front-runner Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, a stunning turn in a race once considered a lock for the former secretary of state, a new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll shows.

Sanders leads Clinton 44-37 percent among likely Democratic primary voters, the first time the heavily favored Clinton has trailed in the 2016 primary campaign, according to the poll of 442 Granite-Staters.

Vice President Joe Biden got 9 percent support in the test primary match-up. The other announced Democrats in the race, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee and former Virginia Gov. Jim Webb, barely register at 1 percent or below.

The live interview phone poll was conducted Aug. 7-10 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap from China. On The Writing On The Wal—the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar—I continue my singular work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

SO, DOUG MCMILLON’S WHOLE PACKAGE IS… Yesterday, in WHAT INCOME INEQUALITY LOOKS LIKE…, I wrote about the wage gap between some employees, like Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, and business owners, like the Koch Brothers, and called that… Keep reading…

DID WALMART IMPLY A RAISE TO $15 AN HOUR…? Walmart has made stupid media and public relations decisions in the past that have blown up in the company’s face. After watching the commercial several times, and reflecting on just how many fecking… Keep reading…

WILL WALMART CHANGE NIGERIAN EMAILS…? I’ve written before about Walmart in Africa and about the experiences of a Nigerian selling ethnic cuisine to Walmart customers. Now I read about Nwike Ojukwu concerns surrounding Walmart’s entrance… Keep reading…

WALMART IS A RACE TO THE BOTTOM… Yesterday I wrote about Nwike Ojukwu’s views on Walmart coming to Lagos State, Nigeria. Ojukwu had reservations. Today, a second African voice, that of Chidi Oguamanam, also writing for Sahara Reporters… Keep reading…

ARE WALMART PAY RAISES BACKFIRING…? I confess, that while I had, and continue to have a number of concerns regarding the pay raises for hourly workers at Walmart announced early in the year, I did not consider that the raises, and how… Keep reading…

WALMART ICE CREAM WON’T MELT…? Before I get to the real story here, I have to share Walmart’s response as to why one of the company’s Great Value ice cream sandwiches didn’t melt after 12 hours out-of-doors in a Southern Ohio summer. Here’s what… Keep reading…

REMEMBER THOSE ASIA SUBCONTRACTOR TIFFS…? Walmart—and to be fair, many other garment wholesalers and retailers doing business in Asia—has long been rightly pilloried for the way workers making all that cheap plastic (wearable) crap from China… Keep reading…

NEW YORKERS POLLED ON WALMART… Are politicians, and their Union backers, depriving New York City residents of the joys and benefits of shopping at Walmart. A poll taken by Quinnipiac University seems to make that case. Greg David, reporting in… Keep reading…

Previously on Walmart Wednesday…

I first wrote about Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate on 14 March, at the beginning of my consideration of The Guardian’s Keep Carbon In The Ground campaign. I ordered a copy of Klein’s book from the library and waited nearly five months for my request to be filled.

That was a huge mistake. I ought to have bought a copy—an error I have since corrected—that day.

What follows are my notes from the introduction of the book (pp. 1-28) as compiled in My Electronic Chapbook. More will follow in the coming days. Don’t wait for my notes, however, buy the book today. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring galvanized my own environmental awareness in 1969 when I was a high school freshman. I’ve read many books on ecology and the environment since, but none come close to the clarity and call to action as Klein’s.

She is an amazing, focused and clear writer with a vital message to share. My fervent wish is that what she has done here will have the same effect on people as did Carson’s descriptions of those silent robins.

Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

In the very same way, if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when elite interests are in peril. p. 6

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what’s wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house?

I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process and most of our major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in history. But it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made the decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. Indeed, governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in 1988—the exact year that marked the dawning of what we call globalization, with the signing of the agreement representing the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship between Canada and the United States, later to be expanded into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the inclusion of Mexico. p. 18-9.

[Free trade] was always about using these sweeping deals, as well as a range of other tools, to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum freedom to multinational corporations to produce goods as cheaply as possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible—while paying as little taxes as possible. Granting this corporate wishlist, we were told, would fuel economic growth, which could trickle down to the rest of us, eventually. The trade deals mattered only in so far as they stood in for, and plainly articulated, this broader agenda.

The three pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending. p. 19

The bottom line is what matters here: our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. p. 21

Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn’t an issue to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve. p. 25

When fear like that used to creep through my armor of climate change denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel, click past it. Now I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my son, just as we all owe to ourselves and one another.

But what should we do with this fear that comes from living on a planet that is dying, made less alive every day? First, accept that it won’t go away. That it is a fully rational response to the unbearable reality that we are living in a dying world, a world that a great many of us are helping to kill, by doing things like making tea and driving to the grocery store and yes, okay, having kids.

Next, use it. Fear is a survival response. Fear makes us run, it makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the fear is only paralyzing. So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us have to give up, whole industries that will disappear. And it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do. But it’s not too late to avert the worst, and there is still time to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters strike. And that, it seems to me, is worth a great deal. p. 28

This last awakened me like a plunge through ice. In the past week I have turned off my radio because of stories concerning animal deaths from Global Warming. This is why I chose to put the end of the Rite of Spring clip from Fantasia at the top of this post. Watching this video makes my heart hurt in ways that the images did not when I first saw the movie more than a half-century ago.

As I’ve grown older I have found myself increasingly affected by stories and videos involving injury to animals. This is perhaps driven by my own very deep relationship with a mutt named Buster.

I, we all, must heed Klein’s call-to-arms, to not turn away, to use the fear while we can yet save the only home we have: Earth.

I have a new favorite word this morning: decroissance. The word appears in a footnote on page 93 of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate. Klein writes:

In French, decroissance has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

This book has become No. 19 on my list of the NINETEEN BOOKS THAT HAVE SHAPED MY WORLD. In my universe, this may be the bookend to Rachel seminal book Silent Spring.

Bernie Sanders writes:

Climate change is an unprecedented planetary emergency. If we don’t act aggressively now to combat it, there will be major and painful consequences in store later: rising oceans that inundate coastal areas, bigger superstorms like Hurricane Sandy, worsening droughts, out-of-control wildfires, historic floods that come year after year, rising food prices, and millions of people displaced by climate disasters. It’s not a future any of us wants to imagine.

But despite how difficult the problem is, the basics of how we should respond to it are actually not that complicated: we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and move to 100 percent renewable energy—and we need to act immediately.

That’s why I cannot understand why some Democratic presidential candidates have refused to take a stand against the Keystone XL pipeline. Keystone XL would transport millions of gallons of some of the dirtiest oil on the planet—oil that scientists tell us we simply cannot burn if we want to stop the worst impacts of climate change. As former NASA scientist James Hansen has said, building Keystone XL would mean “game over” for the climate.

A decision on Keystone XL could come at any moment, and that’s why it’s so important you make your voice heard through our campaign today:

It’s no big surprise that in recent years, most major Republican politicians have chosen to deny that climate change even exists. Republicans in Congress have Continue Reading »

It’s never too early it seems for political navel gazing.

So who do you think will run for mayor of Cleveland in 2017? And does it matter since mayors don’t run the town.

Mayor Frank Jackson, in his third term, was to me Neighborhood Councilman. He took care of his ward. As mayor, he’s the Downtown Mayor. Can’t explain the dramatic change.

Not too early to think about this because another term from Mayor Jackson could be— despite all the hype about CLE aglow—devastating for the city. Things are bad. They can, however, get worse. Believe me. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

Jackson won’t say he wouldn’t run for another historic 4th term. He’s going to have to be dynamited out of City Hall.

Cleveland is Political Center for GOP presidential candidates and the media circus they draw. We’re part of the Big Nonsense now. So let’s make it more spectacular (as in a spectacle).

Let’s start with the obvious candidates and their positives and negatives.

Jeff Johnson: He has the felony record over his head. But he has the experience of many years in city politics. He’s always shown unusual courage. I’ve Continue Reading »

Yesterday was something of an information perfect storm.

I caught a bit of an National Public Radio story about Coca-Cola funding The Global Energy Balance Network, a front group to push exercise over not drinking cans of pop containing 9.33 teaspoons of sugar as a strategy to alleviate our current obesity epidemic.

When I got home I listened to the stream of Robert Siegel’s interview with Reporter Anahad O’Connor. Siegel set the story up this way:

The Global Energy Balance Network is a nonprofit concerned with preventing diseases associated with inactivity, poor nutrition and obesity. That’s from the group’s website. The site also acknowledges that it has received support from the Coca-Cola Company. In fact, The New York Times reports today that Coke gave the group $1.5 million to get started and that it has supported the work of two of the group’s founders to the tune of almost $4 million. The Global Energy Balance Network stresses lack of physical activity as opposed to diet as a cause of obesity.

O’Connor began:

So this group, you know, their message is one that’s pretty contradictory to what, you know, most independent public health experts are saying, which is, you know, people need to cut back on the amount of, you know, calories, food in general, that they’re consuming and especially, you know, sugary sodas. And this group is saying that, you know, we need to emphasize that side of the equation less and people just need to be more physically active and get moving and that that will, you know, help sort out the obesity epidemic.

Here’s a fun fact. To burn off the calories in a single 12 oz can (which, by the way, contains two servings) of Coca Cola you would need to walk five miles or run for 50 minutes.

After dinner—corn on the cob, asparagus, sliced tomatoes and grilled chicken—we sat down to watch a DVD that has been sitting on my desk for a few days: Fed Up. I confess that I almost stopped watching after the first five or so minutes because I disagreed with what I thought was the implied message—that there was no connection between consuming calories and burning calories when dealing with obesity.

I’m glad I stuck with the program.

An additional piece of information that I picked up today is that while Fed Up talks about limiting sugar consumption to no more than 10 percent of consumed calories, an English study now sets the bar at five percent.

This morning I began to do some checking. I don’t eat that many processed foods—half a power bar with my morning coffee before I begin writing, 135 ml of carrot juice before walking Buster, 60 g of granola for breakfast and 200 ml of grapefruit juice, diluted with water, for a forenoon snack. Guess which of those contains the most sugar.

The grapefruit juice and granola tie at 14 grams each.

The carrot juice is second at 7.3 grams and the power bar last at 2.5 grams.

I shoot for 1,600 calories a day, so I should consume no more than 80 calories from sugar or (at 4 calories per gram) 20 grams a sugar per day. My processed sugar intake is now 37.8 grams or about 189 percent of my recommended daily allowance.

A missive from my spam filter this evening:

Assalamu-Alaikum,

I am Abu Bakr, a rebel leader here in Aleppo Syria,

I and my second in command came across some parked Trunk box, worth over Thirty Million Dollars,

In President Bashar AL-Assad’s allies’ house, kept to procure Chlorofluorocarbon object of gas ozone chemical for troops Destruction,

We moved the trunk box out of the war zone to the United Nations office as medical equipment,

We hereby seeking for your assistance to be our Volunteer Reserve Force administrator Overseas to help us save this fund,

Lodge it on your Custody as our Rescue and Resuscitate bond fund after the War,

Pending When the war will be of victory here in my Country Syria.

Kindly reach me through this e-mail: redacted@yahoo.co.jp

Yours sincerely,

Abu Bakr.

Hmmm… Let’s see… 10 percent finders/administration fee nets me $3 million. :)

Newspaper owners, editors and assorted flunkies are running scared. They’re drowning in a rising tide of new media that has rendered them, at best, marginally valuable, and no step seems to extreme to keep their heads above the surface long enough to retire and run.

The latest shameful, from-their-knees act, is to take a faked police recording and fire cartoonist Ted Rall.

John Backderf adds some perspective in The LA Times takes down Ted Rall. He writes:

One must assume city hall was putting big time pressure on the Times to muzzle Ted. In the current sad state of media, especially local media in any given city, corporate newspapers are now toothless watchdogs. Think about all the recent cases of police abuse. Have a single one of them been uncovered by a newspaper? No, they’ve all surfaced because someone recorded it on a cellphone or got ahold of security video and posted it online! Or a witness posted an account on facebook. Then, when it becomes viral, the newspaper jumps in, and only then, pathetically galloping in the wake of the viral stampede. Newspaper editors are scared to take on the cops. They’re scared of the backlash from readers (or, to be more accurate, from the horde of feces-throwing commenters on the papers’ website). They’re scared of getting in a war with city powers. They’re scared of losing advertisers. Newspapers once monitored the Man. Now they are the Man, servile mouthpieces for corporate powers.

Seriously, when was the last time anyone under the age of 40 paid to read a newspaper?

I tend to make most choices—the kind bounded by factors such as red-or-blue, thousand island or french—rather quickly. I really hate discussing the merits of banal decisions such as which movie to see or which restaurant to eat at. Make a choice and move on, damn it!

Options are, apparently, important to some people as Oliver Burkeman explores in Does choice always come at a price?

Yet the idea of keeping one’s options open exerts an extraordinary power—as demonstrated again, most recently, by research in the field of “compliance-gaining techniques.” One of the most reliable ways of persuading someone to do what you want, it turns out, is simply to add a phrase such as, “But you’re free to choose” or, “But obviously, don’t feel obliged.”

What’s especially unsettling about this isn’t the simple fact that we like to be reminded we’ve got options. Instead, it’s the implication that this freedom is being granted by the person seeking our compliance. Confronted by a chugger in the street, you’re obviously always “free to choose.” whether or not he or she happens to mention it. The findings seem to suggest, however, that we give our accoster the authority to give or withdraw that autonomy—which makes you wonder if it’s really autonomy at all. It’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the “closed choice” technique for gaining compliance from toddlers: “Would you like to wear the green jumper, or the red jumper? You get to choose!”

There are times when I think Henry Ford had the right idea: you can buy your Model T in any color you wanted as long as you wanted black.

I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died.

Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between The World And Me, like Coates’ journey, is visceral, eloquent and beautifully redemptive.

And it’s examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory.

This is required reading. —Toni Morrison.

I finished my first reading of Coates’ masterwork this morning. This cover blurb, the book’s only cover blurb—what else could any one possibly say?—appears on the back cover and I cannot add a syllable. I have written much about Coates before and I will have much more to say in the coming days as I dive back in for a second reading. Until then, however…

Buy this book.

To the best of my knowledge, this was the moment–8 April 2015—that Bernie Sanders told us that he was running for his party’s candidacy to be the President of The United States of America. I have been jazzed ever since.

Last Tuesday, I marked the anniversary of the murder of John Crawford III for the crime of shopping while black at a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. Today I mark another tragic police murder, that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Terrence Heath, in One Year After Ferguson: Making Black Lives Matter writes:

Some things have changed in the year that has passed since Brown’s death.

Ferguson has a black interim chief of police, tasked with building trust between the city’s predominantly African-American population and its mostly white police force.

In a landmark election, Ferguson voters turned out in record numbers, and elected two new black representatives to the city council. Half the members of the city council are now African-American.

In the wake of Ferguson, the Obama administration has proposed implementing policing reforms, and stemming police militarization.

Two Department of Justice reports uncovered racially biased practices in the Ferguson police department, and found that Ferguson police officers violated the rights of protestors.

Michael Brown is getting a permanent memorial in Ferguson.

Changed, yes, but changed only in the right direction. Not changed, in any sense, sufficiently for me, or anyone to pat themselves on the back. Heath agrees.

What has not changed is police violence against African-Americans. Since Michael Brown’s death, hardly a month has gone by without a report of another African-American shot and killed by police, dying in police custody, or injured by police use of excessive force.

A timeline of deaths and incidents of brutality in the year since Michael Brown’s death shows how much hasn’t changed.

It’s easy to view a timeline like this, and conclude that police violence against African-Americans has suddenly reached epidemic proportions. Such incidents seem to have risen dramatically. Researching such incidents for a much longer timeline made it clear to me that these recent incidents are part of what Angela Davis called, “an unbroken line of police violence that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan.”

It’s not that such encounters are happening more often. We’re just seeing more coverage of them, thanks to a “perfect storm” of social media, ubiquitous smartphone technology, and the growth of a movement to focus national attention on police violence against African-Americans.

There has been a positive change.

What happened to Sandra Bland, Sam Dubose, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown has happened for generations in our communities. What has changed is that we’re more likely to hear about it. The availability of smartphones and social media means that more people have the tools of the media in their hands.

These tools have an unparalleled impact when combined with intent. When people use them to bypass the gatekeepers of conventional media, stories that wouldn’t have spread beyond local media become national stories. This exposure makes a difference in a couple of important ways.

More people hear more of the truth about what’s really happening. In the past, the police version of events was usually the accepted version, even when witnesses told another story. In the cases of Sandra Bland, Sam Dubose, Tamir Rice and Jonathan Crawford, video footage revealed the police version of events was far from the truth.

I don’t own a video camera. I don’t own a smart phone. I don’t know if I will ever have a call to make a permanent video record of injustice and government violence, but I do know that I ought to be prepared for that eventuality.

We all should.

One of the commenters on Oliver Berkeman’s Exploiting gullible people is a modern form of mining in The Guardian quipped: Capitalism was created by psychopaths. That is not to imply that all all Capitalists are psychopaths, but I wouldn’t dispute that the best Capitalists are.

If what he said is true, Delmaro’s customer, it’s reasonable to conclude, was a fool. And he certainly counts as a “phool”, as defined in Phishing For Phools, a forthcoming book by the economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. Technically, “phishing” is the scam whereby fraudsters persuade you to part with your financial details, using emails and websites that look trustworthy. But Shiller and Akerlof argue that deception and manipulation aren’t confined to the fringes of the economy; instead, they’re central to how consumer capitalism works. We’re being phished all the time (making us, in their terminology, phools). In a free market, one set of profit opportunities comes from exploiting people’s psychological weaknesses. Trickery is so commonplace, the authors show, that the line we draw between sleazy or illegal behaviour and canny business practice is pretty arbitrary. Almost as arbitrary, in fact, as the line between a fraudulent psychic and a non-fraudulent one.

Selling, at best, involves the telling of very selective truth. I think back to the section in Thomas More’s Utopia where he describes the process of full disclosure for prospective partners prior to marriage.

In choosing their wives they use a method that would appear to us very absurd and ridiculous, but it is constantly observed among them, and is accounted perfectly consistent with wisdom. Before marriage some grave matron presents the bride, naked, whether she is a virgin or a widow, to the bridegroom, and after that some grave man presents the bridegroom, naked, to the bride.

If such transparency existed in common commerce, the system would collapse.

Over the years of watching interviews on The Daily Show, I’ve wondered why any sane person would agree to be interviewed by a comedian with a camera crew. Jessica Williams demonstrates that I assumed way too much. No sane person would agree to be interviewed by a comedian, but plenty of other people have and welcomed a second bite at the apple.

You simply can’t make this shit up.

Socialism is not the antithesis of Capitalism, rather, in balance, Socialism and Capitalism promote economic freedom—the pursuit of happiness; the third leg of the inalienable rights that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in our Declaration of Independence—and protect our economy from rapacious acquisition by oligarchs enabled by feelings of entitlement.

Bernie Sanders is making being a Socialist acceptable again. The United States has long benefited from the efforts of earlier Socialists. Miles Mogulescu, writing in I Was Wrong About Bernie Sanders, And So Is Barney Frank And His Fellow Clintonistas for The Huffington Post tells us:

Even though an avowed socialist has never been President (unlike in Western Europe where socialist Presidents and Prime Ministers are common), socialists (and even, despite their blind spot to political repression, those who’ve passed through communism) have had a profound impact on the policies that have made America a better place.

Socialists Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas ran for President as independents, garnering millions of votes, and their ideas influenced progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. Socialist W.E.B. DuBois founded the NAACP and made a profound impact on the growth of the civil rights movement. Socialist Walter Reuther helped form and lead the United Auto Workers. Socialist Michael Harrington wrote the book “The Other America” about poverty in America in the ’60s which influenced JFK and LBJ to commence a War on Poverty and pass Medicare and Medicaid. Socialist Martin Luther King spent the last years before his assassination advocating for greater economic justice.

So, what does a Socialist agenda look like? Mogulescu provides a list:

As Mogulescu notes, these are not radical ideas anathema to Americans.

These and other proposals from the Sanders campaign are supported by large numbers of Americans but they are a bridge too for most corporate Democrats and have been largely absent from debate in the Democratic Party.

For better or worse, Presidential campaigns are one of the few events in which major policy proposals get a certain amount of coverage in the mainstream media.

Bernie is not, however, in this campaign to get his policy proposals before the people; he is in this campaign to win and bring real change to a nation much in need of that change.

The Daily Show’s final episode with Jon Stewart was mostly, and rightly, Stewart saying goodbye to all the people who made his more than 16 years on Comedy Central an institution. You know a lot of people in that much time and, I think, Jon squeezed in most of them in his 49 minutes and went out with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band on stage performing Land of Hope and Dreams and Born to Run.

The goodbyes were nice, but what will stay with me was Jon’s final camera-three moment.

Jon was right building our communities is all about the never ending conversation.

Yesterday I noted two extremes on the current dustup over funding Planned Parenthood. Senator Elizabeth Warren took the debate to the floor of the senate and shamed the self-righteous ideologues who can only repeat their corporate minders’ taking points.

This is why I want Warren to stay in the Senate. I don’t want that body to loose both Bernie Sanders and Warren to the White House in 2017.