THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday, July 31, 2017, 4:45 PM


Excerpt:

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of "Finding Your Roots" on PBS, says the show "couldn't have scripted" the discovery that actor, comedian Larry David and Senator Bernie Sanders are related.

An episode where the two learn they're distant relatives will air on the show's upcoming fourth season, premiering Oct. 3.

He said Sanders and David share "identical DNA" of three chromosomes and "that's a lot of matches."

http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/entertainment/bernie-sanders-larry-david-share-identical-dna-article-1.3372371

The Political Scene
August 7 & 14, 2017 Issue - The New Yorker
In Trump’s America, the Independent senator is fighting to win back the heartland for Democrats.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5978f40efe4d9616c4bfd08d/master/w_649,c_limit/170807_r30352.jpg
Sanders is not a natural storyteller; his great political gift is his relentlessness.Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

Excerpts:

For decades, Sanders has argued for a single-payer health-care system, and he is getting ready to introduce a “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate. This summer, however, he assigned himself the task of leading the campaign against efforts, by Republicans in the House and the Senate, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On the Sunday after the Fourth of July, as Senate Republicans prepared to release their bill, Sanders took a charter flight from Burlington to West Virginia and Kentucky, for a pair of hastily arranged rallies. He and his staff had chosen states whose Republican senators were pivotal in the health-care debate. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, was shepherding the bill toward a vote without any public hearings. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, and Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, were indicating that they might vote against it.

Sanders talked about the Senate bill’s likely effects in McConnell’s home state. “How do you throw two hundred and thirty thousand people off the health care they have without hesitation?” he asked. “It happens because the Democratic Party is incredibly weak in states like Kentucky. And so he doesn’t have to face the wrath of the voters.” But it wasn’t just the Democrats who were absent in Kentucky, he said; it was also a balanced press. “In many of these conservative states, you get a media that is all right wing.” One purpose of his visit, he said, was to generate local coverage, so that he could explain to ordinary people “what’s in the bloody legislation.”

In Washington, Sanders has been trying to build support for his single-payer bill. His recent progress may be the clearest measure of his influence on the Democratic Party. In the House, a majority of Democrats now support a version of Sanders’s bill, the Medicare for All Act (which Representative John Conyers, of Michigan, has proposed each year since 2003). Several prominent senators have expressed their support, including Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts. Warren has said she believes that “now is the time for the next step—and the next step is single-payer.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/bernie-sanders-campaign-isnt-over

By SETH MILLSTEIN 9 hours ago

Excerpts:

On Friday, commuters on a commercial airliner spotted Sen. Bernie Sanders on the plane, and took some time to show their appreciation. According to a story posted on Reddit and later confirmed by Bustle, the passengers on the flight gave Sanders a thank-you note, passing it around the plane so anybody who wanted to sign it could. Bustle has reached out to Sanders' office to find out more behind the story.

Images of the thank-you note were posted by Jennifer Turchi, one of the passengers on the plane. Turchi told Bustle that after the commuters realized Sanders was on the plane, a group of young adults at the back of the flight wrote a thank-you note for the Senator, and passed it around the plane ("Sign if you want & keep passing forward to Bernie," a Post-It note on the paper read).

"We were stranded on the runway for over an hour headed from Reagan National airport to Burlington," Turchi told Bustle. "Someone at the back of the plane started the hand-made note and passed it forward. People could sign if they wanted to, but were asked to pass it forward. It made it all the way to the front of the plane, and then to Sen. Sanders."

Turchi added that before the flight departed, Sanders was chatting with his fellow travelers in the terminal.

"I can only imagine how tired he was," Turchi said, noting Sanders' late-night health care vote the night before, "but he was giving with his time and attention."

https://www.instagram.com/p/BXL0DoFBzPY/

https://www.bustle.com/p/a-thank-you-card-for-bernie-sanders-was-signed-by-the-adoring-passengers-on-his-flight-73477

http://liveforlivemusic.com/news/bernie-sanders-twiddle-tumble/

Published on Jul 30, 2017
Senator Bernie Sanders joins Jake Tapper to discuss the Obamacare repeal's failure and his own plans for health care legislation

https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats/status/891066431890014208

MSNBC
Published on Jul 27, 2017

The Republican Party is dominated by the far right wing 'Koch brothers ideology,' says Senator Bernie Sanders, and they want to eliminate 'every federal program passed in the last eighty years.'

By Ronald Aronson TODAY 6:00 AM

Excerpts:

A new consensus has emerged among young people that is definitely social democratic—as that term has traditionally been used—or democratic socialist—as Bernie and Jeremy have described themselves. By whatever name, young people are insisting on social solutions to social problems. This consensus rejects the privatizing and individualizing trends that have prevailed since the late 1970s.

Remarkably, this generation—raised, educated, and shaped to neatly fit what Zygmunt Bauman calls “individualized society”—is thinking, aspiring, and acting collectively. They are repudiating spurious but once-galvanizing Reaganite claims to limited government and personal responsibility, turning their backs on Margaret Thatcher’s goal of replacing the “collectivist society” with a “personal society.” In the latest election, the new social democrats/democratic socialists demonstrated that three decades of concerted effort have not changed “the heart and soul of the nation” in quite the way that Thatcher wished for.

They were brought up to be self-seeking entrepreneurs, not to feel responsible for each other. They were primed to accept that every last corner of the world, and their own lives, would be organized by the logic of the market. They were taught to see social contradictions as personal, not political problems—to live by Thatcher’s dictum that “there are individual men and women and there are families…. There is no such thing as society.” Yet, instead of becoming cynical free agents, young people are drawn to the sincerity of Corbyn and Sanders. Against the flashy marketing of their opponents, these men express the humility of old-fashioned values such as fairness and equality. As recent surveys show, young people raised to ensure capitalism’s future have become deeply skeptical of it and many are instead drawn to something called “socialism.”

While many in the older generation have learned to shift for themselves and ignore their social side, the younger generation cannot. The unrestrained harshness of the bottom line helps explain this turn, because rising inequality and economic insecurity have become especially intolerable to young people facing their future. In addition, at least two kinds of generational awareness have heightened their sense of social belonging: threats to the environment and global interconnectedness.

The perils of climate change predispose anyone growing up today to see herself as belonging to the ever-more-besieged natural world: linked with, dependent on, and worried about natural processes and beings everywhere. They increasingly live on the planet Earth.

https://www.thenation.com/article/corbyn-and-sanders-show-that-neoliberalism-has-failed-to-privatize-hope/

July 25, 2017


Excerpts:

Sanders left no doubt about his targets, regularly denouncing the bankers and Wall Street financiers who were responsible for the economic meltdown of 2008, most of whom were bailed out by the government and walked away richer than ever. But Schumer can't convincingly take on those special interests because he's one of their leading champions in the Senate and benefits handsomely from providing that protection.

That's not populism.

And neither is offering a tepid "better deal for American workers." Populism is a politics of anger. It needn't escalate to violence. It shouldn't tear down institutions that can be reformed in productive ways. But it does need to channel the passion for justice and give voice to justified resentments. That will sometimes mean lashing out at people, groups, classes, and established leaders. One way to do that is to propose policies that don't need to be labeled by party leaders as "strong" and "bold" because they so obviously represent dramatic breaks from the status quo.

In this respect, Sanders' proposals to break up the biggest banks, provide universal health care, and make college tuition free were quintessentially populist in content as well as style. Had he won the presidency in 2016, political realities and limited resources would have forced Sanders to prioritize among these and other goals. Compromises would have needed to be struck. But those who voted for him would have known exactly where he stood, and what he would choose to do if he could. That would be the ground from which he began to work toward a compromise, not a position that already represented a pre-emptive capitulation to the other side, which is what Democrats have been doing ever since they made their peace with the Reagan revolution.

More important than the person is the message itself. Both parties have neglected too many of the needs of too many Americans for far too long. One party or the other will remake itself as their unapologetic champion. The Democrats need to ensure that they're the ones to do it.

http://theweek.com/articles/713941/democrats-dont-need-better-deal-need-bernie-sanders