While the Democrats brilliantly rolled Donald Trump in today’s meeting on hurricane relief and raising the debt limit, one House Democrat says his party shouldn’t be so eager to work with the president.
On MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, Congressman Luis Gutierrez said Democrats shouldn’t be negotiating with Trump the day after he rescinded protections for 800,000 young undocumented immigrants.

1) IS THERE reason to believe that global warming made Hurricane Harvey more intense than it would have been?

2) HOW DID capitalist development in Houston make the effects of the storm even worse? Also, there are more than 1,000 people dead in in South Asia--why are the floods like those in Bangladesh, India and Nepal also more deadly?

3) DID GOVERNMENT administrators in Houston know this disaster could happen, but didn't do anything about it because of the cost or pressure from real estate interests?

THE IMPORTANT thing to remember is that this disaster didn't start last week--it happened over decades. That's the real problem.
Last December, there was an article about Houston published by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune called "Boomtown, Floodtown." They document, going back to the 1930s, how flooding has taken place in Houston as a byproduct of development.

Before the ACA, Michael Moore's 2007 documentary Sicko--which focused on the victims of the for-profit health insurance industry rather than on the United States' exclusion of fifty million people from health care coverage--provided a serious boost to activist organizing for Medicare for All......

The Medicare-for-All movement is engaged in a number of strategic debates right now. Should we puruse a state-based legislative strategy or a national one? How much of our collective resources should we devote to political lobbying and electoral campaigns versus broader political organizing? How do we organize the millions of health care victims? How do we build Medicare-for-All committees in communities and workplaces?

A Florida church has recreated the biblical scene of the last supper in one of the coolest ways possible: with 78,408 LEGOS.

Salman Azhar and his wife, Azleena, had been thinking of making the hajj for a while now. This year they finally received what they called “an invitation.”
As Muslims, the couple believes that when the time is right, God sends an invitation to make the physically demanding and spiritually uplifting pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of their faith.

An in-your-face atheist until his early 20s, Schmelzer ended up in seminary and, eventually, at the pulpit of Vineyard Christian Fellowship, an evangelical church in Cambridge, Mass. Under his leadership, membership soared despite its location in one of the most secular enclaves in the U.S.
Then something changed. Schmelzer started asking why some Christians focused less on Jesus and more on exclusion, drawing lines between themselves and other people whose sexual orientation or politics they disagreed with. He took his church in another direction, focused on inclusion, eventually formalizing its philosophy as a “Blue Ocean Faith” — because these churches “fish” where others don’t and because blue oceans connect the world.

In the worst moments of the tragedy in Houston, something remarkable about America burst into view, as government and business and military and especially ordinary citizens put aside thoughts of personal gain and dedicated themselves to the needs of fellow human beings. .....

The empathy and cooperative spirit—the socialism!—that gripped America was delightful to behold. But soon we return to reality. 

Capitalism Has No Incentive to Help the Poor, or the Victims of Disaster, or Even Children 

"One group of negotiators spent all day Sunday working on the labor file," The Globe and Mail noted. "One source familiar with the discussions said Canada wants the United States to pass a federal law stopping state governments from enacting right-to-work legislation; the source said the United States has not agreed to such a request."

Yet it’s sobering to remember that almost exactly a year ago, that we were talking about the last “thousand year flood” that hit Louisiana that August, and the “thousand year flood” that left West Virginia and Texas underwater just a few months before.
This is the reality of climate chaos looks like now: a series of unprecedented catastrophes, each one more severe than the last.

The media never, ever gives up, and instead of focusing on real issues, they keep talking about never-ending campaigns," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told journalist Chris Cuomo in a Thursday night interview on CNN, when Cuomo asked whether he will run for president again in 2020.