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Photos: Bernie Sanders campaigns for Rob Quist in Montana

Rob Quist: I’m running to represent all Montanans

Over the past few months, I’ve had the greatest privilege of my life campaigning to serve Montana in the U.S. House. I’ve traveled to every corner of the state and met with people of all ages and backgrounds who have stories just like the one I heard recently from a young woman named Katie.

Katie is a cancer survivor. She and her husband and young daughter live in Bozeman. And she’s one of over 420,000 Montanans — that’s nearly half the state — with a pre-existing health condition.

All of those people could face financial ruin because of a health care bill the U.S. House just passed and that my opponent supports. Our health care is at stake this election, and that’s why I’m asking for your vote.

Deep in the red: Sanders stumps for Democrat Rob Quist in Montana

Calling the campaign a harbinger of things to come, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders stumped Saturday for Democrat Rob Quist, who seeks to wrest Montana’s only congressional seat from Republican control.

“I don’t want to make you nervous, but the eyes of this country are on Montana this week,” Sanders told an estimated 3,500 people gathered inside the University of Montana’s Adams Center in Missoula.

“If you can do it in Montana, we can do it all across this country,” Sanders said. “We can create a political revolution that restores power to the working class, not just the billionaire class. That’s what this campaign is about.”

The Montana seat became open after President Donald Trump named former-Rep. Ryan Zinke to head the Department of Interior. Quist’s main opponent is Republican Greg Gianforte, a Bozeman engineer and entrepreneur who in 2011 sold his software company for $1.5 billion.

Voting is already well underway: Absentee ballots were mailed April 28, and voting ends Thursday.

Quist, a longtime Montana musician and poet, said he’s visited 49 of Montana’s 56 counties in the past few months. When he first began campaigning, he said, the No. 1 issue he heard raised was access to public lands. But in recent weeks, the focus has shifted to health care.

Bernie Sanders Rallies Montana Voters to Support Rob Quist

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke about economic inequality and the failings of the country’s health care system Saturday as he sought to rally Montanans to vote for a singing cowboy trying to become the state’s first Democrat in the U.S. House in two decades.

Sanders, an Independent who defeated Hillary Clinton in Montana’s Democratic presidential primary last June, urged a crowd of about 3,500 at the University of Montana in Missoula to vote for Rob Quist in Thursday’s special election.

Republican Greg Gianforte and Libertarian Mark Wicks also are seeking to fill Ryan Zinke’s House seat after he joined President Donald Trump’s cabinet as Interior secretary.

Sanders challenged Montana voters to show that a rural state with a small population can take on the big money interests that he said are trying to buy the election.

“The eyes of the country are on Montana this week,” Sanders said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders wraps up Montana tour at MSU

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took a weekend tour through Montana to campaign for Montana Democratic congressionalal candidate Rob Quist.

Sen. Sanders began his trip in Missoula on Saturday morning and wrapped up his quick tour on Sunday morning in Bozeman.

“You see those organizational charts where it has to CEO at the top and then everybody else, we’re flipping that the people of Montana will be at the top and I’ll be at the bottom,” Quist told the crowd gathered on the MSU campus.

About 4,000 people gathered in Bozeman to rally for Quist and Sen. Sanders; a similar number showed up a day earlier in the Adams Center in Missoula.

“This is not a focus group guy, this is a man of the people,” Sen. Sanders said about Quist. Health care was the hot topic with Sen. Sanders saying, “health care is a right, not a privilege.”

Senator Tester holds Quist Rally in Great Falls

While Senator Bernie Sanders stumped for democratic U.S. House candidate Rob Quist in Missoula and Butte today, Senator Jon Tester came to Great Falls to rally support for the democrat.

The main issue that Tester reiterated was health care.

Tester says he’s against the plan that the republican-held congress recently passed because it will take away the Medicaid expansion the 75,000 Montanans depend on for health care, and will strip services for pre-existing conditions such as pregnancy and PTSD.

Tester says that republican candidate Greg Gianforte told Montanans that he would not support these slashes to health care, but in a private conference call to lobbyists Gianforte said otherwise.

Tester explained: “I think it’s a fact that he talks out both sides of his mouth. On one day he’ll say the health care bill is bad, and he’ll tell a different group of people in a different forum that he likes it. I mean, that kinda stuff, that’s not Montanan. And, that’s not what Montanans stand for.”

Sanders stumps for Quist in Montana

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hit the campaign trail in Montana this weekend, using his populist rhetoric to fire up voters before the May 25 special election.

Stumping for Democrat Rob Quist, Sanders turned to many of the talking points from his own presidential campaign at a Sunday rally in Bozeman, Mont.

“Montana, you are about to make history,” Sanders said to applause. “This is not a focus group guy. This is a man of the people.”

Sanders blasted the House legislation to repeal and replace ObamaCare and praised Quist for fundraising through small contributions from working people, rather than from millionaires and billionaires.

“And what he has done in the last couple of months is extraordinary. It may be literally unprecedented,” Sanders said.

LTE’s:

Grassroots is only thing working well

My mailbox is being choked by mailers from the Greg Gianforte campaign, large and slick with wildly deceitful rants.

This type of flogging is so dispiriting. Making me wonder, will we, as a country, be able to remain tethered, by the current slimmest of threads, to the likelihood of reconstructing a democracy? We don’t have one now. Obscenely wealthy individuals and corporations preposterously endowed with the rights of human beings are in charge, our elections now ever more fiercely bought, small-dollar donors stretched beyond imagining. In this teetering condition, we are but one fake-news terrorist attack from full-throttle dictatorship.

The Republican National Committee needs a primer on kindness and integrity, the Democratic National Committee a come-to-Jesus stare in the mirror. The only aspect of government working well is the grassroots. Praises be, for the swelling grassroots! March! Vote!

Organizers call on marchers to support Quist

It’s been over 100 days since the Women’s March on Montana. We call on marchers to remember why you marched and the energy you felt while marching. What inspired you to march? Fear? Anger? Hope? We ask that you continue to find this same inspiration now when it’s most needed.

There were 10,000-16,000 Marchers in Helena on Jan. 21, and we’re guessing far more people than that, across the state, could not join us at our Capitol. We marched for human rights and for equality, and we marched against anything that threatens these core values.

We asked a lot from you back in January – we asked you to remain vigilant and engaged. You have responded! You have consistently been protesting, rallying, making phone calls, and sending emails and letters. Now, we are asking all of you to march again. This time, march to your polling place and help Montana elect the only sensible candidate to represent us in Congress. It’s time to elect Rob Quist.

Bernie Sanders backers say Democrats are ‘in absolute crisis and denial’

RoseAnn DeMoro, the outspoken leader of the California Nurses Association, looked out at a horde of red-clad supporters as they prepared to march on the state Democratic Party’s convention Friday to advocate for public-funded universal health care.

“They are a party in absolute crisis and denial,” DeMoro said of the resistance her group, which supported Bernie Sanders for president, encounters from the Democratic establishment. She offered an explanation for the friction coloring their disagreements: “They are too comfortable.”

Inside the convention hall, DeMoro’s nurses booed and heckled Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez. They repeatedly interrupted Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. Activists marched to the historic mansion of Gov. Jerry Brown protesting contributions from oil companies.

Late Saturday, the party nearly elected as its chairwoman Kimberly Ellis, a liberal from outside the establishment who ran on “redefining” what it means to be a Democrat. The new chairman, Eric Bauman, was greeted with loud boos from her supporters.

In the months since Donald Trump’s unforeseen election, California Democrats have held up their liberal state as a fortress of the resistance, repeatedly invoking their efforts to address climate change, deliver health care to millions and protect those in the country illegally.

But emboldened activists who believe it’s not enough to resist the Republican president are pressing for a shift further left in next year’s elections, demanding that issues like income inequality, universal health care, free community college and student loan debt forgiveness, affordable housing and campaign finance reform be treated not as slogans but as litmus tests.

Democratic divisions on display as Bauman wins California party chairmanship

A caustic contest between the party establishment and “Berniecrat” activists gripped the nation’s largest Democratic party in Sacramento this weekend, underscoring fierce Democratic divisions at the state level that continue to simmer five months into Donald Trump’s presidency. Even as longtime party operative Eric Bauman eked out a razor thin victory over progressive newcomer Kimberly Ellis to win the chairmanship of the California Democratic Party, party leaders warned of turbulence ahead.

After a raucous day of protests, Bauman was declared the victor Saturday night by a razor-thin 62 vote margin out of nearly 3,000 votes cast. His acceptance speech was marred by boos and protests from backers of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign who complained of a rigged election and unsuccessfully demanded a recount in the closing hours of the convention.

The tumult showed that in the country’s largest state — which is controlled entirely by Democrats — the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders divide of 2016 and the intra-party sparring that followed Clinton’s November loss remain very much at the forefront.

Bauman issued a statement after the vote count urging unity. “Regardless of the outcome of today’s election, and regardless of the fact that we have proven that California is the one place in the nation that knows how to do it right – there is no denying that there is a problem when so many of our hardworking activists feel that they are not welcome within our Party and that they have been slighted and shut out of the process,’’ he said.

Bernie Sanders is America’s most popular politician – and he’s coming after Donald Trump

I like Bernie Sanders,” my four-year-old niece in Texas said to me last month. “Why isn’t he president?” More than six months on from the defeat of Hillary Clinton, it’s a question that countless frustrated progressives across the United States continue to ask aloud.

In this dystopian age of Trump, it is remarkable that Sanders is now by far the most popular politician in the US – and this in a country where “socialist” has long been a dirty word. Increasing numbers of Americans seem nevertheless to “feel the Bern”. As such, Sanders supporters cannot help but ask the big counterfactual question of our time: would Trump be the president today if he had faced Bernie rather than Hillary in the election? Throughout the campaign, polls showed him crushing Trump in a head-to-head match-up. In a poll on the eve of the election, Sanders trumped Trump by 12 percentage points.

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Bizarrely, that election campaign has already begun. On 1 May, Trump released his first official campaign ad for re-election, 1,282 days before the next presidential vote. Biden visited New Hampshire last month to give a speech, while Warren is on a national tour to promote her new bestselling book, This Fight Is Our Fight.

Sanders, however – riding high in the polls, and with his vast database of contacts from the 2016 race as well as a clear, popular and long-standing critique of a US political and economic system “rigged” in favour of “the billionaire class” – is the man to beat. And rightly so. Sanders understands that the Democrats have to change, and change fast. “There are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo,” he said in March. “They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

Biden fuels 2020 speculation with remarks, schedule

Joe Biden has been out of office for four months, but the former vice president hasn’t left the public eye.

Instead, Biden has kept a robust schedule that fuels speculation about 2020 presidential run.

Some Democrats looking to bounce back from 2016 defeats are still looking to Biden to reorient their messaging in a way that could win back the working class voters who fled the party to vote for President Trump.

Bernie Sanders supporters are suing the DNC: Here’s what you need to know

As the world turned its collective head toward President Donald Trump‘s bevy of scandals, controversy has quietly brewed on the other side of the aisle—but you’d need to look beyond mainstream media outlets to know it.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging that the political organization improperly favored Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election campaign from the beginning, essentially blocking any chance Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) may have had at being the party’s standard-bearer against Trump.

The suit has been moving in and out of courtrooms since June 2016, when a complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. It lists dozens of donors to Sanders’ campaign—whose contributions ranging close to $3,000 to as low as $25—as plaintiffs. They claim to represent people from 45 states and Washington, D.C.

The suit has so far progressed in relative obscurity. Here’s what you need to know to get caught up.

Amid F-Bomb and Uproar, Dems Face Demands to Get Behind Single Payer

California Democrats on Friday kicked off their three-day convention with a “raucous start” in Sacramento, where a wave of single-payer advocates demanded the party work towards a system that makes healthcare a human right.

The gathering comes amid growing momentum nationwide for a single-payer, or Medicare-for-All, healthcare system, and as the Republican’s widely scorned American Healthcare Act (AHCA) is days away from receiving its potentially problematic Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment.

In a evening rally and march that went from the capitol to the Sacramento Convention Center, a crowd of nurses and other healthcare activists urged support for SB562—the advancing Healthy California Act—which would create a universal health system for Californians, and could “send a message” and “be a catalyst for the nation.”

Of the fight for single payer, RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, which organized the action, thinks California Democrats “cannot be in denial anymore that this is a movement that can primary them.”

‘Unconscionable’ Arms Deal Inked, Trump Delivers Remarks in Saudi Arabia

A day after finalizing an “unconscionable” $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump on Sunday gave a speech in Riyadh to leaders of dozens of Muslim-majority countries—a “vast congress of dictators and cut-throat autocrats,” as one analyst put it—in which he called on them to “drive out the terrorists and extremists” and isolate Iran.

Trump—who previously declared, “We’re having problems with the Muslims” and pushed for a Muslim ban—spoke of “shared interests” and stamping out terrorism.

“To the leaders and citizens of every country assembled here today, I want you to know that the United States is eager to form closer bonds of friendship, security, culture and commerce,” he said.

Of the weapons sale, described as the largest single arms deal in American history, Trump said “it will help the Saudi military to take a greater role in security operations.”

Human rights campaigners, meanwhile, have denounced the sale, as it would only further help the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition carry out potential war crimes and add to the death toll in the more than two-year long war on Yemen—now famine-stricken and where a cholera outbreak has spread with “unprecedented” speed.

Notre Dame Students Stage Walkout During VP Pence’s Commencement Address

Over 100 members of the University of Notre Dame’s latest graduating class walked out Sunday as commencement speaker Vice President Mike Pence began his address.

The former Indiana governor “has supported policies that have targeted the weakest and most vulnerable among us,” said graduate student Luis Miranda to NBC affiliate WNDU before graduation day. “These are my classmates; these are my friends; these are our family members as well. We’re standing up for them. We’re standing up for their dignity.”

The planned protest at the Catholic, Indiana school was taken to merely follow its mission to “create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice,” a press statement from the coalition WeStandForND, which organized the action, says.

Trump Admin. Now Deploying Controversial Surveillance Tool in Immigration Crackdown

As the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans continue to push for a harsher immigration crackdown, new reporting reveals that FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents employed a controversial surveillance technology known as Stingrays to hunt down undocumented immigrants.

According to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Adam Schwartz, the The Detroit News report, based on a federal search warrant affidavit, marks “the latest sign of mission creep in domestic deployment of battlefield-strength surveillance technology.”

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The Detroit News reported, the

secret device [either a Stingray or an upgraded version of them known as Hailstorm] was used in March by a team of FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Metro Detroit to find Rudy Carcamo-Carranza, 23, a twice-deported restaurant worker from El Salvador whose only brushes with the law involve drunken driving allegations and a hit-and-run crash.

“Few law enforcement spying technologies are a greater threat to digital liberty: by their very nature, [cell site simulators or] CSSs seize information from all of the people who happen to be nearby. So government should be barred, for example, from using CSSs to hunt down traffic scofflaws, petty thieves, and undocumented immigrants,” Schwartz wrote.

Global Study Shows Americans Dying from Preventable Causes at Shocking Rates

Americans are dying at a shockingly high rate from preventable causes, found a first-of-its-kind global health study published late Thursday.
The new research demonstrates that despite the fact that the U.S. has the largest economy in the world, healthcare for many of its residents is woefully inadequate. The U.S. was tied with Estonia and Montenegro, far below other wealthy nations such as Norway, Canada, and Australia, in the study’s ranking of 195 countries.

“America’s ranking is an embarrassment, especially considering the U.S. spends more than $9,000 per person on healthcare annually, more than any other country,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, senior author of the study and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. “Anyone with a stake in the current healthcare debate, including elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels, should take a look at where the U.S. is falling short.”

Progressives have long pointed out that the U.S. is one of the only wealthy nations not to provide some form of government-mandated healthcare, exacerbating inequality in healthcare outcomes.

The study published in the Lancet created a Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index, “a summary measure based on 32 causes, that in the presence of high-quality healthcare, should not result in death,” the researchers wrote.

Whatever Happened to Peace? Arms, Oil and War by Proxy

Billionaires Lay Siege to State Governments by Jim Hightower

It’s easy to become mesmerized by The Donald Show in this year’s political circus.

But a lot of the real action is in the outer rings, where the Koch brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and their corporate cohorts have laid siege to our state governments.

It’s no coincidence that such a large flock of corporatists and right-wing ideologues now roost in state offices, nor that they keep pushing exactly the same anti-people rhetoric and tactics. Nor is their lockstep embrace of identical corporation-enthroning proposals the result of small minds thinking alike.

More than a firefight here or an ambush there, the Koch-ALEC cabal have launched a massive, coordinated maneuver to conquer the countryside.

If you doubt that the strategy has gone local, consider this fact: Even though the Kochs didn’t back a presidential campaign last year — they said they were concentrating on only half a dozen Senate races — they deployed 1,600 paid political staffers into 38 states to drive elections and policy campaigns.

Chelsea Manning Is Free–but Whistleblowers Still Face Prison

Human Rights Watch is glad that Chelsea Manning is free. A statement from the group’s General Counsel’s office notes that Manning’s “absurdly disproportionate” 35-year sentence for passing classified documents to Wikileaks in 2010, commuted by Barack Obama on his last day in office, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which they warn still stands ready for use against the next potential whistleblower.

The Act was intended to punish those who leak secrets to foreign governments, but the US government is increasingly keen to turn it against those who give information to journalists. Critically, those prosecuted under the Act can’t argue they intended to serve the public interest, and prosecutors don’t have to prove that national security was harmed at all, much less that it outweighed the public’s right to know.

So as Manning walks free after seven years and 120 days (or “just seven years,” as USA Today had it—5/17/17), some of it in solitary confinement, it’s worth remembering that corporate media did virtually nothing in support of her clemency, even though her revelations were the basis for countless media reports—including revelations about a 2007 US military attack in Iraq that killed two Reuters journalists.

“Fossil Fuels Have Lost. The Rest of the World Just Doesn’t Know It Yet”

Fossil fuels have lost,” argues Eddie O’Connor, chief executive of Irelands’s Mainstream Renewable Power company, before adding: “The rest of the world just doesn’t know it yet.”

O’Connor was speaking to the influential business newspaper, the Financial Times, in a must-read 4000 word article about the rapid energy transition that is taking place right now from cars to power plants, from solar roofs to wind turbines, affecting how we drive and power our homes and industry.

Change is coming much faster than people think says the article: “The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable”.

As the paper states: “After years of hype and false starts, the shift to clean power has begun to accelerate at a pace that has taken the most experienced experts by surprise. Even leaders in the oil and gas sector have been forced to confront an existential question: will the 21st century be the last one for fossil fuels?”

As the old saying goes, the stone age didn’t end due to the lack of stones and the hydrocarbon age will not end because we ran out of oil. It will end due to concerns over climate change and the fact that fossil fuels could not compete against cheaper renewables.

‘Spiteful and petty’: Maine governor bans signs to Obama-designated monument

A decision by the Republican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, to ban signs to Katahdin Woods and Waters, a national monument designated by Barack Obama, has been described as “sophomoric and petty” by a member of the family that donated the 87,563-acre tract to the nation.

LePage made the controversial move, which was announced on Friday, pending the outcome of a federal review of 27 national monuments ordered by Donald Trump in April and being carried out by the US interior secretary, Ryan Zinke.

In February, LePage asked Trump to reverse Katahdin’s designation, arguing that Obama had violated the federal Antiquities Act. “I think it was a horrible, horrible decision and it should be reversed if it can,” he said in remarks reported by the Portland Press Herald.

A state transportation spokesman, Ted Talbot, said in remarks reported by the Bangor Daily News that the refusal to allow official signs for Katahdin to be placed along main roads, including interstate 95 and routes 11, 157 and 159, was a cost-saving measure.

Revealed: Google tried to block media coverage of gender discrimination case

 The Rev. William Barber Is Bringing MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign Back to Life

T he Rev. William Barber II announced last week that he will step down as president of the North Carolina NAACP and lead a new national initiative that aims to end poverty and begin what Barber calls “a national moral revival.” This new Poor People’s Campaign will pick up where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. left off 50 years ago when he turned his focus to uniting poor people across lines of race and geography and pushing their priorities onto the federal agenda.

 The campaign, which launches in partnership the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, will bring together organizations with a longstanding commitment to confronting poverty and inequality—local and national groups such as Picture the Homeless in New York and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization. Barber said a task force made up of poor people and economists, theologians, and other experts will in September release a report called “The Souls of Poor Folks” that will lay out the campaign’s agenda.

 Joe Lieberman Is a Civil Libertarian’s Nightmare

 A politician has never served as FBI director, and breaking that precedent under these circumstances would be particularly egregious. Not only is Lieberman a politician, but he’s openly loyal to Trump and the GOP: Lieberman endorsed John McCain in 2008 and introduced Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention. He showed up at Trump Tower after the 2016 election and has been touting some of Trump’s cabinet picks, testifying on behalf of now–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at her Senate confirmation hearing.

But Lieberman’s record on civil liberties is the single most alarming thing about his selection. Throughout his career in the Senate, Lieberman consistently showed a disregard for basic Constitutional protections and ambitiously pursued expansions of the government’s ability to surveil and detain Americans without judicial review. He has also advocated investigating news outlets for reporting on classified information, and once defended waterboarding by saying “it’s not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies.” Combined with his near-demagogic focus on Islam as a radicalizing force, Lieberman is a wildly bad pick for the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

True Climate Justice Puts Communities of Color First

T he day before the People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, Preyton Lambert—skinny, dreadlocked and sporting black-frame glasses—was getting hustled on a boulevard near the National Mall. Another boy restrained his arms, before throwing him to the ground. His cheek pressed against the pavement. Two girls recorded the encounter on their phones as a crowd looked on.

 The youth were part of a delegation from Philadelphia’s Soil Generation, a group of black, radical, urban farmers, and this was an act of street theater, organized by the national It Takes Roots coalition of grassroots environmental groups. Among them were indigenous, Appalachian, and immigrant activists, each performing the attacks and defense of their communities and environment. “This is what happens to young black men and women almost everywhere,” explained Lambert. Their scene represented the most potent symbol of contemporary American racism: a young black man being brutalized by a cop. “We’re not just here for climate justice.”

So what does police brutality have to do with issues like carbon emissions, rising global temperatures, water pollution and government-by-oil-corporations that have dominated mainstream climate discourse?

The Next Standing Rocks: 4,800 Miles of Oil Pipelines Planned Under Trump

A high-stakes battle is underway on multiple front lines across America, as Native American and climate change activists square off against oil and pipeline companies racing to lay as much infrastructure into the ground as quickly as possible.

The U.S. oil industry is enjoying a surge in production, which has shot up 86 percent since 2008. Unshackled by Congress and enabled by the most oil-friendly president in decades, the industry aims to transform the American landscape with tens of billions of dollars in new pipelines, storage depots, and export terminals.

That includes the Dakota Access pipeline, scene of the yearlong protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, which was slated to begin transporting oil on Sunday.

Yet despite oft-repeated claims by politicians and oil executives about the danger of relying on foreign oil, this U.S. petroleum renaissance never was designed to make America energy self-sufficient: A growing amount of that oil will end up in China, Japan, the Netherlands, even Venezuela.

Planting a symbolic protest to the Keystone XL Pipeline

Just north of Neligh, Neb., one acre of land, tilled and ready for corn, received special treatment on Sunday. This wasn’t regular corn. It’s sacred blue Ponca corn, being planted directly in the path of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

“This is where they’re from, “ Art Tanderup said. “This is Ponca land, right where we’re standing.”

Technically, it’s Tanderup’s land. He told 10/11 News, the farmstead had been in his wife’s family for more than 100 years. But decades before that, it was Ponca land. Before the U.S. government came in and told the tribe to leave, it was Ponca land. Before the trail of tears, this was Ponca land.

“To have a foreign entity come in and take land, it’s something we empathize with,” tribal chairman, Larry Wright Jr., said.

Sunday, activists, farmers, tribal leaders and members of the Cowboy-Indian Alliance, all showed up to plant sacred corn by hand. The plot of corn and a freshly planted patch of trees are now symbolic barriers to the pipeline.

“This corn is sacred and consequently, this ground is sacred,” Tanderup said

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Paging Rahm: House Dems revive 2006 playbook for 2018

An unpopular president, the scent of corruption in Washington, a riled-up liberal base — to House Democrats, 2018 is already looking like 2006 on overdrive.

Now Democrats see the same ugly storm forming for Republicans that delivered them the majority 11 years ago, and they’re digging out the blueprint.

The party is vastly expanding the number of districts it plans to contest, recruiting veterans and business owners to compete in conservative terrain as it did back then. Three senior House Democrats are soon heading to Chicago to seek advice from Rahm Emanuel, the party’s 2006 master strategist. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has been tutoring members on the party’s campaign efforts that year.

And outside groups have gotten in on the revival spirit, too, with large organizations, including MoveOn.org, diving into their email archives and seeking out lessons from people on the front lines in 2006.

Impeach Trump? Houston lawmaker holds unusually agreeable town hall

In a political season marked by livid constituents railing at their representatives during town hall meetings, an event on Saturday in Houston was positively mellow by comparison. But then, the topic was not a divisive issue such as healthcare. It was the impeachment of Donald Trump.

The meeting was held by Al Green, a 69-year-old Democratic Houston congressman who took office in 2005 and is typically softly-spoken and understated. Not on Wednesday, though, when he became the first member of Congress to take to the floor and ask for the president’s impeachment.

“I rise today, Mr Speaker,” he said, “to call for the impeachment of the president of the United States of America for obstruction of justice.”

It was a move that thrilled many liberal activists, though it was not immediately endorsed by many of Green’s colleagues, who worry that rhetoric is outpacing reality so soon in Trump’s tenure, with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate and much left to be proven amid the miasma of revelations and accusations.