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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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

‘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.

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

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.