Tips, Comments, Complaints, Etc!

PS: Do me a favor and at least click candidate diaries even if you are not going to read them! It helps in regards to search rankings if anyone happens to be googling a particular candidate, etc.

Also a big thanks to those who liveblogged the CNN ‘debate’. I was well past asleep by that point and will have to catch up later… but I’ll have plenty of articles telling us all about it before I get the chance.

CNN of course does not have the debate up on its youtube page that I can find so heres a couple bootlegs. If I missed that theres a real copy floating around somewhere… please point me in its direction!

CNN TOWN HALL DEBATE – LINDSEY GRAHAM, BILL CASSIDY VS BERNIE SANDERS, AMY KLOBUCHAR

or

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Calls for More Relief Intensify as Puerto Rico Descends Into Humanitarian Crisis

As U.S. President Donald Trump spent his weekend demeaning professional football players for peacefully protesting racial injustice, Puerto Rico continued its descent into a full-blown humanitarian crisis following a direct hit from Hurricane Maria, which last week made landfall as a Category 4 storm, devastating the island and U.S. commonwealth.

Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital city, described current conditions in an interview with The Washington Post: “There is horror in the streets. There is no electricity anywhere in Puerto Rico.”

“People tell us often, ‘I don’t have my medication, I don’t have my insulin, I don’t have my blood pressure medication, I don’t have food, I don’t have drinking water,'” she continued. “The aid is pouring in, but what people need to realize is…we’re an island—everything we need comes from outside.”

At least 10 Puerto Ricans have died so far because of the storm, but with dwindling resources, that number is expected to rise.

“A damaged dam is in danger of bursting. Most buildings are damaged or destroyed. Millions are without power, and the communication network is crippled,” CNN reported on Monday, after speaking with the island’s Governor Ricardo Rosselló, who warned that “we need to prevent a humanitarian crisis occurring in America.”

Though Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is sending airplanes and ships to deliver food, water, and generators to Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands affected by the recent hurricanes, Rosselló said that’s not enough.

“We need something tangible, a bill that actually answers to our need right now,” he said, calling for congressional action. “Otherwise, there will be a humanitarian crisis…. There will be a massive exodus to the United States.”

Tony Blair Says Bernie Doesn’t Have the Answers (Public Opinion Says Otherwise)

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview on The Global Politico Podcast published Monday that people should not approach U.S. President Donald Trump with “flat-out opposition” and seemed to argue that Americans should be less concerned about Trump and more concerned about the platform of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—remarks that earned him immediate derision from commentators on social media.

Critics took particular umbrage at Blair’s attempt to claim that the solutions proposed by “populist right” and the “populist left” are similarly misguided, a stance some mocked as an attempt to equate those fighting for Medicare for All with neo-Nazis.

Throughout the Politico interview, Blair, a “Third Way” centrist figure who enthusiastically supported the Iraq War, characterized the demands of the left in the U.S. and the U.K.—like free public college tuition—as little more than pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

“[Y]ou can go for what are very good-sounding things like, we’re going to abolish tuition fees, or we’re going to give you this for free, or that for free,” Blair said. “Okay, so that’s one way you can go, and it definitely, in today’s world, and in particular, in the absence of a vigorous change-making center, that’s very attractive. But I don’t think it’s the answer, and I’m not sure it would win an election.”

Sanders: America must guarantee healthcare ‘as a right for all people’

In his opening remarks during tonight’s CNN healthcare debate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) blasted Senate Republicans’ latest attempt to repeal and replace ObamaCare by highlighting major opposition to the bill.

“Every major health association in this country, whether it is the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the American Cancer Society, the Alzheimer’s Society, every single major medical organization in this county think this proposal is a disaster,” Sanders said.

Sanders then said “it’s our job now is to defeat this disastrous proposal” and called for a bipartisan fix to the Affordable Care Act in the short-term

“Long term, in my view, I speak only for myself, this country has to join the rest of the civilized world and guarantee healthcare as a right for all people,” he said.

Chelsea Manning says she has been barred from entering Canada

Chelsea Manning, the former US soldier who served seven years in military prison after instigating one of the biggest breaches of classified data in US history, has said she has been barred from entering Canada.

On Monday, Manning posted on Twitter a report from the Canadian government that identified her as a foreign national “who has not been authorized to enter Canada” due to prior convictions.

“So, I guess Canada has permanently banned me?” wrote Manning – one of the most prominent whistleblowers of modern times.

The letter, addressed to the country’s minister of immigration, said Manning had attempted to enter Canada at the official border crossing near Champlain, New York, late last week.

Manning had told Canadian border officials that she had been convicted in 2013 of charges associated with the United States Espionage Act and had been released from prison in May.

The letter added that if the same offence had been carried out in Canada, it “would equate to an indictable offence, namely treason”, and could result in up to 14 years in prison. For this reason, Manning was deemed inadmissible to Canada.

National park ban saved 2m plastic bottles – and still Trump reversed it

A ban on bottled water in 23 national parks prevented up to 2m plastic bottles from being used and discarded every year, a US national park service study found. That is equivalent to up to 326 barrels of oil worth of emissions, 419 cubic yards of landfill space and 111,743lb of plastic, according to the May study.

Despite that, the Trump administration reversed the bottled water ban just three months later, a decision that horrified conservationists and pleased the bottled water industry.

“The bottled water industry has led a years-long campaign against this commonsense policy, all to protect its bottom line,” said Lauren DeRusha Florez, an associate campaign director at Corporate Accountability International.

“The fact that Trump administration officials knew the benefits of this policy back in May but still decided to rescind it last month sure looks to me like the bottled water industry’s lobbying dollars at work,” she said.

The plan to curb pollution in America’s most famous wilderness areas was spurred when arguably its most famous park, the Grand Canyon, banned the sale of plastic water bottles in its gift shops, according to the report. Approximately 331 million people visit US national parks each year.

Facebook’s underclass: as staffers enjoy lavish perks, contractors barely get by

The social network has an army of behind-the-scenes employees who can’t afford to live in an area with out-of-control housing costs

LeBron James joins NFL in hitting back at Trump: ‘The people run this country’

A day after players across the NFL defied Donald Trump with gestures of protest during the national anthem, and as the president continued to tweet his anger, a league spokesman hit back by invoking the 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about sexual assault.

“Everyone should know, including the president, that this is what real locker-room talk is,” said the NFL’s Joe Lockhart, referring to Trump’s defense of a leaked tape in which he bragged about groping and kissing women without their consent.

The NBA great LeBron James also slammed Trump, telling reporters: “The people run this country, not one individual. And damn sure not him.”

Corbyn is a changed man – and he’s forging a path to power

We are the grown-ups now.” So said several speakers. In the grotesque political playground of Brexit Britain, Labour has indeed become the nation’s adults, the sensibles, the party least likely to wreck the country’s future. How short a time ago Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were regarded as delinquent adolescents who had never grown out of the 1970s. They may be the masters soon.

What a transformation. Remember how early in the general election campaign they fell 11 points behind in dismal local council results? Whatever Labour leaders say sourly now to those of us who feared the worst, waiting for that exit poll in June they too were braced for heavy losses, never expecting a crushing humiliation for Theresa May.

Bali volcano eruption could be hours away after unprecedented seismic activity

Mount Agung in Bali is experiencing unprecedented levels of seismic activity and could erupt in a “matter of hours” if tremors continue, Indonesia’s volcanology centre has said.

More than 75,000 people have been evacuated in the last few days as Agung, the highest point of the island, has experienced hundreds of internal volcanic earthquakes.

“Instrumentally we have never recorded such high energy or seismicity from Mount Agung,” Devy Kamil Syahbana, a seismologist from Indonesia’s centre for volcanology and geological hazard mitigation, told the Guardian.

Data showed that Mount Agung experienced 844 volcanic earthquakes on Monday, and 300 to 400 earthquakes by midday on Tuesday, he said. “We need to pay attention because these kinds of earthquakes indicate the movement of magma and increase the probability of an eruption.”