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Giving Thanks to Chef José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen Chefs

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By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

Disasters strike in this country and around the world 365 days a year. There are no holiday dispensations for natural disasters. For the victims—food, clothing, and shelter are not luxuries—they are necessities for survival.

This Thanksgiving, if you are one of the people fortunate enough to not be worrying about that next meal, if you are not living under a blue tarp, or homeless because your house has been flooded or burned out, take a moment to count your blessings, and reach out to support the many heroes who ensure that next meal for those who wouldn’t have one, without help.

One group of heroes are the chefs of World Central Kitchen, founded by Chef José Andrés, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Many readers became aware of his work, and that of #ChefsforPuertoRico when double disasters struck Puerto Rico and the USVI—back-to-back Hurricanes Irma and Maria.   [Read more…]

Rake America Great Again

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God bless the Finns. They’ve been there for us after the Idiot-In-Chief visited a ravaged California – the death count is now 80, with 993 feared dead – stood awkwardly in the rubble of what was once Paradise, which he called “Pleasure,” and spewed gibberish.

Because many, many people say he knows the best words about how to stop fires, he intoned, “You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important…”

He went on, I was with the president of Finland and he said, ‘We have a much different – we’re a forest nation.’ He called it a forest nation, and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things. And they don’t have any problem. And when they do, it’s a very small problem, and when it is…I know everyone is looking at that.”   [Read more…]

A Historic 2,000+ Women Will Be in Office This Coming Year—Almost Entirely From One Political Party

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When conservatives scoff at the progressive slogan “The Future is Female,” they are usually responding to the insecurity that comes with knowing, deep down inside, you are in the wrong.

The strides that women, people of color, and the LGBT community have made in organizing around the 2018 midterm elections is staggering. It’s absolutely terrifying to the Right, and you are seeing desperate and craven attempts to bully and suppress the levels of democracy they’ve inspired.

In January of the last two years, beginning on Donald Trump’s inauguration day in 2017, Women’s Marches have taken over the streets across not just the United States, but the world. These marches were not simply a public protest of our current misogynist in chief; they were a call to organize and take back our government.   [Read more…]

Indivisible Goes From Defense to Offense With Two New Action Guides

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After more than year of playing defense against President Donald Trump and the GOP’s attacks on healthcare, workers, immigrants, refugees, the LGBTQ community, and the common good, the progressive group Indivisible on Tuesday published a new action guide aimed at helping organizers and constituents go beyond resistance and pressure the new House Democratic majority to fight for a positive, ambitious agenda.

“This guide is for what comes next,” Indivisible notes, contrasting the new roadmap with its viral 2016 Trump resistance guide.

“This guide is about using our constituent power to go on offense,” the group states. “Offense is exciting, but it’s more complex than defense. We have the opportunity to use congressional oversight to hold Trump and his cronies accountable. We can set the legislative agenda with a bold progressive vision rooted in inclusion, fairness, and justice. But none of this is automatic—we have to demand it of Congress.”   [Read more…]

Hey NRA, This Is Our Lane: Furious Docs Explain They’re Not Anti-Gun But Anti-Bullet Hole

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Warning: Graphic Images

Last week, hours before the slaughter of 12 people at a country music bar in Thousand Oaks, CA., our 307th mass shooting this year, the ever-judicious NRA denounced doctors and other health care professionals – those steadfast, often blood-soaked heroes who daily labor to pick up the shattered pieces from NRA-funded carnage universally deemed a public health crisis, who for years “have seen and heard things that cannot be unseen and unheard” – for daring to seek to reduce gun violence.

Citing a recent paper on the epidemic from the American College of Physicians titled, “Reducing Firearm Injuries and Death in the United States,” the ghouls at the NRA sneered, “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.”   [Read more…]

President Trump Amps Up Crusade Portraying Press As ‘Enemy of the People’

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Things Moving Fast Dept: With the firing of racist elf and A.G. Jeff Sessions – and his alarming replacement by Trump’s “Roy Cohn” – it’s admittedly hard to keep up with the Constitutional crises hovering on our fraught horizon, but key amidst the unraveling was the spectacle of our babbling, vengeful tinpot wannabe berating and abusing reporters at his hallucinatory press conference.

Of course, there were many madhouse moments:

  [Read more…]

Against the Advice of Everyone, Trump Went to Pittsburgh to Rub Salt into a Wounded City

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The mayor of Pittsburgh told Donald Trump to wait. Local religious leaders asked Trump to wait. Politicians in both parties begged Trump to wait.

Tens of thousands of local residents told Trump not to come at all until he was ready to completely disown the white nationalist agenda that contributed to the mass murder at Tree of Life Synagogue. 

Still, Trump thought that doing a photo shoot in Pittsburgh as the families of 11 victims were getting ready for funerals was a good idea. And, as everyone except Trump predicted, his presence in the city generated anger and disruption on a day that was already so difficult for so many.

  [Read more…]

Up to 14,000 Active-Duty Troops to Deploy as Trump-Ordered Racist ‘Caravan’ Campaign Prop

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Daily Kos

It’s unclear just why the Trump administration is so absolutely insistent that refugees with the well-established right to seek asylum in this nation are an existential danger, but—oh, wait, it’s not unclear at all. They’re rancid racists who have been stoking anti-immigrant, anti-refugee fear as an existential danger to this country solely as cheap electoral theater; now we are learning that ploy will include up to 14,000 active-duty U.S. military troops, many of them armed, to be deployed to the border to intercept a caravan of unarmed men, women, and children.   [Read more…]

To Once Again Be Whole

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“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire

A week of horror: Bombs mailed, black people executed, Jews slaughtered at prayer while a well-armed lunatic shrieked, “All Jews must die!”, all as the heedless Nationalist in the White House blathers, “It’s a terrible thing what’s going on with hate in our country.”

There were abundant signs: Michael Moore has outtake footage of a bulked-up Cesar Sayoc yelling “CNN Sucks!” at an early Trump rally, another sorry soul full of fear and anger, looking for someone to hate, “a lost dog with no direction home.”


  [Read more…]

Being Trans in America Was Already Scary. San Diego #WeWontBeErased Protest Set for October 27

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By Robin Carver / OtherWords

I’m a trans woman, and I’m terrified.

Already, on any given afternoon, I’m regularly and publicly catcalled, mocked, laughed at, and treated as an object of social disgust. Trans women are one of the most assaulted and murdered demographics in the United States, especially when they’re non-white.

We’re the frequent and favorite target of even liberal-leaning culture outlets like Saturday Night Live. Even Democratic darling Kamala Harris repeatedly fought to deny life-saving medical treatment to incarcerated trans women when she served as California’s attorney general.

  [Read more…]

Trump Cheers Assault on Journalist as Republicans Smear Murdered Washington Post Columnist

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By Mark Sumner / Daily Kos

On Thursday evening, Donald Trump went to Montana to make jokes about assaulting journalists and the rally crowd responded by laughing and making threats against the reporters on hand at the event. If Trump and his followers seemed particularly cruel … that’s exactly where the whole Republican Party is going. Because even as the evidence piles up that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered inside the Saudi consulate on orders from crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Republicans are planning their response — smear Khashoggi.

As the Washington Post reports, both conservative congressmen and media hosts have mounted a campaign against Khashoggi to paint him as someone who was friendly with terrorists and who conspired against the United States. The purpose of the campaign is to make the gruesome dismemberment of the US resident acceptable, make Saudi actions ugly but necessary, and most of all to make Trump’s continued refusal to speak out against bin Salman acceptable.

Republicans in the House have been swapping links and posts from alt-Reich websites that have already turned Khashoggi into a founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and a supporter of terrorists. Those same reports are getting more attention on right-wing talk radio, where they’ve been blown up even larger than the original sites — making the whole idea that Khashoggi was allowed into the United States in the first place seem like a mistake.   [Read more…]

Trump and Saudis Conspire to Cover Up Murder of Washington Post Journalist

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By Mark Sumner / Daily Kos

It’s not unusual for governments to cooperate in investigating an international crime. It’s a little less common for governments to put their heads together in an attempt to dream up an acceptable alibi for why a Washington Post journalist was literally taken apart one finger at a time.

With the Turkish government releasing grisly information on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, the US government should be pressuring the Saudi leadership for the facts about the brutal murder of a US resident journalist. And according to a report from the Washington Post, the US and Saudi governments are cooperating … but to cover up a crime, not find the truth.   [Read more…]

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