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Wednesday, July 19, 2017 4:25 a.m. EDT by Mary Ellen Murphy

KALAMAZOO, MI (WHTC-AM/FM) - The race for the Democratic nomination against Congressman Fred Upton now has another Democratic throwing his hat into the ring.

Former YMCA National Health Officer Dr. Matt Longjohn has announced he is going to challenge the 16-term incumbent from St. Joseph.

Longjohn is the fifth Democrat to run and is the only Democrat planning to enlist the services of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. According to his website, Longjohnstrongly believes that fighting disease is only part of a doctors job.

"To truly be successful, physicians need to help patients have a high quality of life, which means ensuring people have access to health care, a safe and healthy environment, a good education and the opportunity for jobs that pay a living wage. Matt will take this same comprehensive approach to Congress, where he will fight for affordable health care, clean air and water, strong early childhood programs, public schools, community colleges and good-paying job"

Upton told WHTC News that he is focused on his day job and his family. He has not said what at his plans are for 2018.

"These campaigns always come third and you never like to start a campaign prematurely. No we've not made a decision as to what we're gonna do in 2018, particularly if we run for the Senate or not. I continue to be flattered by people who have reached out suggesting that I would be a strong candidate. We're gonna do some due diligence and figure this out in the next couple weeks or so. We don't have any fixed time table, but campaigns do start early, like it or not."

Kid Rock released a statement last week that he is running for the U.S. Senate, but has yet filed the necessary paperwork.

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Democrat doctor challenges Fred Upton in 2018 - Midwest Communication

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnellemployed an iron fist over the Republican health care effort, keeping top lieutenants in the dark about key decisions and withholding detailed policy information from the conference as a whole until just before it was released publicly.

Now with theseven-year effort to gut the 2010 health care law in tatters,it falls on the Kentucky Republican to deal with the aftermath, and quell concerns about whether he can continue to lead effectively.

With no clear direction forward, the rest of the ambitious GOP agenda remainsuncertain.

Republicans on Tuesday were largely noncommittal over what would come next, and several instead chose to continue to harp on the potential damage to the party if its long-held antipathy of the law does not yield measurable progress.

We have to have the confidence of the American people that we can get things done. There will be millions of people who see significantly higher premiums because we havent been able to come to a consensus on this particular issue, Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said.

I continue to believe we can and will get this done, Texas Sen. Ted Cruzsaid. Every Republican for the last seven years has campaigned on repealing Obamacare. I think the credibility of the conference is seriously undermined if we fail to deliver on that promise.

Questions also linger over what impact McConnells strategy choosing to craft a bill largely behind closed doors and placing strict deadlines on his own members has had on the morale of the GOP conference.

Sen. Ron Johnson, for example, declined to say on Tuesday whether he still trusts McConnell following the health care failure, citing assurances the majority leader made to moderate lawmakers that the GOPs proposed cuts to Medicaid would never go into effect.

I was very troubled with those comments, the Wisconsin Republican said.

When asked whether McConnell is solely to blame for the failure, Johnson said, I dont know, who wrote the bill?

And while the Senate Republican Conference tries to recover from a monumental defeat on the health care effort,President Donald Trump vowed to move forward with his plan to let the health care law collapse.

I think were probably in that position where well let Obamacare fail, he said. Were not going to own it. Im not going to own it, he said, despite the GOP locking Democrats out of the process.

Following Tuesdaysweekly Republican policy luncheon, McConnell said the chamber would hold a vote sometime in the near future on legislation from 2015 to repeal the health care law that was vetoed by President Barack Obama. The majority leaderinformed senators Tuesday that, at the request of the president and vice president, the vote would take place early next week.

Its pretty clear that there are not 50 Republicans at the moment to vote for a replacement for Obamacare, he told reporters. This has been a very, very challenging experience for all of us.

But the vote on an initial procedural hurdle looks destined to fail. Three Republican senators have said they wouldnt support the motion to proceedthat would allowthe 2015 repeal legislation to come up for a vote, enough to block it.

What comes after that likely failure remains an open question, but McConnells top allies expect work to begin on a bipartisan health care bill.

I suspect there will be discussions on a bipartisan bill, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas said. To me, thats unfortunate in a sense because I think the Democrats are strongly committed to Obamacare and are unwilling to admit the structural problems which create the problems we are having in the individual market today.

And while the conference continues to try to chart a path forward, skeptical lawmakers are holding back any direct criticism.

I dont want to ascribe blame to anyone, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the three GOP senatorswho vowed to vote against the 2015 repeal bill. I have long held that a committee process allows for a way to go forward that, while not easy, does allow for, typically, a product that has gone through greater vetting.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Lamar Alexander, in a statement released on Tuesday, said his panel would soon turn to work on measures to shore up the insurance markets that have shown signs of turmoil.

However the votes come out on the health care bill, the Senate health committee has a responsibility during the next few weeks to hold hearings to continue exploring how to stabilize the individual market. I will consult with Senate leadership and then I will set those hearings after the Senate votes on the health care bill, the Tennessee Republican said.

Other members continue to try to push their respective proposals. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, for example, is still advocating for a bill he is working on alongside Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina that would essentially give states a bulk amount of funding each year to manage their insurance systems.

Obviously, leadership wants to know that there is an interest in this among everybody, so we are trying to develop that interest, Cassidysaid.

And despite a looming battle on the overhaul of the U.S. tax code that promises to be as difficult, if not more so, than the health care debate, Republican members are optimistic.

At the end of the day, what we have to do is cobble together the votes to move forward on other issues. The reality of it is this is a setback, but its not, in my opinion, an unexpected setback, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scottsaid.

Andrew Siddons and John T. Bennett contributed to this report.

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Link:
Senate Health Care Failure Prompts Republican Soul Searching - Roll Call

In the space of a few hours, Mr. Trump reluctantly agreed to preserve President Barack Obamas nuclear deal with Iran and failed in his effort to repeal Mr. Obamas health care program.

But Mr. Trump hasnt given up. He announced new sanctions on Iran and he called on Congress to simply repeal Mr. Obamas health care program without passing a replacement.

Well let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us, the president said at the White House.

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The Obama administration ordered Russian diplomats to leave two waterfront compounds in New York and Maryland. Now, Russia wants them back.

3. The White House acknowledged that President Trump and Vladimir Putin had an undisclosed private talk at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, but there is no U.S. government record of it. The unreported meeting raises new questions about their relationship.

Meanwhile, the eighth person who attended a June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. was identified as an emissary of a Russian oligarch.

Russia said its patience is wearing thin over two waterfront compounds that the Obama administration seized from Russian diplomats as punishment for Moscows meddling in last years presidential election. The video above explains it.

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, had called the seizure robbery in broad daylight, and the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said that Russia reserved the right to retaliate against the United States.

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4. China partly blocked WhatsApp in its ever-tightening grip over internet content.

The messaging app was the last of Facebooks major products that still worked in China. It appears to have fallen victim to an online crackdown fed by a perfect storm of politically sensitive news, important events and a new cybersecurity law that went into effect last month.

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5. It took global outcry, two rejections and President Trumps intervention for six teenage girls on an Afghan robotics team to get the U.S. visas to take part in a competition in Washington.

Theyre like superheroes, a competitor from Myanmar said.

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6. Texas lawmakers are gearing up for a special legislative session, where they are likely to decide the fate of a bill regulating the access of transgender people in public restrooms.

But theres more on the line the political future of Joe Straus, the speaker of the Texas House, who has put himself at odds with his fellow Republicans over his resistance to the bill. Mr. Straus is one of the states last moderate Republicans.

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7. My will to survive kicked in.

James Church was fishing off a jetty when he was struck by lightning in Florida, a state that has more lightning strikes and fatalities than any other state.

Here are four tales of survivors with disparate stories that all began with a bolt from the blue.

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8. Mountain roads provide an optimal vantage point to see a bicycle race in person, but theyre difficult to reach. The Tour de France has a longtime tradition of cycling fans camping out in the mountains for days, or even weeks, to claim a coveted place along the course.

The New York Times went up the mountainside of Mont du Chat to join them.

On the soccer field, the second-highest-ranking soccer official with FIFA was arrested and charged with corruption and embezzlement.

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9. Hello Kitty once represented the height of consumer culture, with everything from lunchboxes to hand-held mirrors adorned with the little girl character.

But the Japanese consumer goods brand Sanrio, which debuted the catlike cartoon with a hair bow in 1974, has introduced new characters that have a much more anticapitalist vibe.

One character, Aggretsuko (pronounced ah-GRET-su-KO), chugs beers and performs death metal karaoke as flames spark around her face.

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10. We wrap up the day in Norway with a new food movement: neo-Fjordic cuisine. Why would an ambitious chef open a restaurant in western Norway, where only 3 percent of the land is arable and the growing season is a blip?

The fjords are what make Norway different, the chef, Christopher Haatuft, said. Thats what I want my food to be.

Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help.

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Want to look back? Heres last nights briefing.

What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.

Excerpt from:
Republican Party, Texas, Donald Trump: Your Tuesday Evening Briefing - New York Times

Buchanan has developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. It is reshaping politics. Illustration: Sbastien Thibault

Its the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century. To read Nancy MacLeans new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible.

The history professors work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man who had died that year whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James McGill Buchanan. She says the first thing she picked up was a stack of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the university by the billionaire Charles Koch.

Her discoveries in that house of horrors reveal how Buchanan, in collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded, developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. The programme is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of differential or discriminatory legislation against the owners of capital.

Any clash between freedom (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe. Despotism in defence of freedom.

His prescription was a constitutional revolution: creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.

He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American south could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private schools. It was he who first proposed privatising universities, and imposing full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was to crush student activism. He urged privatisation of social security and many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links between people and government, and demolish trust in public institutions. He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.

In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.

None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan the Nobel memorial prize for economics. It is one of several decisions that have turned this prize toxic.

But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought. Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan as sellouts, as they sought to improve the efficiency of government rather than destroy it altogether. But Buchanan took it all the way.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanans work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary cadre that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenins techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential. Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical reforms. (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a counter-intelligentsia, allied to a vast network of political power that would become the new establishment.

Through the network of thinktanks that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trumps administration by members of this network and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanans vision is maturing in the US.

But not just there. Reading this book felt like a demisting of the window through which I see British politics. The bonfire of regulations highlighted by the Grenfell Tower disaster, the destruction of state architecture through austerity, the budgeting rules, the dismantling of public services, tuition fees and the control of schools: all these measures follow Buchanans programme to the letter. I wonder how many people are aware that David Camerons free schools project stands in a tradition designed to hamper racial desegregation in the American south.

In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called economic freedom and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.

Buchanans programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLeans discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. Were getting there.

Original post:
A despot in disguise: one man's mission to rip up democracy - The Guardian

It also seems clear that the failed coup attempt has helped Erdoan to solidify his power and use it to push his political agenda. Photograph: AP

A year after Turkeys failed coup attempt, Recep Tayyip Erdoans regime faces a dilemma: first it fears any kind of street-based movement. Erdoans harsh response to the Gezi Park protests in 2013 or the protests that were brutally quashed in the Kurdish cities of south-east Turkey last year are examples. Yet with the presidents power built on a friend-or-foe dichotomy, he also needs a street-based legitimacy. Witness the weekend ceremonies marking the anniversary of 15 July in which he whipped up public support for punishing coup plotters with the death penalty and talked about ripping the heads off so-called traitors.

And as a result of disabling parliamentary opposition and governing by decree under a continuous state of emergency it is not possible for him to prevent oppositional street-based movements from erupting. Last weeks justice march led by Kemal Kldarolu, chair of the opposition Republicans Peoples party, (CHP) which brought at least 1.5 million people for a final rally proves this point.

Erdoan and his followers come from a tradition of political Islam that is often accused of seeking to impose sharia law by stealth. Beyond this, Erdoan has given Turkey a worse record than China or Iran for jailing journalists and activists. Since July 2016 he has pursued a crackdown which has seen more than 50,000 people detained and nearly 170,000 people placed under investigation. It is fair now to say that democracy and its institutions in Turkey are dying by the day.

It also seems clear that the failed coup attempt has helped Erdoan to solidify his power and use it to push his political agenda. He is entrenching it via the institutions of Islam, notably the mosques. The directorate of religious affairs has become an apparatus of Erdoans political initiatives. Of course, mosques have been the carriers of rightwing politics in Turkey throughout history, but traditionally claimed to be supra-political and unbiased.

After last years events they no longer even pretend to be neutral. To underline this, look at some statistics on the Islamisation of the country: since Erdoan came to power, thousands of new mosques have been built, including the one inside the compound of Erdoans vast new presidential palace which is, incidentally, four times bigger than Versailles. Tens of thousands more students are attending religious schools than there were in 2002 when Erdoan came to power, according to the Education and Science Workers Union of Turkey. In effect, Erdoan is using Islamism for power.

Turkey has always been a divided nation but the rise of Erdoan since 2002 has fuelled polarisation

But it wasnt long ago that Turkey was seen as a model democratic state in the Islamic world. So, what has happened? Erdoan started his political career as a traditional Islamist and rebranded himself a conservative democrat politician by founding the Justice and Development party, the AKP. For years, explaining Turkeys democratic path seemed such an easy task. There was the persistence of an authoritarian tradition associated with Kemalism (the secularist founding ideology of the Turkish Republic led by Kemal Atatrk) which the military embodies. According to the mainstream liberal narrative on Turkey, all that was needed for Turkish democracy to flourish was the emergence of a force strong enough to curb the power of the military. Erdoan seemed, to western liberal observers, to be the answer.

Furthermore, a common narrative claims that Turkish military top brass were strictly secular and that this led them to stage coups at various times. They spoke out against Erdoans non-secular policies which prompted a political crisis in 2007. In 2010, a constitutional referendum gave Erdoans government more control over the judicial system. Prosecutors were given extraordinary powers to prosecute secular high-ranking officers in the military. The Turkish military has not been secular in the same sense since then. A number of new officers who have filled vacant positions allegedly had ties with the Gulenist movement, now the number one suspects for the failed coup.

Any lingering hopes that Erdoan would eventually return Turkey to the path of democracy have wilted following both the coup attempt and the referendum in April which allowed him to expand the executive power of the presidency. A French political scientist, Alain Rouqui, advances the term hegemonic democracy to describe regimes such as Erdoans Turkey. He suggests these are not liberal democracies, because the rights of the minorities and the rule of law are not respected; but neither are they dictatorships as elections are held thus political alternation remains possible. Erdoan once declared that democracy was a vehicle, not a goal implying that one could disembark at any point.

On the other hand he does not seem quite capable of transforming society to meet his political needs. In the recent referendum, Turkeys relatively urban cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir as well as the Kurdish south-east region, largely voted against his presidency. Although just 33% of those in the cities voted against, these cities contribute 64% of Turkeys GDP and, in effect, sustain the economy. A poll by Ipsos for the Turkish affiliate of CNN International on the referendum result reveals that 87% of those who voted no consider the election process to have been unfair. And 77% of the yes voters think it was fair. Turkey, therefore, is split down the middle.

Meanwhile, the economy is deteriorating. Investment, tourism and the currency all continue to suffer. Foreign companies are reluctant to make long-term investments, uncertain how long Turkey will remain in a state of emergency. No wonder Bloombergs Misery Index, which combines countries 2017 inflation and unemployment outlooks, recently placed Turkey in fifth place, after Venezuela and Greece.

Thousands of educated Turks are seeking ways to flee and find another life in dignity and peace where they might secure the basic protection of law, citizenship, healthcare or social support. So what lies ahead for those citizens who remain? Turkey has always been a divided nation but the rise of Erdoan since 2002 has fuelled polarisation in the country. Indeed he has turned polarisation ethnic, sectarian and cultural into a political strategy. The opposition seems weak and divided.

Moreover, Turkey has never had a truly free press. It has a long tradition of censorship, especially around the combustible politics of its religious and ethnic minorities.

On the other hand, Erdoans crackdown has to be short-lived. He needs to show potential coup plotters that the cost of rebelling can be prohibitively high. Yet, plunging the country into a permanent state of suspicion, purges, economic uncertainty and military weakness is not in his interests either. The increasingly authoritarian president should know that the failed coup had underlying causes that will not go away by themselves.

Excerpt from:
Turkey's democracy is dying but this brutal crackdown can't last - The Guardian