Asylum, Sanctuary and Refuge

Asylum dates back to medieval times when an individual could seek refuge or sanctuary against persecution in a church. It is one of the hallmarks of civilization, and an important element of one’s humanity.

My wife Katie has worked on getting better results for public school kids as long and as diligently as I have worked on health care for the uninsured. We know Marshall Tuck very well and have seen what he can do in turning around poor performing schools. At the very top of his platform are more funding for public schools and greater support for teachers.  https://marshalltuck.com/invest-in-our-teachers-and-principals/ and https://marshalltuck.com/issues/classrooms-that-are-fully-funded/

American voters have a real choice next week. It’s basically a referendum on Donald Trump, which is unfortunate, but he has remade the Republican Party in his own image, and too many elected Republicans have acquiesced in the most disgraceful aspects of his Presidency.

Marshall Tuck (D) v. Tony Thurmond (D)

I strongly support Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent of Schools and hope you will consider him on the November ballot. Marshall has been on the ground turning around poor performing schools for low-income children throughout Los Angeles.

What an incredible and captivating treat.

Financing Medicare for All is far better done at the federal than at the state level.

We have some very big problems that need to be addressed by our federal, state and local elected officials. Voting has never been more important, so please vote in the November midterms and get all your friends, family and colleagues to vote as well.

Medicare for All – A Single Payer Health Care System for California and the Nation

Medicare was established back in 1965 under the Johnson Administration. It’s a program for seniors (65 and older) and for many of the nation’s disabled. It has advantages such as freedom of choice of providers and regulated rates and disadvantages such as uncovered costs and services and shaky financing.

It is essentially NAFTA updated.

Judge Kavanagh has some fairly retrograde views on the sorts of issues that are going to be coming before the US Supreme Court.

The uninsured rate for the nation as a whole fell 5.8% from 14.5% uninsured to 8.6% uninsured between 2013 and 2017 due to the Affordable Care Act.

President Trump’s supporters and enablers are stretching credulity in their efforts to protect their favorite commander in chief’s tenure and reputation. If President Trump commits a crime, like shooting or jailing his political rival(s), of course he could be charged with murder or other crimes and tried in a criminal proceeding in state or federal court depending on where the crime occurred. He does not first have to be impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate; that appears nowhere in the Constitution or in the nation’s jurisprudence. In my opinion, that’s a Giuliani/Kavanaugh/McConnell myth. On the other hand any President of either party should not be subjected to a series of political/judicial persecutions as President Clinton was by Judge Starr, Speaker Gingrich and their associates (among them Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh). If President Trump descends from his fitful rages into a full fledged, disabling mental illness or has a heart attack and can no longer fulfill the duties of his office, the 25th Amendment is the right recourse for his cabinet to remove/suspend him from office. If indeed he and President Putin and others cooked up some deals to finance him, and get him elected, and he’s been selling our nation and its allies down the river since acceding to the presidency, the right remedy is impeachment and conviction then removal from office.

As yet there is no evidence he has done any of the above, so the most important steps for all Americans is to let the Mueller investigation take its course and to vote in the November elections.

In my view, all workers should have the opportunity to join unions, and those unions should play a major role in representing us in the workplace and in the public square. Men and women died for the right to form unions, to strike, to bargain collectively. We need unions now to become the inspiring force and to play the vital roles in our democracy that they did during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. We need unions to become associations that workers want to proudly join.

We will dearly miss his courage, his wisdom and his judgment. He never shrunk from duty; he always spoke his mind on the great issues of the day; he embraced the difficult challenges facing our nation. He sought bipartisan solutions.

Paul Manafort, prior to being hired by President Trump as his campaign manager in 2016, was the campaign strategist and lobbyist for Victor Yanukovich, the former President of the Ukraine for about ten years from 2004 through 2014.

Trump aligned gubernatorial candidates in Georgia, Minnesota, and Kansas upended more conventional Republican candidates. It’s unclear that these candidates will win in November, but it is clear that Trump is enormously popular among Republican voters, and if you’re an elected or campaigning Republican candidate, you cross him at your peril.

Today’s (8/13/18) New York Times has an excellent piece on the impacts to date of the Trump corporate tax cuts: share buy backs leading to higher stock prices for investors, no increases in spending on plant and equipment, no increase in worker’s real wages and a very large increase in the national debt.

From 1980 to 2016, income inequality has steadily increased in the United States, but not in Western Europe.

Gustavo Arrellano has an interesting opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times arguing for parents’ ability to vote in local elections, regardless of their immigration status.