Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time—war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race—in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all.

With crystalline prose, Starry Messenger walks us through the scientific palette that sees and paints the world differently. From insights on resolving global conflict to reminders of how precious it is to be alive, Tyson reveals, with warmth and eloquence, an array of brilliant and beautiful truths that apply to us all, informed and enlightened by knowledge of our place in the universe.

The point has recently been made that three southern candidates came with a very small margin of beating their unbeatable Republican opponents in the last election. One of them was white, two black, and the only real difference among them candidate-wise is that everyone is falling all over themselves to elevate the white guy to the status of High Candidate, while the two African American candidates have, at best, been suggested for a subservient role.

That got me thinking, “has Stacey Abrams written a book by any chance” and yes, she has! Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change by Stacey Abrams.

Leadership is hard. Convincing others?and yourself?that you are capable of taking charge and achieving more requires insight and courage. Lead from the Outside is the handbook for outsiders, written with an eye toward the challenges that hinder women, people of color, the working class, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make change. Stacey uses her hard-won insights to break down how ambition, fear, money, and failure function in leadership, and she includes practical exercises to help you realize your own ambition and hone your skills. Lead from the Outside discusses candidly what Stacey has learned over the course of her impressive career in politics, business and the nonprofit world: that differences in race, gender, and class provide vital strength, which we can employ to rise to the top and create real and lasting change.

And here is a short video on the book:

All indications are that we will get to hear Trump say the N-word some time over the next week or two. I don’t really need to hear that, but there may be those who do.

What happened in your politics today? For those in the handful of states that had primaries today, you’ve got one night to rest. Tomorrow, all roads lead to November 6th.

And now for your entertainment and inspiration:

There is a writeup on this at Think Progress by Joe Romm.

I’ve seen, and in some cases, been part of various efforts by various on line entities to clean up fake news or, more often, anti-science news or activism. What I’ve found in every case is that there is an enormous perceived shift in the bottom line for on line entities that keep out fake news vs. those that ignore it, or even encourage it.

In fact, I suspect that people who are more likely to believe, purvey, or defend fake news are also more likely to be ripped off by unscrupulous retailers. The scruples of the business are one thing, the profit levels are another. Facebook makes its money off of retailers making profits. Facebook is going to be dragged out of the fake news business kicking and screaming, if ever.

If you are like me, you live in a Facebook bubble. I do not maintain “friend” status with purveyors of fake news. The people on my Facebook feed are generally much more interested in the truth. So, it is hard to see the fake news problem as very important.

But there are all these other people who also live in a Facebook bubble. Their bubble is full of fake news. Their friends include voters, influencers, parents, maybe even teachers, who are living in that fake news bubble as well. This is a real problem. Facebook fakeness is the proximate reason that Donald Trump is president. I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is taking that seriously, and I assume this is because he is biased by the prospect of a huge shift in profits with vs. without the heavy spice of alt-reality in the feed.

Whatever.

Now, the California state Democratic party has had an endorsing event. You will see the following FALSEHOODS promulgated because of it:

• Now that Berniebots/Progressives have added their own candidate to the race, the Democrats can’t win, this race
• Progressives are going to throw Diane Feinstein out despite her great power and service and wondrfulness
• Other similar things.

But, the truth is, the way the system works in California, there are exactly two people running in the general election for Senate: Feinstein and de Leon. There are no Republicans, do the Democrat will win.

Also, given that Feinstein cleaned de Leon’s clock in the primary, you can bet that she’ll win the general election as well. But, who knows, either one could win.

There is relevance to what is happening here. Within the California Democratic Party, progressives have suddenly developed a significant power base, quite possibly displacing both centrists and labor. If that is a bad thing, don’t worry. Given the primary system in California, they can’t do too much damage. If it is a good thing, then this is a real good thing, in my opinion, because we actually need to have more progressives, and we need to drop the centrist, incremental, line and be more strongly true to our values.

Personally, I’d like to see Feinstein stay to continue the fight against Trump. Personally, I’d like to see de Leon win, because we need to be shifting towards a more progressive landscape. Personally, I’d like to see the Republican lose this race, and that is going to happen for sure because there is no Republican in this race.

So everything in California is good. Stop whinging, y’all!

People need to lighten up. Trump needs no agenda for this meeting. Putin has it totally under control. Relax!

Trump has promised to bring up “meddling.” However, I assume he’ll be bringing up to apologize for the witch hunt.

Anyway, here is my short list of things Trump will give Putin within a month of the meeting. Not all these things, and there will be things not on this list. But I think there will be things from this list:

1) Pardon Mueller-indicted Russians
2) The Crimea
3) A presidential finding that oil extraction in Siberia is outside any sanctions by the US, including Congress
4) Alaska
5) Syria

What’s on your list?

Rebecca had run to seek the endorsement from the Minnesota DFL (that’s what we call Democrats in Minnesota). The state convention, at which endorsements are determined by a large collection of dedicated delegates and alternates, was held in Rochester. (Note: candidates can still run in the August primary, but it is often considered bad form to ignore the endorsement process.) I was there as a delegate. I’d never been to a state convention before, though I’ve been to plenty of state Senate District and Congressional District ones. The state convention was similar but ten times bigger, twice as loud, three times as long, and doubly exhausting.

Rebecca lost the endorsement process with a gut-punching and unexpected low number of votes on the first ballot, followed by a long period of chaos, followed by the exuberant endorsement of candidate Erin Murphy. Congratulations to Erin, who has doubled down on this process with her choice of picking a second Erin, Erin Maye Quade, as her running mate. That was a stunningly excellent choice.

But back to the Otto campaign. I was truly expecting the numbers to be different in this endorsement process. I was not personally privy to the detailed data on this campaign, but I had seen the top-line analyses. I expected Murphy, not Otto, to be in distant third. Clearly the numbers were wrong!

I don’t fault the people in the Otto campaign for getting that wrong. Well, yes, they did get it wrong, but this is not uncommon. I myself have had the job of counting delegates. I’ve gotten it at least as wrong. I know others who have as well. Campaigns often, perhaps to some extent, in most races, end up with incorrect delegate counts. (I note that as far as I know, the Murphy campaign had the numbers close to correct.) I have some ideas as to how this happens, and it might be helpful to work out some theory on this. But that is for later. For now, there is this one element of getting surprised by a low delegate count on the first ballot that I’d prefer to dwell on for just one moment:

It feels really, really, bad.

I don’t feel it is my place to relate how things were in the war room after the end of the process. That is private. But I was struck by one thing I’ll leak out. The people in the room, all of whom I have great love and respect for, exhibited the full range of expected emotional states from quietly stunned to liquefied-in-place, except for Rebecca Otto herself. Rebecca was the strength in the room. That was not unexpected, but I think it is something that should be said. I know she felt just as bad. I know her just enough to have sensed that. But she was not the quivering bowl of jelly I would have been.

I helped Rebecca in her campaign for two reasons. One is simply that she and her husband, Shawn, are my friends. But I’ve had a lot of friends run for office for whom I offered only perfunctory help. In the case of Rebecca Otto, there was another reason. I knew that Rebecca was blindingly smart, and a deeply good and honest person, and ever thoughtful. I know that for each area of policy, Rebecca would assemble her best assets and then ask them to assemble their best assets. These teams would then develop details and try ideas, in order to ultimately advance well developed proposals that could be brought to fruition in the State House to change the fundamental nature of economy, society, and culture in Minnesota, all in good ways. I was at the tail end of at least one of those assemblies, and contributed a bit to the policy development. There was a fact Rebecca often repeated in her stump speeches that I had worked on. I was proud to hear it mentioned again and again.

The other candidates are great people, great democrats, any one would be great as a governor, but I was supporting Rebecca Otto because I knew her approach and her results would be uniquely and powerfully transforming. People around the country were going to look at Minnesota, and go, “Wow, what the heck was that??? Why can’t we do that? Who did that? Let’s do that!” And the answer would be Rebecca Otto and the team she leads.

In the end, we are all Democrats. Just as importantly, those other guys? They are all Republicans. So, we have work to do. I like Erin Murphy. I will support her and her campaign, as the endorsed candidate. I’ll support all the endorsed candidates. I’ve been working on the campaign of our local Minnesota House, where my friend Ginny Klevorn hopes to unseat Representative Sarah Anderson, who is is a less religious but just as tea-happy mini-me version of Michel Bachmann, and leader of the evil Republican redistricting ploy in our state.

But I’ll be standing by for future versions of a Rebecca Otto campaign, should that happen, and I hope it does, somehow, sometime, somewhere.

A few notes about the other events at the convention.

The first one is a major piece of news that is still unfolding even as I write this.

Lori Swanson is the Minnesota Attorney General. Swanson has been the perennial heir apparent for that job forever. What I mean by that: everybody always assumed she’d be endorsed, then win. She has a great reputation and everybody likes her, etc. etc.

But this year, Matt Pelikan ran against Swanson for AG. Everybody seemed to like Matt, but everybody also said this about that race: we need Lori, she’s been great, Matt is great, but he has no experience, maybe he can run for something else someday.

Meanwhile, Swanson made a nuisance of herself at the very beginning of the pre-election season, last summer, telling everyone she might or might not run for Governor. This moved several good people into the position of running for the AG seat, but promising to pull out if Lori gives the governor’s race a pass. She pulled that trick (do I sound annoyed? sorry!) for way too long, using the fact that she was a state AG but also, not really an actual candidate, to exploit her moves along with other state AGs against Trump for positive Democratic Party cred.

At the convention, two things happened, then the boat tipped over.

First, Matt Pelikan, who is one very impressive young man, gave a speech that in my view was in the top three given at the convention, maybe the best one. He had the crowd on their feet. He also landed about eight good punches on the Swanson campaign, including noting Swanson’s NRA endorsement over the years, and her stand on various other issues that have become highly questionable even though everybody loves Lori and assumes she’s the automatic candidate.

Then, the Swanson campaign totally messed up their own presentation. Each campaign gets a certain number of minutes, then they have to get off the stage. Most campaigns have a short video, a person or two talk in favor of the candidate, then the candidate gives a rousing speech. Swanson had a mediocre video. Then, some dozen or so people lined up to each speak on her behalf. They were mostly unpracticed and poor speakers (including at least one who is an experienced politician who simply had not woken up that morning, it seemed). Each one spoke for 3-5 minutes. But they were supposed to speak for one minute! SO, half way through that awkward and embarrassing event, the whole lot of them got thrown off the stage, and Swanson never got to speak.

When the delegates voted, Pelekan had denied Swanson the endorsement. A very large number of delegates had probably figured, “OK, Lori is the obvious candidate, but Imma cast this one vote for Pelikan because he is so impressive.” The outcome of that vote was so astonishing, they had to bring in a special sweeper device to remove everyone’s jaws from the floor.

Before the second vote, Swanson dropped out. Ear shattering collective gasp.

My first thought? She’ll run in the primary for the AG slot!

My second thought, seconds later? No, wait! She’s running for governor!

And, low and behold, seconds ago as I write this, the news has leaked out: Swanson is running for Governor with Congressman Nolan as her Lt Gov.

In a less dramatic and less complicated event, former Republican and Bush ethics lawyer Richard Painter ran against Senator Tina Smith for the endorsement. Smith got the endorsement, but Painter got a surprisingly large number of votes.

And, finally, another sad thing. I’ve always supported Jon Tolefson in his political career, and I wanted him to be endorsed for auditor. He had a lot of support, including the endorsement of the Environmental Caucus. In something of a surprise, Julie Blaha took the majority of votes on the first round, and Jon stepped away, allowing Julie to be endorsed by acclamation. That was sad for me, but more sad for Jon’s Mother, who was sitting with me in my unit delegation at the event.

That’s all I have for now, but later, there are some people I want to thank. First, some dust has to settle and and I have to go through some photos and videos I may post.

OK, everybody, get to work!

ADDED: Keith Ellison, US Congressmember and Democratic Party co-head, considering running for Minnesota AG? This makes no sense! The world is spinning in the wrong direction!

This graph says it all:

One thing this means is that the Democrats, in putting up candidates in Minnesota, are not trying to win back Republicans or Trump voters. They are simply trying to win back their own.

Many months ago I coined the term “snowflake” to refer to liberals, progressives, or Democrats, who felt that since their own personal point of view is not perfectly represented in the mind of each and every other liberal or progressive or Democrat, that they should therefore complain incessantly, stay home from the polls, and sit there in a funk hoping someone like Trump wins the election in order to show the rest of them how bad they are being.

Unfortunately, the snowflake moniker has been co-opted, without my permission, by others! But, here, I revise it for the special purpose of talking about this graph.

Roughly six percent of Minnesotans are snowflakes.

This year, dammit, show up.

Also, in the coming convention, if you are a DFL delegate, vote for Otto because you don’t need a medium size male with a lumberjack shirt and a booming voice to win in this state.

A state bank that is not chewed up by Wall Street goons has the potential to help a lot of people and advance important progressive ideals. Therefore, you can expect Republicans, Libertarians, Conservatives, and of course, bankers, to vigorously oppose it.

But Minnesota may well get a state bank.

Minnesota Auditor and Gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto (DFL) has just proposed a state bank as part of her overall economic plan (the Local Economies Plan) for Minnesota.

The idea is to address high student debt, and limited access to capital for small businesses including farms, and to address social (often racial or, really, just plain racist) disparities in access to cash within the state. The plan is outlined here.

I caught up with Rebecca this morning and asked her to tell me a bit more about the project. For one, I wanted to know why, with all the banks around that seem to serve a wide range of purposes, we needed this new kind of bank. “Right now the scales have tipped away from the people and toward big industry,” she told me. “Because we live in a time of the politics of greed and citizens united, we’ve got to aggressively figure out how to provide for equality of opportunity and focus back on strong local economies and the common good, and we must pursue every option available.”

We live in an increasingly miserly culture, I told her. I see every single policy proposed, some policy that might keep baby kittens from being tortured, and people insist on knowing the economic benefit before the moral or ethical benefit. How does this plan address the most parsimonious sensibilities?

“Consider farming,” she said. “When the economy turns down, the farmers that are most diverse tend to survive. That’s been well-established and I have seen it as a member of the Rural Finance Authority board. It’s just like when Shawn and I were in business, we knew that we needed a diverse customer base. If we let any one customer become too big a share of our sales, we became vulnerable. Diversity in the local economy makes us stronger and that means more small businesses. That way when one of them decides to close up shop you don’t lose half the economic base of the town.” And one of the main purposes of the bank is to address this problem.

During the conversation we got a bit off track to talk about her overall economic plan. Regarding a $15 minimum wage, Auditor Otto noted that “People tell me, ‘$15, we could never afford that,’ and I ask them: are you telling me that we can’t afford to pay people enough to survive? Because the alternative is to have people starving or to put more and more money into government safety net programs instead of people making enough to support themselves, and we all pay for that in taxes,” she argued. “So this is a moral question as well as an economic one. Capitalism doesn’t work unless people have an education and have money in their pockets. The whole thing breaks down, so policies that improve the common good economically support capitalism too.”

The other day, I spoke with some of Otto’s lead campaign staffers, and I got the strong impression that Otto is currently even with, or slightly leading, the other main candidate in the DFL’s endorsement process, and has a very good chance of being the endorsed candidate for governor. Otto, a resident of rural Minnesota with strong ties to the cities, the educational communities, and business, enjoys more statewide support than any other candidate, and has a high probability of winning in November, even if there isn’t a “blue wave.” But there will likely be a blue wave as well. So, the chance that we get to see how a State Bank can work for the state is very high!

Clearly, there is something wrong, and since this is not a mystery novel, I’ll tell you right up front what it might be. It appears that the health insurance industry has hijacked the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) into favoring Democratic Party candidates that are not in favor of rapid deployment of a single payer system.

Is it true that Americans currently prefer single payer? Yes, and this has been true for at least a year.

A June, 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center showed that 60% of Americans want the Government (that would be the “single payer”) to be responsible for covering health insurance premiums.

A Harvard-Harris Poll done in September 2017 indicated that 52% of all Americans want a single payer plan. About 70% of democrats support it, and 65% of Republicans oppose it. Independents were shown to be about 50%-50%. For a major issue like this, this counts as winnable support. A different poll, by Politico, indicated that 49% favor single payer while 35% oppose it, indicating a similar level of support.

More recent polling shows these numbers to be holding or increasing in favor of single payer. How many people prefer a single payer plan depends on if it is called “single payer” or something else (“medicare for all” plays even better)

Every industrialized nation in the world has single payer health care, except for the United States. Americans pay something like three times the cost for health care as other countries, and for the most part we do not get better services. Approximately one third of the excess costs of health care in the US, paid by people either in premiums, co-payments, direct payments, or taxes that cover the uninsured, is paid to the insurance companies just to do the job of moving money around and being extremely annoying. Another third is to pay for extraordinary costs such as grossly overpaid specialists and very expensive pharmaceuticals. Another third is keeping up the shiny parts of our system. We pay extra to have more single or double occupancy hospital rooms, really nice birthing facilities, great lobbies, all that.

So yes, Americans have “deluxe” health care. But beware the concept of “deluxe.” Often, the deluxe version of a product is simply the one they charge more for, and maybe stick a fancy ribbon on, but that is otherwise no different. We get average heath care with a few amenities that have little to do with actual health, pay three times as much for it, and in so doing, prop up an industry that is so fat with our funds that it did not suffer ill effects during the Republican Recession.

And now, progressive politicians around the country are running on the “single payer” platform, and we are begining to fight over it, about it, and oddly, even with it. For example, Rebecca Otto, running for Governor in Minnesota, has a single payer plan that totally cuts out the insurance companies. Cutting out the insurance companies is such a desired outcome among voters, that when activists who disagreed with the widely popular candidate on other issues wanted to land a punch, they spread false rumors that the Otto single payer plan used insurance companies (it does not). Point is, single payer is so important to people that they are starting to use it to try to win fights.

But I digress. Let’s get on to the part that smells somewhere in Denmark. Here is what happened.

First, a bunch of people got filthy rich selling healthcare insurance.

Then, everybody, but especially Democrats, wanted to cut the insurance companies out and save everyone a bundle, and reduce the chance that a family would have to make some horrific decision on health because the soul-less greedy insurance companies put some plan limit on important services.

Then, recently, a handful of insurance companies hired an insurance industry connected polling firm to carry out an utterly bogus and invalid poll that could be nefariously misconstrued to suggest, in opposition to all the known valid research, that voters do not want single payer.

The poll asked the open ended question, “If you could change one thing about your healthcare, or heath insurance, what would it be?”

Respondents, allowed to say only one thing, mostly said “make it cheaper.” Only 12 percent said, specifically, “make it single payer.” No actual professionally done poll would have asked such an open ended question, and no legit pollster would ever tell a client, based on this poll, that only 12 percent of Americans want single payer. And, nobody with two neurons to rub together would hear that statement and believe it, especially if they were tasked with routing hundreds of millions of dollars of donated money to support political campaigns, based on that information.

But that is what actually happened. This poll was used to manipulate the preternaturally hapless and embarrassingly ineffective Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to preferentially fund candidates that were soft on, or even opposed to, single payer.

The memo provided to the DCCC said,

The American people overwhelmingly want Congress to improve the Affordable Care Act, not repeal it or replace it with something radically different. We need to offer reasonable solutions to improve the law instead of a massive overhaul.

That was a lie promulgated by agents of the health care insurance industry to shape Democratic party politics in a way that served them but that was distinctly different from what Democrats actually wanted.

The characterization of Americans as, essentially, opposing a modern civilized health insurance system is patently untrue, and clearly designed to steer the DCCC to support candidates that would be favorable to maintaining the the health of the insurance companies, rather than the people.

The analysis was done by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and GBA Strategies, with Stan Greenberg at the helm of the polling.

According to The Intercept,

Greenberg is the spouse of Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa Delauro. She is not one of the 121 House Democrats who back the single-payer legislation before Congress, and one of only 11 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who did not sign the bill.

In a comment to The Intercept, Greenberg noted that Alan Quinlan, a partner at his firm, led the work on the poll. On the firm’s website, Quinlan lists Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan as one of his former clients.

Which candidate in your state or district is running on a pure single payer platform, vs. some alternative? Please report back in the comments!

Sources on polling data:

http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/351928-poll-majority-supports-single-payer-healthcare

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/23/public-support-for-single-payer-health-coverage-grows-driven-by-democrats/

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/20/single-payer-health-care-poll-242907