I just received an email from Bernie.

The wealthy and powerful in this country have never had it so good.

While the very rich get richer and the middle class shrinks, the Republican majority has passed a deeply unpopular tax bill that would make income and wealth inequality much worse. This legislation, at the end of ten years, would provide 83 percent of the tax benefits to the top 1 percent and the largest corporations. Incredibly, 60 percent of the benefits would go to the top 1/10th of one percent. Meanwhile, by 2027, taxes on 92 million middle class households would increase. Further, 13 million people will lose their health insurance and premiums on the individual market will increase by 10 percent.

Having passed this horrific legislation, the Republican leadership now wants to shut down Congress and head home for the Christmas break.

Well, I respectfully disagree.

Maybe, just maybe, before Congress adjourns for the holidays they should pay attention to the needs of the working families of our country and not just the billionaire class.

Maybe, just maybe, before Congress goes home they might want to address the incredible anxiety that some 800,000 Dreamers are facing who are on the verge of losing their legal status, and face the possibility of deportation. Can you imagine being 20 years old, having spent virtually your entire life in the United States, and now worrying about being forced out of the only country you have ever known because of Trump’s incredibly ugly decision to repeal DACA? Despicable.

Congress must act NOW to protect the Dreamers.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Community Health Centers, whose funding expired on September 30, must be reauthorized and fully funded. Before Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan shut down Congress for the holiday season tens of millions of Americans and their kids must be guaranteed that they will not be thrown off of the health insurance they currently have.

Congress must act NOW to protect health care for children and working families.

If Congress does not act now, 1.5 million workers and retirees in multi-employer pension plans could lose the pensions they were promised by up to 60 percent. People who have worked their entire lives for guaranteed pensions should not be forced to live in poverty because Congress broke the promise it made to them.

Congress must act NOW to protect the earned pensions of 1.5 million American workers.

While members of Congress return home for holiday celebrations, many people in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands will not be able to turn on their Christmas lights because they continue to have no electricity as a result of the devastation caused by the recent hurricanes. Congress must pass significant disaster relief to help the people of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Texas and Florida.

Congress must act NOW to provide financial disaster assistance to those communities hit hard by recent natural disasters.

Sisters and brothers: Our message is simple. Congress cannot simply close shop, go home and leave millions of working people in desperate anxiety.

Please send a message to Speaker Ryan and Senate Leader McConnell. Sign my petition telling them don’t shut down Congress for the holidays until you address the pressing needs of the American people. Don’t give tax breaks to billionaires while ignoring the suffering of working families.

Thank you for making your voice heard. The struggle continues.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

(Letter to the Editor) I don’t want to insult anybody’s intelligence, but still feel compelled to state the obvious: If U.S Congressional members are forced to resign by sexual harassment charges, what about our president?

Congressional Democrats have generally been willing to force resignations, including those of their own offending party members.  But considerably more pressure is required by congressional Republicans like our Rep. McMorris Rodgers to effect the president’s resignation.  Unfortunately, as pointed out in a prominent eastern Washington newspaper’s 12/7/17 editorial, there is a double standard among most congressional Republicans: offending Democrats should resign but not Republicans. Once again congressional Republicans choose political gain over ethics and morality.

McMorris Rodgers

As usual, our own US Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers marches lockstep with the Republican leadership’s double standard, showing her continual reluctance to criticize the president and with no effort in learning her constituents’ views on the subject.

The good news is that we can change all this, at least locally, by electing Lisa Brown to replace McMorris Rodgers in 2018.

Norm Luther
Spokane, WA

I am please to see that Democrat Matthew Sutherland has decided to run for the 9th Legislative District of Eastern Washington instead of the race against Cathy McMorris Rogers for her 5th Congressional seat. The rumor is that he has decided to run against Republican Joe Schmick for the 9th LD, and I believe this is a winnable race for Matthew. The 9th LD includes the Cities of Pullman, Clarkston and Colfax, WA, an all of Adams, Asotin, Franklin, Garfield, and Whitman Counties as well as parts of Spokane County.

Matthew Sutherland, a Washington State University alumnus who announced his candidacy early this year, told a gathering of Democratic donors Sunday night he was stepping aside to support former state Sen. Lisa Brown. Sutherland will run for one of two positions in the state House of Representatives in the 9th Legislative District.

“I’m committed to making decisions that are best for the team,” Sutherland said in an interview Monday. “I think this is the best decision for Eastern Washington.”

(11/15/17) Where’s our representative, Cathy McMorris Rogers?

Here we are with the Republicans in Congress lining up in front of media microphones to denounce an alleged sexual predator, Judge Roy Moore, who thinks he should be their guy in the Senate from Alabama.  Gadsden, Alabama’s pride and joy has the GOP leadership apoplectic at the prospect of having to eject an elected senator like Moore who has a history of prowling malls and high school civics classes in his 30s looking for dates.

Admittedly, this depraved (retired?) predator Roy Moore plans to infect the Senate, not the House of Representatives. But you have to wonder, wouldn’t a powerful woman like Cathy McMorris Rodgers in GOP leader in the House have something to say about the victimization of young girls by a politically powerful man?  Apparently not. Silence.

Cathy McMorris Rogers purports to be the fourth most powerful person in Congress. Yet Wikipedia officially lists the Republican leadership as: Speaker Paul Ryan, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Then it moves on to describe the Democratic Party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Stenny Hoyer.  Oops! They missed McMorris Rodgers, the fourth most influential legislator in the House of Representatives.  All that clout, and yet no mention of Cathy. Hmmmm…

Not to worry.  If you want to find the fourth most powerful Congressperson, you need only adjust your glance during any of the seemingly endless appearances of other Republican leaders on your TV screen.  Just look to the left or right and behind any of these brighter lights of the GOP.  There McMorris is!

That’s’ our Cathy, standing a row or two back, sometimes obscured by a flagpole or potted plant, always with good posture. There’s our McMorris Rodgers with the same forced grimace-cum-smile.  There’s CMR, head nodding approval at just the right moments, politely applauding on cue.

Occasionally we may even see our Congresswoman McMorris Rogers in a solo appearance as she leaves the podium at the beginning of a presser, just before someone the media actually wants to hear from takes to the dais.  Apparently, Cathy is useful for microphone checks.

Often, Cathy McMorris Rodgers is the only distaff member of her caucus in the crowded video frame at media opportunities.  She serves to prove the GOP leadership is not composed entirely of cranky old Southern men with names like Buddy or Trey or Jefferson Beauregard or smug X-Gen refugees from a Nordstrom catalog. McMorris Rodgers sidelined position in this bold new Congressional leadership team is somehow supposed to reflect her power, accumulated via six re-elections, in the Congressional 5^th District, a seat the Democratic Party has pretty much written off as unwinnable…until this year.

For the first time in a long while, the Democratic National Committee and the Congressional Campaign Committee are committing resources to taking back the 5^th Congressional District, part of a larger effort to recapture the House of Representatives, https://www.rollcall.com/politics/dccc-target-list-gop.

That may account for the recent uptick in canned email updates I have been getting from the our Representative McMorris Rodgers lately.  Often these emails will include a Rogers interview copied from some obscure conservative radio broadcast or podcast or a blurry video from the basement of some Bannon wannabe.

Since McMorris Rodgers painfully boring response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address 2014, (See it here, if you are having trouble sleeping through Donald Trump’s tweet storms:  https://youtu.be/QKWc_mMal1A).

This presentation should make it clear why Congresswoman Rogers has been pretty much the potted plant at GOP media events. As she said in that snoozer, “Who’d have believed a young girl working the drive through at the McDonald’s in Colville….”

She makes a good point. I’ve been to that Colville McDonald lots of times and I can tell you that I don’t remember a single face from that drive-through window, not even CMR’s.

Clearly, voters in Eastern Washington can do better – much better, as it turns out this cycle. This election cycle, voters in Eastern Washington don’t have to pick one tribe or the other. Yes, CMR’s opponent will be running under the Democratic party banner.

Lisa Brown, will be running mostly under her own flag, a bright, inspiring banner of legislative and economic development achievements that helped Eastern Washington survive the Bush-Cheney recession as Majority Leader of the Washington State Senate.

Then she came home to lead the development of a full-on, uniquely conceived medical school for Washington State University.  While in the state senate, Brown pressured, cajoles, smoozed and persuaded her peers to support establishing WSU’s first medical school right here in Spokane.  And due to her leadership as Chancellor of the WSU Spokane campus that developed a truly unique focus on developing general practitioners who will stay in Eastern Washington to practice in the critical, but vanishing, role of family doctor.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers can continue to hide from the white male bullies like Judge Roy Moore.  She is an expert at fading into the background when the political heat rises.

But Lisa Brown didn’t deliver these very real benefits of North Side freeway funding, Kendall Yard development incentives or Spokane’s first complete medical school by hiding behind her male counterparts, smiling complacently in row two or three of every photo op.

At long last it should be abundantly clear to the Eastern Washington voter that we can do better…a lot better by voting for her. She’s the one in the front row, at the microphone, leading, not the potted plant in the background behind that collection of cranky old men.

By Jim Wavada

While running for the Washington State Senate, Nancy McLaughlin was caught faking the support of the popular Ben Stuckart.  Stuckart, President of the Spokane City Council, was not amused.  He wants to make it “loud and clear” that he does NOT support Republican Nancy McLaughlin in her effort to be elected to the 3rd Legislative District against Democrat Andy Billig.

Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart said Thursday that he didn’t give City Councilwoman Nancy McLaughlin permission to use a picture of him on a campaign mailer for state Senate. Read the rest of this entry

We launched a website against Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers called We-Can-Do-Better.org.  On it, we tear down the myth that she is a citizen legislator. Her popular appeal is the idea that she is just a down-home girl from the fruit stands of Eastern Washington who is doing a short stint in Congress.  She is not.  Cathy McMorris-
Rodgers is career politician who has been intricately involved in Republican Party politics to facilitate the Wall Street and Corporate take over of America.

Read the rest of this entry