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The political battle to stop the GOP-led Congress from destroying healthcare safety nets via House and Senate bills to dismantle Obamacare and shrink Medicaid jumped into a new orbit Wednesday, as the Senate Majority Leader said he would keep revising the legislation and numerous pro-healthcare groups stepped up their protests.

On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell announced he did not have enough votes to pass his healthcare-cutting bill before the upcoming long July 4 holiday recess. While McConnell said on Wednesday that he hoped to have a revised bill before the weekend, his failure to get 50 out of 52 Republican senators to go along prompted progressives and Democrats to launch a new wave of protests, phone-banking, letter-writing and other efforts targeting Republicans in 10 states before Congress reconvenes in mid-July.

These efforts come as new polls find that only 12 percent of the public supports the Senate Republicans healthcare plan. A 53% majority say Congress should either leave the law known as Obamacare alone or work to fix its problems while keeping its framework intact, the USA Today/Suffolk University poll said.

By midday Wednesday, protests had begun. Outside the Capitol, NARAL Pro-Choice America held a rally attended by several Democratic senators and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the country, Progressive Democrats of America activists hovered in the Phoenix and Tuscon offices of Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, where they held signs saying, Healthcare is a Right, Medicare for All, and wore hats saying, Single-payer now.

Flake is among a handful of GOP senators who have not endorsed McConnells bill or are seen as vulnerable in 2018 targeted by PDA. The other senators are Alaskas Lisa Murkowski, West Virginias Shelley Capito and Nevadas Dean Heller, who all would see draconian cuts to health care safety nets in their states.

PDA is one of many groups urging members to contact their senators. They have phone and letter-writing tools on their Facebook page. Others, like ActionNetwork.org, seeks volunteers for sit-ins at Senate offices on Thursday, July 6. While other Trump protests are planned, stopping McConnells health care bill is the most immediate priority.

AllOfUs, Democracy Spring, Democratic Socialists of America, Our Revolution, and The Peoples Consortium are working together to organize, coordinate, and support sit-ins at Senate offices across the country on Thursday, July 6th, ActionNetworks website said. We will target as many Republican Senators as possible with a common demand that they vote NO on the Better Care Reconciliation Act.

The Indivisible Project has launched TrumpCareTen.org, which targets GOP senators in 10 states. In addition to the states and senators named by PDA, theyre looking at Alaskas Dan Collins, Maines Susan Collins, Colorados Cory Gardner, Ohios Rob Portman, Pennsylvanias Pat Toomey, Louisianas Bill Cassidy and Arkansas Tom Cotton. Its site has brief sketches of each senators positions, scripts to call specific senators and other ones encouraging Democrats to stop all Senate business until McConnell relents.

Every day, Indivisible will post daily calls scripts to use on your calls to the 11 Senators in 10 key states focusing in on specific topics that must be addressed in the Senates work. Check back here and spread the word, they said.McConnells delay does not mean the bill is dead; it means this recess will determine whether the bill dies once and for all or lives to see another day.

Indivisibles site also had an interactive state-by-state map that gives callers specifics about how the Senate bill would raise premiums in each state, how many people would lose private insurance, employer-provided healthcare or coverage through Medicaid. It explains that callers to Senate offices need to speak knowledgeably to Senate staffers, because those conversations from home-state callers are noted and tallied.

Find out how much premiums would increase and how many people would lose health coverage in your state under TrumpCare then contact the Senate staffers handling health care for your Senators and tell them to vote NO on TrumpCare, their website said. As we said in the Guide, the person answering the phone when you call your member of Congress office will be a staff assistant or intern. You should always ask for the Senators legislative assistant who handles that particular issue for the Senator. In this case: health care. Often times, youll be put through to that persons voicemail. Leave one. And then use the information below to send a follow-up email.

What stopping the senate means

The stakes are enormous in the fight over the Senates bill. McConnells legislation is not merely fulfilling the GOPs promises for the past seven years to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare. The House and Senate have used that pledge to shoehorn in another longtime GOP goal, so-called federal entitlement reform, which, in this case, has meant cutting back the future funding of Medicaid by a quarter.

Each of these elements has very different implications. The Obamacare repeal provisions deregulate the health insurance marketplace. Congressional budget analysts have said it would leave the public paying less for premiums but far more for out of pocket costs due to escalating co-pays, deductibles and having insurance policies cover less than is now the case. As Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, told NPR on Tuesday, GOP lawmakers are not concerned with cutting the same costs as the public.

The conservatives theyre focused on what the federal government spends on health care, reducing federal spending and cutting the federal budget and capping entitlement programs, he said. The American people are focused on something entirely different: their own health bills, their premiums, their deductibles, and their drug prices.

Altman said that the House and Senate bills do nothing to address pocketbook concerns of ordinary Americans. In fact, by deregulating insurance markets, he said the GOPs bills would make these costs take even bigger bites out of household spending.

The biggest change in health care today has been the steady rise in deductibles and other forms of cost sharing, Altman said. That change in insurance is probably a bigger change than the ACA, which has occurred under the radar screen while weve had this great debate about the ACA. And the biggest question in health care were not debating is how much cost sharing is too much.

Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, the real impact of the GOPs decision to go after Medicaid (the government health plan for the poor and disabled) and mostly leave Medicare (the government plan for seniors) alone, pits the elderly against the poor. (The GOP bills still cut into Medicare, because Medicaid pays for nursing home care under that program.) But, as the Journal wrote, Bysingling out Medicaid, it would signal that the burden of cost containment will fall largely on the poor while sparing the elderly.

The deliberate undermining of healthcare for people with private insurance and lower income people on Medicaid tens of millions of whom are woman and children has left longtime Democratic lawmakers like Rep. John Lewis, D-GA, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, saying they have never seen a bill as cruel, heartless and backwards as the GOP health care proposals. To make matters even worse, the bills spending cuts would be given to the wealthiest Americans as tax relief.

Can you even believe what this does for wealthy people who can afford whatever they want with respect to healthcare? Feinstein said Tuesday. And all these children, five million of them [in California] that depend on Medi-Cal, or there is no health care My voice level goes up two octaves when I talk about it it makes me so upset.

I think its a shame and a disgrace that we are moving down this road, Lewis said on Monday, during a discussion with Sen. Corey Booker, D-NJ, on the Capitol steps that went viral. Telling the most vulnerable segment of society youre on your own.

Because of the Senates arcane rules and the procedural tactics that McConnell is using to push the bill through with a simple majority of 51 votes, no other Senate business can be taken up until the healthcare bill is passed or set aside.

This means that stopping the GOPs Obamacare-Medicaid-tax cut bill will could force the Republicans to work with Democrats going forward, as much as they have refused to do so thus far. On the other hand, if they pass it (and President Trump signs it), they will quickly move onto tax reform, where the GOP wants to give even more to the wealthy, leaving, as John Lewis said, the rest of America to fend for itself.

Thats why the protests this weekend and into early July will be pivotal as important as any seen since Trump and the current GOP-majority Congress too office.

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Progressives and Democrats make coast-to-coast protest push to finish off Trump's assault on health care - Salon

Mark Levin's new book, "Rediscovering Americanism," an assault on the media and progressives and a call for Americans to take back their country, debuts today at No. 1 on Amazon.

Showing the draw of the New York Times bestselling author and top syndicated radio host, his book is already on the way to becoming another big seller.

"My new book covers a lot of territory philosophy, history, economics, law, culture, etc. And I look deeply into what is meant by Americanism, republicanism, individualism, capitalism. What do we mean by natural law, unalienable rights, liberty, and property rights? From where do these principles come? Why are they important?" he told Secrets.

It follows in the path of his other books and the nation: Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto; Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America; The Liberty Amendments; and Plunder and Deceit.

Secrets reviewed "Rediscovering Americanism" last week and wrote:

In the book, Levin attacks the embrace by the media, politicians and academia of progressive promises of a "utopia" defined by the end of personal freedom and individuality.

He has a grim name for it: "The Final Outcome." Levin wrote, "They reject history's lessons and instead are absorbed with their own conceit and aggrandizement in the relentless pursuit of a diabolical project, the final outcome of which is an oppression of mind and soul."

Levin added, "the equality they envision but dare not honestly proclaim, is life on the hamster wheel, where one individual is indistinguishable from the next."

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com

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Mark Levin book condemning media, progressives, debuts No. 1 on Amazon - Washington Examiner

Two days before an assassination attempt on Republicans, the NRA posted a video on Facebook warning of leftist violence. Progressive journalists are now pretending political violence is the NRA's fault.

Barely two weeks after a progressive Democrat activist attempted a mass assassination of Republican officials, progressives are outraged at the NRA for noting that the Second Amendment gives people the right to defend themselves, with arms if necessary, from people who might try to assassinate them or their families.

You might not remember it because the news media pivoted away from the story as quickly as possible, but just two weeks ago an anti-Trump Bernie Bro tried to assassinate a bunch of elected Republican officials while they practiced for the annual bipartisan Congressional baseball game. Just days after the New York Times revealed that Republicans regularly practiced at a public park in Alexandria with minimal protective detail, the shooter showed up at the park and started surveilling it. According to the FBI, he even took pictures of the location. Before opening fire on the lawmakers, the shooter also confirmed that the assembled officials were Republicans.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of Republicans responded to the attempted massacre by noting that unconstitutional laws in D.C. actually prevented the Republican officials from carrying firearms for the purpose of self-defense (although the shooting was in Virginia, most lawmakers reside in D.C., meaning D.C. law effectively bans them from carrying anywhere in the area since they would eventually have to return to their homes with the firearms).

Progressives, however, are outraged at Second Amendment defenders for having the audacity to claim a right to self-defense in the wake of a mass assassination attempt. On Thursday, failed Baltimore mayoral candidate and Black Lives Matter gadfly Deray McKesson raged at Dana Loesch and accused her and the National Rifle Association (NRA) of white supremacy for noting in a prophetic promotional video filmed in April that progressive activists were becoming increasingly violent.

They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance, Loesch states in the video. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia, to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.

And when that happens, theyll use it as an excuse for the outrage, Loesch concludes. You can watch the full video here. Rather than undercutting Loeschs claim that progressives reflexively scream racism whenever anyone challenges them, McKesson only underscored her point by accusing her of being a white supremacist for pointing out violence committed by leftists.

On June 12, just two days before the progressive Democrat activist opened fire on GOP members of Congress and other innocent civilians just minding their own business, the NRA reposted the video on Facebook. That aroused the ire of Michael Goldfarb, a liberal journalist who writes for the Guardian, who took to his Facebook page to condemn the NRA.

This new NRA propaganda piece is the most disturbing video Ive seen, Goldfarb wrote in response to the June 12 NRA post on Facebook featuring the Loesch video. Not surprising but disturbing. Reinforces my despair that America is not going to get out of its mess without bloodshed.

Two days after that Facebook post by the NRA, a Democrat political activist tried to murder a park full of Republican politicians.

Judging by his Twitter and Facebook feeds, neither of which mentions the June 14 anti-GOP assassination attempt even a single time, Goldfarb appears to be unaware that bloodshed happened quite recently, that it wasnt perpetrated by the NRA, and that the shooter was a vocal progressive activist who loved Bernie Sanders and hated President Donald Trump. Goldfarb did, however, take time to attack Trump and his supporters, Vice President Mike Pence, GOPygmies, and British conservative Boris Johnson. He does not appear to have ever condemned the June 14 shooter who nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.)

Anne Applebaum, another liberal journalist and former member of the Washington Post editorial board, hopped onto Twitter and did her best to amplify Goldfarbs rage at the NRA for noting on Facebook, two days before an anti-Republican assassination attempt, that progressives were becoming increasingly violent and unhinged in their opposition to the Trump administration and the Republican Congress.

Like Goldfarb, Applebaum also appears to be under the misimpression that no major political violence occurred in the U.S. in recent weeks.

Rather than attempting to exploit what happened in Alexandria earlier this month, Dana Loesch and the NRA predicted it. And rather than acknowledging the reality of what happened, McKesson and Goldfarb and Applebaum chose instead to close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears and scream at the NRA and its allies for pointing out the need to protect the right of self-defense in the wake of a politically motivated assassination attempt on Republicans. Projection in this case, progressives accusing people on the Right of plotting violence while completely ignoring excusing constant violence being perpetrated by the Left is one thing. But what we see in these examples isnt just projection. Its outright denial of reality. Its the Big Lie on steroids: dont just refuse to acknowledge one of the most heinous acts of political violence in recent memory, convict the other side for acts that havent even been committed.

The fact of the matter is that it wasnt the NRA that tried to murder a bunch of its political opponents. It wasnt the NRA that published the location and security details of its foes. It wasnt the NRA that surveilled a park and confirmed that everyone in it had the wrong politics before unloading on them. No, that was done by a progressive Democrat activist. All the NRA did was point out leftist violence and note that Americans have a God-given right, affirmed by the U.S. Constitution, to defend themselves and their loved ones from that very violence.

To Golfarb and Applebaum and McKesson, the NRAs crime wasnt committing or fomenting violence. The NRAs crime was refusing to let leftist violence go unnoticed.

Sean Davis is the co-founder of The Federalist.

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Progressive Journalists Are Outraged At The NRA For Pointing Out Leftist Violence - The Federalist

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Posted: Jun 30, 2017 12:01 AM

Years ago Marxist-socialist leftists, embarrassed at being Marxist-socialist leftists, made up a shiny new name for themselves, progressives. Its a word that sounds like a garden of forward-thinking delights, but is simply code for the failed, human-spirit-destroying government-command-and control that birthed all the evil isms of the past. Thats why every time I hear a conservative commentator in print, radio, or on TV call lefty-socialists progressives my 200 billion brain cells swoon.

The Fourth of July brings to mind how far alleged progressivism deviates from this nations founding freedoms. The government command-and-control against which the American revolutionaries fought was King George III and British rule that denied the colonists basic human rights and the freedom to govern themselves. The Kings officials and soldiers bullied the colonists and tried to break their independent spirit with oppressive laws. The Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights gave citizens the electoral power to choose their own leaders, make their own laws, and the right to freely speak their minds without reprisal from the powerful.

But today, progressives are trying to destroy our God-given Constitutional rights by force and intimidation, the traditional tactics of despotism. Wearing black masks, they smash cars and stores, rioting at college campuses and violating the law and the First Amendment to shut down speakers they dont like. Prominent progressive voices in the media, celebrities, even some in Congress actually call for physically harming conservatives. Some actually gloated when Rep. Steve Scalise and other Republicans were attacked at a baseball practice by a leftist wacko whose heroine is leftist wacko Rachel Maddow.

Once content with telling us what light bulbs we could buy and how much soda we could drink, now progressives mimic ISIS terrorists by holding up a bloody fake beheaded Trump, or not too subtly suggest presidential assassination in a public play partly funded by taxpayers. Celebrities adored by millions of impressionable fans say they want to blow up the White House or ruminate about actors assassinating presidents.

These are the behaviors of tyrannical anarchists who are the very opposite of progressive which Webster defines as continuous improvement; the development of an individual or group in a direction considered more beneficial than and superior to the previous level. Theres nothing beneficial for us as citizens or our nation about lawlessness, property and First Amendment destruction, deadly threats, and calls for personal attacks and assassination. Yet as long as we let them get away with calling themselves progressive, we allow them to claim moral and intellectual superiority over the rest of us.

Its an insult to all Americans when so-called progressives try to claim they are the new revolutionaries, freedom fighters like the original colonist tea-dumpers. Theyre actually freedom-destroyers, bent on ripping apart the freedom of expression and the elective will of the voters, scorning the Constitution and torching the flag of liberty. Their goal is the death of liberty, not its advancement. Their heroes are murdering monsters Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, while they revile white-privileged Washington and Jefferson who pledged their lives for freedom.

The progressive credo is the same as the Cuban dictators and their mentors Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot: oppressive government control under the guise of leveling the playing field or equality and redistribution of wealth. But the people on the receiving end of the progressive promises of that eravariously known as socialism, Communism, or Marxismrather than thriving, have instead died in huge numbers thanks to the benevolent progressive policies imposed on them. The innocent victims of progressivism amount to 120 million or so expiring at the hands of their own governments, according to historians.

Now multi-billionaire progressives like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and entrepreneur Elon Musk are calling for an exciting new way for government to ensure equality, today called social justice. While America was founded by brave settlers who built the new nation with their fierce spirit of independence, personal responsibility and achievement based on hard work, Zuckerberg (whose name means Sugar Mountain in German) wants to replace all that with the ultimate Sugar Daddy, a government that would provide everyone with a universal basic income.

Zuckerberg feels guilty that not everyone has the financial safety net to become entrepreneurial billionaires like he did with Facebook. But everyone should its only fair! Hopefully millions of people immediately sent him their addresses so he could start cutting their monthly checks.

Actually a universal basic income is already here for millions. The number of Americans receiving assistance from about 79 federal poverty programs is up 32 percent since 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected president. Now more than 100 million nearly one in three Americans get benefits from at least one of these programs, not including Social Security and Medicare payments.

This huge redistribution of taxpayer wealth toward welfare benefits is making Americas founding values of personal responsibility and self-reliance seem not only quaint, but unnecessary. Amazingly, in 35 states combined welfare benefits pay more than minimum-wage jobs, which means many have no reason to work. According to a Cato Institute study, a worker would need to make more than $60,000 in Hawaii, and more than $50,000 in Washington D.C. and Massachusetts, to earn more than collecting welfare would bring.

So its no mystery that U.S. labor participation is at an all-time low and that those numbers pretty much mirror the number of people collecting government benefits. Just before the 2016 elections fully 37.2 percent of our non-institutionalized, civilian population over 16 was not working or even looking for work. Of course, free money becomes an effective bribe to vote for the party that will keep the checks coming: the Democrats.

Given human nature, it only makes sense that for many, if you dont need to work to support yourself and your family, you wont. Those who continue to work will be ridiculed by those who feed at the government sugar dispenser.

But the satisfaction of work, almost any kind of work, is essential for a healthy sense of self-worth in humans. Even FDR, the Democrat president who created the New Deal to aid the jobless in the Great Depression, warned against the habit of welfare; relief as it was called then. The lessons of history show that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber, he said in 1935. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. But it has only increased.

Government is a fickle master as the victims of the isms discovered. Dependency breeds subservience and finally bondage after it destroys the aspirational nature fundamental to human happiness.

Since its been abundantly demonstrated for centuries that the progressive approach leads to more human suffering rather than an improvement in the human condition, the leftist/socialist/Marxistists are actually taking us backwards, not forward. Their plans would regress humanity to an earlier and utterly failed model thats left a trail of blood across human history. So lets call them what they are: regressives, not progressives. And lets celebrate Independence Day, not Dependence Day.

Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and author who writes for Townhall.com, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/JoyOverbeckColumnist Follow her on Twitter @JoyOverbeck1

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Stop Calling Them Progressives - Townhall

California Democrats have been some of the most vocal critics of the Trump administration to date and it's not just the lawmakers.

Ahead of next year's midterms, a growing number of grassroots organizers are throwing their support behind political outsiders.

In Southern California, one group of activists is hoping to flip the last Republican-held seat based primarily in L.A. County. They're called Indivisible 2.9, and they gathered on the deck of a private home in the Hollywood Hills earlier this month to discuss their next steps.

They're throwing their weight behind congressional hopeful Katie Hill, a 29-year-old political newcomer.

"She's young, she's smart, she's progressive, she's incredibly committed to her district in a way that I think is quite unusual," says Michele Mulroney, who is hosting the meeting. She's backing Hill as the one who can beat incumbent Republican Steve Knight. She thinks Hill's knowledge of the district and her work in the nonprofit sector more than make up for her lack of traditional political experience.

"Yeah, she's technically 29, but her wisdom goes way beyond her years, and I think it's time frankly to turn this country over to the young and passionate candidate," Mulroney says.

Indivisible is a political advocacy group started by a few Democratic congressional staffers after the 2016 election. Their mission: resist the Trump agenda.

To do this, they put together a playbook of best practices for organizing. They say they were inspired by another, more infamous grassroots organization: the conservative Tea Party, which rose in prominence in 2009 during the Obama presidency.

Now, Indivisible members crash town halls, knock on doors and raise money about $2 million since last year. Their website says there are 5,800 chapters of the group registered in the country, including many in California each in places where they hope to replace a Republican with a Democrat.

Hill and her supporters are after District 25 in Northern L.A. County, which includes cities like Santa Clarita, Simi Valley, Palmdale, and Lancaster.

Incumbent Steve Knight won re-election in November by about 16,000 votes but voters in his district chose Clinton over Trump. Results like these give Indivisible hope, but Hill faces some significant hurdles, such as campaign financing.

She'll need to raise about $200,000 by the end of this week in order to unlock funding from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee $3 million to flip the seat. And money is just part of it.

Democrats face long odds in Republican districts, in part, because the party itself is less than united: There's still a rift between progressives who supported Bernie Sanders and more traditional Democrats.

Another challenge: Progressives are also political outsiders. Theyre up against people who know how to play the game.

"The fact is [the] Democratic Party's been around a long time. It has rules and procedures and people who have really dedicated their lives to it blood, sweat and tears for a long time," says Matt Rodriguez, former western states director for the Obama campaign.

Rodriguez says enthusiasm is generally a good thing in politics, but it's not enough.

"Their issue set might not be enough for large swaths of voters. That means you have to work within that system. That's the system that exists. And that's gonna take time," he says.

Indivisible's organizers continue to work on plans to get their candidates elected, but it's not clear if they'll have enough support (and enough money) to put political newcomers like Hill into office.

Despite these clear challenges, the voters at Hill's event say they want change. And to them, change is only something an outsider can bring.

Press the blue play button above to hear the full report.

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SoCal progressives are growing in numbers but can they get a candidate elected? - 89.3 KPCC