Aug. 9 Open Thread: Even ‘Fox & Friends’ Viewers Support Medicare for All

If there’s one thing centrists love to tell us, it’s that America isn’t ready for “radical” progressive ideas like Medicare for All. Somebody forgot to send that memo to Fox News viewers. “Fox & Friends” ran a scare segment about how expensive that would be, using that Koch brothers study that found it would cost “$32.6 trillion” over 10 years. They did not mention that the same study found (and tried to bury) that figure amounted to a $2 trillion savings over what it would cost under our current system. But when they asked the show’s viewers if that extravagant cost was worth it, 73% of them said yes. Maybe it’s only because “Medicare For All” is easier to understand than anything centrists have ever devised.

Another clear sign was sent by Missouri voters.Two-thirds of them rejected the Right to Work law passed just weeks ago by the Republican legislature. Missouri used to be purple but has been trending more Republican for 20 years, showing that there’s nothing like giving conservatives control to show voters they shouldn’t do that.

Centrism can’t be dead! It hasn’t even made out its will yet! Yes, sadly, so-called “centrist” or “moderate” Democrats — we know them as neo-liberal corporate tools — still haven’t recognized that America is leaving them behind. That hasn’t stopped people from preparing the obituaries for the Democratic Party movement that disenfranchised an entire generation of working people.

The motivating principle of centrism is that everything will work out all right, but that’s only true if the country is on the right track in the first place. When the center shifts, as it did post-Reagan, centrists shift with it. That’s been the problem since long before Trump, and it’s still the problem, though Trump’s incompetence is obscuring it for now. In this telling, the biggest portion of blame falls on Congress, which for decades has ceded power to the president in violation of its Constitutional duty.

One big reason Trump happened is the public’s growing awareness of how two-faced its representatives really are. Devin Nunes, for instance, seems like Donald Trump’s strongest supporter in Congress. But a leaked audio of his fund-raising talk for GOP Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers reveals that Nunes knows what Trump did is illegal, and that he’s sticking with him because if he doesn’t, Republican control of Washington “goes away.”

I keep seeing trolls who need to update their pro-fossil fuel talking points. Not only are they wrong about jobs — there are far more of them in renewables like wind and solar than in carbon extraction — their projections about natural gas as the “bridge” to renewables

On the foreign front, guess who’s helping America’s allies in the undeclared and un-reported-on war in Yemen? Our once and future buddies in Al Qaeda. Yes, America’s war on terror has come full circle. We have met the enemy, and by golly, he looks mighty familiar.