How a bold new Disability Insurance proposal would benefit individuals with disabilities and taxpayers

  A half-billion-dollar fraud conspiracy… thousands dying as they await their benefit hearings… Social Security’s Disability Insurance program does a good job making the news. Unfortunately, it’s for all the wrong reasons.

  The Disability Insurance program is broken, both functionally and financially. It doesn’t serve disabled people well; it doesn’t serve taxpayers well. Its excesses have stripped about $150 billion from Social Security’s retirement program over the past three years.

  Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.) introduced a bill that addresses many of the program’s functional shortfalls. His Making DI Work for All Americans Act of 2018 (H.R. 6352) would also make the program solvent over the long run, setting the stage for a significant payroll tax cut.

Hank Sanders: Sketches #1642 - Transitions are powerful, and I am in transition

  Transitions are powerful. Transitions may be powerfully good or powerfully bad. Transitions are rarely neutral. Transitions are nearly always powerful.

  I am in transition. After 35 years in the Alabama Senate, I have transitioned out of that body and that world. The Senate did not dominate my life, but it did frame it. The Senate did not determine who I needed to be, but it did reflect who I needed to be. The Senate did not make me the man I am, but it did enlarge my reach.

Steve Flowers: Inside the State House – Analysis of General Election

  A few last thoughts and observations on our November 6 General Election in Alabama.

  Our newly-elected 55th governor looked and sounded more like the old Kay Ivey than the one we have seen the past few years and during the campaign. She was vibrant, succinct to the point, had a perfectly timed and unscripted victory speech. Her green jacket was becoming. She will be a good governor. She will tackle the tough issues the state must face in the next four years, especially our pressing infrastructure needs.

These white Southerners changed their views on race. Your family can, too.

  Last Thursday, many of us sat around tables with family members who don’t share our politics, our belief systems, or even our values.

  That can be difficult. Just ask the people who were interviewed by Donna Ladd earlier this fall in Mississippi: white Southerners whose views on race have changed since their racist upbringings.

  There’s Bob Fuller, who grew up in Mississippi in the 1970s but whose history class made zero mention of the freedom fighters who transformed his state.

  There’s Laurie Myatt, who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election but reached out to a black friend after realizing she had never sat down in a home with a black person to share a meal.

Crowdfunding is a symptom of America’s sick health care system

  “I nearly went to the hospital for the 22nd time in 7 months. As you can imagine this has depleted all of my money,” writes Tara. She continues: “My family has done so much and will help me once I’m there, but I need to move on my own…So look, I’m a responsible girl, I’ve been holding it down for 16 years while feeling like I could be taken at any time.”

  Tara is running a campaign on the popular crowdfunding site GoFundMe. She has fibromyalgia and a host of complications and needs to relocate to access health care. She started fundraising in March 2017, and a year and a half later, she’s raised less than a quarter of what she needs. She’s not alone. Medical expenses are already the leading crowdfunding cause and donations can’t keep up with demand; a 2017 study showed that 90 percent of medical crowdfunding campaigns failed to reach their goals.

Are we being invaded yet?

  If President Trump’s and the Pentagon’s military defense against the impending refugee invasion of America shows how they defend our country from an invasion, maybe it’s a good thing that the commies didn’t invade the United States by coming up through Latin America during the Cold War. Otherwise, there is a good chance that we all would be speaking Red today.

  Why do I say that? Well, it turns out that most of the troops who were sent to the border either forgot their weapons or were ordered to leave them back at home. What gives with that? How can soldiers be expected to defend our country from an invasion if they can’t even shoot the enemy?

  We mustn’t forget that the president and the national-security establishment were as scared of a commie invasion through Mexico during the Cold War as they are today of the Central American refugee invasion.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse – Alabama vs. Auburn

  The only sport that Alabamians enjoy more than Alabama politics is college football. We especially love the Alabama vs. Auburn football game. Folks, this is Alabama/Auburn week in Alabama!

  The Alabama vs. Auburn annual event is one of the fiercest of college football rivalries. It is the game of the year. It is a state civil war that divides friends and even families. It is bragging rights for the entire year. The loser has to live with his boasting next door neighbor for 364 days. It seems that one must choose a side no matter if you despise college football and could care less who wins. Newcomers to our state are bewildered on this fall day each year. They cannot comprehend the madness that surrounds this epic war. It is truly that, a war. It is the game of the year.

Five ways the new Congress should support resilient infrastructure

  In the past two years, hurricanes have devastated urban and rural communities from Puerto Rico to North Carolina, Florida, and American Samoa. Record-breaking and deadly wildfires have raged across Northern and Southern California, displacing families, destroying homes, and devastating communities. In the first three months of 2018 alone, the United States saw three disasters with damage topping $1 billion.

  These two years of extreme weather are the latest in a sobering trend. Since 1980, the United States has suffered 238 weather- and climate-related disasters causing a billion dollars or more in damage. Billion-dollar events are growing markedly more frequent: Over the entire 37-year period between 1980 and 2017, the annual average number of such events was six, but in the past five years for which complete data are available, the annual average number of billion-dollar plus events (adjusted for inflation) nearly doubled to 11.6.

14 Thanksgiving facts you may not know about

1) Because it is unclear that the Pilgrims ate turkey at their inaugural Thanksgiving meal in the 1620s, the writer Calvin Trillin mock-campaigned for years to have the national Thanksgiving dish changed from turkey to spaghetti carbonara.

2) The people who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower weren't even called Pilgrims. Most of them, dissidents who had broken away from the Church of England, called themselves Saints while others called them Separatists. Some settlers were known as Puritans, dissidents but not separatists, who wanted to "purify" the Church. Not until roughly the American Revolution did the name Pilgrims become associated with the Plymouth settlers.

Sorry, Mr. President — You don't get to choose

  Sorry Mr. President, but you don’t get to just pick and choose who — on behalf of the public — gets access to the White House to ask you questions on our behalf.

  Your predecessors in the White House — Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the like — settled that matter with the Bill of Rights some time ago.

  Whoever told you that you should pull the security pass for CNN’s Jim Acosta — or failed to tell you that you shouldn’t — was wrong.