Can Barrasso be a "Flake"?

Want to know what loyalty is worth these days? Ask John Barrasso.

Former White House strategist and neo-nationalist Steve Bannon declared war on Wyoming’s Junior Senator. Bannon identified Barrasso as a target, announcing on Fox News, “Nobody is safe. We’re coming after all of them and we’re going to win.”

Bannon recruited candidates to challenge Barrasso in next year’s Republican primary. One is Jackson resident Foster Friess. He says women should hold their knees together instead of using birth-control. The other is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother Eric Prince, founder of the scandal-ridden Blackwater, who got filthy-rich off the war in Iraq.

In other states, Bannon-like candidates include a convicted felon and one known for using racial slurs.

Wyoming Republicans were primed for Bannon. They recently elected rightwing extremist Frank Eathorne as party chair. Eathorne responded to Bannon’s challenge with a shot over Barrasso’s bow. Barrasso, Eathorne said, has some votes that need explaining.

Can’t you just hear John? “Why me Steve Bannon. Why have you forsaken me?” John must be immersed in the Book of Job. “For the thing I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I have no rest, but trouble comes.” Job’s friends answered him as Barrasso’s friends might. “Affliction does not come from the dust, nor does trouble sprout from the ground.”

Bannon’s challenge didn’t materialize out of thin air. If Barrasso thinks Trump isn’t behind the Bannon ploy, he’s as silly as he looks when photo-bombing Mitch McConnell.  

No one sold his soul to the Republican Party at such a bargain price. Look up “partisan.” There’s a photo of John Barrasso standing to the right of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It seems he is frozen in time in that position.

Being called loyal doesn’t begin to honor the role John played all these years in the Senate. He’s been loyal even when it hurt his own constituents. He’s been loyal even when he knew millions of Americans were going to be hurt by his support of GOP legislation.

Unlike Tennessee Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, John has refused to question Trump and acknowledge what is obvious. The emperor has no clothes.

British politician Neil Kinnock could have tipped John off. “Loyalty,” he warned, “is a fine quality, but in excess it fills political graveyards.”

Senator Barrasso is at a crossroad. He can choose to do what Luther Strange did when Bannon went after him in the recent Alabama Republican Primary. Senator Strange, the incumbent, decided to make it a contest over who can be the most loyal to Trump. Bannon campaigned for Roy Moore, a man twice removed from the Supreme Court for improprieties, painting Strange as a part of the establishment as he will do to Barrasso.

Trump and the GOP leadership endorsed Strange, which Bannon used to the incumbent’s disadvantage. Bannon told Trump-loving voters that the GOP leadership, which includes Barrasso, “think you’re a pack of morons, they think you’re nothing but rubes.” Imagine this scenario playing out across Wyoming in the 2018 GOP primary.

Bannon beat Luther Strange and he will beat Barrasso if John plays the game as it was played by the Alabama incumbent.

The other choice Barrasso has is to travel the road Senators Flake and Corker chose. Take up John McCain’s mantel. Be honest about Trump’s fitness. Join them. Sound the alarm. Trump poses a danger to the country. Barrasso knows it as much as anyone.  

Hey John, appeal to the fundamental patriotism of Wyoming people and announce you’ll no longer tolerate the lies and the incompetence. Announce you’ll not continue to support a mentally ill president who can’t disavow neo-Nazis. Be honest about how dangerous Trump is to America’s future.

Stop defending the indefensible. Return to your moderate roots. Shed the rightwing shtick. Demonstrate loyalty to your country and your constituents, instead of your party. 

Be courageous John Barrasso, and show the voters that there is something bigger at stake than ego. The future of the U.S. is on the ballot in 2018.

Wyoming Interfaith Network welcomes Muslims, Jews, Unitarian Universalists, those who practice Native American traditions, and other non-Christian participants.

Kahlil Gibran said, “I love it when you bow in your Mosque, kneel in your temple, or pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is of the Spirit.”

The Wyoming Association of Churches has made an historic decision. During its annual meeting this coming weekend in Cheyenne, it will become the Wyoming Interfaith Network.

The group has long been an ecumenical Christian voice in Wyoming. Its membership has included Presbyterians, United Methodists, Disciples of Christ, American Baptists, the Friends, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of North America, the United Church of Christ, Episcopalians, and others from time to time.

Now, as the Wyoming Interfaith Network, it will welcome Muslims, Jews, Unitarian Universalists, those who practice Native American traditions, and other non-Christian participants.

The organization began as the Wyoming Church Council in the 1960s. In 1976, it became the Wyoming Church Coalition. They called themselves the Wyoming Association of Churches (WAC) in 2003.

The group’s website says that membership is “based on a commitment to come together with others, putting aside our differences to advance our mission.” The “others” will now include those of our friends and neighbors who worship different from Christians. Together, they will all pursue a mission that includes the promotion of spiritual growth, responsible stewardship of God’s creation, and social justice.

The decision to open its uniquely Christian voice to the voices of non-Christians is a matter of significance. There are people in our community who call themselves Christians who will not be a part of anything that includes Muslims, Jews or others. The Wyoming Interfaith Network will offer testimony that exclusionary practices do not serve God’s hopes for the world.

The WAC decision is a recognition that the world’s great religions have in common far more than that which divides them. The fundamental belief shared by each is expressed by Christians as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The Quran of the Muslims says, “Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself.” The great Rabbi Hillel taught in the Talmud of Judaism that, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This, Rabbi Hillel exclaimed, “is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”

The same theological thread runs through Hinduism, Confucianism, the Baha’i Faith, Taoism, and Sikhism, which teaches, “I am a stranger to no one and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a friend to all.”

We live in times when the failure to understand the way in which others come to understand the divine threatens the well-being of the world and the security of our fellow human-beings. While covering one of the hundreds of international crises on which Walter Cronkite reported, the iconic anchorman said interfaith dialogue and respect were necessary for the survival of democracy. He said “never before has the need for interfaith commitment been nearly as great as it is at this very moment.” The same is perhaps more urgent in our troubled times.

The world needs to grow quickly beyond employing varying perspectives on God to justify hatred. Replacing fears about the religion of others with facts and understanding is the best chance the world has to save itself from the sort of violence currently engulfing much of it.

Theologian David Smock has studied interfaith dialogue and has written extensively on the subject. Smock says, “It is only when participants have a deep understanding of their own religious traditions and are willing to learn and recognize the richness of other religious traditions that constructive cooperation can take place between those of different faiths.”

An interfaith encounter should not be seen as an opportunity to convert the other person to your religion. Neither does it require that you relinquish your own beliefs. It simply demands an openness and a curiosity about what sustains someone who worships and serves the divine in a manner with which you might not be familiar.

The "death tax" hoax

In coming years, the savings and assets of middle-class baby-boomers will be transferred, not to their children as they hoped, but to nursing homes. If tax reform supported by Senators Enzi and Barrasso, are enacted, the wealthiest Americans will be the only ones able to transfer their enormous wealth to their children.

These people amassed unimaginable fortunes selling products and services to consumers at inflated prices while underpaying employees. Now they want to transfer all that ill-gotten wealth to their children while the middle class transfers theirs to nursing homes.

This heist is perpetrated by those who hijacked American politics with political contributions. The contributions came with an IOU. The politicians are paying off the debt.

The payoff is a tax reform bill the non-partisan Tax Policy Council finds gives 80% of its benefits to the top one-percent, while adding a couple of trillion to the debt. At the same time, Enzi, the Budget Committee chairman, proposes Medicare cuts of $450 Billion. He and Barrasso believe the national debt is reason to cut Medicaid and Medicare but not to deny tax cuts to the rich.

While they are spending billions to give their wealthy benefactors a huge tax cut, they’re coming after your healthcare.

Here’s why that matters to middle-class baby boomers.

As you age and require nursing home care, your children will watch helplessly as their inheritance is shoveled into the coffers of nursing home owners. Median cost for semi-private rooms in Wyoming is $6,692 per month according to the Genworth 2015 Cost of Care Survey.

Studies indicate middle-class Americans have saved only $20,000 for retirement. Even if your savings is 10 or 20 times that amount, it won’t survive long-term care. Your assets will be liquidated to pay that bill until you have nothing left for your children except perhaps a beat up old car.

Then you'll be relying on Medicaid. You may have thought that was only for the poor. Before Medicaid pays a nickel toward your nursing home care, you’ll be poor, actually destitute. Your U.S. Senators want to cap the growth of Medicaid and turn it over to the states to administer at a time when they know the trajectory for Alzheimer’s diagnoses alone are about to skyrocket.

The Alzheimer’s Association estimates the costs of caring for people with Alzheimer’s will exceed $20 trillion by 2050, by which time the numbers of Alzheimer’s patients will increase from today’s 5.1 million to 13.5 million. And, of course, Alzheimer’s won’t be the only thing landing us in nursing homes beds.

With the prospects for the aging middle class this dire, Enzi and Barrasso are intent on repealing the Estate Tax. While they employ talking points crafted to scare you into believing this is a tax on you, the truth is that it is only a tax on couples with estates valued at more than $11 million, the richest people in America, who are unwilling to share what they have with charities or family members during their lifetime.

They can pass $11 million to their children with no tax. Estates valued above that are taxed with 40% going to the people of the country that made them wealthy.

These rich folks who want to avoid sharing their great wealth with this great nation are “taking a knee” during the National Anthem. They didn’t create wealth on their own. They succeeded, in significant part, because the nation’s infrastructure, public works and other programs, paid for by the taxpayers, and a business-friendly tax code, enabled them to amass the wealth they seek to squirrel away from the national good, which ought to include healthcare for seniors and others.

They are greedy, not patriotic.

There’s an old joke about the cattleman asked what he’d do if he won the lottery. “I guess I’d just keep ranchin’ till it was all gone.” Voting for politicians like Mike Enzi and John Barrasso is like that. You all can just keep voting for them until everything you have is gone.