Patheos has the article Jeb Bush Says Catholic Dogma Trumps US Government.

Theocracy Alert: In an ominous speech announcing his 2016 presidential campaign, Jeb Bush promised if elected president he would favor Catholic dogma over the courts, the law, and the U.S. government.

John Ellis Bush (aka Jeb) is free to choose his own religion, but he is not free to choose mine.

The Salon article Here’s how Bernie Sanders could win: The one issue where Hillary’s vulnerable, and where the Tea Party might be right has the perfect one line description to start you off.

If progressives want to retake government, a full-throated war on public corruption is the key to everything

I liked the fact that the article notes that corruption of the political system was running rife long before the Citizen’s United decision where the Supreme Court explicitly accepted corruption as part of the system.

In Citizens United, Justice Kennedy “found” that government has no stake in “soft corruption”–the billions spent on lobbying and elections–because, he says, it does no harm and people don’t seem to mind it.

This is nowhere near what the founding ancestors thought about corruption. If Supreme Court justices actually wanted to be strict constructionists, they would not be so cavalier about even a hint of corruption.

I bet some politicians are going to say that the Supreme Court will knock down any efforts at fixing the system. So first we have to change the Supreme Court. Under the current corrupt system, that would take too long before we could even get started.

If we have a flood of laws making even the hint of corruption punishable, as the founding ancestors did, it could take years for the Supreme Court to knock them down. While the reformers are at it, they could also make clear that impeachment will rapidly follow any Supreme Court justices who take money, or even vague promises of favors, for their decisions. There are at least a couple of current justices who would be gone in seconds if this rule were enforced.

To set the stage, let’s take a little detour into the preposterous article by Reuters, Greek PM tears into lenders, euro zone prepares for ‘Grexit’

“In the event a solid reform package is not presented, then a ‘Grexit’ would have to be accepted if necessary,” said Michael Grosse-Broemer, a senior lawmaker in Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “I’m not so sure anymore if the Greek government is really interested in averting damage for the people of Greece.”

How much worse can it get than what Germany has already forced on Greece? We know who isn’t really interested in averting damage for the people of Greece. This is a ploy often used by our Republicans. They know perfectly well what a damaging policy is when they choose it. In fact they think it is so damaging that the accuse the other side of doing it. The gall of it is almost beyond belief had we not seen it with our own eyes.

OK, let’s return from the detour to the article on New Economic Perspectives, The IMF “Defense” of it Actions against the Greeks is an Unintended Confession.

The IMF, the heedless horseman of the troika that announced it would stop negotiating with the Greeks and go home, has attempted to justify its position through Olivier Blanchard, its “Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department.” Blanchard entitled his defense “Greece: A Credible Deal Will Require Difficult Decisions By All Sides.” That is a “serious person” title, but it is also economically illiterate – and no one knows that better than Blanchard. After all, it is the IMF’s deeply neo-liberal economists whose research has confirmed that the IMF’s austerity policies are self-destructive responses to the Great Recession and that fiscal stimulus programs are even more effective than economists had predicted.

The reason why this ought to be of so much interest in the USA, is that if we let the oligarchs get away with this behavior in Greece, it only strengthens the arguments for doing it here. If we get the chance to prove them wrong in a definitive way, then we can more easily defeat them here. Who was it said that we’d rather defeat them over there than have to fight them over here?