For those looking for a more detailed description of how the new Republican Party was formed, one can start with a Google search formation of the republican party. One of the items I found was this Salon article Racism and the founding of the GOP: Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and the real history of the Republican Party.

The political party that grew from these concerns over slavery was the Republican Party. In turn, it nourished and carried forward the public’s anti-slavery feelings. But the party was an amalgam of strangely different elements. It contained men from different political backgrounds, and it combined antislavery convictions and antiblack prejudices.

For any topic as complicated as this is, I wouldn’t expect simple answers. This article can only be expected to provide food for thought, not a definitive answer to many questions. I don’t know if reading the book from which this article was excerpted, Lincoln’s Dilemma: Blair, Sumner, and the Republican Struggle over Racism and Equality in the Civil War Era (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era) will provide any more details.

Counterpunch has the article Single-Payer Bernie Morphs Into Public Option Dean.

And PNHP, in a paper titled The Public Plan Option: Myths and Facts, says that

“the current Medicare experience combined with experience in many different states that have tried this type of reform shows that public plans are left with the sickest patients and fail due to rising costs while the private insurers continue to collect premiums from the healthiest patients and maintain their high profits.”

We have to be very wary of what Senator Sanders proposes.

Naked Capitalism has copublished the article Bill Black: Why Did Preet Bharara Refuse to Drain the Wall Street Swamp? Lest there be any confusion, the key word in the title is refused.

Bharara knew how to drain the Wall Street swamp. He had the facts, the staff, and the jurisdiction to drain the Wall Street swamp. Bharara refused to do so.

Makes you wonder why the Trump administration fired him, as he seemed to be the pussycat that the Department of Justice wanted to guard Wall Street crime.

The other point is to not let the corporate press like The New York Times fool you into thinking that the Justice Department under Barack Obama had any interest in reining in corporate crime.

Could the Obama legacy be the massive corruption of the executive branch of our government?