Shortly before the Edge got on the phone with Rolling Stone to talk about U2’s upcoming LP Songs of Experience, Bono’s “brush with mortality” that sent the album into a different lyrical direction and his thoughts about the band’s upcoming arena tour, we sent the singer a bunch of questions via email. It was a day off between between shows and he didn’t want to blow out his voice chatting on the phone. Here’s the complete exchange.
You started this album three years ago when the world was a very different place. How did the chaos of Brexit, Trump and everything else shape the eventual course of the album? Would it have been a very different album had those things not happened?
On the latter part of the question, it’s hard to quantify but I would say the emotional temperature is up about 25 percent.
You’ve spent the past few months playingThe Joshua Tree on tour as you put the finishing touches on the album. Has the tour impacted how you thought aboutSongs of Experience? How?
In truth, there’s a couple of reasons why we delayed Songs of Experience. One personal, one political. The world around us was certainly changing out of all recognition, we nearly lost the European Union, something that has helped keep the peace in our region for nearly 70 years. Globalization replaced with localization is somewhat understandable, but the return of hard right views is not to be tolerated. If Marie La Pen had been elected president of France, the whole idea of a European Union would have been vulnerable.
You’ve had the same sort of disaffection in the United States with the rise of a new kind of constituency, people on the both left and right who have lost faith in political process, the body politic, in political institutions. These sentiments are easily played and manipulated by the likes of Donald Trump. In a world where people feel bullied by their circumstance, sometimes people fall prey to a bully of their own. Lots of people around me, both conservative and liberal, feel that this is one of those defining moments in their life and in the storied life of their country. After the election, some people on the left were almost grieving I’d say and when I try to understand this, I realized there was a kind of mourning, a mourning for innocence that was lost.
For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality and justice for all. The baseness of political debate, the jingoism, the atavistic fervor of Trump’s verbiage reminded us that we were dreaming if we thought evolution applied to consciousness. Democracy is a blip in history and it requires a lot of focus and concentration to keep it intact.
Last week, a group of Senate Democrats rallied behind single-payer health care at a splashy press conference. This week, the same group is scrambling to beat back the GOP’s latest Obamacare repeal blitz.
The contrast shows the chasm between the two parties’ approach to health care: Republicans claim that Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” pitch fueled their revival of repeal, an argument that even Democratic single-payer foes dismiss as untrue. Yet some Democrats wish more attention had been paid to protecting the Affordable Care Act before some of the party’s biggest names turned to single-payer.
It’s also a reminder that in Washington you can never underestimate the power of a president, even if they don’t always win. Trump wanted one last shot at repealing Obamacare, and Democrats are now struggling to preserve a victory they thought they’d already won.
“I thought that anyone who believed that you should take your eye off the ball before Sept. 30 wasn’t being smart,” said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who does not support single-payer. “So it doesn’t surprise me that this is coming back.”
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) acknowledged that “maybe” the single-payer rollout had been premature, recalling a Methodist minister who once advised him as governor that “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
“In this case the main thing is stabilizing the [Obamacare] exchanges, so people in every state, every county, can have better health insurance at a better cost,” said Carper, who has not signed on to Sanders’ bill. “That’s what we should be about right now.”
Veteran actor Morgan Freeman appeared in a political video published Monday, in which he demanded President Donald Trump speak directly to the American people about the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
While insisting that the Kremlin’s election interference is “no movie script,” Morgan said, “we need our president to speak directly to us and tell us the truth.”
“We need him to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office and say, ‘My fellow Americans. During this past election, we cam under attack by the Russian government,” Freeman demands Trump to say, adding, ‘I’ve called on Congress and out intelligence community to use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation to determine exactly how this happened.’”
Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke reportedly dropped the F-bomb in an email exchange with a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist who was working on a story about the former sheriff’s security detail.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel watchdog columnist Daniel Bice sent Mr. Clarke, an ardent President Trump supporter, a series of questions last week asking how he felt about losing his round-the-clock, taxpayer-funded security detail, which was reportedly put into place in the summer of last year after the sheriff received an onslaught of death threats. Officials last week announced that Mr. Clarke would no longer receive such protection, which reportedly cost more than $220,000 since January.
“Was this a wise use of taxpayer dollars?” Mr. Bice asked, according to screenshots he shared on Twitter, The Hill reported.
“‘F— you and the horse you rode in on.’ I’m David Clarke and I approve this message,” the sheriff responded from his private email address.
The senators behind the last shot at overhauling Obamacare are fighting back against criticisms that their bill will erode protections for people with pre-existing conditions by saying that states can solve the problem.
The bill aims to provide Obamacare funding for the Medicaid expansion and federal healthcare subsidies to states through block grants. A key provision is letting states waive a protection called community rating that prevents insurers from charging sicker people more money than healthy ones.
The provision has been met with much skepticism from patient and doctor groups. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry’s top lobbying group, also was concerned, saying the bill would pull back protections for pre-existing conditions.
Under the bill, a state that wants a waiver from community rating has to prove that it will still provide adequate and affordable coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. However, adequate and affordable have not been defined, as that would be largely up to the secretary of Health and Human Services.
The bill does not let states waive a separate mandate that requires insurers to provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, which vary from diabetes to cancer. Experts have repeatedly said that without community rating, people with pre-existing conditions can still buy healthcare coverage but it wouldn’t be affordable.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told the Washington Examiner Tuesday that states have a slew of options to take care of people with pre-existing conditions.
“They have a choice of things. Invisible high-risk pools is one example,” he said.
Over the years, a curious habit has taken hold at the United Nations. A body designed to strengthen the best of humanity has too often become a font of doublespeak and appeasement that protects the worst of humanity.
That tragic comity was shattered when President Trump played the skunk at the garden party and dared to tell the truth. Many truths, in fact.
Among them, that Islamic terrorism is a scourge that must be stopped. That Iran is controlled by a “murderous regime” bent on getting nukes.
That North Korea’s “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission” and the United States “will have no choice but to totally destroy” that country if war begins. And that socialism and communism have failed everywhere, including Cuba and Venezuela.
The delegates and heads of state got The Full Trump, including what it means to put America First. It was the president’s finest, most complete expression of his worldview and, thankfully, contained no apologies for American power or history.
Yet even as Trump spoke, a threat to his presidency gained new steam. Reports that special counsel Robert Mueller had wiretapped former Trump campaign boss Paul Manafort and plans to indict him sent Washington into a new tizzy of speculation.
According to CNN, which first carried the wiretapping report, Manafort was surveilled under a FISA warrant, meaning the FBI suspected he was operating as a foreign agent. The network said it is possible G-men listened to the president talking to Manafort because the wiretap continued into this year and Trump and Manafort often talked in 2017.
If so, that would mark an infamous history — an American president being overheard by secret agents of his own government.
It would also be additional support for Trump’s charge that former President Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.”
Life isn’t fair. If you try to adjust everything for a child so they wouldn’t feel any pain, you completely incapacitate them from being able to deal with life.
Members of the royal family aren’t often told what they can and can’t do. But just a few days into his first year of school, 4-year-old Prince George already faces a mandate: No best friends allowed.
Thomas’s Battersea, the school George attends, bans kids from having best friends, Marie Claire reports. Instead, teachers encourage all students to form bonds with one another to avoid creating feelings of exclusions among those without best friends.
Jane Moore, a parent whose child attends the school, explained the idea on a recent episode of the British talk show “Loose Women.” “There’s a policy,” she said, “that if your child is having a party — unless every child is invited — you don’t give out the invites in class.”
After two previous deadlines came and went, House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has set a new date for the FBI and Justice Department to turn over documents relating to the Trump dossier.
Nunes originally subpoenaed the FBI and Justice on Aug. 24, demanding dossier documents by Sept. 1. When none were produced, Nunes agreed to extend the deadline to September 14. During that time, arrangements were made for intelligence committee investigators to visit the Justice Department to make sure officials on both sides understood precisely which documents the committee seeks.
No documents were produced by Sept. 14, and now Nunes, apparently unsatisfied with the results of the staff meeting, has sent a new letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In it, Nunes set a deadline of this Friday for the documents to be produced. If the documents are not produced by then, Nunes directed that Wray and Sessions appear in an open committee hearing Sept. 28, to explain why they did not hand over the materials.
The American electoral college system should be abolished because it provides foreign nations with the opportunity to influence the outcomes of U.S. presidential elections, according to Politico.
The authors used Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 68 to explain the Founding Fathers’ theory that the U.S. electoral college would protect the nation from “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
The story further argued that Hamilton and the other American forefathers could not have imagined, or prepared for, an election like 2016, thereby bolstering the claim that Russia “was able to manipulate America’s election process with stunning effectiveness.”
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters has been obsessed with impeaching Donald Trump – so much so that her latest call for impeachment was during a eulogy.
During comedian Dick Gregory’s funeral on Saturday, Waters quickly turned what was supposed to be a memorial of her friend into an anti-Trump political rally, reports The American Mirror.
“I’m cleaning out the White House,” Waters declared. “We’re going to sanitize the White House. We’re not going to take what is happening in this country. Haven’t you taken enough?”
“And then comes along this person,” she said of Trump. “This person who does not respect you. This dishonorable human being who cheats everybody! This dishonorable human being who will lie at the drop of a hat. This dishonorable human being who has the alt-right, and the KKK and everybody else inside his Cabinet!”
Internal Department of Veterans Affairs data provided by whistleblowers reveals the agency is only filling about half of its capacity to make medical appointments, even as veterans continue to wait an average of at least 30 days before a medical appointment can be scheduled.
The VA documents show that between July and September of 2017, the agency only used 51.44 percent of the appointments available across its healthcare system.
VA documents also show there are currently 184,520 veterans across the nation waiting longer than 30 days for an appointment and more than 45,000 new veteran patients waiting more than 90 days. Internal VA documents also indicate 479,239 veterans nationwide are waiting for physician requested follow-up appointments over 30 days for the period July to September 2017.
The VA says its times have improved over the last few years.
“The wait time for all VA clinics from the date the veterans first requests an appointment to the date when the appointment is completed has decreased from 19 days to 17 days since 2014,” according to VA spokesperson Curt Cashour.
But in clinics around the country, the VA’s ability to use all of its available appointment time is still lagging.
Barbra Streisand only wants to be shot from her “good side” — even when it comes to charity.
The singing diva joined other A-list celebrities such as Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, Kerry Washington and Diddy at the “Hand in Hand” relief benefit in LA last week, but made sure fotogs shot her best side (which we’re told is the left side of her face).
“There were a ton of celebrities on the red carpet, but she wanted to walk the carpet in reverse order, so the cameras would only shoot her good side. It was as if she was a salmon swimming upstream,” a source quipped.
s the left struggles to digest a presidential election loss that shattered their insulated worldview, foul play becomes their only explanation for the rise of Donald J. Trump. Thus, film director and former All in the Family star Rob Reiner, renowned as much for his left-wing politics as his Hollywood pedigree, has joined other Democrats in an electoral Hail Mary: the formation of a task force to investigate the real “red state’s” infiltration of the 2016 election.
Joining forces with Atlantic senior editor David Frum, Obama-era director of National Intelligence James Clapper, conservative political commentator and prominent never-Trumper Charlie Sykes, as well as other former officials and Trump critics, the Committee to Investigate Russia will, according to the organization’s website, serve as a non-partisan command post “to help Americans recognize and understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy.
Though no evidence has surfaced suggesting wrongdoing on the part of President Trump, talk of Russia, collusion, and corruption has dominated the mainstream media since the November election. In addition, both the House and Senate Intelligence committees have initiated investigations, and a separate probe is being conducted by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
