This is the Tom Hartman program.

And welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you.

On the line with us is Congressman Ro Conna, the Vice Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, he represents the

Silicon Valley area of California in the U.S House of Representatives, and K-H-A-N-N-A-D-H-N-A-D.

House.

Go. Is his website, you can tweet him at Rep or O'Connor.

And Congressman, just a little procedural thing.

Joyce, who normally screens our calls, is the traffic here is just, it's not the traffic.

They're evacuating literally five miles south of

Portland. The city is engulfed in smoke and Joyce was trying to get in this morning

and there's all kinds of car accidents because you can't see and Route 5 is shut

down the freeway that gets you to near you know close to where we are and so she's

still stuck in traffic it's been an hour and a half apparently there's some god-awful accident out there and so I'm screening calls live while we're on the air

But I can't talk to people I can only see what their phone number is where they're calling from and if they've ever called before I can

see their name. So I'll be popping people on the air to talk to you but they're on screen so I may be

dumping people real quickly or whatever. Sean's got her finger on the obscenity button and all that kind of stuff.

So my apologies, but I hope you're well and I'm wondering what your thoughts are while we're on the air.

Well, I hope you're well and I hope that you and your team are safe. I've been reading how awful the

fires and everything are in Oregon. On 9-11 I'm reflecting obviously on the loss but also how there seemed a moment of

kind that our nation came together that seems so far away from the polarized times we have and I think it's unfortunate that a lot of the common purpose we had was then squandered into a needless war in Iraq and it really seems that's

where the polarization of the nation began.

But if we could reflect about what can bring us together and have a thoughtful

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