Category Archives: Poltiics

So Really, Who Among Them is Ready for Campaign 2020?

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I’ve taken a few days to digest what the paid pundits digested immediately after last week’s Democratic debates. And now I’m telling anyone who listens that the quality I’m looking for among the 20+ candidates shouting, “Me! Me! Me!” is assurance that they’re aware and prepared enough for the unconventional-to-berserk campaign that is coming at us like a freight train in a mountain tunnel.

Here’s an example of what I mean. It’s something the cable news pundit class mentions a lot. Namely, “How will [Candidate X] look standing up there on the debate stage next to Donald Trump?” To which I say, like the crazed old geezer ranting at his TV, “Why should we assume Trump will show up for a debate?”

After everything else he’s done since riding down that gilded escalator, is it really so implausible to imagine him looking at poll numbers that never poke up above 42%, along with non-Fox media’s drumbeat incantation of his wooze-inducing corruptions and lies and say, to paraphrase the great Walter Sobchek of “The Big Lebowski”, “[Bleep] it dude, let’s go hold a rally.”

And yes, I’m serious.

Throughout 2016 Trump was the irresistible novelty object that cable news couldn’t get enough of. (They gave him $5 billion in free advertising.) The public regarded him as “fresh” and “entertaining”, even if they also knew he was a fraud and a buffoon. He wasn’t taken seriously.

In 2020 the “charm” of novelty is long, long gone. Trump’s 42% will harden around him. But the antipathy toward him from everyone who isn’t grazing on the droppings of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity is as hardened and intense as an extruded obsidian boulder.

Trump may be “a [bleeping] moron” to quote his former Secretary of State, but the one thing he knows fer sure is how to protect his brand, and that doesn’t happen when you walk out in front of 60-70 million people and take A: Questions from people who aren’t named Tucker and Laura (Ingraham), and B: Be exposed to accusation, follow-up and cross-examination from a Democrat who, unlike Hillary Clinton and everyone else on the planet, believes they’re coasting to an easy victory.

As I also keep saying — call me Nostralambertus — it is entirely likely, if not fully inevitable, that we are entering a campaign cycle unlike anything we have ever seen. A heretofore unimaginable [bleep]storm of hysteria, duplicity and sabotage.

Not only do we — and the Democratic candidate — have to prepare for Trump saying and doing anything to win reelection, (and avoid a torrent of criminal indictments), but we have to bake in the reality that Mitch McConnell, who notoriously refused to cooperate with the U.S. intelligence agency’s plan in the fall of 2016 to warn the public about Russian election interference, and since than has stifled every election-security measure pushed up toward the Senate, will pull every lever he can to protect Trump from himself, (and McConnell’s Senate majority from Trump.)

The long-standing agreement that major party presidential candidates submit to televised debates? I have two words for you: Merrick Garland. (Candidates are not required to debate.)

Any out-of-left field legal challenge on the trifling debate business can, like everything else, be shuttled off into the court system … which McConnell and his capos have been carefully stocking for years now. Hell, in that system we might even get a decision by Inauguration Day 2021.

So yeah, I watched the debates last week and constantly asked myself, “Can this guy/gal beat Trump and McConnell at their game? Are they savvy and, frankly, cynically-minded enough to anticipate how foul and nefarious the 2020 race will (not ‘can’) become?”

Besides all the vanity candidates — Marianne Williamson, Bill DeBlasio, Eric Swallwell, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Andrew Yang, Tim Ryan, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard — this personal criteria of mine also red-lined Joe Biden.

Joe’s game, a lot like traditional media outside New York and D.C., is so deeply invested in respect for tradition and the imagery of institutions, he is nowhere nimble or open enough to innovation to respond adequately — much less preemptively — to unprecedented cynicism, recklessness and border-line criminality.

So “who then” you may ask?

Next time: The premiere of Nosatralambertus’s “2020 LameHorse Power Rankings.”

Don’t you dare miss it.


Championing Both Medicare-for-All and Buy-in Option

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During last night’s Part I of the Democratic Presidential debate, moderators and candidates acted as if candidates must make a choice between advocating for Medicare-for-All and a Medicare buy-in option.  It was one of the few areas of division among the progressive candidates

Why?  Progressives should be simultaneously advocating for both policies. 

Stop Bashing Buy-In Option

Medicare-for-All advocates like Sanders and Warren need to stop taking cheap shots at a Medicare buy-in option. 

The reality is, without a filibuster-proof Senate majority, Medicare-for-All simply can’t pass for a while.  Therefore, progressives need a Plan B that helps as many Americans as possible, shows that Democrats can deliver on their health care rhetoric, and advances the cause of Medicare-for-All. 

That’s what a Medicare buy-in option does. 

It helps more Americans in the short-run by bringing much more price competition to the marketplace and ensuring every American has at least one comprehensive coverage option available to them, even in poorly served areas. 

Beyond helping Americans in the short-term, a buy-in option also advances the cause of Medicare-for-All. Americans have been brainwashed by decades of conservatives’ vilifying of “government run health care,” but a buy-in option will give younger generations of Americans first-hand evidence showing that Medicare is not to be feared. It will show millions of Americans that Medicare is cheaper and better than conservatives’ vaunted corporate health plans.

And that will help disarm conservatives’ red-faced criticisms of “government run health care” and Medicare-for-All.

Stop Bashing Medicare-for-All

At the same time, champions of a Medicare buy-in option like Biden and Buttigieg need to stop railing on a Medicare-for-All. 

Even though Medicare-for-All can’t pass right away, progressives need to keep explaining what the world’s other developed nations figured out a long time ago, that a single payer government-run is the only real solution for any nation that hopes to control costs, cover everyone, and improve health outcomes.

For far too long, progressives have been afraid to educate Americans about why a single-payer system is needed.  When fearful progressives sensor themselves from explaining why Medicare-for-All is needed, they leave the stage to conservative and corporate demagogues relentlessly spreading myths about the evils of “government-run health care.” 

And when progressives leave the stage to conservative demagogues — surprise, surprise – progressives lose the debate.

Start Pushing Both

What would it sound like to advocate these two positions simultaneously? It could sound something like this:

Ultimately, we must cover everyone, control skyrocketing costs, and improve health outcomes. And you know what? Ultimately, the only way to do that is Medicare-for-All. 

In America, Medicare has proven effective and is popular with those who use it. In developed nations around the world using government-run systems like Medicare, everyone is covered, costs are much lower and health outcomes are much better. 

So Medicare-for-All must to be our ultimate goal. We have to keep our eyes on that prize. We need it as soon as possible.

At the same time, the Republican-controlled Senate won’t pass Medicare-for-All.  That’s reality folks.

Given that reality, what can Democrats do right now to both help the American people and pave the way for Medicare-for-All in the long-run?  A Medicare buy-in option.  A buy-in option has lots of public support among Republican voters, so it has a much better chance of passing the Senate than Medicare-for-All.

Let Americans choose between corporate care and Medicare. If they want to keep their private health insurance, they can. But given them another option.

President Trump is afraid to give Americans make that choice. I’m not. He knows Americans will like Medicare better, and doesn’t want to give them that option. I’m not afraid, because I know that a Medicare plan that isn’t required to profit off of patients will be cheaper and better that corporate care. So let Americans choose.

Enacting a buy-in option now will show more Americans that they have nothing to fear from Medicare coverage. And that will help us move the American people towards embracing Medicare-for-All.

Pols and pundits keep framing this issue as if it must be a battle to the death for progressives. But Medicare-for-All versus a Medicare Buy-in Option is a false choice.  Progressives should be advocating for both, and stop savaging each other on the issue.

Don’t Donate To Presidential Candidates

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If you want to defeat Trump in 2020, I’d argue one of the worst things you can do right now is donate to Democratic presidential candidates.  I’m serious. 

Bear with me. 

Last time I checked, Democrats have something like two dozen candidates in the race.  That means any given donor’s chances of picking the winning candidate who ultimately runs against Trump are poor.  Therefore, the contribution you give today could be, for the purposes of defeating Trump, pretty much wasted.

But what if you really feel strongly about a candidate? 

Look, the policy differences between most of the candidates are not very significant.  The differences get artificially magnified in heated primaries, but let’s keep things in the proper perspective.  If you feel strongly about Issue X, the odds are very good that you are going to have several candidates in the race who agree with you, if not all of them. 

So, donating now won’t particularly help promote Issue X. That’s why it’s very difficult to pick a Democratic candidate deserving of your donation.

Finally, making a contribution to an individual candidate now could inadvertently prolong the portion of the campaign season where Democrats have so many candidates in the race that their message is pretty much incoherent.  Candidate winnowing is particularly needed with a field of 24, because a crowded, contentious field muddles the eventual nominee’s message and probably muddies the nominee’s reputation. 

Candidates typically leave the race when they run out of money to pay for staff and ads, so giving to candidates now could simply delay the badly needed winnowing phase of the campaign. 

So, which candidate or candidates should get your contributions?  None of them. 

Instead of contributing to one of the Democratic presidential candidates at a stage of the process when the race is essentially a roulette wheel, direct your contributions to Unify, Or Die. 

Unify, Or Die was started by the hosts of the excellent podcast Pod Save America, in partnership with Swing Left.  The idea simple and brilliant.  People who want to defeat Trump can Donate to the Unify, Or Die Fund now, and the minute there is a Democratic Party nominee, all of the accumulated funding immediately will go to the Democratic nominee, so they can hit the ground running post-Democratic Convention against Trump and his massive war chest

So before you write that next big Hickenlooper check, stop, think big picture strategy, and redirect your money to a unified movement to remove the most corrupt, incompetent, and bigoted President of our times.

If the Democrats are Serious About Climate Catastrophe …

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Like so many things lost amid our degrading obsession with Donald Trump is this odd business of old(er) guard Democrats’ unwillingness to devote even one of their 13 scheduled candidate debates entirely to the issue of climate change. This could still happen, but for the moment the idea is going nowhere.

The realization that climate change is a fact of life, and not just a devious scare tactic whipped up out of thick, hot air by Al Gore — right after he got done inventing the internet — is steadily gaining bona fides. “Average” people have heard about it and more and more believe it is real. A few less believe it’ll get worse. Fewer still believe it’ll get a hell of a lot worse, to the point of global catastrophe.

Most of those worrying about what life will be like on Mother Earth in the year 2080 imagine places like Miami looking like Venice on a bad day, along with occasional stories of floodings and drownings in far-off Third World places our clueless leader refers to as “shithole countries.” But that, along with a bunch of dead polar bears and shorter winters, will be about it. We’ll just go on rooting for the home team and keeping up with the Kardashians.

What the majority of people have yet to accept and absorb is that, in fact, based purely on our current emission numbers, global catastrophe is already the far more likely scenario than a couple dead polar bears and watery lobbies on South Beach.

Far more.

And not 60 years off in the future, but in 20 years from now, when even a few of us “I got mine” geezers will still be shuffling around, albeit disappointed all to hell that our assisted-living condo in Naples, Florida is under three feet of water.

Denial, not being a river in Egypt, requires Baby Boomers not to read, much less take seriously, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells.

The short, briskly-paced book is, in a single phrase, flat-out terrifying. The sort of thing that changes pretty much everything you look at every day. And that’s just as things are in 2019, with the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere today. The book is a stretched-out version of Wallace-Wells’ 2016 New York magazine story, that has become one of the three most-read pieces New York has ever published.

There is of course disagreement over the horrifying scenario Wallace-Wells paints — a world where much of the tropical and sub-tropical planet is unlivable because of sea rise, heat and humidity, and where even First World economies are crippled by the cost of constant, climate-fueled natural disasters and military conflict over mass migration.

Embedded in some of the disagreement in the scientific community — not the cynical chowderheads of the right-wing media bubble — is this thinking:

“Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.” (From The Atlantic piece linked above.)

My suspicion is that this view, that, “All that doomsday shit is a bummer, man” is part of the Democrats’ no-climate debate calculation. Why have their candidates out there talking about how terrible and hopeless everything is when we’re organizing a pep rally to vote Trump out of office?

While Wallace-Wells persistently emphasizes that we already have the ability to arrest climate change before the tipping point, (it would require something like a global, WWII-size mobilization — good luck with that), there is a fascinating generational psychology at play here. These days, Boomers like me think more and more frequently about how many “good years” we have left. Twenty? Thirty? Not so many we’ll have to live through full-on climate catastrophe? So we largely ignore thoughts of climate horror and focus on other things — like the buffoonery of Trump.

But our children, who are beginning to accept that they will in all likelihood have to live through at least some level of climate (and economic) catastrophe — (at current rates of carbon exhaust, Wallace-Wells sees 2040 as the point where climate calamity becomes constant) — may think differently. As in, “Who among this crowd is actually smart enough to do something?”

Pretty much every Democrat in the race has said something about climate change. Jay Inslee, the has-no-shot-at-all Governor of Washington has made it his sole focus. But an actual debate with Inslee, or Pete Buttiegieg, or Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden all forced to get deep in the weeds of “what to do” would, I believe, be instructive to the generations who are going to have to try and survive in Wallace-Wells’ most optimistic forecasts.

Also, deep in those weeds is Wallace-Wells’ and other climate-solvers’ real-world admonition that weaning the world off fossil fuels (as in: every car and truck is electric) and keeping up with steadily increasing energy demand is simple not mathematically possible with wind and solar alone. Like it or not, carbon-free nuclear has to be a primary option.

Given the most peer-reviewed and widely-accepted climate forecasts, what Democrat is prepared to advocate for that?


The Miniseries That Could Save America

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I usually like the book better than the movie, but the reality is, most of us never get to the book. And so it goes with the Mueller Report. Reportedly, only 3 percent of us have read it. This contributes mightily to the fact that 52% disapprove of Trump, but only 41% currently support impeachment. 

We Americans are drawn to well-crafted imagery and storytelling. We love our movies and series, and a dramatized version of the Mueller Report would make quite a show.

Imagine it.

A Mystery Movie

The screenplay could begin by telling the story of how Trump’s multiple business failures made borrowing impossible. 

But then suddenly in 2014, Eric Trump is publicly boasting:

“We have all the money we need out of Russia.” 

Wait, what? Why? How? Who? 

It’s a compelling mystery, and Americans love mysteries.

A Spy Movie

The screenplay could then then focus on Part I of the Mueller Report findings, which focus on the Trump campaign’s 272 contacts with the Russians in the midst of the Russians’ attacks on America’s democratic crown jewel, our free and fair elections.

“If it’s what you say I love it…especially later in the summer.” 

“Russia, if you’re listening…”

“Wikileaks, we LOVE Wikileaks.”

12 Russian intelligence officers indicted for interfering in the American election to help Trump  

It’s a spy story, and Americans love spy movies.

A Mafia Movie

It could then dramatize Part II of the Mueller Report findings, which focuses on Trump’s cover-up of the Russian collusion and witness tampering. 

“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

“I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it. . . . when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”

“Mueller has to go. … Call me back when you do it.”

“I don’t do cover-ups.”

It’s a story of a family engaged in criminal activities doing whatever is needed to hold on to their wealth and power, and Americans love mafia movies.

A Horror Movie

It could end with the President’s son-in-law trying to set up a back channel communication to the Kremlin, President Trump repeatedly insisting on meeting with Putin without an interpreter or note-taker in the room, and Trump and the smirking Putin spooning in Helsinki.

“He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” 

Scrolling before the credits would be the letter signed by over 1,000 former federal prosecutors who reviewed the findings of the Mueller Report.

“We are (over 1,000) former federal prosecutors. We served under both Republican and Democratic administrations at different levels of the federal system.

As former federal prosecutors, we recognize that prosecuting obstruction of justice cases is critical because unchecked obstruction …puts our whole system of justice at risk.

Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”

It’s a story with a horrifying ending — an American President seemingly in the pocket of a hostile foreign enemy who is being held above the laws that every other American is expected to obey. And Americans love horror movies.

Bring It To Life

Close your eyes and imagine all of this flickering on screens across the nation.  All laid out as a clear, linear story, as opposed to a lengthy, abstruse report.  All portraying documented evidence, but evidence brought to life by talented actors and cinematographers. All applying an ethical “smell test” instead of a sterile legal test.  All presented in the summer and fall of 2020 to Americans as a three-part miniseries on a widely available streaming service, such as Netflix. 

To save America from this corrupt President, we need to give the people what they want.  They don’t want a 448-page reading assignment.  They don’t want 19-hours of audio book.  They don’t want Mueller on C-Span3 making their eyes glaze over with his gray, inconclusive, buck-passing legalese.

They want the findings of the Mueller Report spoon-fed and dramatized in a highly condensed and entertaining format. They want it brought to life.

Netflix, if you’re listening…

On MinnesotaCare Buy-In Option, Legislators Must Put Patients Over Lobbyists

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Why can’t the Minnesota Legislature give consumers a MinnesotaCare buy-in option so that they have a guaranteed health insurance coverage option, more doctor choices, and much better price competition?  An army of corporate lobbyists say it’s because reimbursements to the health care industry would be lower under that approach, an argument that froze legislators into inaction during the 2019 legislative session. 

To be clear, if that argument prevails, Minnesota lawmakers will never contain health care costs.

To contain costs, policymakers have to lower the amount of money going to the major cost drivers — insurance overhead, doctors, nurses, medical devices and pharmaceuticals.  If politicians reject a reform every time lobbyists for those cost-drivers object about getting lower reimbursements, they will never contain consumer costs.

Let’s look at one of those cost-drivers, physicians.  Politicians like to complain about insurance overhead and pharmaceuticals, for very good reasons, but that’s too easy.  Let’s look at the most sacred of health care’s sacred cows.  Doctors have an abundance of fans, campaign donating power, and lobbyists, so politicians are especially afraid to direct cost-control efforts at them. 

When you look at the long list of developed nations where physicians are paid less than in the U.S., paying less for doctors seems reasonable and doable.  For example, the average specialist in the U.S. earns $230,000 per year, while the average specialist in other industrialized nations receives less than half that amount, $107,000 per year. 

Remember that the next time you hear physicians and their lobbyists complaining about reimbursements being too low.

Oh and by the way, the health outcomes in those developed countries with modestly paid physicians are better than in the U.S. So don’t buy the claim or inference that better pay automatically leads to better care.  It doesn’t.

And about those pharmaceuticals.  American patients pay much more for pharmaceuticals than patients in many other developed nations around the world.  Remember that the next time you hear lobbyists complaining about Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements being too low.

(On this front, the Minnesota Legislature needs to pass legislation to allow importation of Canadian pharmaceuticals, as I argued a while back.  Florida recently passed such a bill, but Minnesota politicians remain frozen by health care lobbyists.)

A Minnesota Care buy-in option — branded as “ONECare” in Minnesota by Governor Tim “One Minnesota™” Walz — would ensure that every Minnesotan always has at least one health insurance option available to them, which is particularly important in remote rural areas.  It would give them broader networks of caregivers, which again is important to Greater Minnesota residents.  It would provide comprehensive benefits and a service that gets good consumer reviews. It would bring better price competition to hold down the health insurance costs.  Those all would be huge benefits for hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans.

But not if Minnesota politicians get cowed into inaction every time corporate health care industry lobbyists complain about receiving lower reimbursement rates. If this group of legislators won’t do the right thing on a MinnesotaCare buy-in option, we should elect a new group who will.

Nancy’s Game: Cut Mitch Off at the Knees

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Any doubt that “the I-word” is coming at us fast evaporated with Robert Mueller’s Byzantine, double-negative laced statement a couple days ago.

” … if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.” (Hello! Copy desk!)

The only question(s) now are, “By what name” and “when”?

The fundamental problems of accusing Donald Trump of gross corruption and criminal conduct remain the same. To reiterate: (1) Mitch McConnell will not permit a conviction of Trump under his watch. (2) Any chance Democrats had to promote their policies — climate change, women’s reproductive rights, gun control, consumer advocacy, yadda yadda — will be buried under a landslide of constant, hourly, tweet-by-tweet impeachment insanity, and (3) Impeachment plays to Trump’s only real game, which is chaos and supercharged partisan warfare.

But I have some confidence that Nancy Pelosi, who is steering this bus, understands the game she is playing. Despite the criticism of her for “slow walking” impeachment, I have to believe she appreciates that impeachment in 2019 is much more a competition with Mitch McConnell than Donald Trump.

The strategy as I see it is to commence impeachment by another name, reducing media hysteria as much as possible, and orchestrate a steady run of damning hearings that conclude (or not) as close to November 3, 2020 as possible. The effect being to give the extraordinarily cynical and diabolical McConnell little or no time to hold a fraudulent show trial and acquit Trump before election day.

Pelosi is well acquainted with McConnell and certainly sees him as someone fully willing to abuse and violate whatever law or tradition necessary to protect his tribe. Only a naive fool would expect McConnell (and Bill Barr) to behave honorably and within the bounds of accepted standards in an full out impeachment brawl.

Pelosi’s problem, in addition, to wrangling all the Democratic firebrands demanding “impeachment now, goddamn it!”, is staging and coordinating a long series of televised hearings that connect all the characters and dots in the Trump-Russia saga in a way that is understandable to the millions of semi-informed Americans who only read headlines or listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Day to day I’m constantly struck by how few people — even among those disgusted by Trump — are conversant in what has actually been revealed over the last two and a half years. On one hand, those people can be admired for not being the kind of sad pathetic bastard who follows this sprawling story obsessively. They clearly have lives I don’t.

But the point of an orchestrated series of hearings — not called impeachment — is to explain to “those with lives” how second and third-tier Trump-Russia characters like, for example, Trump Inc. CFO Allen Weisselberg and Deutsche Bank “private banker” Rosemary Vrablic fit into the story. And to use revelations from their public (i.e. televised) testimony to explain how Trump is fatally compromised by his long (long) association with Russian “investors”, i.e. oligarch gangsters.

Explaining in common language — unlike the very old school and convoluted vernacular of Robert Mueller — how Russian money has propped Trump up for decades then allows Pelosi to explain how and why there was obstruction of Mueller’s investigation into “collusion.”

The wild card — and I do mean “wild” — is Pelosi preparing for the sheer hellstorm of lies, rage and seditious threats Trump will — not “may” — unleash to protect himself against defeat in the 2020 election. Her understanding being pretty much what us sad bastards have come to appreciate.

And that is this: Trump may not fear impeachment so much knowing that his 91% approval rating among Republicans requires McConnell to contort the constitution to do everything possible to protect him on Capitol Hill. But defeat in the 2020 election, and the (no doubt messy, howling) removal from office means finding himself suddenly naked and exposed to a torrent of indictments from a dozen different jurisdictions.

Put most simply, Trump is in a fight for his life.

Removal from office, which will not happen by impeachment, means both the very high likelihood of financial ruin, (for a guy who is nowhere near as wealthy as the MAGA-hat crowd believes he is), and total, unequivocal exposure as arguably the most legendary fraud and con man in American history.

Pelosi’s strategy is to tell the story of Donald Trump’s long, sordid con well enough and long enough that Mitch McConnell never gets the opportunity to acquit the guy … by any means necessary.

“No New Taxes” Is The Real Winner In Minnesota’s 2019 Legislative Session

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Today in its lead front page story, the Star Tribune trumpeted Governor Tim Walz as the triumphant victor in the recently concluded legislative session.  But the truth is, the real victor looks more like conservative devotees of a “no new taxes” pledge.

For many years, former Governor Tim Pawlenty and the Minnesota Taxpayer’s League’s David Strum enforced strict adherence to a “no new taxes” pledge, even during many years when lawmakers were struggling with huge budget shortfalls. Though Pawlenty and Strum are no longer players, and conservatives have a weaker bargaining position now than they had in those days, Pawlenty’s “no new taxes” position still somehow bested Walz’s “many new taxes.”

  • No Gas Tax Increase. Governor Walz wanted a large gasoline tax increase. He didn’t get half of what he recommended.  He didn’t get one-quarter.  He got no increase. Zip.
  • Income Tax Cut.  Walz wanted to preserve the status quo on state income taxes. That didn’t happen either.  He got a cut instead.
  • Provider Tax Cut.  Walz desperately wanted to keep the provider tax at the same 2.0% level it has been for years.  He got a 10% cut in the tax instead, to 1.8%.
  • Overall Revenue Cut.  Overall, Walz wanted to raise much more revenue to deliver much improved services.  Instead, he got lower overall revenue.  As a result, he was forced to dramatically scale back his agenda and a dip into the state’s rainy day fund to balance the budget, a fiscally irresponsible move that DFL former Governor Mark Dayton strongly opposed.

A Walz Win?

With all of this Walz losing on the taxation front, how can Walz be crowned the session’s big winner?

The Star Tribune sees it this way:  First, Walz kept legislative overtime to a minimum by capitulating to Republican demands early and often.  They seem to put an inordinate amount of value on ending on-time. Second, interest groups who either oppose taxes or support Walz declared him a great guy.  Third, Walz declared himself victorious, during a news conference in which he made a touchdown signal.  And, duh,everyone knows losers don’t make touchdown signals.

“No New Taxes” Leads To Dozens of Losses

To be fair, the Strib did acknowledge, in the 23rd paragraph where few readers read, that Walz lost on the revenue side of the ledger:

“Still, the cut in the health care tax, coupled with a middle income tax cut of 0.25%, means state government gets less money than if current taxes had stayed in place. On that, Republicans could claim victory too.”

But here’s the thing:  “No new taxes” is not just one individual issue that is equivalent to other individual issues debated at the Capitol.  Pawlenty and Strum understood that very clearly.  They understood that winning on “no new taxes” meant stopping progressives from making progress on dozens of issues.

That’s exactly what happened in 2019.

Without more revenue, Walz-backed improvements in roads, bridges and transit became impossible.

Without more revenue, the large House-passed increases for k-12 education became impossible.

Without more revenue, restoring the Pawlenty-era social services cuts became impossible.

The point: When Tim Walz lost on “no new taxes,” he didn’t lose on one issue.  He effectively lost much of his policy agenda.

Walz Reluctant to Use Negotiating Advantage

State budget negotiations can be thought of as a three-legged stool, with one leg controlled by the House, one by the Senate, and one by the Governor.  DFLers currently control two-thirds of the legs — the House and the Governor’s office — and Republicans only have one of the legs, with a narrow majority in the Senate.  This means DFLers should have an advantage in budget negotiations.

But to tap into that negotiating advantage and move a progressive agenda forward even just a little bit, Governor Walz needed to hold firm, and probably go into legislative overtime.  I understand that’s not a pleasant proposition for an affable fellow like Walz, but my guess is that a more progressive and fiery Governor Erin Murphy would have been willing to do that.  Governor Tim Walz was not.

If that “no new taxes” trend continues over the next three years, the Walz era may not be as different from the Pawlenty era as progressives like me had hoped.  Somewhere I have a suspicion that David Strum and Tim Pawlenty are smirking to themselves.

Impeaching Trump Will Require Smart, Savvy Storytelling

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If the Democrats are going to impeach Donald Trump — and there’s zero doubt that’s what Trump wants them to do — they’re going to have to be a hell of lot better storytellers than they’ve been so far.

All the reasons not to impeach Trump remain as valid as they’ve ever been.

A: No amount of evidence will convince the Republican controlled-Senate to convict him. As headlines go, he will be found “innocent.”

B: The “verdict”/acquittal will be strung out by Trump’s legal team and Mitch McConnell to conclude dramatically in the heat of next year’s election season, allowing Trump to rant with true finality, “Total exoneration!”

C: As infuriated as every anti-Trump voter will become over the course of the process, there’s no reason to believe the critical fraction of voters who pay little to no attention to details will respond in any other way than by voting in Trump’s favor in 2020.

D: Impeachment will be the only topic every Democratic candidate will be asked about and judged on until election day 2020.

If you are “the chaos candidate” (tutored and guided by the international maestro of chaos, Vladimir Putin), the all-consuming, total partisan warfare of impeachment with certain acquittal is a dream campaign strategy.

That said, Elizabeth Warren and others are absolutely correct when they say Democrats have a constitutional obligation, based only on what is known about the Mueller report today, to bring charges against Trump, politics be damned.

The essential issue is storytelling, which in modern America does not come in the form of a legalistic, 448-page government document, or blockbuster reporting like the two New York Times stories on Trump’s freakishly fraudulent tax-filings. Big complicated stories — a bit like “Game of Thrones” — are best presented on television, serially, regularly, with heavy advance marketing, an eye and ear for sympathetic characters and shrewdly ascending drama.

Raise your hand if you think today’s Democrats have that skill set.

In addition to the enormous obstacles everyone can see in plain sight, (the GOP Senate looking at Trump’s 91% approval among their voters), Democrats have to be aware of what lurks hidden beneath the surface.

A lot of what explains Bill Barr’s behavior — a 68 year-old establishment Republican coming back to go all-in for a flagrant fool and scoundrel like Trump — has to do with his sympathy for the power game as played most recently by Dick Cheney. Barr’s “go [bleep] yourself” attitude toward both Congress and legal tradition is a step-for-step repeat of Cheney’s reign “under” George W. Bush. (I refer everyone interested to Bart Gellman’s “Angler” for a full dramatic narrative of The Cheney Process.)

More to the point — and this is absolutely critical — as Bill Barr plays lead pharisee for a fundamental restructuring of American governmental (and economic) power, he can draw confidence that McConnell, with the conservative and highly influential Federalist Society, have now thoroughly stocked most levels of the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court, with judges sympathetic to their belief system. This is key to support of the so-called Unitary Executive Theory.

As of 2019 the court stocking is so thorough — or at least adequate — that (Republican) presidents truly are immune to any kind of traditional criminal prosecution. The guess is Barr believes that there are now enough judges on “the team” that the wheels of investigation can be gummed up, delayed and conflicted so badly that the only likely result of anything as supposedly conclusive as impeachment is … confusion.

Mitch McConnell, accurately reading the changing demographics of America, where white Americans are rapidly diminishing toward minority status, has long understood that gaming and stocking the judicial system is the best (only?) way to sustain control over American culture well past the point Republicans are able to win presidential elections … by normal means.

However Democrats imagine impeachment playing out, are they truly prepared to deal with how far outside the bounds of good faith, normal politics and litigation McConnell will take Republicans to protect Trump?

I have no confidence that they do.

Democrats are still playing the game as though the rules matter, while McConnell, Barr and others are quite literally writing new rules on the fly.

But … good storytelling is as powerful an emotional device today as it was around the cave fires of the Neolithic age. The Trump-Russia saga has so many primary characters, so many sub-plots, supporting characters and red herrings, unless you’re a sad nerd consuming this episode daily like a tele-novela (guilty) it’s mostly a blur.

Democrats would be smart to seek out some crowd-sourced expertise from professionals with a demonstrated talent for strategic storytelling. When to play up or play down certain characters and information. Key emotional plot lines. Where personality matters. Likewise, they have to conceive of a way to advance their investigation beyond the realms that Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr can control.

The normal, traditional judicial system is not going to be their friend in this matter.

Guilty or Not, Mohamed Noor is Not the Most Culpable Party

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As of noon Tuesday the fate of Mohamed Noor was, to borrow a lyrical phrase favored by polite journalists, still “in the hands” of a Minneapolis jury. If I had a service revolver pointed at my head, I’d predict Noor walks, on the by now familiar grounds that he is a cop who “feared for his life” when he saw something blonde and pink raise a hand outside his police cruiser two years ago.

Among beard-stroking legal theorists, the fundamental twist in this case is whether Noor’s conduct — a plainly terrified young cop, his gun out of its holster while responding to a fairly routine call to a reasonably well-lit alley in an upscale part of town with remarkably low levels of violent crime — constitutes a criminal action on his part.

The third-degree homicide charge seems to be a stretch, given the evidence and the average jury’s inclination to give cops every possible benefit of doubt.

The second-degree manslaughter seems a better bet, but to my mind hinges on the part that requires, ” … the person’s culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”

This issue there is who created “unreasonable risk” and the mindset that “consciously takes chances of causing death … .” Was young, inexperienced Mohamed Noor wholly responsible for that kind of thinking?

Were I juror, I’d be annoying the hell out of the other 11 by arguing that the “consciousness” that killed Justine Damond was created at least as much by Minneapolis police training/or lack thereof as Noor himself. After all, his defense has heavily emphasized how carefully and completely he followed police training … to protect himself and his partner.

While the jury deliberates, the Mayor and the police union, led by the medieval consciousness of Lt. Bob Kroll, are squabbling over the department’s shall we say, “highly problematic” training practices, specifically the hyperbolic “warrior” training that instills an amped-up combat zone mentality on recruits.

Part of the training, as we’ve learned, involves stark reminders of the ambush killing of Minneapolis cop Jerry Haaf, 27 years ago in what was then a rough section of Lake St. It was a notorious case and a tragedy. But what exactly makes it so relevant to daily police work in 2019 that it is seared into young cops as the sort of thing they must be prepared to deal with every moment they’re on duty, answering routine calls in quiet, upscale neighborhoods on warm summer nights?

Insurance companies, with all their data-driven underwriting may be a bane of modern American life, but the weird thing is that the numbers — the probabilities and risks — usually don’t lie. Which is why I have to wonder what the real world statistics are on the likelihood of another Jeffry Haaf cop ambush in Minneapolis?

Think of it this way: since Haaf’s murder in 1995 how many Minneapolis cops have answered how many calls, eaten at how many greasy spoons, rolled through how many dark (and not really so dark) alleys without being ambushed? Add all that up and what are the odds — really — that a Haaf-like ambush will happen again? Are we into winning-the-lottery odds yet? Lightning strikes twice odds? Peace breaking out in the Middle East odds? Donald Trump saying anything truthful odds?

Your average Bob Kroll will of course fly into a red-faced rage about how, “It only has to happen once! You goddam elitist pussy!” which is an echo of Dick Cheney’s famous “One Percent Solution”. That’s the one where you go to war with an adversary if there’s even a 1% chance he’ll do something nasty.

Where this leads is the obvious answer to who is most responsible for the death of Justine Damond? A young, inexperienced cop with an overactive paranoia? Or the city that selected and trained him, firing his imagination him with a war zone mentality?

Even a conviction of Noor will do little to nothing to prevent the next cop, “fearing for his life”, from gunning down some unarmed  citizen. What will have some impact though is an enormous civil verdict — $10, $15, $20 million or more — against the city for its responsibility in consenting to police recruitment and training that instills more terror than competence in the people it badges and arms to “protect and serve.”

 

A Short List of Questions Post-(Redacted) Mueller Report

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As the specifics of The Mueller Report kept exploding like cherry bombs all day yesterday and into this morning, my list of questions and reactions kept getting longer and longer. As a confessed Trump/Russia obsessive nerd, here’s an abbreviated list (in no particular order) of where I’m at roughly 24 hours after release:

1: Mueller decided not to subpoena Trump for an in-person interview, the most conclusive way of determining “corrupt intent” in obstruction and a host of other wildly sketchy behaviors. He didn’t want a “protracted” fight with Trump, one that almost certainly would have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Plus, there was the high likelihood that if Trump did get in front of a grand jury, a la Bill Clinton, he probably would have pleaded The Fifth from start to finish, rendering the whole fight meaningless. That said, Donald Trump truly is “Individual #1”, everything emanates from him and revolves around him, and the case against him (or even for him) is hobbled by not getting the best possible evidence from him. The fight for his in-person testimony should have gone forward. And let’s remember, it was only a bit over four months from the time Nixon got a subpoena for his White House tapes and the Supreme Court ruled — unanimously — that he had to turn them over. After 22 months of Mueller, we could have waited until July.

2: Likewise, how do we explain Mueller calling in the hapless Sarah Huckabee Sanders for an interview but not anyone in the immediate Trump family? Not Donald Jr., the “I love it!” recipient of the Russian offer to assist the campaign? Not Ivanka, arguably her father’s key advisor (can’t make it up), and not Jared Kushner, his Swiss Army knife of a lieutenant who had clearly demonstrated influence on obstruction by advising Trump to fire Jim Comey? I really want to hear Mueller explain that one.

3. There is nothing — zero — in the redacted report about Trump’s absurdly squirrely finances. Was a full investigation of Trump’s long, long experience with Russian “investor”/oligarch/gangsters truly not part of Mueller’s mandate? A lot of people, not just me, were believing that the presence on Mueller’s team of ace money-laundering prosecutor Andrew Weismann, was proof that Mueller was looking closely at how long-term Russian “investment” in Trump not only explained a comfortable existing relationship with Russians, but a key element in the Russians’ on-going leverage over him. Did Mueller farm all that out to the Southern District of New York? If so, what is anyone doing to prevent Bill Barr from putting a fat thumb on that scale? Never mind “collusion”. Never mind “conspiracy”. “Compromise” is the issue here.

4. Also in finances — understanding that money and the pretense of fabulous, Croesus-like wealth is absolutely essential to Trump’s highly suspect “brand” — was nothing more learned about Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, a.k.a. the only bank who would still do business with him? Subpoenas are now out from the House Oversight Committee. But was anything investigated regarding the credibly estimated $300-plus million Trump apparently still owed Deutsche Bank as recently as early 2018, (much of it for the construction of the Trump-branded tower in Chicago)? We have good information that many, if not all of Trump’s loans came from a bank within Deutsche Bank, a private bank with assets provided by … who, exactly? In that context it’s interesting to note the number of times in recent weeks the question has been asked whether Trump’s Deutsche Bank debt has been forgiven or dramatically restructured? Wildly speculating here, but if that bank-within-a-bank is in fact a depository for well-laundered Russian money and the Russians have agreed to “relieve” some of Trump’s debt burden … well that’d be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it?

5. It’s already understood that Muller’s obstruction section is in essence a road map for Congress, (i.e. Democrats) to begin aggressive investigation … or more. And everyone is making much of all the Trump aides who just ignored his “crazy shit” and refused to cooperate in flagrant obstruction. But, come on! Since when does it matter that the perp was too stupid or lazy to actually pull off the obstruction? The fact he — the President of the United States — tried so often (and so recklessly) to obstruct investigation(s) doesn’t make it less of a crime. And  again people, this is over a matter — Russian rigging of an American presidential election — about a quadrillion and a half times more serious and relevant to you and me than Bill Clinton obstructing “justice” into sexy time with an intern.

6. Speaking of flagrant, Bill Barr’s gobsmacking defense of Trump was of course appalling, and it reaffirms a key (and politically exploitable) factor in explaining the seething in American culture today. Namely that every system that matters is gamed out in favor of the wealthy and connected — the “insiders”, the people who can leverage — via money or favors — any and all rules in their defense, no matter how naked their crimes. That said, how much do we know about Bill Barr’s private finances? Not to go all tinfoil hat here, but it’d be reassuring to take that question off the table.

7. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing the long-strategy of Barr and the White House (and Mitch McConnell and the Freedom Caucus) being basically a taunt to Democrats to press the impeachment button. Given the picture Mueller does paint and things likely to emerge out of all the other investigations into Trump’s epically sleazy business career, the rest of Trump’s term is going to be more of the same. But what turbo-charges the conflict in Trump’s favor is a full-out impeachment. Total war is where Team Trump is preparing to go anyway to win reelection (and thereby postpone an avalanche of indictments when he does leave office). But impeachment is nuclear fuel for the base. Torches, pitchforks and precious Second Amendment rights. Democrats are going to have to be especially canny in keeping the fires red-hot without setting MAGA-world aflame.

8. Finally, (for the moment), Mueller’s “no conspiracy” decision teeters on the very thin edge of the fact that he couldn’t show anyone on Team Trump with a direct, almost contractual agreement with Russians to game the election. In other words Mueller couldn’t prove that Team Trump engaged — hands-on — in the technical aspects of the hacking, the WikiLeaks dumping, the Cambridge Analytica-style social media distortion, etc. Common sense that is cutting “conspiracy” implausibly fine. Trump knew about it. Trump accepted it. Trump continues to deny the Russians had any role in the attack. What’s more, neither Trump nor Bill Barr yesterday has ever expressed any concern, much less outrage, that the attack happened.

And then there’s the fact the … Trump and everyone around him has lied about their chumminess with Russians every goddam time they’ve been asked.

 

Every Day, A Higher Level of Infuriation with the Justine Damond Case

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We should be able to agree that the entire police culture is on trial in Minneapolis these days, and not just Mohamed Noor. With every passing day of trial testimony the natural reaction — certainly from me — is greater and greater infuriation.

Few incidents put “the blue wall of silence” and the truly horrifying inadequacy of police hiring and training in starker relief than the killing of Justine Damond and the “professional response” by Minneapolis police in the minutes and months afterward.

As we’ve learned through the first weeks, the two cops immediately involved, Matthew Harrity and Noor, ignored police procedure about body cameras, as did virtually every other cop who arrived on the scene, turning them on and off as they saw fit. Likewise, we’ve learned that contrary to the original, long-standing police version of the event, the alley in which Damond was killed wasn’t pitch dark, but so well illuminated by street lighting that the next wave of arriving cops could plainly see her lying dead on the ground as well as the surrounding area.

Then there’s the “startling” slam on the police car that so terrified Noor he fired at the first shape he saw outside Harrity’s window. We now learn that the slam on the car was something that only churned up into the story days after the event, by which time the whole case was pretty much in lockdown by “the blue wall”, with Noor refusing to explain himself and other officers forced to give testimony by a grand jury.

The credibility of police in a civilized society is a pretty damned important matter, and here in Minneapolis, and all over the USA, that credibility continues to take a ferocious beating. Why? Because tech advances and social media are more and more able to transmit real-time evidence of actual police behavior. The taxpaying public can now see — fully, as in the case of Philando Castile, and intermittently in the Damond case — how more or less average cops go about their daily business. And, frankly, it’s terrifying.

When the Noor trial started it was estimated at a straight-up 50-50 call on his guilt. I doubt that has changed. Noor’s Somali ethnicity may play a role in this case that the Hispanic ethnicity of officer Jeronimo Yanez didn’t in the Castile case. But it’s likely that typical jury respect for anything with a badge will again be a powerful counter-balance to the appalling behavior of Harrity, Noor and so many other cops on the scene in quiet, leafy southwest Minneapolis that fateful night.

I mean, FFS, what goes through a trained cop’s mind when they can’t bring themselves to tell the arriving EMT crew what actually happened?

Clearly, a lot of rethinking of the basic cop code has to be done to relieve public concerns that too many of these people are poorly vetted, ill-trained, demonstrably terrified individuals playing out a bizarre kind of military adventure on city streets, with themselves as executioners routinely exempt from punishment.

What to do?

1:  Offer significantly better compensation to attract a much higher quality of police candidates. Give communities a true choice in the quality of people they’re (arming) and putting on the streets, rather than forcing cities to pretty much take (and keep) whoever walks in the door.

2: Vet out the most militaristic “Bulletproof Warrior” crowd, the people itching for the authority a badge and a gun gives them. Don’t try to adapt them to police procedure, simply red-line them at the get-go.

3: Never, ever, allow two newbie cops in the same car on the same beat. Neither Harrity or Noor had the emotional stability or experience to deal with Damond situation, and that’s with the reminder that they supposedly “feared for an ambush” in southwest [bleeping] Minneapolis, a neighborhood with one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country.

4: Multi-projectile police revolvers. Service weapons with two separate loads of ammunition. The default position being either rubber bullets or chemical darts. If cops are responding to a Hollywood-style shoot-out they can switch their weapons over to the real thing. (Harrity and Noor had a military-style rifle in their car.) In the meantime, given the horrifying tally of citizens executed by inexperienced cops “fearing for their lives”, a rubber bullet fired in terror at a nice lady in her pajamas would have a much different ending than … her being dead on the spot.

5: A fresh re-writing of the city’s police standards and legal consequences. As in:

a:  fail to turn your body camera on when responding to a possible crime — you’re fired.

b:  fail to fully describe the events of a shooting to arriving back-up, EMT and supervisors — you’re fired.

c: “decline” to give any statement or testimony to police or state investigators after a police-involved shooting — you’re fired. Likewise, counsel an officer involved in a shooting incident not to speak to investigators — you’re fired.

In a fair world, where as Randy Newman said, “It’s money that matters”, a massive, eight-figure pay-out to the Damond family for the actions of Noor and the Minneapolis police might get the gears turning on some of these reforms.

Not that I’m betting on it.

 

 

 

 

 

The Applause Line You Won’t Hear At Trump’s Minnesota Tax Day Rally

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President Donald Trump is coming to Minnesota today.  That means we’ll be treated to lots of bullying of Representative Ilhan Omar, crowing about the “exoneration” that the Special Counsel specifically has said was not an exoneration, and vilifying of families fleeing desperate conditions for a better life in America.

And you thought there was a cold wind blowing into Minnesota last week?

Since it’s Tax Day, we’ll also be hearing lots of bragging from the President about his tax cut law.  But you probably won’t hear him mention that his tax law, which was dutifully supported by every Republican in the Minnesota congressional delegation, led to twice as many corporations paying $0 in taxes compared to the period before the Trump tax cuts.  Here is an excerpt from an NBC analysis.

At least 60 companies reported that their 2018 federal tax rates amounted to effectively zero, or even less than zero…according to an analysis released today by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The number is more than twice as many as ITEP found roughly, per year, on average in an earlier, multi-year analysis before the new tax law went into effect.

Among them are household names like technology giant Amazon.com Inc. and entertainment streaming service Netflix Inc., in addition to global oil giant Chevron Corp., pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly and Co., and farming and commercial equipment manufacturer Deere & Co.

“Instead of paying $16.4 billion in taxes, as the new 21 percent corporate tax rate requires, these companies enjoyed a net corporate tax rebate of $4.3 billion, blowing a $20.7 billion hole in the federal budget last year.”

“The specter of big corporations avoiding all income taxes on billions in profits sends a strong and corrosive signal to Americans: that the tax system is stacked against them, in favor of corporations and the wealthiest Americans,” Gardner wrote in the report.”

The next time you hear Trump or other Republicans say there isn’t enough money to help seniors, children, disaster victims, patients, farmers, disabled people, veterans, students, parents, and dislocated workers, remember this report and these lavish corporate handouts that are blowing an enormous hole in the federal budget.

I’m pretty sure “and we doubled the number of corporations paying zero taxes” is not likely to be an applause line that we will hear from President Trump at today’s Minnesota Tax Day rally.  So I thought I’d do the President a favor and promote that particular accomplishment here.

Again, the Star Tribune and MPR Keep Their Distance from a Big, Volatile Story

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As of last Friday, Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews/Fox Business News empire had mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 3,181 times in 42 days, an average of 75 times a day. Murdoch’s media empire is similarly obsessed with my congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, to the point where last week his Manhattan paper, the New York Post, mashed her up — on a full-color cover — with the exploding World Trade Center.

The pile-on aimed at Omar naturally included Murdoch/Fox’s biggest fan/property, Donald Trump, who went on a Twit tear against Omar to the point that literally hundreds of other publications and public figures have expressed disgust at the attacks and fear for Omar’s safety. As of this morning U.S. Capitol security is “assessing” how much additional attention they need to give … a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.

I’ve always placed faith in the notion that it’s pretty easy to see what people fear most simply by listening to what they talk about the most.

In the case of MurdochWorld the concept of fear is of course inseparable from their “assessment” of what their audience wants to hear. (What’s the First Rule of Show Biz? “Give the people what they want.”) In AOC and Omar, Murdoch-Fox has a twin tri-fecta for its predominantly old, white and male audience — i.e. two young, not-(entirely) white women.

As I say that part is easy to understand. Not that it makes the threat to Omar’s safety any less legitimate. Hell, less than two weeks ago FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that white supremacy was a “persistent, pervasive threat” to the security of the United States. No one following the news with intelligence and good faith denies what the FBI is correctly seeing. Not that Sarah Sanders or Trump or Stephen Miller or Fox (as far as I can tell) made so much as a peep about this FBI’s of fact.

But here’s the curiosity, locally, as far as the Ilhan Omar story goes. While the furor of what Omar said to a group in California in late March has been intense, to say the least, Minnesota’s largest news organizations have been treating it like a mildly curious side-show. Strib reporter Patrick Condon wrote a straight-down-the-middle-no-value-judgment-here piece on April 11, dutifully quoting, in a fair and balanced way, both sides of the controversy, giving each equal weight. Since then though, as Trump has twitted and the attacks on Omar by Murdoch Inc. have become an international incident, the Star Tribune has left the story to wire services, as though what? their DC correspondents have more important stories to cover?

This morning’s Strib has a tout to the latest Omar story (inside on A4) at the top left of the front fold. But the reporting therein is a product of The Washington Post.

Since the uproar over her “some people did something” speech the paper has taken no op-ed stance on the controversy. Likewise, MPR is content to use AP coverage  — of an international furor over Minnesota’s highest profile congressperson. (Obviously, MPR is never in the business of taking a values-based stand on anything, much less assessing the validity of what Omar said in California or the Fox media/White House attacks on her.)

The behavior of the Star Tribune and MPR on the Omar story bears a striking similarity to their “we have no fingerprints on this” non-coverage of accusations of staff abuse by Amy Klobuchar.

Which leads you to ask, “What is the similarity here?”

Is it that neither news room is yet aware of what the Fox/Trump machinery is saying about Omar? Of what papers from England to Australia are saying about the episode? Are both newsrooms too understaffed to prioritize a national/White House assault on … a metro area congresswoman? Or is it perhaps another one of those stories that screams “partisan dynamite” so loudly that it is most, um, prudently, farmed out to other more faceless, and more distant messengers, organizations who are less well-defined targets for wrath and antipathy?

I’m guessing it’s the latter.

The basic rub with this latest Omar story is that no fair-minded, dutiful reporter could listen to her entire California speech and come away with any interpretation other than what she was saying was that the entire world’s muslim community — 1.5 billion people — was being held responsible for the criminal actions of 19 people, “some people”, who attacked the US on 9/11. Likewise, no professional newsroom could look at the truly dangerous Murdoch/FoxNews/Trump re-framing and exploitation of those comments and see it as anything but the grossest and most reckless kind of exploitation.

Could Omar have spared herself some of the heat from the Murdoch/Trump echo chamber if she had instead said something like, “… 19 criminals, 15 of them privileged youth from our great ally Saudi Arabia, attacked us on 9/11 and as a result every muslim everywhere, all 1.5 billion of us, has been tarred as a radical terrorist. Did that happen to white, male Americans when Timothy McVeigh blew up that building in Oklahoma?”

Maybe.

But given the Fox/Trump obsession with selling muslim terror to their primary audience and the stark visual reality of Omar — a brown female in a hajib, I truly doubt it. Anytime she says anything, her words are a target for hyper-cynical retrofitting. Every day the Murdoch machine needs new fuel to fire the base.

Still, I fail to see how the Star Tribune and MPR, again, can see this latest full-frontal attack on, as I say, the most prominent person in the state’s House delegation, as a noisy sideshow most wisely left to others to cover.

Oh yeah, they’d take plenty of heat if they gave a full and accurate appraisal of Omar’s comments and the tone of the Murdoch/Trump reaction. But the thing is, that’s the news game. It’s what happens when you — not someone else — does your job and gives your audience the complete story.

If that scares you, find another line of work.

Joe Biden Serves No Purpose in 2020

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Since most elections are run on the strategy of selling the biggest possible contrast between yourself and your opponent, I see even less reason to give Joe Biden another thought.

While Biden is a stark contrast to Donald Trump in terms of respect for truth, personal integrity and an interest in people other than himself, too much about him is attached to another time, a time rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror. And we’re not just talking his old school, creepy uncle squeezing and sniffing and kissing of women he doesn’t know particularly well.

Biden has been around so long DC and the media are clogged with people who have been up close with the ex-Senator and Veep. None of them describe him as sexually predatory. To date no one has retold a tale of Joe pinching butts, trying to talk an intern into a one-on-one “counseling session” in his hotel room or ruining anyone’s career because they declined his offer for some free-range canoodling.

His style is more the sage and avuncular shtick. The wiseman/tribal elder forever ready to console and demonstrate empathy … personally.

But the thing is, that kind of paternalistic vibe gets more out of step with modern America with each passing day. Maybe it’s true that the Trump-voting blue-collar crowd in the Rust Belt still has a lingering affinity for old, straight white guys who can find Scranton on a map. But the energy driving  Democrats today is — I’m pretty sure — fueled by desire for a radical, dramatic change on wide range of topics, from women’s rights to tax fairness to climate change, and as top-of-the-ticket names there are at least a half-dozen better options than Biden already on the menu.

More and more I’m betting that Democrats in general are going to migrate toward a candidate most unlike Trump. Young and vigorous instead of old and decadent. Smart and well-read instead of intellectually lazy. Honorable instead of morally repugnant. Optimistic instead of fear-mongering. Whether this also means female rather than an appalling sexist [bleep]hole, I can’t say yet. But it’s trending in all those directions.

The desire for “the candidate” best able to drive a wave that not only defeats Trump but takes out another chunk of the Republican wall of obstruction is seen in virtually every poll out there today. The underlying attribute to that yet-to-be-determined person is the power to inspire.

Inspiration of course is weird, ephemeral thing. It’s a highly aspirational emotion. Voters project all sorts of hopes and dreams on such a person. And, somewhat ironically, that projection is easier to do the less they know about the person. Hang around the game 20, 30, 40 years and everybody knows everything about you and no one can project anything “dreamy” on you anymore. What they like about you is that you’re familiar.

Despite their current (name recognition-driven) standing in the polls, my bet is that Biden’s “known knowns” (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld) also apply to Bernie Sanders. Both of the grand old men have the temporary benefit of affection largely based on the fact people know them. (There’s more aspiration attached to Bernie.)

But — prediction here — all that will begin to shift, and quickly, once revved-up, mad-as-hell voters realize that there are younger people, better attuned to the culture of the moment, (and in terms of the looming horrors of climate change, likely to still be alive in 2040 when the [bleep] really hits the fan), standing at the next podium over on the debate stage.

Do I have anyone particular in mind? Yes and no. There are so many Democrats out on the field at the moment it’s nearly impossible to get a full sense of each of their “inspirational” qualities, or lack thereof. But yeah, with every appearance he makes, Mayor Pete Buttegieg does more to elevate himself as someone who has thought well and thoroughly about the stuff that matters, even to a Boomer geezer like me.

Here’s his latest.

One thing for certain is that Donald Trump continues to destroy the value of tradition in politics. So let’s not expect a traditional candidate running a traditional campaign is going to flush him out office.

 

 

Does Bill Barr Really Think He Can Get Away With This?

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One week later, The Big Question is: does Bill Barr really think he can pull this off?

As many of us know, less than 48 hours after Ken Starr wrapped up his (far longer and more expensive) investigation of Bill Clinton’s sexual hijinks he dropped a 400-page report Congress and the public. Oooo, stained dresses! Cigars! Dirty talk! Love it!

By contrast, Barr, arguing that Robert Mueller’s work, because it operated under a different legal arrangement, needs, you know, a lot of time-consuming finessing and redacting and re-phrasing and, well … mostly it needs delaying, in order for Trump’s claim of “total exoneration” to settle in.

Unlike say, Rudy Giuliani or Matt Whitaker or some other of Trump’s other legal “talent”, Barr doesn’t seem to be a sad fool with no regard for history’s verdict or his reputation. That said, he is playing a perilous game in those regards. He has to be smart enough to know that his narrow and vaguely paternalistic interpretations of law (i.e. “I’m the legal savant here, you lesser people just go on about your petty business”) could quite easily backfire on him, and badly when — not if — Mueller’s full volume of information is released … or leaked.

He’s heard the name, Robert Bork, I’m quite sure.

If Barr is so stupid as to play along with a White House strategy to declare victory, parade around the country and the Twitter-verse calling everyone who has followed the Russia case in extreme detail “losers” and “pencil necks” he’s in for a very rude awakening. While Trump and his usual crowd of “libtard”-hating dead-enders, the folks who only know what Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity tell them, are still doing their touchdown celebration ..,. they haven’t noticed that they’ve spiked the ball 40 yards short of the goal line.

Moreover, on a human-reputational level, this clumsy game Barr is playing with the non-release of everything Mueller found out — which is dead certain to be chockfull of damning details about how badly Trump may be “compromised” by his corrupt activities — is accelerating the infuriation of not just the Adam Schiffs and Elijah Cummings and Jerrold Nadlers of the world, but the mainstream press as well. None of those people — all of whom have invested thousands of hours analyzing Trump/Russia/obstruction — are any too happy about being smeared (by fools) with the assertion that they’ve been both wrong and “biased.”

Put another way, anyone who cares to know knows damn well that Trump has engaged in a Vegas buffet of corrupt business and campaign activities. How so? Because it’s been out there for everyone to see for years.

The country beyond the MAGA crowd wants this story told. In full, with all the juicy “blue dress” details. And they expected Mueller to tell it.

So now, in this interlude between Barr getting the report and figuring out how to release it with as little damage as possible to the man who appointed him, American adults are disappointed-to-disheartened that this storytelling is being twisted up into yet another round of rancid partisan legalisms.

In that context, if Barr “succeeds” in redacting or murking-up the most damaging evidence Mueller produced, I ask you, has there been a better, more righteous excuse for a Daniel Ellsberg – Pentagon Papers-style leak than this?

The Russians hacked into a presidential election on behalf of the improbable, disreputable character now in the Oval Office. A character now simultaneously alienating allies and abetting long-standing Russian goals at every possible turn … without ever … ever … acknowledging what the Russians did.

Seriously smart people are not going to put up with this.

Buh-lieve me.

Post-Mueller: Raw Politics and a Million Questions

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All morning I’ve been thinking about the famous video of Bill Clinton explaining for the camera what the real meaning of “is is”. It was not Bubba’s finest moment, but it was the President of the United States, under oath for four hours and forty minutes answering questions before a grand jury. He was answering them badly and, uh, excessively legalistically, mind you. But he was answering them.

Donald Trump has not done that — about a matter considerably more relevant to the protection of the American public than canoodling with a White House intern — and it appears Robert Mueller never pushed to force him to answer any questions live, in person and under oath. Nor, as far as we know at this moment, did Mueller ever bring Donald Trump Jr. in to ex-plain what exactly he was doing (or did afterward) as organizer of the infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with multiple Russians offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (aka “Little Adam Shitt”)* has been wondering aloud for weeks about this investigatory oddity.  Not that it means that Mueller is part of an establishment cabal (the deep state underlying “the deep state”, you might say) conniving to keep Trump in office. But rather it could be an indication of a strictly legalized, small-“c” conservative, only by-the-book process designed exclusively to deliver foundational information to Congress and let Congress to then take it wherever they may.

Too many obsessive Mueller-watchers have held a belief that somehow an hour after Mueller finished his work, a half-dozen FBI agents would grab Big Donny by the nape of the neck and frogmarch him out of the Oval Office.

That was never going to happen, which is one reason even Trumpy-insiders like the much abused and humiliated Chris Christie have been saying for a while that Trump’s biggest problem has never been Mueller as much as the Southern District of New York, (and all the other legal offices in his home state). That crowd, furiously filing terabytes of information about Donny’s flagrantly corrupt business activities in Manhattan for the past 50 years, has the power to bring charges that present Trump with the likelihood of complete financial ruin … once he leaves the White House.

But for the moment — as in the last 72 hours — the most salient point is that while, yes, Mueller found no (prosecutable?) evidence of collusion and did not “exonerate” Trump for obstruction, all any of us really knows about the two-year investigation, the 500+ witnesses and the 2800 subpoenas, is what Attorney General Bill Barr characterized in his four-page “op-ed” as critics are calling it.

Given that 800,000+ pages of raw data on the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation, (you know, the one that almost certainly meant a Sixth Extinction apocalypse for the American way of life), there’s no excuse whatsoever for all of Mueller’s raw data — not just his full report, but everything in his taxpayer-funded files — to also be turned over to Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and others.

The basic idea of a Special Counsel is to keep the investigation away from politics, but then when completed, turn it over to politicians for wherever the grand battle royale will take it. That is obviously what has to happen here, and pronto. The public interest in what has been going on — about a cyber attack on our election system, not intern canoodling or a private e-mail server  — has unprecedented public interest.

Without over-playing the partisan hack card, Bill Barr is a true believer of Dick Cheney’s “unitary executive theory”, which basically places the president above and beyond any standard of law applying to everyone else. Barr is also the guy who “auditioned” for his current job with an unsolicited multi-page memo last year reinforcing those beliefs to Trump’s legal team.

Whatever else Barr may be trying to achieve by his minimalist characterization of Mueller’s investigation, what he has achieved over the weekend, by allowing Trumpland to crow loudly about “total exoneration”, is new handicapping of Democrats in the grand political fight that was always to come. With Trump now unleashed to bellow “no collusion” to every MAGA rally he can schedule, the Democratic counter-attack on what are still literally dozens of potent legal fronts, will be viewed by the Trump base as just the wretched whining of poor losers.

All that could shift pretty fast with a crowd-sourced scrutiny of Mueller’s entire report and all his raw data.

Maybe then we’d get answers to hundreds of questions.

Like:

1: Did Mueller ever get Trump’s tax returns?  If not, why not?

2: Mueller’s team included the much-celebrated Andrew Weismann,  a renown pitbull on money-laundering scams, something the Trump family has engaged in flagrantly for years. What did he find? And given the collection of Russians characters using Trump properties for criminal purposes and the leverage that played against Trump, how did that not lead to conspiratorial links?

3: What about the case of Cambridge Analytica? It’s an episode where we find not only Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Trump campaign aid Brad Parscale, but Michael Flynn and most significantly Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the wackadoodle climate change-denying billionaire father-daughter team behind the creation of both Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica. We know Cambridge had a way to micro-target voters down to precise precincts. Who weaponized that information? How exactly was it used?

And 4: If nothing else. For god’s sake tell us why virtually everyone in Trump’s orbit was constantly, perpetually lying about their contacts with Russians?

*As described by our president.

Obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes

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At the moment I’m struggling with an Elizabeth Holmes obsession. No, not that kind of obsession. Rather the kind that can not understand how people like Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, nutjob Amway heiress Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Communications, the Waltons of WalMart, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, super-lawyer David Boies were conned by a twenty-something blonde with a weird voice who never blinked.

The story Holmes is all over the place at the moment. There’s a podcast, “The Dropout”, an HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” by Alex Gibney,  the book most of this is based on, “Bad Blood”, by Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyou and soon … a Hollywood movie with Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, (to be directed by Adam McKay of “The Big Short” and “Vice”.)

Reduced to its most basic, Holmes claimed to have created a home espresso-size machine that could take a blood sample from a pinprick and run 200 analyses pretty much while you waited. Tapping the above-mentioned luminaries and more, she pocketed $900 million in investments, set up shop in Silicon Valley, hired dozens of employees, (as many marketing and branding gurus as scientists and engineers), and began building the intense cover-gal cult of blonde and blue-eyed Elizabeth … i.e. the long-awaited female Steve Jobs.

Everything about Holmes and her company, Theranos, is now in ruin. The $900 million is gone — $300 million to lawyers she was once paying at the rate of $1 million a month — and Holmes is facing charges of criminal fraud that could toss her in jail for 20 years. (Although, given what’s happened with Paul Manafort, she too may get off with probation for her “otherwise blameless life.”)

My copy of “Bad Blood” just arrived. But I watched Gibney’s doc, listened to a couple of hours of the podcast and inhaled a half-dozen Vanity Fair-like features. It’s an amazing, Hollywood-worthy story. (And the lead character is blonde!) But even after all that, I’m still left asking, “How?”

How did major league figures like Shultz, Kissinger, Boies, Slim, Murdoch and others buy into this con? Murdoch in particular invested $120 million. (DeVos was good for $100 million. Shultz, Kissinger and Boies were board members.)  On what possible basis?

I used to assume that before a canny old bastard like Murdoch threw down as much as a 20% tip he’d made damn sure he got everything and more than he was paying for. As in, for example, the best scientist-engineers he could find, with orders to Holmes that they were coming into her lab to verify that the machine — which she named “Edison”, after you know who — actually worked, or at the very least that there was bona fide science showing the concept was doable.

Clearly, none of that happened.

Being a wretched cynic and part-time pervert, my first theory was that the weird but-still-sort-of-attractive blonde was “encouraging” the old dogs with private, Robert Kraft-like consultations, even though at their age you’d worry that Shultz and Kissinger might have a stroke at the mere thought of it.

But apparently that isn’t true, either. The best explanation to date of this stunning gullibility on the part of some of the absolute lions of Spy vs Spy vs Spy insider diplomacy, international investment and skullduggery is that … she won them over, and kept them won over despite mounting evidence of fraud, purely on the basis of her family pedigree and Jobs-inspired bullshit.

In her family history there is a genuine medical hero, with a hospital named after him in Cincinnati and then there were her D.C.-based parents/power couple. (Her father was for a time — wait for it — an executive at Enron.) Somehow, maybe because when you get to a certain status in life you get lazy and place more value and trust in the pedigrees of who you know than real-time due diligence, the Shultzs, Kissingers, Boies, Waltons and Murdochs lent their name, reputation and money based on social association instead of gimlet-eyed investigation.

All to a con that on the face of it seemed far too good to be true.

Not that I worry for a second about any of them, you understand. It’s just that if these types of people — Harvey Weinstein’s go-to-guy Boies in particular sticks in my mind — are so judgmentally sloppy and easily deluded by a character like Holmes how can they purport to have any credibility on any other subject?

Part of the explanation for their immunity from shame and reputational disgrace is of course that most of them have their own media offices and control their own press. Stories such as this are fascinating because they are so rarely revealed to the public, much less so widely disseminated.

Still, not one of them hired an actual expert to find out if there was anything behind the bullshit … coming from the dropout child of pedigreed parents?

The revolution can’t come soon enough.

Let Us Praise Devin Nunes’ Golden Cow … and Mom.

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I like to remind friends anguishing over “the state of things” that — at least until we hit the fatal tipping point — there is a counter-balance to the stupendous landfills of venality and criminality choking the headlines. And right now there’s no story making that counter-balancing effect clearer than Devin Nunes suing … Devin Nunes’ Cow … and Devin Nunes’ Mom.

The no-doubt atheist writers for the Jimmy Kimmels and Stephen Colberts of the world had to have fallen to their knees in praise of Yahweh and golden calves for this latest heaven-sent torrent of “you can’t possibly top this” comic material. I mean, Nunes is outraged that people (maybe the same person) claiming to be his cow and his mother are constantly making mercilessly fun of him, mainly for being a witless tool of a corrupt moron? Where could they possibly get that idea? And how dare they!

Technically, Nunes — the California Republican most identified as a complete Trumpist stooge — is suing Twitter. On the grounds that the OCD-inflaming social media platform is damaging his hard-earned reputation … for being a witless tool of a corrupt moron, apparently. He’s demanding $250 million in damages for this suit and is threatening to bring “many more” in his valiant effort to rid the world of snarky bastards who make fun of public fools.

In case you’ve missed the first chapter:

” … the lawsuit objects to a colorful array of claims made by the since-suspended account @DevinNunesMom:

– ‘Nunes is ‘not ALL about deceiving people. He’s also about betraying his country and colluding with Russians’

– ‘I don’t know about Baby Hitler, but would sure-as-shit abort baby Devin’

– ‘Alpha Omega [Nunes is an investor in a Napa vineyard] wines taste like treason’

and

– “falsely [suggesting] that Nunes might be willing to give the President a ‘blowjob.’”

The lawsuit also accuses ‘Devin Nunes’ Cow’ of spreading false claims to its 1,204 Twitter followers. Those claims include stating that ‘He’s udder-ly worthless and its [sic] pasture time to move him to prison” and “Devin is whey over his head in crime’.”

Naturally — and also hilariously, where Devin Nunes’ Cow had 1204 followers before Nunes’ suit, the number exploded to over 152,000 by the end of the day, with off-shoot accounts like “Devin Nunes’ Goat”, “Devin Nunes’ Grandmother”, “Devin Nunes’ Lawyer” and “Devin Nunes’ Cock” sprouting by the minute. [UPDATE 3/21: @DevinNunes’Cow = 528,000 and still growing.] Simultaneously, “Devin Nunes’ Mom” — with a gleeful push from snark-loving liberals — was pushing north of 300,000 with the goal of more followers than (the real) Nunes. (Oops! It’s now suspended.)

This is all gob-smacking, extremely funny, cathartic and reassuring. When the history of the Trump era is carved in granite, Devin Nunes will be there as the most … well, I can’t use “witless stooge” again so soon in the same rant, can I? The guy’s a nearly impossible tool/fool. You really wonder what weird, anomalous genetic combination spawned someone so astonishingly devoid of self-awareness and common sense?

But there’s an element of this Twit-storm carnival that gnaws at me.

Not being a Twitter guy, (Life Goal #14: Less time staring at a glowing screen, not more), this may be another opportunity to remind snarky, hipster, tech-inhaling liberals that Nunes’ people, the crowd out in Fresno that keep on re-electing him, probably because of his witless stooge-ism, isn’t living on a regular diet of Twit.

The modern press corps and the entertainment industry have an intravenous relationship with Twitter. And it’s not just the appeal of the immediate news flow. The second-by-second call and response of Twitter is like an individualized Nielsen rating for every reporter, pundit, comic and elected official’s ego. You can tell in a flash if you’re tracking or not. If you matter, or not. If you’re a player, or not.

But while Twitter is 99% of the conversation at The Cool Kids’ Table, it’s (very) telling that Team Trump 2020 is making its biggest social media investment in … Facebook, otherwise known as Crazy Grampa in Sun City’s Slow-Mo Twitter.

Nunes’ — my guess here — represents a whole class of people who, A: Don’t “get” Twitter, B: Don’t “get” irony and satire, but C: Do get an enormous chunk of their “news” off of Facebook. The tales of how Facebook has allowed itself to be gamed over and over again by Russians and other cynical actors are well-established. But Team Trump is betting that it can do what it did all over again next year. Facebook nation hasn’t changed.

Facebook better suits a crowd — picture your average 65-plus retiree with a couple free hours before the weekly gun show meet-up — that isn’t on the move. They can sit home and scroll through what their tribe is trading today: Hillary Clinton sex rings in pizza parlors, invading Honduran toddlers with machetes for lopping off the heads of heroic Vietnam vets, skinny wackadoodle liberals coming to take your hamburgers away.

Nunes gets that crowd.

For me, I’m left wondering who is backing the guy’s latest shameless absurdity? Who’s going to pick up his legal bills? And/or how much of this nutjobbery is just a Michelle Bachmann-style set-up to extract “legal fund contributions” from the Crazy Grampas on Facebook?

 

 

 

 

Medicare Buy-In Option: The Next Span in the Bridge to Medicare-for-All

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Democratic presidential candidates are lining up in support of Medicare-for-All, and I’m glad they’re making that case to Americans.  Around the world, single payer systems like Medicare-for-All are delivering better and cheaper health care than Americans are getting, and we need to adopt such a system as soon as possible.  As William Hsiao, Ph.D., professor of economics at the Harvard School of Public Health puts it:

“You can have universal coverage and good quality health care, while still managing to control costs. But you have to have a single-payer system to do it.”

But for reasons I’ll explain below, I don’t believe Medicare-for-All can pass in 2020, even if Democrats control Congress and the White House.  So, we need to extend a meaningful bridge to Medicare-for-All.

So what could Democrats pass to make Medicare-for-All possible in the relatively near future?

The 74-Year Battle

Before we get to that, let’s back up to reflect on how we got here.   In 1945, Harry Truman wanted what we today would call Medicare-for-All.  For 20 years, it went nowhere.  What was dubbed “socialized medicine” by Ronald Reagan and other Republicans just didn’t prove to be politically feasible.

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson had a partial breakthrough. He passed Medicare for 65 and older, but it wasn’t as comprehensive as today’s Medicare. As support for Medicare grew, improvements were made.  In 1972, Republican Richard Nixon agreed to expand coverage. In the Reagan years, home health care, hospice services, and a limited prescription drug benefit were added.  In the George H.W. Bush era, the prescription drug benefit was expanded.

The historical lesson:  Health care reform in a nation dominated by powerful private health insurance companies has been supremely arduous, and therefore incremental.  This is true even though Medicare has proven popular and efficient.

Medicare-for-All Next?

Unfortunately, three-quarters of a century after Truman started advocating for Medicare for All, the debate still is treacherous. In 2019, the Medicare expansion debate boils down to essentially this:  Should progressives push for 1) publicly financed, mandated Medicare-for-All; 2) voluntary, consumer-financed Medicare buy-in option; or 3) a publicly financed, mandated “Medicare at 50.”

Many progressives, myself included, point to the polls showing strong support for Medicare-for-All, and say now is the time to push for it.

Indeed, progressives should continue to make the case for making Medicare-for-All the goal. At the same time, we have to recognize that in the current political environment, Medicare-for-All has much less popular support than a Medicare buy-in option.  A January 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) poll finds that  56% of Americans support Medicare-for-All, while 77% support a Medicare buy-in option.  So when conservatives and insurance companies start attacking, the buy-in option would be much more politically bullet-proof than Medicare-for-All.

Moreover, as the debate heats up Medicare-for-All and Medicare-at-50 will be vulnerable to two of the most deadly attacks in all of American politics.  First, opponents will say they’re “massively expensive.” Second, they will say consumers would be “forced to give up your current coverage.”

We shouldn’t discount the political power of those two critiques.  When it comes to taxpayer expense and mandated change, American voters have historically been very easily spooked. Those two attacks, which would be greatly amplified via hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the most intensive political and special interest propaganda the nation has ever seen, will be very effective at eroding support.

Therefore, today’s poll numbers for Medicare-for-All and Medicare-at-50 will not hold up, and when they shrink, congressional votes will disappear.

Advantages Of A Medicare Buy-In Bridge 

A Medicare buy-in option, however, is much more politically durable, and not just because it has 21 points more support in the KFF survey than Medicare-for-All.

Not Expensive. First, a Medicare buy-in option wouldn’t have a big taxpayer price tag like Medicare-for-All or Medicare-at-50, because consumers under age 65 would be paying premiums, not taxpayers.

Not A Mandate.  Second, a buy-in option wouldn’t force any consumer to give up their current coverage, which they would need to do with either Medicare-for-All or Medicare-at-50.  Under the buy-in option, consumers who want to continue to pay more to keep their private coverage could still choose to do so.

The fact that a Medicare buy-in option is voluntary and self-financing would largely disarm the most potent political attacks that have been working since 1945.

A Bridge To Medicare-for-All. But make no mistake, passing a Medicare buy-in option would constitute dramatic progress that would make Medicare for All much more likely in the future.  Let me count the ways:

  • More Affordable for Millions.  Because Medicare has much lower overhead than private health insurance, it would give millions of Americans more affordable coverage than they have today. By the way, if private insurance somehow turns out to be cheaper and/or better than the Medicare option, as conservatives have long claimed, consumers obviously will choose it.  If that happens, Republicans will be proven correct. So let patients decide, not politicians. Conservatives should have nothing to fear from giving this option to consumers.
  • Aid Cost Control.  A Medicare buy-in option would give Medicare a bigger pool of consumers, which would give Medicare officials much more leverage to negotiate cost control with hospitals, doctors, device makers and pharmaceutical companies. “Medicare-for-more” would not be as effective at leveraging lower costs as “Medicare-for-All” will be, but it will bring important progress.
  • Deepen Medicare Support. As more Americans voluntarily switch from private insurance to the cheaper Medicare buy-in option without experiencing worse service and coverage, it will show Americans that this “government-run health care” is not the horrific bogeyman Republicans have made it out to be.
  • Broaden Generational Support. Finally, while Medicare currently mostly only has senior citizen champions, newly converted believers in Medicare would be in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and early 60s. This would dramatically strengthen the Medicare-for-All base of support.

So, a Medicare buy-in option would be much more politically feasible than Medicare-for-All or Medicare-at-50, and it is the next logical span of the bridge to Medicare-for-All to add. Progressives shouldn’t be hesitant to build it.