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It's a MAGA Microbe Meltdown |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51503"><span class="small">Paul Krugman, The New York Times</span></a>
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Saturday, 14 March 2020 08:39 |
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Krugman writes: "For three years Donald Trump led a charmed life. He faced only one major crisis that he didn't generate himself - Hurricane Maria - and although his botched response contributed to a tragedy that killed thousands of U.S. citizens, the deaths took place off camera, allowing him to deny that anything bad had happened."
Paul Krugman. (photo: MasterClass)
It's a MAGA Microbe Meltdown
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
14 March 20
 or three years Donald Trump led a charmed life. He faced only one major crisis that he didn’t generate himself — Hurricane Maria — and although his botched response contributed to a tragedy that killed thousands of U.S. citizens, the deaths took place off camera, allowing him to deny that anything bad had happened.
Now, however, we face a much bigger crisis with the coronavirus. And Trump’s response has been worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined. He has treated a dire threat as a public relations problem, combining denial with frantic blame-shifting.
His administration has failed to deliver the most basic prerequisite of pandemic response, widespread testing to track the disease’s spread. He has failed to implement recommendations of public health experts, instead imposing pointless travel bans on foreigners when all indications are that the disease is already well established in the United States.
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Why Bernie Must Keep Going: It's About Our Future |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53672"><span class="small">Christopher D. Cook, In These Times</span></a>
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Saturday, 14 March 2020 08:35 |
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Cook writes: "With the latest primary results narrowing Sen. Bernie Sanders' path to the Democratic nomination, a number of mainstream media pundits and establishment politicians have urged Sanders to drop out of the race in the sake of 'unity.'"
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders greets supporters during a rally. (photo: Juan Figueroa/AP)
Why Bernie Must Keep Going: It's About Our Future
By Christopher D. Cook, In These Times
14 March 20
Sanders is down, but he’s not out. And he can still help advance a progressive agenda for all of us.
 ith the latest primary results narrowing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ path to the Democratic nomination, a number of mainstream media pundits and establishment politicians have urged Sanders to drop out of the race in the sake of “unity.”
Thankfully, Sanders is forging on, preparing for a one-on-one debate with Joe Biden on Sunday, as well as the upcoming primaries in Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Illinois.
It’s worth noting that, with less than half of the delegates chosen, Biden leads by only about 150 delegates, with 109 delegates still to be apportioned from states where Sanders is either leading significantly or tied. This race is not yet finished, and there’s still time or Sanders to either stage a comeback or, at minimum, to make a major impact at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee this summer.
Some may ask—with a clearly diminished chance at victory and the need to ultimately unite against Trump, why should Sanders continue? There are a few important reasons for Bernie to campaign all the way to the convention, even if he continues to be behind in the delegate count.
First: you never know what can happen on the campaign trail, and Biden is a risky nominee from a variety of vantage points. With a close race for the nomination, and even with Sanders’ diminished chances, it remains vital to present a serious and viable alternative to what could be a disastrous matchup of Biden versus President Trump.
Second: Biden is losing hugely among younger voters, and significantly among Latinx voters—two critical voting blocs for any Democratic nominee. As CNN reported following Super Tuesday, “Looking across all the contests with an exit poll, Sanders won an astounding 61% to Biden's 17% among voters under 30 years old. He even beat Biden by 20 points (43% to 23%) among those between 30 years old and 44 years old.” Sanders has also won independent voters in 13 out of the 16 states where exit polls were conducted.
Democrats should fight for a nominee who can mobilize and inspire these vital voters. While Biden is winning strong majorities of older African American voters, especially in the South, there remain significant generational, geographic and ideological splits among all voters.
Third, and perhaps most critical: Bernie Sanders has been forging (and largely winning) the campaign of ideas and policies since 2016, and this effort must go on for the good of the country—and planet.
This battle for ideas and policies must not be swept under the political rug. With the fixation this election on “anybody but Trump,” and “blue no matter who,” the urgent need for significant policy change—particularly to address the fast-ticking climate crisis—is being largely overlooked.
“It’s not just about winning one election or winning the presidency,” Brandon Harami, co-Chair of the San Francisco Berniecrats and a California Democratic Party delegate, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “This is about winning working-class power and winning progressive seats.”
Yes, of course defeating Trump is essential to blunt his administration’s far-right policies and achieve progress on questions of justice and equality. But if we don’t continue to push for the policies and ideas that are essential to repairing the climate crisis and creating a more equitable society, then we all lose out.
In his speech the day after Tuesday, Sanders laid out some of the important questions he plans to challenge Biden on in Sunday’s debate:
Joe, what are you going to do for the 500,000 people who will go bankrupt in our country because of medically related debt? And what are you going to do for the working people of this country and small businesspeople who are paying on average 20 percent of their incomes for health care?
Joe, what are you going to do to end the absurdity of the United States of America being the only major country on earth where health care is not a human right? Are you really going to veto a Medicare for all bill, if it is passed in Congress?
Joe, how are you going to respond to the scientists who tell us we have seven or eight years remaining to transform our energy system before irreparable harm takes place to this planet because of the ravages of climate change?
Joe, at a time when most young people need a higher education to make it into the middle class, what are you going to do to make sure that all of our people can go to college or trade school, regardless of their income? And what are you going to do about the millions of people who are struggling with outrageous levels of student debt?
Joe, at a time when we have more people in jail than communist China, a nation four times our size, what are you going to do to end mass incarceration and a racist criminal justice system? And what are you going to do to end the terror that millions of undocumented people experience right now because of our broken and inhumane immigration system?
Joe, what are you going to do about the fact that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth and are living with the fact that 500,000 people tonight are homeless and 18 million families are spending half of their income to put a roof over their heads?
Joe, importantly, what are you going to do to end the absurdity of billionaires buying elections and the three wealthiest people in America owning more wealth than the bottom half of our people?
These are the questions that tens of millions of Americans are asking, and that Bernie’s campaign continues to raise while Biden fails to address. These are the questions that any nominee or president must answer—not just to win, but to create meaningful change and progress for the American people and the planet.
So yes—in the name of a still potential Sanders nomination and presidency, and of pressuring any Democratic nominee to embrace urgently necessary policies like a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free public college, student debt relief, a $15 federal minimum wage and other vital changes—Bernie Sanders, and the movement he’s galvanized, must keep organizing, campaigning and battling.
In so many ways, the fight has only just begun. And, as before, it isn’t about Bernie Sanders—it’s about all of us, and our future.
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The Need to Replace Bad Tenants With Better |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
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Friday, 13 March 2020 12:25 |
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Keillor writes: "Politics is all about optics."
(photo: MPR)
The Need to Replace Bad Tenants With Better
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
13 March 20
 day of spring appeared out of nowhere Monday, trees blooming in the park, a troop of tiny kiddos roped together with teachers fore and aft, sociable dogs, and yellow daffodils in bloom, though I’m not a botanist, and maybe they were begonias but to me they’re daffodils because begonias sound like pneumonia and so Wordsworth and Herrick wrote poems about daffodils. Let’s just assume that’s true.
I came home to try to read the instruction book for my new printer, which was written by an electrical engineer for another electrical engineer, one pro trying to impress another, two guys who whizzed through college math courses that to me were a solid brick wall, and here I sit, reading through pages of fabulous technical know-how trying to figure out how to print on one side of the paper, not two, and it simply isn’t there — the secrets of the universe are freely available through this machine, but I can’t find the ON switch.
This is my complaint against poets: they write for each other, knowing that nobody else is interested, and for that reason nobody else is interested.
Candidates for public office speak to others of their ilk, fellow politicians, officeholders, coatholders, executive assistants, so when Joe Biden stood up Tuesday night in victory, he tried to be exultant but politics doesn’t lend itself to exultation. He cried, “All of you who’ve been knocked down, who’ve been counted out, who’ve been left behind, this is your campaign!” But that’s not his line, it’s Bernie’s. And Bernie stood up and said, “I tell you with absolute confidence that we are going to win the Democratic nomination and we are going to beat Trump.” I know a number of guys from Brooklyn and none of them would say “with absolute confidence” except ironically. “Absolute confidence” is the code word for Highly Dubious.
Bernie is out to correct the glaring inequality of book ownership in America: 90 percent of the hardcover books in private hands are owned by 5 percent of adults. Five percent whose shelves are jammed with expensive books that they will never read and that they keep on their shelves merely for decor, to appear to be literate while countless young people live with nothing to read but food labels and Facebook. It’s unjust.
As a published author, I get free copies of books from publishers hoping I will provide a blurb such as “full of wistfulness and futility yet somehow spangled with hope,” which I send to every book publishers give me, including Proust’s “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” all about when he was temping at Purdue, doing research, and there it is on my shelf, and meanwhile, America needs a woman to take charge — I speak from experience here — and instead we have a choice between three elderly men.
I know about old men, being one myself. They have fragile egos and hang onto old grudges and every day they feel a powerful urge to lie down and sleep. They can pick up new jargon but their competency is declining at an alarming rate. We face four years with an old man in charge: which one would you entrust with the care of small children? Which one would be an adequate teacher of remedial English? If each of them were your wife’s ex-boyfriend, which would you be okay with as a weekend houseguest?
Politics is all about optics. Jimmy Carter fainted while running a marathon and fell, knees buckling — presidents should never run in public view. Ronald Reagan rode a horse and looked good and beat him. John Kerry went windsurfing in a wet suit and lost: presidents don’t go around in spandex. The three old men all look rather old. One wears a red cap, “Keep America Great,” and the other two are capless. Joe is not going to take up golf but why not a chainsaw? Bernie needs to be seen with his arm around a dog who is looking at him lovingly.
It is spring, hope is springing, young people out running, and dogs are meeting their friends and daffodils are here. I give up on the printer. The statistic about 90 percent of all hardcover books being in the hands of 5 percent of the adult population was invented by me in order to get your attention in an authoritative way. The daffodils were genuine, assuming they were not begonias.
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FOCUS: At Least Nero Could Spell |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 13 March 2020 11:09 |
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Rich writes: "The most urgent question is not whether the coronavirus is the crisis that will doom the Trump administration. It is whether the Trump administration is the crisis that will doom America."
President Trump about the coronavirus outbreak at the White House with Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, physician Deborah Birx and Vice President Pence. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
At Least Nero Could Spell
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
13 March 20
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Trump’s response to the coronavirus, Joe Biden’s chances as a general-election candidate, and the generational divide among voters in the Democratic primaries.
 espite announcing some measures in his television address last night, Donald Trump is reportedly “not comfortable with the optics” of formally declaring a coronavirus emergency — and delivering the resources that declaration would release — as more and more reporting has begun to detail how the crisis has been mismanaged by the federal government. Is this the crisis that will doom the Trump administration?
The most urgent question is not whether the coronavirus is the crisis that will doom the Trump administration. It is whether the Trump administration is the crisis that will doom America. What we saw during that 11-minute Oval Office address last night was an enervated, glassy-eyed, thin-voiced president who had trouble reading a teleprompter. The thin gruel of “policy” in his script — essentially forcing European travelers to fly to the U.S. solely via U.K. airports, perhaps to encourage layovers at his golf resorts en route — is useless, if not counterproductive, in boosting American and international responses to the outbreak. And even so, Trump had the details of his own policy wrong.
Has anyone ever heard of a televised presidential speech that had to be corrected within minutes after it ended by both the president who delivered it and officials in his own government? Apparently not. Markets overseas crashed instantaneously. Meanwhile, Trump did nothing to stem the public’s panic about an existential health menace that is tearing through the very fabric of American life, piling up casualties and tanking the economy. To say that Trump has now topped George W. Bush’s sequential fiascos of the catastrophic Katrina response and the 2008 crash by presiding incompetently over comparable calamities at the same time seriously understates the case. An hour before last night’s address was announced by the White House yesterday afternoon, as the virus was spiraling and markets tumbling, Trump could be found complaining on Twitter about his coverage in Vanity Fair. This morning, after the disastrous fallout of his failed speech metastasized, he could be found tweeting a threat to veto a FISA bill and declaring himself once more the victim of a “coup.” At least Nero could spell.
Unlike Trump, Bush still had some residual 9/11 good will to tap into when Katrina hit (though he ran through it fast). By contrast, we have a president who began his term by lying about the attendance at his inaugural and has piled up daily lies ever since. He long ago exhausted any political capital or credibility that would be valuable in leading the country in a crisis of this magnitude. Trump’s weeks-long insistence that the coronavirus was a seasonal flu whose cases would dwindle to “close to zero,” thanks to either a “miracle” or a nonexistent vaccine, rendered last night’s Oval Office pantomime as meaningless as the Soviet dissembling in Chernobyl. And it raised new questions. Is Trump seriously ill? Why isn’t he being tested for the coronavirus given the dangers posed by those in recent close proximity to him, from quarantined fellow CPAC attendees to his infected Mar-a-Lago dining companion, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s press secretary? Who, if anyone, is functional in a White House so depleted it couldn’t even vet its chief executive’s speech, let alone mobilize against the virus? Is it time to consider removing an incapacitated president under the 25th Amendment? It would take the cowering Vichy Republicans in Congress to make that happen. So for now, we are saddled with a president who seems to have less leadership capacity than Woodrow Wilson, who remained president after suffering a stroke in 1919 but at least had a first lady, Edith Wilson (a direct descendant of Pocahontas, by the way), capable of covering for him.
Of course, if Trump were to vacate the White House, that would leave us with Mike Pence, who has proved an impressive liar in his own right in his new role as virus czar. Pence is giving quite a performance; he knows how to do a furrowed brow. You’ll notice as well that he is now being constantly photographed clutching a sheaf of papers and files, props that are apparently meant to persuade us that he’s doing something. What he’s mainly doing is pulling fictitious numbers out of the air to suggest that coronavirus tests are plentiful and available when they’re not. One million test kits! Four million! Whatever. Almost anything said by Pence, his boss, and the supine secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, is contradicted by Anthony Fauci and the CDC head, Robert Redfield. Or will be until Trump inevitably fires them.
In the midst of the current crisis, the question of Trump’s reelection prospects seems academic. What’s clear is that the older voters who make up a large segment of his base are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus — and equally vulnerable to the propaganda that Trump, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh are putting out, telling them to disregard all Fake News reports of the pandemic’s threat to their lives and livelihoods and to ignore any instructions about how to combat it. One thing is certain: This political strategy is not likely to increase the turnout of the GOP base in November.
With victories in four more states this week, Joe Biden looks to have taken control of the Democratic primary. Does he have what it takes to beat Trump in the general election?
Biden’s weaknesses are well known by all and were not enough to prevent his unlikely victory over tough competitors like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. If he’s facing a Trump anything like the one we saw on television last night, his gaffes may seem relatively benign and even reassuring. He, unlike the incumbent, does live in the real world. That said, a bigger question for the moment is a possible threat to the election itself. An unchecked coronavirus could seriously disrupt the electoral machinery, providing a further opening for Vladimir Putin and his Facebook and White House allies to undermine the contest’s legitimacy. Trump’s own lawlessness, more unchecked than ever since the Senate’s impeachment acquittal, continues to raise the question of whether he would exploit any means at his disposal, including a national health emergency, to try to either forestall an election or fight a defeat at the polls with further unconstitutional actions.
Some of this week’s exit polls show a stark division among Democratic voters, with a sharp preference swinging from Bernie to Biden at around age 50. Does a Biden nomination risk alienating the next generation of Democratic voters and sacrificing the party’s future?
This week it feels like the next generation of voters may inherit the Earth, let alone the Democratic Party, faster than anyone had thought.
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hose too busy emptying the Costco shelves of hand sanitizer and toilet paper might have missed the news that the National Basketball Association has 
