Hurlburt writes: "Americans wrote their French friends lots of open letters in recent weeks, imploring them not to 'make the same mistakes we did.' Perhaps Americans ought to write one more, thinking of 2009: Don't assume, because the candidate of wide smiles and new ideas has triumphed, that old fears and resentments - and older power structures - are gone for good."
Don't get too comfortable. (photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images)
Liberals Should Still Be Worried About France
By Heather Hurlburt, New York Magazine
08 May 17
s anti-fascists everywhere breathe a sigh of relief over Emmanuel Macron’s big victory in the French presidential election, many Americans will take away from today that the French made a different choice in the contest between a liberal centrist and right-wing populist.
That’s true as far as it goes, of course. But that comparison might not be the most apt one. What if, instead of an alternative to what was in 2016 or a forecast of what could be in 2020 in the U.S., Macron is a French remake of 2008? As Emily Schultheis noted, Macron’s campaign tactics, from a 2016 listening tour to the recruitment of thousands of grassroots enthusiasts to a massive database, were new to France. A figure with an Establishment pedigree who runs as an outsider on a platform that mixes new touches and the oldest standards involved borrowing Barack Obama’s playbook — and Macron’s strategists will tell you so.
But looking ahead to the challenges Macron faces in governing, the similarities to Obama reappear. First, the French public is profoundly alienated from government — and the urbanites that are so excited about Macron forget this at their peril. One in four French voters didn’t show up for the second round — and though that number sounds great to Americans, it is the lowest second-round turnout in France since 1969. That’s the year Charles de Gaulle left politics, as student protests, riots, and violence rocked France from one end to the other. The years that followed featured economic contraction, crippling strikes, and profound questioning and anxiety about France’s place in the world.
Of the 75 percent that did vote, more than one in ten turned in a deliberately spoiled ballot — blank, or with another name written in. That’s the highest level ever recorded in France, and twice as high as the last presidential election. That leaves just two-thirds of French citizens who bothered to vote for one candidate or the other; the fact that two-thirds of them voted for Macron stills leaves him shy of majority approval among eligible voters, though he will surely do his best to claim a national mandate in the French legislative elections next month.
Macron has pledged to run a candidate in every district in France next month. He says half will come from civil society, and half will be women. Six weeks is a very short time to build a complete electoral slate, leading to speculation that many sitting Socialist legislators will come over to his En Marche party. The Socialists currently hold a majority, and the first poll published predicted that Macron could possibly claim another big victory — or he could fall just short.
This matters enormously for two reasons. First, France’s government is a hybrid of presidential and parliamentary. The president must appoint a premier of whom the legislature approves. So a president who lacks a parliamentary majority is presented with an ideological opponent as his key implementer. Second, Foreign Policy’s Emily Tamkin warns that French political parties have not been accustomed to compromise and coalition-building across ideological lines. Macron, who has never held elective office, will have to ride herd over — at best — a majority mixing longtime politicians who have been successful on their own terms, and new civic activists who have entered politics with entirely different motives, power bases, and expectations.
In this respect, his situation may be more like Donald Trump’s than Obama’s. It may be a bit extreme to suggest that such a coalition will be as fraught, and as unproductive, as the coalition of mainstream GOP, Freedom Caucus, and Trumpistas that are currently ruling the roost in Washington. But the potential parallels ought to make Macron fans sober up fast Monday morning.
Regardless, the National Front is not going away, and neither are the issues that fueled its rise. While Macron and his lieutenants must try to define and build their political party even as they set the agenda for governing France, Marine Le Pen’s party has its platform, its legislative candidates, its infrastructure … and a steady trend of rising votes at every level in France. At 10 percent, unemployment is twice as high as in Germany, the Netherlands, or the U.K. Seething racial resentments and terror networks nurtured in French prisons defy easy solutions. And Le Pen’s Gaullist nostalgia hit home in France’s smaller towns and cities, left behind as globalization spurred growth only in major centers.
Americans wrote their French friends lots of open letters in recent weeks, imploring them not to “make the same mistakes we did.” Perhaps Americans ought to write one more, thinking of 2009: Don’t assume, because the candidate of wide smiles and new ideas has triumphed, that old fears and resentments — and older power structures — are gone for good.
Trumpcare Advocates Lie Their Way Through the Sunday Political Shows
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=25345"><span class="small">Zack Ford, ThinkProgress</span></a>
Sunday, 07 May 2017 14:12
Ford writes: "Days after the House passed a newly-amended American Health Care Act, its biggest proponents took to the Sunday morning political shows to defend it - by blatantly lying about what the bill does."
Tom Price. (photo: CNN)
Trumpcare Advocates Lie Their Way Through the Sunday Political Shows
By Zack Ford, ThinkProgress
07 May 17
The misinformation campaign is rather stunning.
ays after the House passed a newly-amended American Health Care Act, its biggest proponents took to the Sunday morning political shows to defend it — by blatantly lying about what the bill does.
Because the House passed the bill without waiting for a new scoring from the Congressional Budget Office, the shows’ anchors had no choice but to litigate the effect of the legislation based on the old numbers from March. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) called any concern that the bill was passed without a final CBO score a “bogus attack from the left,” insisting that the final amendment “was only three pages long.”
Even though those three pages had a significant enough outcome to sway the Freedom Caucus to change their votes from before — and even though Ryan was the one attacking Democrats for passing Obamacare without a final CBO score — Ryan claimed it didn’t matter that Trumpcare passed without a new assessment.
During his interview with ABC’s This Week, Ryan also insisted, “under this bill, no matter what, you cannot be denied coverage if you have a preexisting condition.” In reality, the latest version of Trumpcare has even weaker preexisting condition protections than the version that the CBO scored.
This version allows states to opt-out of Obamacare’s prohibition against insurers charging those with preexisting conditions higher rates, and to shuffle these people into “high-risk pools.” In the past, high-risk pools often offered skimpy coverage at exorbitant rates — if coverage was available at all, as there were often long waiting lists. Ryan ignored this concern, insisting people will be fine so long as they have continuous coverage.
Over on Fox News Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was spreading the same misinformation about preexisting conditions. Like Ryan, he downplayed the number of people who would be impacted, pointing out it wouldn’t affect preexisting conditions for employer-based insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or anyone with continuous coverage. “Let’s assume that there are some people who might not have continuous coverage,” Priebus said, before host Chris Wallace interrupted to highlight that it’s not just “some people,” but in fact millions of people.
Priebus insisted that the $8 billion the bill supplies for high-risk pools will help keep down the costs for those people with preexisting conditions, but an analysis from the Center for American Progress found that the $8 billion will only subsidize 76,000 more people. In reality, the bill is short about $200 billion, meaning the $8 billion is just a drop in the bucket and the high-risk pools are likely to be overburdened and underfunded as they were before.
On this point, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price even admitted Friday his belief that people with preexisting conditions should, in fact, pay more for insurance, but that’s actually not what he talked about Sunday morning.
In his interviews on both NBC’s Meet The Press and CNN’s State of the Union, Price defended the way Trumpcare cuts some $880 billion from Medicaid, at least according to the CBO score from a previous version of the bill. This cut was one of the primary contributors to the CBO’s conclusion that 14 million people would lose their coverage by next year. Price tried to downplay the cut by suggesting it was somehow not a cut, adding that he believes it will correct the problem of many doctors not accepting Medicaid. On CNN, Jake Tapper countered that the primary reason some doctors don’t accept Medicaid is because it doesn’t reimburse them enough, asking Price how less money will help reimburse doctors more.
Price insisted that the proposed system will allow “greater flexibility so that more resources could be put to the seniors and disabled and appropriate resources could be put to the healthy moms and kids in a medicaid system.” He did not explain how less money will create more flexibility, and he later claimed again — falsely — that “there are no cuts to the Medicaid program.”
Given how much time these Trumpcare advocates spent denying what Trumpcare would do and lying about things it doesn’t do, very little of their discussions spoke truthfully to what the bill actually would do. Coincidentally, many House Republicans admitted they didn’t read the bill before voting for it on Thursday.
FOCUS: Why Doesn't Anyone Know We're Incredibly Close to Replacing the Electoral College With the Popular Vote?
Sunday, 07 May 2017 10:40
Carberry writes: "It's been six months since the divisive 2016 election, and America's ritualistic, obligatory bitching about the Electoral College is already fading in the face of nascent policy battles."
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. (photo: Getty/Drew Angerer/Molly Riley/Wikimedia)
Why Doesn't Anyone Know We're Incredibly Close to Replacing the Electoral College With the Popular Vote?
By Maegan Carberry, Salon
07 May 17
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has passed a total of 35 state legislative chambers in 23 states
t’s been six months since the divisive 2016 election, and America’s ritualistic, obligatory bitching about the Electoral College is already fading in the face of nascent policy battles.
That’s the cycle: Every four years we rend our garments only to have off-season outcries over new executive orders or legislation distract us before we can achieve any kind of major structural changes. By the time another general election rolls around, we’re back where we were — watching John King baffle CNN viewers with his fancy maps.
And, yet, a way out of the electoral chaos is not that far off, thanks to the quiet, wonky National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Though the initiative gets sporadic media coverage, it is hardly general public knowledge. It should be.
The simple compact proposes that states pledge their electoral votes “to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.” This rather brilliantly obviates the need for an amendment dumping the Electoral College from the Constitution.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would only take effect when a sufficient number of states sign on such that their combined electoral votes constitute the magic 270 we’ve always needed to elect a president.
So far 165 electoral votes from 11 states have been secured. Of the remaining 105 required, 82 are seriously in play, having passed at least one legislative chamber in 10 states. Optimistically, we’re 23 new electoral votes away from ridding ourselves of the Electoral College. It’s something that could be managed through strategically pressuring a handful of state representatives.
For any cynic who thinks the people can’t course-correct our own disenfranchisement, this is about as feasible as it gets.
While I’m not sure either party will be putting up any worthy presidential candidates in 2020, instating the popular vote is about more than the short-term apocalyptic scenarios most operatives are freaking out over now. They’re resisting Trump, mending fences between Hillary supporters and Bernie Bros, navigating the collapse of the old Republican power structure, and preparing for the emerging maybe-fascist world order. These are all important things, but they will only exacerbate if people continue to believe their votes don’t count. A lack of participation empowers fringe-y power grabs. If we have four years to derail the current train wreck our society is quickly becoming, shouldn’t we force the political machine to campaign differently and include all of us? Especially if the infrastructure to do it is so close to implementation?
“In a representative democracy you need a critical mass of voters who are engaged and informed,” says David Burke, founder of the civic engagement organization Citizens Take Action. “The Electoral College disincentivizes voters in a majority of states to get involved with or vote in the presidential election. Most states are safe states and the outcome is preordained.”
“A common argument against fixing the Electoral College is that it protects small states, but the evidence based on where presidential candidates spend time and money indicates otherwise,” Burke says. “Fourteen of the 15 smallest states by population are ignored like the big ones because they’re not swing states. Small states are safe states. Only New Hampshire gets significant attention. In terms of protecting small states, it’s a myth.”
Unfortunately, without widespread public knowledge, the greatest obstacle to implementing the popular vote despite this incredible strategic position is probably the impulse of political activists to conflate civic responsibility with their partisan objectives.
“Being partisan is how you get attention, clicks, or raise money,” says Burke. “A lot of organizations and nonprofits have an incentive to be anti-Trump, for example. That gets attention initially but won’t result in success. The popular vote movement has to be detached from the last election. It has to be about the civic process, and doing something about why the Electoral College in its current form is undemocratic, inequitable, and depresses voter turnout. It requires going against short-term self interests.”
There’s significant resistance from the political class when it comes to drastically overhauling the familiar processes that keep them in power, but how many electoral cycles do we have to witness where voters report low enthusiasm? Surely, some bold, perhaps even non-traditional candidates would see an opportunity to run a new kind of campaign for all Americans. We can’t rely on befuddled swing state moderates caught between their wing-nut neighbors to appoint our leaders anymore.
Perhaps we increasingly see a divided America because we are suppressing the majority.
Reich writes: "Hopefully, Saturday's hacked leaks purporting to show offshore accounts and tax evasion by France's independent candidate Emmanuel Macron won't jeopardize his lead over racist nationalist Marine Le Pen in Sunday's French election."
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
The Attack on Western Democracy
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
07 May 17
opefully, Saturday’s hacked leaks purporting to show offshore accounts and tax evasion by France’s independent candidate Emmanuel Macron won’t jeopardize his lead over racist nationalist Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s French election.
But there may be a larger significance to the leaks and their distribution – their apparent connection both to Russian operatives and to the American alt-right. It’s the same network that sought to deliver the U.S. presidential election to Trump.
We don’t know for sure that Russian hackers have sought to help Le Pen as they did Trump. But it seems likely.
Meanwhile, analysts have determined that the social-media campaign in France following the leak originated in the United States, in a well-known network of alt-right Twitter accounts that had been associated with the Trump campaign.
Ben Nimmo, a research fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said in an interview that the subsequent #MacronLeaks Twitter storm — notably in English, not French — largely began with the account of Jack Posobiec. Prosobiec is a Washington-based correspondent for the alt-right website TheRebel.media. He has written that he served, in 2016, as “Special Projects Director of Citizens for Trump, the largest Trump grassroots organization in the US.”
From there, news of the Macron leaks was retweeted by William Craddick, another alt-right activist known to have spread in December a fake news story about German Chancellor Angela Merkel tolerating Islamic State terrorists to deploy an “E.U. army” to subdue her country’s neighbors. Then the “#MacronLeaks” was retweeted in France by well-known National Front accounts — reaching 47,000 tweets in just three hours.
Hopefully, Macron will win Sunday’s election in France.
But the parallels between what happened in the United States during the presidential election of 2016 and what has occurred in the French election are too close to ignore.
Are Western democracies under attack from Russia and the alt-right in America, in an effort to put racist nationalists in power?
It is critically important that U.S. intelligence agencies, working with Interpol and other international intelligence agencies, answer this question. And whatever the answer, we must better guard our democracies.
Donald Trump Obsession with Andrew Jackson Is a Carnival Act Unlike Anything I've Seen at the White House
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
Sunday, 07 May 2017 08:14
Rather writes: "I wanted to let this story go. I really did. I don't want to be distracted from all the important things taking place."
Dan Rather. (photo: USA Today)
Donald Trump Obsession With Andrew Jackson Is a Carnival Act Unlike Anything I've Seen at the White House
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
07 May 17
wanted to let this story go. I really did. I don't want to be distracted from all the important things taking place. Where are we on the Russia investigation again?
But the sheer craziness of this obsession by Donald Trump with Andrew Jackson and the Civil War is a carnival act unlike anything I have ever seen at the White House. And not to let something drop, there is Mr. Trump on Twitter just recently pouring gasoline on the fires of his ignorance.
Nevermind that Mr. Trump's knowledge of American history seems below that of most gradeschoolers. Nevermind that in many people's view, Jackson is not exactly the kind of president, or man, you would want to hold up as an example. And nevermind that there is an implicit criticism of arguably our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. (It reminds me of his slam against John McCain and how war heroes aren't captured. Apparently great presidents don't wage a war to keep the Union together).
These are the rantings of someone who really should be focused on the job of governing. Should we not conclude that he approaches policy decisions with the same half-baked conspiracies with which he apparently approaches history?
To be President of the United States is to part of the great American story. To not understand that story is to not understand the presidency. Maybe Frederick Douglass can give Mr. Trump some advice. Apparently, he's "an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more."
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s anti-fascists everywhere breathe a sigh of relief over Emmanuel Macron’s 
ays after the House passed a newly-amended American Health Care Act, its biggest proponents took to the Sunday morning political shows to defend it — by blatantly lying about what the bill does.
t’s been six months since the divisive 2016 election, and America’s ritualistic, obligatory bitching about the Electoral College is already fading in the face of nascent policy battles.
opefully, Saturday’s hacked leaks purporting to show offshore accounts and tax evasion by France’s independent candidate Emmanuel Macron won’t jeopardize his lead over racist nationalist Marine Le Pen in Sunday’s French election. 
