Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Does Ron DeSantis Actually Believe In What He Says And Does?

Friday, May 19th, 2023

When Hitler’s Nazis took complete power on 5 March 1933 the first groups they and the Brownshirts went after hammer and tong were Communists, other political parties (within three months they were all gone), intellectuals and the Jews. Among the intellectuals, they focused on university professors, who they judged not sufficiently “reliable” to parrot the Nationalist Socialist ideology, and the music directors of large orchestras, who were mostly Jews.

During the first few months of the 3rd Reich, the Nazis eviscerated higher education. On 7 April 1933, the Reichstag, the German parliament now controlled by Hitler, passed the Enabling Act, which contained a civil service provision that provided for the dismissal of “politically unreliable” state employees. This was a catch-all phrase for Jews, Communists, non-Aryans, as well as anyone who had had the temerity to criticize the Nazis. And since, unlike other countries, all colleges and universities were state-owned, that meant many of Germany’s best and brightest were now out of work and facing physical danger. This included 20 past or future Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein was one of them — Germany’s loss; Princeton’s gain. But the Nazis never cared.

They easily had already coopted university students. On 10 May 1933, at the instigation of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, German university students organized an “act against unGerman spirit” (a euphemism for non-Nazi ideology) in nineteen university towns across the country. They compiled a list of “unGerman” books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares, and set them all alight.

I mention this history, because I’ve been thinking about what is happening in Florida, as well as in a number of other red states. But it’s Florida that interests me most, because of its Governor, Ron DeSantis, who little by little unveils his nakedly ambitious and relentless drive to become our president.

I started down the Ron DeSantis rabbit hole more than a year ago when he revoked the Walt Disney Company’s Special Taxing District designation, which had been in effect for 55 years, because Disney CEO Bob Chapek had the temerity to criticize the Governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Take that, Goofy!

Then, in an act of cavalier cruelty, he sent two planes full of undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to stick it in the eye of northern liberals.

Next, once again flexing his imagined Popeye muscles, he had his Commissioner of Education ban 54 math textbooks because of their potential to indoctrinate Florida’s children with Woke ideology (I never knew math could be so divisive).

And, speaking of book banning, acolytes of DeSantis have had a field day doing just that all over Florida, most notably in Escambia County where more than 100 books have become restricted, or just plain banned altogether, taken off the shelves of school libraries and put in permanent storage.¹

Moving right along, DeSantis fired a prosecutor, elected by the citizens of Hillsborough County (yup, a governor can do that in Florida), because he said the prosecutor, Andrew Warren, had been “soft on crime.”

He bullied a group of high school students for wearing masks at an event at the University of South Florida. “You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. This is ridiculous,” he told the teens just before slamming his folder on a lectern. He all but said, “Don’t you know Covid-19 won’t hurt you?”

He’s Florida’s grand puppeteer who wants to be America’s grand puppeteer. For whatever reason and by whatever means the Governor seems to have every Republican legislator in Florida dangling from his many-fingered hands. Whatever he demands, they do. Last week they passed a law that changes what was Florida law and allows him to remain Governor as he runs for President (Is that a sign of a lack of confidence on his part, or just careful planning?).

On Monday of this week, after spending months beating the Woke out of what was once an excellent state educational system, the Governor signed a law prohibiting state colleges from offering courses in DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). I can’t think of any other colleges that explicitly prohibit a specific course from being taught because of ideology. Can you?

“If you look at the way this has actually been implemented across the country, DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” DeSantis said during a news conference at New College of Florida in Sarasota. “And that has no place in our public institutions.”

You tell ’em, Ronnie.

As if all that weren’t enough, yesterday the Governor-wanna-be president signed five newly-passed bills (at his instigation and encouragement) that will govern student pronouns in public schools (they’re out), limit access to gender-affirming care (that’s out, too), and allow group prayer before sporting events (that’s in, thank God).

To add to the theme, he signed the bills on a stage at Cambridge Christian School in Tampa.

From banning books, to muzzling teachers, to eviscerating DEI, to criminalizing any teaching that racism is endemic, to slapping down any discussion of gender identity, to picking a huge fight over a small issue with Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, Machiavellian DeSantis continues to find new and improved ways to wage the full scale culture war he thinks will lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And just now, the Tampa Bay Times has reported DeSantis will formally announce his candidacy at Miami’s Four Seasons Hotel next Thursday, 25 May. Should be quite the show.

But here is a question for you: Do you think Ron DeSantis, Yale undergrad, Harvard Law, actually believes what he’s spewing all over the Sunshine State (and now in Iowa and New Hampshire, too)? Or, is he the consummate hypocrite trying to see what really resonates with the MAGA crowd and beyond by throwing the worst of the worst up against the wall to see how much sticks?

It’s got to be one or the other. Both are bad. Really bad.

And now for a house selling update

I cannot allow Ron DeSantis to have this entire page, and I know you’re curious. It seems that realtors Kurt and Tom were right. We have many people who want to see the place. Maybe one of them will want to buy it. Maybe more than one of them. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’m beginning (barely) to forget the six weeks of drudgery lugging all those boxes and plastic bins. It seemed there’d never be an end to them. But now, here in the Berkshires, even Lancelot the wonder dog seems happy for us.

Open House isn’t until Saturday, but we already are loaded with what Kurt and Tom call “showing  appointments.”

Friends, this is beginning to turn into a fun project.

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¹ For a deeper dive into Escambia County’s book banning shenanigans, see Judd Legum’s continuing and relentless coverage of this miscarriage of educational justice in Popular Information.

Has The Past Become Prologue Again?

Friday, March 24th, 2023

On 30 January 1933, the 85-year-old German hero of World War 1, President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Nazi leader Adolph Hitler as Reich Chancellor, which was akin to being named Prime Minister. Hindenburg and his German Cabinet, many of whom shared Hitler’s Nationalist positions, thought they could control the loose-cannon Hitler better if he were in Government rather than out of it. Sort of like bringing the camel into the tent, where you hope he’ll spit out, rather than leaving him outside, where you know he’ll spit in.

Thirty-five days later, on 5 March 1933, a coalition of political parties led by the Nazis won the national parliamentary election.

Just as Hindenburg and his Cabinet thought they could control Hitler, so did his coalition party partners. They were all wrong. And, just like that, the 14-year Weimar Republic was dead.

Despite winning only 45% of the vote — 55% of the country having voted against them — the Nazis were now in charge, and within three months the coalition was a thing of the past, with every other political party in Germany having gone the way of the Wooly Mammoth. The Nazis, using what they called “coordination,” had banned them all.

Immediately, Hitler’s Storm Troopers, whose numbers had grown from 400,000 in 1932 to nearly 2 million in January of 1933 (they outnumbered the Jewish population by close to 4 top 1¹) amped up their brutal intimidation and persecution of Jews, Communists and homosexuals. According to the World Committee’s Brown Book, by the end of June they had murdered 43 Jews and severely beaten hundreds more, but the chroniclers point out these estimates are likely quite low.

The Prussian police force was the largest in Germany, and Hitler put Hermann Göring in charge of it. He immediately  populated it with unhinged Storm Troopers wearing police uniforms. They arrested anyone thought to be an “unreliable” German. This included Jews, members of the non-Nazi German press, intellectual elites, homosexuals, and more Jews. In fact, so many were arrested that the country’s prisons could not contain them all. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, solved that problem. On 20 March, just two weeks after the Nazis’ election victory, he announced to the press that “a concentration camp for political prisoners” would be opened at Dachau, just outside Munich. It was to be Germany’s first concentration camp and set an ominous precedent. Two days later, four police trucks ferried 200 of the Nazis’ newly ordained “criminals” to their swell new digs. The citizens of Dachau watched them go by.

Three weeks later, to show they meant business, Himmler’s guards took four Jews out of their cells, brought them outside, stood them against a wall, and shot all four dead.

Dachau, however, was not an improvised solution to an overcrowding problem. As far back as 1921, Hitler had declared that when they came to power, the Nazis would imprison German Jews in concentration camps along the lines of those used by the British in the Boer war.

But the Nazis did much more in the first three months of the Third Reich than round up their version of the usual suspects. They also eviscerated higher education. On 7 April 1933, the Reichstag, the German parliament now controlled by Hitler, passed the Enabling Act, which contained a civil service provision that provided for the dismissal of “politically unreliable” state employees. This was a catch-all phrase for Jews, Communists, non-Aryans, as well as  anyone who had had the temerity to criticize the Nazis. And since, unlike other countries, all colleges and universities were state-owned, that meant many of Germany’s best and brightest were now out of work and facing physical danger. This included 20 past or future Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein was one of them — Germany’s loss; Princeton’s gain. But the Nazis never cared.

And they did not stop with professors and scientists. On 10 May 1933, at the instigation of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, German university students organized an “act against unGerman spirit” in nineteen university towns across the country. They compiled a list of “unGerman” books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares, and set them all alight. Goebbels joined the students at the Berlin burning, the biggest, telling them they were “doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames.” One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre of intellect.

We’re not burning books in America — yet, but we sure are banning them.

That is how it started in that most momentous of years, 1933, a year scholars have likened to the Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 France.

But in reality, the Nazis’ rise to power began with a quickly-put-down revolution in Munich immediately following the end of World War 1. Right up to the very end, the German military and the Kaiser had convinced the German people the country was winning the war. The Armistice signed on 11 November 1918 came as a huge shock, and the people felt they had been betrayed or, as one man put it, “Knifed in the back by the ruling class.” Then came the Treaty of Versailles with its draconian terms of surrender.

Out of the shock and humiliation of that defeat, a small group of radical, fanatical zealots began to slowly poison the soul of what, at that time, was the largest and most advanced country in Europe. In the 14 years of the Weimar Republic between the end of the war and 5 March 1933, the Nazis gradually unleashed a cultural revolution that eventually became an unstoppable national revolution — which ended 12 years later, deep in the ground of a Berlin bunker.

The Nazis did not come to power overnight, but the circumstances of the 1920s and early 1930s sowed fertile ground for their eventual ascendancy. People wrote them off at the beginning. But an economic depression, tremendous bitterness over the perceived betrayal at the end of the war along with the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, and one man of messianic and evil determination was all it took. And millions upon millions paid the price.

Americans knew what was happening in 1933 Germany. Our journalists covered it in detail, and our newspapers published what they wrote: the beatings, the discovery of Jews lying in gutters covered in blood, the book burnings. All of it. But we had our own problems back then, so nobody did a thing to help. Right here, it’s fair to ask, could anything have been done, by anyone, to reverse the unfolding terror. The behavior of the Nazis had been horrific, but the regime had been in power for only a few months. At the same time, the entire world was still in the midst of a global depression, and most countries looked upon what was happening in Germany as a German problem that Germans would fix. At that point, no one cared. Germans had done it to themselves and had walked into that biggest of bear traps with their eyes wide shut.

In America right now we are undergoing our own cultural revolution, and it has some of the same chaotic characteristics of the early 1920s in Germany. Of course it’s different, and we’ve built systems that we hope will withstand the current partisan fanaticism. But January 6th really happened, and it could have been catastrophically worse, just as Adolph Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch really happened in November 1923, ten years prior to his coming to power. We might want to note that, while 335 of the January 6th insurrectionists have been sentenced to prison thus far, Hitler and his putsch cohorts also went to prison.

It’s what happened afterwards that made all the difference.

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¹ According to the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were approximately 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January, 1933.

 

The Roger Ailes Road To Shame And Infamy, Twenty-Five Years In The Making

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023

In 1996, trying to replicate the success that made him a billionaire in Britain, Rupert Murdoch hit the US airwaves with Fox News Channel. The news and political commentary network operated under the umbrella of the Fox Entertainment Group, the film and television division of Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox (formerly News Corporation). Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to run the new  network as CEO. Ailes had been a senior Republican consultant and strategist during the presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, a campaign in which he and Lee Atwater came up with the Willy Horton ad that doomed the candidacy of Mike Dukakis.

When he was dying of inoperable brain cancer, Atwater apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the Horton ad; Ailes never did.

Ailes lasted at Fox for 20 years, until in 2016 Murdoch forced him to resign in disgrace after several female Fox employees, including on-air hosts Gretchen CarlsonMegyn Kelly, and Andrea Tantaros, accused him of sexual harassment. Murdoch and Ailes’s accusers eventually settled all the cases for about $45 million. Ailes, himself, walked away with a severance package of $45 million. Crime pays.

Ten months after leaving Fox, Ailes, a hemophiliac, died from injuries he suffered in a fall at his home.

During his 20 years as CEO, it was Roger Ailes who set Fox News on the highly successful road of right wing, conservative “opinion reporting” by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, et al. Ailes and Fox attracted a base of fiercely loyal viewers for whom Fox became the one and only place to hear their truth, regardless of what the real truth was. Fox’s news division reported actual news with a conservative slant, but it was the prime time opinion shows with their hyperventilated hyperbole and outright lies that propelled Fox’s ratings.

A television network makes money in a number of ways, but the two primary ones are through licensing fees cable operators pay to carry the channel and through advertising. Licensing fees are based on multi-year contracts, but advertising rates are determined by viewership, the market where the ads will appear, the time of day they’ll run, and how often, with viewership being the most important. What an advertiser pays will be based on how many thousands of people will see the ad. It’s called Cost Per Mille, or CPM. Viewership determines ratings, and ratings determine what a network can charge for an ad. For 20 consecutive years, under Roger Ailes’s leadership, Fox News Channel outscored all its rivals in viewership, which led to huge profits for the Murdoch family and big paydays for its on-air personalities.

All of that became threatened with the presidential election of 2020, the election Donald Trump lost by more than seven million votes.

Four years following the Ailes departure, the road he built led to a single moment a whisker after midnight on election night when all the fecal matter in the Fox television universe thwacked into the giant whirring instrument sitting in the middle of the company’s New York City headquarters. For that was the moment Chris Stirewalt, Fox News’s digital politics editor, polling chief Dana Blanton and analyst Arnon Mishkin called Arizona, and its 11 electoral votes, for Joe Biden. That was the moment everyone in Trump-world began to think something might be very wrong.

Stirewalt later testified before the House Special Committee Investigating the January 6th Insurrection. In his testimony he took great pride in calling Arizona for Biden. “We were able to beat the competition,” he said with a broad smile.

For beating the competition, Fox fired Stirewalt in what it labeled “a company-wide restructuring.” Bill Sammon, a longtime Fox News executive who was also involved in the Arizona call was forced to resign as the network cleaned house.

At that singular moment when Stirewalt and the Fox Digital Election Team gave Biden Arizona, the Fox election desk team came to a fork in the Roger Ailes Road. On one side, a trail led to announcing the unfortunate result, bemoaning how terrible they thought it was that their favorite had lost in Arizona, and then moving on. The other trail, the one that bore to the right, the far right, led to disputing the results in all the states Trump eventually lost, fabricating conspiracies to account for the losses, hosting whack-a-doodle theorists in prime time to vividly detail the fake conspiracies, thoroughly and publicly agreeing with all the nuttiness, while privately calling it “insane” and “crazy”—and blaming everything on Dominion Voting Systems, a company that provided voting technology machines to 28 states during the 2020 election, including swing states Wisconsin and Georgia. The conspiracy accusations, made with almost biblical certainty by Trump election advisors Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell claimed the Dominion machines had been “rigged” to falsify votes so Biden could win.

Remarkably, that was the road Fox took. Three months later, on 26 March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems Corporation sued Fox News Network, LLC, for $1.6 billion. This, after another voting technology company, Smartmatic, which provided its technology to one county in America, Los Angeles County, had already sued Fox, Powell, Giuliani, and others for $2.7 billion.

Last week, after significant Discovery, Dominion filed its Brief in Support of its Motion for Summary Judgment. It’s damning in how it shows Fox’s political commentators saying one thing on-air and the opposite privately to each other.

Before he resigned in the “company-wide restructuring” that purged Stirewalt, Managing Editor of the Washington , D.C. Bureau Bill Sammon said, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

When Stirewalt and his independent crew called the Arizona race, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity were angry and concerned, texting each other, as well as Fox executives, that the network was in danger of losing those fiercely loyal viewers who would feel betrayed by the Arizona call. Losing those viewers would lead to diminished ratings, which would impact profits, which would jeopardize big paydays for them.

They were right. After the Arizona call, viewers immediately began to pound Fox on social media for betraying President Trump. They headed for the Fox door and the Fox far-right competition, Newsmax and OAN. By January, 2021, Fox viewership had dropped 20% and CNN’s had soared. But by the following June, the viewers had returned to the nest as Fox fed them what they wanted to hear. From April to June, Fox averaged 1.2 million viewers per day, far ahead of MSNBC (847,000) and CNN (654,000). In primetime, it was even further ahead (2.2 million viewers to MSNBC’s 1.5 million and CNN’s 914,000).

In hindsight, Fox executives and on-air talent believed that, while Arizona had been truly lost to Trump, most of the danger would have been avoided had Fox waited until other networks called it and then gotten in line at the rear. As it happened, Biden won Arizona by 11,000 votes, but other networks did not make their own calls until eight days had passed. Eight days of terror for Fox. It was during those eight days that the conspiracy nutjobs took their seats of honor at the Fox dinner table.

Three days after the election, Maria Bartiromo interviewed Sydney Powell on Fox Business. Powell claimed Dominion created a secret “algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip. And they used the computers to flip those votes from Biden to—I mean, from Trump to Biden.” Bartiromo agreed with her. And it was Powell who told Lou Dobbs on his show that Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems conspired with Venezuela’s communist leadership, ditto with Cuba, and “likely” China to create software to fix the election for Joe Biden against Donald Trump.

Night after night, for nearly two months, the hosts on the opinion side of Fox News fed the conspiracy dragon. Not one of them ever said publicly the conspiracy theories were “crazy” or “insane,” but that is exactly what some of them said to each other, as the Dominion Brief makes crystal clear.

Pirro, Bartiromo and especially Lou Dobbs, who had been with Fox since Day 1, repeatedly repeated the lies. Dobbs was the highest-rated host on Fox Business. He often doubled his lead-in’s ratings. But 24 hours after he and Fox were named in the $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, Murdoch fired him. Fox News’s official reason for canceling Dobbs’ show —”a post-election programing adjustment”—is a nice way of saying they had to throw some high-rated somebody over the side.

The Dominion Brief says the company tried an eye-popping 3,600 times without success to get Fox to retract the nonsense.

The Fox defense is the same one Sydney Powell made when Dominion sued her individually: No reasonable person would be expected to believe this stuff.

Except people did, reasonable or not, and the Roger Ailes road, the one he started building 25 years earlier, ended with five dead and 140 injured at the January 6th Insurrection, a day of national shame and infamy, unrivaled since the Civil War.

 

Mississippi: Continuing To Lead From The Rear

Tuesday, February 7th, 2023

Tonight, President Joe Biden will deliver his State of the Union Address to the nation and a packed Congress. It will be performative, with Democrats applauding and Republicans sitting on their hands. It always makes for a pretty good show. One of the things Biden will ask this Congress for is greater expansion of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid provision.

A week ago and a world away, Mississippi’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves stood on the steps of the state capital in Jackson and delivered his State of the State address. Like Biden will tonight, he talked about the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion provision—and his rigid determination to have nothing to do with it.

Since Congress passed the ACA and President Obama signed it into law on 23 March 2010, 39 states and the District of Columbia have taken advantage of the Medicaid expansion provision. And last November, South Dakota became the seventh state to do so through ballot initiative. The state now has until 1 July to set up a system that would be ready to enroll the estimated 42,500 people who will then become eligible for health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

Medicaid expansion as of 2023

The one argument Governors and state legislators make in states that have not adopted Medicaid expansion, and the one South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (R) made before the ballot initiative, is that it is unaffordable and will put untenable strain on states’ budgets.

Nearly 13 years of research has proven this to be untrue. As my dear father would say when presented with a similarly specious claim, “That is an argument full of what makes the grass grow green and tall.”

Of course, there is another argument, the purely political one, and Governor Reeves made it in his State of the State address as reported by the Mississippi Free Press:

During his State of the State address on Monday, Gov. Reeves told Republican lawmakers not to “cave under the pressure of Democrats and their allies in the media who are pushing for the expansion of Obamacare, welfare and socialized medicine.” (The governor often invokes “socialism” when criticizing ideas or opponents, including his 2019 Democratic and Republican  challengers).

In reiterating his opposition to expanding Medicaid, Reeves said, “Instead, seek innovative free-market solutions that disrupt traditional health-care delivery models, increase competition and lead to better health outcomes for Mississippians. Do not settle for something that won’t solve the problem because it could potentially and only temporarily remove the liberal media’s target on your back.”

That statement has the intellectual weight of a soap bubble. The Governor refuses to focus on the real and terrible problems of Mississippi’s health care system.

In May, 2022, the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization that provides objective information to inform health policy decisions, published its 56-page analysis entitled, Healthcare System Performance – Mississippi Indicators & Healthcare Infrastructure: Opportunities for Improvement. 

The very first sentence in the report’s Executive Summary says, “The performance of Mississippi’s healthcare system is consistently ranked as one of the lowest in the nation.” In four other places it hammers this home:

“Over the past decade,…Mississippi’s healthcare system has continued to rank as the poorest performing state healthcare system of the United States and the District of Columbia.” (page 5)

“Despite diligent efforts, Mississippi continues to maintain the worst performing state healthcare system in the United States.” (page 7)

“Since 2009, Mississippi has ranked last on overall health system performance every year.” (page 8)

“Mississippi has the highest rates of potentially preventable hospitalizations for chronic conditions in the United States.” (page 12)

On every level, in every category, the Center for Mississippi Health Policy’s report is a ringing indictment of health care in the Magnolia State.

Could it look any worse for Mississippi’s health care performance? Well, yes, it could.

Consider deaths from COVID 19.

From the beginning of the pandemic Mississippi experienced the third highest rate of deaths in the nation at 444 per 100,000 people, trailing only Arizona and Oklahoma (but not by much). And in the number of deaths in excess of what would have been expected based on historic mortality patterns, Mississippi led the nation.

The Commonwealth Fund is another organization that analyzes health care performance, both in the US and globally. For the US It publishes annually a Scorecard on State Health System Performance. Last June, it released its 2022 Scorecard.

This is even more damning when one considers that the Commonwealth Fund’s analysis of  US health care performance with respect to its global peers is nothing short of woeful. The Fund’s 2023 report, U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes, paints a picture that should disgust any American who reads it. In nearly every metric measured, our country lags behind its global competitors.

To put it bluntly, in a country that spends far more than any other developed nation, close to 2 to 1 on the average, yet trails its peers in nearly every health care category, in a country where life expectancy at birth is three years less than the OECD average, in a country with the highest maternal and infant mortality, in a country obviously in desperate need of serious health care improvement, Mississippi is dead last.

With all this as background, I now sincerely ask: Why has Mississippi chosen for 12 years in a row to reject availing itself of the proven benefits coming out of the Affordable Care Act?

Accepting Medicaid expansion has nearly eliminated people going uninsured in expansion states, and, because of the federal matching payments of 90% has made it economically neutral, at worst. It has lowered costs and improved health care.

A recent white paper by Manatt Health, prepared in partnership with the Commonwealth Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, estimated the fiscal impact of Medicaid expansion in Mississippi. It demonstrated that Medicaid expansion is a better fiscal deal than ever before, especially when you consider that under the American Rescue Plan Act the federal government will increase its portion of payments by 6.2%. In addition to significantly increasing insurance coverage, the paper projects that expansion in Mississippi would cover more than 220,000 adults and, along with significant ongoing savings, would result in zero net cost to the state for more than six years. Yet for 12 years in a row Mississippi has chosen to throw nearly a quarter of a million of its citizens into the land of the uninsured, where hospital emergency rooms become primary care providers.

Which brings us to Uncompensated Care. Right now, at this very moment, 54% of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are on the cusp of closing—38 of them, because they don’t get paid enough for taking care of poor rural people, most of them uninsured. Yet states that have adopted the Affordable Care Act have seen substantial drops in their uncompensated care costs. Between 2013 and 2015, states that were early adopters of the ACA saw Uncompensated Care decline by $8.6 billion, or 23%. But Mississippi doesn’t seem to care. This is a slap in the face and a punch to the gut for the state’s rural communities, which make up 79.3% of the state’s 82 counties.

You won’t find peer reviewed, published studies demonstrating that states have been harmed by ACA expansion. We’ve had more than ten years of research with solid findings in many areas, including expansion’s positive effects on health outcomes, access to services and medications for behavioral health and other needs, providers’ financial stability, and employment. Some recent analyses that include outcomes beyond those typically examined in Medicaid expansion research show that expansion is associated with decreased mortality overall and for certain specific conditions; reductions in rates of food insecurity, poverty, and home evictions; and improvements in measures of self-reported health and healthy behaviors.

There are smart people in Mississippi, a lot of them, and they know the research. They know what expansion would do for their poor neighbors, for their state, for themselves and their families. But there are also modern day troglodytes in Mississippi, and it seems the troglodytes are in charge.

 

 

 

 

Mike Pence And His Book Deal Shenanigans

Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

There are so many compelling and thought provoking things happening every day that it’s ridiculously easy to miss a few you’d rather have known about. Today, I see my job as helping you avoid that unfortunate circumstance. Read on and be enlightened.

Question: How many books must an author sell in order to make the New York Times Bestseller List?

Answer: A minimum of 5000 book sales in a single week across diverse retailers and from multiple geographic locations.

There are ways to manipulate sales, chief among them bulk sales and authors buying their own books. Wikipedia has a nice synopsis of sales manipulation:

Manipulation by authors and publishers. In 1956, author Jean Shepherd created the fake novel I, Libertine to illustrate how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists based on demand, as well as sales. Fans of Shepherd’s radio show planted references to the book and author so widely that demand for the book led to claims of it being on the Times list. Author Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls) attempted to “butter-up” Times-reporting booksellers and personally bought large quantities of her own book. Author Wayne Dyer (Your Erroneous Zones) purchased thousands of copies of his own book. Al Neuharth (Confessions of an S. O. B.), former head of Gannett Company, had his Gannett Foundation buy two thousand copies of his own autobiography. In 1995, authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema spent $200,000 to buy ten thousand copies of The Discipline of Market Leaders from dozens of bookstores. Although they denied any wrongdoing, the book spent 15 weeks on the list. As a result of this scandal the Times began placing a dagger symbol next to any title for which bookstores reported bulk orders. However, daggers do not always appear; for example Tony Hsieh‘s Delivering Happiness was known to have been manipulated with bulk orders but didn’t have a dagger.

Enter stage right former Vice President Mike Pence. In 2021, CNN reported the ex-VP had signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster worth $3 million to $4 million, a pay day few, if any, Trump alums will get, especially if they did not resign immediately after the 6 January insurrection. Also not getting book deals are members of Congress who voted not to certify the 2020 presidential elections. All these people are damaged goods in the publishing world. Nothing personal; publishing is a business.

To fulfill the first half of his deal, Pence recently released So Help Me God. Now, it is assumed by everyone masochistic enough to follow the political scene that Pence aspires to run for President in 2024 (he also aspires to win) and that his book lays a marker down, a sort of sword in the sand. But how to get people to read it (Another question: How to get them to believe it?)? Although Pence is known to be deeply religious (in his own way) his book isn’t exactly as captivating as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which spent 136 weeks on the Times Bestseller List.

The way out of this dilemma is to join the manipulators. And that’s what Mr. Pence did. As reported by Zach Everson, writing for Forbes, on 9 November 2022, Pence’s PAC, the Great America Committee, paid Books on Call NYC $91,000 for what the PAC described as “collateral materials,” according to a report the PAC filed in December with the Federal Election Commission. A spokesperson for Pence confirmed the money went to buy the book at $21.78 per copy, 4,178 of them to be precise, leaving friends and family only having to buy another 822 to make the Bestseller list. Sort of reminds me of Donald Trump in the early 1990s masquerading as fictional publicist John Miller (sometimes John Barron) and calling reporters to let them know what a brilliant and wonderful person his employer Donald Trump was.

Because Pence was not yet an official candidate for the 2024 election, it was legal for his PAC to do this.

So Help Me God debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times’ best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction and remained there for six weeks. The Times says when retailers report bulk orders of a book a dagger marking is supposed to appear beside the book’s name on the List. Inexplicably, no dagger ever appeared next to So Help Me God.

If you’re interested in being able to talk about So Help Me God without having to actually read it, you can find a number of reviews all in one place. The general verdict from all of them: Although the book is “well-written and well-paced,” (so says the Wall Street Journal), once again Pence is all things to all people. Whenever he writes something in So Help Me God, you can be sure it will be followed by, “On the other hand…”

I know it’s not charitable, but Mr. Pence has always reminded me of a cross between the David Copperfield’s unctuous Uriah Heep and a mortician describing his casket collection to the relatives of the dearly departed.

“Autobiography,” George Orwell once wrote, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful…since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” The defeats Pence documents in So Help Me God are the ones that make him look good.

One thing Pence doesn’t talk about in the book is his brother Greg, a member of the House of Representatives from Indiana’s 6th congressional district since 2019. That’s the seat brother Mike held for 12 years. On the day of the insurrection, after the madding crowd had erected a gallows outside the Capitol Building and were now marching through the halls looking for brother Mike and screaming, “Hang Mike Pence,” Greg was with his brother and family. The Secret Service evacuated him with the Vice President.

Hours after emerging from a secure location, Mike Pence gaveled the joint session of Congress back in session and presided over the certification of the election, despite Trump’s demands. His finest hour. The one the history books will mention.

Greg Pence, meanwhile, joined 146 other Republican election-denying members of Congress who sided with Trump and cast a vote rejecting the outcome in Pennsylvania, the state that clinched the election for Biden.

You won’t find any of that in So Help Me God.

 

 

 

 

A Midterm Reminder That Bears Repeating

Monday, November 7th, 2022

The Midterms are tomorrow, and, if you’re like me, you can’t wait for the campaigning to be over. The constant emails, texts and television ads will stop―for about a week, after which we’ll begin getting bludgeoned by the 2024 campaign. God help us all.

According to Bloomberg, the two political parties and their candidates will have spent nearly $17 billion to get elected, by far the most for any Midterm election in history. That’s more than the budgets of 14 US states.

Predictions are Republicans will win in the House, and perhaps the Senate, too. If they do, what will happen then?

In early April of this year I wrote about that when I analyzed Florida Senator Rick Scott’s Plan to Rescue America. Scott was the only Republican lawmaker willing to put a stake in the ground and tell America what the GOP would do when, at least in his mind, it inevitably came to power. At that time I thought his plan so outlandish and, to use a technical term, flat out wacky, it would die a quick death. I was wrong. By my count, the majority of Republican candidates, especially for the House, have been trumpeting, Trump-like, many of Scott’s prescriptions for “rescuing” America. And that’s not all. One of the things not in Scott’s manifesto is the myriad investigations the Republican-controlled House will begin immediately upon taking power to show the rest of America all the evil things done by President Biden and his fellow Democrats in the last two years. Impeachment will likely follow. This is not hyperbole, but it sure is scary.

Therefore, today I’m republishing the April analysis to give us all an idea of what might be in store for us over the next couple of years, and maybe beyond. Fasten your seatbelts.

Rick Scott Is Going To Rescue America!

Rick Scott is the junior U.S. Senator from Florida. Elected in 2018, Scott has now served in Congress for 39 months. In November, 2020, his Senate GOP colleagues elected him Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). His job is to get Republicans elected and reelected to the Senate.

Prior to the Senate, Scott was a two-term governor of Florida, succeeded by Republican Ron DeSantis. Before that, he was a businessman. We’ll get back to that later.

You would think the Chairman of the NRSC would be lock-step with Republican leadership in the strategy to take the Senate from the tenuous hold of the Democrats in the upcoming mid-terms. But this does not appear to be the case. Senator Scott is marching to his own drummer.

On Thursday, after no consultation with or cooperation from Senate GOP elites, Scott officially unveiled and launched the Rick Scott, 31 page, 11 Point Plan to Rescue AmericaThe Rescue Plan has 117 agenda items.

This is not a surprise to GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. Scott’s Plan has been discussed for more than a month, and as far back as 1 March McConnell publicly rebuked Scott for it. McConnell is fixated on making the mid-terms a referendum on President Biden, not on laying out a Republican plan he and the GOP establishment would have to spend the entire mid-term campaign defending. He wants Biden playing defense. Scott, on the other hand, wants America to know what Republicans will do if given control of the Senate. Right at the beginning of his Rescue Plan he says, “Americans deserve to know what we will do if given the chance to govern.” If Scott gets his way, now they will. And you have to hand it to him; he certainly doesn’t tap dance around the many issues facing the country.

Before diving into his 11 point, 117 agenda item plan, Scott lays out what the future will look like if nothing changes:

The militant left now controls the entire federal government…Among the things they plan to change or destroy are: American history, patriotism, border security, the nuclear family, gender, traditional morality, capitalism, fiscal responsibility, opportunity, rugged individualism, Judeo-Christian values, dissent, free speech, color blindness, law enforcement, religious liberty, parental involvement in public schools, and private ownership of firearms.

Holy Militant Left, Batman! We need a plan to stop all that!

A few of Senator Scott’s 117 agenda items, guaranteed to be saliva-producing red meat for the trumpiest of trumpsters caught my eye.  For instance,

We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump.

Kids in public schools will say the Pledge of Allegiance, stand for the National Anthem, and honor the American Flag. We must foster national unity.

Teacher tenure at public schools must be eliminated

We will not allow political or social indoctrination in our schools. Teachers who refuse to comply will need to find new jobs.

We will close the federal Department of Education. Education is a state function.

Government will not ask American citizens to disclose their race, ethnicity, or skin color on any government form.

Our military will engage in ZERO diversity training, teachings on critical race theory, or any woke ideological indoctrination that divides our troops.

We will force prosecutors to prosecute. At present, many prosecutors in big cities are allowing criminals to go free with no justice, and they are doing it on purpose.

Immigrants will not be eligible to collect unemployment benefits or welfare for the first 7 years after arriving in the US.

No government assistance unless you are disabled or aggressively seeking work.

If Congress does not pass a budget, the members of Congress do not get paid. Full stop.

Other than disaster relief, the federal government must stop spending money on non-essential state and local projects until the budget is balanced.

All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.

Enact term limits for the Washington ruling class – 12-year limits for Congress and government bureaucrats.

All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.

We will immediately cut the IRS funding and workforce by 50%.

Humans are born male and female, there are two genders, and to deny that is to deny science. No government forms will include questions about “gender identity” or “sexual preference.”

We will protect women’s sports by banning biological males from competing.

No tax dollars will be used to pay for any diversity training or other woke indoctrination that is hostile to faith.

We will not pay any dues to the United Nations or any international organization that undermines the national interests of the USA.

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.

There are a few difficulties with a number of these policy tectonic changes. Ending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in five years being among the biggest. Also, Scott’s colleagues in Congress might have something to say about going without pay and getting sent home after 12 years. Increasing taxes on 50% of Americans may prove challenging for Republicans on the campaign trail. Pulling billions of dollars from the states until we have a balanced budget might irritate a few Republican governors. And reducing the IRS’s funding and currently understaffed workforce by 50% would have brought tears to the eyes of mobster Al Capone.*

Although Senator Scott’s plan is dead on arrival, the problem is it arrived in the first place. It’s not about getting Republican senators elected; it’s about Rick Scott.

And what about Rick Scott? As I mentioned above, before getting into government, Scott was a “businessman.” He co-founded Columbia Hospital Corporation in 1987. Columbia later merged with another corporation to form Columbia/HCA, which eventually became the nation’s largest private for-profit health care company with Scott as Chief Executive. According to The New York Times, “[in] less than a decade, Mr. Scott had built a company he founded with two small hospitals in El Paso into the world’s largest health care company – a $20 billion giant with about 350 hospitals, 550 home health care offices and scores of other medical businesses in 38 states.”

Sounds good, right? Quite the businessman.

But there were problems. In March of 1997, the FBI, the IRS, and the Department of Health and Human Services arrived with search warrants. Four months later, Scott was forced to resign by his Board. He didn’t leave willingly, but when he did, he left with a settlement of $9.88 million and 10 million shares of stock worth $350 million. Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine in what was at the time the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history.

The company admitted to systematically overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable, by striking illegal deals with home care agencies, and by filing false data about use of hospital space. It also admitted to fraudulently billing Medicare and other health programs by inflating the seriousness of diagnoses and to giving doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to HCA. It filed false cost reports, fraudulently billing Medicare for home health care workers, and paid kickbacks in the sale of home health agencies and to doctors to refer patients. In addition, it gave doctors “loans” never intending to be repaid, free rent, free office furniture, and free drugs from hospital pharmacies.

And that’s not all. In 2002, HCA agreed to pay the federal government an additional $631 million, plus interest, and $17.5 million to state Medicaid agencies, in addition to $250 million paid up to that point to resolve outstanding Medicare expense claims. The entire fiasco cost the company $1.7 billion. Nobody went to jail.

All on Senator Scott’s watch.

There’s one last twist. In a civil suit deposition connected to the case (there were a lot of civil lawsuits), Senator Scott invoked his 5th Amendment rights 75 times.

Somehow, all of that has been forgotten, and Scott has managed to be a governor, a Senator, and, I’m guessing, a man, a businessman, who has his eyes on the biggest prize of all, the one up for grabs in 2024.

Rescue Plan, indeed.

*Capone was a nationally famous, Chicago-based killer and crime boss who went to prison in 1931 for tax evasion.

The Earth Is Moving Under Medicare And The Price Of Drugs ― But Slowly.

Friday, November 4th, 2022

Prologue

This is a story, 16 years in the making, of government-enabled corporate greed. It’s complicated and somewhat dense. It has to be to go on that long. It’s a story of how one industry, the Pharmaceutical industry, has done Olympian good while achieving Titanic profit, which has been surgically excised, Midas-like, from the hides of American taxpayers who never felt the touch. The story ends with a different way, a better way, but a way we common folk won’t likely see.

The story

Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit plan for Medicare beneficiaries, became law on 1 January 2006 under the George W. Bush administration and a Republican controlled Congress. The legislation was enacted with no funding provisions whatsoever. Since then, Washington politicians have been arguing over whether this government program should be allowed to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies the prices it pays for drugs its members need. Medicare beneficiaries, all 64 million of them, and the public at large, have overwhelmingly supported such a move. Over the years, pharmaceutical companies have spent a king’s ransom donating to politicians to secure―should we say “buy?”―their votes in opposition.

What’s been the result?

  • A study published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded more than a quarter (27.2%) of Medicare spending is now for prescription drugs;
  • That would be $180 billion, as reported by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission for 2020;
  • According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the total we in the US spent on prescription drugs in 2017 was $333 billion; and,
  • The Rand Corporation studied and compared US prices to 32 other OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – the most developed nations) and reported our prices are “nearly twice those of other countries after adjusting U.S. prices downward to account for rebates and other discounts paid by drug companies.”

And now, the gravy train may be slowing.

In August 2022, Congress finally passed―without a single Republican vote―and President Biden signed, the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, allows Medicare to move forward with drug price negotiations―sort of. Right about now, you may be asking what prevented Medicare from doing that all along since 2006 as a normal part of its drug-purchasing process?

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains:

Under the Medicare Part D program, which covers retail prescription drugs, Medicare contracts with private plan sponsors to provide a prescription drug benefit. The law that established the Part D benefit included a provision known as the “noninterference” clause, which stipulates that the HHS Secretary “may not interfere with the negotiations between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and PDP [prescription drug plan] sponsors, and may not require a particular formulary or institute a price structure for the reimbursement of covered part D drugs.”

In other words, although Medicare is buying drugs for its members, all 64 million of them, it has not been allowed to even hint that a lower price might be more fair and appropriate for the government to pay. That is the very definition of a “sweet deal” for drug manufacturers.

Giving the negotiation contrarians the benefit of a doubt they more than likely don’t deserve, their argument in opposition hangs on the slim thread that negotiations will lower the income of drug manufacturers, and that will, in turn, reduce the amount of money the companies invest in research and development to discover new life-saving drugs. My own opinion is that this argument is chock full of what makes the grass grow green and tall. And, by the way, the Congressional Budget Office agrees with me, although their analysists said it with a bit more eloquence.

And what does the aforementioned Inflation Reduction Act do, anyway?

It does a number of things, one of which is to lay down new rules for price negotiations. These are its major health care provisions, leaving out, for the moment, the negotiation issue. It will:

  • Require drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if prices rise faster than inflation for drugs used by Medicare beneficiaries, beginning in 2023;
  • Cap out-of-pocket spending for Medicare Part D enrollees and make other Part D benefit design changes, beginning in 2024;
  • Limit monthly cost sharing for insulin to $35 for people with Medicare, beginning in 2023. This might be the most far reaching and important item in the entire legislation.
  • Eliminate cost sharing for adult vaccines covered under Medicare Part D and improve access to adult vaccines in Medicaid and CHIP, beginning in 2023;
  • Expand eligibility for full benefits under the Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy Program, beginning in 2024; and,
  • Further delay implementation of the Trump Administration’s drug rebate rule, beginning in 2027.

Notice the years in which these provisions take effect. In most cases, it’s 2023.

The negotiation provision of the Inflation Reduction Act:

  • Requires the federal government to negotiate prices for some drugs covered under Medicare Part D and Part B* with the highest total spending, beginning in 2026. Note the year.

This provision targets the most expensive drugs. Here’s how.

Under the new Drug Price Negotiation Program, Medicare will negotiate the price of 10 Part D drugs for 2026, another 15 for 2027, another 15 for 2028, and another 20 for 2029 and later years. The drugs to be chosen for negotiation will be selected from among the 50 drugs with the highest total Medicare spending. The number of drugs with negotiable prices  will accumulate over time.

So, beginning four years from now, the law goes after the most expensive Medicare drugs.

There are debatable reasons for delaying implementation until 2026, all dealing with operational processes. The period of negotiation between the Secretary of Health and Human Services and manufacturers of the selected drugs will occur between 1 October 2023 and 1 August 2024, and the negotiated “maximum fair prices” will be published no later than 1 September 2024 and will go into effect 1 January 2026.

This seems to me a rather long and drawn out negotiation process, but it is, after all, a political compromise.

The better way

And now for the better way.

There is another government health care organization that has never had a prohibition with respect to negotiating drug prices. It is the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA.

In January, 2021, the Government Accountability Office released a study that concluded:

“the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) paid, on average, 54 percent less per unit for a sample of 399 brand-name and generic prescription drugs in 2017 as did Medicare Part D, even after accounting for applicable rebates and price concessions in the Part D program.”

This means what the VA pays is in line with those other 32 OECD countries.

Moreover, the GAO found that 233 of the 399 drugs in the sample were at least 50% cheaper in the VA than in Medicare, and 106 drugs were at least 75% cheaper. Only 43 drugs were cheaper in Medicare than in the VA.

What are the operational differences between the two organizations?

For one thing, the programs pay for drugs differently. Medicare reimburses the Part D plan sponsors to pay pharmacies through the middlemen―Pharmacy benefit Managers, but the VA buys drugs directly from manufacturers. It cuts out the middlemen. The VA can get lower prices because it can:

  • Negotiate as a single health system with a unified list of covered drugs; and,
  • Use discounts defined by law that Medicare doesn’t have.

As in everything political, it all comes down to economics. The VA, with only nine million health care beneficiaries, as opposed to Medicare’s 64 million, could fly under the political radar and avoid congressional restraint. It was able to keep the congressional camel’s nose and, more to the point, its sticky fingers out of its tent.

Medicare is so big, it could never do that.

And here we are.

______________________

*Medicare will also negotiate in a similar manner the prices of Part B drugs. These are drugs administered in physicians’ offices or hospital outpatient departments.

The Role Of Religion In Our Divided America

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022

Everyone who follows the political winds in the US is laser-focused on the upcoming midterms, which are six days from now. Most prognosticators expect Republicans to end up controlling the House of Representatives, and maybe the Senate, too. While that is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, if we look out farther into the future, the picture is decidedly less rosy for the Grand Old Party.

Stay with me as I try to explain why.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey, which provides insight into the beliefs of most of the nation’s faith groups, nearly three in four Americans (74%) say things in this country are going in the wrong direction, and 49% say things were better in the 1950s. That’s right, the 1950s when a third of the country, 51 million people, still had to use outhouses, a cancer diagnosis was a death sentence, rotary dial phones were how we communicated, and Jim Crow was alive and well and on the march. Sixty-six percent of Republicans believe our culture and American way of life have deteriorated since then. Thirty percent of Democrats feel the same way. PRRI sums up its September 2022 Values Survey this way:

Approximately three-quarters of Americans agree that the country is heading in the wrong direction, but there is considerable division over whether the country needs to move backward — toward an idealized, homogeneous past — or forward, toward a more diverse future. Though most Americans favor moving forward, a sizable minority yearn for a country reminiscent of the 1950s, embrace the idea that God created America to be a new promised land for European Christians, view newcomers as a threat to American culture, and believe that society has become too soft and feminine. This minority is composed primarily of self-identified Republicans, white evangelical Protestants, and white Americans without a college degree. The majority of Americans, however, especially younger Americans, the religiously unaffiliated, and Democrats, are more likely to embrace a competing vision for the future of America that is more inclusive.

When examined in concert with PRRI’s 2020 Census of American Religion, a pattern emerges that does not bode well for Republicans.

In 1996, 65% of Americans identified as white and Christian; that number is now 43%, down nearly a third. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans identify that way. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans are white evangelicals. The problem for Republicans is white evangelicals now make up just 14% of the total population. That is down significantly from 23% in 2006. The following chart depicts religious affiliation by age. It also shows vividly that white evangelicals, the rock solid foundation of the Republican party’s base, and to a lesser degree mainline protestants, are aging out of the population. They are being replaced by people unaffiliated with any religion.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, the unaffiliated are predominantly Democrats.

The PRRI data also shows younger generations, especially 18 to 29 year-olds, more often identify as Democrats than Republicans, which should be good news for the Democrats. The problem lies in getting them to vote. Seventy percent of Republicans say they are very or somewhat excited about voting next week. For the Democrats that number is only 64%.

One more startling point from the PRRI Values Survey. Among a host of other issues, the PRRI researchers asked about QAnon, and this is how they framed the subject:

To measure the scope of the QAnon movement, PRRI tracks agreement with three statements that form the core tenets of the conspiracy theory:

  1. The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.

  2. There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.

  3. Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

PRRI labels people who believe all three statements to be true as QAnon Believers. It may shock you to learn QAnon Believers now comprise 19% of the population. It may shock you even more to learn the number jumped five points in the last year. You might want to think about that.

What I take away from all of this is Democrats have a solid opportunity to take command looking out into a somewhat distant future, but they may first have to walk through the valley of death to get there. Republicans, on the other hand, will continue to yearn for “the good old days” of white isolated and insulated America. They may win next week, but that just might be the beginning of their collective swan song, a swan song the Chad Mitchell Trio suggested nicely way back in 1964 with Barry’s Boys, their white-hot roasting of Arizona Senator and that year’s Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater:

I wanna go back to the days when men were men
And start the First World War all over again
Back to Barry
Back to Cash and Carry
Back to Barry’s Boys.

“Where Is Nancy?”

Friday, October 28th, 2022

Last night in San Francisco, 42-year-old David Depape broke into the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and went looking for her, yelling, “Where is Nancy?’

“Nancy” wasn’t home, but her octogenarian husband Paul was. He and Depape scuffled and Depape beat Mr. Pelosi with a hammer.

According to San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, “The suspect pulled the hammer away from Mr. Pelosi and violently assaulted him with it. Our officers immediately tackled the suspect, disarmed him, took him into custody, requested emergency backup and rendered medical aid.”  CNN’s Jamie Gangel scooped that the attacker was attempting to tie up Paul Pelosi “until Nancy got home,” and said he was “waiting for Nancy.” (She was in D.C. at the time.)

Although 82-year-old Paul Pelosi suffered serious injuries (a hammer will do that) he is expected to make a complete recovery. And there you are. An assassination avoided. Let’s all move on.

Well, not so fast. Let me tell you a story.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Europe’s political tectonic plates began moving precipitously as wealthy elite landowners were being challenged by emerging socialism whose leaders demanded power for the working classes, something anathema to the elites. One of the issues intensifying the socialist movement in France was the Dreyfus case.

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been falsely accused and convicted of treason for delivering French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life in prison on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Jewish Alsatian French artillery officer, and, yes, from its beginning antisemitism hung heavily over what came to be known as the Dreyfus Affair.

Born in 1859, Jean Jaurès was a highly respected leader of the socialist movement in the Legislative Assembly. He, among others, took up the cause of Dreyfus and was instrumental in forcing a second trial once it became known that high military officers had conspired to frame Dreyfus. In 1896, after 12 years, Dreyfus was fully acquitted and went on to serve with distinction in the First World War. The Dreyfus Affair propelled Jaurès to the forefront of French politicians.

Between the end of the Dreyfus Affair and the war, Jaurès became the intellectual champion of the socialist cause as leader of the French Socialist Party. He was an antimilitarist who was able to pragmatically straddle France’s left and right political wings and could see both sides of an issue. However, in the feverish fervor of the run-up to World War I, while the vast majority of the French were convinced the ignominy of the Franco-Prussian War, with its mortifying defeat at Sedan and humiliating Treaty of Versailles, had to be avenged and Germany crushed, Jaurès advocated diplomacy. He continued tirelessly to prod the public to reject the calls for war.

On 31 July 1914, the day before both the Germans and French mobilized for battle, Jaurès, knowing he had lost the argument and worn out from his efforts, went to the Café Croisant a little after 9:00 pm, for dinner, sitting with his back to a window that looked out onto the street. That was when Raoul Villain, a 29-year-old French nationalist who’d been following him since the evening before, shouted “pacifist” and “traitor,” and fired two shots into his back. Jaurès slumped forward. Five minutes later, he was dead.

The killing of Jaurès stunned Paris. Everything came to halt. He was buried on 4 August, the day the war began.

The death of Jaurès is what can happen when seemingly rational people lose their rationality and are magnetically drawn to violence. Last night in San Fransisco we could have had a similar result.

The political rancor and hatred oozing throughout America today, with its tangible potential for violence, has been brewing for decades. Donald Trump did not begin it. He just made it fashionable.

Although both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were quick to condemn last night’s home invasion, I’m wondering what they and the legislators they’re supposed to lead will do now. Will any of them condemn the former president for inciting this violence? Will they condemn any of the Republican leaders who, cult-like, mimic Trump’s incitement? The next 24 hours will be interesting.

On 6 January 2021, in the corridors of the Capitol, the traitorous insurrectionists were yelling, “Where’s Mike Pence?” I ask you what would have happened if they’d found him? And what would have happened last night in San Francisco if the Speaker of the House, the third-highest ranking person in US government, had been home?

Please. Think about that.

 

Will The State Of The Economy Determine The Midterm Outcomes?

Tuesday, October 18th, 2022

 

On the evening of 3 November 2010, President Barack Obama faced a White House East Room full of reporters after his party lost 64 House seats in that day’s midterm election. Among other things, the humbled President said, “I’m not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like I did last night.” Well, to quote Hamlet, it is entirely possible on the evening of 4 November his recommendation may be, “More honored in the breach than the observance.”

Why? Because it was true in 1992 when James Carville coined the phrase, and it’s true today: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

With the midterms three weeks away, it is becoming clearer every day that the number one, overarching concern of most Americans is what they perceive to be a bad, and worsening, economy and how it affects them.

How do those Americans define the word “economy?” They don’t need advanced degrees in Economics to do it. No, what “economy” means to the average American is:

1. What does it now cost to buy the things I need and want?

2. Do I have enough money to do it?

Mr. and Mrs. Average American can answer those two questions in a nanosecond, no algorithms required.

1. The year-over-year rate of inflation is now 8.2%, down from 8.3% in August, according to the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index, which measures how much Americans pay for certain goods and services. That is more than four times the Federal Reserve’s  benchmark target of 2%. Due to the Fed’s actions to combat the spike in inflation, interest rates for borrowing have risen commensurately. Everything now costs more than a year ago. A lot more.

To put this in human terms, consider that here in Massachusetts we were greeted two weeks ago with the announcement that, despite the Commonwealth regulating them, electricity costs will rise 64% starting with November’s bills. That number is not a typo. The coming winter will bring serious problems for many people here in the Northeast.

So, the answer to the first question is: A lot more than a year ago.

2.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on 13 October real average hourly earnings decreased 3.8% from September 2021 to September 2022. That’s a cut in pay.

For our Mr. and Mrs. Average American, this means that although everything costs more, take home pay is 3.8% less. For them, trying to keep up with inflation is like trying to outswim a Navy Destroyer. With every stroke they fall farther behind.

Some 46% of people now call their personal financial situation poor, up from 37% in March, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Moreover, although 54% say their finances are good in the latest survey, that figure was at least 62% through the global recession caused by the pandemic in 2020, and even in late 2021 and early 2022 as prices began to rise across the country.

As if that’s not enough, Bloomberg economists reported yesterday a US recession is “effectively certain” in the next 12 months.

So, the answer to the second question is: For many people, No.

What does this mean for the upcoming mid-term election? Possible disaster for the Democrats, who seem to be campaigning on abortion rights, election denial, and saving democracy.

These are certainly important issues. In many states, abortion rights aren’t rights anymore. More than 60% of Republicans still say conspiratorial Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. A Washington Post analysis found a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 291 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election without a shred of evidence. Democrats maintain if these people are elected the future of democracy is in grave peril.

One thing the Democrats are not talking about—much—is the economy, except to say it’s a global problem and, although it’s not the fault of the Biden Administration, the President is doing everything he can to make things better. That, and $4.25, will get you a Grande Chai Latte Tea at your local Starbucks.

What about the Republicans? One thing they do not have to do is offer solutions. And they aren’t.

All the Republicans have to do is quote Ronald Reagan’s famous question uttered in his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in 1980: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” To that question, Mr. and Mrs. Average American can only answer, “No.”

The only thing that seems to be helping Democratic candidates is the quality of the Republican candidates, which, amazingly, Mitch McConnell bemoaned publicly. Regardless of the poor quality, pollsters now say Republicans have a slight lead—and momentum that is widening it.

Republicans in the House, led by Kevin McCarthy, are beginning to count their chickens. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who describes herself as a “Christian Nationalist,” and who in earlier times would be known as a “Nutjob,” predicted recently of McCarthy, “I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.” Merely to think about that prediction coming true is all you need to know of politics in 2022.

Barack Obama is one person who has learned the lesson of the 2010 debacle. In an interview with former aides on Crooked Media’s Pod Save America, he advised Democrats to get to know Mr. and Mrs. Average American and pay less attention to the latest crazy thing coming out of the Republican dragon known as Donald Trump. He chided Democrats to explain how they’d make people’s lives better.

“We spend enormous amounts of time and energy and resources pointing out the latest, crazy thing he said, or you know, how rude or mean, you know, some of these Republican candidates behaved. That’s probably not something that, in the minds of most voters, overrides their basic interests: Can I pay the rent? What are gas prices? How am I dealing with child care, et cetera. Right?”

Right. Democrats better start listening and relating to the needs of their constituents and stop focusing on the fog of the battle. If not…

Shellacking, anyone?