The Liberal Media February 28, 2019February 27, 2019 The problem is, the TRUTH is liberal. It believes in science. It believes in crowd size. It believes in facts. It opposes bullying, tax fraud, injustice, illogic, voter suppression — misstatements and lies. Is the National Enquirer really more professional and reliable than the New York Times or Washington Post? Are Fox News and Rush Limbaugh really more professional and reliable than CBS and NBC? Can the leaders of the Republican Party really believe that? It made me a little nuts to hear a Republican congressman branding the FBI’s Andrew McCabe a liar — in defense, no less, of Donald Trump. Yet it’s the party line. HAVE YOU READ OR LISTENED TO ANDREW McCABE’S BOOK? It’s really not possible, I think, to listen to his accounts of busting the Russian mafia, reacting to 9/11, overseeing the Boston Marathon bombing, investigating the Clinton emails — everything he’s done in his life and how and why he’s done it — and imagine that he’s anything but the best America has to offer. Honest, brave, and in it for all the right reasons.
In The Same Boat February 27, 2019February 26, 2019 But first: Have some onerous student debt? Know someone who does? (Want to help your employees with their debt?) CommonBond might be able to help. And now: I met Zeus (the dog, now seven) when he was just weeks old. His pal Marc believes it’s important to acknowledge that we’re all in the same boat. A one-minute video. Check it out. (And then, perhaps, the three-minute “about” video where you meet Zeus.) And by the way? “I didn’t meet a single one of the models in the video,” Marc writes. “They are all virtual. It’s done with a site called placeit.net and it is amazing.” Twenty-nine bucks a month — but cheaper than hiring an art department. In real life, Marc is a communications coach. He teaches elevator pitches. On-line, from the comfort of your desk.
Spend Eight Minutes With Tucker Carlson February 26, 2019February 24, 2019 You may have seen clips of the Dutch history, Rutger Bregman, who spoke truth to power at Davos. Tucker Carlson apparently thought this would fit well this his brand of sticking up for the little guy against the elites, so invited him on his show, as described by TV critic Erik Wemple. But, oh, did it ever go wrong for Tucker. So much so that he decided not to air it. So Bregman did. Take a look. (For the record, I think Bregman needs to put less emphasis on sky-high nominal tax rates, which the rich and corporations have traditionally spent a lot of time and money to avoid actually paying, and more emphasis on closing the loopholes and tax havens and generation-skipping trusts, etc., etc., that allow them to pay much less than the nominal rate. Better, in my view, fairly steep rates that can’t be avoided than confiscatory rates that won;t in fact be paid. Still, the overall point he made it Davos — here, in 60 seconds — clearly struck a nerve, and led to the Carlson interview.) HAVE YOU READ OR LISTENED TO ANDREW McCABE’S BOOK? YOU MUST. IT’S WAY MORE THAN YOU’VE SEEN ON TV. It’s really not possible, I think, to listen to his accounts of busting the Russian mafia, reacting to 9/11, overseeing the Boston Marathon bombing, investigating the Clinton emails — everything he’s done in his life and how and why he’s done it — and imagine that he’s anything but the best America has to offer. Honest, brave, and in it for all the right reasons. I’m not sure how you can say that about the Trumps and the Manaforts, the Michael Cohens and Roger Stones, the Flynns and the Zinkes — and on and on. Wilbur Ross? Tom Price? And wait til you read about Jeff Sessions.
A Way To Fix Gerrymandering And The Electoral College February 25, 2019February 24, 2019 If Democrats won back the Senate and White House in 2020, they could — with a simple majority vote in both houses, argues this audacious proposal — reset the size of Congressional districts. And that would change everything. (Thanks, Jim Burt.) There were only 224,000 of us per Congressional District when the number of CDs was set at 433 in 1913 (raised to 435 in 1929). Today: 735,000 per district. What if Congress reset it to 500,000? Wait — what? More politicians? More Congressional staffers? Where would you put everybody? We all hate Congress (though we like our Congressperson)! So this is not at first an appealing idea. But, as you will read, it would eliminate the distortions of gerrymandering and of the Electoral College. I don’t see it gaining traction. The prospects for the National Popular Vote effort strike me as more realistic, with 172 of the needed 270 Electoral College votes already secured and 89 more having passed at least one legislative chamber in 11 other states. But that would only solve the Electoral College piece, not gerrymandering. (To help fix gerrymandering, visit the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.) Still . . . what do you think? Make our democracy more democratic? Republicans will hate it. But they’d still have as many senators in North Dakota and Wyoming (combined pop: 1.4 million) as Democrats have in California and New York (combined pop: 60 million). So at least they’d still have that unfair advantage. HAVE YOU READ OR LISTENED TO ANDREW McCABE’S BOOK YET? YOU MUST. IT’S WAY MORE THAN YOU’VE SEEN ON TV. It’s really not possible, I think, to listen to his accounts of busting the Russian mafia, reacting to 9/11, overseeing the Boston Marathon bombing, investigating the Clinton emails — everything he’s done in his life and how and why he’s done it — and imagine that he’s anything but the best America has to offer. Honest, brave, and in it for all the right reasons. I’m not sure how you can say that about the Trumps and the Manaforts, the Michael Cohens and Roger Stones, the Flynns and the Zinkes — and on and on. Wilbur Ross? Tom Price? And wait til you read about Jeff Sessions.
Corruption On A Scale Never Previously Imagined February 22, 2019February 20, 2019 Rachel Maddow had fun last week with a proposal Trump recently made for fireworks on the Fourth of July. It then turns more serious, with one more example of what in any other adminsitration would be called a scandal. There was a time your career could face ruin over accepting $16,000 in — legal — contributions. It’s what led to Nixon’s famous Checkers speech. HAVE YOU READ OR (BETTER STILL) LISTENED TO ANDREW McCABE’S BOOK YET? YOU MUST. IT’S WAY MORE THAN YOU’VE SEEN ON TV. Why some British people don’t like Donald Trump, by Nate White: A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.* I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever.* And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. . . . And it goes downhill from there . . . Even so, sometimes there are bright spots on a bleak horizon. Have you seen this? Trump administration launches global effort to end criminalization of homosexuality. A complex issue, as you will read. Have a great weekend. *This is not in fact true. During one of the Republican primary debates, when each candidate was asked what Secret Service code name she or he wanted, Trump deadpanned: “Humble.” I still laugh thinking about it.
What A Field! February 21, 2019February 20, 2019 It’s an abundance of riches. Even just the young ones, like Booker and Buttigieg and Beto startng with B. Read this profile of Cory Booker and tell me you’re not at least a little impressed. Watch Pete Buttigieg (BUTT-edge-edge) with Colbert and tell me you’re not at least a little impressed. (I particularly love that interview.) And so many others, announced and unannounced. The three old white “B’s” — Biden, Bloomberg, and Bernie. The amazing women (alphabetically) Amy, Elizabeth, Kamala, and Kirsten. Outliers like Andrew Yang, whose important book I have previously plugged. Former governors like Terry McAuliffe and John Hickenlooper, who did terrific jobs for Virginia and Colorado. And a whole bunch more. Sherrod Brown! Michael Bennet! (Two more B’s.) A dozen others! I reject the notion that there’s only one way to win — go left to excite the base or go moderate to reassure independents. The only thing I know for sure is that all the candidates need to compete by touting their own visions and qualifications, not by knocking their opponents. And that once we do have a nominee, all the rest must rally around her or him with enthusiasm. We need to win; restore civility, competence and reliability to the presidency; solve big problems in a thoughtful, constructive way. Which means also snatching the gavel from McConnell, who may be the least constructive Senate majority leader ever to have held one. HAVE YOU READ OR (BETTER STILL) LISTENED TO ANDREW McCABE’S BOOK YET? YOU MUST. IT’S WAY MORE THAN YOU’VE SEEN ON TV.
And Yet You Still Don’t Turn The Lights Off When You Leave The Room February 20, 2019February 20, 2019 It’s time to panic — right here — but first a quick detour. Tasmania is burning. The Climate Disaster Future Has Arrived While Those In Power Laugh At Us. As I write this, fire is 500 metres from the largest King Billy pine forest in the world on Mt Bobs, an ancient forest that dates back to the last Ice Age and has trees over 1,000 years old. Fire has broached the boundaries of Mt Field national park with its glorious alpine vegetation, unlike anything on the planet. Fire laps at the edges of Federation Peak, Australia’s grandest mountain, and around the base of Mt Anne with its exquisite rainforest and alpine gardens. Fire laps at the border of the Walls of Jerusalem national park with its labyrinthine landscapes of tarns and iconic stands of ancient pencil pine . . . Five years ago I was contacted by a stranger, Prof Peter Davies, an eminent water scientist. He wanted to meet because he had news he thought would interest me. The night we met Davies told me that the south-west of Tasmania – the island’s vast, uninhabited and globally unique wildland, the heart of its world heritage area – was dying. The iconic habitats of rainforest, button grass plains, and heathlands had begun to vanish because of climate change. I was shocked. I had understood that climate change’s effects on Tasmania would be significant but not disastrous; the changes mitigated by Tasmania being surrounded by seas that were not heating as quickly as others: the island’s west would get wetter, the east a little warmer and drier, but compared to much of the world it didn’t seem catastrophic. But it wasn’t so. . . . Of course, we barely know where Tasmania is. But we know where Florida and Louisiana are. It would be a shame if they were underwater at high tide. Same with Lower Manhattan. It’s Time to Panic, as you may have read in last Sunday’s New York Times. “If we don’t take action . . . the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” Technology is racing to meet the challenge. Bill Gates is thinking a lot about cow farts and helping to develop meatless meat and self-contained toilets — watch his ultimately upbeat 7 minutes here if for some reason you missed Fareed Zakaria this past Sunday. But in the meantime, shouldn’t we be eating much less meat? Boiling no more water than the amount of coffee we plan to drink? Turning the lights off when we leave the room? Setting the thermostat at least as low in the winter as we do in the summer; at least as high in the summer as we do in the winter? Time to Panic argues: that stuff’s nice, but it is collective action, through politics, we need to take. So in addition to walking or biking instead of driving, when you can, how about taking 1o minutes to read Time to Panic . . . and ten more to send it to your Republican friends? Back to Tasmania: . . . Then there was the startlingly new phenomenon of widespread dry lightning storms. Almost unknown in Tasmania until this century they had increased exponentially since 2000, leading to a greatly increased rate of fire in a rapidly drying south-west. Compounding all this, winds were also growing in duration, further drying the environment and fuelling the fires’ spread and ferocity. . . . . . . Later Davies took me on a research trip into a remote part of the south-west to show me the deeply upsetting sight of an area that was once peatland and forest and was now, after repeated burning, wet gravel. The news was hard to comprehend – the enemies of Tasmania’s wild lands had always had local addresses: the Hydro Electricity Commission, Gunns, various tourism ventures. They could be named and they could be fought, and, in some cases, beaten. But the new danger was not here. It was in the sky, it was carbon, and every year there was more of it. The name of the crime was climate change. Six weeks ago, the future that Davies and others had been predicting arrived in Tasmania. Lightning strikes ignited what would become known as the Gell River fire in the island’s south-west. In later weeks more lightning strikes led to more fires, every major one of which is still burning. . . . . . . Today Tasmania is burning. Its fires are so large that a firefighting team was reportedly called out in New Zealand to investigate a heavy smoke haze that turned out to have drifted across 2,500km of ocean from the Tasmanian fires. Firefighters are confronted with 1,629km of fire front, with fires having consumed 190,000 hectares, or 3% of Tasmania’s land, with authorities warning there is no sign of the fires abating for several weeks, and the potential for catastrophic consequences still a distinct possibility. . . . Politics apparently plays a role in Tasmania, too. Where here we have an imbecilic Senate committee chairman holding up a snowball, the Tasmanians have a prime minister holding up a lump of coal. . . . Scott Morrison’s proudest boast is that when the barbarians were at the gate, he stopped them. But now the truth is clear: the barbarians were never at the gate. They were always here, in the palace, in power, and they were blinding us with their lie that the enemies who would destroy our world were the wretched and powerless who sought asylum here. And all along our real enemy was them: those who held up lumps of coal in front of their throne, and laughed and laughed . . . What has become clear over these last four weeks across this vast, beautiful land of Australia is that a way of life is on the edge of vanishing. Australian summers, once a time of innocent pleasure, now are to be feared, to be anticipated not with joy but with dread, a time of discomfort, distress and, for some, fear that lasts not a day or a night but weeks and months. Power grids collapse, dying rivers vomit huge fish kills, while in the north, in Townsville, there are unprecedented floods, and in the south heat so extreme it pushes at the very edge of liveability has become everyday. And the future in which the people of Tasmania now find themselves, in the evacuation centres, camped in friends’ and family homes, fighting fires day after week after month, isn’t just frightening. It’s terrifying. While Morrison, now the prime minister, rushes around the country trying to scare the people about franking credits, he seems blithely unaware that the people are already scared – about climate change. Climate change isn’t just happening. It’s happening far quicker than has been predicted. Each careful scientific prediction is rapidly overtaken by the horror of profound natural changes that seem to be accelerating, with old predictions routinely outdone by the worsening reality – hotter, colder, wetter, drier, windier, wilder, and ever more destructive. . . . It is beginning to look as though Mars may once have had water on its surface. Perhaps life. Should we really assume, as the Republican Party largely does, that dumping 90 million tons of global-warming pollution a day into the atmosphere — day after day, week after week, year after year — won’t have an effect on that atmosphere? Won’t throw our fragile ecosystem out of kilter? Are we really such poor stewards of this miraculous blue marble as not to spring to Mother Nature’s defense? It’s Time to Panic.
Power Walking With Chris Christie February 19, 2019February 18, 2019 Yesterday, I linked to a column that inspired a power walk. When you go out for yours, I suggest listening to high-energy music (Jersey Boys! Hamilton! Workout Now! Cardio Motivator 2009!) or a good book. City of Thieves, perhaps. What a story. Endurance. A year in space, weightless. Or Chris Christie’s Let Me Finish, read by the in-your-face former governor himself. He, too, tells a great story. The parts about his 15-year relationship with Trump especially so. He spent months leading a team of 125 serious people putting together Trump’s transition plan. It would have staffed a proper government. Trump never even looked at it. Much of what Christie has been willing to help Trump work toward, I’m against. But if America was going to get an in-your-face overweight white guy, Christie would clearly have been a million times better than the one we got. He repeatedly justifies his support of Trump by stating, simply, the alternative was Hillary. As if that needs no elaboration. But it does — and he never says why he found her objectionable. Surely he didn’t buy the Benghazi nonsense, or the child sex rings. In 2008, Trump wrote, “I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president.” “Hillary is smart, tough and a very nice person. Bill Clinton was a great president. They are fine people. Hillary was roughed up by the media, and it was a tough campaign for her, but she’s a great trooper. Her history is far from being over.” Christie obviously never quotes that — or helps us understand why he differs. But he does cover the elephant in the room (and all the elephant jokes) . . . and I now believe he neither concocted nor approved Bridgegate. Whether or not he was completely unaware of it for the four days it was going, as he claims to have been, is harder to know. But if he wasn’t largely or entirely blameless, wouldn’t Bill Baroni, his Port Authority appointee, have said something to prosecutors to avoid or mitigate the two-year prison sentence he ultimately got? (Long before and entirely unrelated to Bridgegate — but since we’re talking about power walks and elephant jokes — Bill wrote Fat Kid Got Fit: And So Can You!) Putin is winning. His sneak attack may ultimately prove to have done more to diminish America than the Japanese did with theirs. It is ongoing, and almost half our country doesn’t even believe it happened or is happening. We have handed the American Century to China. Our allies are as hopeful as anyone else who “believes in” things like science, civility, and truth-telling that Trump will be gone soon. But can the damage ever be fully repaired? As good a read as Christie’s book is, when is he going to start saying these things? Had he been chosen as Vice President, which by his account was all but in the bag, would he have been the enabler and apologist Pence is?
The Inspiration YOU Need? February 18, 2019February 17, 2019 At least one of two people need to read this from the LA Times (thanks, Rich!): How I got my 89-year-old dad to crush it in the gym. Namely, you, if you’re not exercising regularly (walk to work! climb the stairs!); and/or some senior you know. Excuse today’s short column: I’m going out for a long brisk walk.
NYC. UK. Canada. February 15, 2019 There’s much to admire about AOC’s energy, much to share in her goals for a better world. But boy did she ever screw up by costing New York its Amazon headquarters — and by giving Republicans yet another way to mischaracterize the Democratic Party in the next election. A big unforced error. Could we have a do-over? Speaking of unforced errors, how about Brexit? Could they have a do-over? Paul Abrams made the case for this 30 months ago and it’s no less compelling today. Some of my friends tell me the outcome of a second referendum would be no different — and that may be true. But as the March 29 deadline looms, don’t the Brits owe it to themselves to find out? CORRECTION Last month I noted that Libertarian Republican Senator Rand Paul was going to Canada for hernia surgery. “Better care than he can get here. If he were Canadian, it would even be free.” Steve: “The clinic Rand Paul is going to for surgery is world renowned but is NOT part of Canadian single-payer plan. If I went there I would have to pay their rate but would get reimbursed for the scale rate under Canadian system which might be a fourth or a tenth the actual charges. Sorry to correct your column.” –> Oops. “On balance,” I asked Steve, “which system do you think is delivering a better result? The most bang for the buck?” Steve: “No question the Canadian System does . . . with one notable exception: cancer. While you get world class treatment for it here, a fast- or even moderate-growing cancer might not be treated in a timely manner (depending upon where you live, as wait time can vary dramatically by province or city where you are located). Here is the big difference between the two systems: Americans have health care rationed by price. Canadians have it rationed by time. Everyone gets it but you may have to wait. “In 2010 I had a mild heart attack. I needed four stents put in. Total out-of-pocket cost to me, including doctors (diagnostic cardiologist with four appointments for stress tests and nuclear stress tests; surgery including hospitalization; and four Boston Scientific Drug coated stents inserted by a surgeon who had trained at Mayo Clinic): zero. “A friend of mine whose son at a very young age was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma had chemotherapy and radiation treatment over six months which cured it (or so they thought) same cost zero. When it recurred he has just undergone stem cell treatment including four weeks in hospital. His parents do very well, but even with their upper middle class lifestyle they would have been looking at selling their house and a major financial setback had they lived in the US. Instead, their only cost was for housing in a city they didn’t live in because treatment is at a major city. Better yet, the son (patient) had disability coverage at work, which paid his salary; Canada Pension Plan (think US Social Security) also has a disability portion so he got that as well.” And Canada does this at a dramatically lower percentage of GDP than we do (roughly 11% versus 18%). It’s impossible to go overnight to the same kind of single-payer system every other advanced nation on the planet employs so much more cost-effectively that what we had to. The Affordable Care Act was a first step toward a fairer more efficient system. Adding a public option to it would be another. Lowering the Medicare age by one year per year would be a third. Have a great weekend.