Author: A.T.

THE POLITICAL CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Just 26% of Republicans believe that Russia interfered in the Presidential election.  That compares with 78% of Democrats, 53% of independents — and 100% of America’s 17 intelligence agencies.

Think what that says about Putin’s and Trump’s ability to manipulate American public opinion.

According to the lengthy Washington Post story that so many have been talking about:

In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy.

Yet our commander-in-chief, like the honey badger, he don’t care.

After all, the Kremlin isn’t run by commies anymore.  It’s run by a multi-billionaire kleptocrat.  A lying, journalist-murdering, opponent-murdering former KGB agent — what’s not to like there? — who has our commander-in-chief wrapped around his finger.

(You disagree?  Then tell me this:  If Angela Merkel or Kim Jung-Un had asked Trump to invite their top ministers into the Oval Office, would he have said yes?  And allowed only the German or North Korean press in with them?  And seemed so truly relaxed and happy to have them there?)

Our commander-in-chief is focused on more important matters than Russia’s sustained attack on our democracy.

This week, he and his party are focused on shifting hundreds of billions of dollars from ordinary people’s health care back to the millionaires and billionaires who control the Republican Party.

On that score, I have friends who buy the notion that the Republicans are being no more heavy-handed in rushing through Trumpcare than Obama was with his bill.

There are two things to note about this.

First, it’s spectacularly untrue.  If you doubt that, Claire McCaskill nails it in under three minutes.  (And here is Seth Myers taking a more flippant, circuitous route.)

Second, Obama’s motivation is passing the Affordable Care Act was to help tens of millions of Americans get better health care; relieve all Americans of the worry they might one day develop a pre-exisiting condition or run into a lifetime cap; and launch reforms to make care more efficient and bend the health care inflation curve down — much of all this paid for by adding 3.8% to the tax millionaires pay on investment income — an extra $3.8 million on every $100 million they realize.  Whereas Trump’s and the Republicans’ motivation in rushing through Trumpcare is to repeal that tax.  See the difference?

You can argue the top 1% are over-taxed (though the rate on investment income when Ronald Reagan left office was higher) — oppressed at the hands of the bottom 80% of Americans mostly struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck.  Good for you.

But I’m with those who opposed the “mean” House health care bill — only 17% favored it. (It was Trump himself who called the House bill mean, after celebrating its passage.)  And who will oppose the Senate version, in much the same ballpark of wrong-headed cruelty.

Doug S: “After having read about the abomination that is Mitch McConnell’s healthcare bill, I — as a resident of a high-tax state — say enough of tax welfare for the other states: what about legislation that mandates that no state shall receive more from Uncle Sam than it pays to Uncle Sam?  Oh, but that would benefit the blue states to the detriment of the red states? Hmm, gosh, that is a shame. I’d also advocate for Congressional health care be set equal to the least generous healthcare plan available by any state (or the average of the worst three).  Since the Republican Congress is clearly waging war on the 99%, it is time they live with the consequences they seek to impose on the rest of us.  Fuming in New Jersey.”

Call your senators and ask them to oppose Trumpcare.

Instead, they should improve Obamacare:

1. Allow negotiation of prescription drug prices.  It’s nuts that under current law, the Federal government must accept whatever price the drug companies set.  Trump is supposed to be a good negotiator.  Start negotiating!
2. Add 2% to the tax on income above $1 million in order to lower deductibles and co-pays for those struggling to get by.
3. Stop sabotaging it — discouraging people from signing up and insurers from making it work.

Doing so would go a long way toward making the Affordable Care Act a success and the country more healthy.

Now that I’m a private citizen, I feel even freer than usual to say what I think:

1. To my donor who wrote that he was “dispirited,” I suggested “disappointed” is the better way to feel.  It was disappointing not to win — was it ever! — but (read on), that disappointment should fuel our resolve, not slow us down.                                                                                                                                                                                      .
2. Everyone did his or her best, and should be lauded for that.  But it was ridiculous to spend $25 million Democratic dollars on this.  Understandable — everybody wanted an outlet to help — and within days of Ossoff’s announcement, I sent $1,500 myself.  But once it was apparent he was raising vastly more than could be spent effectively in a single CD, I stopped.  There were better, more leveraged ways to help fuel a sea change for 2018 — funding Tom Perez’s new DNC, prime (very possibly first) among them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        .
3. To my knowledge, the DNC wasted not a dime of our contributions adding to Jon’s $25 million.  Instead, they sent 12 staffers to work on the ground in his district: a sensible, cost-effective way to help.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         .
4. Nor did the DNC choose the candidate.  Jon is terrific and my God he worked hard at this.  We should be grateful to him and everyone who helped him.  But as Joe Scarborough noted the morning after, a young guy without a family and without decades of local roots was not the best way to win the seat Newt Gingrich and Tom Price long held by huge margins.  I don’t blame the DCCC either.  It is they who work to recruit and encourage the best possible Congressional candidates; but this was a snap election with no time to prepare.  No one could have known in advance Trump would pluck Price out of the House to join his Cabinet.

So my bottom lines are:  hats off to everyone for trying, but going forward we need to be

• as STRATEGIC as possible (just $15 million of those $25 million would have allowed the DNC to quadruple the $7,500/month it sends to strengthen each of the 50 state parties, allowing each to approach the kind of operation Nevada ran last cycle — where we won the Senate seat, 3 of the 4 House seats, and flipped both chambers of the state legislature blue);                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               .
• PUMPED, not discouraged — we can ABSOLUTELY win back the House in 2018 (and the Senate and state chambers) even if we don’t prevail in deep red districts.  And by the way?  With more time to encourage the most competitive candidates to run . . . and, especially, with more time for the voters to realize, 16 months from now, no they did NOT get “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost” — and all the rest – we might even win THIS Georgia seat, too.

So help if you can.*

And in any event: “Don’t agonize — ORGANIZE.”

*Don’t be put off by the huge amounts on that page — there’s a box for “other,” and it’s the millions of “other,” human-size contributions that are what we are really about.  It’s just that this is “my” page, so I’ll see what you do, to say thanks.

In the Brave New World department — if we can summon the wisdom not to destroy each other first — look at this (thanks, Paul!).

It doesn’t seem to be from the Onion.  And if one of you does show me that it’s nuts and not really going to happen by 2020, do you know what?  Something else like it will!  If not by 2020, then 2030 — which is virtually the same exact instant in geological time.

To wit:

. . .a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.

All the data contained in our computer files, historic archives, movies, photo collections and the exploding volume of digital information collected by businesses worldwide is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. This represents enough data to fill more than six stacks of computer tablets stretching to the moon. The world is producing data faster than the capacity to store it.

Now celebrating its centenary year, Technicolor’s laboratories are at the cutting edge of the science of filmmaking, leading a worldwide revolution in immersive entertainment. The company’s latest amazing innovation is the encoding of movies into artificial, “non-biological” DNA. DNA is almost unimaginably small — up to 90,000 molecules can fit into the width of one human hair — so even a large movie library is totally invisible to the human eye. All you can see is the water in a small test tube. . . .

. . . DNA has some great advantages. It is much smaller than traditional media. Researchers found that they can reach a density of 215 petabytes per gram of DNA. Also, DNA lasts for a prolonged length of time — over 100,000 years — which is magnitudes more than traditional media. As an example, one petabyte is roughly 16,000 times the data that your 64GB iPhone can store. DNA can store 215 petabytes in just 0.035 ounces.

Another advantage of DNA is that it will never become obsolete. If you have cassette tapes of music, or vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, they will not be able to be played unless you have a compatible playback device. These devices are available now, but what about in future decades or even centuries? DNA has been around for billions of years, and humanity is unlikely to lose its ability to read these molecules. . . .

What a time to be alive, on the cusp of all-but-unimaginable well-being for virtually everyone, if we can figure out how to live together.

Or extinction, if we can’t; or if the machines decide to fuel themselves by consuming our carbon.

Register.  Vote.  It matters who lead us through the next make-or-break couple of decades.  “Believing in” science should probably be one prerequisite.

This tells it all in under three minutes: Claire McCaskill on the “process” being used by “the world’s greatest deliberative body” to craft America’s health care system.  And how it differs from the process when Obamacare — flawed though it is — passed the Senate.

Watch.

My friend Seth Sikes killed in London earlier this month and will be at 54 Below in NYC this Saturday — invited back for the twelfth time (tickets here) — and up in Provincetown this summer.

But if Seth delights a crowd, that’s nothing compared to the way Trump delights his Cabinet. God, they love him. Their praise is positively fawning! The praise any good autocrat can expect from those who serve him.

(As recounted by David Margolick for the New Yorker, our leader may have gotten the hang of this from the birthday parties his mentor, Roy Cohn, used to throw.  Except that a great many people, including close friends of mine, truly liked the reptilian Cohn, and enjoyed blowing him encomia.  With Trump, I’m not sure Reince Priebus, et al, were having as much fun.)

This six-minute interview with Fareed Zakaria is Canada’s foreign minister’s thoughtful praise of America’s role in the world these past 70 years — for which she thanks us sincerely — and her lament at our having stepped aside.  Thoughtful and important.

It’s not the 1966 comedy, The Russians Are Coming!  The Russians Are Coming!, it’s the 2017 reality: the Russians are here.  According to all 17 of our intelligence agencies, they have deployed thousands of cyber-agents to disrupt our democracy and weaken the United States.

Our commander-in-chief doesn’t believe it and is doing nothing about it.

The attack — which would clearly seem to be working — is expected to be sustained, permanent, and to include as targets other liberal democracies as well, and the ties that have bound us together, like NATO and the UK’s inclusion in Europe.

Our commander-in-chief has shown no interest in doing anything about it.

Russia’s leadership does not trouble him.

A man who murders political opponents, murders journalists, lies to and steals billions from his countrymen is a man our commander-in-chief can respect. A man whose top aides our commander-in-chief can welcome into the Oval Office with great jocularity — his kinda guys! — while declining even to shake hands with Angela Merkel.

So forget for a minute whether he’s obstructed justice.  And forget for a minute whether he or his team have been or currently are in league with the Russians.  His campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was paid $10 million a year to, in his own words, greatly benefit the Russian government — but leave that aside for a minute, too.

We are under attack.  Our commander-in-chief doesn’t care and is doing nothing about it.

Why are 36% of Americans and the Party controlling the House and Senate okay with this?

Is it because we are about to have great health care at a tiny fraction — not just a fraction but a tiny fraction — of the cost?

Sorry.  Been busy raising money for the party that “believes in” climate change and a higher minimum wage and better relations with Cuba; and health care for all rather than tax cuts for billionaires, and allowing the refinancing of federal student loans at today’s low rates.

Oh: and repelling attacks by journalist-murdering Vladimir Putin.  An issue in which Trump has shown absolutely no interest.

How does this all end?

I am holding my SIGA.  Click here for their latest.

Hope to post more robustly soon.  Stay tuned.

Troubled by the state of our democracy?

Run for something.  If you’re a Democrat, this site proposes to train you, in the comfort of your own home, at your own pace, for free.

Though the stock market doesn’t reflect it, there is, in fact, much to be troubled about.

With the intentional help of a massive sustained attack by the former KGB, an unstable, incompetent, petty and petulant pathological liar, who for years kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, came within just three million votes of a plurality in the race for President in 2016.

We all know the rest of the story, or at least much of it, as it has unfolded to date — we are soon to get GREAT health care at not just less than before, but at a fraction — no, a “tiny fraction” — of the cost.  The crowd on the mall at his Inauguration — as anyone could see — was by far the largest in history . . . and his Electoral College win was the largest since Reagan’s.  And now, as we go around the Cabinet, everyone confirms it: what a spectacular leader we have in this man.  He’s a smart cookie, like Kim Jung-Un; a strong leader, like (journalist-murdering, kleptocrat) Vladimir Putin . . . and on and on.

These are dangerous, potentially dark times for our country.  The folks who elected him were (mostly) not at all deplorable, any more than were the folks who elected a powerful German leader 80 years ago.  They were bamboozled.

But are we now more than a few inevitable terrorist attacks away from his declaring martial law?  Terrorist attacks that though tragic, for sure, might collectively cause loss of life equal to a week’s highway fatalities?

Might he actually fire Robert Mueller?  And if he does, will the Republican Congress — that stole the Supreme Court by not allowing a vote on Merrick Garland, and that blocked the American Jobs Act that would have put millions to work at good jobs rebuilding our decaying infrastructure — will that Republican Congress stand up to him?  Punish Putin?  Did the Republicans not forever pride themselves on being staunchly anti-Soviet?  Ah, but that was when Russia was communist.  Now that it is an oligarchy run by and for billionaires, it may be a different story.

In a matter of months, the rest of the world has concluded we are not the America they could once look to.  Russia and China are filling the gap.  They are winning so much they may soon grow tired of winning.  How much further will we slide before, somehow (how?) we awake from this nightmare?

Could the Supreme Court at some point — just as they installed Bush in a “one-off” decision they explicitly said was the product of exceptional circumstances, that should not be relied on as precedent — find a way to interpret the Founders’ intentions as not to have included victory for the KGB against the will of a plurality of the citizenry?

Run for something.  This site proposes to train you, in the comfort of your own home, at your own pace, for free.

Did you know that New York City now has ferry service?  So on top of all the other things you can do here this summer, for $2.75 you can take the ferry from (say) Wall Street to Rockaway beach.  For another $1, bring your bike aboard.

Did you know that in New York City, the phone line 888-NYC-WELL is “your connection to free, confidential mental health support?”  “Speak to a counselor via phone, text or chat and get access to mental health and substance misuse services, in more than 200 languages, 24/7/365.”

And that the City has a comprehensive plan for mental health?

But that if you do encounter a citizen in distress, you can call 311 or text 311-692 to report it (unless it’s an emergency, of course: 911).  That number or website is a portal to everything from alternate-side-of the-street parking info to potential job information.

Click here for a ton of other programs — like Ladders for Leaders, if you’re in a position to hire a talented young intern.

The City is thriving, with its lowest unemployment rate — and highest high-school graduation rate — ever.

And more than 70,000 toddlers enrolled in universal — free — full-day pre-K.

And teensy-tiny Manhattan apartments you can rent for as little as $1,750 a month (which is why God invented Queens).

Harlem is hot again.  Brooklyn rocks.

Last year — 2016 — was the safest year in New York City history; and New York is the safest city in America.

Taxes are high, but do you know what?  Per Oliver Wendell Holmes (and common sense), “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

Come visit!

I am a week late with this, but if you can find 20 minutes, every segment of this LAST WEEK TONIGHT is dead on. As is generally the case with John Oliver.

How about this: James Comey for President (since Elon Musk was born in South Africa); Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Al Franken to run the communications shop. (Or Al Franken for President, Tom Hanks for VP, Oprah — or Charlie Rose — for Secretary of State, Trevor Noah to run the press shop.)

I cede the balance of my time to John.