The Oppression of the Supermajority
The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the thwarting of a largely unified public.
TIM WU, NY TIMES
March 6, 2019
March 5, 2019
March 4, 2019
March 3, 2019
Michael Jackson Cast a Spell. ‘Leaving Neverland’ Breaks It.
In a new documentary on HBO, two men accuse the star of sexually abusing them as children. Our critic wrestles with their stories, and his own fandom.
NY TIMES
10 Undeniable Facts About the Michael Jackson Sexual-Abuse Allegations
The author, who spent more than a decade covering the scandal for V.F., shares the key revelations and insights that viewers of the new HBO documentary Leaving Neverlandneed to know.
VANITY FAIR
March 2, 2019
March 1, 2019
February 28, 2019
Michael Cohen accuses 'racist, conman' Trump of criminal conspiracy.
Five key takeaways from the hearing.
The president faces peril having nothing to do with Russia.
Mr. Cohen’s testimony did not provide conclusive proof that incriminates the president on possible collusion with Russia. On another matter, though — one that is the province of federal prosecutors in New York and not that of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — Mr. Cohen’s testimony and documents could prove far more damaging.
Mr. Cohen said the president had firsthand knowledge of the payment made to Ms. Daniels, just before Election Day in 2016, that were part of an effort to silence her from talking about a sexual encounter she said she had with Mr. Trump. Acting at the president’s direction, he said he procured a home-equity loan to pay Ms. Daniels $130,000. But Mr. Cohen also gave the committee documentary evidence: a copy of a check dated Aug. 1, 2017, for $35,000 from Mr. Trump’s personal bank account that bore Mr. Trump’s signature. Mr. Cohen said the check was one of 11 installments that the president made to reimburse him.
Perhaps more important, Mr. Cohen said that the president directed him to lie about Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the payment to Ms. Daniels.
Cohen savaged Trump’s character.
Not content to talk only about a possible conspiracy and payoffs to Ms. Daniels, Mr. Cohen also offered a damnable assessment of Mr. Trump’s character. He said that he made bigoted remarks about African-Americans in the United States and about predominantly black nations.
'Mr. Trump is a racist. The country has seen Mr. Trump court white supremacists and big got bigots. You have heard him call foreign countries s***holes. He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black wasn't that wasn't a s***hole. This was when Barack Obama was president of the United States,' Cohen said.
'While we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way. And he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid. And yet I continued to work for him.'
He said Mr. Trump boasted about inflating assets when it served him, and about understating values when it helped to lower his taxes. He also carried out orders from Mr. Trump to tell contractors that Mr. Trump was refusing to pay them the money owed “for their services.”
About avoiding Vietnam through a medical deferment, Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump told him, “You think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to Vietnam.”
Mr. Cohen did offer one important piece of exculpatory information for the president. He said that despite many rumors, he knew of no tape from an elevator that showed Mr. Trump hitting his wife, Melania.
Cohen provides plenty of smoke — if not a gun
Cohen gave key claims and documents that will birth all kinds of new targets for reporters and, potentially, investigators. But most of his most important contentions require explanation and inquiry.
His statement that he heard a phone conversation in which President Trump spoke to Roger Stone about a looming WikiLeaks documents dump before it landed? We still need to know exactly where Stone allegedly got that information and whether it actually came from WikiLeaks.
The scene he painted of Donald Trump Jr. whispering to his father, “The meeting is all set,” around the time of the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer? Trump’s knowing about the meeting would be significant, but that’s hardly conclusive on the basis of what Cohen says.
Cohen’s statement that Trump’s lawyers altered his testimony about the timeline of the Trump Tower Moscow deal? It’s important to know in what way — and whether they were acting at Trump’s direction.
Cohen suggesting Trump inflated his assets while applying for a loan from Deutsche Bank to buy the National Football League’s Buffalo Bills? There are many ins and outs there.
The big takeaway here, as it has been in much of the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, is that there is a lot that we don’t know, and it might have been investigated far more than we’re aware.
There is a ‘smoking gun document’
Cohen went into granular detail about a scheme that he said was cooked up by Trump, Donald Jr and the chief finance officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, to pay off Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who has alleged she had an affair with the real estate tycoon. The scheme arranged for Cohen to be paid back the $130,000 he had paid from his own money to buy Daniels’ silence just before the 2016 election, in installments, Cohen said, in order to disguise the purpose of the transactions.
Cohen produced for the committee a copy of one of the installments – a $35,000 check signed by Trump from his personal bank account on 1 August 2017, when he was already in the White House. Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, said this was the “smoking gun document” that proved a conspiracy by Trump to commit criminal fraud by hiding the purpose of company spending.
In Cohen’s account, Trump was aware of the scheme at every stage. “Oh, he knew about everything, yes,” he said. The aim was “to keep Trump as far away as possible” from the Daniels payments.
In an exchange with Katie Hill, a Democrat from California, Cohen said he had received a call from Trump when the lawyer was in the course of an interview with Vanity Fair. His boss wanted to agree on the “public messaging” about the payments.
Cohen was instructed to say that Trump “was not knowledgeable of these reimbursements and he was not knowledgeable of my actions”. That statement could place the president in severe legal jeopardy under campaign finance laws that prohibit the use of secret funds for political gain during an election.
Another investigation involving Trump
Speaking of which, in one exchange with Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), Cohen hinted at another investigation involving Trump. And he said it involved Trump allegedly breaking the law.
“Is there any other wrongdoing or illegal act that you are aware of regarding Donald Trump that we haven’t yet discussed today?” Krishnamoorthi asked.
Cohen responded: “Yes, and again, those are part of the investigation that’s currently being looked at by the Southern District of New York.”
This would seem to be separate from the campaign finance violations to which Cohen has pleaded guilty (and in which he implicated Trump) and which had already been chewed over in the hearing. It also would not seem to be the SDNY’s probing of the Trump inaugural committee, which had also been broached. And it would be separate from anything having to do with the Mueller investigation, which is not being handled by the SDNY.
The most tantalizing prospect is that it might have something to do with the Trump Organization, but we have no idea.
The ‘catch and kill’ racket run by the National Enquirer owner goes much deeper than thought
In December, the publisher of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc (AMI), admitted to paying a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, $150,000 in hush money. In a so-called “catch and kill” deal, she agreed to keep silent about her alleged sexual affair with Trump while AMI agreed to suppress the story so that it remained secret.
Cohen’s testimony suggested that the practice of “catch and kill” at AMI both long preceded his arrival as Trump’s lawyer in 2007 – they went back at least 12 years he said – and went much wider than the McDougal affair. Under questioning by Jackie Speier, Democrat from California, he revealed that the media group frequently engaged in suppressing stories as a favor to Trump, a personal friend of AMI’s CEO, David Pecker.
AMI had tried to “catch and kill” a story that was circulating that Trump had been caught on tape hitting his wife Melania in an elevator. The story, Cohen said, was not true, but the National Enquirer’s owners had nonetheless checked it out with the intention of squashing it.
The company had also pursued “catch and kill” with a story over a Trump love child. That rumor was also untrue, to Cohen’s knowledge, but AMI had even so paid $15,000 to prevent it from becoming public.
Two questionable claims
There were two exchanges in which Cohen seemed to contradict the public record, and where he might have to explain how his statements are consistent with the facts.
He was asked on multiple occasions whether he had sought to work in the White House, and he denied it. “I did not want to go the White House,” he claimed. This is at odds with reporting, including by The Washington Post and the New York Times, indicating that Cohen had sought jobs at the White House but failed to land any. The Post reported that he had been in the mix for White House counsel and had even promoted himself as a possible chief of staff.
Cohen seemed to acknowledge at another point that this had at least been run up the flagpole and that it was decided that he would be forfeiting his attorney-client privilege with Trump. “I brought a lawyer in who produced a memo as to why I should not go in because there would be no attorney-client privilege,” he said. “And in order to handle some of the matters that I talked about in my opening, that it would be best suited for me not to go in.”
Another discrepancy involves Prague. He has denied the claim, and here he did so again, this time under oath. But he went even further, saying, “I’ve never been to Prague. I’ve never been to the Czech Republic.”
Except he told Mother Jones’s David Corn in 2016, “I haven’t been to Prague in 14 years. I was in Prague for one afternoon 14 years ago.” And he told the Wall Street Journal he was in Prague in 2001, so around the same time. Did he mean he was only there briefly? Is that the same as never having been there? Expect to hear more about this.
Ocasio-Cortez shows up the veterans
One of the sad truths about these hearings is that, even for the members who are there to elicit information (rather than grandstand), most of them aren’t very good at it. And that’s especially the case when you only have five minutes to get something out of a witness.
Enter the chamber’s much-discussed youngest new member, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
The 29-year old’s questioning was low-key, but it actually unearthed new information. She followed up on others’ questions (a novel concept!) about topics including the ways in which Trump’s inflation of his wealth could be criminal. And she got Cohen to name three Trump Organization executives who would seem to be likely candidates for subpoenas on that point:
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?COHEN: Yes.OCASIO-CORTEZ: Who else knows the president did this?COHEN: Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari.
Simple but effective. She also got Cohen to name people who might know about a potential treasure trove of information about stories the National Enquirer’s parent company bought the rights to kill them to help Trump. And she laid a predicate for House Democrats to try to get Trump’s tax returns, by asking Cohen whether they would be helpful when it comes to him inflating his assets. Cohen said they would be, and that they could be found at the Trump Organization.
All of this could turn out to be useful for Democrats moving forward.
TRUMP NEVER WANTED TO WIN
Cohen's 20-page statement describes Trump as 'a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great. He had no desire or intention to lead this nation – only to market himself and to build his wealth and power.'
Cohen claims the president often said his White House campaign 'was going to be the 'greatest infomercial in political history.'
'He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign – for him – was always a marketing opportunity,'
"I probably threatened people for Trump over five hundred times
Cohen estimated that he threatened litigation or got into arguments on his former client’s behalf more than 500 times.
n a remarkable exchange, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) asked Cohen, “How many times did Mr. Trump ask you to threaten an individual or entity on his behalf?”
“Quite a few times,” Cohen responded. That led to a wild back-and-forth:
Cohen quickly clarified that any threats referred to litigation “or an argument with a nasty reporter that is writing an article.”
Among the evidence he brought to lawmakers to back up his claims, Cohen provided a letter he wrote in 2015 to administrators at Fordham University threatening legal action if the institution released Trump’s academic records without Trump’s consent. A Fordham University spokesperson later confirmed the university had received the letter and a follow-up phone call.
In 2015, Cohen threatened a reporter who was working on a story about Trump’s divorce settlement with his first wife, Ivana. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?” Cohen wrote in a lengthy, expletive-filled email.
But Cohen has long described himself as Trump’s fix-it guy, telling the Wall Street Journal in a January 2017 interview: “Anything that he needs to be done, any issues that concern him, I handle.”
WASHINGTON POST‘Can we go home now?’: How conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen’s explosive testimony.
“Watch live: Convicted liar Michael Cohen testifies for democrats against Trump,” the site said.
Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate project that Trump and his company pursued in the midst of the 2016 campaign.
The coverage of the hearing on Wednesday ran parallel to the reception Cohen was given from Republican lawmakers, who also questioned his credibility and the reasons he came forward. And the White House had taken a similar tack.
“This is a melodrama, it’s a soap opera, it’s a tabloid, all wrapped into one,” Fox News contributor and former congressman Jason Chaffetz said Wednesday morning. “Michael Cohen didn’t serve in the government; he wasn’t part of the executive branch; everything that they’re talking about happened before Donald Trump became the president.”
“There’s no 'there’ there,” contributor Dan Bongino said later, echoing what seems to be a common refrain after these moments from the pro-Trump crowd. “None of this is great politically. The question is, is it criminally damaging? And the answer is no.”
Fox host Tucker Carlson opened his show with a lengthy dismissal of the substance of Cohen’s testimony.
“There’s no collusion, there’s no Russian blackmail, there’s no obstruction of justice; there are none of the things that our entire media class has spent the last two years huffing and speculating wildly about,” he said, in front of an image that said “No collusion.” “If Michael Cohen had the dime he would drop it, but he doesn’t. There is nothing there. It was all a lie. Can we go home now?”
Some of the main highlights of Cohen’s testimony include detailing how deeply and personally involved Trump was in the scheme to pay off an adult-film actress who alleged that she had an affair with Trump, describing how he had long sought to protect the president, and suggesting that federal prosecutors are investigating unspecified criminal allegations involving the president that have not been made public.
February 27, 2019
February 26, 2019
February 25, 2019
The Lost History of FDR’s Court-Packing Scandal
Some Democrats are talking about adding justices to the bench. But new revelations show almost no one understands what really happened back in the 1930s.
POLITICO
February 24, 2019
Health Care and Insurance Industries Mobilize to Kill ‘Medicare for All’
Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan
Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers are intent on strangling the idea before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item.
Their tactics will show Democrats what they are up against as the party drifts to the left on health care.
Even before Democrats finish drafting bills to create a single-payer health care system, the health care and insurance industries have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill “Medicare for all,” an idea that is mocked publicly but is being greeted privately with increasing seriousness.
Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers are intent on strangling Medicare for all before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item. They have hired a top lieutenant in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to spearhead the effort. And their tactics will show Democrats what they are up against as the party drifts to the left on health care.
They also demonstrate how entrenched the Democrats’ last big health care victory, the Affordable Care Act, has become in the nation’s health care system.
The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.
“We have a structure that frankly works for most Americans,” said Charles N. Kahn III, the president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents investor-owned hospitals. “Let’s make it work for all Americans. We reject the notion that we need to turn the whole apple cart over and start all over again.”
The Democrats’ proposals could radically change the way health care providers do business and could drastically shrink the role and the revenues of insurers, depending on how a single-payer system is devised.
The hospital federation and two powerful lobbies, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, created a coalition last June to pre-empt what they saw as an alarming groundswell of interest in proposals to expand the federal role in health care.
In a daily fusillade of digital advertising, videos and Twitter posts, the coalition, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that Medicare for all will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients — arguments that echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health plan in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago.
The coalition will step up the tempo in the coming week as Democrats in the House and the Senate plan to introduce bills to establish a single-payer system.
The name of the coalition is intentionally nondescript, and its executive director, Lauren Crawford Shaver, who led Mrs. Clinton’s efforts in 2016 to put marginal states into play, is cagey when asked for details. She says only that the group is planning “a big nationwide effort” with grass-roots allies.
But its reach is undeniable. The coalition has picked up more than 25 members, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and the nation’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.
And it has already sprung into action.
When Senator Bernie Sanders, the author of the Medicare for All Act, announced on Tuesday that he was again running for president, the coalition immediately attacked him as “a leading advocate for upending our nation’s health care system in favor of starting from scratch with Medicare for all.”
Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, fired back at the insurance and drug companies. “They make tens of billions of dollars a year in profits from this dysfunctional health care system and pay their C.E.O.s outrageous compensation packages,” Mr. Sanders said. “We’ve expected their opposition all along.”
When members of Congress unveiled legislation to let people age 50 to 64 buy into Medicare, the coalition conflated it with proposals to put all Americans into Medicare.
“This is a slippery slope to government-run health care for every American,” said David Merritt, an executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobby for insurers.
The buy-in proposal for older Americans dates back to Bill Clinton’s presidency, and many of its advocates have put it forward as a moderate alternative to Medicare for all.
The chief sponsor of the House buy-in bill, Representative Brian Higgins, Democrat of New York, said: “The critics lump our bill with the bigger Medicare-for-all proposal. That’s strategic, and I think it’s deliberate.”
Mr. Higgins said the option of Medicare at age 50 would create “a countervailing force to private insurance.”
“Insurance companies are fighting it because they are afraid of the prospect of a potent new competitor that will cut into their profits,” Mr. Higgins said. “Medicare has lower administrative costs and lower executive salaries and could use its bargaining power to get better deals from hospitals and other health care providers.”
Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and the sponsor of the buy-in bill in the Senate, said she was not surprised at the criticism. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction to anything that expands Medicare,” she said.
Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan
Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers are intent on strangling the idea before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item.
Their tactics will show Democrats what they are up against as the party drifts to the left on health care.
Even before Democrats finish drafting bills to create a single-payer health care system, the health care and insurance industries have assembled a small army of lobbyists to kill “Medicare for all,” an idea that is mocked publicly but is being greeted privately with increasing seriousness.
Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers are intent on strangling Medicare for all before it advances from an aspirational slogan to a legislative agenda item. They have hired a top lieutenant in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to spearhead the effort. And their tactics will show Democrats what they are up against as the party drifts to the left on health care.
They also demonstrate how entrenched the Democrats’ last big health care victory, the Affordable Care Act, has become in the nation’s health care system.
The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.
“We have a structure that frankly works for most Americans,” said Charles N. Kahn III, the president of the Federation of American Hospitals, which represents investor-owned hospitals. “Let’s make it work for all Americans. We reject the notion that we need to turn the whole apple cart over and start all over again.”
The Democrats’ proposals could radically change the way health care providers do business and could drastically shrink the role and the revenues of insurers, depending on how a single-payer system is devised.
The hospital federation and two powerful lobbies, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, created a coalition last June to pre-empt what they saw as an alarming groundswell of interest in proposals to expand the federal role in health care.
In a daily fusillade of digital advertising, videos and Twitter posts, the coalition, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that Medicare for all will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients — arguments that echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health plan in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago.
The coalition will step up the tempo in the coming week as Democrats in the House and the Senate plan to introduce bills to establish a single-payer system.
The name of the coalition is intentionally nondescript, and its executive director, Lauren Crawford Shaver, who led Mrs. Clinton’s efforts in 2016 to put marginal states into play, is cagey when asked for details. She says only that the group is planning “a big nationwide effort” with grass-roots allies.
But its reach is undeniable. The coalition has picked up more than 25 members, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and the nation’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.
And it has already sprung into action.
When Senator Bernie Sanders, the author of the Medicare for All Act, announced on Tuesday that he was again running for president, the coalition immediately attacked him as “a leading advocate for upending our nation’s health care system in favor of starting from scratch with Medicare for all.”Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, fired back at the insurance and drug companies. “They make tens of billions of dollars a year in profits from this dysfunctional health care system and pay their C.E.O.s outrageous compensation packages,” Mr. Sanders said. “We’ve expected their opposition all along.”
When members of Congress unveiled legislation to let people age 50 to 64 buy into Medicare, the coalition conflated it with proposals to put all Americans into Medicare.
“This is a slippery slope to government-run health care for every American,” said David Merritt, an executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobby for insurers.
The buy-in proposal for older Americans dates back to Bill Clinton’s presidency, and many of its advocates have put it forward as a moderate alternative to Medicare for all.
The chief sponsor of the House buy-in bill, Representative Brian Higgins, Democrat of New York, said: “The critics lump our bill with the bigger Medicare-for-all proposal. That’s strategic, and I think it’s deliberate.”
Mr. Higgins said the option of Medicare at age 50 would create “a countervailing force to private insurance.”
“Insurance companies are fighting it because they are afraid of the prospect of a potent new competitor that will cut into their profits,” Mr. Higgins said. “Medicare has lower administrative costs and lower executive salaries and could use its bargaining power to get better deals from hospitals and other health care providers.”
Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and the sponsor of the buy-in bill in the Senate, said she was not surprised at the criticism. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction to anything that expands Medicare,” she said.
But, she said, people 50 to 64 need the option.
“We see the auto industry laying people off, encouraging people to retire early,” Ms. Stabenow said. “Many people are holding their breath until they turn 65. They put off preventive screenings, so they come into Medicare at 65 with more health problems.”
Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can increase premiums with a person’s age, and older people who do not qualify for subsidies face the highest premiums on the insurance exchange. For a 60-year-old in Charlotte, N.C., the average premium for a midlevel silver plan is more than $1,100 a month; in Phoenix, it is nearly $1,000 a month.
The coalition, like President Trump, attacks any proposals that smack of socialized medicine. But it also has a positive agenda. It wants to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in Texas, Florida and other states that have yet to do so. It wants to expand federal subsidies under the health law so insurance will be affordable to more people. And it wants to stabilize premiums by persuading states to set up reinsurance programs, using a combination of federal and state funds to help pay the largest claims.
Beyond their desire to preserve the status quo, coalition members have done well by the Affordable Care Act. Many participants, such as the American Medical Association, the pharmaceuticals lobby and the hospital association, backed the A.C.A. from the start, banking that more insured Americans would mean more customers. The hospitals saw the health law’s Medicaid expansion as a lifeline as they struggled with the uninsured working poor.
“We see the auto industry laying people off, encouraging people to retire early,” Ms. Stabenow said. “Many people are holding their breath until they turn 65. They put off preventive screenings, so they come into Medicare at 65 with more health problems.”
Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can increase premiums with a person’s age, and older people who do not qualify for subsidies face the highest premiums on the insurance exchange. For a 60-year-old in Charlotte, N.C., the average premium for a midlevel silver plan is more than $1,100 a month; in Phoenix, it is nearly $1,000 a month.
The coalition, like President Trump, attacks any proposals that smack of socialized medicine. But it also has a positive agenda. It wants to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in Texas, Florida and other states that have yet to do so. It wants to expand federal subsidies under the health law so insurance will be affordable to more people. And it wants to stabilize premiums by persuading states to set up reinsurance programs, using a combination of federal and state funds to help pay the largest claims.
Beyond their desire to preserve the status quo, coalition members have done well by the Affordable Care Act. Many participants, such as the American Medical Association, the pharmaceuticals lobby and the hospital association, backed the A.C.A. from the start, banking that more insured Americans would mean more customers. The hospitals saw the health law’s Medicaid expansion as a lifeline as they struggled with the uninsured working poor.
The need to bolster the Affordable Care Act will become even more urgent, the coalition says, if Texas and other states succeed in their lawsuit to invalidate the entire law.
Even without legislation to expand Medicare, the program is sure to grow because of the aging of the baby boom generation. The number of Medicare beneficiaries, 60 million today, is expected to top 75 million within a decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicare spending will grow under current law to $1.5 trillion in 2029, double the total projected for this year.
The more modest Medicare buy-in bill has been endorsed by Mr. Booker, Ms. Gillibrand and Ms. Harris, as well as by another Democratic candidate for president, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and a potential candidate, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
Yet another Democratic proposal, allowing states to create a Medicaid buy-in program for all their residents, regardless of income, has won support from 23 senators, including Mr. Booker, Mr. Brown, Ms. Gillibrand, Ms. Harris, Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren.
Members of the coalition had different positions in the struggle to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, but rave about it today. Ten million people have coverage through the exchanges, 14 million have gained Medicaid coverage, and in a strong economy more people have jobs that provide health insurance, they say.
NY TIMES
Even without legislation to expand Medicare, the program is sure to grow because of the aging of the baby boom generation. The number of Medicare beneficiaries, 60 million today, is expected to top 75 million within a decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicare spending will grow under current law to $1.5 trillion in 2029, double the total projected for this year.
The more modest Medicare buy-in bill has been endorsed by Mr. Booker, Ms. Gillibrand and Ms. Harris, as well as by another Democratic candidate for president, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and a potential candidate, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
Yet another Democratic proposal, allowing states to create a Medicaid buy-in program for all their residents, regardless of income, has won support from 23 senators, including Mr. Booker, Mr. Brown, Ms. Gillibrand, Ms. Harris, Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren.
Members of the coalition had different positions in the struggle to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, but rave about it today. Ten million people have coverage through the exchanges, 14 million have gained Medicaid coverage, and in a strong economy more people have jobs that provide health insurance, they say.
NY TIMES
February 23, 2019
Crime and justice in Brooklyn: DA Eric Gonzalez makes progressive changes.
HARRY SIEGEL, NY DAILY NEWS
February 22, 2019
Populist leaders linked to reduced inequality.
Populists on left and right have closed gap between rich and poor - but also eroded freedoms
GUARDIAN
February 21, 2019
In ‘The Threat,’ Andrew McCabe Issues the Latest Warning Call About Trump’s America
NY TIMES
On the back cover of his new book, “The Threat: How the F.B.I. Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” Andrew G. McCabe looks preposterously fit (he competes in triathlons). His hands are at his hips, gunslinger style. It’s as if he were a kind High Plains sheriff who had stumbled upon an intolerable rodeo of villainy.
McCabe’s prose is lean, too. (Not that he wrote this book. In his acknowledgments, he thanks “a great writing and editing team.”) The first sentence demands to be read in the voice of Jack Webb from “Dragnet”: “Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law.”
McCabe is, of course, the former deputy director of the F.B.I. who was fired last March, just 26 hours before his scheduled retirement. He was briefly the F.B.I.’s acting director, after the dismissal of James B. Comey. The president hooted on Twitter: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the F.B.I. — A great day for Democracy.”
“The Threat” is a concise yet substantive account of how the F.B.I. works, at a moment when its procedures and impartiality are under attack. It’s an unambiguous indictment of Trump’s moral behavior. “Let me state the proposition openly,” McCabe writes. “The work of the F.B.I. is being undermined by the current president.”
It’s a rapid-fire G-man memoir, moving from the author’s training in Quantico (shades of “The Silence of the Lambs”) through his experiences chasing the Russian mob, the Boston Marathon bombers and others. The book is patriotic and oddly stirring. It has moments of opacity, where you feel he is holding back at crucial moments, but it is filled with disturbingly piquant details.
McCabe made headlines after a recent “60 Minutes” interview, during which he reported that top Justice Department officials, disquieted by Trump’s firing of Comey, discussed trying to encourage cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. He also confirmed a New York Times report that the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, offered to wear a wire during his meetings with Trump.
These stories, frustratingly, were in the TV interview but are not in this book. But there are many other gleanings.
McCabe’s accounts of his baffled interactions with Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, would be high comedy if they were not so dire. They are a highlight, or a lowlight, of this book. We see a Sessions who is openly racist. “Back in the old days,” he says to the author about the F.B.I., “you all only hired Irishmen. They were drunks, but they could be trusted.”
Sessions seemed not to read his daily briefings. He had “trouble focusing” and “seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement.”
Sessions concentrated almost solely on the immigration aspect of any issue, McCabe writes, even when there was no immigration aspect. Similarly, “Sessions spent a lot of time yelling at us about the death penalty, despite the fact that the F.B.I. plays no role of any kind in whether to seek the death penalty.”
A recent cartoon in The New Yorker depicted a person feverishly covering two walls with a link chart, with names and Scotch tape and Magic Marker, of the Trump administration’s alleged misdeeds. Another person stands watching from a doorway. The caption is: “Hon, Mueller’s got this. Come to bed.”
Image
Andrew G. McCabeCreditRandall Slavin
It turns out that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, has strong opinions about charts. McCabe worked under him at the bureau. “He detested diagonal lines,” McCabe writes. “Some colors he liked. Some he didn’t.” McCabe explains the reasons for these preferences.
He writes about Mueller: “Sometimes he would take out the chart and suddenly you would see his face fall, as if to say the kind of thing that he would rarely say: Who made this piece of crap?”
Mueller is, in this book, the Mueller we have come to know: punctual, determined, the antithesis of casual, with a special loathing for people who speak when they don’t know what they are talking about.
McCabe’s memoir joins a roster of recent and alarming books by high-ranking members of the United States’ justice and intelligence communities, each pushing back sharply against the president’s war on facts and competence.
These books include Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty” as well as “The Assault on Intelligence,” by Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, and “Facts and Fears,” by James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, written with Trey Brown.
Each is its own Paul Revere ride of warning. Each is a reminder that we will be reading about Trump and his administration for the rest of our lives, for the exact opposite reason that we will also be reading about Lincoln and his for the rest of our lives.
He wades back through the big muddy of the Benghazi hearings. He writes of his fears about the increasing use of encryption.
He spends a good deal of time talking about Hillary Clinton and her email server. He argues that Comey, whom he admires, made crucial mistakes in how he handled the matter. “As a matter of policy, the F.B.I. does everything possible not to influence elections. In 2016, it seems we did.”
He recounts the attacks on his credibility, by Trump and others, after his wife, Jill, ran for Virginia’s State Senate as a Democrat in 2015. He hurt his own credibility, according to the F.B.I. inspector general, by making false statements about his contacts with the media.
The Trump-bashing texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, his F.B.I. subordinates, did something worse: They cast doubts about the impartiality of the agency. McCabe rushes past this material too swiftly. Yet if McCabe has made mistakes, his basic decency shines through in this memoir.
He adds to our understanding of how deeply Trump remains under Vladimir Putin’s sway. After a North Korean ballistic missile test, Trump told an F.B.I. briefer that reports of the test were a hoax. McCabe writes, incredulously: “He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”
About Trump, the author asks, “What more could a person do to erode the credibility of the presidency?” He watches this moral limbo dancer go lower and lower. Yet he sees the president as a symptom as much as a disease.
“When is the right time,” he asks, “to give up on people’s general ability to understand any slightly complicated statement that they don’t agree with?”
NY TIMES
On the back cover of his new book, “The Threat: How the F.B.I. Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” Andrew G. McCabe looks preposterously fit (he competes in triathlons). His hands are at his hips, gunslinger style. It’s as if he were a kind High Plains sheriff who had stumbled upon an intolerable rodeo of villainy.
McCabe’s prose is lean, too. (Not that he wrote this book. In his acknowledgments, he thanks “a great writing and editing team.”) The first sentence demands to be read in the voice of Jack Webb from “Dragnet”: “Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law.”
McCabe is, of course, the former deputy director of the F.B.I. who was fired last March, just 26 hours before his scheduled retirement. He was briefly the F.B.I.’s acting director, after the dismissal of James B. Comey. The president hooted on Twitter: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the F.B.I. — A great day for Democracy.”
“The Threat” is a concise yet substantive account of how the F.B.I. works, at a moment when its procedures and impartiality are under attack. It’s an unambiguous indictment of Trump’s moral behavior. “Let me state the proposition openly,” McCabe writes. “The work of the F.B.I. is being undermined by the current president.”
It’s a rapid-fire G-man memoir, moving from the author’s training in Quantico (shades of “The Silence of the Lambs”) through his experiences chasing the Russian mob, the Boston Marathon bombers and others. The book is patriotic and oddly stirring. It has moments of opacity, where you feel he is holding back at crucial moments, but it is filled with disturbingly piquant details.
McCabe made headlines after a recent “60 Minutes” interview, during which he reported that top Justice Department officials, disquieted by Trump’s firing of Comey, discussed trying to encourage cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. He also confirmed a New York Times report that the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, offered to wear a wire during his meetings with Trump.
These stories, frustratingly, were in the TV interview but are not in this book. But there are many other gleanings.
McCabe’s accounts of his baffled interactions with Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, would be high comedy if they were not so dire. They are a highlight, or a lowlight, of this book. We see a Sessions who is openly racist. “Back in the old days,” he says to the author about the F.B.I., “you all only hired Irishmen. They were drunks, but they could be trusted.”
Sessions seemed not to read his daily briefings. He had “trouble focusing” and “seemed to lack basic knowledge about the jurisdictions of various arms of federal law enforcement.”
Sessions concentrated almost solely on the immigration aspect of any issue, McCabe writes, even when there was no immigration aspect. Similarly, “Sessions spent a lot of time yelling at us about the death penalty, despite the fact that the F.B.I. plays no role of any kind in whether to seek the death penalty.”
A recent cartoon in The New Yorker depicted a person feverishly covering two walls with a link chart, with names and Scotch tape and Magic Marker, of the Trump administration’s alleged misdeeds. Another person stands watching from a doorway. The caption is: “Hon, Mueller’s got this. Come to bed.”
Image
Andrew G. McCabeCreditRandall SlavinIt turns out that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, has strong opinions about charts. McCabe worked under him at the bureau. “He detested diagonal lines,” McCabe writes. “Some colors he liked. Some he didn’t.” McCabe explains the reasons for these preferences.
He writes about Mueller: “Sometimes he would take out the chart and suddenly you would see his face fall, as if to say the kind of thing that he would rarely say: Who made this piece of crap?”
Mueller is, in this book, the Mueller we have come to know: punctual, determined, the antithesis of casual, with a special loathing for people who speak when they don’t know what they are talking about.
McCabe’s memoir joins a roster of recent and alarming books by high-ranking members of the United States’ justice and intelligence communities, each pushing back sharply against the president’s war on facts and competence.
These books include Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty” as well as “The Assault on Intelligence,” by Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, and “Facts and Fears,” by James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, written with Trey Brown.
Each is its own Paul Revere ride of warning. Each is a reminder that we will be reading about Trump and his administration for the rest of our lives, for the exact opposite reason that we will also be reading about Lincoln and his for the rest of our lives.
He wades back through the big muddy of the Benghazi hearings. He writes of his fears about the increasing use of encryption.
He spends a good deal of time talking about Hillary Clinton and her email server. He argues that Comey, whom he admires, made crucial mistakes in how he handled the matter. “As a matter of policy, the F.B.I. does everything possible not to influence elections. In 2016, it seems we did.”
He recounts the attacks on his credibility, by Trump and others, after his wife, Jill, ran for Virginia’s State Senate as a Democrat in 2015. He hurt his own credibility, according to the F.B.I. inspector general, by making false statements about his contacts with the media.
The Trump-bashing texts between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, his F.B.I. subordinates, did something worse: They cast doubts about the impartiality of the agency. McCabe rushes past this material too swiftly. Yet if McCabe has made mistakes, his basic decency shines through in this memoir.
He adds to our understanding of how deeply Trump remains under Vladimir Putin’s sway. After a North Korean ballistic missile test, Trump told an F.B.I. briefer that reports of the test were a hoax. McCabe writes, incredulously: “He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”
About Trump, the author asks, “What more could a person do to erode the credibility of the presidency?” He watches this moral limbo dancer go lower and lower. Yet he sees the president as a symptom as much as a disease.
“When is the right time,” he asks, “to give up on people’s general ability to understand any slightly complicated statement that they don’t agree with?”
February 20, 2019
On Health Care, 2020 Democrats Find Their First Real Fault Lines
A Los Angeles rally supporting Medicare for all. Eighty-one percent of Democrats approve of the idea, according to a recent poll.CreditRonen Tivony/NurPhoto, via Getty Images
NY TIMES
The debate unfolded over a period of days, on multiple televised stages in different states. There were no direct clashes between the candidates, no traces of personal animus — but a debate it was, the first vivid disputation over policy in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
The subject, perhaps predictably, was health care. At issue was just how drastically to transform the American system, and how comprehensive the role of government should be.
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In one camp were a pair of blunt-speaking Midwesterners, Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sherrod Brown of Ohio — both beloved by many liberals, yet both dismissive of fellow Democrats’ promises to create a vast new apparatus of government-backed health care. They endorsed incremental policy changes, like lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare.On the other side was the party’s most uncompromising economic populist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist who promised nothing short of a revolution in health care with his proposal for “Medicare for all.” He held up Canada and Western Europe as working models for the United States.
“If our friends in Scandinavia can provide quality health care to all of their people as a right, for far less than we spend, you tell me why we can’t do it,” Mr. Sanders said in a CBS interview, broadcast on Tuesday morning after he declared his candidacy for president.
The political and policy fault lines were familiar ones, but the scale and clarity of the disagreement was new to the 2020 presidential primary, an affair that has thus far unfolded as a contest of splashy campaign rollouts, forceful personalities and overlapping policy wish lists. While the party’s most prominent candidates have differed in their rhetoric and most distinctive legislative proposals — Senator Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, or Senator Kamala Harris’s middle-class tax cut — at this early stage they have declined to engage the submerged philosophical rifts between them.
The political and policy fault lines were familiar ones, but the scale and clarity of the disagreement was new to the 2020 presidential primary, an affair that has thus far unfolded as a contest of splashy campaign rollouts, forceful personalities and overlapping policy wish lists. While the party’s most prominent candidates have differed in their rhetoric and most distinctive legislative proposals — Senator Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, or Senator Kamala Harris’s middle-class tax cut — at this early stage they have declined to engage the submerged philosophical rifts between them.
Yet the exchanges over health care hinted that those ideological divisions may not stay buried for long: As the Democratic primary field develops and grows, the party is headed for a fuller public conversation about the role of government and the scale of their own ambitions.
Even before Mr. Sanders entered the race, other candidates drew unsubtle lines separating themselves from his brand of politics: Ms. Warren has branded herself a proud capitalist, and Ms. Harris said emphatically on Monday, “I am not a democratic socialist.”
But the debate over health care may be unique in its potency. It mirrors a larger struggle among Democrats over how daring their message ought to be, and whether promising to rapidly expand social-welfare programs is the best way to defeat President Trump.
Polls show that Democratic ideas for expanding government health care are popular, but the key details of a single-payer system can make many voters uneasy.
Jared Bernstein, a liberal economist who served in the Obama administration, said the distinctions between Democratic candidates had less to do with where they want to take the country than with how — and how quickly — they aim to get there. Their core priorities were largely identical, Mr. Bernstein said.
“The candidates who are trying to carve out more moderate positions are essentially saying, ‘I think we get from where we are to where we need to go through incremental steps.’ The others are saying, ‘No, we’re into giant steps,’”
That Mr. Sanders would be a champion of giant steps is no surprise. His insurgent campaign in 2016 exploded the bounds of traditional debate in Democratic politics and thrust once-remote ideas — like European-style health care and free tuition at public colleges — to the center of debate on the left. He has shown every sign so far of approaching 2020 in a similar spirit, and describes other proposed policy solutions as inadequate half measures. He cast all impediments as the products of a corrupt political system that could be overcome through a mass mobilization of the popular will.
[Read about Bernie Sanders’s entrance into the 2020 race, and where he stands on the issues.]
Invoking the watchword of his 2016 candidacy, Mr. Sanders said it was time to “complete that revolution” by enacting his health care and education policies. To him and his supporters, it is an article of faith that Democrats lost the 2016 election partly because Hillary Clinton failed to offer a vision of economic justice that might have captured some of the indignant energy of Mr. Trump’s campaign.
While throngs of Democrats have endorsed “Medicare for all” as a campaign slogan, Mr. Sanders has been nearly alone among the presidential candidates in demanding an immediate-term, full-blown version of the idea. Most of his leading rivals, like Ms. Warren and Senator Cory Booker, have backed the concept as an eventual goal as they pursue more pragmatic alternatives in the near term. (Ms. Harris endorsed eliminating private health insurance in a CNN town hall, but has also stressed her support for more modest ways of expanding government-backed care.)Mr. Brown and Ms. Klobuchar stand out for their willingness to say “no.”
Both have long been skeptics of single-payer health care, viewing it as impractical and disruptive. They are both closely attuned to the sensibilities of the moderate Midwest, a region that delivered the presidency to Mr. Trump and that Democrats are determined to recapture in 2020.
Mr. Brown, who has been visiting early primary states but has not decided whether to run for president, kicked off the long-distance debate over the weekend, arguing on CNN that pushing for single-payer would be a mistake.
“I want to help people now, and helping people now is building on the Affordable Care Act,” said Mr. Brown, a liberal populist whose diagnosis of the country’s economic problems resembles Mr. Sanders’s in important ways.
Even before Mr. Sanders entered the race, other candidates drew unsubtle lines separating themselves from his brand of politics: Ms. Warren has branded herself a proud capitalist, and Ms. Harris said emphatically on Monday, “I am not a democratic socialist.”
But the debate over health care may be unique in its potency. It mirrors a larger struggle among Democrats over how daring their message ought to be, and whether promising to rapidly expand social-welfare programs is the best way to defeat President Trump.
Polls show that Democratic ideas for expanding government health care are popular, but the key details of a single-payer system can make many voters uneasy.
Jared Bernstein, a liberal economist who served in the Obama administration, said the distinctions between Democratic candidates had less to do with where they want to take the country than with how — and how quickly — they aim to get there. Their core priorities were largely identical, Mr. Bernstein said.
“The candidates who are trying to carve out more moderate positions are essentially saying, ‘I think we get from where we are to where we need to go through incremental steps.’ The others are saying, ‘No, we’re into giant steps,’”
That Mr. Sanders would be a champion of giant steps is no surprise. His insurgent campaign in 2016 exploded the bounds of traditional debate in Democratic politics and thrust once-remote ideas — like European-style health care and free tuition at public colleges — to the center of debate on the left. He has shown every sign so far of approaching 2020 in a similar spirit, and describes other proposed policy solutions as inadequate half measures. He cast all impediments as the products of a corrupt political system that could be overcome through a mass mobilization of the popular will.
[Read about Bernie Sanders’s entrance into the 2020 race, and where he stands on the issues.]
Invoking the watchword of his 2016 candidacy, Mr. Sanders said it was time to “complete that revolution” by enacting his health care and education policies. To him and his supporters, it is an article of faith that Democrats lost the 2016 election partly because Hillary Clinton failed to offer a vision of economic justice that might have captured some of the indignant energy of Mr. Trump’s campaign.
While throngs of Democrats have endorsed “Medicare for all” as a campaign slogan, Mr. Sanders has been nearly alone among the presidential candidates in demanding an immediate-term, full-blown version of the idea. Most of his leading rivals, like Ms. Warren and Senator Cory Booker, have backed the concept as an eventual goal as they pursue more pragmatic alternatives in the near term. (Ms. Harris endorsed eliminating private health insurance in a CNN town hall, but has also stressed her support for more modest ways of expanding government-backed care.)Mr. Brown and Ms. Klobuchar stand out for their willingness to say “no.”
Both have long been skeptics of single-payer health care, viewing it as impractical and disruptive. They are both closely attuned to the sensibilities of the moderate Midwest, a region that delivered the presidency to Mr. Trump and that Democrats are determined to recapture in 2020.
Mr. Brown, who has been visiting early primary states but has not decided whether to run for president, kicked off the long-distance debate over the weekend, arguing on CNN that pushing for single-payer would be a mistake.“I want to help people now, and helping people now is building on the Affordable Care Act,” said Mr. Brown, a liberal populist whose diagnosis of the country’s economic problems resembles Mr. Sanders’s in important ways.
February 19, 2019
Elizabeth Warren Proposes Universal Child Care.
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan proposes a network of child care centers that would be free to families earning less than two times the federal poverty level.Travis Dove for The New York Times
NY TIMES
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts introduced a universal child care proposal on Tuesday, the latest in a series of ambitious policy ideas from Democratic presidential candidates.
Ms. Warren’s plan, the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act, would create a network of government-funded care centers based partly on the existing Head Start network, with employees paid comparably to public-school teachers. Families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level would be able to send their children to these centers for free. Families earning more than that would be charged on a sliding scale, up to a maximum of 7 percent of their income.
The plan would be funded by Ms. Warren’s proposed wealth tax on households with more than $50 million in assets, her campaign said.
“The guarantee is about what each of our children is entitled to,” Ms. Warren said at a campaign rally in Los Angeles on Monday, announcing her plans to introduce the bill. “Not just the children of the wealthy, not just the children of the well-connected, but every one of our children is entitled to good child care.”
Ms. Warren framed the issue broadly: not just as a matter of access to education, but as a means to promote economic growth and address gender inequality in the work force. The cost of child care has “weighed heavily on female labor force participation,” because some women who can’t afford it are unable to work outside the home as a result. In a post on Medium on Tuesday, Ms. Warren repeated a personal story she has often told before: that if it hadn’t been for her Aunt Bee, who helped care for her children, she would have had to quit her job as a law school instructor.
February 18, 2019
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