We’ll jump right in this morning with some overviews from the first night of the second Democratic debate.
Ezra Klein over at Vox thinks that South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg gave the most important answer of the evening.
So far, I’ve found Buttigieg’s campaign underwhelming on policy. But where he’s clearly leading the field is his emphasis on structural reform. Buttigieg isn’t the only candidate with good ideas on this score — Elizabeth Warren and Jay Inslee have been strong on this too — but he’s the only candidate who consistently prioritizes the issue.
The reality is Democrats are debating ever more ambitious policy in a political system ever less capable of passing ambitious policy — and ever more stacked against their policies, in particular. Their geographic disadvantage in Congress is only getting worse, Republicans control the White House and the Senate despite receiving fewer votes for either, and an activist conservative Supreme Court just gutted public sector unions and greenlit partisan gerrymandering.
If CNN’s Daniel Dale were solely fact-checking Democrats for a living, he’d be out of a job.
It seems that Marianne Williamson had an...interesting night and given that the current Occupant has probably caused a severe uptick in psychological and mental stress, is it all that surprising that Williamson seems to be holding her own? Here’s Katherine Miller at Buzzfeed.
Williamson has sold a lot of metaphysical books and lectures that, while occasionally drifting into the "everything is an illusion" zone of New Age, basically offer solid and old fashioned advice: love other people, love something higher than yourself, believe in the egalitarian dignity of your own life. When Oprah started ruminating on spirituality 25 years ago, she brought Williamson on her show. And Williamson is part of that wider wellness world — up to and including Williamson's view that, for example, antidepressants are overprescribed (which earned her some real criticism last week, about how that view can stigmatize seeking real help) and other hazy aspects of the wellness approach to health.
But we know that, or maybe suspect that going in.
So it becomes this balance between fun and emotion, which is why the room goes silent and is rapt when Williamson speaks. She's not Donald Trump in 2016 — by now he was leading the polls. It's FUN, for once. Like can't we have just a couple minutes that are fun and a little charming and weird?
Yes, Ms. Williamson has all sorts of problematic positions past and present and yes she is a bit of a grifter. But do consider that Ms. Williamson might be fulfilling a need that many of us have at this point in the Trump presidency. And do consider that the Democratic presidential nominee will need to be able to...allieveate those psychological and mental stressors as best as he or she can. Policy and only policy all of the time won’t cut it.
Policy...We have POLICY!!
After months of confusing statements on the campaign trail, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) has finally released her proposal to offer comprehensive, universal health-care coverage under the Medicare-for-all brand.
Harris’s rollout Monday was met with swift criticism from both the Biden camp, which called it “A Bernie Sanders-lite Medicare for All,” and the Sanders camp, which insists Harris “can’t call [her] plan Medicare for All.”
In saying this, the Sanders campaign is effectively trying to lay a copyright claim to Medicare-for-all, as if it, and only it, can define what it means. The reality is far less clear — and depending on your perspective, it could be Harris’s proposal that is more justified in claiming the Medicare-for-all branding.
There might be a diary or two somewhere here at DK where Harris’s health care proposal is being debated.
Elie Mystal at Above the Law.com has looked at Vice President Joe Biden’s criminal justice proposals and is not impressed.
Most of the media attention around Biden’s plan has focused on his weaksauce approach to marijuana legalization. Biden wants to decriminalize marijuana use at the federal level, and leave it to the states to decide whether to legalize it. Other Democratic candidates have pushed for the legalization of marijuana, and the release of people imprisoned for its use. Biden’s approach here is not bold, but it’s not all that different from the plan Senator Kamala Harris has introduced, along with Representative Jerry Nadler, in Congress.
I juxtaposed those two on purpose, not just because Harris has also shifted her position on marijuana laws and not because Harris is Biden-kryptonite. It’s because there’s really no centrist, good-government, restrained plan that Biden has that Harris doesn’t also have, only Harris has it in more detail. If you like Biden, you should LOVE Kamala Harris, and that fact that you don’t is, you know, something you should probably work on.
***
It is in dealing with racist, murderous cops where Biden’s plan exposes itself as completely useless. Biden proposes a $20 billion grant program to states that reduce incarceration and crime rates. But the only thing in his plan that can be reasonably read to address police brutality is a paltry $300 million he offers to fully fund the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. Biden says COPS was never fully funded, and he’s right. But COPS is literally a program created in the (wait for it) 1994 crime bill that is wholly inadequate to deal with the problems of racially biased police brutality.
If you’d like, you can use German Lopez’s overview of Biden’s criminal justice policy proposals over at Vox...but really, it’s not saying aanything too different from Mystal is saying...it does say it kindly.
Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect loves...and I mean loves Elizabeth Warren’s trade policy.
Just when you think Elizabeth Warren can’t do it again, she does it again. Trade has been a bewildering issue for Democrats. Corporate Democrats have bought the view that anything that dismantles “barriers” is good economics, even if the result undermines the very brand of managed capitalism that has been the Democrats’ signature since FDR. Labor Democrats have been branded “protectionists,” even when they are resisting the overt protectionism of other nations such as China.
Most of the economics profession, meanwhile, teaches the theory of comparative advantage as if the world hadn’t changed since Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As Paul Krugman’s early work pointed out, advantage is no longer a matter of climate and natural characteristics—advantage can be created by government policies.
And the press, for the most part, still embraces the simpleminded frame that free traders are good and “protectionists” are bad, and that progressives who resist the corporate use of trade as all-purpose deregulation are no different from Trump.
as for Paul Krugman himself...there’s this Twitter thread
Clarence Page at the Chicago Tribune on Trump’s weekend tweets about Rep. Elijah Cummings and Baltimore.
But, let’s face it. Trump’s attacks have virtually nothing to do with his concern for living conditions in Baltimore compared with what they have to do with punishing Cummings. As chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he pressed a tough case against Trump’s border policy last week and also is conducting multiple investigations of the president.
And attacking Cummings also provides red meat for Trump’s base during his never-ending reelection campaign.
As Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot suggested when asked by reporters whether Trump was racist: Don’t overthink it.
But everyone also should avoid being distracted by the race question from “what people actually care about and what they need,” she said. “What they need is leadership.”
Indeed, actions speak louder than labels. Office-seekers in our democracy have a choice. They can try to win by dividing people along lines of race and other differences or they can act to bring people together by emphasizing what we share in common.
I hear what Mr. Page is saying but I do have to agree with Jamil Smith at Rolling Stone that Trump’s racism should not be an occasion for Democrats to strike up chorsues of kumbaya...or nothing at all.
I often learn about President Trump doing or saying something bigoted before I’ve had a chance shake the cobwebs loose, as my father’s expression goes. Thanks to my phone alerts and my cursed curiosity about the news, I have to swallow some newly reported cruelty before I have brushed my teeth or have had a glass of water. What is old is often still old, often a regurgitated version of some former divisive strategy Trump has employed as far back as his old housing discrimination and Central Park Five ad days. He rarely changes what has worked since the 1970s, since it seems to resonate both with Republican Party sycophants and his entranced supporters. Racism doesn’t really have seasons.
It may be easy for some to digest, but not for me. There is no getting used to this when you are in the crosshairs of this policy, when people who look like you sit patronized by a president who tells them all the time about how he got a few more of us some jobs and few more of us out of jail, then acts as though we should be satisfied with that. “What do we have to lose?” he asks, while we sit in this systematically racist America. “Why do we hate America?” he wonders aloud, as we criticize his administration for working consciously to exacerbate inequities in everything from health care to education to housing. “Why don’t we want safety and security?” Trump proclaims, as we see his government treat migrants (the ones who survive) like literal vermin while comparing our communities to “infestations.” Again, there is no getting used to this.
Which reminds me of Michael Calderone’s piece on being a black journalist in the age of Trump over at Politico.
The Associated Press earlier this year shifted a national race and ethnicity reporter to its 2020 election team, an acknowledgment that race has become a defining element of President Donald Trump’s campaigns.
That beat, assigned to reporter Errin Haines Whack, is fairly unusual among major news organizations. And media outlets’ approach to covering race is frustrating some prominent journalists of color at a time when Trump’s language — as he recently called a civil rights leader a “con man” and referring to a predominantly black district, which includes much of Baltimore, as a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” this week — is threatening to define the campaign.
Some journalists of color are growing increasingly vocal in their push for media outlets to take race head-on in political coverage — and they are publicly highlighting the ways they say Trump’s words and the semantic debates over whether to call them “racist” weigh on them personally.
Belen Fernandez reports at AlJazeera that the Trump Admnistration is a threat to legal safe abortion not only in the United States but worldwide.
The current "pro-life" regime of United States President Donald Trump, of course, is no fan of such programmes. But it is all about controllinghuman populations and behaviour worldwide in accordance with unhinged religio-imperialist visions - many of them especially damaging to the poor.
In 2017, for example, the Trump administration dramatically discontinued financial support for that diabolically radical outfit known as the United Nations Population Fund, which is allegedly attempting to overthrow civilisation by promoting abortion and other evils.
That same year hosted the unveiling of the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance" policy, which cuts US government funding to foreign NGOs considered to be involved in abortion work.
A vastly more punishing version of the so-called "global gag rule" that has been regularly implemented by Republican presidents since 1984, the policy now also applies to organisations that work across a range of health issues. In short, this means that an NGOdealing with HIV/Aids, cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, gender-based violence, and so on cannot receive US funds for these activities if it also chooses to inform patients about the existence of abortion as a possible method of family planning.
Noah Smith at Bloomberg.com upends conservative conventional wisdom about American poverty by taking a look at another country
Many conservatives in the U.S. believe that poverty is mainly a result of bad personal decisions. African-Americans are especially likely to be blamed for their own poverty -- an attitude that some political scientists call racial resentment. Stereotypes of so-called welfare queens have been a staple of Republican messaging for decades. But conservatives also attribute similar failings to poor white people. In a memorable 2016 article, National Review writer Kevin Williamson blamed divorce and substance abuse for the despair of the white working class:
[The white working class] failed themselves…Take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy [and] you will come to an awful realization…The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.
According to this perspective, if people were just to work hard, avoid drugs, alcohol and violence, and stop having children out of wedlock, poverty would be rare.
But there is at least one rich country where people follow all of these prescriptions -- where they work hard, avoid risky, self-destructive behavior and make wise life choices. That country is Japan. And it still has plenty of poverty.
Violence is exceedingly rare in Japan. The murder rate is so small as to barely register...
Jacob Rees-Mogg must be in seventh heaven right now. His obsession with anachronistic rules and rituals finally has a professional justification. Boris Johnson has made him leader of the House of Commons, a British institution more steeped in arcane ritual than almost any other. He even has a bonus title, Lord President of the Council, complete, no doubt, with complicated modes of address. I’m sure he’s checked the entry in Debrett’s and will be correcting anyone who gets it wrong.
Because he’s a stickler for that kind of thing: it emerged at the end of last week that he has a list of banned words and style rules that he asks members of staff to apply in written communication. (How he polices oral communication is unknown. One thing I would say: it’s probably best to avoid asking him where the toilet is.)
We all have style preferences, and there’s nothing wrong with expressing them – as long as you don’t claim they’re the only “correct” way of doing things. But the words and phrases Rees-Mogg has singled out are revealing, if not exactly surprising.
Yes, I had to lookup Burke’s Peerage.
But really...leaving aside the fact that Mr. Rees-Moog seems to me to be generally loathsome (in a poltical sense) and the fact that language is always protean and changing but...understand that sometimes old skool is best, what do you think of Mr. Rees-Moog “rules?”
Are there any old grammar rules that you would re-adopt?
Thank you for reading!