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Saturday, February 29, 2020

Social Security cuts: Trump has more cruel plans for his 'forgotten people' in rural America

 
Impeached President Donald Trump swore in a recent tweet that "We will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget." He reiterated Monday in a meeting with Republican governors: "We’re not touching Medicare.
[…] We're not touching Social Security." Which is, of course, a lie. 

A disproportionate number of those Republican governors represent the people that will be disproportionately hit by Trump's proposed cuts to the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program. That's rural people predominantly living in red states who would be subjected to onerous, often insurmountable barriers to maintaining the modest SSDI payments they get every month.

The average payment is about $1,200 for people who are not yet of retirement age but can no longer work because of a mental or physical impairment. The Social Security Administration conducts reviews of all beneficiaries on the basis of three categories: the people who are only temporarily disabled, people who might improve, and people who are not expected to improve. The reviews ensure that people are still qualified to receive help and require doctors visits, documentation, and no small amount of hassle. Some reviews are as frequent as twice a year, and some are once every seven years.

The administration is proposing to add a new classification of "Medical Improvement Likely," and is aiming it at older workers who are not longer able to work in their fields, or about 1 million people. Many of them can work part-time or in odd jobs. Most, however continue to live below the poverty line, even with SSDI help.

As with the Medicaid and food stamp work requirements, the Trump administration wants to create more hoops for these people to jump through. But for rural people the process is even harder because they have to work with a Social Security office both in the review process and in the event that they're denied ongoing payments.

More than 2 million people with SSDI live in counties that don't have Social Security offices, and more than 1 million of them are in rural counties where getting transportation to go to the closest SSA office is difficult. This problem is compounded by how hard disabled people in rural communities have had it since the Great Recession. Fewer disabled people in rural areas are employed now than were in 2008, even though the unemployment rate is low nationwide.

It's a population that's hit disproportionately hard by disabilities—rural dwellers are 5 percentage points likelier to become disabled during their working lives and are more likely to become disabled at a younger age than people in urban areas.

So once again, the Trump administration is taking action that will disproportionately hurt his base, or the "forgotten men and women" he supposedly championed in his run for office. They haven't been forgotten by Trump—not at all. They're among his favorite targets.

Friday, February 28, 2020

Trump not only handed off coronavirus epidemic to Pence—he lied about the threat to Americans





US President Donald Trump (L) looks on as US Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a news conference on the COVID-19 outbreak at the White House on February 26, 2020. - US President Donald Trump on Wednesday defended his administration's response to the novel coronavirus, lashing the media for spreading panic as he conducts an evening news conference on the epidemic. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

One Wednesday evening, Donald Trump held a press conference to announce how the United States would address the looming threat of the 2019 novel coronavirus.

Trump’s primary action was to place Mike Pence—a man who not only directly intervened to help make an HIV epidemic in Indiana worse, but also wrote columns expressing doubt about the link between cigarettes and cancer—in charge of the epidemic. Why Pence? According to Trump, people with actual experience in the area were too busy. So apparently Pence will handle what could be the most pressing issue facing the nation because he has some free time.

For nearly an hour, Trump rambled in a terrifyingly incoherent appearance that sent the stock markets into an after-hours nosedive. Again and again, Donald Trump insisted that there were 15 cases of COVID-19 in the United States, listing off the outcome of some of the first cases to be diagnosed, and ignoring the fact that the actual number is 60. And that 60 includes the first case in the United States to have no known contact with someone who traveled to a region where the infection is rampant. While Trump was waving off the crisis as something that would never happen, it gave every appearance of already being in the room.

This is an accurate transcript of a small portion of Trump’s press event. See if you can discover the true number of coronavirus cases in the United States from listening to what he told the public.
Uh, as most of you know, uh, the ... the level that we've had in our country is very low and those people are getting better, or we think that in almost all cases they're better or getting better. We have a total of 15.
We took in some from Japan, you heard about that, because they were American citizens and they were in quarantine. And, uh, they're getting better too.
But we felt we had an obligation to do that, it could have been as many as 42. And uh, we found that ... we were ... it was just an obligation we felt that we had. We could have left them and that would have been very bad. Very bad, I think. American people. And ... they're recovering.
Of the 15 people, the original 15 as I call them, uh, eight of them have returned to their homes, to stay in their homes, until fully recovered.
One is in the hospital. And five have fully recovered. And one is, we think, in pretty good shape. In between hospital and going home.
So we have a total of ... but we have a total of 15 people. And, uh, they're in the process of recovering. Some having already fully recovered.
Again, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States at the time of the press event was 60. In order to try to make the number seem smaller, Trump, along with Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, continually left out not only cases that had been diagnosed on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship before being returned to the United States, but both cases from diplomatic flights and the Diamond Princess passengers who had been tested and confirmed after returning the United States. The whole “15 cases” thing appears to be an arbitrary division created simply to make the incidence sound small—in spite of reality.

And here’s something critical that seems to be getting overlooked. Those “original 15” that Trump mentioned included the case in California that appears to be the first known case of possible community spread within the United States. Here is Azar speaking on Wednesday morning, hours before Trump’s press event:

As of this morning, we still had only 14 cases of the novel coronavirus detected in the United States involved travel to or close contacts with travelers. Coming into this hearing, I was informed that we have a 15th confirmed case, the epidemiology of which we are still discerning.
That case that they were “still discerning” was the California case. As UC Davis Medical Center has made clear, that patient was transferred to it from another hospital on Feb. 19—over a week ago. It requested testing for COVID-19 at that time, but was turned down because the CDC was not looking for community-spread cases. However, after UC Davis insisted, the CDC did conduct a test on Sunday. The results of that test were confirmed on Wednesday.

Not only did Trump and Azar handle their press events by deliberately underplaying the number of cases being treated in the United States, but they were also aware that coronavirus was circulating in the population before Trump stepped behind the podium. That patient was one of the “total of 15” that Trump kept talking about. He just didn’t share that with the public.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Trump's Flailing Incompetence and Compulsive Lying Make Coronavirus Even Scarier

American officials began a complex evacuation procedure for 328 passengers aboard the Diamond Princess on Sunday night. (photo: Franck Robichon/EPA)
American officials began a complex evacuation procedure for 328 passengers aboard the Diamond Princess on Sunday night. (photo: Franck Robichon/EPA)

By Matthew Yglesias, Vox

26 February 20
America’s pandemic response capabilities have been systematically dismantled.
ate last week, the US government overruled objections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to put 14 coronavirus-infected Americans on an airplane with other healthy people.

The Trump administration swiftly leaked that the president was mad about this decision, and that nobody told him about it at the time. That could be true (or not — Trump and his team lie about things all the time). But even if it is true, it’s a confession of a stunning level of incompetence. The president is so checked out that he’s not in the loop even on critical decisions and is making excuses for himself after the fact.

Resolving interagency disagreements is his job. But Trump has never shown any real interest or aptitude for his job, something that used to loom large as an alarming aspect of his administration. That fear has faded into the background now that the US has gone years without many major domestic crises (the disasters and failed response in Puerto Rico being a big exception).

The Covid-19 outbreak, however, is a reminder that it remains a scary world and that the American government deals with a lot of important, complicated challenges that aren’t particularly ideological in nature. And we have no reason to believe the current president is up to the job. Trump not only hasn’t personally involved himself in the details of coronavirus response (apparently too busy pardoning former Celebrity Apprentice guests), he also hasn’t designated anyone to be in charge.

Infectious disease response necessarily involves balancing a range of considerations from throughout government public health agencies and critical aspects of economic and foreign policy. That’s why in fall 2014, the Obama administration appointed Ron Klain to serve as “Ebola czar” — a single official in charge of coordinating the response across the government. Trump has, so far, put nobody in charge, even though it’s already clear that because of the coronavirus’s effect on major Asian economies, the virus is going to be a bigger deal for Americans.

The Trump administration has asked Congress for $2.5 billion in emergency funding to fight the outbreak. But this is just a fig leaf. The reality is this administration keeps trying to — and at times does — slash funding for relevant government programs.

Trump keeps slashing pandemic response

In 2005, during the H1N5 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development ran a program called Predict to identify and research infectious diseases in animal populations in the developing world. Most new viruses that impact humans — apparently including the one causing the Covid-19 disease — emerge through this route, so investing in early research is the kind of thing that, at modest ongoing cost, served to reduce the likelihood of rare but catastrophic events.

The program was initiated under George W. Bush and continued through Barack Obama’s eight years in office; then, last fall the Trump administration shut it down.

That’s part of a broader pattern of actual and potential Trump efforts to shut down America’s ability to respond to pandemic disease.


As it happens, the Covid-19 problem arose from China, rather than from Africa, where the programs Trump shut down were working. But now that containment in China seems to have failed, the next big global risk is that the virus will spread to countries that have weaker public health infrastructure, from which it will spread uncontrollably — exactly the sort of countries where Trump has scaled back assistance.

Meanwhile, to the extent Trump has done anything in the midst of the crisis, his predominant focus seems to have been on reassuring financial markets, rather than on addressing the public health issue.

Trump picked a strange time to turn globalist

Austria, which borders northern Italy, is looking at reimposing border controls in light of the Covid-19 outbreak in several towns near Milan. Israel has taken action to bar all foreign nationals who have been to South Korea and Japan in the past 14 days from entering the country — adding to an existing ban on visitors from China.

The Israeli response, so far, is a bit of an outlier and perhaps has gone too far.

Still, it’s a bit strange that Donald Trump of all people has done so little to restrict travel at this point — you can book a direct flight from Beijing to Los Angeles tomorrow for $680 while Trump is busy expanding his anti-Muslim travel ban and crippling refugee resettlement based on made-up terrorism concerns.

Trump’s only public statements about this growing crisis are a weeks-old series of tweets in which he expressed confidence in Chinese leadership and said the problem would go away when the weather gets warmer. (Scientists say that may not be true.)

Now that the stock market is potentially crashing on coronavirus fears, maybe Trump will try to rouse himself to do something rather than underreacting for the sake of the Dow. But the biggest problem with Trump is it’s far from clear he really can pull himself together to do the job.

Trump is busy corrupting the American government

Over the past week, when the breakdown of some containment measures became known, Trump was busy replacing his director of national intelligence with an unqualified political hack who will also simultaneously serve as ambassador to Germany. It’s bad to have unqualified people in key roles, but the reason Trump did it is worse — Richard Grenell was installed after his predecessor Joseph Maguire got fired for briefing Congress about intelligence regarding Russian activities and the 2020 presidential election.

Trump felt the contents of Maguire’s briefing were politically embarrassing to him, and therefore wanted the information withheld.

That’s typical of Trump’s approach to governance — he sees the entire executive branch as essentially his personal staff, whose only obligation is to advance his personal interests.

But in a crisis, it can be good for the country for embarrassing information to come to light if that’s what it takes to provoke a stronger and more accurate response.

Trump, however, has clearly signaled he does not think this is the right way to do things. Consequently, in the middle of the crisis, Trump’s national security adviser went on Sunday shows to smear Sen. Bernie Sanders, rather than provide credible information about the international situation to the public.

Trump is also busy having his Customs and Border Protection officials wield airport security as a tactical weapon against the population of New York when these are the people who we’ll need to screen travelers.

More broadly, Trump has a well-deserved reputation for dishonesty and has acted over the years to clean house of any officials (James Mattis, Dan Coats, etc.) who develop a reputation for contradicting him. It’s almost impossible to know how this administration could convey accurate and credible information to Americans in a crisis even if it wanted to.

The country has thus far muddled through with Trump at the helm better than Americans had any right to hope, but the emergence of the occasional crisis is a constant in government. And with the world on the brink of a potential disaster, it’s terrifying to contemplate the reality that the man in charge just isn’t up to the job.

Trump didn't just hand off the coronavirus epidemic to Pence—he lied about the threat to Americans
 
On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump held a press conference to announce how the United States would address the looming threat of the 2019 novel coronavirus.

Trump’s primary action was to place Mike Pence—a man who not only directly intervened to help make an HIV epidemic in Indiana worse, but also wrote columns expressing doubt about the link between cigarettes and cancer—in charge of the epidemic. Why Pence? According to Trump, people with actual experience in the area were too busy. So apparently Pence will handle what could be the most pressing issue facing the nation because he has some free time.

For nearly an hour, Trump rambled in a terrifyingly incoherent appearance that sent the stock markets into an after-hours nosedive. Again and again, Donald Trump insisted that there were 15 cases of COVID-19 in the United States, listing off the outcome of some of the first cases to be diagnosed, and ignoring the fact that the actual number is 60. And that 60 includes the first case in the United States to have no known contact with someone who traveled to a region where the infection is rampant. While Trump was waving off the crisis as something that would never happen, it gave every appearance of already being in the room.

This is an accurate transcript of a small portion of Trump’s press event. See if you can discover the true number of coronavirus cases in the United States from listening to what he told the public.
Uh, as most of you know, uh, the ... the level that we've had in our country is very low and those people are getting better, or we think that in almost all cases they're better or getting better. We have a total of 15. We took in some from Japan, you heard about that, because they were American citizens and they were in quarantine. And, uh, they're getting better too.
But we felt we had an obligation to do that, it could have been as many as 42. And uh, we found that ... we were ... it was just an obligation we felt that we had. We could have left them and that would have been very bad. Very bad, I think. American people. And ... they're recovering.
Of the 15 people, the original 15 as I call them, uh, eight of them have returned to their homes, to stay in their homes, until fully recovered. One is in the hospital. And five have fully recovered. And one is, we think, in pretty good shape. In between hospital and going home.
So we have a total of ... but we have a total of 15 people. And, uh, they're in the process of recovering. Some having already fully recovered.
Again, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States at the time of the press event was 60. In order to try to make the number seem smaller, Trump, along with Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, continually left out not only cases that had been diagnosed on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship before being returned to the United States, but both cases from diplomatic flights and the Diamond Princess passengers who had been tested and confirmed after returning the United States. The whole “15 cases” thing appears to be an arbitrary division created simply to make the incidence sound small—in spite of reality.

And here’s something critical that seems to be getting overlooked. Those “original 15” that Trump mentioned included the case in California that appears to be the first known case of possible community spread within the United States. Here is Azar speaking on Wednesday morning, hours before Trump’s press event: 
As of this morning, we still had only 14 cases of the novel coronavirus detected in the United States involved travel to or close contacts with travelers. Coming into this hearing, I was informed that we have a 15th confirmed case, the epidemiology of which we are still discerning.
That case that they were “still discerning” was the California case. As UC Davis Medical Center has made clear, that patient was transferred to it from another hospital on Feb. 19—over a week ago. It requested testing for COVID-19 at that time, but was turned down because the CDC was not looking for community-spread cases. However, after UC Davis insisted, the CDC did conduct a test on Sunday. The results of that test were confirmed on Wednesday.

Not only did Trump and Azar handle their press events by deliberately underplaying the number of cases being treated in the United States, but they were also aware that coronavirus was circulating in the population before Trump stepped behind the podium. That patient was one of the “total of 15” that Trump kept talking about. He just didn’t share that with the public.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Key Word in 'Democratic Socialism' Is 'Democratic'

The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. (photo: CommonWealthClub)
The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. (photo: CommonWealthClub)

By Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun Times

26 February 20
 

fter the Nevada caucuses, Bernie Sanders is now the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race.

In South Carolina, the next primary, former Vice President Joe Biden is the favorite, buoyed by his support among African American voters. But Sanders will come into the state with real momentum, having won the popular vote in each of the first three contests.

More importantly, in Nevada, Sanders revealed the breadth of his growing coalition: he led the field among men and women, among whites and Latinos, among union households and non-union households, among voters of all ages, except those over 65, among Democrats who called themselves liberals, moderates and conservatives.

Equally important, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have offered Americans a new direction, not simply another candidate. Both have called for a modern version of what Franklin D. Roosevelt called the Economic Bill of Rights: Medicare for all, tuition-free public education, universal day care, a Green New Deal to generate jobs while addressing climate change. Both would tax the wealthy and corporations to make vital public investments in the common good.

The other candidates — particularly Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg — have scoffed at these ideas as too radical, too bold, too costly, too ambitious. They offer mostly a continuation of the politics that existed before Donald Trump disrupted the country. The problem with that, of course, is that it doesn’t offer much hope for most Americans.

Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist.” Warren objects to that label and says she’s for making markets work. But this is a difference in labels, not in substance. Their agendas are remarkably similar. The direction they would set is the same.

Some already have started to frighten people about the label “democratic socialist.” Trump paints it as Venezuela or Cuba. Mike Bloomberg has called Sanders (and presumably Warren’s) views on taxing wealth “communist.” Voters are going to hear a lot more of this nonsense, if Sanders continues to build momentum or Warren catches fire.

Here’s the reality. The important word in “democratic socialism” isn’t socialism, it’s democratic. Sanders isn’t talking about making America into Cuba or Venezuela; he’s talking about extending social guarantees like those offered in most other advanced industrial states, invoking Denmark or Sweden. These countries have universal health care at lower cost, paid family leave, guaranteed paid vacations, higher minimum wages, more generous public retirement programs. They also have vibrant and competitive economies, lower inequality, less poverty, and higher life expectancies.

Sanders is seeking a popular mandate from voters to move in this direction.

When you think of democratic socialism, remember the programs that Republicans and conservatives and the corporate lobbies denounced as socialistic when they were first considered: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental and consumer protection, banking regulation to protect consumers.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which manages our nation’s civil aviation and international waters, is a state program. The Food and Drug Administration, which ensures that drugs are safe is a state program. The minimum wage, food stamps, public housing could all be considered democratic socialist programs.

Our problem has been that we have too much socialism for the rich and the powerful — subsidies for corporations, get out of jail free cards for crooked bankers, tax breaks for the rich that leaves them paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries, monopoly power for corporations that allows them to gouge customers and more.

And we have too little shared security — democratic socialism — for working people: affordable health care, a living wage, guaranteed paid vacation and family leave, universal childcare, affordable college, public mobilization to deal with the threat of climate change.

When I ran for the presidency, I didn’t use the label, although some tried to slur me as a socialist or a communist, but I don’t think the label makes any difference. The question is one of direction, not name-calling; of program, not posturing.

And on this, Dr. Martin Luther King — often smeared as a “red” or a communist — was very clear. In 1966, he confided to his staff:

“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of the slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

So, put aside the fearmongering and the red-baiting; take a look instead at the substance. There’s no question we need big structural change, as Elizabeth Warren puts it. We need a better distribution of wealth, and a greater protection of basic human rights like the right to affordable health care, as Sanders argues.

Call it capitalism with a conscience, democratic socialism, call it lemonade. It’s the substance, not the label that counts.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Trump's spiritual adviser claims she literally traveled to heaven and saw the face of God

 Paula White Cain gives convocation at Trump's presidential inauguration. 
What a coincidence that President Pussygrabber's spiritual advisor is a cute blonde.  Same odds as Hope Hicks, who is reportedly coming back for an encore, being a beautiful brunette.  You can't make this stuff up.  
Paula White, Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser, has an official White House job. That means we’re paying her to tell POTUS stuff like the following, which she recently disgorged from her Hieronymus Bosch demon’s maw at Apostle Guillermo Maldonado’s church in Miami, Florida:
“My spirit went up, and I literally went to the throne room of God. I won’t say much, but I’ll say something that’s important for me to teach you here today. So in that divine encounter, I don’t know how long I was there, I just know that kind of power is almost impossible for a natural body to contain. And as I went to the throne room of God, first I saw there was a mist that was coming off the water, and I went to the throne of God, and I didn’t see God’s face clearly, but I saw the face of God. It wasn’t a clear, like … I could see your face clearly, but I knew it was the face of God.
“And as God begin [sic], he put a mantle [on me] and it was a very distinct mantle. … There was a mantle, and I saw it very distinctly, the color was like a goldish, it was a yellowish goldish, a little bit different than your scarf, a little bit brighter than your scarf there. And then I saw the Earth for a moment, and he brought me back, and he put me in certain places, one being the White House, one being certain continents. … I didn’t come out of that really until the next morning.”
Yeah, I’ve never done bath salts, so I really don’t know if she’s lying or hallucinating, but I’m pretty confident this didn’t really happen.

First of all, I find it hard to believe that God is using the same color palette as the Dollar Tree’s scarf vendor. Super unlikely.

Secondly, she claims one of the key messages in the Bible is that people watching her should send her a month’s worth of their grocery and rent money. If she did meet God, he'd give her a kick in the ass, not a “mantle.”

And he brought her to the White House? I can only imagine the White House is like kryptonite to God these days.

So, no. Just more bullshit from a low-rent carnival barker with zero scruples.

But still — and I can’t stress this enough — she works at the White House and we pay her.

Monday, February 24, 2020

Pete Buttigieg is a top contender, so obviously high-profile Republicans are going full homophobe



(FILES) In this file photo taken on April 22, 2019, South Bend Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (L) speaks besides husband Chasten Glezman at the West Side Democratic Club during a Dyngus Day celebration event in South Bend, Indiana. - Buttigieg, the gay, liberal mayor of the small American city of South Bend, in the conservative bastion of Indiana, officially launched his presidential bid on April 14th, joining a crowded field of Democrats vying for their party's nomination in 2020. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP)        (Photo credit should read KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Pete and Chasten Buttigieg
Republicans are going to attack any Democrat who shows any strength in the presidential election. There will always be something. After a contested win in Iowa and a close second in New Hampshire, Pete Buttigieg’s moment for those attacks has arrived, and it was never a mystery what one of the Republican attacks would be. Homophobes going to homophobe. 

The first high-profile homophobe to step up to the plate was newly minted Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh. “They’re sitting there and they’re looking at Mayor Pete—a 37-year-old gay guy, mayor of South Bend, loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage. And they’re saying, okay, how’s this going to look, a 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband onstage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump? What’s going to happen there?” There is SO MUCH to say about this. 

First off, a bit of bookkeeping: Buttigieg is now 38 years old.

Now that we have that out of the way: “MR. MAN DONALD TRUMP”? This is the right wing’s symbol of masculinity: a guy who paints his skin, elaborately styles his comb-over, lies about his weight, and whose wife routinely slaps his hand away in public?

It’s certainly beneath Buttigieg to do it, but if that debate ever happens, could someone bring Stormy Daniels to sit in the front row and hold her thumb and index finger just a couple inches apart?

Okay, okay, there are bigger issues here. It takes an idea of masculinity that’s both fragile and toxic to think that Buttigieg’s sexuality in any way diminishes his masculinity, and equally to think that masculinity is an important component of debate stage presence. Hillary Clinton owned Trump each time they debated, unless you’re judging debate success by looming creepily or yelling “No puppet! No puppet! You’re the puppet!” (And that was a moderately more coherent Trump than the one we see these days.) Even if we believe that Donald Trump is a prime example of masculinity and even if we grant that a fair number of voters are sexist, masculinity is still not the top requirement of presidential debating.

Otherwise we’d be seeing, like, weathered cowboy vs. NFL tight end presidential contests. (And we’d still end up with a gay president eventually.)

Of course Limbaugh won’t be alone. The more seriously the right takes Buttigieg as a candidate, the more homophobic incoming he’s going to take from high-profile sources. Former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka took it in a weird direction—probably the first of many weird directions—when he connected Buttigieg’s sexuality to … abortion. “Why is a homosexual man lecturing us about the sanctity of life in the womb? Just a little curious there,” Gorka said. Gee, I don’t know, Sebastian, why is any man?

And while this particular line of attack may be rising up the ranks of the Republican Party and right-wing media ecosystem, it’s not like Buttigieg’s campaign hasn’t been getting homophobic messages from the beginning, because it has. “It doesn’t matter much,” he told The Washington Post much earlier in the campaign.

“The criticisms that really get to you are ones you take seriously, ones that might be right. When someone’s attacking me over a decision I made that might be wrong, that’s going to make me stop and think ... If someone calls me a faggot—okay.”

Pete Buttigieg did not come out of the closet as a grown-ass man who was already an elected official clearly looking at his options to become a high-profile national politician without stopping to think about the likelihood that some people are bigots and jerks. This was baked in from the beginning. And, again, if Republicans weren’t attacking him because he has a public and loving relationship with his very charming husband, they’d be attacking him for another reason, because he’s a Democrat and that’s what they do.

Shoot, this is a week when Donald Trump attacked Michael Bloomberg for racist comments. Which were racist, but come on, Donald Trump? Acting like racism is bad? Talk about a perfect example that Republicans will take any excuse to attack a Democrat.

Sunday, February 23, 2020

Guy who helped ruin our economy says Bernie Sanders will ruin our economy


NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 01:  Lloyd Blankfein, Senior Chairman, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc speaks onstage during the 2018 New York Times Dealbook on November 1, 2018 in New York City.  (Photo by Michael Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times)
Goldman Sachs Senior Chairman Lloyd Blankfein
With Bernie Sanders’ victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday night comes the mantle of “frontrunner.” This means that any and all people who disagree with Sanders’ policies, or don’t like his personality, will now begin turning their attention to Sanders’ campaign—and saying not-nice things about them. This is true any time the traditional media crowns a new primary leader. One of the interest groups most bothered or frightened by Sanders’ political viability are superwealthy folks. 

Billionaires such as Goldman Sachs Senior Chairman Lloyd Blankfein. Blankfein has long attacked Sanders’ popularity, stumping for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as a better candidate than Trump or Sanders. 

But with Clinton no longer in the race, and Sanders performing very well, Blankfein is now showing more of his true colors. As New Hampshire’s primary results began filtering in, Blankfein went to his Twitter account to attack Sanders—in a unique way:

There’s a lot here to unpack. Or maybe just two things to unpack. One is that Blankfein is clearly trying to draw a straight line from Sanders’ more democratic socialism to the era of Communism in the former Soviet Union.

The second is that the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who publicly apologized for the fraudulent dealings that his company—under his leadership—engaged in, which were part of what led to the 2007-2009 financial crisis in our country, is telling the world that Sen. Bernie Sanders will ruin the economy. Lloyd Blankfein and his cohorts literally ruined our economy a little over 10 years ago. Literally.

Blankfein has been a real hypocrite for years. Years ago he was a part of the disingenuous Fix the Debt movement—a movement Blankfein forgot all about once the Republican Party offered up huge tax cuts that would help blow a multitrillion-dollar hole in the national debt.

But most importantly, Blankfein is, in essence, saying that a vote for Sanders is the same as a vote for Trump. This means that Blankfein believes, or wants you to believe, that kids in cages, transparent corruption at our highest levels of government, and an anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian leader is the same as universal health care and free higher education.

To be clear, I do not doubt that Lloyd Blankfein believes this. I don’t imagine Blankfein has had any interest in real democracy for years. The culture of Goldman Sachs, something that Blankfein oversaw during his time as head of the billion-dollar company, is allegedly as immoral as you might imagine. Morality isn’t profitable.