Hillary hits homers off Lauer’s fastball; Trump pops up slop

By Marc Jampole

If the “Commander in Chief” Forum were a baseball game, moderator Matt Lauer would be an out-of-shape pitcher. His first few innings, against Hillary Clinton, he had a sharp fastball with good control. When Trump came on, Lauer started throwing slop—slow pitches right over the plate that were easy to hit.

But it didn’t seem to matter: Hillary hit every question out of the park, mixing facts with realism and reasoned analysis. Trump popped everything up to the third baseman, except when he struck out.

Let’s start with Lauer’s warnings to each candidate before he started pitching questions. He strictly told Hillary not to talk about her opponent, but to focus on what she would do. She pretty much followed his directives, except to point out that Trump had originally been in favor of the Iraq War. When it was Trump’s turn, however, instead of issuing a direct request, he sheepishly sort-of, kind-of made a wishy-washy supplication. Hillary pretty much followed his instructions, mentioning Trump for well less than a minute. Trump, however, put cork in his bat: forgetting he has spent months equating Hillary with President Obama, he spent virtually all of his time attacking the President, which, of course, meant he didn’t answer the questions.

Lauer’s questions to Clinton were tough, and he made sure she stayed on point. When Clinton needed to fill in some detail before answering a question, Lauer would insist she stick to the question, to which she replied she was but needed to give the background and then proceeded to make the necessary logical jumps to get to the answer. Lauer did not interrupt Trump or press him when he changed the subject of the question or refused to answer the question, which was pretty much all the time. He allowed Trump to go on and on about irrelevancies. For example, when asked what he would do once ISIS was defeated, Trump never broached the subject but attacked both Obama and Hillary. Lauer let it pass.

Lauer spent a third of Hillary’s time on her email scandal. In this part of the forum, Hillary hit a massive home run, similar to Mickey Mantle hitting the ball out of Ebbets Field and into the street to put the Yanks ahead for good in the 7th game of the 1953 World Series. (I give this comparison because Mantle’s feat is usually forgotten; a few innings later a psychopathic teammate Billy Martin made a flashy defensive play.) When Lauer, asking one in a series of very specific questions about the emails, commented that Federal Bureau of Investigation’s head James Comey said that her private server could have been hacked, Hillary correctly pointed out that there is no evidence it ever was hacked, whereas we know for a fact that State Department and other government email systems were hacked. 

In fact, Hillary was pretty much Babe Ruth during her entire appearance. She answered every question directly and factually, corrected the mistakes Lauer and the questioners from the audience made—always in a nice way—and did not quibble or try to shape her remarks to the audience. In a short amount of time, we found out a lot about what she thinks:

• She will not put ground troops into Iraq and Syria, preferring to combine our air force with aid and counsel to our on-the-ground allies to defeat ISIS.
• She will always use force as an absolute last resort.
• She will not privatize the Veterans Administration (VA) healthcare system.
• She believes that people on the no-fly list should not be allowed to buy or own firearms.

She was definitely scoring points with the audience. One example: From the facial and body language of one man asking about the VA, you could tell that he disliked Clinton and believed the Kool-Aid about her. By the end of her answer, you could see his face softening its frown and his body getting more relaxed, less stiff, as he seemed to begin to realize that Hillary knows what she’s talking about and has an extensive history passing legislation and supporting organizations that help veterans and their families.

Although he was treated with kid gloves and asked softball questions, Trump essentially “took a collar,” which means he struck out or popped up all of Lauer’s easy pitching. Here are accurate paraphrases of some of the slop questions Lauer threw to Trump with the gist of the Donald’s answers, followed by my comment:

• What have you done that qualifies you as commander in chief? I ran a successful (sic) company and have good judgment. A lie, since other than his TV show and brand licensing, his businesses have been failures.
• Did you learn anything from the confidential briefings you have received? I learned that the people giving the briefings don’t like what the President and Clinton are doing. I hope someone contradicts Trump on this assertion, which must be a lie. Think about it: would every staff member giving briefings be disloyal, because that’s what it would take to keep hidden the disloyalty of even one in front of a candidate.  
• What about your praise of Putin?  Here is the exact quote: “If he says great things about me, I’ll say great things about him.” A statement appropriate at a networking cocktail party for sales executives, but not about foreign affairs.
• Are you studying foreign affairs to learn more? I’m studying sometimes when I have a spare moment from running my business and running for office, but I have a lot of common sense. Trust me, folks.

There’s something to fault with each of these answers. Looks like a lot of pop-ups and maybe a “can of corn,” which is an easy fly to the outfield.

Lauer’s presentation of this last question was obnoxiously obsequious. With the fearful demeanor and voice of a supplicant to the Pope, he said, “You can’t be expected to know the details…” Yes he can, should and must be expected to know the details of defense policy, and from day one. Why would we lower the standard for Donald Trump that we have set for every one of our presidential candidates since Harry S. Truman and Thomas Dewey?

Like an aging slow lefty called in to get one batter, Lauer did strike out the mighty Donnie on the matter of his “secret plan” to defeat ISIS. If he had a secret plan, Lauer asked, why did Trump want to give “the generals” 30 days to come up with a plan? In a series of half-completed jumbled-together sentences that would have done George W. proud, Trump never broached the subject of why he wanted the general’s plans, but said he might use his plans, the generals’ or a combination. It was classic sputtering, followed soon after by irresponsible aggressiveness when Trump insisted he would fire all the current generals. Lauer never connected the dots: Trump wants to give new generals who aren’t current with on-the-ground specifics a mere 30 days to work up a plan.

Trump seems to love channeling Richard M. Nixon. He is calling himself the “law and order” candidate, like Nixon did. He has a secret plan to defeat ISIS, just as Nixon had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. He has been caught and fined for a number of campaign giving violations, has bragged about buying politicians and may have paid off the attorney generals of several states not to pursue lawsuits against his eponymous university. Nixon, Watergate.

One more comparison. Maybe I inferred too much and I can only speak for myself, but by the end of her time, Clinton looked and sounded like a young Ernie Banks, ready to play a double header in the hot Midwest sun. Trump, by contrast, appeared to lose energy as his last minutes on stage ticked down. Some pundits have noted that Trump tended to make all his noise in the first half of the Republican debates. It could be Trump knew that viewers tend to dwindle away the longer a debate lasts. But it could also be that this 70-year-old professed fast-food fan with a large rubber tire around his middle was getting tired.

I come to the debates as a decades-long pacifist, so I reject many of the premises from which our defense policy has evolved over the past century or so. I would rather our candidate be more dovish than any of the candidates who ran for office this year of either party, except possibly Rand Paul. But between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as commander in chief, the choice is about as easy as that between Babe Ruth and Chuck Conners, who hit .238 with two homers for his pro career and later became a television actor. I'm with her.

Judging from the reaction when each candidate appeared, the audience of veterans agrees with me that Clinton is the better choice. The applause for her was both louder and longer than what Trump received. After seeing days of the media’s softball coverage of Donald Trump and their almost morbid fixation on emails that continue to show absolutely no wrong-doing by Hillary (except the admitted mistake of having a private server), it was gratifying to hear the many more vets in the audience voting with their hands for Clinton than for Trump. Now they—and we—have to vote for real on or before Election Day.

How many people voting for Trump have been brainwashed by mainstream news media to dislike Hillary?

By Marc Jampole

Yesterday evening I witnessed something frightening.

The masterful jazz trombonist Robin Eubanks was performing at Dizzy’s at Lincoln Center with his big band. In his introduction to a composition titled “Yes We Can—Victory Dance,” he put in a plug for Hillary and asked everyone to vote. Only about half the audience applauded. The other half sat on their hands grimly. I could see many frowns on the faces and some uncomfortable body language.

That means that about half the audience at an upscale jazz club on Labor Day in liberal New York City are either supporting Donald Trump or vehemently opposed to Hillary Clinton. Of course, some may have just objected to entertainers interjecting their political opinions into their performance, but the piece the band was going to play was political in nature and we’re talking about jazz, a musical art form whose practitioners are much given to political statements in their work. (I’m hopeful that one day soon National Public Radio (NPR) will invite Eubanks on “All Things Considered”  to discuss his political opinions, as it did the right-wing Merle Haggard four years ago to discuss why he hated President Obama.)

The frightening thing is that the large number of people not clapping—or cheering insanely—when Eubanks endorsed Hillary is that it suggests that Donald Trump may actually win, or at the very least that the mainstream media’s long campaign to make the country dislike Hillary Clinton has really succeeded (more on that below). Keep in mind that this audience was whiter and probably wealthier and more educated than the United States as a whole, but that means it was full of the educated whites who are supposed to be abandoning the GOP over Trump.

I would have hoped that, when faced with the choice between a poorly informed and compulsively lying narcissist who failed in business, cheated many people out of money and has a long history of racism on one side and a competent, educated public servant with a track record of achievement on the other, virtually everyone in the country other than unrepentant racists would embrace Hillary and that the crowd would have gone as wild over Eubank’s endorsement as they did over his wonderful music.

As the group played “Yes We Can—Victory Dance,” which at times required many of the group members to clap their hands in unison as if at a peace or civil rights rally, I surveyed the audience wondering about the motives for anyone supporting Donald Trump, even after his frequent inflammatory and often racist or sexist outbursts, his multitude of lies about the state of the country and his past, and the revelations that his real estate and casino businesses were mostly failures, that he is involved in 3,500 lawsuits and that he may have paid off at least two politicians to get lawsuits against his university dropped.

Based on months of following the Trump malevolence unfold, I have identified roughly five groups of Trump supporters, or perhaps I should write, five reasons to vote for Trump:

1.      Racists.

2.      Those who do not think a woman should be president.

3.      Supreme Court voters, those who will vote for Trump because he says he will nominate conservative Supreme Court justices (although I think virtually all people in this group primarily support Trump for one of the other reasons listed here).

4.      The ultra-wealthy and wealthy whose sole criteria for voting is who will lower taxes on the wealthy more, keep the minimum wage the lowest and impose the fewest regulations on their businesses.

5.      Those whom the news media have brainwashed to hate Hillary Clinton.

The last two groups have a causal relationship, as it is the ultra-wealthy who own the mainstream and right-wing news media that have demonized Hillary for the past 30 years, essentially holding her to a standard much higher than any other public official has ever been held. There are almost as many examples of the media treating Hillary differently from others as there are of Trump telling bold-faced lies:

·         While there was no investigation of the 13 terrorist incidents at U.S. embassies around the world during the Bush II Administration, millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent looking for something that Hillary Clinton did wrong to cause Benghazi or in the State Department dealings with the Clinton Foundation.

·         There has been no investigation of the millions of emails the Bush Administration destroyed. Likewise no investigation of the emails of Condoleezza or Colin Powell even though the U.S. foreign policy under their leadership was pretty disastrous. Powell, BTW, advised Hillary to destroy her emails, which she didn’t do. I guess that’s why the media is going after Hillary for a lack of transparency.

·         While conveniently forgetting Trump’s early support of the Iraq War and his many overt racist statements in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the news media continues to hammer Clinton over her vote to authorize the Iraq War and her husband’s support of the crime legislation of the 1990’s that proved to be de facto Jim Crow laws. The implication is that only Hillary among all those misled by the Bush Administration knew that the Bushies were lying and that among thousands including many civil rights leaders only Hillary understood the racial ramifications of tougher sentencing laws.

No one in the media mentions it, but when Hillary left her post as Secretary of State, she was the most popular person in the United States, if not the world.  It was then that the news media resumed its anti-Clinton campaign of the 1990’s.

If you want to see a case history of unfair treatment of Hillary over the years, read the article of two years ago by Oliver Willis and Hannah Groch-Begley detailing the NewYork Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd’s 21-year-long verbal war against Hillary, all based on misperceptions, assumptions and Dowd’s special brand of social-psychobabble. Dowd’s unfair and mostly fabricated definition of Hillary has become the playbook for a large part of the mainstream news media: Hillary is a weak candidate because she is a policy wonk (which means she has no passion), and is graceless, sneaky, secretive, devious and open to corruption. Earlier in the election cycle, the news media kept their anti-Hillary sentiments under control, preferring to focus on Trump’s many outrageous statements, rude insults and personal feuds. In retrospect, it seems as if the anti-Trump coverage was always about trying to help any other Republican (other than Ted Cruz) secure the nomination.

Since it began looking like Hillary could win in a landslide, the mainstream and right-wing news media have ramped up their anti-Hillary storylines. At the same time, the media has begun to treat Donald Trump with the softest of kid gloves. His trip to Mexico was taken seriously. Many reporters actually bought the line that Trump had made his immigration policy less Draconian and extreme than it actually was. While ignoring prima facie evidence that Donald Trump paid off elected officials in Texas and Florida, the news media continues to pore over Hillary’s emails, finding that neither she nor the Clinton Foundation did anything illegal or even unethical, which the news media has hidden under assertions of “the appearance of unethical conduct.” Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” has made it his life’s work to sell the country on the idea that Hillary’s handling of emails was illegal. The media has touted the false and baseless rumors that Hillary is physically incapacitated, despite the fact that she has a standard doctor’s letter that covers all the information given by former presidential candidates. By contrast, the issue of Trump’s health quickly faded, even though the letter he has is completely unprofessional and appears to come from a quack.  The media seems to have forgotten that Trump has still not released his taxes. For some reason the many bankruptcies, business failures, lawsuits and the fact that he has taken tax deductions available only to people with annual incomes under $500,000 have not compelled them to dig deeper or to probe further—they’re probably too busy trying to figure out how to spin the meeting of Secretary Clinton with a Nobel prize winner as part of a corrupt enterprise.

The day after Labor Day provides an excellent example of the mainstream news media’s stealth campaign against Hillary. NPR’s story on the campaign starts with what Donald Trump will be doing today, followed by a long quote by someone in the Trump campaign. The story ends with a short sentence on what Clinton is doing today, presented as an afterthought.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has a front-page story that draws parallels between the two campaigns.  The article repeats the lie that there are “nagging doubts about her candidacy,” without specifying what those doubts might be. The writer presents Trump’s problems—primarily his lack of appeal to minorities—as a challenge that he is trying to overcome. Elsewhere, the Times prints a story about a Bernie Sanders rally for Hillary that focuses exclusively on the small number of Bernie supporters there who may not vote for Hillary. Near the end of the article appears the sentence: “Still, polls show that the majority ofMr. Sander’s former supporters, like Lauren Glass, 22, plan to vote for Mrs.Clinton.” The number of former Bernitians intending to vote for Hillary is actually 90%, making the statement “the majority” as close to a lie as a true statement can be. The angle for the story is completely misleading and meant to sow further “doubts” about Hillary. 

The Times also carried a very positive story about the supposed influence of Norman Vincent Peale’s church on Donald Trump, despite the fact that Trump has never joined the church and never given it a contribution. Besides being a minister, Norman Vincent Peale was a religiously-based motivational speaker who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale’s optimistic conflation of doing well and doing good has made him a favorite of mainstream business-oriented Republicans since the 1930’s. If it wasn’t in the Times, I would swear that the article was part of the Trump campaign to appeal more to traditional Republicans, similar to his many speeches about helping African-Americans he has given to white audiences.  

The Times also had a snarky story about Hillary, who on Labor Day let reporters ride with her on her jet for the first time in the campaign. This story continues the mainstream news media’s campaign to paint Hillary as unavailable just because she hasn’t held any news conferences. The “Hillary is not accessible” storyline demonstrates the underlying anti-Hillary sentiment in the mainstream news media. Hillary has given a tremendous number of one-on-one interviews. As a public relations professional for more than 30 years, I can state unequivocally that reporters prefer one-on-ones to news conference for several reasons: 1) They can ask more questions; 2) They can get into more depth on the issue(s) of most interest to them; 3) They are more likely to get exclusive breaking news, since by definition there can be no exclusive at a news conference attended by many. The news media should be happy that there are so many opportunities to talk to Hillary one-on-one, but instead they turn it around and make it part of a false narrative.

This news cycle also saw the announcement by one of the moderators of upcoming debates, Chris Wallace of Fox News, declare that he would not point out when either of the candidates makes a factual misstatement during his debate; Wallace must know he has given Trump carte blanc to lie as much as he wants in the debate.

This mainstream media support of Trump began in full swing as soon as the Khan controversy died down. And it seems to be having an impact. The latest polls show the race to be in a virtual tie. The latest CC-ORCpoll has Trump up by two points, 45%-43%. Hillary still has a nearly insurmountable lead in the Electoral College, ahead in virtually every swing state and within striking distance in a number of historically Republican states. But still, it’s frightening to think that almost half the country now intends to vote for Trump.

As I have written before, you would think that the specter of a Trump presidency would induce the mainstream news media to skewer coverage in favor of Hillary, or at the very least to play it straight instead of helping the Republicans, as they usually do.  But it looks like I’m wrong.  Maybe the media corporate overlords figure that we’ve had psychopaths, the ignorant and liars for president before and have survived. Bush II and Reagan were ignorant liars, while Nixon was a lying psychopath.  And we’ve had racists in the White House, too, including Woodrow Wilson and Nixon.  Presidents with little experience have made some awful mistakes, such as Kennedy escalating the cold war and arranging for the replacement of the Vietnam government, Clinton’s handling of healthcare reform or Obama bending too far to compromise with the unrealistic demands of Republicans.

But only twice in our country’s history have we had a Democratic president who was a centrist leaning left with both houses of Congress Democratic and the Republic party in disarray. In both instances, the conditions lasted about two years. Coincidentally, virtually every piece of federal legislation that created more equality of income and wealth was passed during these short periods, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. As of August 10, the polls suggested that the possibility of a third confluence of these factors could occur.  And that’s what the ultra-wealthy who own and control the mainstream news media are afraid of. They’ve spent more than 35 years undoing most of the damage that New Deal and Great Society legislation did to the ultra-wealthy’s self-imagined privilege to dominate the economy and exploit everyone else. They don’t want to see their efforts undone by the Democratic platform of higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for social welfare programs, lowering the cost of education, improving our infrastructure and promoting non-fossil fuels. 

In short, they prefer the horrors of Trump to anything that affects their sizable fortunes, even if it helps the country and most of its inhabitants.

Today’s public square: real & imagined mix freely in timeless drift, plus Trump’s illogical comments on Weiner

By Marc Jampole

What can be more irritating than to see a news story that’s a week or month or even a year old appear on Google News, Yahoo! News or your Facebook feed? What’s worse is when days after it was originally published you ran across an early version of a news story—when maybe some of the facts were wrong or the accused had not yet completely exonerated herself (might as well be topical). When I find out I’m reading yesterday’s—or last year’s—news, it raises my blood pressure a little.

That is, if the story has a dateline attached to it and I remember to check it. Otherwise, I may believe it’s the latest news, or that the ideas or assertions that were already discounted are actually true.

This reappearance of stories that should be time-bound out of chronological context is one of the ways that the shift to the Internet for getting news and creating public forums has warped our sense of time.

Another way is the 24-hour availability of Internet news. In traditional news media, the reader, viewer or listener gets a chunk of the world at a given increment in time at the same time every day.  Here is how the world stands when the paper was printed at 1:00 am. Here is how the world stands right now at 6:00 pm. By contrast, the Internet purports to give us news to the instant 24 hours a day. Anyone who frequently checks news-oriented websites knows that it’s more like news every few hours plus whatever big event just occurred. But the very expectation that what you see is up-to-the-minute destroys the sense of chronology you develop by reading the newspaper or watching the 11:00 pm news every day and thus order events by the day they occur. In a sense, on the Internet everything happens at once in a timeless drift.

One thing hasn’t changed, though. Politicians, pundits, store-bought intellectuals and reporters continue to fill news media outlets with lies, false accusations, mistakes in logic and pure fantasy. I’m not talking only about the right-wing media. The mainstream frequently carries distortions, large and small. What was the media applause before the Iraq War, the intense focus on deficit reduction during a recession, the multiple Benghazi hearings, the “swift-boating” of John Kerry, the brouhaha over Planned Parenthood, the touting of the Tea Party in 2010 and the disregard of organized left-wing activity in that same year and this year if not distortions and fantasies. The best recent example of mainstream news media creating false news or a false take on the news is the Associated Press (AP) scandalously falsifying article which claimed that more than half of the people who met with Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state used the Clinton Foundation as a conduit to reach her. As it turns out, the AP was looking at a miniscule subset of visitors, and that in fact very few of the people with whom Clinton met during her reign as secretary of state had made contributions to the Clinton Foundation. Just as the case with every other media outlet that has pored over Clinton emails, the AP was unable to provide one example of a contract given, a policy changed or any other action taken by the State Department as the result of a request to the Clinton Foundation.  The AP is trying to create a scandal where there is none. 

Now for a slight change of topic to Donald Trump’s latest inanity.

It seems as the Donald’s overactive imagination has been acting up again.  During the campaign, the Donald has imagined African-American life in the United States to be a wretched urban hell in which no progress towards a higher standard of living and a safer environment has been made over the past 50 years. He has imagined that crime is up when it’s really down, that unemployment is up when it’s really down and that illegal immigration is up when in fact it’s so far down that more illegals have left the United States than entered over the past few years.  Of course, these fantasies of Trump’s could also be out-and-out lies, like his many lies about his past successes as a businessperson or that he opposed the Iraq War early on or that Hillary Clinton has stated she wants to repeal the Second Amendment. (I wish it were true!)

Trump’s first statement about Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin leaving her husband, the notorious sexter Anthony Weiner, serves as a dismaying metaphor for the current state of public discourse.

Trump said that Huma “is making a very wise decision. I know Anthony Weiner well, and she will be far better off without him. I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information. Who knows what he learned and who he told? It’s just another example of Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment. It is possible that our country and its security have been greatly compromised by this.”

Trump turns a wild innuendo—that Clinton was “careless and negligent” about allowing Weiner to have close access to highly classified information—into a true statement which then serves as an example of a wild assertion—that Clinton exercises poor judgment. His conclusion is that we should be very worried that important state documents got into the hands of an Internet pervert.

Picking apart this statement is easier than walking away from your bills and making your vendors sue you for the money. It assumes that we believe that one or more of the following are true: 1) Clinton has control over the selection of her employees’ mates; 2) Clinton routinely shares state secrets with the significant others of her employees; 3) Huma Abedin told everything she knew about state secrets to her husband, on the advice or orders of Clinton.

Perhaps Trump is confused and thinks we’re still in slave times, when the boss, who was also the owner, tried to exercise complete control over the sex lives of his employees, who were the slaves. Or maybe he thinks that because Abedin has an Islamic background that she has no rights over her own body and voice and was forced to follow her Clinton Mafia family orders to marry that twerp.

So where was Clinton’s bad judgment? In hiring someone who is a high-achieving, hard-working and talented individual? Perhaps it was hiring someone with an Islamic background? That racist assumption may in fact be what Trump is really trying to communicate, just as his ostensible appeals to African-Americans seem meant to really communicate to whites that he endorses certain myths and lies about African-American culture.

It’s worth noting that Trump declares his expertise at the beginning of the statement: “I know Anthony Weiner” well. Is that any different from your run-of-the-mill Manhattan Institute or American Enterprise Institute pseudo-academic claiming expertise in the topic about which she/he is about to lie or distort? In fact, I could point to a number of Wall Street Journal Op/Ed pieces that take exactly the same structure as the Trump quote (for a few examples, see my analyses of Journal opinion pieces in OpEdge blog entries for February 11, 2016, December 8, 2015, August 4, 2015 and May 5, 2015):

1.      Establish false expertise

2.      Give false assumption

3.      Create a causal relationship based on the false assumption, sometimes using coded language

4.      Come to false conclusion. 

The subject of the Trump quote on Abedin-Weiner symbolizes the degradation of the news media over the past 20 years. That the media thinks the separation of two prominent political figures rates top-of-the-news, first-page coverage degrades the marketplace of ideas. This kind of story traditionally was never front page news and often would not even make the Times; it was called “tabloid news” or a “page six” story, after the gossip column page of the scurrilous New York Post. That a political candidate would deign to comment on the private matter of an opponent’s employee further sullies the political discourse. The completely illogical nature of the comment suggests a mind that is both disorganized and deranged or a cynicism about the abilities of the American public to reason cause and effect, or perhaps both. In any case, this kind of logic further demeans discourse. (The hypocrisy of a serial adulterer taking an ethical stand has been par for the course in American political history, and is therefore less troublesome.) 

In short, the Trump quote is a complete disgrace, from every point of view. If you want to know what’s wrong with our current public discourse on important issues, multiply this illogical, tasteless and irrelevant quote by about a billion. 

Editorial: Private Insurance Fails

Aetna’s decision to pull out of health insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act in all but four states is further evidence that for-profit corporations cannot be trusted to provide health insurance. Hillary Clinton and other Democrats should push to expand Medicare as a public option.

Aetna’s withdrawal from the health insurance exchanges forces nearly a million customers in 11 states to find coverage from different insurers in markets where their options are reduced. It followed announcements by two other large insurers — Humana and UnitedHealth — that they would scale back their participation, saying they could not sustain financial losses they were incurring in the ACA’s state markets, where 20 million Americans have obtained coverage in the past three years.

The insurance companies claim they aren’t making enough money because too many people with serious health problems are using the “Obamacare” exchanges, and not enough healthy people are signing up.

Aetna announced the withdrawal after the Department of Justice decided to block Aetna’s proposed $37-billion merger with Humana. The Justice Department sued on the grounds that merging two of the nation’s five largest insurance providers was an antitrust violation that would strangle competition in the marketplace.

In a letter to the Department of Justice dated July 5, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini made a clear threat: If President Barack Obama’s administration refused to allow the merger to proceed, he wrote, Aetna would be in worse financial position and would have to withdraw from most of its Obamacare markets, and quite likely all of them. “[I]t is very likely that we would need to leave the public exchange business entirely and plan for additional business efficiencies should our deal ultimately be blocked,” he wrote.

David Dayen noted at NewRepublic.com that Aetna is doing precisely what a monopolist does — using its market power and political influence to achieve a goal that would allow it to acquire more power and influence. “It’s heartening that the Justice Department did not base its antitrust decision on Aetna’s threat. But it shows how market concentration in the insurance industry was out of control well before Aetna and Humana decided to team up. If Aetna makes that threat and there are 20 other market participants offering insurance on the exchanges, it rings hollow. Only because of the current concentration is that threat credible. And a concentrated industry that serves as a pillar of the president’s biggest legacy item may not be a reliable partner.”

Wendell Potter noted that even if some of the people enrolled in Aetna’s Obamacare exchanges were sicker than they had anticipated, making it necessary for them to pay more in medical claims than they had wanted to pay, “it got significantly more money from taxpayers ... via the government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs, which have become cash cows for Aetna and many other insurers.”

In fact, although Aetna claimed a pretax loss of $200 million from individual public exchange business in the second quarter, it reported significantly more income in the second quarter of this year than it made during the same period last year — far more than even Wall Street analysts had expected. Aetna’s operating earnings increased 8.5%, from $722.1 million during the second quarter of 2015 to $783.3 million in the second quarter this year. Total revenues for the quarter also increased handsomely, to just a few bucks shy of $16 billion, Potter noted.

The Charlotte Observer noted that Aetna enjoyed a record $6.5 billion in government program premiums in the first quarter. “In other words, doing business with the government isn’t so bad after all. In fact, it’s gotten especially good since Obamacare came along, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid in most states … Medicaid, like Medicare, offers the best of most worlds for insurers – it’s single-payer, government-financed insurance, and it has low enrollee costs. So while insurers like to gripe about the individual Obamacare exchanges, they have no issues with the big Medicaid profits that Obamacare helps provide.”

Aetna’s pullout from Texas will leave seven more counties with only one insurer to offer an individual market plan next year, in addition to 50 counties that had only one insurer last year, the Texas Department of Insurance reported.

In Texas, Sabriya Rice reported in the Dallas Morning News, discussion of the issue might be hampered by the extreme division between pro- and anti- Obamacare groups, said Lance Lunsford of the Texas Hospital Association.

“Too many policymakers in the state run on an ‘anything but Obamacare’ platform,” he said. “Considering the complexity of health care, that’s not a very healthy way to go about thinking about the needs in Texas,” where 1.3 million Texans get insurance from the exchange but 18% of adults still lack insurance..

Richard Mayhew notes at Balloon-Juice.com that one of the states Aetna is pulling out of is Pennsylvania, even though, according to the company’s rate application memo, submitted to state regulators in June, Aetna made $13.6 million on the individual market in 2015 and it expected a profit in 2017. “Conditions have not changed enough to make Pennsylvania a money loser in under two months,” Mayhew noted.

But Aetna is pulling out of “nice, profitable, Democratic-leaning Pennsylvania,” Kevin Drum noted at MotherJones.com. “It’s very peculiar, isn’t it?”

If the pullout of Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealth from the exchanges shows us anything, it is that a “free market” does not work in ensuring equitable health insurance choices without strong government regulation.

If insurance companies want a piece of the action in profitable Medicaid and Medicare Advantage programs, the government should require them also to participate in the exchanges. Those companies should be able to show a profit in the long run, as rising penalties drive more healthy people to participate in the marketplaces.

Hillary Clinton has proposed creating a new “government option” for health care coverage to compete with private insurers taking part in the exchanges. Clinton also has proposed a tax credit to help lower-income people afford their insurance deductibles and copayments. And, in an effort to woo supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton has proposed lowering the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 55.

The US Department of Justice also should look into whether Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and other insurance companies have engaged in restraint of trade.

Sanders said he will reintroduce legislation to establish Medicare-for-all single-payer system in the next session of Congress. “The provision of health care cannot continue to be dependent upon the whims and market projections of large private insurance companies whose only goal is to make as much profit as possible,” Sanders said in a statement.

Republicans have remained steadfast in their opposition to any fixes in President Obama’s signature domestic program — demanding that it be scrapped entirely. That would put Americans who now get their insurance from the exchanges, regardless of pre-existing conditions, back at the mercy of insurance executives who increase their profits by denying health care for their customers.

Whether you think Obamacare can be fixed, or Medicare should be opened up as a public option to compete with private insurance companies, or Medicare should be expanded to cover everybody, the first step is to elect Hillary Clinton as president and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2016

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Selections from the September 15, 2016 issue

COVER/Eric Boehlert
Clinton emails - the new Whitewater?


EDITORIAL
Private insurance fails Obamacare test

BETH PORTER
Waste not, save more

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Big league baseball chasing down its ghosts

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Women, play your card smart

DISPATCHES
Miser Trump demands Clintons shut down charity;
Working Families Party endorses Clinton;
Maternity deaths double in Texas after health budget cuts;
Jill Stein: neither Trump nor Clinton is fit to be president
Green VP nominee: Obama is 'Uncle Tom';
Gore: 'If you care about climate change, don't vote for third party;
Majority of economists favor Clinton on economy;
Trump's business a maze of debts and opaque ties
Dems hope to regain Senate, but need a wave to take back the House;
Trump caught lying 30 times in deposition;
US Army fudged accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds ...

JILL RICHARDSON
The miserable catch 22 of mental illness

JOHN YOUNG
Trump enlists the trigger-finger fringe

MARK ANDERSON
Sign points to Clinton flexibility on TPP

BOB BURNETT
Trump’s missing money

ROSIE SORENSEN
Something there is that doesn’t love Trump’s wall

SAM PIZZIGATI
Extracting a cold corporate truth

ERIC BLUMBERG
Memo to Trump’s spiritual adviser: You’re fired

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
The fiscal upside of compassion

SAM URETSKY
We can do big things, but it will cost us

WAYNE O’LEARY
Dystopia on the Potomac

JOHN BUELL
Exxon’s lies and a word from the Pope

SETH SANDRONSKY
Patchwork of state laws for new, expecting parents in labor force, study says

ROGER BYBEE
Socialist moment has come again

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
Florence of the Trachea: Go with the Flo

ROB PATTERSON
‘Night’ unfolds

and more ...

To paraphrase Elvis Costello, what’s so funny about liberty, equality & fraternity?

By Marc Jampole

Since the revolution of 1789, the national motto of France has been “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” which translated into English and updated to remove any sexism translates to “Liberty, equality, solidarity.”

French beach towns are making a mockery of all three concepts by passing laws that forbid the wearing of burkinis.

The New York Times reports that more than 20 French towns, mostly along the Mediterranean, have banned the burkini, which is a head-to-toes beach garment worn by devout Muslim women. The municipalities’ reasons for passing these bans sound as if they come directly from the America right-wing dictionary of racial code: the garments are not “appropriate,” not “respectful of good morals and of secularism” and not “respectful of the rules of hygiene and security of bathers on public beaches.”  

Just reading these odious racist excuses gives me the same yucky, skin-crawling feeling I get from rolling around in sand immediately after applying greasy sunscreen. The reference to hygiene was especially nauseating, because it reminded me of the ugly things well-bred white Americans used to say—and sometimes still do—about African-Americans during the days of legal segregation.

A few comparisons demonstrate the absurdity of banning a modest garment that shows nothing of a sexual nature.

First, let’s compare the burkini to the standard swimwear in France in the late 19th century. They look practically the same, except for the head covering on the burkini. 150 years ago, French women would likely wear wide brimmed hats on the beach. Back then, if a woman dared to show up in a bikini or topless, the authorities would haul her to jail for public lewdness and immorality. By the way, every French Mediterranean beach I’ve ever visited has allowed women to walk around topless.

Now let’s compare the burkini to a wetsuit, which is still allowed to be worn on the beaches banning burkinis. Again, there seems to be nothing to distinguish the two from each other. A few days back on Facebook, I saw side-by-side photos of a burkini and wetsuit in the same sleek green and black color-combination and I really couldn’t tell much of a difference, even in the way the material covered the head.

Evidently the police of these towns are patrolling the beaches and asking any woman wearing a burkini to leave. By the way, if a man or woman wearing a wetsuit on one of these French beaches also sported a very large cross around her/his neck, the local constabulary would ignore it. Evidently a Christian cross in not a religious symbol, whereas wearing clothes that cover your body and a head covering is. I’ve seen 2016 photos of nuns wearing their habits on Italian beaches. Although the habit resembles the burkini in many ways, I doubt the police will be hassling nuns on French beaches this summer.

These bans make a mockery of the French ideals of liberty, equality and the solidarity between human beings encompassed in the word “fraternity.” The French towns are denying the Muslim women the liberty to wear what they choose. They are making the women and their religion less equal than other religions and cultures. And instead of embracing this group as part of the family of man, they are differentiating them from the mass of humanity and creating laws specifically meant to impede their actions. In the United States, we call that Jim Crow.

One rational for these laws is to ensure the security of bathers on the beach. Really? How does wearing a long garment threaten other bathers? Are the authorities concerned that every burkini could hide a machine guns and grenades?

Far from making bathers safer, these bans make all of French society less safe for two reasons: The banning of burkinis inflames the more radical among France’s Muslims and gives them an additional shred of evidence that the West hates Islam. The banning also encourages the French alt-right because it communicates to them that the authorities, at least in these localities, agrees with them that there is something wrong with Islam and that France should control and mistreat their Muslim citizens and immigrants.

As Elvis Costello pointed out in his 1974 song, there’s nothing funny about peace, love and understanding. If the French are serious about domestic peace, they should show a little love to its Muslim population and some understanding that the overwhelming majority of them are law-abiding citizens who only want to express their liberty and live in equality in a community that shows solidarity to all its members.

Emails reveal no conflicts of interest between Clinton State Department & Foundation. Controversy reveals double standard

As an owner of a small business I have been on both sides of requests for access similar to those at the center of the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State.  Anytime my company needs to make contact with a company or highly placed individual, the first thing we do is ask ourselves who might know someone we could reference. It’s called “six degrees of separation” marketing, based on the John Guare play. People who want to work for my agency or sell it goods or services often invoke the name of a business friend to get in the door.

The success of using contacts to gain access doesn’t always work. When I needed to reach out to the Justice Department on a sensitive matter for a client about 10 years ago, I called the former campaign manager for a former Pennsylvania governor and a former prosecutor because I thought they would know whom at DOJ I really needed to contact. Didn’t help me one bit.

I’ve been on the other side of the conversation, too. To get a job interview at my firm, one of my very best employees of all time used the name of someone whom she had gotten through another contact—that’s three degrees of separation. 

Virtually every month, someone on my staff gets requests from business friends to interview someone or consider contributing our time or money to a charity. I don’t have much to do with these matters any more, but occasionally I get an email asking me about a request or letting me know we said “no.”

So if I wanted to contact someone at the State Department and I knew someone at the Clinton Foundation, damn right I would call the Clinton Foundation. And if I’m at the State Department, damn right I’m going to turn down all these requests. Except maybe sometimes, I might propose a short meeting if it seemed appropriate, just as I would if it were the chair of General Motors or the executive director of the NAACP.

And if I were the person responsible for fielding requests, damn right, I would occasionally write a memo to my boss. It sure would be embarrassing if HRC met Bono at a party and didn’t know the State Department had turned down his request for high-level help to arrange a live link to the International Space Station for his concerts.

Thus, the key fact in the controversy over whether Clinton Foundation donors got access to and favors from the Clinton State Department is buried in the fifteenth paragraph of the Washington Post’s expose:

“State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters Monday that there is ‘no clear sign’ donors received access for their contributions.”

The Washington Post article gives three examples of requests for access. In two cases, the answer was “no.” The third case was the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a country with which the United States has friendly relations. The Crown Prince also applied directly to the State Department. He participated in one Clinton Foundation event in 2005. In what way is setting up a meeting with the head of a foreign country that’s an ally corruption? Should a State Department turn down all requests for meetings from any organization in which a key executive has gone to college with the Secretary and Undersecretary? Worked for the same law firm? Served on the same board? Lived in the same town?

Corruption comes not in fielding these requests, but in approving a request for any reason other than its merits.

If there were any evidence—any slip of paper or veiled reference—of someone calling the Clinton Foundation and then winning a competitive contract with the State Department or getting their nephew a cushy job, the Washington Post would have published it. If a majority or even close to a majority of requests were granted, the Washington Post would have noted it and not had a “no” as the result of two out of the three case histories it detailed. That The New York Times article used the same Bahrain case history strongly suggests that there was nothing really problematic in the emails.

In other words, what the emails show incontrovertibly is that the system worked. Influential people tried to gain access to the Clinton State Department through the Clinton Foundation and none did, except in those instances that the Clinton State Department was going to say “yes” in any case to a meeting request.

As usual, the Clintons are under a much more careful scrutiny that has not been applied to others. No one has scrutinized the emails of the Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell State Departments. We swept the illegalities of the torture gulag the Bush-Cheney Administration created under the rug.  No one wonders about the millions of emails the Bush-Cheney Administration destroyed.

Let’s compare. A few people may have been able to meet with State Department personnel because they had a contact with a nonprofit organization that does wonderful work around the world. High-level officers in an Administration concocted a series of lies to convince the United States to begin a war that turned into a quagmire and then engaged in barbaric acts that were illegal under U.S. and international law. Who do we go after?

Or how about this double standard: Do we investigate Benghazi or do we investigate the 13 separate attacks of U.S. embassies during the Bush-Cheney years in which 60 diplomatic officers died?

The most recent of these comparisons comes this week. The right-wing media is putting out false and scurrilous rumors that one candidate has serious health problems and the mainstream news media is correctly telling us that the rumors are baseless—using the experts and facts that right-wing enthusiasts always doubt because it goes against what they know in their hearts must be true. This candidate released a letter from her physician that gives her a clean bill of health, while discussing past medical problems; the letter takes the form and uses the language that virtually every other letter about a candidate’s health has ever employed. The one exception to this standard format for medical letters is the other candidate in this year’s race, who released a letter that sounded as if it were written by an ignoramus, not a physician. The letter said all tests were positive, which is generally a bad thing and asserted that the candidate would be the healthiest president ever, which a physician would never say unless he had personally examined all the others. And yet except for Rachel Maddow and a few other journalists, no one is questioning the authenticity or veracity of this letter. And no one has wondered about the true state of health of this overweight 70-year-old who professes to love unhealthy food and whose primary exercise is riding a golf cart. 

A double standard for Hillary? I would say so. 

Instead of doing push-ups, supporters of veterans should organize against war or staff suicide prevention lines

By Marc Jampole

I first learned about the 22 push-up challenge on Facebook. Several of my 2,300+ Facebook friends are doing 22 push-ups a day for 22 days to commemorate the fact that 22 veterans commit suicide every day. The idea is to complete the 22 days and then challenge someone you know to do the same, all in memory of the 22 veterans added to our suicide rolls every day.

This morning I began seeing news stories on the 22 push-up challenge, about 127,000 in all in a Google News search, which is a relatively small number. The most prominent of the mostly minor media to cover the fad are Fox News and Inc. Most of the coverage focuses on the celebrities who have decided to drop and give 22.  They include Kevin Hart, Chris Pratt, Chris Evans, Kevin Bacon, Ludacris, John Krasinski and Dwayne Johnson. 

The 22 push-up challenge was devised by 22kill.com, which looks like it’s a for-profit group with the lofty goal of raising awareness about the high rate of suicide among veterans. The website mostly sells a variety of rings, clothing and headgear with 22kill.com branding. Unlike the typical awareness-raising event such as a walkathon or last summer’s ice bucket challenge, the 22kill.com people aren’t trying to use the challenge to raise money, although I’m fairly certain they would be delighted if the campaign led to an uptick in the purchase of their merchandise. 22kill.com does try to raise money on its website, which it says will be allocated to a wide range of nonprofit organizations helping veterans. Donate a minimum of $22 for four months and you get a free honor ring. Two questions remain unanswered: 1. How much of your donation does 22kill.com keep and how much gets funneled to the real nonprofits? 2. Why can’t you cut out the middle man and give directly to these other organizations?

While many things about 22kill.com sound fishy, I am not going to condemn or accuse the group, as I don’t know enough about it. Besides, whether or not the group is legitimate does not affect the viability and potential impact of the campaign, which I view as a complete waste of time.

Over the next few days and weeks it is possible that the 22 push-up challenge will blaze across the Internet and the mainstream media, much like the ice bucket challenge did last year and twerking did in 2013. But so what? How does that greater awareness help veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder?

Only two things will reduce the incidence of veteran suicides:

1.      Spending more money to provide services that help soldiers adjust to the aftermath of war.

2.      Not sending soldiers to war.

In that context, doing 22 push-ups a day for 22 days with no donation is pretty meaningless. At 10 minutes a day, the total time spent doing the push-ups works out to more than 3.5 hours. The same time could be spent staffing a suicide line or at a table outside Walmart soliciting contributions for one of the many organizations that help veterans in trouble. Perhaps the best use of the 3.5 hours would be to send letters to our elected officials exhorting them to spend more on veteran’s mental health and psychological counseling. The 3.5 hours could also be converted into a contribution:  For example one person I know who is doing the challenge makes in excess of a half million a year; instead of doing push-ups, this person could contribute $875, which represents 3.5 hours of a $500,000 salary for a 2,000-hour work year. 

While the 22 push-ups does nothing for veterans, it helps the participants in several ways. Obviously doing 22 push-ups a day improves the fitness of most healthy people. But doing the push-ups also makes the participants feel good inside in three ways: 1) They think they have helped an important cause; 2) They get to bond with other participants; 3) They enjoy the approval of the circle of their friends and associates who know about the challenge.

In short, doing something makes people feel good because they feel they are doing something. The premise is that people who participate in challenges, walkathons, marathons or dinners will give more money and be more committed to the cause than if they just wrote a check. People also like getting the various pins, water bottles, hats, tee shirt, mugs and other paraphernalia they typically receive when participating in nonprofit events. Many of my readers may not know that at the most expensive of these fundraising activities—formal dinners and cocktail parties for which the price of admission can be $150, $350 or even $1,000 a ticket—the gifts can be quite expensive and include vacation trips and spa memberships as door prizes. Like participants in the 22 push-ups campaign, those who walk, run or dance and those who sponsor them could give the money and donate their time directly to the nonprofit. But it wouldn’t feel as good.

In short, most fund-raising events and challenges appeal not just to our altruism, but to our inherent self-centeredness. In America, it can’t be good for someone else unless it’s also good for me.

Besides the typical self-centeredness I find in all of these challenges and events, I object to the 22 push-ups challenge for another reason. It does nothing to address the broader question of how we can help prevent veteran suicides. The answer, of course, is very simple: Don’t go to war.

War has always victimized a goodly number of soldiers. Anyone who has read any battlefield literature knows why: Seeing people wounded and die. Having to kill and wound others. Sleep deprivation. Living in ditches or other uncomfortable quarters. The regimentation of your life. The sound of bullets. The smell of blood and rotting corpses. The fear of bombs. Questions about the justness and fairness of the war. The guilt that you survived when comrades didn’t. The frustration of dealing with injuries. No wonder every war destabilizes the mental health of many soldiers.

At this point, we could broach a philosophical question: Is any war ever necessary or just? But in the United States, the issue of a just war has become moot. We have fought at least five wars in my lifetime that were absolutely unnecessary: Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq I and Iraq II; we could also make the case that our incursion into Afghanistan has also been a complete waste. From the standpoint of the home front, churning out PTSD-affected soldiers seems to be an American growth industry. (And let’s not forget the millions of people we killed or injured in the countries we invaded.)

Thus, the best way to reduce veteran suicides—which is the sole goal of the 22 push-ups campaign—is to not fight wars. Those who are doing push-ups would be better off working for and giving money to peace and disarmament organizations. And all of us should make sure that the next time a president or Congress wants to go to war and our territory has not suffered attack by an armed force that we send emails and letters against the war to elected officials and the news media and participate in anti-war demonstrations. 

Shocking revelations in Clintons’ tax returns: Hillary is honest & believes in paying her fair share

By Marc Jampole

No wonder Republicans are so afraid of Hillary Clinton that they continue to hitch their wagon to the exploding death star known as Donald Trump.

The Clintons made $10 million last year, which definitely makes them one-percenters, just like all our presidents have been since Eisenhower, except her husband (who joined later) and Barack Obama (who is well on his way).

What makes Hillary Clinton so dangerous to the ultra-wealthy is her willingness to pay her fair share of taxes without engaging in the kind of complicated, if legal, tax avoidance schemes that we saw in Mitt Romney’s taxes and which past statements by Trump suggest are in his. The Clintons fulfilled their civic responsibility by paying their fair share of taxes, an idea that our plutocracy thinks is un-American and socialist.

The cynical will say that the Clintons avoided sophisticated tax avoidance schemes because they knew Hillary would be running for president and wanted to present clean books. But even if their tax strategies derived completely from political calculations, we must then contrast what Hillary thinks will fly with the American public with what Romney (and no doubt Trump) does. Romney was not afraid that taking legal deductions would make him look bad, even though it reduced his tax rate to 14%, lower than his secretary. In older tax returns from the 1970s, Trump paid no taxes because of the lush tax breaks afforded to real estate investment. By contrast, the “cynical” version of the Clintons decided that the American public really did want their leaders to pay their fair share—which in the case of the Clintons is almost 35% of their income.

Of course, perhaps the Clintons realized that they operate under two double standards—one for the Clintons and one for Hillary for being a woman—and understood that the mainstream news media and the GOP would hit them hard for standard tax shelters used by many one- and two-percenters.

The application of a double standard is implicated in virtually all of the complaints against Hillary Clinton. She, but no one else, remains unforgiven for her vote to support the potential invasion of Iraq, as if she were the only one who could see through the Bush-Cheney lies and deceptions and so is the only one blamed for falling victim to them. For some reason, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and everyone else who voted for the harsh and racially based prison terms in the 1990s get free passes, but Hillary who was not yet in the Senate, gets chided as the wife of the president who reluctantly signed these bad and now widely regretted pieces of legislation.

Why have there been no investigations of the other Secretaries of State like Condoleezza Rice who used private servers, except for the existence of a double standard?

Why has more money been spent on investigating the Benghazi tragedy than on investigating the Bush Administration for creating a worldwide torture gulag or instigating the Iraq War, except for the existence of a double standard?

The email scandal is perhaps the most egregious example of the double standard applied to Hillary Clinton. People who are making a big deal about possible conflicts of interest between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary was running it have floated only one example of a potential conflict problem: a Clinton Foundation donor asked Foundation employees to hook him up with someone from the State Department. But as it turned out, the guy didn’t want any favors, business or special treatment. He wanted to give the State Department inside information he had about a crucial election in another country. He was not trying to use the Clinton connection for selfish ends, but to help the United States.

It’s interesting to note that just days after the Clintons released their latest tax returns, Maureen Dowd ran another screed in her decades-old campaign against the Clintons. Dowd spends an entire column trying to present Clinton as the perfect Republican candidate. She starts her latest flight of fancy by pointing out that the Clintons are one-percenters, ignoring that they have committed the cardinal sin for the ultra-wealthy, which is to leave money on the table for others. She creates Hillary the Republican from bits of facts and innuendos, starting with the wholly irrelevant fact that she supported Goldwater as a middle-schooler. Another double standard—others are allowed to change their views, but not Hillary. Not even the teenaged Hillary.

Most of the evidence that Hillary is really a Republican amounts to a whispering campaign. Dowd assumes that her “pals” John McCain and Lindsay Graham are rooting for her and that the endorsements from the Republican defense establishment has to do with her politics and not the fact that her opponent is an ignorant looney who lacks self-control. Dowd is also convinced that until recently, Hillary never stirred up any emotion among women and that the recent excitement about Hillary is limited to Republican women in the suburbs. (Dowd obviously has avoided Facebook and Twitter for the past two years, or else she would have seen the electrifyingly high level of excitement that Hillary has generated among women since she announced she was running for president.)

Nowhere does Dowd mention that Clinton explicitly states that she wants to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for massive investment in infrastructure and alternative energy technologies. Nowhere does Dowd mention that Hillary explicitly states that she wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 (although I suspect that if Dowd had brought up the minimum wage, she would have used it to call Hillary a flip-flopper, since before the primaries she wanted to start with $10.10 an hour). Nowhere do we read of Hillary’s many connections to labor unions and organizations working to improve the economic standing of minorities. Dowd also seems to forget that Clinton, unlike most Republicans, believes in a woman’s right to birth control and abortion and the right of all Americans to marry whomever they damn well please. Most Republicans want to build a wall along our border with Mexico. Most have a much more bellicose attitude about the Middle East than Hillary, despite what Dowd says. Most are against the Iran nuclear deal. Most want to lower taxes on the wealthy. So how is Hillary the ideal Republican candidate?

The Dowd column is a perfect hatchet job on Hillary’s liberal bona fides. Few facts, a lot of assumptions and a ridiculous conclusion.

The truth is quite the opposite from Dowd’s absurd assertion: Hillary Clinton stands in the great center-looking left tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. She is embracing what is perhaps the most left-wing platform for any political party in American history.  Her plans are detailed and realistic. To call her the ideal GOP nominee is a slander that would not be legal if Donald Trump had his way.

Editorial: Berniecrats’ Choice

The Democratic National Convention went about as well as could be expected for Hillary Clinton. On the first night, former rival Bernie Sanders gave her a strong endorsement. Some of his supporters weren’t willing to let go, and booed every mention of Clinton’s name at the convention, but they have little choice if they want to achieve what Sanders fought for.

In Clinton, the Berniecrats have a candidate who has agreed with Sanders on about 90% of his program, including the need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage; the need to create millions of new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, bridges, water systems and wastewater plants; and the need to act on climate change,.

Sanders and Clinton agreed on a proposal to guarantee tuition-free college education for most students; they want to move toward universal health care, with a public option in their health care exchange and access to primary health care, dental care, mental health counseling and low-cost prescription drugs through a major expansion of community health centers.

Clinton also agreed with the Democratic platform’s calls for breaking up the major financial institutions on Wall Street and the passage of a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act. It also calls for strong opposition to job-killing free trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Clinton also supports overturning the Citizens United decision which allows the wealthiest people in America to buy elections. Sanders has noted that Clinton’s Supreme Court appointees will defend the rights of workers, women, the LGBT community, minorities and immigrants and the government’s ability to protect our environment.

Bernie-Or-Busters who can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary can opt for Jill Stein, the Green presidential nominee, who might have a more progressive agenda than Sanders, but she has never been elected to an office higher than the Lexington, Mass., town council and she won’t be elected president in November. Greens are on 20 state ballots as of July, according to Ballot-Access.org.

The worst alternative is Trump, a narcissistic sociopath who has gained support from the white working class with his attacks on undocumented immigrants and free trade deals, but in his business career he has taken advantage of those trade pacts to outsource manufacturing of his clothing lines to Mexico, China and other overseas factories and he has been known to employ undocumented workers. He has resisted union organizers at his resorts and he does not support a national minimum wage; instead he thinks states should have the right to lower the minimum wage below the current $7.25 an hour. He has resisted paying small businesses for work they’ve done at his resorts and casinos, forcing many of them to accept lower fees than they had agreed to, or sue him, knowing that his legal team could delay court action and starve the contractors out.

Trump also has voiced support for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act to break up big banks, but when he announced a 13-member economic advisory team Aug. 5, Zach Carter reported at HuffingtonPost.com, the team included bankers, hedge fund managers from Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, a shale oil magnate, a real estate developer and the head of Cerberus Capital Management, a notoriously secretive private equity firm. “These are, in other words, mostly people who have backed traditional Republican policies: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation and free trade,” Carter noted. And in a speech to the Detroit Economics Club on Aug. 8, he proposed a moratorium on new agency regulations along with slashing tax rates, which amounts to a replay of Bush-era economic policy that nearly sent the world into a depression in 2008.

Unfortunately, many Sanders supporters have adopted the Republican talking point that Clinton can’t be trusted. They should know better. Clinton has been slurred over a quarter century by the right-wing echo machine and in the past few years the muck has been piled on by taxpayer-funded political action committees operated by Republicans in the House of Representatives with an eye to increasing her negatives. And they succeeded.

Progressives can and should keep an eye on Hillary to make sure she follows through on her promises, but she started left of center with an interest in public service since her college days. She may have friends on Wall Street but Trump has been looking out for his own bottom line since his daddy bankrolled his first real estate ventures in New York. And Trump won’t release his tax returns because he doesn’t want us to know about some of his more exotic business ties. If you believe in his promises of economic populism, you’re being taken for a sucker and you’re likely to join the legions who have gone broke believing Donald Trump’s promises during his long career of enriching himself.

Nicholas Kristof noted in the New York Times (Aug. 7) that a recent CBS News poll found that only 34% of registered voters said Clinton is honest and trustworthy compared with 36% for Trump. “Yet the idea that they are even in the same league is preposterous,” Kristof wrote. “If deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y.”

As of Aug. 8, PolitiFact noted that 27% of Clinton’s statements it examined were “mostly false” or worse, including 11% that were false and another 2% classified as “Pants on Fire.” In comparison, 70% of Trump’s statements were rated “mostly false” or worse, including 36% “false” and 19% “Pants on Fire.”

PolitiFact judged 22% of Clinton’s statements were true, 28% were “mostly true” and 21% were “half true.” Trump’s statements were 4% true, 11% “mostly true” and 15% “half true.”

Likewise, the Washington Post Fact-Checker has awarded its worst ranking, Four Pinocchios, to 16% of Clinton’s statements that it checked and 64% of Trump’s. “Essentially, Clinton is in the norm for a typical politician,” Glenn Kessler, who runs Fact-Checker, told Kristof, while Trump “is just off the charts. There’s never been anyone like him, at least in the six years I have been doing this.”

Trump voters often argue that Clinton is an inveterate liar and a crook, Kristof wrote. Yet when pressed, they usually draw from the same handful of examples: Clinton’s 2008 claim that she landed in Bosnia “under sniper fire” and “ran with our heads down” from the plane, her statements to the families of the four Americans killed in Benghazi in 2012, her disingenuous explanation of flip-flopping on the TPP and her accounts of her use of private email servers.

But this is junior varsity mendacity when compared with Trump, whom Kristof called “the champ of prevarication.” Politico found more than five dozen Trump statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false out of a week’s worth of public statements in March — an average of one misstatement every five minutes. The Huffington Post on March 30 chronicled 71 inaccuracies in an hourlong town hall session — more than one a minute.

Sanders supporters can be proud of what they have accomplished and we hope they have whetted their appetite toward political activism. Many of the current Democratic establishment got their starts as young supporters of progressive insurgents such as Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Fred Harris and Jesse Jackson (including Hillary Clinton, who cut her political teeth working on the McGovern campaign in Texas in 1972). Many others from those insurgent campaigns remain agitators and rabble rousers. The system depends on both sides staying in the game. A good way to keep the revolution going is the plan of some Sanders campaign staffers and volunteers to recruit and run 400-plus progressive candidates in a Brand New Congress campaign for the 2018 midterm elections.

For the next three months, however, Berniecrats and other progressive populists should work to elect Hillary Clinton and congressional Democrats to help Clinton and Sanders pass the progressive agenda the Democratic platform has outlined. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2016

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Selections from the September 1, 2016 issue

COVER/Hal Crowther
Summer of our discontent

EDITORIAL
Berniecrats’ choice

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Was Elie Weisel our last best thinker? 

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen p. 5
Know what you eat, at home or on the road

DISPATCHES p. 5
Obamacare still not killing jobs;
US trade deficits up 8.7%;
Pope: capitalism is ‘terrorism against all of humanity’;
Trump’s ‘economic renewal’ starts with doubling down on fossil fuels, less regs;
Trump properties taking a beating;
Trump Taj Mahal to close after Labor Day;
Krugman warns 'no ight turn' for Clinton;
Right-wing provocateur O'Keefe flops in election fraud scam;
Nuclear plants lose money at astonishing rates;
Coal jobs decline with or without fed regs;
Sam Brownback’s loss in Kansas is everyone else’s gain;
Billionaire bonanza as wealth surges among 1%;
Fact checkers rebut Trump's 'pathetic' economic lies in real time ...

JILL RICHARDSON
Is solar energy really too expensive?

JOHN YOUNG
Democrats’ citizenship smackdown

SETH SANDRONSKY
Reducing US workplace violence

ROBERT BOROSAGE
Hillary Clinton and the choice

DAVE JOHNSON
A look at Clinton and Trump’s promises

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Killing the killer

BOB BURNETT
5 Takeaways from the Democratic Convention

CLAIRE RATER, CAROL SPIEGEL and JIM GOODMAN
Consumers can stop the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
When facts meet rhetoric: The success of Obamacare

SAM URETSKY
Shared ignorance makes matters worse

MARK ANDERSON
Support your local beer

WAYNE O’LEARY
Is there a Brexit in America’s future?

JOHN BUELL
Liar, liar, pants on fire

JOEL D. JOSEPH
Brexit, sschmexit

WENDELL POTTER
It’s way past time for us to stop deluding ourselves about private health insurers

ROB PATTERSON
Rock gets rolled

MOVIE REVIEW/Ed Rampell
The grips of wrath in search of dreck

and more ...

Just when we thought Trump could sink no lower, he calls for assassination of his opponent as if America were Chile or Iran

By Marc Jampole

To walk something back is a recent expression to the American lexicon which refers to the quibbling and prevaricating political candidates or elected officials do to show that they didn’t really mean to make a controversial remark that has sunk them into deep doo-doo.

Supporters of Donald Trump will need a “Million Man March” effort to walk back his explicit suggestion that some identified group of gun owners attempt to assassinate a President Hillary Clinton as a means to prevent her appointing Supreme Court justices who would support the 90% of all Americans who want to toughen gun control laws.

I know readers have seen and heard his exact words a number of times, but they really do capture everything that is dangerous about the Donald, so here goes: “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know…”

There can be no doubt what he is taking about—assassinating Hillary Clinton. The explanation he and his factotums are giving for this vile statement is that Trump is referring to the collective activity of voting, but, clearly his statement refers to a time after Clinton has assumed the presidency. Judging from the reaction by the news media and both Democrats and Republicans, this walk back was a complete and utter failure.

Assassinating the winner of an election is an American tradition, but we usually do it in foreign countries. Many of the same hardliners who approved or would have approved of our complicity in disposing of the elected leaders of Iran, Chile, South Viet Nam and elsewhere are now scared out of their minds that a major political candidate in the United States has floated the notion that the assassination of his opponent might be acceptable.

Trump’s intemperate comments mark the second time since the end of the major party conventions that he has tried to throw into question the legitimacy of the American political process.  Days earlier he started suggesting that the fall elections could be rigged. He didn’t explain how or why, but in his distorted world in which he is the Sun King, the only way he could possible lose anything would be through nefarious means. Just as after his assassination call, after Trump cast shadows on the honesty of the electoral process, a large number of prominent people distanced themselves from his remarks. Many wrote or said rigging a national election wasn’t possible, since the fifty states control the ballots.

There have been at least three rigged elections in my lifetime, all engineered by Republicans: 1) Nixon got the South Vietnamese to agree not to start peace negotiations until after the 1968 elections, depriving Humphrey of the foreign affairs victory he needed to win the election; 2) Reagan got the Iranians to postpone releasing the American hostages until after the election in return for Reagan supplying Iran with advanced weaponry; 3) Illegal purging of voter rolls in Florida gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush.  The first two are examples of rigging by influence, as opposed to our more common understanding of rigging as involving the actual manipulation of votes.

While accusing others of rigging, Trump tried to do it himself. When Trump called on Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee offices and reveal any unsavory emails, he was really asking that a foreign power intervene and help him rig an election.

Historically, however, most rigging has come before an election through denial of the ballot or making it harder for certain groups to vote. The dozens of new voter law to pass in Republican-dominated states over the past six years collectively have one purpose: to prevent minorities, the poor and the young from voting and thereby swing the election to Republicans. Thus, the assault on our democratic process and the desire to delegitimize it does not begin with Donald Trump, but is a long-time strategy of the Republican Party.

In fact, most of the really obnoxious statements the Donald has made over the past year are firmly rooted in the standard post-Reagan Republican playbook. As many have pointed out, he merely speaks with greater crudeness and explicitness than other Republicans.  He was not the first or only politician to express admiration for Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin as a means to denigrate our own President.  Every Republican candidate called for building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and all of them like to conflate terrorism with Islam. Every Republican wants to lower taxes on the wealthy.

Even when he goes too far for his fellow Republicans—as when he went after Ghazala Khan, referred to a television news personality’s menstruation or suggested that women who broke anti-abortion laws should go to jail—he is reflecting the underlying sentiment of the GOP and its core voters.

The reference to assassination is different in that it probably does not reflect the thoughts of any but a handful of deranged people. But in another very important way, Trump’s suggestion that someone assassinate Hillary Clinton is very typical, because when Trump says something really sick and icky, it almost always involves women. A woman should quit a job when facing sexual discrimination or harassment. A woman is too ugly to serve as President. Ivanka is so hot I would sleep with her if she weren’t my daughter. The real reason Ghazala Khan said nothing is that she is oppressed by Islam. Let’s assassinate the first woman president of the United States.

When Donald goes so far over the line that even his supporters distance themselves from his comments, his victim is almost always a woman, which is without a doubt part and parcel of both of his underlying mental illness and his undiminished appeal to uneducated white males.