Profiles in Cowardice

I'm not a Republican (obviously).  One of the many things I don't understand about Republicans is how they're not embarrassed when their Senators do things like this:

A quartet of crucial Senate Republicans said they won’t back Senate leadership’s “skinny repeal” of Obamacare on Thursday unless they get a guarantee the House won’t just pass it into law, enough to kill the effort to repeal the law.

“There’s increasing concern on my part and others that what the house will do is take whatever we pass… go directly to the house floor, vote on it and that goes to the president’s desk,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), flanked by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA).

These four giants of moral fortitude are perfectly willing to vote for a bill which none of them actually want, and which Graham calls a "disaster" and a "fraud" --- but only if the House promises that it will never become law.

I've never served in elected office, but here's a pretty good rule of thumb.  If there's a particular bill you DON'T want passed into law, then vote 'no' on it.  Don't play games, especially when those games might result in a 25% increase in health care premiums for those who need it, a loss of coverage for an estimated 16 million people, and a possible death spiral for the individual health insurance market.

The Republicans don't have a good replacement for Obamacare; if they did, they would easily have passed it by now.  Since they don't, they have to play these legislative games to try to placate their tea party base.  But it makes them look like morons and it puts people lives and livelihoods at risk.

So please, Senators.  Shut the hell up, let Obamacare do its job, and focus on fixing the country's other problems.

Let's Put A Stake Through This, Once and For All

This is disturbing:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Monday said Republican senators have no idea what Obamacare repeal bill they’ll be voting on Tuesday at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) request.

You can always tell that the party in charge has a clear vision of what's best for the country when leadership demands that they vote on something without telling anyone what it is.  Yes, indeed, America needs this bill, and it will make America great again, just as soon as we figure out what it is.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be cause for much concern, because as the story points out, neither of the Senate bills to replace Obamacare has received the necessary support to pass --- at least not publicly.  In addition, the bills which have been made public can't even be passed under reconciliation rules, and would thus need 60 votes to pass.

But then there's this ominous and late-breaking detail:

Sen. John McCain, recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, will make a dramatic return to the Senate Tuesday to cast a critical vote on health care legislation.

McCain's office announced Monday night that he would return Tuesday -- a surprise to most in Washington who expected him to miss the crucial vote and return to Washington at a later date.

Now, given the fact that McCain is literally returning from his hospital bed where he just received life-saving treatment for brain cancer, any reasonable person would assume that he is naturally going to vote against this abomination of a bill, which no matter how you slice it is estimated to cause several million Americans (22 million?  32 million?) to lose their health insurance, most of those people who are on Medicaid and who can't obtain health care in any other way.  After all, it would be the highest form of cruelty for McCain to go to heroic lengths and put his own health at risk for the sole purpose of guaranteeing that millions of Americans will be deprived of exactly the same life-saving treatment he just received.

So I hope McCain is returning to Washington for the sole purpose of standing up in front of the Senate and the nation to tell his Republican party that they should be ashamed of themselves not only for contemplating such a horrific bill, but for wasting 6 precious months of the legislative calendar screwing around with it.  I hope he tells them that he not only intends to vote against this bill or any other like it, but that he will fight tooth and nail to put a stake through the heart of such legislation, and make sure that the coverage provided by Obamacare is not only preserved, but expanded.  If McCain did this, it would certainly cement his reputation as one of the great mavericks and statesmen of our time.

But I'm not getting my hopes up.

One thing that gives me some hope is that someone with a lot more influence than I have organized this:

Every major patients' rights group in the country took out a full-page ad in today's New York Times to urge a No vote on Obamacare repeal. pic.twitter.com/qnijHJnqJk

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) July 24, 2017

It's a good start, but every little bit helps.  It's time to end this fiasco once and for all.  Please call your Senator, especially if your Senator happens to be Jeff Flake (AZ), Dean Heller (NV), Ted Cruz (TX), Luther Strange (AL), Roger Wicker (MS), Deb Fischer (NE), Bob Corker (TN), Orrin Hatch (UT) or John Barasso (WY), as they all happen to be Republicans up for election next year.  Flake, Heller and Cruz are considered especially vulnerable.  Tell them you want them to oppose this legislation, and that if they don't, you'll make sure to remind everyone of their vote next year.

It also seems like a good time to repost this.

The Republicans' Best Chance to Win in 2020

This post is for those who want the Republicans out of the White House in 2020.  If you need to be convinced that this is necessary, see this post, for example.  Or really, any other post on this site.  Or really, any objective news source anywhere.

I'm writing this piece mostly because I've been more engaged in politics than the typical American for the past 40 years, and so there are some things which are obvious to me which may not be so obvious to those new to the process.  Or at least, these are things which a decent chunk of people on the liberal end of the political spectrum fail to appreciate.  Let's start with:

1. If the winner of the next election isn't a Republican, it will be a Democrat.

This seems obvious.  Yet there's a lot of chatter on the left about, for example, Bernie Sanders running as a third-party candidate in 2020.  It's difficult to understand what anyone thinks this will accomplish, apart from making it easier for the Republicans to win re-election.

In the past 50 years, third-party candidates for president have drawn more than 5% of the popular vote only three times.  H. Ross Perot won 18.91% of the popular vote in 1992, which won him 0 electoral votes.  In 1980, John Anderson won 6.61% of the popular vote, which also resulted in 0 electoral votes.  And all the way back in 1968, George Wallace actually won 46 electoral votes while polling at 13.53% of the popular vote.

Put another way, none of these three candidates came within miles of winning the election; two of them won as many electoral votes as I did in each of those years.  And John Anderson, the candidate most similar to Sanders, actually did the worst.

And these were the most successful third-party candidates who ran in the last 50 years.  As for 2016, the third-party candidate whose positions most closely align with Sanders' views was Jill Stein of the Green party (which is why the Green party is the one most often mentioned as the vehicle for a Sanders run).  And she wasn't even the most successful third-party candidate this cycle.  That title belongs to Gary Johnson of the Libertarian party, who won more than three times as many votes as Stein, and was still soundly defeated.

So, if you plan to support a third-party candidate in 2020, then defeating the Republicans isn't really your top priority.  And if you call yourself a liberal or progressive, it really should be.  Let's work together to put out the fire in our house before arguing over the most humane, zero-carbon windows we should use.

2. A splintered opposition opens the door for the Republicans to win

This should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been paying attention.  For example, in 2016, Trump's margin of victory in Michigan was 11,612 votes, less than one-fourth of the 50,700 cast for Jill Stein.

In Wisconsin, Trump's margin of victory was 27,257, barely less than Stein's 30,980 votes.  While there's no guarantee that Trump would have lost if every Stein voter had voted with the Democrats instead, there's certainly a case to be made.  Particularly when you consider that there are almost certainly thousands of liberals who either voted for Johnson or stayed home because they bought into the 'Democrats/Clinton are corrupt' Republican smears.

What's the best-case scenario for a Sanders Green party run in 2020?  Let's say he draws ten times the vote percentage that Stein got, which has to be considered a wildly optimistic assumption.  That would mean he gets 10.7% of the popular vote, and almost certainly no electoral votes.

Trump won 46.09% of the popular vote, which you have to assume is his high-water mark.  But Republicans are extremely loyal to their politicians, especially incumbent presidents.  So it's unlikely his vote total drops below 40%.  In this case (assuming 3% of the vote goes to other third parties), the Democrat would win 46.3% of the vote, which probably translates to an electoral college victory.  But Sanders comes nowhere close to winning.

On the other hand, if Trump can get just 44% of the popular vote, he'll eke out a popular vote plurality, and likely a second term.  And as we've seen just last year, Trump could even lose the popular vote by as much as 2% and still be re-elected.  And what's painfully obvious is that while Sanders has no hope of winning the presidency as an independent, every vote he gets just improves the Republicans' chances.

So the best case scenario for a third-party liberal is that he loses, but doesn't draw enough support to hand Trump a second term.  The worst case is that he splits the anti-Trump vote, and Trump does win a second term.  There is literally no upside to supporting a third-party candidate.

3. The Democratic party is not 'corrupt' or 'anti-Sanders'

I've heard a lot on social media about how the Democratic nomination process was supposedly 'rigged', and how the party is trying to 'silence' Sanders supporters, and so on.  At worst this is nonsense and at best it's whining.  I won't attempt a full takedown of the 'rigged' myth here, other than to make some key observations.  (Those wanting full takedowns are recommended to read this and this and this).

First, and most glaringly, Clinton is a Democrat and Sanders is not.  If it were truly the desire of an all-powerful Democratic party to silence Sanders and his supporters, they never would have allowed him to run as a Democrat in the first place.

But Sanders chose to run as a Democrat, and the Democrats welcomed him in.  This means that Sanders implicitly agreed to play by the Democrats' rules.  Which brings me to my second point.

Are superdelegates fair?  Maybe they are and maybe they're not, but they've been part of the process for more than 30 years, which Sanders certainly should have known when he got in the race.  And if those superdelegates were already Clinton supporters before the caucuses and primaries, that's almost certainly because Clinton spent more than a quarter-century --- more than one-third of her adult life --- fostering that support within the party (and Sanders didn't).  The fact that superdelegates wield a disproportionate amount of power in the nominating process, and the fact that the vast majority of them preferred Clinton, is not evidence of 'rigging' or corruption.  Instead, these were known facts before Sanders chose to run, and thus were presumably realities he accepted.

In a similar vein, Sanders supporters have complained about closed primaries.  Once again, right or wrong, closed primaries have been part of the process for decades.  Complaining about them, or about superdelegates, or claiming 'Sanders would have won if the rules had been different' is just whining.  Maybe Sanders WOULD have won if the rules had been different, but the rules which determined the nominee were the rules he agreed to play by, so who cares?

To make a sports analogy, suppose Sanders is a basketball player with a high field goal percentage, but who sucks at 3-pointers.  If Clinton beats him by making a lot of 3-pointers, it's pointless to claim 'We would have won if there weren't a 3-point rule'.

There also seems to be some belief at the fringes that Clinton herself is corrupt, but that's just the Russian/Republican smear campaign.  I'm not going to go into detail explaining this (because I've already done so elsewhere), but Clinton is a fairly mainstream Democrat who is fundamentally honest and hard-working, but more moderate than Sanders.

4. So if I want to vote for Sanders (or Stein or . . .) that's just too bad?

Absolutely not.  I'm not writing this to advocate for or against any specific candidate; I'm writing it as an appeal to Democratic unity.  And because I know from experience that my motives will be questioned, I should point out that I didn't have a strong preference either for Clinton OR Sanders for the Democratic nomination.  I didn't care who won, because I knew that either one of them would be a better president than Trump, in the sense that any master chef will cook a better meal than a diseased pig will.

One iron law of politics is that you never get everything you want, so you need to get used to the idea.  I hope I've made it clear why supporting a third-party candidate is a recipe to insure that you don't get anything you want.

The alternative is: make a better Democratic party.  The party pretty clearly isn't corrupt, but there's still room for improvement.  Maybe it can and should move further to the left.  If the Democratic party isn't your cup of tea, then get involved and make it your cup of tea.  Indeed, Sanders has already done that (It's my belief that moving the party left was Sanders' sole reason for getting in the race, and he wasn't really trying to win until Clinton already had an insurmountable delegate lead).  The best way to put progressive ideas into policy is to keep the momentum going in the Democratic party, not abandoning it.

Attend party meetings, become an officer, advocate for a cause or a candidate, change the rules.  It won't get you everything you want, but I guarantee it will get you closer than anything you do outside the Democratic party.

5. Relentlessly arguing that Clinton/the DNC is corrupt helps Trump

The Russians worked for months to help elect Trump, and they didn't just start after Trump and Clinton clinched their nominations.  They knew Clinton was the strongest candidate, so they worked to undermine her from the beginning --- including during the battle for the nomination.  The 'Democrats are corrupt' thread started with the Russians in the service of electing Trump, and repeating that idea only furthers that goal.

Not only does it discredit Clinton and the Democratic party generally (which helps Trump), but it also lends credibility to Trump's allegations that the Democrats are corrupt.  And since nearly everything Trump says is a lie, his opponents really should avoid giving him credibility, especially considering (as explained above) that charges of corrupt Democrats are overblown at best and more likely just flat-out false.

6. You catch more flies with honey

Social media is basically a cesspool, it's true.  But I have been surprised recently to find that I've received a lot more vitriol and name-calling from Sanders supporters than from Trump supporters.

It appears that a significant number of Sanders supporters have decided that the best way to get their candidate elected president is to position him for a doomed third-party run, and rudely tell off any liberal who disagrees with them.

To state the obvious, this seems, at best, counterproductive.

7. And Finally

The formula for winning the White House in 2020 is fairly straightforward:

1. Fight like hell to nominate the best Democrat possible.
2. Fight like hell to elect that person.  Even if she's not your favorite candidate.

Clinton's opponents should be able to adopt this strategy a little more easily, given that (despite extensive wild speculation to the contrary), Clinton has said she's not running for any public office again.  But even if she were, any liberal should be able to agree to this plan.  The Democratic party is open and welcoming (as evidenced by the fact that Sanders ran as a Democrat), so any candidate with good policies has a shot at the nomination.  And since any Democrat would be a better president than Trump, this is a no-brainer.

Personally, I don't want Sanders OR Clinton to run in 2020, because I would like it if our next president hadn't passed retirement age.  But despite my personal favorites or misgivings, I hereby solemnly pledge to vote for whomever the Democrats nominate in 2020.

If you really want to be rid of Trump, I suggest you do the same.

It's Worth Remembering How We Got Here

I think we've by and large wrapped our minds around the current situation, but I think it's important to remember just how egregious The Stain's presence in the White House is.  Imagine if you went into a coma in January 2015, and were just waking up now.

This is something I whipped out on Facebook a few weeks back, in response to a supporter of The Stain who said he'd never seen anything as 'irrational' as liberals opposed to his Dear Leader.

* = = = = = = = = = *

You haven't?  Where the hell have you been?  Get this: A corrupt con man with no experience in public office and no clue about how government works ran for president last year.  He lied on a daily basis and insulted reporters, women, blacks, immigrants, the disabled, and BOTH Republicans and Democrats.  He gave speeches which an 8th-grader would have been embarrassed to give, and encouraged his supporters to engage in physical attacks on his opponents and the media.

The main reason this guy gave that he should be president is that he's rich.  But it turns out that he's rich mostly because he inherited his father's real estate empire, which he had mismanaged so badly that he had to declare bankruptcy multiple times and most American banks refused to lend him money any more.

Wait, there's more.  Because about a month before the election, someone released audio of this guy bragging about sexually assaulting women --- and it wasn't just talk, either, because when the audio was released, at least a dozen different women came forward to report that this guy had sexually assaulted THEM (only 11 listed in the link).  Come to find out, this guy had bought the rights to a lot of beauty pageants in part so he could wander into dressing rooms unannounced and leer at the naked or semi-naked women.  Including girls as young as 15.  He also agreed that his own daughter was 'a piece of ass'.

And it turns out that's not all!  He was also embroiled in a lawsuit because he set up a fake 'University' and defrauded thousands of people out of millions of dollars.  He also set up a fake charitable foundation which he used to look like a generous philanthropist, when in reality he didn't contribute any of his own money to it, and used it to, for example, buy a painting of himself which somehow ended up hanging in one of his hotels.

But wait, there's more!  Because this guy ALSO drew the support of a lot of 'alt-right' folks who are either bigoted against Jews and people of color, and some of them are outright neo-Nazis!  In fact, of the handful of newspapers to endorse this guy (over 95% of newspapers endorsed his opponent, including several who had never, ever before endorsed a Democrat), one of them was the newspaper of the KKK!  And another was the National Enquirer!

So of course you're thinking, well OBVIOUSLY this guy lost, right?  Well, yes and no.  His opponent DID get significantly more votes than he did --- nearly 3 million more --- but because of a quirk of the Electoral College, he actually won the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by razor-thin margins, which was enough for him to become president!!!  I know, right?  Totally cray-cray!!!

So, um.  Considering all of that --- and considering everything he's done since taking office (Muslim ban, horribly unqualified cabinet appointments, giving classified information to the Russians and Filipinos, committing obstruction of justice) --- doing everything possible within the law to denounce this man and remove him from office is the only rational course of action.

What's 'irrational' are the people out there who think this guy should continue serving as president.

Trumpcare: Much Scarier Than Terrorism

From that notoriously liberal purveyor of fake news, Business Insider:

According to a September 2016 study by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, some 3,024 Americans died from 1975 through 2015 due to foreign-born terrorism. That number includes the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2,983 people) and averages nearly 74 Americans per year.

Since 9/11, however, foreign-born terrorists have killed roughly one American per year. Six Americans have died per year at the hands, guns, and bombs of Islamic terrorists (foreign and domestic).

The article goes on to point out that, among other things, Americans are 407,000 times more likely to die in a 'motor vehicle incident' than from a terrorist attack.  But this is a bit disingenuous, since the motor vehicles aren't actively plotting to kill you, and terrorists are.  One can rarely foresee a car accident, which is why they're called accidents.

There's another threat to the life and health of Americans, though, and fortunately we CAN foresee this one.  It's called the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017, more commonly referred to as Trumpcare.  And according to researchers at Harvard, it would result in roughly 20,000 preventable deaths per year, due to the fact that it would deprive roughly 22 million people of health care.

Compared to the number of deaths from terrorism between 1975 and 2015, Trumpcare will do 270 times as much damage to Americans as terrorism.  Compared to the number of deaths from terrorism since 9/11, Trumpcare is a 20,000 times larger threat.  And mind you, this only estimates the deaths due to Trumpcare --- it doesn't even take into account the pain and suffering of the remaining 22 million people without access to health care.

There's only so much we can do to fight terrorism.  Fortunately, it's very easy to fight Trumpcare.  Just contact your Senator (especially if your Senator happens to be a Republican) and tell him or her that you oppose the Senate healthcare bill (BCRA), and you oppose any bill which makes cuts to Medicare.

The phone number for the main Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.