Reflections on last night’s Democratic debate

Last night’s Democratic debate was very feisty, to say the least. People came out swinging, and some clear patterns soon emerged.

They all attacked Bernie Sanders and that was to be expected because he seriously threatens the status quo and has now risen in the polls to the top. He led in 10 out of ten polls released since Monday. They attacked his Medicare For All policies saying it would cost too much but never answer his response to explain why it is that the US spends twice as much as other developed countries that have universal health care, when we don’t even cover everyone. That must mean that the US is spending be spending about half its health care costs on things not related to providing health care and thus would experience a reduction of health care costs if we switch to something similar to those countries. It also shows that there is a huge amount of money right now that is spent on providing huge profits to the health insurance industry, buying overpriced pharmaceuticals, and ridiculously high administrative cost that would disappear under his plan, and thus it would end up saving the country and people money because they would no longer have insurance premiums deducted from their salaries, they would have no co-pays or deductibles, and most importantly, no worries about losing coverage.
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And people wonder why Sanders gets such an enthusiastic reception

In the clip below from a town hall in Las Vegas hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in response to a question from a union member about how his proposal for Medicare For All would affect the health insurance policies that they already had, Bernie Sanders gave a clear and detailed response without any waffling. It is such a difference from the equivocating of so many candidates on this major issue. It is quite electrifying. Is it any wonder that we hear that the people at his rallies give him such a rousing response?
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Going beyond identity in choosing a candidate

One of the interesting things emerging from the current Democratic primary race is the lessening role of identity politics. Having commonalities with a feature of a candidate’s identity, even if that identity has been that of a marginalized group, seems to be no longer sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support for that candidate. Take for example, what happened to Pete Buttigieg at a fundraiser in San Francisco,
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The massive corrupting influence of money in US politics

One of the things that this year’s election has laid bare is the dominance of the oligarchy in the process. This has always been the case but before they were acting discreetly, behind the scenes. But now it is out in the open. There are two people responsible for peeling back the veil. One is Donald Trump. By boasting about his wealth and making it one of his main appeals (though there is considerable doubt as to whether he is as wealthy as he claims), he has made other billionaires think that they too can enter electoral contests by flaunting their wealth. I have seen ads for Tom Steyer where he talks about being a real billionaire “with a b” and not a fake billionaire like Trump and how that will enable him to take him on more effectively, as if what we need is some kind of cage fight between two wealthy people.
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The Nevada caucuses

This coming Saturday, the voters of Nevada will vote for their choice of Democratic presidential nominee. This is going to be another caucus though one hopes that the Iowa debacle will not be repeated. The Nevada Democratic party decided to ditch the infamous app that caused such confusion in Iowa and one hopes that they have put in place measures to guarantee a fair vote. It is really quite extraordinary that the US has elections so frequently but has not been able to create a smooth and streamlined process and instead seems to do things at the last minute and on the fly.
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From the department of “Give them an inch …”

Some people just keep pushing the limits of what are allowed to do and then complain when they are finally told to stop.

A Florida man undergoing kidney dialysis three times a week is upset that he can’t bring a life-sized cardboard cutout of President Donald Trump for emotional support.

Nelson Gibson told WPBF that his family can’t sit with him during his three-and-a-half-hour treatments. To help, he began bringing a picture of Trump as a comfort item.

“It just feels like bringing something from home to make you comfortable,” Gibson told the West Palm Beach area television station.

Gibson said no one complained about the photo. Next, he started bringing a small cardboard cutout of himself standing next to a Trump photo. No one complained about the small cutout, and Gibson told the station that some people even took photos with it.

On Saturday, Gibson took a life-sized cutout of Trump to his treatment at Fresenius Kidney Care in Port St. Lucie. He said that again, no one took issue with this new emotional support item.

But when he returned Tuesday for treatment with the presidential cutout, Gibson ran into a roadblock.

“They told me it was too much and it wasn’t a rally,” he told the TV station.

One has to wonder about a person finds that a cardboard cutout of a politician gives him ’emotional support’ during trying times but, hey, whatever floats your boat, as the saying goes. Maybe he also sleeps with a photo of Trump under his pillow and has another one on his bedside table to soothe himself to sleep.

The real question is why he kept steadily increasing the size of the cutout. Presumably he had thought that the two smaller sizes of Trump served his need for a comfort item during the dialysis sessions. To keep making the item larger, so large that no one else in the facility could miss it, seems to indicate that he was trying to make a political statement and was hoping to goad the people at the clinic to object so that he could claim that he was being victimized for being a Trump supporter.

Trump loves playing the victim and it looks like his fans are following suit.

The anti-Sanders media narrative takes shape

Now that Bernie Sanders got the most votes in both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, the media has gone into overdrive to try and find ways to explain why those results don’t mean that he is the current leader in the race. The main one is that he only got about 30% of the vote (true) and thus 70% of the people must have voted against him (false), showing that the majority dislike him. The latter is a false inference that implies that all the people who voted for the other candidates would unify behind any single alternative.


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Gloria Steinem and the CIA

I know that many of the readers of this blog also follow Marcus Ranum’s blog stderr but for the few who don’t, I would strongly urge you to read today’s post. It is truly disturbing about the relationship that feminist icon and founder of Ms. Magazine Gloria Steinem had with the CIA and a program called MOCKINGBIRD which was, like COINTELPRO, one of the many covert projects of the US government to infiltrate, subvert, disrupt, and destroy progressive movements using a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy by fomenting schisms and conflicts along sectarian lines and thus prevent broader unity emerging among the many disenfranchised and disadvantaged groups.
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A strange and sad story

I am not sure what to make of this story about a doctor who took his own life possibly because of regrets that he had provided parents with fraudulent documents that their their children were vaccinated when they were not. These were parents who wanted their children to be vaccinated but he had decided in the last decade of his life that vaccinations were harmful and unilaterally pretended to vaccinate them.
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