Biden is Going To Be The Most Progressive President Since FDR? Did Some Put Some DMT In Bernie's Joint?

The Bernie/Biden unity task forces presented their proposals to Biden this week. No Green New Deal, no Medicare-for-All, no reparations for slavery, no legalized pot, no free college... none of the beautiful, bold ideas that invigorated young voters this cycle. In fact, Biden is promising what he's always promised: no fundamental change, just a little correction around the edges on a few things... a very little and very few. Overall, he's better than Trump and if that doesn't motivate voters-- and I think it will-- he'll lose. He isn't offering anyone anything but a warm bucket of piss... better than Trump's steaming platter of shit. This sure isn't going to get me to vote for him:

Yesterday, the NY Times assigned half a dozen reporters-- Maggie Astor, Lisa Friedman, Dana Goldstein, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Margot Sanger and Jim Tankersley-- to go through the proposals, which Biden will probably not accept anyway (don't forget, Biden has been an arch conservative for his entire career in public service), and write about them. The writer of the piece called the task force and its reports the "clearest sign yet that the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party are trying to unite far more than they did in 2016" and The Times saw what came out as an indication "that progressives succeeded in pushing some proposals leftward, influencing Mr. Biden’s policy platform." Progressives don't think so but The Times is basically part of the Biden propaganda machine now as is, more or less, Bernie and every other Democratic elected official.





Here's the Times' short version:

• Health care: Expanding government-run plans, without ‘Medicare for all’
• Criminal justice: Broad agreement on many priorities, but not on marijuana
• Climate change: New near-term targets, but no fracking ban
• The economy: Closing racial gaps and creating jobs programs
• Education: Rethinking Obama-era priorities
• Immigration: A focus on undoing Trump policies

What a disappointment-- for anyone who wasn't aware of who Biden is and unaware that the task force who absolutely refrain from embarrassing him with proposals too far to the left, like legalizing marijuana, which Biden adamantly rejects even though huge majorities of Americans want, and even a majority of Republicans. Watch Trump sniff that out and get to his left on boo, something that will absolutely attract some young voters and give Trump a patina of... something vaguely attractive in the compare and contrast department. Here's the whole package of recommendations, most of which will be weakened by Biden even further to make them much less progressive:

Health care: Expanding government-run plans, without ‘Medicare for all’

The task force’s recommendations stop far short of Mr. Sanders’s signature health care policy initiative, a single-payer “Medicare for all” system that would enroll all Americans in a generous government-run health plan.

Instead, the task force supports a government-run insurance option that would be offered to all Americans on a sliding scale according to income-- and automatically provided to low-income Americans free.

A so-called public option has always been a part of Mr. Biden’s health plan, but the recommendations specify new details, such as a requirement that certain prescription medicines be offered without any out-of-pocket spending by patients. Similar to Mr. Biden’s most recent health proposal, this one would allow Americans to become eligible for Medicare coverage at 60 instead of the current threshold, 65. The document also suggests considering how Medicare could expand its benefits to cover treatment for dental care, vision and hearing loss.

The task force also recommends special insurance options for people during the coronavirus pandemic. For those who lost coverage because they became unemployed, the task force suggests that the federal government pay the full cost of continuing that coverage under the federal law known as COBRA. People without previous coverage would be allowed to buy a new plan with no deductible, at a price determined by their income, or an existing Obamacare plan.

Criminal justice: Broad agreement on many priorities, but not on marijuana

Mr. Biden’s views on criminal justice had already shifted drastically since he helped pass the 1994 crime bill, and the task force’s recommendations reinforce that transformation. They call for eliminating private prisons, ending cash bail and eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, steps that both candidates supported in the primary; eliminating private prisons, in particular, was something Mr. Sanders championed early.

The task force also suggested a federal standard for police departments’ use of force, a national database of police officers who commit misconduct and an end to sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenders.

It did not, however, bridge a notable gap between the Biden and Sanders platforms. The task force called for decriminalizing marijuana and legalizing it at the federal level for medical use, but for letting the states decide whether to legalize it for recreational use. That is the position Mr. Biden held in the primary, in contrast to Mr. Sanders, who supports full legalization.

Climate change: New near-term targets, but no fracking ban

The climate change task force, led by former Secretary of State John Kerry and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, declared rising planet-warming emissions a nationwide “emergency.” It also directly tied the effort to reduce fossil fuels to a need to address racial injustices that have led low-income communities to bear a disproportionate level of air and water pollution.

The recommendations make no mention of the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other supporters of Mr. Sanders have championed.

There is also no mention of a national ban on fracking, which Mr. Biden has avoided calling for, despite pressure from young climate activists. But there are other signs that progressives on the task force were able to push Mr. Biden to the left.

Specifically, critics of Mr. Biden’s plan to invest $1.7 trillion in order to achieve net-zero emissions before 2050 had complained that his platform included few details on how it would achieve that faraway goal. The recommendations set a number of specific near-term benchmarks that Democrats would promise to reach. They include moving all electric power off fossil fuels by 2035; achieving carbon-neutrality in all new buildings by 2030; and installing 500 million solar panels in the next five years.

The economy: Closing racial gaps and creating jobs programs

The economics recommendations to Mr. Biden include more expansive and expensive plans than he has embraced in the campaign. They are heavily focused on addressing racial inequality and on getting Americans back to work in the wake of the recession caused by the pandemic.

The task force suggested that Mr. Biden consider several plans that his more liberal rivals had championed during the Democratic primaries, though at times it stopped short of endorsing them.

The recommendations call for “a comprehensive agenda for communities of color with ambition that matches the scale of the challenge and with recognition that race-neutral policies are not a sufficient response to race-based disparities.”

The details include asking Mr. Biden to “explore” a so-called baby bonds proposal to provide every child with a government-funded savings account at birth, a policy favored by Darrick Hamilton, an Ohio State University economist who was one of Mr. Sanders’s appointees.

A section on job creation urges consideration of another plan favored by Mr. Sanders’s appointees: a large-scale federal employment program in areas such as infrastructure development. “In order to ensure that everyone who wants to work has a pathway to employment,” the recommendation says, “the government must enact measures to create jobs and jobs programs like those effectively used during the New Deal.”

Education: Rethinking Obama-era priorities

On K-12 education, the task force report represents something of a shift away from the policy commitments of the Obama-era Democratic Party.

Instead of emphasizing standardized tests to drive accountability for teachers and students, the document talks about holistic tests of students’ skills and the importance of schools as community centers that provide a broad array of social services, such as health care and meals.

While the Obama administration was strongly supportive of charter schools, the task force promises to subject charters, which are publicly funded but privately managed, to stricter federal scrutiny, echoing policy plans released by Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, during the primary.

The document commits to tripling federal aid for low-income schools and to increasing funding for students with disabilities. School desegregation by race and class has emerged in recent years as a major concern for progressives. The task force commits to addressing the problem through strategies like busing and magnet schools, but does not mention a specific amount of funding. (Mr. Biden’s opposition to federally mandated busing was a major campaign issue last year, but he has never opposed voluntary busing.)

While many supporters of Mr. Sanders were excited by his promise of universal free tuition at public four-year colleges, the task force stops short of that commitment. It says instead that public universities should be free for families earning under $125,000 per year, and that community colleges should be free for all.

Immigration: A focus on undoing Trump policies

The report indicated that the immigration agenda of a Biden administration would focus on undoing President Trump’s restrictionist policies, which have been anathema to Democrats.

The task force recommended that Mr. Biden work with Congress to maintain protections for about 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation, a program that Mr. Trump is trying to end. It also recommended ending Mr. Trump’s travel restrictions against 13 countries, most of which have substantial Muslim populations.

The report said Mr. Biden should end a program that forced more than 60,000 migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases wound through immigration courts, and should stop diverting asylum seekers to Central American countries. Mr. Biden should increase the number of refugees who can be allowed into the United States to 125,000 per year, from Mr. Trump’s level of 18,000, and raise that cap over time, the committee said. And it called for ending the national emergency declaration that Mr. Trump has used to siphon billions of dollars in Pentagon funding for a wall along the southwestern border.

The task force stopped short of calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished, as some in the party have called for. Instead, the report recommends increasing oversight of immigration enforcement and border agencies with the creation of an ombudsman and a panel. There was also no suggestion that unauthorized border crossings should be decriminalized and made a civil offense, a change Mr. Sanders has supported, although the committee recommended prioritizing prosecutions of human traffickers.

Obviously, the far right will label this plan as Socialism! Kevin McCarthy was already on Fox & Friends clutching his pearls over Biden surrendering to the Bernie-led socialist wing of the party.

One Way We Know Bernie Is The Real FDR Democrat In The Race

This is not a Pritzker

The MSNBC circle of #NeverTrump conservative Republicans may hate Trump, but they hate Bernie as well, if not even more. One of the most disgusting of the lot, AOC-hater Donnie Deutsch, admitted on the air, on Morning Joe, that if Bernie is the nominee, he'd vote for Trump: "I find Donald Trump reprehensible as a human being, but a socialist candidate is more dangerous to this country... I would vote for Donald Trump, a despicable human being... (at which point Scarborough shut him up before he could say the words). Watch:





Soon after, MSNBC gave Deutsch his own show, which failed to get any viewers, was universally panned and lasted for about as long as his friend The Mooch lasted as Trump's press secretary.

On Monday morning, the Daily Beast published a piece by Lachlan Markay: They Donated to Trump’s Inauguration. Now These Big Donors Are Funding His 2020 Competition. Well, they're funding certain candidates, but not Trump's real 2020 competition. The deranged-- and mostly crooked-- multimillionaires and billionaires who hoped to buy favor from Trump by funneling millions of dollars directly into his pockets through an inaugural committee that was nothing but a payoff scheme for Trump, have been donating to almost everyone-- even John Delaney!-- but Bernie (of course).

In January 2019, Jennifer Pritzker wrote an impassioned plea to her political party: She was a lifelong Republican, but the GOP was driving her away with messaging and policies targeting transgender people.

It had only been a few years since Pritzker, the world’s only known trans billionaire and a Republican megadonor, had chipped in a whopping $250,000 to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. But three months after publicly objecting to the GOP’s stance on trans issues, she gave $1,000 to Democrat Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Pritzker is a member of a prominent, wealthy, and politically active family (her cousin J.B. Pritzker is the Democratic governor of Illinois, and his sister Penny was Barack Obama’s commerce secretary). But she is far from the only donor to Trump’s inauguration who has financially supported one of his potential Democratic presidential challengers.

The Daily Beast tallied 15 such donors who collectively gave more than $700,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee but who have since contributed to the presidential campaigns of Democratic candidates, including Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Eric Swalwell, and John Delaney.

The donors have a mixed record of prior support for Republicans. Some, like Pritzker, consistently contributed large sums to GOP candidates. Others had more bipartisan giving histories. And some chipped in to the Trump inaugural despite largely supporting Democrats in the past.

Taken together, though, the crop of donors who ponied up to celebrate Trump’s 2016 victory only to actively combat his re-election a few years later represent some notable political defections. And while the Trump re-election effort certainly is not hurting for cash as the election year begins, those defections signal some discontent among donors who, undoubtedly for various reasons, chose to signal their support for the new president just a few years ago.

...Greg Maffei, the chief executive of the Colorado-based media company Liberty Media, is another $250,000 donor to the Trump inaugural who is backing Democrats in 2020. Though he didn’t donate to Trump’s presidential campaign, he did so for Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008.

This time around, though, Maffei has supported the two Democratic presidential candidates from his home state. In March 2019, he gave the per-election maximum of $2,800 to Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor. Two months later, after a max-out donation to Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, Maffei donated $100,000 to a super PAC supporting Hickenlooper. After Hickenlooper withdrew from the race, Maffei donated the legal maximum to Bennet’s presidential campaign.

...Chrysa Tsakopoulos Demos, the chief executive of California land-development company AKT Investments, is a longtime Republican donor who backed Sen. Ted Cruz’s bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. She donated $5,000 to the Trump inaugural, and continued donating to Republicans through 2018, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and Great America Committee, Vice President Mike Pence’s political group.

But Demos’ only federal political contribution so far in the 2020 cycle is the $2,800 she donated last year to Biden’s presidential campaign.

...Leonard Wilf, a real-estate developer and co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings, has donated to both Democrats and Republicans. But just a few weeks before the 2016 election, he donated $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign and an additional $5,000 to a PAC supporting her. When Clinton lost, Wilf chipped in $25,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. With Trump back on the ballot, though, Wilf is once again supporting a Democrat; in March 2019, he maxed out to Klobuchar’s campaign.

Florida physician Azzam Muftah maxed out to Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and wrote a handful of checks to the Democratic National Committee. But he donated $3,000 to the Trump inauguration, and during the 2018 cycle donated to a number of Senate Republicans, including Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Mike Braun, and Jim Risch.

Come 2019, though, Muftah began chipping in to Trump challengers. So far this cycle, he’s donated to both Buttigieg and Booker.

Bruce Mosler, the chairman of real-estate giant Kushman & Wakefield’s global brokerage practice and a $25,000 donor to the Trump inaugural, really likes to hedge his bets. During the 2008 presidential race, he donated to the campaigns of Clinton, Biden, and Rudy Giuliani. In 2012, he supported both Romney and Barack Obama. Four years later, he donated to both Clinton and Trump.

In 2020, though, Mosler is supporting Biden. He’s donated $5,000 to Biden’s PAC and another $2,800 to his campaign.

Monday morning, NJ.com reported that when DCCC-Blue Dog Jeff Van Drew flipped from a Trump-supporting fake Democrat to a Trump-Worshipping Republican, his campaign manager, political operative Josh Roesch slid right into running the campaign of one of the establishment Democrats running against Van Drew, the Kennedy wife in this case.

Roesch, apparently a moron, told NJ.com, "I thought I was working for a Democrat. I’d like to go work for a Democrat still." I hope Amy Kennedy is more of a Democrat than Van Drew ever was. The DCCC recruited him when he was the most-Republican member of any Democrat in the New Jersey state legislature. It's always what the DCCC wants in candidates. These kinds of things may be important to you and I, but among the elites, a Biden or Mayo Pete or a Trump... mostly all the same. A Jeff Van Drew or a Kennedy... same/same. And that's exactly why Bernie stands out and why you won't find people like Josh Roesch, let along a Donny Deutsch, a Jennifer Pritzker or a Greg Maffei backing him. Bernie's the candidate of working men and women, not of the elites. And that's why I've embedded the ActBlue thermometer on the right. Please click on it and make Donny Deutsch, Jennifer Pritzker and Greg Maffei cry.

Last night, Politico published a more serious piece than we usually come to expect from them-- The coming clash between Bernie and Biden by Marc Caputo and Holly Otterbein. And it's about Biden's longstanding record of trying to gut Social Security and Medicare. Bernie staffer David Sirota told them that "Biden has repeatedly worked to cut Social Security, and has never offered up a good explanation for that crusade. His Social Security record is not only atrocious on a policy level, it is an enormous political vulnerability in both a primary and a general election. Bernie Sanders has exactly the opposite record-- he’s fought those cuts and fought to expand Social Security, and that is a contrast Democratic voters deserve to know." And tonight's the night.

Biden’s advisers said the former vice president will be ready to take on Sanders and prevail against his attacks onstage just as he did when opponents Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Bill de Blasio went after him, only to see their critiques fall flat as they lost ground and exited the race as Biden pressed ahead.

Sanders, though, differs from those other candidates in one important way: He has a devoted base of loyal followers who show no signs of deserting him, many of whom want to see Sanders take the fight to a rival they view as the embodiment of the Democratic establishment by focusing on one of the party’s signature legacy programs, Social Security. He has also already repeatedly criticized Biden for his votes for the Iraq War and free-trade deals on the debate stage without seemingly suffering.

The Sanders team’s expected assault comes as he is at the top of the polls in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa, but still significantly polling behind Biden among seniors. It’s not guaranteed he will execute the attack on Biden in a sustained way: After previous debates, some of his aides and supporters have been disappointed that he hasn’t confronted Biden more aggressively.

The two men’s history over the issue provides a window into their political personas, pitting Sanders, the left-wing outsider against Biden, the moderate dealmaker with a legacy of working with Republicans. Already, that positioning that has proved politically challenging for Biden in the leftward-shifting Democratic primary.

In proposing a Social Security plan during the primary with none of the cuts or changes he once countenanced, Biden has moved more toward Sanders-- a triumph for a progressive movement that fought for years to ensure Democratic politicians would only consider growing the program, instead of raising age eligibility requirements or freezing cost-of-living adjustments to make it pay out less.

“Bernie was key in that evolution,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who served as Biden’s chief economist and economic adviser from 2009 to 2011.

It was in December 2010 that Sanders filibustered the Biden-negotiated deal with Republicans that extended Bush-era tax cuts, cut the estate tax, continued unemployment benefits and created a temporary Social Security payroll tax cut, or “tax holiday.”

The deal was struck just a month after Republicans, in the words of President Obama, had just “shellacked” Democrats at the polls. Obama and Biden were facing reelection in less than two years; the president wanted to position himself as a reasonable centrist who was serious about deficit reduction. He was mindful he had to deal with divided government in Congress, and feeling the pressure to stimulate the economy with tax cuts because the scars of the recession were not healed.

After Biden briefed the Democratic caucus about the plan, Sanders was angered, said his senior adviser Warren Gunnels: “You can see Bernie sitting there listening to that and his blood starting to boil.”

Sanders said he believed the only concession Democrats received was the jobless benefits extension-- but his team had determined that that such benefits had been extended on a bipartisan basis every time the unemployment rate was as high as it was at the time. And he fretted that temporarily trimming Social Security taxes could ultimately help weaken the program.

So Sanders filibustered, mentioning Biden three times only by his title-- but never saying his name-- on the Senate floor as he blasted the deal the then-vice president negotiated with Republicans.

“I know the vice president recently made the point this was originally a Republican idea,” Sanders said, referring to the caucus meeting. “Why did the Republicans come up with this idea? These are exactly the same people who do not believe in Social Security.”

Biden responded with an op-ed in USA Today a month later where he accused opponents of the deal, without naming Sanders, of spreading “misinformation.”

Sanders failed to stop the measure. And his specific fears about weakening Social Security’s tax structure didn’t come to pass, though Social Security advocates said it helped popularize the idea of payroll-tax holidays.

But it catapulted Sanders into the burgeoning progressive movement’s national spotlight by criticizing Obama and Biden from the left. His speech trended on Twitter and blanketed cable television news, and Sanders’ office was inundated with more calls than they had ever received, an aide said.

“Bernie won the debate outside the Beltway,” Gunnels said. “I really think that lit a spark for the movement that Senator Sanders has led to create. That was really kind of the launching pad.”

Bernstein, Biden’s former adviser, agreed, saying Sanders was “showing himself to dissent from the mainstream Democratic playbook, trying to break from a fold that he felt was not pursuing good politics or policy. There’s clearly been a constituency of Democrats who are seeking a more liberal or progressive set of policies than the mainstream was serving up in those years.”

“That group has gotten a lot more attention from candidates and even the more moderate candidates have to their credit evolved with this constituency,” Bernstein said.

Sanders supporters chuckle at the irony that Sanders’ national political profile-- which is helping him mount one of the biggest threats to Biden’s presidential ambitions-- is, in part, the inadvertent byproduct of Biden’s penchant for cutting deals with Republicans.

Bernstein cautions that, while there’s a “leftward drift in the evolution of our agenda” that Sanders helped harness, Democratic voters are still moderate and Biden is a “full-throated and full-blooded supporter of Social Security.”

While Biden’s campaign won’t discuss his previous support for Social Security cuts and spending freezes, his defenders acknowledge he changed. They say the major reasons for that weren’t due to Sanders, but the bad economy of the recession, the bad faith of Tea Party Republicans who dictated the congressional agenda after winning the House in 2010, and a new perception in Washington political circles that didn’t view deficits, especially from safety-net programs, as nearly as dangerous as they previously had.

Biden’s earliest forays into Social Security cuts happened in 1984, when congressional concerns over Reagan-era deficits grew and he co-sponsored a failed proposal with Republicans to freeze spending, including cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security, which would have had the effect of a financial cut for recipients and a savings for government. Reagan and the Senate Republican leadership opposed it, saying it contained serious cuts to Social Security.

Sanders’ campaign pointed out last week that Biden in 1995 recalled on the Senate floor his four prior attempts to balance the budget, saying that he had been ready “to freeze all government spending, including Social Security, including everything.”

Before his second failed bid for president, Biden in 2007 said he would “absolutely” consider Social Security and Medicare spending limits but noted the political risks in pursuit of balancing the budget.

“The political advisers say to me is ‘whoa, don’t touch that third [rail],’” Biden said in a 2007 Meet the Pres” interview. “Look: the American people aren’t stupid.”

During the 2012 reelection, Biden struck a different posture when he told voters in Virginia that “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.” But after reelection, the Obama administration, locked in negotiations with Republicans over what was known as the “fiscal cliff,” offered to change the way cost-of-living adjustments are calculated. Ultimately, the plan went nowhere because Republicans refused to consider tax increases and progressive Democrats balked, led partly by Sanders, at the Social Security plans.

Biden’s campaign accused Sanders and his team of failing to account for the liberal work the former vice president and president did for safety-net programs by passing Obamacare, the 2009 stimulus bill and the 2010 tax cut package that included the Social Security “tax holiday” that was deemed effective by some economists and his team said was a “godsend for working Americans hit indescribably hard by the financial crisis.”

...To progressives, though, Sanders was a voice in the wilderness standing up for Social Security during that time.

“It was a very lonely place,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works and a Sanders supporter. “There was a cacophony of calls for doing something about the debt and Bernie Sanders basically rejected the premise that that’s what it was about...In 2010, the ‘grand bargain’ was at the peak of its popularity in the elite media, in the elite political circles in D.C., in this reinforcing bubble that decided that it made a lot of sense to cut benefits.”