It's Troubling That Bernie And Biden Are Tied In Iowa-- Is Biden's Under The Radar Strategy Working?

In this MSNBC promo-video, Chris Hayes says something worth remembering when you decide who to vote for: "Who will they fight for? What will they fight for? Can they be trusted to do what they say? Everything else is noise." A few days ago, writing for CNN.com, Jill Filipovic asserted that the biggest 2020 mistake the Democrats could make would be to nominate Status Quo Joe. If you don't see how that relates to the Robert Reich video above, consider clicking over to Daily Kos and getting your election coverage there.

As for Filipovic, everyone can agree with her first point: Americans are sick of Trump and want to replace him, even voters who say they are financially better off. "At this point," she wrote, "the election is the left's to lose... The question now facing the Democratic Party is how. Former Vice President Joe Biden has the highest favorable results in the Quinnipiac poll, but at least anecdotally, the voters I've spoken with who support Biden all do so because of some vague concept of 'electability.' They aren't necessarily excited about him, but they think some other imagined voters will like him the best. One of the most dangerous things Democratic and independent voters could do right now is to read the numbers from Quinnipiac (and other recent polls about the 2020 race) and conclude that Joe Biden is the clear and obvious choice to oppose Trump in 2020."

Nominating a milquetoast, ostensibly "safe" candidate may feel like the right decision in such a crucial election. But it may also cost Democrats the White House.

Are voters going to rally en masse for Biden? Is he going to embody the spirit and excitement of a successful campaign? Do voters believe that he has a vision and a plan for America?

Voters are hungry for an alternative to Trump. But that alternative has to hit him where he's weakest. That's why whoever the Democratic nominee is needs to run on a dual message of integrity and opportunity: Return honor to the White House and restore America's damaged reputation the world over; offer a visionary, clear and specific plan for expanding opportunity for every American, scaling back inequality and improving the country. That doesn't mean returning to the pre-Trump days. That means moving forward.

Trump still draws crowds of hardcore fans at his rallies, the same people who love yelling about walls and donning red hats. But a crowd showing up to watch a showman doesn't necessarily mean that showman will win an election. Trump is deeply divisive, and those who were taken in with his message of American strength-- and those, frankly, who were mostly just amused by him-- may have soured on the idea of voting for him ever again.

If a Democrat can capture this tangible need for change and connect with those who feel it-- whether that's the voters who despise Trump or those who could be persuaded that there's a better way forward-- she will win. But the worst thing the left can do right now is what we did in 2016: Read the tea leaves and conclude that the election is in the bag.

2020 could very easily be a big win for Democrats. But complacency, and even reliance on the perceived safest choice, could mean another four years of Trump."

Obviously corporate Dems have a different way of looking at this. Biden's people have a leash and muzzle on him so he's not allowed to say anything at all that isn't in their own script. Frackenlooper, the same kind of garbage candidate, however, has no one controlling what he says. He was on NPR's Morning Edition last Thursday. Taking slam at the candidates who are polling ahead of him-- actually everyone but Wayne Messam is polling had of him-- but really with his own evil eye focused on Bernie, he whined that "if we don't stand up and say that we Democrats don't stand for socialism, we're going to end up reelecting the worst president this country's ever had." He said the party has to be focused on bread-and-butter issues like jobs and then gratuitously slammed programs that create jobs for all Americans. How whole slick shtik made no sense when you look closely at it. Which helps explain why Democratic primary voters don't like him. (Voters in Colorado hate him too-- but, for the most part, for entirely different reasons.) "Certainly we want to address income inequality... But we've also got to recognize to win in Ohio and Michigan and North Carolina and Wisconsin, we're going to have to get more to those kitchen table issues that have to do with somebody's job, or how many jobs they're having to work just to balance a household budget."

Bernie beat Hillary in Michigan and Wisconsin because voters appreciated his bold positions on kitchen table issues. While the Democratic Party in general in writing Ohio off to Trump, Bernie is making it key to his own campaign.

As for Biden, he's leading polls where name-familiarity is what's being measured. In Iowa, though, Democratic voters pride themselves on being discerning and responsible candidate connoisseurs, so as to keep up their first-in-the-nation status. A new poll there, released yesterday by Change Research (this cycle's most worthwhile polling firm), shows Bernie and Biden exactly tied at 24% each:

And by the way, when the pollsters asked Iowa Democrats who are likely to participate in the caucus how they feel about each candidate, this is what they found:

• Frackenlooper

• Very favorable- 2%
• Somewhat favorable- 16%
• Neutral- 40%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 4%
• Very unfavorable- 1%
• Never heard of them- 38%

• Bernie

• Very favorable- 39%
• Somewhat favorable- 32%
• Neutral- 13%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 11%
• Very unfavorable- 5%
• Never heard of them- 0%

• Biden

• Very favorable- 37%
• Somewhat favorable- 32%
• Neutral- 10%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 13%
• Very unfavorable- 9%
• Never heard of them- 0%

OK, so now some of the others who can expect to win delegates:

• Elizabeth Warren

• Very favorable- 40%
• Somewhat favorable- 38%
• Neutral- 13%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 7%
• Very unfavorable- 1%
• Never heard of them- 1%

• Kamala

• Very favorable- 34%
• Somewhat favorable- 36%
• Neutral- 16%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 4%
• Very unfavorable- 3%
• Never heard of them- 7%

• McKensey Pete

• Very favorable- 35%
• Somewhat favorable- 30%
• Neutral- 17%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 5%
• Very unfavorable- 3%
• Never heard of them- 11%

• Beto

• Very favorable- 15%
• Somewhat favorable- 40%
• Neutral- 28%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 9%
• Very unfavorable- 3%
• Never heard of them- 5%

• Cory Booker

• Very favorable- 16%
• Somewhat favorable- 40%
• Neutral- 25%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 7%
• Very unfavorable- 2%
• Never heard of them- 9%

• Amy Klobuchar

• Very favorable- 23%
• Somewhat favorable- 29%
• Neutral- 27%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 8%
• Very unfavorable- 3%
• Never heard of them- 20%

• Julian Castro

• Very favorable- 4%
• Somewhat favorable- 28%
• Neutral- 41%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 3%
• Very unfavorable- 2%
• Never heard of them- 23%

• Gillibrand

• Very favorable- 6%
• Somewhat favorable- 32%
• Neutral- 34%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 9%
• Very unfavorable- 4%
• Never heard of them- 15%

• Tulsi

• Very favorable- 8%
• Somewhat favorable- 16%
• Neutral- 33%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 6%
• Very unfavorable- 5%
• Never heard of them- 31%

• John Delaney

• Very favorable- 2%
• Somewhat favorable- 14%
• Neutral- 41%
• Somewhat unfavorable- 3%
• Very unfavorable- 3%
• Never heard of them- 37%

I didn't include the other 2,000 candidates because none of them had been heard of by enough voters to make the results worth looking at. Now let's take a  look at those findings in another way. Here are the candidates, listed in order of favorability-- very favorable + somewhat favorable combined:

• Elizabeth Warren- 78%
• Bernie- 71%
• Kamala- 70%
• Biden- 69%
• McKensey Pete- 65%
• Cory Booker- 56%
• Beto- 55%
• Amy Klobuchar- 52%
• Gillibrand 38%
• Castro- 32%
• Tulsi- 24%
• Frackenlooper- 18%
• Delaney 16%

Status Quo by Nancy Ohanian

The American People Understand That What's Needed Now Is Disruption, NOT Status Quo Politics

The carbon-tax approach to Climate Change has been an utter and preposterous failure-- the stupidest bullshit approach to an existential calamity in the history of man. Pelosi and other establishment Democrats like it and it's becoming a fallback for Republicans now that the real world is moving away from that "market-based" non-solution. Over the weekend, The Economist was singing its praises:

In economics, climate change is a big but straightforward example of a market failure, with a correspondingly straightforward solution. People take environmentally harmful decisions because the private benefits of doing so (using a car to get to work, say) outweigh the private costs (the price of the petrol to run the car). But emission-producing activities also impose social costs-- deaths from pollution and collisions, the contribution of carbon emissions to climate change-- that do not influence an individual’s decision to drive rather than walk or take public transport. To solve the climate problem, then, governments need only include the social cost of carbon in the prices people pay. The simplest approach is a levy on emissions corresponding to that social cost. Carbon-intensive activities become more expensive, and people efficiently reduce their emissions by responding to prices. It is an elegant approach favoured by this newspaper. In January a distinguished and bipartisan list of economists signed a letter that ran in the Wall Street Journal arguing in favour of a version that would refund carbon-tax revenue in the form of a flat, universal dividend.

It works on paper but would do little to save humanity. The Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Ocasio and others is a game-changer that frightens status quo politicians out of their minds. They don't like game-changing; it threatens the status quo. That's why they fear and hate Ocasio Cortez. She's turning their world upside down and inside out and they're about ready to explode. Everything she wants is too hard.

"On the campaign trail," reported Gregory Krieg and Ashley Killough for CNN, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned herself into a phenomenon. So far it's been the same in Congress, where she's using her star power to turn ordinarily dry hearings into viral, must-see TV. This week her target-- well, one of them-- was campaign finance. Seated at a big leather chair, she went on the attack like she was back on the stump, whipping through a fierce argument about Washington's influence machinery that got retweeted and described as "just sensational" by late-night host James Corden. By Friday afternoon, she was getting invited to watch the Grammys with Chrissy Teigen, who called her 'my hero'."

Kevin McCarthy has been in electoral politics since 2000 when he was elected to be a Kern Community College District trustee. 2 years later he was in the state Assembly and in 2006 he was elected to Congress, where he's a DC version of a star-- like Mitch McTurtle, who has been in elective office since 1977 and was first elected to the Senate in 1984 and exercises immense-- and almost exclusively destructive-- power over every man, woman and child in our country. Can you image Chrissy Teigen ever inviting either over to watch the Grammys and have some pizza. The idea is absurd. Maybe if she was a lobbyist instead of a model...

Last week she "debuted the Green New Deal resolution, her first major legislative proposal, alongside Sen. Ed Markey-- a Massachusetts Democrat who's been in Congress for longer than she's been alive. The launch further stoked a suddenly riveting debate over climate change and jobs programs, which landed on the front page of the New York Times," a paper that barely mentioned her name while she ran her successful campaign against a hack status quo garbage politician who was slated to become the next Speaker after Pelosi finally disappears.

While the fate of the Green New Deal remains a long way off, Ocasio-Cortez has consistently defied critics from both parties who at times seem to be tripping over each other to question her tactics, especially her aggressive use of social media. Ocasio-Cortez's communications director and longtime aide, Corbin Trent, said the Bronx-born congresswoman has no plans to change-- that Twitter and Instagram were key tools for galvanizing the public support that ultimately inspired a handful of the party's top presidential hopes to back the resolution.

"The way she operates, whether it's to come up with lines of questioning or lines of messaging, or how to present things to her constituents or to the American people or to the party-- it's continuous listening and talking," Trent told CNN. "When she using social media, that is essentially a practice run and a conversation that she's working and developing."

It's a long way from November, when she spent part of her first official visit to Washington joining a sit-in of now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, where young activists from the Sunrise Movement gathered to agitate for urgent climate action.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said Ocasio-Cortez represents "a classic story of how somebody gets assimilated into the institution while preserving all their values and desires for change."

"I think it's been a wonderful transition to see someone go from being a full-time activist to being a legislator and an activist," he said.

Pelosi's relationship with Ocasio-Cortez has, to date, been mutually beneficial. Ocasio-Cortez helped secure the California liberal's left flank amid a leadership challenge. Pelosi, even while denying the New Yorker a new select committee assignment that would have been dedicated specifically to shaping the Green New Deal, offered her a seat on a different climate panel.

Ocasio-Cortez turned down the offer, citing the time she needed to manage her other assignments. Their relationship now is less a fight than a dance.

Asked on Thursday about Pelosi's description, in a Politico report, of the Green New Deal as "the green dream or whatever they call it," Ocasio-Cortez passed up a chance to land a jab.

"No, it is a green dream," she told reporters. "I don't consider that to be a dismissive term."

Even as her profile-- and influence-- rises, Ocasio-Cortez operates much as she did on the campaign trail. During a visit to the Midwest last summer to stump for other progressive hopefuls, Ocasio-Cortez would unleash her fire at the mic but then move quietly backstage at events, jotting in her notebook, constantly updating her speech with a new line or idea.

"What we're seeing is that there is not one single way to get things done," Trent said. "She was saying today, everybody says this is the way things are done in Washington and there certainly is a way things have been done in Washington, and there are certainly people who are going to continue to work that way. And I'm sure they'll be able to get things done. But there are also other paths."

Rep. Brenda Lawrence said Ocasio-Cortez and other new members who came in as activists are learning how to operate in a deliberative body.

"It's one thing to protest. It's another to pass laws and bills and actually impact lives and make a difference," said Lawrence, a third-term Michigan Democrat who co-chairs the bipartisan Women's Caucus. "So she's at the beginning of that. And I'm excited. She's going to have some growth and some bumps in the road."

"Every step is growth," she added. "She has such a large media platform, which I pray continues to be a positive one and continues to be one of the boldness of speaking truth to power."

How about a House twitter update? These are the members of the House who were mentioned a lot in the media last week and who have prominent roles in Congress-- along with the number of people who follow them on Twitter

• AOC (D-NY)- 3 million
• Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)- 2.23 million
• Peter King (R-NY)- 1.8 million
• Adam Schiff (D-CA)- 1.19 million
• John Lewis (D-GA)- 1.03 million
• Maxine Waters (D-CA)- 974 K
• Ted Lieu (D-CA)- 943 K
• Joe Kennedy III (D-MA)- 745 K
• Ilhan Omar (D-MN)- 507 K
• Eric Swalwell (D-CA)- 448 K
• Gym Jordan (R-OH)- 419 K
• Devin Nunes (D-CA)- 362 K
• Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)- 336K
• Steve Scalise (R-LA)- 288 K
• Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI)- 270 K
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- 232 K
• Barbara Lee (D-CA)- 223 K
• Mark Meadows (R-NC)- 222 K
• Matt Gaetz (R-FL)- 203 K
• Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)- 193K
• Louie Gohmert (R-TX)- 189 K
• Justin Amash (R-MI)- 153 K
• Seth Moulton (D-MA)- 135 K
• Steve King (R-IA)- 113 K
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)- 111 K
• Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)- 103 K
• Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)- 97.3 K
• Ro Khanna (D-CA)- 90.5 K
• Conor Lamb (D-PA)- 89.4 K
• Jerry Nadler (D-NY)- 87K
• Liz Cheney (R-WY)- 79.1 K
• Mark Pocan (D-WI)- 76.2 K
• David Cicilline (D-RI)- 73.9 K
• Tim Ryan (D-OH)- 68.8 K
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)- 48.9 K
• Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)- 47.7 K
• Jim McGovern (D-MA)- 45.7 K
• Jamie Raskin (D-MD)- 44.4 K
• Frank Pallone (D-NJ)- 31.6 K
• Cheri Bustos (D-IL)- 31.3 K
• Eliot Engel (D-NY)- 28.5 K
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC)- 24.5 K
• Elise Stefanik (R-NY) 21.9 K
• Richard Neal (D-MA)- 20.1 K
• Ben Ray Lujan(D-NM)- 20.2K
• Kathy Castor (D-FL)- 17.4 K
• Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)- 13.2 K
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC)- 4.4 K

Primaries For Bad Democrats?

One New Dem leader down, another one to go

I just got back from a post-election rest in Istanbul. On Saturday I was still there and I dashed off a post about how Blue America is going about looking for 2020 congressional recruits. That generated a ton of e-mails like this one [in part] from Melissa in Houston:

My husband and I have faithfully contributed to the Blue America candidates you guys recommend for almost 10 years. That's because we are never shy in pointing out the short-comings of the conservative Democrats who refer to as "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party." We have found your "Primary A Blue Dog" Act Blue sight especially helpful and we and our friends gave money to Marie Newman, Kara Eastman, Alexandria Ocasio and Kevin de Leon there. I hope when you are recruiting for 2020, you will not just be doing the DCCC's job for them but also looking for alternatives to Democrats who act like Republicans.

No need to worry about that! We have already been talking with several candidates interested in taking on some of the worst of the Blue Dogs and New Dems in 2020. You may have seen this tweet I posted Saturday:

It was in response to a couple of Ocasio-Cortez staffers:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the most spectacularly successful progressive to challenge a bad Dem this cycle. Spectacular for three reasons.

• She is the whole package, one of the sharpest and highest calibre candidates to run anywhere-- someone whose politics are in historical and personal context
• Joe Crowley was a quintessential villain: an ambitious, opportunistic poster child for everything-- no, really, everything-- that is wrong with congressional politics, even beyond being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street.
• She accomplished all this right under the nose of the mainstream media, which had basically never heard of her until the day after she beat the "next Speaker."

Alex Thompson, writing for Politico took a look at her suggestion that progressive groups put some real energy and resources into cleaning up the Democratic Party brand by encouraging and supporting candidates who primary bad Dems. "Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday threw her weight behind a new national campaign to mount primaries against incumbent Democrats deemed to be ideologically and demographically out of step with their districts," he wrote. The incoming star congresswoman from New York again put the Democratic establishment on notice that she and activist groups on the left aren’t content with a Democratic-controlled House: They are determined to move the party to the left."

On a video conference call with supporters Saturday, she said "All Americans know money in politics is a huge problem, but unfortunately the way that we fix it is by demanding that our incumbents give it up or by running fierce campaigns ourselves. That's really what we need to do to save this country. That's just what it is." She added that people who take money from the special interests their committees oversee, should not be on those committees. "I don't think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting climate legislation."

The incoming congresswoman's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, a co-founder of Justice Democrats, was blunter.

"We need new leaders, period," he said on the call. "We gotta primary folks."

...[I]t is unusual for freshmen Democrats to throw their support behind an organization that is threatening to wage primaries against their new colleagues. And it’s unclear whether it could trigger a backlash from incumbent lawmakers who want to take advantage of their newfound majority to get things done, rather than sweating a primary challenge.

But Ocasio-Cortez has already made clear she’s looking to break the mold. During her first week in Washington, she joined a protest in Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office, supporting calls for a “Green New Deal."

”It wasn’t a very polite move to do," Chakrabarti said.

Ocasio-Cortez said at the sit-in that she was not there to protest Pelosi but to support the activists and their agenda.

“Should Leader Pelosi become the next speaker of the House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back in showing and pursuing the most progressive energy agenda that this country has ever seen,” she told them. “This is about unity. This is about solidarity.”

When Blue America started looking for someone to primary Crowley, Ocasio had just turned voting age. We never found anyone; she found us after she was already well on the way to winning (with the help of the Justice Democrats).

Taking into account ideology, the districts themselves, corruption, voting records, etc-- though not identity politics-- the House districts Blue America is trying to recruit in for primaries are below, listed alphabetically by state [Note: if we find one or two on this whole list, it will be a miracle.]:

• CA-07- Ami Bera (New Dem) D+3
• CA-16- Jim Costa (Blue Dog) D+9
• CA-29- Tony Cardenas (New Dem) D+29
• CA-31- Pete Aguilar (New Dem) D+8
• CA-46- Lou Correa (Blue Dog) D+15
• CA-52- Scott Peters (New Dem) D+6
• CT-04- Jim Himes (New Dem) D+7
• FL-23- Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem) D+11
• IL-03- Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog) D+6
• IL-10- Brad Schneider (New Dem) D+10
• MD-05- Steny Hoyer D+16
• MA-06 Seth Moulton (New Dem) D+6
• MA-08- Stephen Lynch D+10
• MN-07- Collin Peterson (Blue Dog) R+12
• NJ-01- Donald Norcross (New Dem) D+13
• NJ-05- Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog) R+3
• NY-04- Kathleen Rice (New Dem) D+4
• NY-05- Greg Meeks (New Dem) D+37
• OR-05- Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog) PVI is even
• TN-05- Jim Cooper (Blue Dog) D+7
• TX-15- Vicente González (Blue Dog) D+7
• TX-28- Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog) D+9
• TX-34- Filemon Vela (Blue Dog) D+10

There are no newly elected freshmen on the list, even though some really terrible ones are about to take office. Let's give them a chance before we go after them.

By the way, when I tweeted the original off-the-top-of-my-head list up top, one of the biggest responses was "What about Hoyer?" He's Crowley times 10 but we're always looking for someone willing. I spoke with someone (while I was still in Istanbul) who said "maybe... but not now." Reporting for Common Dreams on Friday, Julia Conley wrote that "While progressives have been focused this week on pressuring House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to embrace bold initiatives, an interview with Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) served as a reminder that the second-ranking Democrat's vision for the party is sorely lacking, as it heads into a new term with control of the House."

On NPR's Morning Edition early Friday, Steve Inskeep asked Hoyer about Medicare for All, which 26 newly-elected Democrats support. Outspoken support for the plan helped progressive challengers including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib win their elections, while 84 percent of Democratic voters-- and 70 percent of Americans overall-- now back the proposal.

The skyrocketing support for Medicare for All, however, appears to have gone unnoticed by Hoyer, who replied with familiar promises of "affordable, quality healthcare" but gave no sign of backing the proposal which even a Koch Brothers-backed study estimates would save Americans $2 trillion in overall healthcare costs.

...Hoyer's interview served as a reminder that the congressman, who has served since 1981, poses as much if not more of a threat to the passage of progressive policies as Pelosi. As Jonathan Tasini, host of Working Life podcast, noted on Twitter, Hoyer has threatened other broadly popular social programs as one of the Democratic Party's most powerful members.

One fairly senior Democrat in Congress-- a Pelosi supporter-- told me he would never vote for Hoyer to lead the party. "That would be a disaster," he told me last night. "Every single bill would go through K Street. It would be like John Boehner all over again."

Meanwhile... an oldie but goodie-- as true today as it ever was-- if not more so:

Mad Dog Donald Trump Has A New Target-- Vulnerable Seniors In Long Term Care Facilities

What's more exciting, watching the new season of Game of Thrones or the new season of the Señor Trumpanzee Presidency? Remember, though, while we're being distracted by the outrageous antics of America's first-ever kakistocracy, they're working behind the scenes to chip away at everything that makes America great... little by little, relentlessly. Their latest victims: residents of nursing homes. No, really... that's who the Regime is going after now (No, not MS-13, seniors in nursing homes.) The audio above ran on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday.

What Trump wants to do-- well it's what the Chamber of Commerce wants to do but Team Trump is doing the dirty work for them-- is take away the right of abuse and negligence victims' right to sue nursing homes by forcing them to agree to arbitration rather than jury trials. 17 state attorney generals--led by Brain Frosh (D-MD) and Xavier Becerra (D-CA)-- and 31 senators-- led by Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Al Franken (D-MN)-- and the AARP are trying to stop Trump but he now seems to have gotten it in his mind that targeting nursing home patients is something he needs to stand firm on.

Long before he was a congressman, Alan Grayson wrote his masters thesis at Harvard on gerontology and then founded and ran the non-profit Alliance for Aging Research, after serving as a law clerk for both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia! Elder-care has always been one of the portfolios of issues that has driven his political career. He helped write the Medicare-For-All legislation and worked to try to persuade the leaders of both parties to include the care of teeth, eyes and ears in Medicare. When that eventually happens-- and it will-- we'll have Grayson to thank. There is no political leader who gets more incensed over elder-abuse than Grayson, so I went right to him when I saw what Trump is trying to do with these new rules. "It’s just typical of the kind of regulatory 'initiatives' that you see whenever the GOP has power," he told me this morning. "They pay lobbyists billions of dollars a year to generate this kind of malicious garbage, and press the buttons to have it proposed in the Federal Register, 'dropped' as a bill in Congress, inserted into the 'legislative history' of an appropriations bill, etc. In this case, it’s particularly malicious though, because Trump will never find himself in any 'long-term care facility,' unless it’s a federal prison."

Robert Pear covered the ugly news for the NY Times last week, as the Regime brings "its campaign to relax federal regulations to the delicate business of care for older Americans."

The push would undo a rule issued by the Obama administration that would have prevented nursing homes from requiring that consumers agree to resolve any disputes through arbitration rather than litigation. Nursing homes routinely require consumers to sign an arbitration agreement as a condition of admission to the home.

The proposed rule brings together a broader private-sector effort to slip binding-arbitration clauses into the fine print of consumer contracts with the Trump administration’s expansive efforts to roll back regulations and reduce the costs to businesses.

But both matters are particularly sensitive when it comes to older Americans, especially those in nursing homes where such arbitration agreements have already blocked legal recourse, even in egregious cases. About half of nursing home residents have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and consumer advocates say harried family members could easily miss the arbitration clauses as they move a loved one into a home offering care.

“Individuals are very vulnerable when they sign contracts to enter a nursing home,” said Kimberly A. Valentine, a lawyer in Orange County, Calif., who has represented scores of nursing home residents. “In many cases, they are transferred from a hospital, and they are in a nursing home bed for several days before the contracts are even signed. The arbitration agreement may be just one page in a voluminous contract of 30 to 40 pages. Most of the people who come to me have no idea they’ve even signed an arbitration agreement.”

The Obama administration tried to ban such agreements, saying it was “almost impossible for residents or their decision-makers to give fully informed and voluntary consent to arbitration before a dispute has arisen.” Poor or negligent care at some nursing homes has persisted, even after the facilities have attracted regulatory scrutiny.

But the Trump administration says the ban on arbitration agreements imposes “unnecessary or excessive costs on providers” of nursing home care. It noted that President Trump, in an executive order, had directed agencies to roll back rules and reduce “regulatory costs.” The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cited that guidance from the White House in issuing the new proposal.

“Upon reconsideration,” the Trump administration said of the proposed nursing home rule, “we believe that arbitration agreements are, in fact, advantageous to both providers and beneficiaries because they allow for the expeditious resolution of claims without the costs and expense of litigation.” The money that nursing homes spend on lawsuits could be better used caring for patients, it said.

Nursing homes generally welcomed the proposal, but other reaction has been overwhelmingly negative.

...Nursing home inspectors have documented many cases in which patients were injured as a result of infected bedsores, medication errors, malnutrition, dehydration or sexual assault.

The ban on arbitration agreements was issued by the Obama administration in September 2016. Nursing homes challenged it in court, and Judge Michael P. Mills of the Federal District Court in Oxford, Miss., blocked enforcement, pending a trial on the merits of the case.

But, Judge Mills said, “the practice of executing arbitration contracts during the nursing home admissions process raises valid concerns, on a public policy level, since many residents and their relatives are ‘at wit’s end’ and prepared to sign anything to gain admission.”

Long-term care ombudsmen, who receive federal funds to serve as advocates for nursing home residents in each state, are skeptical of the new initiative. “The proposed rule would undermine the rights of people living in nursing homes-- rights established in a 1987 law,” said Patty Ducayet, the Texas ombudswoman, who is a state employee.

The Trump administration has also proposed several requirements to protect nursing home residents who agree to binding arbitration. For example, arbitration agreements would have to be written in “plain language” and be explained to the consumer “in a form and manner that he or she understands.”

The innocuously-named American Health Care Association represents nursing homes in Washington and bribes members of both parties. The top recipient of their "contributions" last cycle was Todd Young, then a House Republican, now a Senate Republican. They always give more to Republicans but they also write checks for the most corrupt of the conservative Democrats from the Republican wings the Democratic Party. Among their biggest investments last cycle were corrupt scumbags on the blue side of the aisle:

• Joe Crowley (D-NY)
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)
• Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM)
• Patrick Murphy (D-FL)

Each got the same $10,000 PAC check that was given to:

• Paul Ryan (R-WI)
• Rob Portman (R-OH)
• Greg Walden (R-OR)
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)

Two years early their biggest investments went to sleaze bags Cory Booker (D-NY- $15,000) and Fred Upton (R-MI- $15,000). they give especially large sums to Blue Dogs and New Dems and anyone else who has the reputation for selling their votes for a few thousand dollars... in a bipartisan way, of course. On Monday the National Law Review noted that "The current administration has set its sights on another federal rule, seeking to eliminate the ban on pre-dispute arbitration agreements for nursing home residents. Pre-dispute arbitration agreements require elderly adults and individuals with disabilities, as well as their families, to waive their right to file a lawsuit in the courts – before admission to a nursing home. As a condition to entering the nursing home, the prospective resident and his or her representative would be required to submit any dispute, including claims of egregious abuse or neglect, to mandatory arbitration proceedings."

Nursing home admission is a stressful and emotional time for the prospective resident and his or her family. Requiring a waiver of rights as a condition of admission, as occurs with pre-admission arbitration agreements, puts the person and his or her family in a time-sensitive quandary, literally at the nursing home door. Under the new amendments, if they refuse to sign away their right to go to court, they can be denied admission to the facility.

Imagine after months of discussions, the decision is finally reached to admit an elderly or disabled individual to a nursing home. This decision often involves the heartache of giving up one’s home and freedom, many possessions, and even treasured pets. The decision is often motivated by a desire to keep the individual safe and ensure that he or she receives required medical care.

But, are nursing home residents safe when they are required to sign away any right to legal accountability for mistreatment or harm in the facility?

Arbitrations take place in private meetings and are confidential. Because arbitrations are not public proceedings like lawsuits and trials, nursing homes have little to fear in terms of lost business or reputation, even if the arbitrator rules against them. To make matters worse, usually the pre-admission arbitration agreements give all the decision-making about the process to the nursing home, including selecting the arbitrator, location, and rules that will govern the proceedings. That removes other safeguards provided by the original rule such as choosing a neutral arbitrator.

The Journal points out that what Trump is doing is "to strip nursing home residents of that right [a jury trial] by removing the provisions prohibiting binding pre-dispute arbitration in long term care facilities," claiming the Obama rule would "likely impose unnecessary or excessive costs on providers."

We reached out to Dr. David Gill, the progressive candidate for Illinois' 13th congressional district. He told us that "As an emergency department physician, I frequently work with social services personnel to facilitate transfer of patients from the emergency department to nursing homes, in situations in which patients can no longer care for themselves at home but are not so acutely ill as to require inpatient care in the hospital. This is an extremely stressful time in the lives of patients and their family members, and it amazes me that our government would seek to take away the rights of these patients and families at such a pivotal moment in their lives. Given the frequent difficulty in obtaining a nursing home bed in these situations, it is extremely unlikely that a family would refuse to sign the waiver being proposed by the Trump administration. To take advantage of individuals in such dire circumstances is shameful, to say the least. I am running against a representative who stands firmly with the president on virtually all matters, and I look forward to replacing him in January of 2019, and bringing compassion and my knowledge gained through 30 years in the healthcare profession with me to Congress."

James Thompson is running for the KS-04 congressional seat, but he's better known as one of Kansas' top civil rights attorneys. This is right in his wheelhouse. He told us that "Arbitrators can play an important role in ending litigation when both sides possess equal bargaining power and agree to arbitration. However, these efforts to deny the right to a jury trial and force arbitration are nothing more than big corporations operating from dominant positions in the business relationship and attempting to deny individual working class Americans a means of redress when nursing homes choose profits over people. Arbitrators are paid on a regular basis by big corporations who have numerous disputes, which provides a financial incentive to rule in favor of big corporate interests. Big corporations weed out arbitrators that rule against them by refusing to use them, while often going back to favorable arbitrators. We need to fight laws that take power from working Americans to give that power to corporate interests."

With "balance" like this, is it any wonder that right-wingers hold NPR in special scorn among the vast hordes of the liberal media?

Today's "balance" quiz: Let's say you're going to have Colorado freshman Sen. Cory Gardner as a guest to shred the president's SOTU address on behalf of the Crackpot Scumbag Party. How would you "balance" him? Take a few seconds to think about it. What's that? With a self-styled conservative Democrat, you say? Ding-ding-ding!

by Ken

After the nifty close look our friend Gaius Publius just gave the president's SOTU speech, surely nobody expects me to have anything smart to say about the speech. Besides, as I noted yesterday, I have the additional handicap of not having seen, heard, or read it. The specifics just don't seem to matter all that much, considering that mostly all that's going to result is more talk.

As I also explained, in the case of such events, I trust to a process of osmosis to sort of squoosh whatever I need to know about the speech into my pores. And sure enough, from the moment I woke up it was pouring out of the radio at me. NPR's Morning Edition was awash in SOTU yammering. Of course I wasn't listening all that carefully, but I see on the Web page for yesterday's show that, along with Mara Liasson's report, "Obama Lays Out Ambitious Agenda In Address To Nation," which I don't remember hearing but which I assume gave some representation to the president's views, there were features like "Fact Checking Obama's State Of The Union Speech" and "Republicans Charge Obama Isn't Serious About Working With Them."

I was charmed to note that when the broadcast turned to a pair of senators for comment, they were carefully chosen. There was on the one hand conservative Dem Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and on the other hand scumbag crackpot Republican Cory Gardner of Colorado.


That's right, you "balance" a lying-scumbag right-wing Republican with hearty Conservadem Heidi Heitkamp.

No, Senator Gardner, the Colorado freshman, wasn't identified as a "scumbag crackpot Republican (some things, it seems, you have to know on your own), but Senator Heitkamp was emphatically identified as a conservative Democrat from a conservative state, and was asked about how she works with the president on mattters where her and her state's views are more conservative. So conservative Democratic senators were represented, and scumbag crackpot Republicans, and since it's not as if there are non-scumbag-crackpot Republicans to talk to (please don't talk to me about Maine's Suzie Q. Collins; I did notice that she was grousing about the president's failure to try to cooperate with Republicans -- just the way she used to bitch about Chimpy the Prez Bush's failure to try to cooperate with Democrats, right?), I guess all the major Senate constituencies were covered.

Let's just double-check:

• Conservative Dems, check.

• Republicans, check.

Um, er, up, that's it. That's all there is, right?

With "balance" like that, is it any wonder that right-wingers hold NPR in special scorn among the vast hordes of the liberal media?

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Bill McKibben on innovative public radio

This American Life's Ira Glass

by Ken

Given a long enough weekend, I hold out the possibility, at least, that a person's (meaning "my") mind may slowly resume functioning. Over the weekend, facing a medium-length subway ride, I armed myself with a New York Review of Books issue that -- like most of them for me these days -- was incompletely read, and stumbled across an interesting piece (in the Nov. 11 issue) by Bill McKibben on interesting doings in public radio.

McKibben begins:

Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the Web—radio may be the least discussed, debated, understood. This is likely because it serves largely as a transmission device, a way to take other art forms (songs, sermons) and spread them out into the world. Its other uses can be fairly pedestrian too: ball games and repetitive, if remarkably effective, right-wing commercial talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is the radio ratings champ; according to the industry’s trade journal he reaches 14.25 million listeners in an average week. Sean Hannity, working the same turf, trails him slightly.

But then he confounds me at least with some surprising numbers about public radio listenership:

[A]n equally large audience turns to the part of the dial where public radio in its various forms can be found. Public radio claims at least 5 percent of the radio market. National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes -- are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts. Morning Edition and All Things Considered are supplemented by well-regarded programs like The World, a BBC coproduction with Boston’s WGBH, and the business broadcast Marketplace -- programming produced outside of NPR itself but within the larger world of public radio. In polls, public radio is rated as the most trusted source of news in the nation. The audience for most of its programs dwarfs the number of subscribers to the The New York Times or The New Yorker, or the number of people who read even the biggest best sellers.

About one in ten Americans tune in to public radio each week; if you landed in a spaceship someplace in America searching for thoughtful and nonpartisan culture, your first stop would be the public radio stations that usually show up below 92 on the FM dial. You'd find not just the big news shows but also a variety of call-in shows: national ones, like On Point, The Diane Rehm Show, or Talk of the Nation, with its much-loved Science Friday edition, but also a number of superb local talk programs, with hosts like Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer in New York, Michael Krasny in San Francisco, Steve Scher in Seattle, Larry Mantle in L.A. -- the list is very long.

These differ from the commercial right-wing shows in that they daily feature guests from a wide spectrum of American political and cultural life: on the morning I'm writing this, for instance, Tom Ashbrook of On Point in Boston spent an hour discussing the rise of social gaming on Facebook, Krasny covered "the troubled construction industry," and The Leonard Lopate Show examined the current state of the company Google. The sine qua non of these efforts is Terry Gross's relentlessly intelligent interview show Fresh Air, which is based in Philadelphia, has been running for thirty-five years, is syndicated to more than 450 stations, and claims nearly 4.5 million listeners.

"And yet," McKibben notes, "very little gets written about public radio." Nor is there any "well-known radio equivalent of the Emmys or the Grammys or the Oscars (or even the Tonys)," which he suggests "reflects public radio's smooth professionalism -- it's gotten so good at its basic task that it's taken for granted, a kind of information utility."

I've mentioned before that I'm a rather reluctant daily Morning Edition listener. Since the loss of Rachel Maddow's Air America morning show (and before that the amazing Morning Sedition) I haven't found anything better on TV or radio to help me get out of the house in the morning. I find ME kind of stodgy and limited in its purview. Still, the information it does present isn't hopeless and is somewhat useful.

As a matter of fact, McKibben isn't here to defend what he describes as the public radio "flagship" broadcasts like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, which he suggests have undergone something of the ossifying process observable in much more complete form in the standard infotainment newsmedia. He quotes All Things Considered veteran Brooke Gladstone:

As they become the primary news source for more and more Americans, public radio newsmagazines are restricting their own ability to move listeners. Like physicians in medieval times they seek to balance the four humors (so as not be too choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, or melancholy) by blood-letting. Public radio newsmagazines are looking a little pallid these days, because the passion has been drained off.

Later, McKibben writes:

It seems churlish to criticize even mildly the flagship public radio news shows -- their reliable excellence deserves lavish praise. In recent years, though, it's started becoming clearer that, for all their polish, the big shows like All Things Considered suffer from some of the same constraints that plague other parts of elite American journalism. They aim for a careful political balance -- one academic study found their list of guests slightly to the right of The Washington Post and "approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report." That's not a particularly interesting place to be, and it may explain why, especially in the Bush years, many left-of-center listeners defected to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, a highly professional but ideologically engaged daily hour on the Pacifica network. Others -- particularly young listeners -- are listening to The Takeaway, a morning news show that pairs veteran public radio voice John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee. It takes stories one after another, and gives each a few serious but fast-paced minutes. It feels electric, alive -- Web-paced journalism, purposely not as polished as Morning Edition but every bit as intelligent. "There ought to be something in the public radio idiom that delivers information live," says Hockenberry.

Now throughout the piece I'm not confident that I'm hearing the same thing as McKibben. I should probably listen to more of the shows he recommends, but the ones I've sampled haven't done much for me. Notably, in a few weeks of listening to The Takeaway, I didn't get it at all. I couldn't even figure out what the show thought it was doing which represented an upgrade over Morning Edition. Of course, it may just be that I'm too old and/or hidebound to represent the "particularly young" audience thirsting for the kind of innovation he's so excited about.

For McKibben the fountainhead for the new wave of information-based radio programming is Ira Glass's This American Life, from Chicago Public Radio. (I can't say I've given the show a fair chance, but it's never held my attention. Again, though, that may just be me.)

Those who restrict their listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered are well informed -- there's no better news operation in English-language broadcasting. But they are missing a quite different world, one that's never been richer or, thanks to the Internet, easier to access.

The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful style that centered on storytelling. There was a group of others -- like Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (known as the Kitchen Sisters), David Isay, and Jay Allison -- who had long been producing remarkable programs, including segments for the flagship news shows, extended features, ranging from quirky accounts of family kitchen rituals to politically minded portraits of juvenile prisoners. The best ones came to be called "driveway moments," because listeners were so hooked that they would linger in their cars to hear the end of a piece even once they'd gotten home. In fact, NPR now packages CD collections of these beloved pieces.

But Glass figured out that he could make a weekly hour entirely of this kind of radio, dispensing with traditional news and talk; and since 1995, under the wing of Chicago station WBEZ, that's what he's done in This American Life.

Glass and the people who have come to work with him, and the people who have been inspired by his example, have in common "a commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn't show up on the newscasts," to covering "life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions."

"A FEW OF THE BROADCASTS WORTH LISTENING TO"

In the print version of his article, Bill McKibben promises a list in the on-line version of radio shows he considers worth listening to. As he points out in the article, via streaming and free-download podcast, virtually every show he mentions can be heard by anyone who owns a computer "free of charge and without the slightest hassle." Here's the list. Note that in the on-line version each listing is a live link.

• This American Life
• Sound Opinions
• Planet Money
• Re:sound
• Too Much Information
• Radiolab
• Studio 360
• Fresh Air
• 360documentaries, with the best from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Wiretap, from the CBC
• Transom podcast
• On the Media
• BBC Radio 4
• The Sound of Young America
• Q podcast
• Vocalo
• The Takeaway
• To the Best of Our Knowledge

McKibben has a lot to say about Glass's approach, and about shows like Studio 360 and Hearing Voices and Radio Diaries and To the Best of Our Knowledge and especially Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad's Radiolab. "In one sense," he writes, "this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It's like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules." However,

there's one problem, and that's the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it's very hard to get paid anything at all; in the early weeks of the fiscal downturn two years ago, NPR canceled two of the shows -- Weekend America and Day to Day -- that were consistently airing the work of new independent producers. Up-and-coming broadcasters are increasingly left to make their own way. Consider, say, Benjamen Walker, whose show Too Much Information airs weekly on New York's independent radio station WFMU. It absolutely crackles -- an hour-long mix of "interviews with real people, stories about fake people, monologue, radio drama." It's good enough that 240,000 people have downloaded some of the twenty episodes he's made so far. That's a lot of people, but it's zero money, since podcasts, like most websites, are by custom given away for free. Walker's previous show, a similar effort called Theory of Everything, was widely promoted on the Public Radio Exchange, and six public radio stations across the country actually paid for and ran it. "I think I made $80," he says. "If I thought about it too hard, I would just quit. It's much better not to think about it."

McKibben lays a good share of the problem at the doorstep of public radio station program directors. In the following excerpt he's quoting Greg Kot, cohost of the pop-music discussion show Sound Opinions, which he thinks is the bee's knees.

They are the gatekeepers for what gets on the air -- and their default mode is clearly to say no. "I'm not a radio veteran," says Kot, "but in my experience, program directors are conservative, afraid to rock the boat." They depend on their listeners to ante up about half a station's budget at pledge time, and local underwriters such as restaurants and bookstores to provide most of the rest, so they don't want to do anything that might offend them.

But the result is all too often flaccid radio, and listeners who have no idea what else is out there that they might enjoy. There are public radio stations so hidebound that they run the not-that-hilarious Car Talk twice each week.

Well, um, actually I think Car Talk is that hilarious -- and a lot else besides. I get a much better sense of the way people are living life in the America of today from a single broadcast of Car Talk than I got from all those weeks of trying to figure out what the Takeaway people thought they were up to, besides being "innovative," of course.

Nevertheless, as McKibben points out, we have hardly any serious discussion of what's happening on the radio, and I think anyone who cares should check out what he has to say.

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