Who's Worse-- Mayo Pete, Status Quo Joe or Michael Bloomberg?

Another addition to the B Team

I saw a headline yesterday, How The Insufferably Woke Help Trump. Uggghh, how did that Fox crap get into my news feed? But it wasn't Fox, it was a pro-Biden op-ed by insufferably #NeverWoke 65 year old NY Times columnist Timothy Egan. His sister is like my brother-in-law, except he loves his sister, who works cleaning toilets in a Walmart in eastern rural Oregon. I've long ago given up on my brother-in-law, who I've known since we were both teenagers in the '60s. Is there a pc word for "retard?" He's that. Egan seems to think his sister is still salvageable even though no matter how much he points out "that Trump is trying to take away her health care protections by litigating to kill Obamacare, that his tariffs have made it harder to pay her bills, that he is the most repulsive and creepy man ever to occupy the White House, she holds firm. Why? One reason is what she hears from the other side. Many Democrats, she says, are dismissive of her religious beliefs and condescending of her lot in life. She’s turned off by the virtue-signaling know-it-alls."

I feel bad; we've failed people like his sister and my brother-in-law. And his sister is probably a rocket scientist or novelist who works at the Walmart cleaning toilets because she finds it meditative. It's possible. Alan Grayson is one of the smartest people I ever met and he put himself through Harvard cleaning toilets. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, has an IQ too low to understand anything more abstract that how to turn on the Rush Limbaugh show. Maybe there was a time I could have rescued him from his ignorance-- but I doubt it and it's too late now anyway. And it's probably too late, from what Egan writes, for his sister. It's a shame and if he wants to blame it on Bernie and Elizabeth... well I hope that gives him some solace.

I know plenty of white working class people who aren't like Egan's sister and my brother-in-law. I ran a large company that employed hundreds of them. They're my people. It's where I come from and who I'll always be. But, apparently, not Egan: "It’s no mystery why so many Democrats can no longer connect to the white working class. Progressives promise free college, free health care, free child care, and scream in bafflement, What’s wrong with you people?" His sister feels "insulted and dismissed." Sorry, but that doesn't mean the Democratic Party needs to be turned into a vehicle for theocracy, racism and a set of reactionary policies the Republican Party already represents well enough. If Bernie can't connect to Egan's sister, she and my brother-in-law likely have as much in common as I suspected, namely: she's neither a rocket scientist nor a novelist.

Eric Levitz might not have won a Pulitzer yet, but he's a lot smarter than Timothy Egan and Levitz's new New York Magazine column, Michael Bloomberg’s Ego Is an Agent of Socialist Change, is far more relevant and worthwhile. "There are anxious days," he wrote, for for Democrats who favor gated communities and unfettered trade. Americans who believe in a woman’s right to choose and private equity’s right to loot, now need a Klonopin with their morning news. Elizabeth Warren-- the slayer of Summers, stumper of Stumpf, and all around bane of (finance) capital-- boasts comfortable leads in Iowa and New Hampshire. In at least one of those states, a Trotskyist fellow traveler is her closest competitor. Now, the betting market’s invisible hand is pointing leftward. And those who fear that blue America is “going red” seem to have no safer bet than a septuagenarian who’s never quite sure what state he’s in (or else, a college-town mayor who may or may not have one black friend). Which is to say: Davos Democrats’s disaffection with the 2020 field is understandable. The fact that their wing of the party has found itself banking on Joe Biden-- a 76-year-old who is rambly beyond his years, and infamous for running memorably awful presidential campaigns in his prime-- is surely distasteful for folks accustomed to hiring only the finest of help. But their frustrated entitlement is starting to cloud their judgment... If blue America’s deep-pocketed political patrons collectively made peace with their predicament, and went all in on Biden, they would have an excellent shot of securing control of the party’s commanding heights. Alas, collective action doesn’t come naturally to this set. And so, Michael Bloomberg appears hell-bent on redistributing vast sums of his own wealth, so as to (unintentionally) advance the cause of democratic socialism."

Mike Bloomberg is jumping into the Democratic presidential race because he believes that Joe Biden is fading, opening the moderate lane next to Elizabeth Warren, sources close to the former New York mayor tell Axios.

Why it matters: “Mike will spend whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump,” a Bloomberg source said. “The nation is about to see a very different campaign than we’ve ever seen before.”

Levitz wrote, hopefully, no doubt, that "past precedent suggests that the dictates of reason may eventually prevail over the pleas of his ego (and/or money-hungry consultants). But the fact that he is even considering an entrance is a testament to the super-wealthy’s boundless capacity for self-delusion. Bloomberg won mayoral elections in New York City by building a coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans, and wildly outspending all of his rivals. In a Democratic primary, Bloomberg’s broad, bipartisan appeal among Hamptons homeowners will be of little use. And in a high-profile presidential race-- in which all top candidates have ready access to earned media-- the billionaire’s money will be much weaker currency than it was in NYC."

Bow Down Before The One You Serve

In 2020, no one can win the Democratic nomination without significant support among either white liberals or African-Americans. A Wall Street titan who (erroneously) insisted that only the systematic harassment of young nonwhite men could keep New Yorkers safe-- and that “it was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis”-- has no appeal with either constituency. He cannot possibly assemble Biden’s current coalition, let alone build on it. To the extent his campaign can have any impact (beyond diverting funds away from actually viable Democratic candidates), it will be to fracture the anti-anti-billionaire vote, thereby shaving precious percentage points off Biden and Buttigieg’s share of delegates. In other words, a Bloomberg candidacy would be an in-kind contribution to the Warren and Sanders campaigns.

Remarkably, the former New York mayor isn’t the only Establishment Democrat mulling an unintentional gift to the party’s progressive wing. Former Attorney General Eric Holder is also considering a late entrance to the 2020 race. And while Holder isn’t as wildly out of sync with the Democratic base as Bloomberg, he also has no obvious advantage over the existing center-left candidates. If Booker and Harris haven’t connected, why would a slapdash Holder campaign hit the mark?

All this said, corporate Democrats can still make “hope and stasis” their party’s 2020 ethos. They just need to put class solidarity above self-striving. Fortunately for the left, “not me, us” plays better streets than it does in the C-suites.

Now's as good a time as any to consider the editorial from this week's Nation: their anti-endorsement of Status Quo Joe. They believe and wrote that the presidential debate "has been stifled by the continuing candidacy of a man whose chief rationale for running-- that he alone can defeat Donald Trump-- has become increasingly threadbare. Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden offers the promise of picking up where the Obama administration left off: a restoration of business as usual for the K Street lobbyists and Wall Street speculators whose prosperity the 2008 financial crisis did little to disturb. Indeed... the man posing as “middle-class Joe” has built his career and his family’s wealth on an eagerness to serve not the many Americans crushed by credit card debt but the very banks whose hands are around their throats. The candidate who insists Medicare for All is too expensive for Americans is also the candidate who, like Clinton, endorsed NAFTA, China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership-- all of which have savaged U.S. manufacturing and workers. Clinton’s record cost her the industrial heartland (Ohio, Pennsylvania, [Wisconsin, Iowa,] Michigan) and, with it, the election."

Biden’s long record of poor judgment-- on everything from the 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration to his botched handling of Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas to his defense of Bill Clinton’s brutal welfare cuts to his support for the Iraq War to his role as cheerleader for Wall Street deregulation-- renders him an even weaker opponent for a president whose reelection poses a clear and present danger to America’s survival as a constitutional republic.

Stumbling through the primaries, Biden’s zombie campaign crowds out worthier challengers, handing Trump a free pass on the very issues that should be his Achilles’ heel.

On issue after issue, Biden’s candidacy offers Trump a unique opportunity to muddy what should be a devastatingly clear choice. The Nation therefore calls on Biden to put service to country above personal ambition and withdraw from the race.

Also, while the enduring loyalty of Biden’s black supporters is to his credit, the very tenacity of that loyalty diminishes race as a factor at a time when white nationalism is a growing threat. His early withdrawal might well boost candidates of color into the currently all-white top tier.

Let us be clear: Joe Biden is not a crook. Unlike Donald Trump, he has not violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution or appointed members of his family to positions of influence and power. The point about “legal graft”-- the corrupt trading of favors, from Tammany Hall to the Delaware Way, so ably anatomized by DiStefano-- is that it’s perfectly legal.

But that doesn’t make it right or a winning platform. Biden and his backers need to face the facts. It may still be unclear which Democrat is best positioned to beat Donald Trump, but we know one thing: The answer is not Joe Biden.

I agree with every word-- except "Biden is not a crook." He certainly is, even if he hasn't been found guilty by a judge and jury yet. As you already know, our political system has a way of protecting crooked politicians.

The Results-- Iowa Republicans Pick Right Wing Lunatic Ted Cruz; Democrats Tied

TRUMP = LOSER

Yesterday Dave Weigel tweeted that far right racist Congressman Steve King told him the polls may be wrong about Trump. "You can't say 'Two Corinthians' and be winning evangelicals." Well... looks like King knew his state's Republican voters better than most of the pollsters did. I wonder if Herr Trumpf laying some greasy bills on a silver communion plate at a church he was using as a prop for his campaign yesterday was the last straw. It looks like the Our Principles PAC-funded voters guide that tens of thousands of homes got in the mail warning them that Herr Trumpf isn't a real conservative-- three decades of Trump’s apostasies from the conservative movement-- may have worked. Trump voters-- in Iowa and beyond-- are angry, frustrated, paranoid, xenophobic, bigoted, prone to crave authoritarianism, intellectually low-functioning... but not really ideological or even aware of what the "conservative movement" is all about or who Grover Norquiest is. But they didn't show up to vote in big enough numbers. By the way, the Des Moines Register had predicted the GOP voter turnout would be 368,000; only 187,000 bothered to come out for the Deep Bench. Anyway, expect a gun fight in Cleveland on the floor of the Republican convention in July.

It looks like the Romney staffers behind Our Principles PAC spent some time reading Timothy Egan's How Stupid Is Iowa? over the weekend. "It was Donald Trump who first raised the issue of Hawkeye State imbecility," he wrote for the NY Times, "in a mocking reference to a crush that Iowans had on Ben Carson last fall. And it’s the odious Ted Cruz who has been using Trump’s very words to goad Iowans into proving that they are not, in fact, so stupid as to back an ego-inflamed reality television star who makes fun of them... You’re supposed to be vetting, Iowa. You’re supposed to be culling out the crazies. You’re supposed to recognize the fraud of Ted Cruz and how Donald Trump is playing you. For all your touted small-town verities, you’re not doing your job. Your bull manure detector is broken." An amusing Establishment hack of the first degree, Egan disqualifies Iowa voters not because they're too stupid but because they're too white and too old.

Consider that half of all the babies born last year in the United States were nonwhite. Not in Iowa, of course, one of the whitest states in the nation. On Monday, if the Republican caucus is anything like the 2012 turnout, 99 percent of the attendants will be white. That’s not even the United States of 1816, let alone this year.

We’re a young nation, though you won’t see much of that fresh blood when Republicans gather on Monday night. Iowa is the fourth oldest state in the nation: In 2012, nearly seven out of 10 Republican caucusgoers was older than age 45.

And Iowa women are not leaning in, at least in one party, where a majority of Republican caucusgoers are men. As for religion, 57 percent of 2012 Republican caucusgoers were evangelical-- more than twice the percentage of the electorate nationwide.

What do these demographics do? They produce candidates who deny that climate change even exists, who favor total bans on legal abortion, who are opposed to the most common-sensical reforms in gun laws, and who would require a religious test for entry into the country. All of those positions are out of step with the views of a country that’s supposed to reflect majority will.

Trump can call for a police state pogrom against 11 million people and be rewarded, because a majority of Republican caucusgoers are white, native-born and believe that electing a demagogue will make American white again.

The evangelicals, in particular, deserve Trump’s taunt at their intelligence. Devout Christians profess a belief in piety, humility and sacrifice. The thrice-married Trump says he’s never asked God for forgiveness. His entire campaign is about pride, ego, solipsistic excess. He can’t even fake evangelical speak. For this, he’s their favorite. As he said, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters.

It’s time to rotate. Imagine Trump making his racially incendiary remarks in the most populous state, California, where Latinos outnumber whites. Or think of the ideas that could emerge from a focus on how the least populous state, Wyoming, could build a more sustainable economy beyond oil and gas. Missouri could bring its raw racial troubles to the table for a larger national debate.

None of this is discussed in the gloomy chill of Iowa. Instead, we have the stupidity question. Trump raised it. And if he wins on Monday, the people of Iowa will have answered him.

I'm not saying Matt K. Lewis is stupid, but he is a conservative... and author of Too Dumb To Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections, about the grifters who run the GOP and who are in the process of being displaced by a higher level grifter, crooked New York billionaire Donald J. Herr Trumpf. Expanding slightly on philosopher Eric Hoffer, "Every great cause [which, obviously conservatism never was] begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." Conservatism started as a racket and degenerated from there. A year and a half ago Lewis, writing for the Wall Street Journal, exposed the conservative PACs trolling for your money. His Salon post this weekend, like his Journal OpEd from 2015, is about how suckers give their money to the Republican grifters.

In order to raise money from the masses, organizations and consultants are also helping dumb down conservatism. In some cases, this consists of rhetoric about taking down the establishment and the “ruling class.” In other cases, it is accomplished by stirring up paranoia and anger among the base, often to get them to sign petitions (and almost every online petition is a ruse to get you on e‑mail lists that can then be sold) or to clog the phone lines of House members so that reasonably conservative Congressmen can be lectured to about why shutting down the government is, in fact, a good idea that will work “if only they have the guts and courage to try.”

The irony is that the people who tell the base what they want to hear are characterized as courageous, while the people willing to stand up to them are labeled cowards. And some of us have our conservatism questioned and are labeled RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).

But it’s not just outside groups and venders pocketing money that should be spent on candidates. In 2013, a reporter for ProPublica, a nonprofit organization that specializes in investigative journalism, alleged all sorts of unethical practices by a group ostensibly set up to help support the troops. According to reporter Kim Barker, “an examination of its fund‑raising appeals, tax records, and other documents shows that Move America Forward has repeatedly misled donors and inflated its charitable accomplishments, while funneling millions of dollars in revenue to the men behind the group and their political consulting firms.” One of the men behind the group is Sal Russo, a longtime political consultant who is chief strategist for the Tea Party Express.

Time for honest and sincere Republicans to give up on their tattered and disheveled party and rally behind Bernie's campaign-- for the sake of the country we love and for the families who live here? Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being but his material well-being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial."

Bernie battled the entire establishment to a tie and O'Malley, like Huckabee, dropped out. Have you contributed to Bernie's campaign? Thank you; you can do it again-- and to the congressional candidates who have endorsed him and are running on his platform. Conservatism is wrong for America, the radical conservatism of Cruz, the establishmentarian conservatism of Clinton and the faux-conservatism of Herr Trumpf. In his concession speech tonight, Rubio pointed to the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War as the beginning of what makes the U.S. special. What he didn't mention is that conservatives opposed both the Declaration and the Revolution itself. Many conservatives fought on the side of the British and fled to Canada, the Caribbean and to England once the British and their German mercenaries were defeated by the progressives. Conservatives never understand their place in history. But Thom Hartmann does:

Tonight in Iowa we see the beginning of the political revolution so many progressives have worked to ignite and that Bernie Sanders has embraced as his campaign's central theme. It is not a revolution fueled by those already invested with money and power but one built with and for people who believe we can and must do better.

Ever since PDA began its Run Bernie Run petition drive in 2013, we have stayed dedicated to the core issues that we can now legitimately claim have the attention and energy of this presidential race.

Bernie Sanders expresses it best when he uses his now familiar cry, "Not me, us." Whether we are talking about creating a more just, improved and expanded Medicare for all healthcare system, providing access to a college education for all, addressing the climate crisis, or ending the death grip of Citizens' United on our democracy, Bernie Sanders gives us reason to unite.

I Always Thought Every Band Should Cover A Bob Dylan Song, Especially "With God On Our Side"

Last week, as you may have read (here and here), I spent time out at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where I haven't been since graduating in 1969. That's 45 years ago and I literally didn't recognize a single thing about the campus, at least not physically. One moment that did ring a bell however, was when one of the administrators asked me if I'm an atheist. The administrators back in the '60s probably had every reason to think so, since atheism has always been part of tearing down the Establishment, something I've always had a penchant for, and certainly gave precedence to over my course work while I was at Stony Brook the first time around. Last week I told her that if I felt there was any sure way that in the future the Catholic Church would be led by people like Pope Francis, rather than the representatives of Satan who generally dominate that church, I would consider even joining up. Consider.

But I'm not an atheist. I've never much felt any affinity for organized religions, to put it mildly. But, unlike my dad, who was a devout atheist, I spend time every day communing with something that might be recognizable in most religions as "God" or a god. I pray. I've followed a spiritual path. I put ethical behavior above all else, not because of fear but because of love. So... it was with great interest yesterday that I saw historian Tim Egan's somewhat tongue-in-cheek OpEd in the NY Times, Faith-Based Fanatics. Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's written seven books, including The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl in 2006. Yesterday he began with how profoundly difficult it is to be God.

He’s had a busy summer. As God only knows, he was summoned to slaughter in the Holy Land, asked to end the killings of Muslims by Buddhist monks in Myanmar, and played both sides again in the 1,400-year-old dispute over the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad.

In between, not much down time. Yes, the World Cup was fun, and God chose to mess with His Holinesses, pitting the team from Pope Francis’s Argentina against Germany, home of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Well played, even if the better pope lost.

At least Rick Perry was not his usual time-suck. The governor proclaimed three days of prayer to end the Texas drought in 2011, saying, “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this.’ ” The drought got worse. Two years ago, Perry said that God had not “changed his mind” about same-sex marriage. But the states have. Since Perry became a spokesman for the deity, the map of legalized gay marriage in America has expanded by 50 percent.

Still, these are pillow feathers in a world weighted down with misery. God is on a rampage in 2014, a bit like the Old Testament scourge who gave direct instructions to people to kill one another.

It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert. Of 1,723 armed conflicts documented in the three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars, only 123, or less than 7 percent, involved a religious cause. Hitler’s genocide, Stalin’s bloody purges and Pol Pot’s mass murders certainly make the case that state-sanctioned killings do not need the invocation of a higher power to succeed.

But this year, the ancient struggle of My God versus Your God is at the root of dozens of atrocities, giving pause to the optimists among us (myself included) who believe that while the arc of enlightenment is long, it still bends toward the better.

In the name of God and hate, Sunnis are killing Shiites in Iraq, and vice versa. A jihadist militia, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, boasts of beheading other Muslims while ordering women to essentially live in caves, faces covered, minds closed. The two sides of a single faith have been sorting it out in that blood-caked land, with long periods of peace, since the year 632. Don’t expect it to end soon. A majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are peaceful, but a Pew Survey found that 40 percent of Sunnis do not think Shiites are proper Muslims.

Elsewhere, a handful of failed states are seeing carnage over some variant of the seventh-century dispute. And the rage that moved Hamas to lob rockets on birthday parties in Tel Aviv, and Israelis to kill children playing soccer on the beach in Gaza, has its roots in the spiritual superiority of extremists on both sides.

The most horrific of the religion-inspired zealots may be Boko Haram in Nigeria. As is well known thanks to a feel-good and largely useless Twitter campaign, 250 girls were kidnapped by these gangsters for the crime of attending school. Boko Haram’s God tells them to sell the girls into slavery.

The current intra-religious fights are not to be confused with people who fly airplanes into buildings, or shoot up innocents while shouting “God is great.” But those killers most assuredly believed that their reward for murder is heaven.

Of late, God has taken a long break from Ireland, such a small country for such a big fight between worshipers under the same cross. There, the animus is not so much theological as it is historical. If the curious Muslim is wondering why Protestants and Catholics can’t just get along on that lovely island, take a look at the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, when about 20 percent of the population of present-day Germany fell to clashes between the two branches of Christianity.

Violent Buddhist mobs (yes, it sounds oxymoronic) are responsible for a spate of recent attacks against Muslims in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, leaving more than 200 dead and close to 150,000 homeless. The clashes prompted the Dalai Lama to make an urgent appeal to end the bloodshed. “Buddha preaches love and compassion,” he said.

And so do Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The problem is that people of faith often become fanatics of faith. Reason and force are useless against aspiring martyrs.

In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.

Will The Foreclosure Crisis Turn Into A New HGTV Program?

Timothy Egan's OpEd in Wednesday's NY Times, Slumburbia focuses in on one specific "foreclosure alley" in Northern California, Lathrop in the San Joaquin Valley, an area where local political shysters-- former and possibly future Congressman Dick Pombo calls immediately to mind-- have been in cahoots with unregulated, greed obsessed developers all through the disastrous Bush bubble years. But Egan could have been just as easily been talking about the Inland Empire in Southern California or about the housing crisis in Arizona, Nevada, or, worst of all, Florida. Egan is the author of The Worst Hard Time which won a National Book Award for his recounting of the history of the Dust Bowl; he knows what he's talking about. In fact, if it was government-encouraged over planting of crops in the Great Plains states during World War I that laid the groundwork for the Great Dust Bowl, it was government encouragement of over-planting of suburbs that laid the groundwork for the Great Recession. Ironically, many of those families worst hit by the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, Iowa, Texas and Kansas fled to California and Florida where their grandchildren are among the hardest hit victims of the housing crisis. Egan points to the calamity these people are going through as "what happens when people gamble with houses instead of casino chips."

Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Nobody is home in the cities of the future.

In a decade, they saw real property defy reality in real time in these insta-neighborhoods that sprouted in what had been some of the world’s most productive farmland.

In places like Lathrop, Manteca and Tracy, population nearly doubled in 10 years, and home prices tripled. After inhaling all this real estate helium, some developers and their apologists in urban planning circles hailed the boom as the new America at the far exurban fringe. Every citizen a homeowner! Half-acre lots for all! No credit, no problem!

Others saw it as the residential embodiment of the Edward Abbey line that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

Now median home prices have fallen from $500,000 to $150,000-- among the most precipitous drops in the nation-- and still the houses sit empty, spooky and see-through, waiting on demography and psychology to catch up.

In strip malls where tenants seem to last no longer than the life cycle of a gold fish, the bottom-feeders have moved in. “Coming soon: Cigarette City,” reads one sign here in Lathrop, near a “Cash Advance” outlet.

Take a pulse: How can a community possibly be healthy when one in eight houses are in some stage of foreclosure? How can a town attract new people when the crime rate has spiked well above the national average? How can a family dream, or even save, when unemployment hovers around 16 percent?

In the last year a record 2.8 million homes received foreclosure notices and something like 5 million homeowners are "underwater" on their mortgages. When these people walk away these insta-suburbs there is every chance that they are condemning them to turn into insta-slums.


A year ago, when the House passed the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act not a single California Republican-- not even those representing the districts with the worst avalanches of foreclosures-- voted for the bill-- a bill specifically designed to keep families in their homes. In some cases the districts are so reflexively reactionary that the gamble that it won't matter will probably pay off-- like for lunatic fringe reactionaries like George Radanovich, Jerry Lewis and Devin Nunes. But several Republican obstructionists in California may well have just sealed their electoral fates by sticking with the banksters and abandoning their own constituents. And in none of these districts can they put forward the Republican claim that only African-Americans get foreclosed on; in these districts it's almost all white people who are losing their homes, often because African-Americans have been carefully gerrymandered out of the districts!

The worst hit district in California is CA-03 way up north, very close to Tim Egan's "foreclosure alley." Only 4% of the population is black. The district has the 15th highest foreclosure rate in America, nearly 18,000 families out on the streets, and their representative is one of California's craziest extremists, Dan Lungren. With ZERO help from the DCCC, he came close to defeat in 2008 (he was re-elected with 50% of the vote, while Obama and McCain were tied). Another far right ideologue who was nearly defeated by a political unknown at that time is the GOP's corrupt screwball Ken Calvert in CA-44, the 21st hardest hit district in America (second worst in California), with 16,043 foreclosures so far and 53,411 projected over the next 4 years. Obama beat McCain in the formerly solid-red Inland Empire district and Calvert's winning percentage was 52%. The guy who nearly beat him, Bill Hedrick is running again-- and this time is very likely to win. Polling this week shows that most people in the district think it's time for Calvert to go. The district is 5.5% African-American, so the Republican racist mantra about who gets foreclosed on won't fly there either.

This afternoon Hedrick talked with me about how devastated the inland California home market has been by multiple financial shocks. "And much like our renowned earthquakes," he pointed out, "the reverberations continue to ripple through our towns and cities forcing more and more residents into foreclosure through a brutal 'shakedown.' If the earth slips, it is an 'act of God.'  The financial and government elites have acted as if the mortgage ‘shakedown' should also be laid at the Lord’s feet-- rather than hung around the necks of the predators who provoked the crash in residential values.

"Residents of the 44th Congressional District and across the inland valleys were not infected by greed. They were, however, afflicted by the scourge of an unregulated financial sector, predatory lenders collecting huge fees for pushing risky loans, and adjustable rates predicated on an ever-rising market value. Now, the combination of depressed values and bailed out banks that refuse to lend or modify loans, leave homeowners hanging by a prayer and in need of substantive mortgage relief. 

"Our nation has rightly rushed to aid quake-ravaged Haiti. In Riverside County and inland California, hard pressed working families need help to dig from the financial rubble left from the economic tremors caused, not by God, but a lawless lending industry. We cannot wait any longer."

Replacing Calvert with Hedrick in November will certainly help but, meanwhile, I wonder if Obama can trap the GOP into helping families caught up in the foreclosure crisis the same way he's "managing" to trap them in regard to health care.

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What the "death panel" lies have "protected" us from discussing about end-of-life care

"About $67 billion -- nearly a third of the money spent by Medicare -- goes to patients in the last two years of life. The need to spend less money at the end of life 'is the elephant in the room,' Evan Thomas wrote in 'The Case for Killing Granny,' the cover story in last week’s Newsweek. 'Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it.'"

-- Timothy Egan, in his Tuesday night NYT "Outposts"
blogpost, "The Way We Die Now"

by Ken

John Kitzhaber, M.D., was governor of Oregon from 1995 to 2003. He's 62 now, and has announced his intention to seek the office again next year. After he left the statehouse, his 88-year-old mother, Annabel, "with a weak heart, and tests that showed she most likely had cancer" (according to the above-linked Timothy Egan NYT blogpost), made the decision "to go home, walking away from the medical-industrial complex," and spend her remaining time with her also-failing husband, Albert. Annabel Kitzhaber died four months later, in 2005; Albert died eight months after that.

“The whole focus had been centered on her illness and her aging,” the Kitzhabers' son the former governor told former NYT reporter Timothy Egan in his Tuesday night NYT "Outposts" blogpost. “But both she and my father let go that part of their lives that they could not control and instead began to focus on what they could control: the joys and blessings of their marriage.”

Egan does a lovely job telling the story of those end-of-life decisions of Annabel and Albert Kitzhaber and the story of John Kitzhaber's horror at the way the end-of-life subject has (finally!) entered the national conversation. Egan writes:

Nobody was more frustrated than John Kitzhaber as the health care debate got hijacked over the summer by shouters and misinformation specialists. And no politician is more battle-scarred on this issue. He looks, at 62, still the Western man, with his jeans, his shag of gray hair, the face weathered by days spent trying to lure steelhead to the surface in the Rogue River. It has been his life work to see if at least one part of the country could join the family of nations that offers universal coverage.

With his mother's death in 2005, Kitzhaber lived the absurdities of the present system. Medicare would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but would not pay $18 an hour for a non-hospice care giver to come into Annabel's home and help her through her final days.

"The fundamental problem is that one percent of the population accounts for 35 percent of health care spending. So the big question is not how we pay for health care, but what are we buying."

He is not, he says, in favor of pulling the plug on granny. The culture of life should be paramount, he says, following the oath he took as a doctor. But Oregon, years ahead of the rest of the country, has talked and talked and talked about this taboo topic, and they’ve voted on it as well, in several forms. They found -- in line with national studies -- that most people want to die at home.

The governor insists that we really do need to rethink the way we spend health care dollars on the dying -- not setting up death panels, but recognizing that aging is not a "disease" that can be "cured," as part of a process of rethinking the way we spend precious health care dollars on terminal patients. It's a piece that's well worth your time.

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