2.29 Biden wins South Carolina primary in a landslide, taking 48% of the vote against Sanders‘ 20%, and winning every county.
2.28 Washington Post: A report issued by the Authors Guild says incomes earned by writing have dropped 24 percent since 2013, and half of all full-time authors earn less than the federal poverty level of $12,488. “The days of authors supporting themselves from writing may be coming to an end,” says Christine Larson, who wrote the study. She contends that the 20th century was a rare historical era in which a relatively large number of people — including women and people of color — enjoyed success as writers. Those halcyon days are over. The closure of thousands of newspapers, magazines and websites leaves fewer places for writers to place their work. And ebooks — sold mostly by Amazon — earn less revenue than print books. Bestselling writers are surviving fine, but the real victims in this new economy are midlist literary authors, who are seeing their livelihoods evaporate. For instance, Katharine Weber, the author of seven well-received books, says she used to earn six-figure advances; her most recent novel brought $2,000. “I feel I’m at the end of a tradition, the last of my kind,” she says.
2.26 Earth has temporarily acquired a new mini-moon.
2.25 CDC warns that the spread of the novel coronavirus in the US appears inevitable
2.24 Charles Lane in the Washington Post: Marx wrote of the modern world’s “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation.”Those words come from the “Communist Manifesto,” which was written in 1848, but they describe almost perfectly the angst that so many Americans feel today. Even recent prosperity has not fully restored Americans’ previous level of confidence in free-market capitalism, in part because it appears to rest on a shaky foundation of debt, and in part because of growing income and wealth inequality. The reformism that broadly characterized U.S. politics from FDR through the Obama administration seems to be losing traction. Voters seek protection in the promises of ideologies that last enjoyed currency a few years before President Trump or Sanders were born: “America First” and, yes, democratic socialism. Instead of two big-tent parties absorbing the fringes, the fringes are absorbing the parties. The first to go were the Republicans, taken over by Trump. Now Sanders is bidding to take over the Democrats. You might say they are both becoming third parties.
2.24 Catherine Rampell in the Post: if you oppose Sanders because you fear a socialist president, ask yourself: Would that be so different from what we have now? Trump loves to red-bait “Crazy Bernie.” Unlike his preferred boogeymen (and boogeywomen) on the far left, though, Trump has actually implemented anti-market, Soviet-style, centrally planned policies, and he has used the power of the state to punish political enemies. He has merely chosen different beneficiaries (and victims) of his Big Government bigfooting. In some ways, in fact, Trump has proved himself a more successful socialist than Sanders is likely ever to be. Many of Sanders’s core “socialist” agenda items, after all, are opposed by not only Republicans but also by moderate Democrats and even Democratic leadership. Trump, meanwhile, has brainwashed his supposedly free-market party into backing a command-and-control-style economy. When it’s commanded-and-controlled by Trump, anyway. With nary a peep from his party, Trump has tried to prop up pet industries, such as coal, by government fiat. Indeed, other Republicans have since copied his strategy at the state level. Likewise, in a move that once would have had Republicans screaming bloody murder, Trump has slapped tariffs on virtually every major trading partner around the world to protect favored industries, such as steel. This not only failed to rejuvenate steel but also led to widespread retaliation, including tit-for-tat tariffs aimed at farm country, a key part of the Republican base. Trump then decided even more central planning was in order. Again, his party didn’t stop him. First, the president unilaterally decided to use taxpayer funds to bail out farmers hurt by his trade wars. When that didn’t work, he did it again. In a tweet Friday, he suggested that a third bailout might yet be necessary. Already, Trump’s farmer trade bailouts are more than double the size of the 2009 auto bailout. A decade ago — with the global economy on the verge of another depression — Republicans howled that this U.S. auto industry rescue package was “the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism” and would set us on “the road toward socialism.”
2.24 Harvey Weinstein was convicted of two counts sexual assault. The jury determined that Weinstein forced a sex act on former production assistant Mimi Haley in July 2006 and raped actress Jessica Mann at a hotel in 2013. He was found not guilty of the most severe charge, predatory sexual assault. The top conviction count could yield up to 25 years in prison.
2.23 The Athletic: Madison Bumgarner of the Arizona Diamondbacks has been competing as a rodeo roper.under the name “Mason Saunders,”
2.22 Chris Matthews likens Sanders‘ win to the Nazi blitzkrieg: “I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says, ‘How can that be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.'”
2.22 Sanders runs off with the Nevada caucuses
2.21 David von Drehle in the Post: The experts did not, in fact, know that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Democracy did not, in fact, flower in Afghanistan and Iraq. Big data has not made health care cheaper and more efficient, as the experts predicted, and the rising tide of wealth in America has not lifted the boats of every worker. A college education has not been a ticket to prosperity for those whose student loan debt persists long after they’ve graduated. So many promises, so many forecasts, have proved to be built on faulty assumptions — and yet they just keep coming. How rich of us to complain about the lack of specifics in the Sanders health plan, or the impracticality of Trump’s border wall. The establishment, not the insurgents, discredited expertise. Ordinary folks have also noticed that the establishment regularly over-delivers on promises that are never spoken, yet well-understood. A child-care subsidy for working parents would be a step down the road to communism, but subsidies for business are just business as usual. Miscalculate in starting a war and you’ll get rich on paid speeches and corporate boards, but miscalculate by skipping a few mortgage payments and you could be living on the street. It’s no wonder Sanders supporters cheer when he says we already have socialism in America — socialism for the rich and well-connected. Combine the feeling that experts cannot be trusted with the sense that insiders are gaming the system and what do you get? A lot of people who believe that something’s rigged.
2.21 Greg Sargent in The Washington Post: When the Senate acquitted President Trump of the high crimes he committed against our country, Republicans and Democrats alike fell back on a convenient fiction: No, Trump has not really placed himself beyond the law and accountability entirely — for he can always be held accountable in the next election. Republicans adopted this fiction to obscure Trump’s crimes — that his Ukraine shakedown was all about corrupting that same election. Democrats adopted it to diffuse pressure to sustain the investigative war footing that protecting the country demands The news that intelligence officials warned House lawmakers that Russia is again trying to sabotage our election for Trump, and that this disclosure angered him, shatters that fiction entirely.
2.21 Lynn Silva, 66, a retired special-education instructor, quoted in the Post: “Bloomberg may be the ultimate candidate. I don’t care that he’s a billionaire trying to buy the election. If that’s what it takes to beat Trump, that’s fine. I loved Kamala Harris, but look at her: Out. I loved Cory Booker, but look at him: Out. No money. These aren’t regular times. We’ve got to get Trump out. That’s the bottom line.”
2.20 Howard Fineman in the Post: The presidential campaign at this strange moment is a bonfire of the boroughs: a nasty, hate-throuple of white, male, septuagenarian New York politicians who have little use for traditional parties and regard themselves as creators and leaders of their own outsider movements. All three have the go-the-distance wallets — either their own or their online supporters’ — that other contenders cannot match. There is something inevitable about the New Yorking of the race — besides the fact that the president used to call Fifth Avenue at 57th Street home. The “I’m-walking-here” talk dominates our discourse. Trump didn’t create the corrosion, but he has amplified it and made the belittling, street-corner style of the New York tabloids the official language of politics. Many voters are going to love this stuff. They want one nasty New Yorker to take on another. They want a Democrat who can fearlessly — eagerly — throw it back at Trump. Whether Bloomberg can do that live and on a debate stage is now, after Las Vegas, an open question. But he is offering in any case to do it prosthetically, through billions in advertising and hired-gun, prepaid, social media hucksterism.
2.20 Roger Stone is sentenced to three years and four months in prison.
2.20 Frederick Foer in The Atlantic: On Monday, Jeff Bezos announced the creation of the Bezos Earth Fund, which will disperse $10 billion in the name of combatting climate change. The fund is a triumph of philanthropy—and a perfect emblem of a national failing. Or rather, a series of national failings. In a healthy democracy, the world’s richest man wouldn’t be able to painlessly make a $10 billion donation. His fortune would be mitigated by the tax collector; antitrust laws would constrain the growth of his business. Instead of relying on a tycoon to bankroll the national response to an existential crisis, there would be a national response. But in an age of political dysfunction, Bezos has begun to subsume the powers of the state. Where the government once funded the ambitious exploration of space, Bezos is leading that project, spending a billion dollars each year to build rockets and rovers. His company, Amazon, is spearheading an experimental effort to fix American health care; it will also spend $700 million to retrain workers in the shadow of automation and displacement. Meanwhile, swaths of the federal government have contracted with Amazon to keep data on the company’s servers. Bezos is providing the vital infrastructure of state. When Amazon locates its second headquarters on the Potomac, staring across the river at the capital, it will provide a perfect geographic encapsulation of the new balance of power.
2.20 Former California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher confirmed in a new interview that during a three-hour meeting at the Ecuadorian Embassy in August 2017, he told Julian Assange he would get President Trump to give him a pardon if he turned over information proving the Russians had not been the source of internal Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks.
2.18 Trump pardoned financier Michael Milken and policeman Bernie Kerik, and commuted the 14-year sentence of ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
2.18 Henry Ryerson Civil War Roundtable, Newton NJ
2.18 Donald Ayer in The Atlantic: “Bill Barr’s America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached.”
2.18 Conservative activist Oren Cass, interviewed in The Washington Post: “An earthquake clears a lot of space for rebuilding, but an earthquake does not rebuild. And there are a lot of people who want to rush right back in and build what you already had after the earthquake. But something an earthquake shows you is which of the things that you’d already built were really not built very thoughtfully. It’s important to learn lessons from this disruption that has occurred. It’s important to go back to first principles and ask: What do we actually believe and why? What do we care about and why?” Inside the GOP coalition, Cass argues, traditional economic conservatives ceded economic policy to libertarians as part of a “bargain” to win the Cold War. Ronald Reagan called it a three-legged stool: economic libertarians, social conservatives and national security hawks. Cass believes this “fusionism” worked well – in the past. “When you had a situation where the free market was delivering the social outcomes that conservatives most prized, libertarians and conservatives tended to agree,” he said. “What we’ve seen more recently is a growing understanding that the market does not necessarily in all cases deliver a set of social outcomes that conservatives prize.”Markets are good, Cass explained, but life is about so much more than markets. He said American conservatism historically had a richer conception of the role of government beyond maximizing returns, such as strengthening domestic industry. He lamented the growing concentration of wealth, geographically on the coasts and in the big cities, as well as in a handful of industries, which has accelerated income inequality. “When you zoom out, you can have a rising GDP, but if it’s in the context of collapsing families and people no longer getting married and declining fertility rates and so on and so forth, you haven’t necessarily enhanced well-being,” said Cass. “Likewise, if you are generating growth by trading off the non-market work that people historically performed within their households for a model where everyone goes to work and then they pay each other for the things they used to do in their own household, that’s not great either. Obviously, there are times when disruption, even if unfortunate, is necessary, but it’s important to recognize that, alongside the value that the hyper-efficient conglomerate brings, there is also an awful lot of value that the locally-owned small business brings.” Cass said American Compass will “think differently” about labor vs. capital than Republicans have in recent generations. “A big component of market fundamentalism – in many cases, held entirely in good faith; in some cases, more as a matter of political convenience – is the argument that whatever policies are best for shareholders in the short run are the best policies and will eventually be good for everyone else also,” he said. “That is something that’s not actually part of real economics, and it’s certainly not a conservative way of thinking about how a society operates. … We need to recognize that sometimes we should feel just as comfortable saying, ‘What’s good for workers is going to be good for shareholders in the long run.’”
2.18 Patti Davis in The Daily Beast: “We are so bombarded with the crudeness of Donald Trump, his cruelty and wanton disregard for the tenets of our Constitution, that the image of a president who has a moral compass, reveres our democracy and follows its laws is fading from our collective psyche.”
2.18 U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the Philadelphia-based head of the Federal Judges Association is taking the extraordinary step of calling an emergency meeting to address the intervention in politically sensitive cases by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.
2.17 Eugene Robinson in the Post: President Trump’s playbook for the general election is obvious: demonize the Democrat who runs against him. Democratic primary hopefuls need to stop doing the job for him.
2.17 The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy.
2.16 more than 1,100 former Justice Department employees released a public letter calling on Barr to resign over the Stone case.
2.13 William Barr to ABC: “I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases. [Tweets] about the department, about people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending here, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.”
2.13 Radley Balco in the Washington Post: So we get righteous fury over the FBI’s mistakes in obtaining wiretaps for former foreign policy adviser Carter Page, even as Republicans vote to reauthorize the law that allowed those taps and reject proposed reforms. We get President Trump bashing the federal law enforcement apparatus even as he praises countries whose governments execute people accused of selling drugs. We get angry denunciations of the “jackboots” who arrested Roger Stone and raided Michael Cohen’s office and residence (though they were both treated far better than, say, your average suspected pot dealer), while Trump encourages police brutality against everyday suspects and Attorney General William P. Barr declares that people who criticize law enforcement for brutality against black people aren’t worthy of police protection. And now we have Stone, and Barr’s decision to rescind the sentencing recommendation filed by the federal prosecutors working on the case.
2.12 Max Boot in the Washington Post: Gallup just released a poll showing that most Americans would be willing to vote for a presidential candidate who is black, Catholic, Hispanic, Jewish, a woman, gay or younger than 40 — but not for a socialist. Sanders is a self-proclaimed socialist. His signature issue is Medicare-for-all. That slogan tests positively. But in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 58 percent are opposed to eliminating private health insurance and 60 percent are opposed to paying higher taxes for health care. Sanders’s plan calls for eliminating private health-insurance and paying more taxes. It’s an electoral loser — it’s the super-yacht we can’t afford and don’t need right now — whereas promising to defend and expand the Affordable Care Act is a proven winner that helped Democrats retake the House in 2018. . . . Given the terrible track record of far-left candidates in the 2018 midterm election and in the recent British election (Jeremy Corbyn lost in a landslide), it’s a risk we cannot afford.
2.11 Axios on the New Hampshire Primary: Bernie wins, Pete chases, Amy rises, Elizabeth fades, Joe flops
2.11 The four lawyers who prosecuted Roger Stone quit the case — and one quit his job — after the Justice Department overruled them and said it would lower the amount of prison time it would seek for President Trump’s longtime ally. Trump had blasted the original recommendation of 7-9 years as “very horrible and unfair.”
2.11 Dana Milbank in the Washington Post: Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking. In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus. Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.
2.11 Paul Krugman in the Times: The question now is whether Trump will pay any price for betraying all his promises. Democrats took the House in 2018 largely because of the popular backlash against his attempt to destroy Obamacare. But there’s a real danger that Democrats will blow the election by making it a referendum on ambitious ideas like so-called Medicare for all that are unlikely to become reality, rather than on Trump’s ongoing efforts to destroy programs Americans love.
2.11 According to the Department of Labor, Trump created 1.5 million fewer jobs (6.6 million) in his first three years in office than Barack Obama did in his final three (8.1 million)― a decline of 19%.
2.11 Albany
2.10 Albany
2.10 Statues of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were unveiled in the Maryland statehouse
2.9 After a 21-year–old Mercer University student asked Joe Biden a question about his performance in the Iowa caucus, he called her a ‘lying, dog-faced pony soldier
2.9 Parasite wins Oscar for Best Picture, the first foreign language film so honored. Director Bong Joon-ho: “Thank you, I will drink until next morning.”
2.9 Maureen Dowd in the Times, quoting an anonymous Democrat: “Donald Trump is narrowcasting to African-Americans and Latinos with his Super Bowl ad and at the State of the Union, and the economy’s doing well, and meanwhile we’re fiddling around with a Socialist and Encyclopedia Brown,”
2.9 Ross Douthat posits in the New York Times: “[T]he meltdown at the Iowa caucuses, an antique system undone by pseudo-innovation and incompetence, was much more emblematic of our age than any great catastrophe or breakthrough.” That’s because, Douthat writes, “civilization has entered into decadence,” in the classic sense of the word — “a lack of resolution in the face of threats,” with “hints at exhaustion, finality.” What’s new: The truth of the first decades of the 21st century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we probably aren’t entering a 1930-style crisis for Western liberalism or hurtling forward toward transhumanism or extinction. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, growing old unhappily together in the light of tiny screens. Why it matters:[T]rue dystopias are distinguished, in part, by the fact that many people inside them don’t realize that they’re living in one, because human beings are adaptable enough to take even absurd and inhuman premises for granted.If we feel that elements of our own system are, shall we say, dystopia-ish — from the reality-television star in the White House to the addictive surveillance devices always in our hands; from the drugs and suicides in our hinterlands to the sterility of our rich cities — then it’s possible that an outsider would look at our decadence and judge it more severely still.
2.8 Max Boot in the Post: Trump is unchastened, unchained and unhinged. I fear for the future of our democracy with such a vindictive bully wielding the awesome powers of the presidency with less and less restraint. He is making an example of all those who have exposed his misconduct in the past to ensure that he can get away with even greater wrongdoing.
2.8 Frank Bruni in the Times: “You can analyze Sanders and assess his prospects in terms of how liberal many of his positions are: the end of private health insurance, the dismantling of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, free tuition at public colleges regardless of a student’s economic circumstances. By that yardstick he’s Corbyn, and, in my view, a hell of a general-election risk.”
2.8 1917 with Ginny
2.7 Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic: In the 2010s, the national unemployment rate dropped from a high of 9.9 percent to its current rate of just 3.5 percent. The economy expanded each and every year. Wages picked up for high-income workers as soon as the Great Recession ended, and picked up for lower-income workers in the second half of the decade. Americans’ confidence in the economy hit its highest point since 2000, right before the dot-com bubble burst. The headline economic numbers looked good, if not great. But beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability Crisis. This crisis involved not just what families earned but the other half of the ledger, too—how they spent their earnings. In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible. Viewing the economy through a cost-of-living paradigm helps explain why roughly two in five American adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency so many years after the Great Recession ended. It helps explain why one in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. It demonstrates why a surprise furnace-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many American families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. Fully one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.” . . . . The price of housing represents the most acute part of this crisis. In metro areas such as the Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston, severe supply shortages have led to soaring prices—millions of low- and middle-income families are no longer able to purchase centrally located homes. The median asking price for a single-family home in San Francisco has reached $1.6 million; even with today’s low interest rates, that would require a monthly mortgage payment of roughly $6,000, assuming that a family puts down the standard 20 percent. In Manhattan, listings for sale now ask an average of nearly $1,800 per square foot. . . .Home prices are rising faster than wages in roughly 80 percent of American metro regions. . . . Health-care costs are exorbitant, too: Americans pay roughly twice as much for insurance and medical services as do citizens of other wealthy countries, but they don’t have better outcomes. . . . Next up is student-loan debt, a trillion-dollar stone placed on young adults’ backs. Or, to be more accurate, the $1.4 trillion stone, up 6 percent year over year and 116 percent in a decade; student-loan debt is now a bigger burden for households than car loans or credit-card debt. . . .Finally, child care. Spending on daycare, nannies, and other direct-care services for kids has increased by 2,000 percent in the past four decades, and families now commonly spend $15,000 to $26,000 a year to have someone watch their kid.
2.7 Trump fires Gordon Sondland, Alexander Vindman, as well as Vindman’s twin, Yevgeny. Trump tweets: “Allow me a moment to thank… Adam Schiff. Were it not for his crack investigation skills, @realDonald Trump might have had a tougher time unearthing who all needed to be fired. Thanks, Adam!”
2.7 Chris Matthews on MSNBC: “I have my own views of the word ‘socialist’ and I’d be glad to share them with you in private. They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War, I have an attitude towards Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay? So I have a problem with people who took the other side.”
2.7 Washington Post: President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts
2.7 Amy Klobachar‘s debate closing: ` I will tell you this, there is a complete lack of empathy in this guy in the White House right now. And I will bring that to you. If you have trouble stretching your paycheck to pay for that rent, I know you, and I will fight for you. If you have trouble deciding if you’re going pay for your child care or your long-term care, I know you, and I will fight for you. If you have trouble figuring out if you’re going fill your refrigerator or fill your prescription drug, I know you, and I will fight for you. I do not have the biggest name up on this stage, I don’t have the biggest bank account. I’m not a political newcomer with no record, but I have a record of fighting for people. I’m asking you to believe that someone who totally believes in America can win this, because if you are tired of the extremes in our politics and the noise and the nonsense, you have a home with me.”
2.7 Helaine Olen in the Washington Post: Think of it this way: Jobs are more plentiful and average hourly wages are rising slowly, but the conditions we work under are not all that great. Laws and regulations make it difficult for workers to join together and unionize. Shift workers literally don’t know what they will earn week to week, yet need to be available to work all hours on demand. When it comes to health care, it’s not simply that costs and deductibles continue to rise, often past Americans’ ability to pay the bills. Earlier this week, Kaiser Health News reported on the increasing problem of insurance companies giving approvals for tests, procedures and medications only to retroactively yank them, leaving consumers on the hook for thousands of dollars in expenses, with little in the way of recourse. There are increased demands on families, too. Rising medical costs are colliding with a growing population of seniors, and Medicare does not pay for many of the expenses associated with long-term care. The result? A survey released last year found that half of adults assisting their elderly parents cut back on their own personal spending as a result of the financial burden. You can think of any number of such economic issues, which we mostly see as our own individual burdens. But that’s not true: They are multigenerational, and the financial effects cascade through families. The age cohort with the fastest growth in student loan debt? It’s not millennials (though they do owe higher amounts overall); it’s people over the age of 60. They’re swamped not just by their own lingering college tuition expenses, but by the need to help their children and grandchildren pay for higher education. These are not the things we contemplate when we talk about the economy. But this is absurd. A good economy is about more than having a job. It’s about being able to afford the health care we need and knowing how many hours we will work during a given week. If you think about it this way, you don’t need to convince people that the economy still doesn’t work. They are, all too often, living it.
2.6 Jonathan Chait in New York: It is always darkest, John McCain used to say, before it gets totally black. So it is for the American center-left right now. Bernie Sanders is currently favored to win the nomination, a prospect that would make Donald Trump a heavy favorite to win reelection, and open the possibility of a Corbyn-esque wipeout. It is hard to see how the situation is likely to improve soon. Indeed, it could get worse.
2.5 The Department of Homeland Security announced that the department has stopped enrolling or re-enrolling New Yorkers in Global Entry and other expedited traveler programs, in retribution for state “sanctuary” policies.
2.5 Chris Lu and Harin Contractor in The Washington Monthly: In 2019, for instance, the gap between the richest and poorest households in the United States reached its highest point in more than 50 years. The number of Americans without health insurance continues to climb following years of declines since the passage and implementation of Obamacare. And household debt is now in excess of $14 trillion, exceeding the pre-recession high Even with low unemployment, wage growth is lagging. The most recent employment report reported wages increasing by just 2.9 percent over the last year. With inflation at 2.1 percent, that’s not much of a pay raise. To the extent that wage growth has picked up in recent months, a major contributor has been increases in state and local minimum wages that Republicans and the president opposed. Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, the 2017 tax cut, has produced none of its promised benefits, including the $4,000 pay raise that he and his allies promised to American workers. In fact, as a result of the tax cut, 91 companies in the Fortune 500 paid no federal taxes last year. The country’s six biggest banks saved $32 billion at the same time that they laid off more than 1,000 employees. The tax cut has also failed to produce the “four, five and even six percent” economic growth that Trump promised. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the GDP growth of 2.1 percent was lower than both the growth rate before the tax cut was passed in 2017 and the average of Obama’s second term (2.4 percent). Instead, the tax cuts have produced annual budget deficits of $1 trillion, which Trump has signaled may lead to cuts in Social Security and Medicare, in addition to his ongoing efforts to erode the social safety net. Ironically, despite the president’s pledge to help the “forgotten men and women,” blue-collar job growth—which includes construction, manufacturing, and mining—remains anemic, only growing at 0.8 percent in 2019 compared to 2 percent in Obama’s final term. What’s more, the ongoing trade war plunged the manufacturing sector into recession last year, which has stunted economic growth in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. Tensions with China produced a 24 percent increase in farm bankruptcies last year, with the most coming from Wisconsin. The Congressional Budget Office estimated recently that Trump’s trade policies will cost American households an average of $1,277 this year. Worse yet, employers reported the highest number of layoffs in four years. For workers who are able to find new jobs, data shows they earn about 10 percent less than before. That gap is even greater for workers who were at the same job for three years or more. But while the economic reality under Trump is troubling for most Americans overall, it’s even more daunting for African-American workers, who have an unemployment rate almost twice as high as white workers. 2.5 The members of the House who supported the first article of impeachment received about 38.5 million votes in 2018 — over 6 million more votes than were cast for members who opposed the article. In the Senate, the difference was even more stark. Nearly 69 million votes were cast for senators who supported removing Trump from office based on that first article of impeachment, about 12 million more votes than were received by senators who opposed his removal. Trump received 63 million votes
2.5 James Carville on MSNBC: “We gotta decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult, or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct — to be a majority party? I am scared to death. We gotta get relevant. The urban core is not gonna get it done.” What’s he really saying? Forget Bernie, Joe may be done, think about Sensible Pete.
2.5 David von Drehle in the Post: Aristotle got a lot of things wrong, but he was dead right in teaching that politics is not an end in itself, but the means to greater virtues. For Americans, those virtues were spelled out from the beginning: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of joy. Yet it is precisely this higher purpose that is missing from contemporary politics, which has become the very picture, the raw embodiment, of joylessness. From one end of the political spectrum to the other, the common tenor of our public life is hatred, denunciation and struggle. Every path forward is to be strewn with the bodies of vanquished enemies, be they witch-hunting swamp-dwellers or rapacious billionaires. There are no policy disagreements, only fights for fighters who promise to win like winners. “Choose sides,” a disgruntled reader scolded me the other day, as though the key to truth is opposition. Just because there are two parties does not mean there are two sides. Life is richer than that. Endless antagonism is a disease in politics, and widespread unhappiness is the symptom. The next great leader of the United States will be one who pulls the country together in some shared passion or purpose.
2.5 Trump acquited
2.5 Mitt Romney: Hamilton explained that the founders’ decision to invest senators with this obligation rather than leave it to the voters was intended to minimize, to the extent possible, the partisan sentiments of the public at large. So the verdict is ours to render under our Constitution. The people will judge us for how well and faithfully we fulfill our duty. The grave question the Constitution tasked senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanor. Yes, he did. The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so. The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The president’s purpose was personal and political. Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust. What he did was not perfect. No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.
2.5 Kirk Douglas dies at 103.
2.4 Alice Mayhew dies at 89
2.4 Trump snubs Pelosi at SOTU; Pelosi rips up speech
2.4 George Will in the Post: The progressive party’s Iowa caucuses were a hilarious parody of progressive governance — ambitious, complex, subtle and a carnival of unintended consequences. The party that promises to fine-tune everything, from the production of wealth to the allocation of health care to the administration of education, produced a fittingly absurd climax to what surely was Iowa’s final strut as a national distraction.
2.3 Democrats botch Iowa caucus
2.3 Jay Chiat in New York: The substantive importance of the initial Trump error is extremely minor. It’s the sort of gaffe that, had a Democratic president committed it, would have supplied hundreds of hours of mocking Fox News programming about out-of-touch coastal elites. (George W. Bush’s reelection campaign was premised largely on John Kerry having mispronounced the name of Green Bay’s football stadium and ordering the wrong kind of cheese on his Philly cheesesteak sandwich.) But since Democrats have an overabundance of serious Trump vulnerabilities to exploit, nobody is going to spend much time on his confusion between the two different Kansas Cities. The importance, rather, lies in the willingness of his supporters to defend Trump regardless. Trump has taken the long, deep tradition of anti-intellectualism running through the American right and elevated it to almost cultlike status. Trump has created a hierarchy in which loyalty is determined by willingness to defend even his most absurd lies. The dynamic has been on display throughout the Senate trial, where Republicans have vied for his favor by openly declaring their lack of interest in weighing factual evidence. The Trumpiest Republicans are those who will repeat even his most fantastical claims
2.2 In congratulating the Chiefs, Trump says they are from Kansas
2.2 Scoring three touchdowns in final nine minutes, the Kansas City ChiefS defeat the 49ers 31-20, winning the Super Bowl for the first time in fifty years. Jennifer Lopez and Shakira performed during halftime