Super Tuesday Reads
Posted: March 3, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Chris Matthews, coronavirus, Donald Trump, Super Tuesday 46 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
Super Tuesday has arrived, and by tonight we should have a better idea of how the Democratic race for the nomination is going. If you live in Alabama, American Samoa, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, or Virginia, today is your day to vote. Here’s the state of the race after Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke endorsed Joe Biden last night.
The Washington Post: Power Up: Is this a two-person race or a slog? Waiting on Super Tuesday results.
YOUR (PROACTIVE) GUIDE TO SUPERDELEGATES: With 1,357 pledged delegates at stake today, Super Tuesday will go a ways in determining if there’s a clear front-runner in the Democratic primary or if we have a long slog ahead.
Meaning there’s still a chance the nomination battle drags on through the Democratic convention in Milwaukee this summer, resulting in a rare contested convention that hasn’t occurred for either major party in almost 70 years.
That became less likely as the moderate wing of the party moved rapidly to coalesce behind former vice president Joe Biden after his South Carolina win over fears that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the front-runner so far, is gaining unstoppable momentum. But Biden’s push to make this a two-person race isn’t guaranteed, and the party is still fractured enough that there could very well be a muddled picture and continued infighting moving ahead.
Nonetheless, Biden’s campaign rolled out endorsements all yesterday from party bigwigs and ex-rivals and appeared in Dallas last night with former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), as well as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (Texas).
“We need a politics that’s about decency, a politics that brings back dignity. That’s what Joe Biden has been practicing his entire life,” Buttigieg said at an event ahead of Biden’s rally.
Klobuchar declared at the rally: “I cannot think of a better way to end my campaign than joining his.”Yet former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) remain in the race and might very well prevent Biden’s push to make this a two-man race. Depending on the delegate picture in a post-Super Tuesday world, it’s possible no candidate successfully captures a clear majority of delegates (1,991) necessary to secure the Democratic nomination.
Read more at the WaPo.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews shocked viewers at 7 last night by announcing his “retirement.”
The Daily Beast: MSNBC Host Chris Matthews Resigns After Accusations of Sexism and Harassment.
Longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced on air Monday night that he was resigning following a slew of on-air fumbles and allegations that he made sexually inappropriate remarks to a political columnist in 2016.
“I’m retiring,” he said. “This is the last Hardball on MSNBC, and obviously this isn’t for lack of interest in politics.”
Over the past several weeks, the cable news veteran has been under increasing scrutiny due to allegations about previous offscreen conduct, as well as a number of eyebrow-raising on-air statements. Observers took note when Matthews, normally a staple of election coverage, did not appear on air on Saturday during the South Carolina primary.
“After my conversation with MSNBC, I decided tonight will be my last Hardball,” Matthews said on his show Monday night. “So let me tell you why. The younger generations are ready to take the reins. We see them in politics, the media, and fighting for their causes. They’re improving the workplace. We’re talking about better standards than we grew up with, fair standards… Compliments on a woman’s appearance some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were OK were never OK. Certainly not today. For making such comments in the past, I’m sorry.” [….]
After Matthews delivered his resignation announcement, Steve Kornacki took over for the remainder of the hour, expressing shock over his colleague’s retirement.
The New York Times: Chris Matthews Out at MSNBC.
Chris Matthews, the veteran political anchor and voluble host of the long-running MSNBC talk show “Hardball,” resigned on Monday night, an abrupt departure from a television perch that made him a fixture of politics and the news media over the past quarter-century.
Mr. Matthews, 74, had faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.
On Saturday, the journalist Laura Bassett published an essay accusing Mr. Matthews of making multiple inappropriate comments about her appearance, reviving longstanding allegations about the anchor’s sexist behavior. By Monday, his position at the news network he helped build had become untenable.
Accompanied by his family, Mr. Matthews walked onto the “Hardball” set inside NBC’s Washington bureau shortly before 7 p.m. to deliver a brief farewell. His longtime crew members, who had been told of his plans roughly an hour earlier, looked on stunned.
“I’m retiring,” Mr. Matthews told viewers in a solemn and brief monologue as his broadcast began at 7. “This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC.”
His sudden signoff took many colleagues by surprise — “Wait. What?” the MSNBC anchor Katy Tur wrote on Twitter — but it followed days of discussions with Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC and one of the early executive producers of “Hardball.”
Unfortunately, most of the news today is still about the coronavirus, which appears to be spreading rapidly in the U.S. and the testing situation is still problematic.
Last night a woman in Seattle posted her experience on Twitter. She says she has chronic bronchitis and is immunosuppressed. She works in a health care facility in Seattle and has symptoms.
As of this morning, she still has no further information. What’s in the headlines about the virus:
Associated Press: More testing sheds light on how virus is spreading in US.
SEATTLE (AP) — An increase in testing for the coronavirus began shedding light Monday on how the illness has spread in the United States, including in Washington state, where four people died at a nursing home and some schools were closed for disinfection.
New diagnoses in several states pushed the tally of COVID-19 cases past 100, and New Hampshire reported its first case, raising the total of affected states to 11. Seattle officials announced four more deaths, bringing the total in the U.S. to six.
In Seattle, King County Executive Dow Constantine declared an emergency and said the county was buying a hotel to be used as a hospital for patients who need to be isolated. He said the facility should be available by the end of the week.
“We have moved to a new stage in the fight,” he said.
Vice President Mike Pence met with the nation’s governors and pledged to continue updating them weekly by teleconference. President Donald Trump met with pharmaceutical companies to talk about progress toward a vaccine.
The deaths at a nursing home in suburban Kirkland, Washington, were especially troubling to health care experts because of the vulnerability of sick and elderly people to the illness and existing problems in nursing facilities.
“It’s going to be a disaster,” said Charlene Harrington, who studies nursing homes at the University of California, San Francisco. Infection is already a huge problem in U.S. nursing homes because of a lack of nurses and training.
In Texas, tension between U.S. and local officials brewed over the planned release Monday of more than 120 ex-passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship in quarantine in San Antonio. Mayor Ron Nirenberg declared a public safety emergency in an attempt to continue the quarantine. He and other officials in San Antonio called for more lab testing of the passengers after one woman tested positive after release.
Read the rest at AP.
The New York Times: Defense Secretary Warns Commanders Not to Surprise Trump on Coronavirus.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper has urged American military commanders overseas not to make any decisions related to the coronavirus that might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge, American officials said.
Mr. Esper’s directive, delivered last week during a video teleconference call with combatant commanders around the world, is the latest iteration of Mr. Trump’s efforts to manage public fears over the disease, even as it continues to spread around the world.
Mr. Trump has said Democrats and the news media are stoking fear about the disease, even calling their concerns a “hoax” during one rally last week….
Mr. Esper told commanders deployed overseas that they should check in before making decisions related to protecting their troops.
In one exchange during last Wednesday’s video teleconference, Gen. Robert B. Abrams, the commander of American forces in South Korea, where more than 4,000 coronavirus cases have been detected, discussed his options to protect American military personnel against the virus, said one American official briefed on the call.
In response, Mr. Esper said he wanted advance notice before General Abrams or any other commander made decisions related to protecting their troops.
So it sounds like pacifying Trump is still the top priority–not protecting Americans.
Anthony Fauci might be the one person everyone in Washington trusts right now.
But at 79, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is in the thick of one of the biggest battles of 35 years in the role: The race to contain coronavirus when the nation is deeply polarized and misinformation can spread with one tweet — sometimes, from the president himself.
“You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don’t want to go to war with a president,” Fauci, who has been the country’s top infectious diseases expert through a dozen outbreaks and six presidents, told POLITICO in an interview Friday. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”
And the truth about coronavirus? “I don’t think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed,” he said. “I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say boy, that was bad.”
The plainspoken scientist with a heavy Brooklyn accent has navigated outbreaks from HIV to Ebola, Zika and the anthrax scare with an ability to talk frankly yet reassuringly about threats, to explain science, public health and risk to the public in a way few can match.
But in this outbreak, he’s not always the comforting public face amid crisis.
More headlines, links only:
The New York Times: As Coronavirus Numbers Rise, C.D.C. Testing Comes Under Fire.
Business Insider: The Trump administration says Medicare and Medicaid might not cover all healthcare for coronavirus patients.
The Washington Post: Major airlines, U.S. officials clash over passenger tracking related to coronavirus cases.
The Daily Beast: Defense Intelligence Agency Bans Some Domestic Travel, Sources Say.
The Atlantic: Trump’s Playbook Is Terribly Ill-Suited to a Pandemic.
That’s all I have for today. What stories are you following?
Middling Monday Reads: Adulting in what passes for the USA these days
Posted: March 2, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Affordable Care Act (ACA), Afghanistan 48 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
There are several story lines cooking their way to the news day. None of them are particularly uplifting which just about matches stuff I’ve been going through lately too. I wish I could give up adulting but Spring Break and Carnival have ended not that I could truly enjoy either with this ever lingering flu. I’m going to fill the pages today with imaginary creatures since I’ve pretty much had it with the real ones. They are from Danish Illustrator/Artist Kay Nielsen whose primary works are illustrations for Fairy Tales and are stylistically Art Deco but many have Asian influences. He is best known for doing the Bald Mountain Scene in Disney’s Fantasia.
Super Tuesday is tomorrow and we’re down two candidates today as Pete Buttigieg just bumped Tom Steyer out of the last man out of the race place. His race was historic no matter what you thought of his chances or his positions. From the AP:
He opened February by sharing victory with one of the Democratic Party’s best-known figures and ended it with a humbling defeat at the hands of another. Yet Pete Buttigieg’s unlikely path over the last 30 days exceeded virtually everyone’s expectations of his presidential ambitions, except perhaps his own.
The former mayor of Indiana’s fourth largest city, an openly gay 38-year-old whose name most voters still can’t pronounce, formally suspended his White House bid Sunday night. He did so acknowledging that he no longer had a viable path to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, even after finishing in the top four in each of the first four contests of the 2020 primary season.
“By every historical measure, we were never supposed to get anywhere at all,” Buttigieg reminded his hometown crowd, which was disappointed and hopeful at the same time. The crowd interrupted his speech with chants of “2024.”
Buttigieg began the month effectively in a first-place tie with progressive powerhouse Bernie Sanders in Iowa’s presidential caucuses. The mayor made history as the first openly gay candidate to earn a presidential delegate, never mind becoming the first to finish on top in any presidential primary contest.
And now we hear Amy’s out and gone over to the Biden side via NYT.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who entered the Democratic presidential race with an appeal to moderate voters and offered herself as a candidate who could win in Midwestern swing states, has decided to quit the race and endorse a rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., according to a person close to Ms. Klobuchar.
Ms. Klobuchar will appear with Mr. Biden at his rally in Dallas Monday night. The decision comes one day after former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., departed the race, and after weeks of Democratic Party hand-wringing about a crowded field of moderate candidates splitting a finite field of centrist votes, allowing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to march forward unopposed among progressives and amass delegates.
From the fairy tale ‘Mother Among Thorns’ Kay Nielsen Danish illustrator 1886-1957
What would year would it be without the Republicans trying to get rid of the old Republican cum American Enterprise Institute cum ChaffeyCare cum Dole cum Care/Romney care relabeled and passed as ObamaCare? The odd thing thing about this is that it will likely kill off their most ardent Trumperz which is why they’ve got it to the Supreme Court but the Court won’t actually here it until after the Election because, well, you know that’s what the Trumpist regime requested. I’m headed for Medicare about that time so my ObamaCare is safely in place until then but all I can say is that those of us with pre-existing conditions are evidently just supposed to die so they can get on with it. This is the headline from WAPO: “Supreme Court will once again consider fate of Affordable Care Act”. written by Robert Barnes. It will also be a test of Republican Court Stacking efforts since they’ve managed to get another Religious Inquisitor on their Bench.
The Supreme Court will hear a third challenge to the Affordable Care Act, this time at the request of Democratic-controlled states that are fighting a lower court decision that said the entire law must fall.
The court’s review will come in the term that begins in October, which would not leave time for a decision before the November presidential election. The law remains in effect during the legal challenges.
Democrats are eager to keep public attention on the fate of the act, sometimes called Obamacare, which has features voters value, such as required coverage for preexisting conditions. Health care is a leading concern, especially among Democratic voters, and many considered it a persuasive argument when the party won control of the House in 2018.
The House and Democratic-led states asked the court to review a decision last year by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
Hearing a challenge from Texas and other Republican-led states and backed by the Trump administration, the panel struck down the law’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance but sent back to a lower court the question of whether the rest of the statute can stand without it. The lower court had said the entire law must fall.
The House told the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit decision “poses a severe, immediate, and ongoing threat to the orderly operation of health-care markets throughout the country, casts considerable doubt over whether millions of individuals will continue to be able to afford vitally important care, and leaves a critical sector of the nation’s economy in unacceptable limbo.”
he House and Democratic states also have been eager to get the issue before the Supreme Court because the majority that has upheld the ACA in two previous challenges remains.
Sheherazade offers to marry the Sultan
Texas is leading the efforts in voter suppression yet again. This is from the UK Guardian: “Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to vote. Guardian analysis finds that places where black and Latino population is growing by the largest numbers experienced the majority of closures and could benefit Republicans”
Long considered a Republican bastion, changing racial demographics in the state have caused leading Democrats to recast Texas as a potential swing state. Texas Democratic party official Manny Garcia has called it “the biggest battleground state in the country”.
The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinxs.
“The fact of the matter is that Texas is not a red state,” said Antonio Arellano of Jolt, a progressive Latino political organization. “Texas is a nonvoting state.”
On a local level, the changes can be stark. McLennan county, home to Waco, Texas, closed 44% of its polling places from 2012 to 2018, despite the fact that its population grew by more than 15,000 people during the same time period, with more than two-thirds of that growth coming from Black and Latinx residents.
In 2012, there was one polling place for every 4,000 residents. By 2018 that figure had dropped to one polling place per 7,700 residents. A 2019 paper by University of Houston political scientists found that after the county’s transition to vote centers, more voting locations were closed in Latinx neighborhoods than in non-Latinx neighborhoods, and that Latinx people had to travel farther to vote than non-Hispanic whites.
Super Tuesday is the biggest day of the Democratic primary campaign. Fourteen states will hold nominating contests to pick who they think should square off this fall against likely GOP nominee President Trump.
There are 1,357 delegates at stake, about a third of all delegates. So far, fewer than 4% of the delegates have been allocated.
People will head to the polls all across the country, from Virginia to California, Tennessee to Texas. The states and voters are diverse. Almost half have significant black populations, and Latinos figure to be an important factor in the two states with the biggest delegate hauls, California and Texas.
Rosanie or the Inconstant Prince by Kay Nielson
And who’d have thunk it? The Taliban have already broken their “peace” agreement signed with the Trumpist Regime on Saturday via Agence France-Presse.
A deadly blast shattered a period of relative calm in Afghanistan on Monday and the Taliban ordered fighters to resume operations against Afghan forces just two days after signing a deal to usher in peace.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack at a football ground in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, where three brothers were killed, officials told AFP.
The blast occurred around the same time the Taliban ordered fighters to recommence attacks against Afghan army and police forces, apparently ending an official “reduction in violence” that had seen a dramatic drop in bloodshed and given Afghans a welcome taste of peace.
The partial truce between the US, the insurgents and Afghan forces lasted for the week running up to the signing of the US-Taliban accord in Doha on Saturday, and was extended over the weekend.
and the entire thing under the watchful eye of this guy which doesn’t seem to know about it even though French Journalists obviously do …
https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1234519901894828032
Night in a Chinese Garden by Kay Nielsen
And, I want to go back to Fairy Tales again. I’m tired of this adulting stuff. This article in The Atlantic has just about done me in: “The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions. How Trump is destroying the civil service and bending the government to his will.” by George Packer.
But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible
This is the story of how a great republic went soft in the middle, lost the integrity of its guts and fell in on itself—told through government officials whose names under any other president would have remained unknown, who wanted no fame, and who faced existential questions when Trump set out to break them.
Read each of these stories please. Unfortunately, they are not fairy tales.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
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quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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