If you’re mystified or just trying to make sense of all the different moving pieces in the health-care policy debate taking place in the Democratic presidential primaries, I’ve got something you’ll want to see. As you know, there’s the ACA expanded with a “public option.” There are various Medicare buy-in models which can be similar to the public option additions. Then there are various flavors of “Medicare for All.” There are many political, ideological and priority questions in this debate. But I was really most interested in clarifying the moving pieces in the different plans, the technical specifics, how transitions work, how you save money without creating big disruptions, how many people the different approaches actually cover. So last week we did a TPM Briefing with President Obama’s Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Andy Slavitt, to discuss these topics. I found it an incredibly illuminating discussion and many participants told me they did too. If you are a TPM member you can watch the Briefing here.
Look at this remarkable piece of video. President Trump announces that he’s received another “very beautiful letter” from Kim Jong Un in which Kim tells Trump he’s not happy about U.S.-South Korea military exercises, Trump appears to agree with Kim and Trump chides South Korea for not paying the U.S. more money.
Let me tell you about a new project we’re involved with. It’s called Crime Story. It’s the brainchild of a friend of mine named Kary Antholis. It’s about crime both in its story telling dimensions (in fiction, crime reporting, documentaries etc.) and also as a policy and social justice issue (mass incarceration, implicit bias in the criminal justice system, reform DAs, etc.) in American society.
Yesterday we learned more details about the White House’s continued indifference to or actual interference with the DHS’s efforts to combat violent white supremacist extremism and terrorism. This is hardly surprising. There’s basically no clear line separating the kind of folks Trump invited to his social media ‘bias’ festival at the White House and various white supremacist propagandists who radicalize guys like the shooter in El Paso. But it’s misleading to see this as particular to Trump or this administration. This goes back at least 25 years and is in its own way comparable to NRA-backed legislative mandates preventing federal public health officials from funding research on gun violence.
The lawyer for a Trump supporter (Curt Brockway) who assaulted a boy for not removing his hat during the national anthem says his client thought he was acting on Trump’s orders.
It wasn’t a central part of his note, really more an aside. But TPM Reader MP made one error in yesterday’s note when he wrote that “the Tree of Life massacre was the worst attack on Jewish people in American, nay, Western Hemisphere history.” A surprisingly large number of TPM Readers wrote in to say that this was clearly wrong. The largest, by really any definition, was the AMIA Jewish Community Center bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994 in which 85 people died and some three hundred were injured. Of course, massacres of this scale can’t really be compared in some apples to apples sense. Each is radically individual, separate, total in itself. But this is an important correction of the record.
I want to thank everyone who has taken us up on our offer of a two week free trial of Prime Ad Free (AF). If you’re a current Prime member and would like to give it a try, just click here. It’s free. No obligation. You can turn the trial on and off with a single mouse click. And if you decide you’d like to upgrade that’s great news for TPM. Here’s my note from yesterday with a bit more detail about why we’re making this offer.
At around 10 p.m. Tuesday night, panic gripped the Times Square area of Manhattan after a backfiring motorcycle was mistaken for gunshots.
I happened to be caught up in the chaos with my family. Upon leaving a Broadway show on West 45th Street, a sea of people rushed toward the theater, shouting and scared.
This gets a bit deep in the weeds. But it’s worth going there. Because it’s important. The President has been going into court in his personal capacity – i.e., with his own private lawyers – trying to knock down various House efforts to subpoena documents relative to his personal and business finances. His lawyers, particularly a guy named William Consovoy, have made a raft out of outlandish legal claims which, if taken at face value, mean the Congress has very little oversight or investigative powers at all.
The new Quinnipiac poll confirms the two real facts of the Democratic presidential primary race to date: 1) The persistence and resilience of Joe Biden’s frontrunner status, one that continues to be undergirded by strong support from African-Americans (47%). 2) The slow, steady rise of Elizabeth Warren. No debate bumps or splashes – just consistent growth in support over time.
Biden 32%, Warren 21%, Sanders 14%, Harris 7%, Buttigiege 5%, Booker and O’Rourke 2%.