Margaret Flowers at TruthOut finds the upcoming Sanders "Medicare-for-All" bill to be noticeably weaker than Rep. Conyers's H.R. 676, long the "gold standard" of single-payer health insurance bills. Well, that would explain why Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX), the latter Sen. Ted Cruz's likely challenger in 2018, have embraced the cause! Mr. Sanders appears to have learned the wrong lesson from Mr. Reagan's similarly close loss in the 1976 primaries -- whereas many people then asked "wouldn't it be nice if Ronald Reagan could manage facts and figures?", no one is now asking "wouldn't it be nice if Bernie Sanders could 'play the game'?" When you've already changed the game, you don't play the old one.
Canada demands that the U.S. drop its state-level "right to work" laws and institute a generous paid family leave program, as part of NAFTA renegotiations. So that's what Barack Obama was talking about when he said "free" trade deals would force other nations to protect their workers better! But did he fail to consider it'd be used on us? I oppose any attempt to bargain away our laws in trade deals, even laws I don't like. But this sure is what's-good-for-the-goose territory for "free" traders. If we're very lucky, it might be the kind of thing that induces President Trump to throw up his hands and withdraw from NAFTA entirely.
"JPMorgan Software Does in Seconds What Took Lawyers 360,000 Hours," reads this breathless headline which, at any site other than Bloomberg, might be followed by an explanation point. I would advise my fellow liberals to avoid celebrating at the misfortune to be suffered by password-resetting techs and lawyers who used to read commercial loan agreements -- I mean, are any bosses suffering in this scenario? -- and attend to the very real possibility, unaddressed by this apparently slightly-rewritten PR release, that software is a way to avoid accountability for human mistakes and human wrongdoing. Also, JP Morgan Chase fucking cloud computes? Doesn't anyone care about security anymore?
Hillary Clinton alleges, in her upcoming election loss post-mortem, that Bernie Sanders caused "lasting damage" to her campaign, that he "made it harder to 'unify progressives'," and even paved the way for Mr. Trump's "Crooked Hillary" line of attack. These charges may be true in the strictest sense, but surely she remembers (for example) that George W. Bush's "flip-flopping" charges against John Kerry originated with Howard Dean (who used actual flip-flops!), and surely she knows that these things always happen in primaries. So I submit that as more evidence that she thought she had some kind of right to the nomination, if not also to the election, and we all know what that kind of hubris brings.
Finally, in a truly stunning display, the Trump Administration EPA goes to considerable lengths to attack one AP reporter over his work finding seven out of seven Superfund sites in Houston "inundated" by water. Tha Bush Mobb would simply have split hairs over whether "inundated" means "flooded," and I'm almost nostalgic for that kind of silliness, though the EPA's claim of having examined sites through "aerial imaging" does recall Bush Mobb reports that Mr. Bush had seen Katrina damage from on high. But the kicker, of course, is the personal attacks on the reporter for an unrelated story -- because when you can't win the case on the merits, personal attacks are all you have left.
Comments