Centrists squirm as 2020 Democrats swerve left

Comment from the Left-leaning Boston Globe below:

The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Donald Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.

Two months into the presidential campaign, the leading Democratic contenders have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced leftist ideas on health care, taxes, the environment, and Middle East policy that would fundamentally alter the economy, elements of foreign policy and ultimately remake American life.

Led by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a democratic socialist who is the top candidate in the race at this early stage, many vocal leaders in the party are choosing to draw lessons from liberal victories in 2018 rather than the party’s breakthroughs in moderate suburban battlegrounds that delivered Democratic control of the House.

These progressive Democrats risk playing into Trump’s hands — he has repeatedly branded them “socialists” — yet they argue that their ambitious agenda can inspire a voter revolt in 2020 that elects a left-wing president.

“Those ideas that we talked about here in Iowa four years ago that seemed so radical at the time, remember that?” Sanders, returning to Iowa this past week for the first time as a 2020 candidate, crowed Thursday. “Shock of all shocks, those very same ideas are now supported not only by Democratic candidates for president but by Democratic candidates all across the board, from school board on up.”

The sprint toward populism amounts to a rejection of the incremental and often-defensive brand of politics that has characterized the party’s approach to highly charged issues for 40 years. Yet when nearly half of voters indicate in polls that they will not support the president’s reelection, many moderates say the cautious strategy in 2018 that helped the party pick up 21 House seats that Trump carried two years earlier should be the playbook for next year.

“What we saw in the midterms is a lot of people from the center and moderate part of the party really win and take back the House,” said Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, alluding to the careful and poll-tested campaigns many Democrats in Republican-leaning districts ran last year. “We need to make sure we’re being as pragmatic as we can.”

This moderate wing of the party lacks an obvious standard-bearer. Former mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who would have run a centrist campaign, begged off this past week; Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Midwestern progressive who favors a within-the-system style of pragmatic politics, also decided not to run. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is running, has presented herself as a centrist but has not yet gained traction.

Should former vice president Joe Biden enter the race, as his top advisers vow he soon will, he would have the best immediate shot at the moderate mantle. (And if he does not run, Democrats like former governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia or governor Andrew Cuomo of New York might try to seek that role.)

Biden’s candidacy would immediately thrust a fundamental dispute to the center of the Democratic race: Do Americans simply pine for a pre-Trump equilibrium, less chaos and more consensus, or do the yawning disparities of these times call out for a more transformational administration?

Sanders and other Democratic candidates, like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are plainly wagering that voters want more than a return to normalcy.

Warren proposed Friday that the government break up big tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, the latest, and perhaps boldest, proposal to come from her campaign. And Sanders’ platform — “Medicare for all,” free college tuition, and an aggressive plan to combat climate change — has grown in popularity, according to polls.

Speaking at the University of Iowa on Friday evening, Sanders took aim at “establishment Democrats” and won his loudest and most sustained applause by pledging to push through his universal health care bill.

Sanders and Warren, along with a new generation of high-profile progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have emerged this winter as the clearest and most vocal arbiters of Democratic aspirations, if not the immediate congressional agenda.

They are, at least, hastening the tectonic shifts taking place in the party. It was no accident that House Democrats modified a resolution targeting Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — for her controversial claim that pro-Israel advocates carry an “allegiance” to a foreign country — after Ocasio-Cortez, other lawmakers of color, and the party’s leading presidential hopefuls rebelled against singling out Omar. The episode marked a striking departure from the down-the-line support for Israel that has characterized the upper ranks of most Democratic primaries.

Yet Biden, in speeches at home and abroad, has used much of the first part of this year pledging to restore the dignity he believes that the country has lost in the Trump years, promising a restoration rather than a revolution. And, as his supporters put it less subtly, his campaign would represent something else.

“Overwhelmingly, the primary electorate of the Democratic Party wants to win,” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said. He argued that Biden could “repair a lot of the ways in which our position in the world has been harmed” while offering a “hopeful, optimistic, positive” vision at home that would heal the divisions he said Trump has exacerbated.

To such moderate Democrats, the most instructive recent election is not that of Trump in 2016 but rather the 2018 midterms, when many of the Democrats who won in battleground House districts and governor’s races were decidedly less confrontational than Sanders.

“The overwhelming majority of seats we picked up were by center-left candidates representing more centrist-type districts,” said Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, adding, “There’s still lots of folks on our side who are OK with compromise.”

Democrats in Washington are seeing the tensions within the party firsthand as they try to balance an agenda that their newly elected moderates can support while also mollifying more liberal newcomers who are eager to impeach Trump and pursue far-reaching goals, such as the Green New Deal.

“A lot of young people have come into a world where there was more diversity, more opportunities and where they had use of social media,” said Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland about the expectations of next-generation activists and lawmakers, some of whom serve on the oversight committee he chairs. “A guy like me, I had to fight to even get in the door.”

To tell some of these younger Democrats that a uncompromising progressive platform may be unattainable, let alone who can and cannot be elected president, is difficult given Trump’s victory and the chasm they see between the scale of the problems they will confront and the policies in place today.

And unlike many in the party’s pragmatic wing, these Democrats believe the recipe for success in the general election is not to nominate another seemingly safe candidate like Hillary Clinton, who was unable to galvanize the base and lost crucial votes to a Green Party nominee, but to put forward somebody who will energize reluctant voters.

“Obviously we’ve shown that we’re at a place where we’re OK with nontraditional candidates,” said Riley Wilson, a 29-year-old Nebraskan who crossed the Missouri River to see Sanders. He added: “I think so many people just aren’t involved at all in politics, and I think he would be able to bring some of those people into the fold because they’ll feel like they have options that they haven’t had before, politically speaking.”

SOURCE 

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Dad Of Sick Child Explains Why Government-only Medicine Always Leads To Rationing

Would you like all hospitals to run like the typical DMV?

The reintroduction of Democrats’ single-payer legislation has some families contemplating what total government control of the health-care sector would mean for them. Contrary to the rhetoric coming from liberals, some of the families most affected by a single-payer system want nothing to do with this brave new health care world:

Pouncing Joe Pilot, MD: "I promised you all a thread on the state of modern American healthcare from the unique perspective of both a pediatrician and a father of a gravely ill child undergoing surgery"

As this father realizes, giving bureaucrats the power to deny access to health care could have devastating consequences for some of the most vulnerable Americans.

Determining the ‘Appropriate’ Use of Medical Resources

To summarize the Twitter thread: The father in question has a 12-year-old son with a rare and severe heart condition. Last week, the son received an implantable cardioverter defibrillator to help control cardiac function.

But because the defibrillator is expensive and cardiologists were implanting the device “off-label”—the device isn’t formally approved for use in children, because few children need such a device in the first place—the father feared that, under a single-payer system, future children in his son’s situation wouldn’t get access to the defibrillator needed to keep them alive.

The father has reason to worry. He cited a 2009 article written by Zeke Emanuel—brother of Rahm, and an advisor in the Obama administration during the debate on Obamacare—which included the following chart:



The chart illustrates the “age-based priority for receiving scarce medical interventions under the complete lives system”—the topic of Emanuel’s article. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this chart sure speaks volumes.

Also consider some of Emanuel’s quotes from the same article, in which he articulates the principles behind the allocation of scarce medical resources:

Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments.
The complete lives system discriminates against older people….[However,] age, like income, is a ‘non-medical criterion’ inappropriate for allocation of medical resources.

If those quotes do not give one pause, consider another quote by Zeke Emanuel, this one from a 1996 work: “[Health care] services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” When that quote resurfaced during the debate on Obamacare in 2009, Emanuel attempted to claim he never advocated for this position—but he wrote the words nonetheless.

The Flaw in Centralized Decision-Making

Beyond their Orwellian tone, these quotes ignore a more fundamental flaw in this kind of centralized system, where bureaucrats like Emanuel determine who gets scarce medical resources and who does not. Research into various drugs and treatments determines their effectiveness on average. But by definition, a single individual is by no means “average.”

The father in his Twitter thread hit on this very point. Medical device companies have not received Food and Drug Administration approval to implant defibrillators in children in part because so few children need them to begin with, making it difficult to compile the data necessary to prove the devices safe and effective in young people.

Likewise, most clinical trials have historically under-represented women and minorities. The more limited data make it difficult to determine whether a drug or device works better, worse, or the same for these important sub-populations. But if a one-size-fits-all system makes decisions based upon average circumstances, these under-represented groups could suffer.

To put it another way: A single-payer health care system could deny access to a drug or treatment deemed ineffective, based on the results of a clinical trial comprised largely of white males. The system may not even recognize that that same drug or treatment works well for African-American females, let alone adjust its policies in response to such evidence.

A ‘Difficult Democratic Conversation’

In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, Barack Obama mused aloud about whether government bureaucrats would have to make tough health care decisions at the end of human life:

The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here….There is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.

Some would argue that Obama’s mere suggestion of such a conversation hints at his obvious conclusion from it. Instead of having a “difficult democratic conversation” about ways for government bureaucrats deny patients care, such a conversation should center around not giving bureaucrats the right to do so in the first place.

SOURCE 

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Fascist Democrats Won't Condemn Anti-Semitism

Even Ilhan Omar voted for the resolution that was originally supposed to rebuke her

The whole point of the Democrats’ originally planned resolution this week was to rebuke the repeated and specific anti-Semitic remarks of a sitting member of Congress. The actual resolution they passed Thursday did not do that. Worse, but predictably, the 23 Republicans who declined to participate in what became a generic “anti-hate” charade are now being vilified for daring to vote against “condemning hatred and bigotry.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has been the source of much consternation since winning a seat in Congress last November, showing her true hateful colors on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) protested that Omar’s “words are not based on any anti-Semitic attitude” but are instead because “she didn’t have a full appreciation of how they landed on other people.” Translation: Omar is dumb, not racist. As for the resolution, Pelosi insisted, “It’s not about her. It’s about these forms of hatred.”

The resolution was so watered down to include “Islamophobia,” anti-Hispanic sentiment, and even law-enforcement profiling that Hamas-supporting Omar herself voted for it. Again, given that its original purpose was indeed, contra Pelosi, a rebuke of Omar, that should tell you all you need to know about the radicals who now run the Democrat Party.

Now, the resolution didn’t cover every kind of hate — just those flavors Democrats wanted to highlight. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said he was “shocked” that the measure “refused to similarly condemn discrimination against Caucasian Americans and Christians.” We’re sure he meant “shocked” about as facetiously as Captain Renault in “Casablanca.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) opposed the resolution, calling it a “sham” that was actually “designed to protect anti-Semitic bigotry.” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) added, “By refusing to mention Rep. Ilhan Omar by name and allowing her to keep her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrats have sent a message that anti-Semitism is less serious than other types of hate.” Indeed, House Minority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) said as much, dismissing families of Holocaust survivors as not truly understanding how the former refugee Omar is the one “living through a lot of pain.”

Why has anti-Semitism been legitimized by Democrats? Because they are increasingly becoming fascist — a bastardized socialist philosophy in which anti-Semitism is deeply rooted. Their 2020 platform is one of authoritarian government control of private industry, class warfare, and a race-based hierarchy of victim groups. That’s fascism in a nutshell, despite the fashionable leftist historical lie that puts 20th-century fascists and their ideological descendants on the Right. After all, as Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is attributed to have said, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”

And if anyone knows how to repeat a lie often enough, it’s Democrats.

SOURCE

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Hispanic Unemployment Breaks Another Record Low, But TOTALLY Ignored By Telemundo & Univision

President Trump is breaking records left and right. In the month of February, the Hispanic unemployment rate hit another record low, the fourth time since this past June. So what did the two main Spanish news networks in America (Telemundo and Univison) have to say about this great news? Absolutely nothing!

Trump has done more for the black and hispanic communities in the past two years than Obama did in his entire presidency. That’s a fact. Check out what the Epoch Times reported:

Hispanic unemployment dropped from 4.9 to 4.3 percent between January and February, following the previous trend of historically low unemployment for the group and in general, which was somewhat broken in January by the temporary increase in furloughed workers due to the partial government shutdown.

Telemundo and Univision both ran articles on the unemployment data, but neither mentioned the historical significance of the Hispanic rate. The Telemundo article didn’t mention the Hispanic rate at all.

SOURCE 

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