"Pro-Life" Texas Representative Threatens to Kill O’Rourke With an AR-15

I am not an advocate of abortion and believe it should be safe and rare,  That said, I have no use for most of the "pro-life" crowd which seemingly worships fetuses and loses all interest in children the moment they exit the birth canal.  How else to explain the manner in which these "conservatives" and right wing "Christians" routinely oppose funding for programs for the poor - often children - and support the Republican agenda that would shred the social safety net that many, including the elderly, need to survive.   These programs are assuredly "pro-life" in a different form but they are anathema to the "godly folk."  But the hypocrisy and ugliness goes goes even further:  these folks demonize those with differing views and are not adverse to using violence against their political and culture war opponents as was demonstrated by a self-style "pro-life" Texas Republican who threatened to use an AR-15 on Beto O'Rourke after he proposed a common sense confiscation of assault weapons in civilian hands.  Here are highlights of this disturbing but all too typical story:

It might seem surprising that Briscoe Cain, the Texas state representative who proudly told Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke that his automatic rifle was “waiting for” him, considers himself ardently “pro-life,” but of course it’s not.

Hopping on Twitter last night during the Democratic debate, after O’Rourke had given a stirring answer about seizing high-capacity weapons from citizens if he was elected president, Cain decided to threaten his fellow Texan with his own automatic rifle — also calling him “Robert Francis,” deliberately eschewing O’Rourke’s Spanish nickname “Beto.”

Per an O’Rourke spokesperson, Cain has been reported to the FBI for his violent speech, which you might think would fly in the face of the “sanctity of life”–type rhetoric he uses as an anti-choice legislator in the Texas legislature. Earlier this year, Cain was an architect of the draconian heartbeat bill, which failed in the Texas House in May, that sought to ban abortion at six weeks, before most women even realize they’re pregnant. When introducing it, he said in a statement, “When you have a heartbeat you have a life and we should honor that life at all cost.” So zealous is he in these views that, just this week, he took the bold stance of wanting to abolish the city of Austin, after it voted to provide $150,000 to help women retain access to abortion care.

The twin conservative principles of protecting both fetuses at the very moment of conception and the right to buy the kinds of guns that can (and have) murdered dozens of fully grown children in just a few minutes is a well-worn contradiction, a hypocrisy even older than the many Republican men who have been caught railing against abortion in public, then quietly paying for them in private. Restricting women’s autonomy over their own bodies is a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s ongoing national project, which is to consolidate power among the white and wealthy over the most vulnerable Americans.

People like Cain are disgusting not to mention complete hypocrites in their wailing about being "pro-life."  They are anything but pro-life and constitute a threat to the lives and well-being of countless Americans.

Let's Talk Honestly About America's Gun Crisis

As regular readers know, I am a strong advocate of drastic changes to America's insane gun laws.  No other advanced nation has the number of guns in civilian hands and no other advanced nation has the gun violence and carnage seen regularly in America.  America is exceptional alright, and not in a good way. Indeed, America's inundation with guns is nothing less than a public health crisis which requires drastic action to address.  While in Charlottesville recently, Beto O'Rourke (family members met him) spoke honestly about the extent of the problem and what needs to be done to address it.  A column in the New York Times looks at O'Rourke's statements and the need to implement actions that will challenge the lies disseminated by the NRA and gun manufacturers and the politicians - mainly Republicans - who parrot the lies.  Here are column excerpts:

Beto O’Rourke has easily emerged as my favorite presidential candidate on the issue of gun control. 

I long ago tired of hearing politicians who are supposed to be in favor of smarter gun laws and reducing American gun deaths and injuries pull their punches so as not to upset the gun lobby and gun lobbyists.

Among other things, O’Rourke’s “gun safety” plan includes declaring gun violence a public health emergency, creating a national gun licensing system and registry, requiring universal background checks, implementing red flag laws and banning “the manufacturing, sale and possession of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”

Other candidates agree with some of these proposals, and others have additional ones, but I like the full-throated way O’Rourke responds to being challenged on this front.

This week in Charlottesville, a reporter asked O’Rourke, “How do you address the fears that the government is going to take away those assault rifles — if you are talking about buybacks and banning?”

O’Rourke didn’t skip a beat: “I want to be really clear, that that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Americans who own AR-15s, AK-47s, will have to sell them to the government. We’re not going to allow them to stay on our streets, to show up in our communities.”

This was not the first time O’Rourke’s buyback plan has been challenged. Two weeks ago, the USA Today editorial board complained, “Anything smacking of confiscation would breathe life and energy into the not-from-my-cold-dead-hands crowd, endangering law enforcement and likely putting a full stop to any further gun safety measures.”

When asked this week on CNN about that criticism, O’Rourke responded, “This triangulation, calculation, poll-testing every move — that’s what got us here in the first place.”

Finally, a breath of fresh air. . . . we have to start taking deliberate and thoughtful action to deal with this problem. For instance, a mandatory buyback could be met with a constitutional challenge. A voluntary buyback might be most doable.

The scope of the problem is enormous.

According to a Washington Post report in 2018: “There are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, or enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over.”

Furthermore, The New York Times reported in December:

“There were 39,773 gun deaths in 2017, up by more than 1,000 from the year before. Nearly two-thirds were suicides. It was the largest yearly total on record in the C.D.C.’s electronic database, which goes back 50 years, and reflects the sheer number of lives lost.”

We must reduce the overall number of guns in the population, especially those considered weapons of war; we must shrink the market desire for new weapons; and we must set a course to not only pass a new law in a moment but build in the expectation that federal legislation around guns will be the never-ending, ever-adjusting reality.

People interested in reducing gun violence in America have to stop lying about what that would require. Opponents of new gun legislation will accuse its supporters of seeking the worse no matter what they do.

The point is to see a reduction in all shootings. And that argument actually reinforces a need to aggressively fund studies to figure out which measures would work best.

They are right when they say that restrictions on new purchases would place a burden on responsible gun owners — the overwhelming majority of gun owners — when only a tiny fraction participate in shootings. To that I say: AND?! Nearly 40,000 people in 2017 were killed by guns in this country. If a reduction in that number comes with more red tape for you, then so be it.

This is a public health crisis, as O’Rourke points out, and anything we can do to prevent guns from being used in a crime, to prevent a child from accidentally shooting a sibling, to prevent a depressed person from putting a barrel in his or her mouth, must be a consuming priority for all of us.

Even in the radical District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court decision in 2008 that established the right to bear arms as an individual right, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion:

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

Guns can be effectively and constitutionally regulated in this country. People who want to do so should be upfront and honest about how far they truly hope to go in that regard.

Will Texas be in Play in 2020

Texas state capitol.

One of the things that has pushed Virginia towards full "blue state" status has been the growth of its educated urban and suburban populations which seemingly have at last passed critical mass where they can out vote the reactionary, knuckle dragging rural regions of Virginia.  If the Democrats win control of the Virginia General Assembly n November, legislation long blocked by Republicans will win passage in the string of 2020 and the transformation from red to blue will be near complete. If this happens, expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth from rural areas and the Christofascist at The Family Foundation, Regent University and Liberty University where a 12th century world view still reigns.

Something similar is happening in Texas, although the process is not as far along as in Virginia. Both CNN and New Republic have pieces that look at the urban/suburban growth and the demographic change that have the potential to make 2020 a very bad year for Texas Republicans. Personally, I'd love to see the Texas GOP lose power.  While I have not lived in Texas in decades, I remain a member of the State Bar of Texas and cringe when I see the legislative poison and batshitery pushed by the Texas GOP.  First, these excerpts form the lengthy CNN piece:

The fast-growing metropolitan areas of Texas are moving to the front line of the battle between the two major political parties for control of the nation's direction.  Texas has been a linchpin of the Republican Party's national strength for a generation. But in 2018, Democrats recorded their most significant gains in decades in the state's largest urban centers.
 Now Texas Republicans face indications that the same recoil from President Donald Trump that has hurt the party in other diverse and well-educated metropolitan areas -- from suburban Philadelphia to Orange County, California -- could combine with growing racial diversity to move Texas from reliably red into a genuinely competitive state much more quickly than almost any analyst envisioned even a few years ago. "Trump has sped everything up by four to six years," says Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist. For the Republicans, he said, "it's a deadly combination of rapid demographic change and the immediate political dynamics." Texas remains a difficult, though not unreachable, target for Democrats in the 2020 presidential race -- in part because it's unclear whether any potential Democratic nominee other than Beto O'Rourke, who represented a House district in El Paso, would invest the massive sums required to truly compete in the state.
 But the party's improving position in Texas' thriving metropolitan areas is creating the opportunity for it to seriously contest as many as five or six more seats in the US House, possibly recapture enough seats to regain a majority in the state House of Representatives and mount highly competitive races both against Trump and Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who is seeking reelection next year. The battle for the allegiance of metropolitan Texas is likely to be one of the pivot points in American politics over the next decade. Republicans have carried Texas in every presidential race since 1976, and with the help of favorable district lines drawn by the GOP-controlled state Legislature, have been able to count on big margins from its state congressional delegation -- where Republicans now hold 23 of the 36 seats -- as well as its two Senate seats.
 It would fundamentally reshape the competition between the parties if Democrats can loosen the Republican grip on any of those prizes in Texas, especially its 38 Electoral College votes. And if Republicans can no longer count reliably on Texas -- or other Sun Belt states, including Arizona and Georgia, also being transformed by the same twin forces of urbanization and diversification -- it would represent a huge price for the Trump strategy of maximizing support among rural and working-class white voters that has strengthened the GOP in Rust Belt battlegrounds such as Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
 The key to Texas' political future is whether it finally follows the geographic realignment that has transformed the politics of many other states over the past quarter century.  Across the country, Republicans since the 1980s have demonstrated increasing strength among voters who live in exurbs at the edge of the nation's metropolitan centers or beyond them entirely in small-town and rural communities. Democrats, in turn, have extended their historic dominance of the nation's urban cores into improved performance in inner suburbs, many of them well educated and racially diverse.
 Both sides of this dynamic have accelerated under Trump, whose open appeals to voters uneasy about racial, cultural and economic change have swelled GOP margins outside the metropolitan areas while alienating many traditionally center-right suburban voters. The key to the GOP's dominance of the state is that through most of this century it has also commanded majorities in the 27 counties that make up the state's four biggest metropolitan areas: Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. Demographically similar places in states along the coasts and in the upper Midwest have moved consistently toward the Democrats since Bill Clinton's era. But in Texas, Republicans still carried 53% to 59% of the vote in those metropolitan counties in the four presidential races from 2000 through 2012, Murray and Cross found. In the Trump era, though, that metro strength has wavered for the GOP. In 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly beat Trump across the 27 counties in Texas' four major metropolitan areas. Then in 2018, Democrat O'Rourke carried over 54% of the vote in them in his narrow loss to Sen. Ted Cruz, Murray and Cross found. O'Rourke won each of the largest metro areas, the first time any Democrat on the top of the ticket had carried all four since native son Lyndon B. Johnson routed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race, according to Murray and Cross.
 Looking just at the state's five largest urban counties -- Harris (Houston), Travis (Austin), Bexar (San Antonio), Tarrant (Fort Worth) and Dallas -- the change is even more stark. In 2012, Obama won them by a combined 131,000 votes. By 2016, Clinton expanded the Democratic margin across those five counties to 562,000 votes. In 2018, O'Rourke won those counties by a combined 790,000 votes, about six times more than Obama did in 2012. Along the way, Democrats ousted Republican US House incumbents in suburban Houston and Dallas seats and made substantial gains in municipal and state house elections across most of the major metro areas.
 Yet that, of course, still wasn't enough for O'Rourke to overcome Cruz's huge advantages in smaller nonmetro communities. That outcome underscores the equation facing Texas Democrats in 2020 and beyond: They must reduce the GOP's towering margins outside of the major metropolitan areas and/or expand their own advantage inside the metro centers. The stakes in the struggle for Texas' big metro areas are rising because they are growing so fast. While the four major metro areas cast about 60% of the statewide votes in the 1996 presidential election, that rose to about 69% in 2016 and 2018, Murray and Cross found. Murray expects the number to cross 70% in 2020.
 And the concentration of Texas' population into its biggest metropolitan areas shows no signs of slackening. The Texas Demographic Center, the official state demographer, projects that 70% of the state's population growth through 2050 will settle in just 10 large metropolitan counties.
 This urbanization is unfolding together with growing diversification. From 2010 through 2018, the US Census Bureau found, non-Hispanic whites accounted for only 14% of Texas' population growth; Asian-American growth roughly equaled whites', African Americans slightly exceeded both and Hispanics dwarfed all three -- they accounted for over 55% of Texas' population growth in that period. Democrats are cautiously hopeful that a backlash against Trump in minority communities will improve their turnout in 2020, particularly after a young white man echoed Trump's language of "invasion" before carrying out the recent mass shooting in El Paso. The sheer weight of the state's urbanization and diversification will eventually undermine a Trump-type strategy that focuses on maximizing the party's margins outside metro areas at the price of eroding its strength within them. But to close the gap in the next few elections, Democrats may need not only greater turnout but also slightly improved vote shares among their best groups: minorities and especially college-educated white voters. [T]he diverse young families now filling the suburbs of Texas' largest metropolitan areas are very different from the predominantly white families who powered their first wave of growth after the 1960s: While those earlier suburbanites were largely fleeing racially diverse cities, their successors today want to remain close to the cities while securing more affordable housing. "Fundamentally, that's a different kind of mindset," he says, "and that's a mindset that tends to align more with Democratic Party values." For 2020, both sides are preparing extensive voter-mobilization efforts targeted mostly at the major metropolitan areas. Dickey says the state GOP, which for years faced little effective challenge to its control, will launch a major organizational effort next year with both paid staff and volunteers to roll back the 2018 Democratic gains in the big population centers.
 [I]n Texas, as in other states, Trump's racially divisive messaging leaves the GOP facing a stiff headwind in metropolitan areas growing mostly with minority and well-educated white voters. "Trump is killing the urban Republican Party," Murray says flatly.  If that proves true even in Texas, whether in 2020 or soon after, it will fundamentally reshape the national electoral landscape.

The New Republic piece covers some of the same ground but puts more emphasis on how Trump and the Texas GOP's own growing extremism put the state more into possible play.  Here are excerpts:

When Beto O’Rourke proclaimed, during the second round of Democratic presidential debates, that “there’s a new battleground state, Texas, and it has 38 Electoral College votes,” eyes rolled in unison across America. We’ve all heard that nonsense before! Pundits and progressives have been predicting that minority-white Texas would go blue for so long, it’s practically become a running joke. 

But as people in Texas know, O’Rourke wasn’t blowing smoke. Although Republicans have continued to routinely swat away Democrats in statewide races (they haven’t lost one since 1990), while sending legions of unhinged conservatives to gum up the works in Washington, Democrats have taken control of every big city in the state over the past decade—a process that began in Dallas in 2006, when Democrats swept into power. More important, and more worrying for Republicans, that trend spilled over last year into the sprawling suburbs, long the bedrock of Texas Republicanism. Suddenly, Texas Republicans are on the defensive in their national fortress—and they’re both talking and acting like it. “The tectonic plates shifted in Texas in 2018,” Senator John Cornyn, the powerful Republican who’s facing reelection in 2020 (with just a 37 percent approval rating) said earlier this year. . . . “If Texas turns back to a Democratic state, which it used to be, then we’ll never elect another Republican [president] in my lifetime,” said Cornyn. A confluence of events over the past couple of weeks has reinforced Cornyn’s message. In what giddy Democrats are calling “the Texodus,” four Republican members of Congress announced, in short order, that they won’t be running for reelection in 2020; three of their seats, all in the suburbs, will likely go Democratic, adding to the two they took from Republicans in 2018. And then there was President Trump and the terrorism in El Paso. By 2022, Latino Texans are projected to outnumber whites, and the rising majority won’t soon forget the mass murder by a gunman, apparently inspired by Trump’s rhetoric, who took advantage of the state’s insanely lax gun laws. Nor will it forget the way the president put a target on the city’s back, falsely claiming in this year’s State of the Union that El Paso was “one of our nation’s most dangerous cities” before the border barriers went up, then amplifying the message in a rally there a few weeks later. “Murders, murders, murders!” Trump cried out as he talked about immigrants, while his fans chanted, “Build the wall!” Even before the El Paso massacre, Trump had been an albatross for Texas Republicans. While he carried the state in 2016, his single-digit margin of victory—in a state Hillary Clinton didn’t even try to contest—was the narrowest for Republicans in almost 20 years; even Mitt Romney had carried Texas by 16 points. In the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas, which accounted for more than half of the state’s votes, Trump won only 48 percent, and early 2020 polls have shown him losing Texas to O’Rourke, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders.

Cal Jillson, a venerable political scientist at Southern Methodist University, is among those who think this president has accelerated the Democratic comeback in Texas. . . . .That’s not just because the president has trashed the image of Republicans for Texas Latinos, who’ve traditionally been more conservative than their peers in places like California; it’s also because the Texas GOP has wholeheartedly embraced Trumpism and Tea Partyism. Despite the state’s ultra-conservative reputation, this is a recent development: When the party rose to power in the 1990s, and then achieved dominance in the 2000s, its leading figures—Governors George W. Bush and Rick Perry—prevented right-wing lawmakers from passing Arizona-style anti-immigration laws.

Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, right-wing ideologues who both won reelection last year, have unchained the pent-up lawmakers and activists who’d long chafed at the relative moderation of party leaders—and they’re steering the Texas GOP straight toward self-destruction. “You’ve got a very conservative group of Republicans in the legislature passing their preferred legislation,” Jillson noted, “while the wave builds on the other side and Democrats are making gains.”

[N]obody in Texas, aside from a few blinkered Republicans, believes that Democrats won’t continue to loosen the Republican stranglehold in 2020. At least half a dozen Republican seats in Congress will be ripe for the taking, and Democrats have a realistic chance of capturing the nine Republican seats in the state House they need to gain a majority—just in time for the next round of redistricting in 2021. If they regain a toehold of power in Austin, and can prevent Republicans from having total control over gerrymandering, Democrats could turn Texas blue in a hurry; if not, it’ll probably be a more gradual process over the next decade, with strict voter ID and other forms of suppression still intact, and districts artificially tilted in Republicans’ favor.

Whether Democrats regain power in Texas quickly or gradually, it still adds up to a doomsday scenario for Republicans—and a precious ray of light, through the fog and gloom of Trumpism, for Democrats. 

Democrats Don’t Need 23 Presidential Candidates

Time to end McConnell's power.

One has to wonder what kind of vanity pushed some of the 23 Democrats vying for the Democrat 2020 nomination to throw their hats into the ring.  Some have almost zero name recognition outside of their own states and are currently registering close to zero in the latest polls in places like Iowa.  They seem only to be making the process far more complicated while having a snow ball's chance in Hell of winning the contest (polls also show Democrats want a number to drop out of the race).  Meanwhile, some could be engaged in far more winnable and important U.S. Senate races that could flip control of that body to Democrats and end the foul and democracy destroying reign of Mitch McConnell, a man some see as doing more harm than even Der Trumpenführer.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality and names some names of those who would be perhaps better serving their party and the country by changing races.  Here are column highlights:

Dear Democratic presidential candidates: I know all 23 of you want to run against President Trump, but only one will get that opportunity. If you truly believe your own righteous rhetoric, some of you ought to be spending your time and energy in another vital pursuit — winning control of the Senate.

I’m talking to you, John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who would have a good chance of beating incumbent Republican Cory Gardner. I’m talking to you, Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, who could knock off GOP incumbent Steve Daines. I’m even talking to you, Beto O’Rourke, who would have a better chance than any other Texas Democrat against veteran Republican John Cornyn.

And I’m talking to you, too, Stacey Abrams of Georgia, even though you haven’t jumped in. You came within a whisker of being elected governor, and you have a national profile that would bring in a tsunami of campaign funds. You could beat Republican David Perdue — and acquire real power to translate your stirring eloquence into concrete action.

As the Republican Party has long understood, it’s all about power. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could not care less about lofty words and high ideals. Coldly and methodically, he has used his power to block widely supported progressive measures such as gun control, to enact a trickle-down economic agenda that favors the wealthy and to pack the federal bench with right-wing judges whom we’ll be stuck with for decades.

That’s how McConnell rolls. He exercises his power to its full extent and is not bothered by what you or I or anyone else might think. Charges of hypocrisy do not trouble his sweet slumber.

McConnell is not going to be reasoned, harangued or shamed into behaving differently. The only way to stop him is to take his power away, and the only way to do that is for Democrats to win the Senate.

That will not be easy this time around, but it is possible if Democrats can build on the blue-wave momentum they generated in last year’s midterms — and if they put forth the candidates who have the best chance of winning. But fortune favors the prepared. Good things are much more likely to happen for the Democratic Party if it backs up the presidential nominee with down-ballot candidates who have their own appeal and their own pizazz. Imagine a Texas Senate race featuring O’Rourke, whose near-miss campaign last year against incumbent Republican Ted Cruz resulted in nearly twice as many Democratic voters turning out than in 2014. All of a sudden, Texas’s 38 electoral votes don’t seem like such a mortal lock for Trump. Texas begins to look like a state in which Trump has to spend time and money — resources he would rather deploy elsewhere. Likewise, Georgia’s 16 electoral votes look genuinely up for grabs if the electrifying Abrams is on the ballot. There and elsewhere, whatever boosts voter registration and turnout is likely to help the Democratic Party — and ultimately make our government more representative of the nation it serves.

Who am I to tell Hickenlooper and Bullock not to run for president and to go for the Senate instead? A realist. In a Des Moines Register poll released Saturday, each was the first choice of 0 percent of likely Iowa caucus participants. Yes, it’s early. Yes, Joe Biden could stumble. But will Bernie Sanders stumble, too? And Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala D. Harris, and Amy Klobuchar, and Cory Booker, and all the rest who at least have measurable support?

O’Rourke, at 2 percent, is at least on the map in Iowa. Maybe he’ll light up the first debate and climb in the polls; if he doesn’t, I urge him to assess his options. And Abrams, of course, has a perfect right not to run for anything. I just wish she would reconsider.

We don’t need 23 presidential candidates. Some of you, please, fight for the Senate.

Democrats Keep Saying They Want Younger Candidates

Democrats seems to be demonstrating a case of Schizophrenia in that surveys indicate that they want younger presidential candidates even as the current two front runners - Biden and Sanders - are well into old geezer status. I am nowhere near Biden's or Sanders' age, yet even I know I am not what I was physically 15 to 20 years ago - spreading 45 bags of mulch this weekend has made that very clear.  But seriously, age also impacts mental ability and given the duties of the office of president, if properly performed - something not happening currently - mental cognition and memory ability are crucial. Besides needing to talk on the level of his base, Trump's constant speaking at an elementary school level may be a sign of declining mental abilities.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the dichotomy between what Democrats want and what Biden and Sanders represent.  Here are highlights:

[P]ublic opinion indicators keep showing that Americans, and particularly Democrats, don’t like the idea of having a really old president. It’s hard to square with an early 2020 Democratic presidential contest in which the two front-runners are over 75.

Back in late February a NBC/Wall Street Journal survey of adults without regard to party asked about desirable and undesirable traits in presidential candidates. Fully 62 percent said they’d either have reservations about, or would be very uncomfortable, with such a prospect (ranking second only to “a socialist” as a discomforting characteristic, which was less than great news for the 77-year old self-described socialist Bernie Sanders).

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in April showed that among Democrats over half said they’d be less likely to support a presidential candidate if they discovered he or she is over 70.

And then a May Pew survey of Democrats asked the best age for a president. Only 3 percent reported a preference for septuagenarians (at 47 percent, the 50s were the plurality winner as ideal for presidents).

So what’s up with that? Are Democrats simply finding other qualities of oldsters that outweigh age considerations?

It’s possible voters simply don’t know these popular public figures are as old as they actually are. I can’t find any research testing that hypothesis. But whether it’s a matter of ignorance or not thinking deeply about it, this data does open up some possibilities for the campaigns of younger candidates.

First, they could do the research that the public pollsters apparently aren’t doing about voter awareness of candidate age, and whether being informed that a candidate has achieved advanced geezerhood might have an impact.

And second, they could subtly get their comparative youthfulness across in ads that touted their energy and fresh ideas, while presenting images that silently conveyed the decrepitude of the old folks. It could serve as a rehearsal for general election reminders that the junk-food-devouring Donald J. Trump will turn 74 next year.

One objection to age-based comparisons like this is that it might honk off older voters. But there’s some evidence (notably in the Ipsos/Reuters survey) that seniors are more concerned about age-related candidate impairment than anyone, perhaps because they understand what it’s like to lose a step.

There’s also scientific research on the cognitive consequences of that lost step, as Robert Kaiser recently explained:

Studies of old people conclude that between 16 percent and 23 percent of Americans over 65 experience some form of cognitive impairment. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology found that these subjects performed worse than others on tasks involving working memory — the ability to remember information while manipulating it, as when calculating the tip on a restaurant bill — and that they’re more impaired when those tasks become more complex. Older adults also have difficulties with tasks that require dividing or switching attention . . . .

If the 2020 general election really does match Trump against either Biden or Sanders (or arguably Elizabeth Warren, who turns 70 next month, though women’s brains tend to age more slowly than men’s), looking at such sobering evidence could even be conducted on a bipartisan basis, perhaps in conjunction with a closer look than is customary at the qualifications of the Democratic and Republican veep nominees.

Why the Media Dumped Beto for Mayor Pete

I have written in prior posts that the media may again unwittingly help re-elect Trump through its love affair with false equivalency and refusal to expose lying candidates for the liars that they are, preferring to merely parrot what the liars have said.  The other problem is the tendency of reporters to rally to what is "new and fresh" as they try to out scoop each other. For candidates, this can be a good thing yet then morph into something less helpful. A possible case in point is the media's current infatuation with Pete Buttigieg even as its short attention span passes over those over whom they previously gushed about. A column in Politico looks at the phenomenon and the media's fickleness and what Buttigieg will need to do if he wants to remain a media darling.  Here are excerpts:

Burning with the velocity of a prairie fire on a gusty Indiana day, Pete Buttigieg scorched the airwaves, seared the podcasts, and charred the press this week as he ignited his presidential campaign, temporarily torching his Democratic competition in the process.

The secret to Buttigieg’s publicity run was no secret, wrote Matthew Yglesias in Vox. Like Molly Bloom in his favorite novel, Ulysses, he can’t stop saying “yes”—to media invitations. In recent weeks, he’s appeared on a CNN town hall, Ellen, A-list podcasts and Morning Joe, and been featured in New York, POLITICO Magazine, the Atlantic and much more. But saying yes is never enough to hold the press spellbound.

Buttigieg has satisfied the ravenous press corps’ appetite by offering them an entire menu of newish things—no, make that an entire food court of newish things—to write about. He’s the youngest candidate in the field (at 37, he’s the only millennial except for Tulsi Gabbard), he’s gay and married, he’s an Afghan war veteran, he’s a Rhodes scholar (as is Cory Booker, but never mind), he plays a decent piano, he’s a churchgoer, he’s the mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana, he once gave a TEDx talk, he worked as a McKinsey consultant, he’s a polymath, he’s as earnest as a preacher, he’s an old person’s idea of what a young person should be like, and he’s figured out how to package progressive ideas as moderate.

The Buttigieg boom has also benefited from the stumbles of our previous political shooting star, Beto O’Rourke. . . . The things that once seemed so appealing about O’Rourke to the press—the generalities, the platitudes, the offhanded charisma, the rolled-up sleeves—seem off-putting now. The clearest sign of the press corps’ O’Rourke infatuation was its routine reference to him by his first name in its stories—something it has moved on to doing with Buttigieg. Such shameful and transparent familiarity.

[T]he press corps has dumped him [O'Rourke] for the Kennedyesque Hoosier like a speed-dater on the rebound from a Tinder relationship gone bad. Its transition to Buttigieg has been seamless, finding in him another candidate who speaks complete sentences, who likes the camera almost as much as it likes him, who subscribes to the usual Democratic articles of faith and scans like a lost episode of The West Wing.

The fear of boredom plagues political reporters. Assigned to a well-known candidate, their first question is, “Haven’t we read this all before?” They crave novelty and newness, for the underexposed over the overexposed, and that prejudice gives relatively unknown candidates a leg up on established ones, especially in the early months of the campaign. Booker and Elizabeth Warren, whom the press once treated as fresh, almost delectable personages a couple of years ago, are now dismissed as known, lackluster quantities.

Candidates benefit from having some triumph over adversity in their résumé. It can be as simple as getting shot down in enemy skies, suffering the premature loss of a loved one, or rising up from poverty. On this score, Buttigieg seems to have let the press corps down. He did come out of the closet at 33 on the op-ed page of the South Bend Tribune, but today deliberately soft-pedaled the event. Smoothed of the standard rough edges, Buttigieg’s life has a soft radiance to it, making him a bit of a walking miracle for journalists who’ve never encountered such a person.

There are two problems with generating political buzz through news coverage, as O’Rourke can tell you. The first is that it’s hard to sustain the note. Having told a candidate’s story, reporters grow bored unless he presents evidence of his viability. . . . They want to see a winner in the making because few reporters really want to write about losers.

The second and more cautionary problem is that after all these years we’ve failed to learn that media infatuations are rarely a good proxy for voter enthusiasm. National political reporters live in a bubble that extends from New York to Washington, which makes them better at taking a colleague’s pulse than a standard-issue voter’s. . . . Voters, on the other hand, move more cautiously, often taking months or a year to sort out the candidates. Reporters are fickle. Voters are loyal.

Finally, whenever national political reporters look at the ambitious, conspicuously educated, ticket-punching, aggressively tame candidate Buttigieg, they can’t help but see themselves. Think of their coverage as modest self-assessments.

Time will tell whether Buttigieg can continue to dazzle the media.

Beto O’Rourke’s Ambitious Health Care Plan

America's health care system remains a nightmare for countless Americans who are either under insured or find themselves with medical decisions being driven my insurance companies seeking to minimize payouts rather than doctors and medical professionals.  And even with "good coverage," the deductibles can be staggering and can financially strain average Americans who simply do not have thousands of dollars lying around. Something needs to be done, but the question is what.  Some Democrat presidential candidates are lauding "Medicare for all" - Medicare still is not free and requires regular payments - which those on the right (who put little value of on the lives of most of us) say is too costly. In a response to the problem, Beto O'Rourke seems to be fashioning a proposed solution.  A piece in Slate looks at the matter.  Here are highlights:

Beto O’Rourke may not be feverishly churning out policy white papers like some of his presidential rivals, but over the last few days, the hand-wavy former representative from Texas has at least started clarifying his position on health care. And for a candidate who seems to be carving out space in the Democratic field as a relative moderate, it’s strikingly ambitious.

While campaigning in Iowa on Friday and over the weekend, O’Rourke backed away from his previous support for Bernie Sanders’ single-payer bill. The former Senate candidate told an audience that he was “no longer sure” it was “the fastest way” to achieve “guaranteed, high-quality universal health care for all.” Instead, he talked up another piece of legislation currently kicking around Congress known as “Medicare for America.”

Introduced by a pair of progressive congresswomen, Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Jan Schakowsky, Medicare for America offers a sort of middle ground between a true, Sanders-style single-payer system—which would ban private comprehensive health coverage—and a more modest public insurance option. (It is extremely similar to a proposal crafted by the Center for American Progress, which I’ve described as “single-payer with American characteristics.”)

The bill creates a new, revamped version of Medicare that would be open to all adults and children. It would automatically enroll newborns, the elderly, and the uninsured. It would also bar insurance companies from selling policies to individuals that duplicated the government’s coverage, meaning it would largely wipe out the nongroup market as we now know it. However—and this part is key—the bill would permit businesses to continue offering private insurance as a benefit, as long as it was as comprehensive as today’s gold plans. Companies would also have the option of purchasing Medicare for their employees by paying a tax equal to 8 percent of their annual payroll. Individual workers could opt for the government plan, as well.

One of the major political selling-points of Medicare for America is that it wouldn’t necessarily force workers off of the health plans they currently receive through their jobs, which many people still like, or at least are hesitant to give up. Polling suggests that support for Medicare for All drops drastically when voters are told that it would eliminate private insurance . . . . (The Kaiser Family Foundation has found that 73 percent of Americans back the idea of a national health plan if it would let them keep their current coverage).

That seems to be Beto’s wager.

“It responds to the fact that so many Americans have said, ‘I like my employer-based insurance. I want to keep it. I like the network I’m in. I like the doctor that I see,’ ” O’Rourke said of the bill, according to the Texas Tribune. “It complements what already exists with the need that we have for millions of Americans who do not have insurance and ensures that each of them can enroll in Medicare. It then suggests additional investments in that program so it becomes the program of choice and people who have private insurance migrate over to the Medicare system.”

Another advantage to Medicare for America is that it would be cheaper than single-payer, at least so far as the federal budget is concerned. There are no public cost-estimates for the bill yet. But it would almost certainly save Washington money compared to the Sanders approach, because it would not require immediately transitioning the entire employer-sponsored market onto a government health plan. The new version of Medicare also wouldn’t be free for everyone; families earning more than 200 percent of the poverty line would pay premiums—they would go up with income, but be capped at no more than 9.69 percent of a household’s earnings—as well as copays and deductibles. Of course, the Sanders bill wouldn’t exactly be free either; instead of paying “premiums,” households would simply pay taxes. To a certain extent, the difference there is semantic. While Medicare for America is not a single-payer system, it could create the bones of one, and gradually transition the country in that direction over time as it automatically enrolled more individuals and more businesses chose to buy in. At the same time, by preserving private coverage, it could leave a pressure valve in place, giving voters another option in case the new system doesn’t work out quite as smoothly as its supporters hope (we all remember the rough early days of Healthcare.gov, after all). In the scheme of major Democratic health care plans, it’s arguably the second most far reaching after the Sanders bill; it would do more to fundamentally change the U.S. insurance system than the Medicare or Medicaid buy-ins that other candidates have talked about, which would basically graft a public option onto Obamacare’s framework. Medicare for America would be something genuinely different.

Beto O'Rourke Raises $6.1 Million on First Day, Topping Sanders

So far I have not decided which would be Democrat nominee I support, although I have most certainly decided on who I do NOT support.  Leading in this category are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.  I do see the first two as remotely electable despite the views of Sanders' cult like followers who in their own way are as blind to reality as Trump's base. Thus, I was delighted to see Beto O'Rourke out raise Sanders on his first day of fundraising, clearly sending a message that Sanders' may have passed his shelf-life.   Ditto for Elizabeth Warren who has already done herself in with her idiotic claim of Native American ancestry.  A piece in NBC News looks at O'Rourke's fundraising hall.  Here are excerpts:

WASHINGTON — Beto O'Rourke raised $6.1 million in his first 24 hours as a presidential candidate, according to his campaign, surpassing Bernie Sanders and every other 2020 Democrat who has disclosed their figures.

O'Rourke's campaign announced Monday that he had taken in $6,136,763 in online contributions in the day after declaring his candidacy Thursday morning.

"In just 24 hours, Americans across this country came together to prove that it is possible to run a true grassroots campaign for president — a campaign by all of us, for all of us, that answers not to the PACs, corporations, and special interests but to the people," O’Rourke, who has sworn off PAC donations of any kind, said in a statement.

That's a strong showing for the former Texas congressman who lost a Senate race last year to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, while setting a new fundraising record.

Sanders beat expectations and stunned observers by raising a then-record-setting $5.9 million in his first 24 hours as a candidate last month.

Meanwhile, Sen. Kamala Harris collected $1.5 million, which was seen as impressive haul for the California Democratic lawmaker. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., raised $1 million in 48 hours, as did former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. It took Jay Inslee 72 hours to raise more than $1 million, but that still surpassed expectations for the Washington governor.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., raised at least $300,000 on New Year's Eve, her first partial day in the race, according to filings from the online donation clearinghouse ActBlue. But her campaign declined to disclose their complete one-day fundraising picture.

O'Rourke's campaign did say he had collected money from every state and territory in the union before noon on the day he declared his candidacy.

The Texan built a massive email fundraising list during his failed campaign against Cruz and some allies wondered if donors would be as eager to support his presidential campaign as they were to try to oust the Texas GOP senator.

Beto O'Rourke Ramps Up in Iowa

As more and more would be candidates enter the fray for the 2020 Democrat Party nomination, one possible candidate has held back on declaring to date, but seems to be taking steps for a presidential run.  The candidate is Beto O'Rourke,  Where he will shake out in the mix is uncertain.  What is certain so far, is that no candidate who has announced to date has set the base on fire with enthusiasm outside of Sander's almost cult like followers.  Biden has not yet announced and, I fear is not electable despite the chatter to the contrary. Ditto for Sanders who, like Biden, is in my view too old.  O'Rouke, who came close to defeating Ted Cruz in deep red Texas might perhaps be able to rally younger voters to actually go to the polls and vote against Trump and others in the GOP who are busy destroying their futures.  Time will tell, of course, but at the moment, no one in the Democrat field so far excites me.  Some like Warren, Harris and Sanders who have meddled in Virginia's politics have already alienated me.  A piece in Politico looks at O'Rourke's seeming steps to launch his campaign.  Here are highlights:

Beto O’Rourke is beginning to staff up in Iowa and has been in talks about visiting the first-in-the-nation caucus state as early as this week.

Democrats organizing a rally for Eric Giddens, a Democratic state Senate candidate, in Iowa on Saturday have told prospective attendees that they expect O’Rourke to appear at the event, a source familiar with the plans told POLITICO.

Norm Sterzenbach, a former executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, is assisting O’Rourke in the state and was reviewing resumes from potential staffers as recently as last week, according to two sources familiar with O’Rourke’s Iowa operation. O’Rourke, like several Democrats who already have announced their presidential campaigns, has been in discussions about assisting Giddens in his March 19 special election, potentially with a door-knocking effort, according to three Iowa Democrats.

O’Rourke’s outreach comes as the former Texas congressman begins to more intensely court activists outside of his home state. He is preparing for a near-certain presidential run after months of deliberation.

O’Rourke is scheduled to participate in a call with the High School Democrats of America on Sunday, the group said. Its advisory informed participants that questions must be “must be brief and unrelated to Beto as a potential 2020 candidate.”

O’Rourke said nearly two weeks ago that he has decided whether to run for president. In Austin, Texas, over the weekend for the South by Southwest festival, he told reporters, “I want to make sure I do it the right way and I tell everyone at the same time, so I’ll be doing that.”

He said, “I’ve got to be on the timeline that works for my family and for the country.”

A Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll released Saturday saw O’Rourke’s poll numbers slipping in Iowa. He had dropped to 5 percent in the poll, down from 11 percent in December. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are running far ahead of the rest of the field in the state.

O’Rourke’s advisers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Nor did Gibbens, Sterzenbach, Tewes or Plouffe.

The Democrats MUST find someone who can defeat Trump or Pence should the lair-in-chief somehow decide not to run.  The nation and the world cannot stand four more years of Trump/Pence.