Louisiana Dem. Governor John Bel Edwards Wins Reelection

In another blow to Donald Trump's fantasy that he can invincibly mobilize his toxic base to defeat Democrats merely by tweeting and holding rallies,Democrat John Bel Edwards won reelection yesterday in Louisiana.  Among popular measures Edwards had oversee during his first term were Medicaid expansion and criminal justice reforms, plus passage of a sales tax to address the budget disaster left by his Republican predecessor, Bobby Jindal who, like GOP extremist Sam Brownback in Kansas proved GOP tax cut policies are disastrous.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Edwards' win and the erosion of governorships held by Republicans during Trump's time in office.  Here are story excerpts:

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards was elected to a second term on Saturday, overcoming opposition from President Trump and an increasingly polarized state electorate to hand Democrats their second major victory in a governor’s race over the past two weeks.

Edwards, 53, was running against Republican businessman Eddie Rispone, 70, in a runoff election after neither candidate won an outright majority of votes last month.

Edwards’s victory is another setback for Trump, who traveled to Louisiana twice over the past month to campaign for Rispone and sent a series of tweets urging Republicans to vote. [Trump's] The president’s popularity in the South has failed to prop up GOP candidates in two of the three states that held gubernatorial elections this year, allowing Democrats to gain governorships for the third consecutive year.

In Kentucky, Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear unseated Republican Gov. Matt Bevin this month. In January, 24 of the nation’s governors will be Democrats, up from 15 at the end 2017.

The Louisiana election caps off a grueling campaign in which Edwards, a relatively conservative Democrat, worked to prove his party could still lead a state that has continued to drift to the right in the Trump era.

[Trump] The president made another pitch for Rispone on Saturday.  “Louisiana, 3 hours left, get out and Vote for @EddieRispone for Governor,” he tweeted. “Lower taxes and much more!”

But Edwards, who was minority leader in Louisiana’s House of Representatives before being elected governor in 2015, has remained relatively popular throughout his term and was optimistic his reelection bid could withstand the head winds of national politics, including the ongoing drama in Washington over the impeachment inquiry.

“We need to keep moving forward, and we can’t take a chance of going back,” Edwards said at a campaign event in New Orleans this past week.

After he succeeded Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), Edwards worked with a Republican legislature to balance the budget, imposing a sales tax increase. He also successfully fought to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which extended coverage to nearly a half-million residents. The governor also pushed to hike teacher pay while working to drive down the state’s unemployment rate to the lowest level in more than a decade.

One of Edwards’s most high-profile accomplishments has been legislation reworking the criminal justice system in a state that had one of the nation’s highest and most racially unbalanced incarceration rates. The bipartisan legislation, which reduced sentences for some drug crimes and made it easier for some inmates to seek parole, could cut the state’s prison population by 10 percent over a decade, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Democrats have made a net gain in governorships for the third consecutive year. The party picked up seven governorships last year in the 2018 midterm elections, including winning several Midwestern states that Trump carried in 2016.

Democrats also gained a governorship in 2017, when Gov. Phil Murphy (D) replaced Republican Chris Christie in New Jersey in the same year that Virginia voters elected Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to replace former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Medicare for All: A Vote Loser

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and their respective rabid supporters are adamant about nothing less than Medicare for all in contrast to others, including Pete Buttigieg who want a more moderate, blended approach to expanding health care coverage.  Personally, I view Medicare for all as a laudatory goal, but in order to get to full coverage implemented, candidates need to get elected.  Results from the 2018 mid-term elections suggest that Medicare for all is a vote loser and could be kryptonite to getting elected.   Thus, I support a more moderate approach such as Buttigieg's which would not sweep away employer based plans and potentially alienate moderate voters and Republicans - few as they may be - who are sickened by Donald Trump.  A piece at Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball looks at the cautionary message from what happened to Democrats running on Medicare for all in the 2018 midterms.  Here are excerpts:

“Medicare for All” has emerged as a key issue in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination campaign. Two of the leading candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have made Medicare for All a central issue in their campaigns. Warren’s and Sanders’ proposals would abolish private health insurance in the U.S. within a few years and move all Americans into a government health plan based on the current Medicare program but with no copayments or deductibles.

Several Democratic candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who has led in most national polls, have been highly critical of this idea. These candidates, along with a number of health policy experts and pundits, have attacked Sanders’ and Warren’s Medicare for All proposal as prohibitively expensive and politically unrealistic. They have also argued that embracing Medicare for All would alienate many independents and moderate Democrats and risk costing Democrats the electoral votes of several key swing states.

But 2020 is not the first election in which Medicare for All was an important campaign issue. It was also debated extensively during the 2018 midterm elections. By examining the impact of Medicare for All on the results of the 2018 U.S. House elections, we may gain some insights into how this issue could affect the 2020 presidential election.

Democratic candidates supporting Medicare for All did substantially worse than those who did not — winning only 45% of their races compared with 72% for the non-supporters. Their average vote margin of 0.5 percentage points was also somewhat worse than the average vote margin of 3.5 points for the non-supporters. This was true despite the fact that in terms of 2016 presidential vote margin, the districts of supporters were somewhat more Democratic (average Clinton margin of -0.2 points) than the districts of non-supporters (average Clinton margin of -2.7 points).

[A]fter controlling for all of the other variables affecting the outcomes of these contests, Democratic candidates who endorsed Medicare for All did significantly worse than those who did not. The estimated coefficient of -4.6 indicates that support for Medicare for All cost Democratic candidates in these competitive districts almost five points of vote margin — a substantial effect in a close election.

An analysis of the impact of Medicare for All on the 2018 House elections indicates that Democratic challengers and open seat candidates in competitive districts who endorsed a version of Medicare for All similar to that proposed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did significantly worse than those who did not. This negative effect, close to five points of margin after controlling for a variety of other factors, was clearly large enough to affect the outcomes of some House contests.

It is possible that the estimated effect of Medicare for All was a byproduct of other differences between supporters and non-supporters. For example, supporters might have taken more liberal positions on a variety of other issues as well as Medicare for All. Even if that is the case, however, these findings are not encouraging to supporters of Medicare for All. They indicate that candidates in competitive races who take positions to the left of the median voter could get punished at the polls. Democratic presidential candidates would do well to take heed of these results, particularly as the eventual nominee determines what he or she wishes to emphasize in the general election.

Yes, Sanders and Warren supporters will be livid with this post, but elections are about WINNING, not ideological purity.

More Saturday Male Beauty

Trump Pardons Three Guilty of War Crimes

Donald Trump continues to destroy American morality as he pardons three U.S. Military members convicted of war crimes.  The pardons came over the protests of the military who said the moves undermined the military justice system.  Sadly, to me, it is representative of Trump's view that if victims are non-white, then it really doesn't matter. Of course, there are also parallels with Nazi Germany where Hitler protected and rewarded those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Trump's support among morally bankrupt evangelicals remains firm.  The Washington Post looks at Trump's actions which undermine both military justice and what moral authority America purports to hold in the Middle East and elsewhere.   Here are highlights: 

Trump intervened in three cases involving war crimes accusations on Friday, issuing full pardons to two soldiers and reversing disciplinary action against a Navy SEAL despite opposition raised by military justice experts and some senior Pentagon officials. 

The service members were notified by Trump over the phone late Friday afternoon, according to lawyers for Army Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn and former Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, the SEAL. Golsteyn faced a murder trial scheduled for next year, while Gallagher recently was acquitted of murder and convicted of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State fighter in Iraq.

The third service member, former Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, was expected to be released Friday night from prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2013 and sentenced to 19 years for ordering his soldiers to open fire on three men in Afghanistan.

Golsteyn and Lorance received full pardons, while the president will direct the Navy to restore Gallagher to his previous rank before he retires, the White House said. His demotion marked the only significant penalty he received following his acquittal on the murder charge.

[S]ome senior Pentagon officials [tried] to change Trump’s mind, according to three U.S. officials. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said some commanders have raised concerns that Trump’s move will undermine the military justice system. Their cases have been featured frequently on conservative media, as advocates prepared cases for the president behind the scenes.

The military, he said, has “worked for decades to lay the ghosts” of the Vietnam War and war crimes committed during it to rest, and Trump’s decision risks undermining that.

“Executive clemency like this introduces doubt into the chain of command, and creates uncertainty about accountability for breaches of military rules,” said Carter
The facts of the three cases vary.

In Golsteyn’s, the Special Forces officer went from being regarded as one of the Army’s heroes in the Afghanistan war to under investigation in the 2010 death of an unarmed man in a combat zone.

The case first emerged after Golsteyn, who had been awarded a Silver Star for valor on the same deployment, said during a polygraph test while applying for a job with the CIA that he had killed the man and burned his body. . . . He set an ambush for the man, whom he believed to be responsible for the recent death of two Marines, he said. He reasoned that if the man came in his direction, he was returning to activities with the Taliban.

In Gallagher’s case, the Navy SEAL faced a court-martial this summer after he was accused of mortally stabbing a wounded Islamic State detainee in the neck and obstruction of justice for allegedly threatening other SEALs who reported him.

In Lorance’s case, nine members of his unit testified against him, including some under immunity. They said under oath that Lorance, as their new platoon leader, had ordered them to open fire on three Afghan men riding motorcycles even though their intent was not clear, after issuing death threats to local leaders.

The action follows Trump pardoning another veteran, former 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, in May in the 2008 murder of an Iraqi prisoner suspected of being a member of al-Qaeda.  Behenna was convicted of unpremeditated murder and sentenced to 25 years after stripping a detainee naked, interrogating him without authorization and shooting him twice.

And we wonder why America is hated by so many in the Middle East.

Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals

Not since Richard Nixon has an occupant of the White House proven to have surrounded himself with criminals than Donald Trump.  This, of course, should come as no surprise if one has followed Trump's mob boss like business conduct over the years in New York City and elsewhere where many believe Trump facilitated money laundering by the Russian mob and other undesirables. Criminals tend to surround themselves with other criminals.  With yesterday's conviction on all counts of long time Trump confident Roger Stone, we now have a half dozen convicted criminals who made up part of the Trump/Pence campaign and/or regime.  A piece in Politico looks at Stone's conviction (note the references to Trump lying to Mueller as well): 

A federal jury on Friday found the longtime Republican provocateur guilty on all charges for thwarting a House investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, opening up a political pandora’s box for a president already facing pressure from his conservative base to issue a pardon.

Stone’s fate was sealed after a trial that spanned just over a week, which concluded with unanimous guilty verdicts against Stone on five felony counts of lying to investigators, one count of obstructing a congressional probe and one count of witness tampering.

Friday’s guilty verdicts represent the biggest victory for prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe since former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on eight felony charges at a trial in Northern Virginia over a year ago. In the courtroom for Stone’s trial, there were ample signs of the case’s origins.

Trump told Mueller’s investigators they spoke from “time to time during the campaign.” Prosecutors introduced evidence collected from phone records during Stone’s trial showing about 60 separate communications between the two men from February to November 2016.

A second piece in New York Magazine looks at Trump's larger circle of criminal associates.  Here are highlights:  

The legal ring surrounding him [Trump] is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.

Day two of the House impeachment hearings, featuring Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, may have appeared on the surface to focus on a sideshow. Yovanovitch was not directly involved in Trump’s efforts to extort Ukraine for political advantage, the main charge he faces. What her testimony instead accomplished was to put the lie to Trump’s ludicrous defense that he was pursuing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine — that his demands that Kiev investigate his rivals were simply about cleaning the country up.

Her testimony was devoted to proving the hypocrisy of Trump’s claim. She testified how she had worked in Ukraine to promote reform, how her efforts to do so alienated corrupt oligarchs there, and how those oligarchs then worked in tandem with Rudy Giuliani to foment a backlash against her. She explained that the fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Trump praised to Ukraine’s president in a July phone call was in fact totally corrupt.

Trump fired Yovanovitch because she stood in the way of the corruption he and his allies were promoting. To the extent corruption motivated Trump’s diplomatic posture in Ukraine, it was that he wanted to encourage more of it.

During Yovanovitch’s testimony, a federal court registered a guilty verdict on all seven counts for Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. Stone’s crimes involved lying and covering up Trump’s awareness of Democratic emails stolen by Russians. Rick Gates, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, told investigators that he personally witnessed a July 31, 2016, phone call between Trump and Stone shortly after WikiLeaks published a tranche of stolen emails. After hanging up with Stone, Trump announced more information was on its way.

The two figures in his campaign who most directly colluded with Russia, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, both refused to cooperate with Mueller. Whatever they know about Trump’s full collusion with Russia’s campaign hacking will remain secret, probably forever.

And yet, even if he pardons Manafort and Stone, and all his other loyalists, the plain fact will remain that his inner circle is marked by endemic criminality. In addition to his close adviser Stone, his campaign manager (Manafort), his deputy campaign manager (Gates), his lawyer (Michael Cohen), and his national security adviser (Michael Flynn) have all been convicted of felonies. Trump may have persuaded his hard-core base that all these convictions represent a fraudulent witch hunt. But outside the Trump cult, which is not by itself large enough to win the election, being surrounded by criminals is not an admired quality.

In all probability, the parade of charges is probably not over. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is reportedly being investigated for a number of alleged federal crimes, including bribing foreign officials, conspiracy, violating federal campaign-finance laws, and failing to register as a foreign agent. The Wall Street Journal reports today that federal prosecutors are investigating whether Giuliani personally stood to profit from a natural-gas shakedown run by his partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

Parnas and Fruman, two figures linked to the Russian mob who have been arrested, were helping Giuliani run his off-the-books diplomatic work in Ukraine. 

If Rudy himself was involved in the gas shakedown, as the Journal story suggests, it would be an even deeper form of corruption. Trump’s lawyer and personal representative would have sent gangsters to extort Ukraine for Trump’s political gain and his own profit. The false accusations Trump has hurled against Biden are pale versions of the very real crimes Trump’s cronies have tried to carry out.

[T]he full scale of his betrayal is staggering. Trump will probably not become the first president to be impeached and removed from office, but he will go down in history as the most criminal president in American history.

One can only hope that indictments against Giuliani come soon. 

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

Oleksandr Kalinovskyi 

Honor and Morality vs. Trump

One way to think about what we are witnessing as the public impeachment hears unfold is to think of a mix between the movie "The Godfather" and sleazy real estate investors/developers who skirt the laws and often rely on bribes and treats to push their projects along.  Donald Trump - and sadly most of those who have signed on to his administration - embody this combination of criminality and moral haziness, if not out right moral bankruptcy.  As the hearings unfold in contrast to this corruption and lawlessness, one is witnessing individuals cut from the cloth of old school career diplomats who, unlike Trump, put honor, professionalism, and country ahead of squalid personal gain.  An op-ed in the Washington Post co-authored by a law school classmate, Evan Thomas, who has written numerous historical works looks at this stark contrast between Trump world and what ought to be the standard for government service.  If Trump avoids removal from office, it will be a sad day for America.  It will also be a sign that morality has been kicked into the gutter by someone little better than a mob boss and that immorality is now the hallmark of the Republican Party.  Here are column highlights: 

Geography, Napoleon is reputed to have remarked, is destiny, and this axiom came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan. 

Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south — you don’t even need a Town Car — and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post.

To Trump supporters, the testimony Wednesday was the “deep state” surfacing briefly from the depths of white papers, institutional knowledge and a facility with U.S. military and diplomatic history. (Kent’s evocation of von Steuben and Lafayette was straight out of a Ward Just novel.)

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world.

The story of upended conventions and of a president who careens between self-parody and serious lawlessness is by now familiar, as old as the Age of Trump itself. The distinction is that the impeachment hearings have given us perhaps the clearest example yet of the triumph of political demimonde wise guys such as Trump, Giuliani and the Rogers Stone and Ailes over the latter-day Robert Lovetts and Dean Achesons. And it’s not just Wise Men, of course: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice hailed from the establishment world, as do Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill. The moment of decision between the Wise Men and the wise guys on Wednesday was subtle but nevertheless clear. It came when Rep. Michael R. Turner, a Republican, noted that diplomats such as Taylor and Kent “deal in words of understanding. Words of beliefs and feelings, because in your profession, that’s what you work with to try to pull together policy.” Theirs, the lawmaker was implying, was almost a touchingly naive way of life in which one trusted what one was told, assumed the fundamental truthfulness of, say, a presidentially appointed ambassador, and believed that a president himself meant what he said.

No longer: The midtown game of wheeling and dealing, often done over a cigar at the Grand Havana or perhaps an overpriced steak at 21, has now gone global as the denizens of Trump’s neighborhood run shadow foreign policy ops seeking 2020 election help and good paydays.

Had any other president, Taylor was asked, linked official aid in the American interest to private or political benefit? With a stoicism and brevity that would’ve made George Marshall quietly proud, Taylor replied, “No.”

To be sure, the establishment has been far from perfect, its fall from preeminence more than partly self-inflicted. Elite education and conventional expertise don’t guarantee good results, and America has been shaped by the battle between the privileged and the populist since long before Andrew Jackson. Such establishment condescension also fueled the rise of Joe McCarthy and of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who served as lawyer and mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to a young developer from Queens who was looking to make it big in Manhattan. And Donald Trump never forgot a thing Cohn taught him. In midtown Manhattan, Trump learned to dominate the news — in his rise, that meant the New York Post, with its screaming, one-sourced stories, an early harbinger of the presidential Twitter strategy. He learned the power of TV. And he learned that tough guys — or “killers,” in a favorite approbation of Trump’s — like Ailes, who presided over this stew of often-abusive power, money and misinformation, were the kinds of guys he could count on.

For one thing was certain: The Wise Men of 68th Street or the United Nations or any of the traditional institutions of expertise weren’t his guys. The question America now faces in impeachment and, should Trump prevail, in the 2020 election, is whose New York will serve us best in the long run — the wise guys’ or the Wise Men’s?

Be very, very afraid.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

Red and Blue Economies Are Heading in Sharply Different Directions

I have long maintained that part of the economic problems facing "red states" and red rural areas is that their social reactionary nature and hostility towards non-whites, non-straights and non-Christians makes them unattractive to the business of the 21st century and the future.  Here in Virginia, Southwest Virginia is a prime example.  That region continues to demand that state monies be used to turn around the region economically yet the residents (and, yes, there are exceptions) continue to embrace social, religious and political views that are anathema to the economic change they claim to want.  Now a study, as reported in the New York Times looks at the diverging paths of so-called blue economies associated with rising urban areas and those of red economies associated with rural and reactionary regions.  And yes, the red areas tend to be far more white and perhaps more racist.  Here are article highlights:

At a quick glance, red and blue metropolitan areas are performing equally well on average in the most watched indicators of labor market health. . . . Silicon Valley (blue) is booming. So is Provo, Utah (red).

But below the surface, red and blue local economies are worlds apart on enduring, fundamental measures that determine their future prospects and their biggest economic challenges.

The correlations between deeper economic measures and how the contrasting metro areas voted in 2016 are striking.

In bluer metros, more residents have college degrees: The 10 large metros with the highest educational attainment each voted for Hillary Clinton by at least a 10-point margin. Median household incomes are higher in bluer metros even after adjusting for the cost of living, which is higher in bluer metros as well. (Metro area is a better measure for a local labor market than a neighborhood, city, county or state.)

And bluer metros have a more favorable job mix for the future, with fewer manufacturing jobs, a higher share of harder-to-automate “non-routine” jobs, and a higher share of jobs in occupations projected to grow faster.

These measures — education, household income, cost of living, non-routine jobs and projected job growth — are highly correlated with one another, and with voting Democratic.

Other economic measures are less strongly correlated with partisanship but still show a pattern. Bluer metros have less year-to-year volatility of job growth. In part that’s because goods-related sectors like manufacturing and mining are more volatile and are clustered in Republican-leaning areas.

Home values have risen more in bluer metros than in redder ones. And blue metros have a higher prime-age employment-population ratio, even though the unemployment rate varies little by partisanship. That’s because red metros have a higher share of prime-age adults who are not in the labor force and therefore aren’t counted in the unemployment rate.

But there are a few places that vote differently than you’d expect from their local economic fundamentals. Colorado Springs and the Provo-Orem area, for instance, have education levels and an occupation mix more typical of blue metros but voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016 by a wide margin. On the flip side, Stockton, Calif., and El Paso look more like red metros economically but voted for Mrs. Clinton.

Why do some metros vote differently than their economics might suggest they would? Race, ethnicity and religion. Metros that vote Democratic despite having lower education and a job mix more typical of redder metros tend to have large Hispanic populations, including many in inland California and on the Texas border. Metros that vote more Republican despite having higher education and a blue-metro job mix tend to be whiter.

[I]ncome inequality — and all the social and political challenges that come with it — tends to be lower in redder metros. And while cost-of-living-adjusted household incomes are higher in bluer metros, cost-of-living-adjusted salaries for a given occupation are typically higher in redder metros.

There’s a reason for this difference: Bluer metros tend to have higher-paying occupations and fewer prime-age adults out of the labor force, which increases household incomes. But if you move from a bluer to a redder metro and find a job in the same occupation, you’re likely to get an increase in salary after taking living costs into account.

The economic challenges of blue metros — unaffordability and inequality — are different than those of red metros, which face lower living standards and greater risks of job loss. Even if the economy takes a back seat in the 2020 election to health care, immigration and President Trump’s record, these economic differences won’t be far from the surface. And if national economic conditions soften, these differences will become more reason for partisan disagreement on urgent policy priorities.

If the places that moved left between 2012 and 2016 continue getting bluer — and the places that swung Obama-to-Trump keep getting redder — the local economies of red and blue America will keep growing further apart.

Innovation and progressive thinking gravitates to blue regions while "conservatism," closed mindedness and an unwelcoming atmosphere toward those who are different concentrates in red regions. Both bring economic consequences.