Dear Commons Community,

Calling himself “the chief law enforcement officer of the country,” the president yesterday renewed his attacks on the criminal justice system, demanded a new trial for his friend Roger Stone, and granted clemency to several white-collar criminals.

By the end of the day, Attorney General William Barr was said to be considering resignation, though the Justice Department denied such suggestions. The attorney general said last week that Mr. Trump was making his work “impossible,” and the president agreed with him on Tuesday, saying: “I do make his job harder. I do agree with that. I think that’s true.”

White House officials said Mr. Trump had followed recommendations from friends, celebrities and campaign donors in granting full pardons or commutations to 11 people. (A commutation makes a punishment milder without wiping out the underlying conviction.)

The Supreme Court has ruled that presidents have unlimited authority to grant pardons; below is a full list of those who received clemency yesterday. Among them are Michael Milken, the Wall Street financier and so-called junk bond king of the 1980s, and Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who essentially tried to sell the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated after he was elected president.

They represent a collection of societal parasites if there ever was one.

Tony

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A Complete List of Trump’s Pardons and Commutations

President Trump pardoned seven people on Tuesday, including the “junk bond king” Michael R. Milken and Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner. He also commuted the sentences of Rod R. Blagojevich, a former governor of Illinois, and three others.

The Constitution gives presidents what the Supreme Court has ruled is the unlimited authority to grant pardons, which excuse or forgive a federal crime. A commutation, by contrast, makes a punishment milder without wiping out the underlying conviction. Both are forms of presidential clemency.

Here are the 11 people who benefited from the executive grants of clemency that Mr. Trump signed Tuesday.

COMMUTATION

Rod R. Blagojevich

Former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2011 for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated after he was elected president. Mr. Blagojevich’s expletive-filled remarks about his role in choosing a new senator — “I’m just not giving it up for nothing” — were caught on government recordings of his phone calls and became punch lines on late-night television.

In 2010, while Mr. Blagojevich was awaiting trial, he was a contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” a reality series hosted by Mr. Trump. Mr. Blagojevich was fired at the end of the fourth episode of the season.

PARDON

Edward DeBartolo, Jr.

Edward DeBartolo Jr., a former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, pleaded guilty in 1998 to concealing an extortion plot by a former governor of Louisiana. Mr. DeBartolo was prosecuted after he agreed to pay $400,000 to the former governor, Edwin W. Edwards, to secure a riverboat gambling license for his gambling consortium.The 49ers won five Super Bowl championships in a 14-year span while Mr. DeBartolo was serving as the team’s principal owner. Although Mr. DeBartolo avoided prison time, he was fined $1 million and was suspended for a year by the N.F.L.

PARDON

Ariel Friedler

Ariel Friedler, a technology entrepreneur, pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiracy to access a protected computer without authorization and served two months in prison, according to a statement from the White House.

Mr. Friedler has since dedicated his life to promoting veterans issues and helping former prisoners re-enter society, the statement said.

COMMUTATION

Tynice Nichole Hall

Tynice Nichole Hall was sentenced in 2006 after she was convicted on various drug charges in Lubbock, Texas, according to the Justice Department. The evidence at trial showed that Ms. Hall’s residence was used as a stash house for drugs by her boyfriend, who was the main target of an investigation, according to court documents. The police found large quantities of crack and powder cocaine and loaded firearms in her apartment.

Ms. Hall has spent the last 14 years in prison, where she has participated in apprenticeships, completed coursework toward a college degree and led educational programs for other inmates, the White House statement said.

PARDON

Bernard B. Kerik

Ten years ago this month, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner, was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials. Mr. Kerik, who was a close ally of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, took responsibility for his actions.

Mr. Kerik’s rise to prominence dates to the 1993 campaign for mayor in New York City, when he served as Mr. Giuliani’s bodyguard and chauffeur. After the pardon was announced, Mr. Kerik expressed his gratitude to Mr. Trump on Twitter. “With the exception of the birth of my children,” he wrote, “today is one of the greatest days of my life.”

PARDON

Michael R. Milken

Michael R. Milken was the billionaire “junk bond king” and a well-known financier on Wall Street in the 1980s. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, though his sentence was later reduced to two years. He also agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties. Mr. Milken was the inspiration for the Gordon Gekko character in the film “Wall Street.”

Among those arguing for Mr. Milken to be pardoned were Mr. Giuliani, who prosecuted Mr. Milken when he was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Since he was released from prison in 1993, Mr. Milken has striven to repair his reputation by creating the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan economic and public policy think tank.

COMMUTATION

Crystal Munoz

Crystal Munoz was found guilty in 2008 of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute marijuana, according to a petition filed by the Criminal Defense Clinic at the Texas A&M University School of Law. Ms. Munoz, who was sentenced to nearly two decades in prison, drew a map that her friends used in a large marijuana trafficking operation, according to Rolling Stone.

Over the past 12 years, Ms. Munoz has mentored people and volunteered with a hospice program while serving in prison, according to the White House statement.

COMMUTATION

Judith Negron

Judith Negron was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2011 for her role in orchestrating a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme as the owner of a mental health care company in Miami. Ms. Negron has served eight years in prison, and her prison warden described her as a “model inmate,” according to the White House statement.

PARDON

Paul Pogue

In 2010, Paul Pogue, the founder and former chief executive of a large construction company in Texas, was sentenced to three years of probation and was ordered to pay $723,0000 in fines and restitution for filing false income tax statements, according to the McKinney Courier Gazette.

The White House applauded his charitable work in its statement on Tuesday. “Despite his conviction, Mr. Pogue never stopped his charitable work,” the statement said.

PARDON

David Safavian

David Safavian, the top federal procurement official under President George W. Bush, was sentenced to a year in prison in 2009 for covering up his ties to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Mr. Safavian, a former chief of staff at the General Services Administration, was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements.

“Having served time in prison and completed the process of rejoining society with a felony conviction, Mr. Safavian is uniquely positioned to identify problems with the criminal justice system and work to fix them,” the White House said in the statement.

PARDON

Angela Stanton

Angela Stanton, an author, television personality and motivational speaker, served six months of home confinement in 2007 for her role in a stolen-vehicle ring. Her book “Life of a Real Housewife” explores her difficult upbringing and her encounters with reality TV stars.

Recently she has begun giving interviews about her support for Mr. Trump. The White House credited her in its statement with working “tirelessly to improve re-entry outcomes for people returning to their communities upon release from prison.”

Dear Commons Community,

On Monday, Democratic candidate for president, Michael Bloomberg unveiled his policy plans for higher education. In a phone call with journalists, his advisors touted his ambitious and expensive proposals (an investment of $700 billion over 10 years) to make college fairer and more affordable, including boosting states’ investment in higher education, simplifying financial aid forms and eliminating legacy admissions. They said he’d pay for his ideas by, among other things, raising corporate taxes.

Below is an excerpt from an article that appeared in The Hechinger Report.  This was forwarded to me by my colleague, David Bloomfield who is quoted in the article.

I like Bloomberg’s proposals especially the elimination of  legacy admissions.

Tony

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 …Bloomberg now has a plan for the future of higher education that both echoes and expands upon policies his fellow Democratic candidates have already called for: Free community college, greater investment in Pell grants and automatic income-based repayment plans for student loans.

In a phone call with journalists Monday, Bloomberg’s advisors touted his ambitious and expensive proposals (an investment of $700 billion over 10 years) to make college fairer and more affordable, including boosting states’ investment in higher education, simplifying financial aid forms and eliminating legacy admissions. They said he’d pay for his ideas by, among other things, raising corporate taxes.

And overall, Bloomberg’s plans represent a clear departure from Trump’s education agenda, especially the president’s recent proposed education budget for fiscal year 2021.  Trump’s plan would reduce the federal role in education, eliminate public service loans and tighten spending on financial aid programs.

Higher education experts have said Trump’s plan could push college out of reach for low-income students. Bloomberg’s plan calls for helping such students instead, by directly investing in private colleges and universities with large populations of low-income students. Boosting Pell grants would cover their books, meals, transportation and child care – all frequent obstacles to college completion.

Julie Peller, executive director of the bipartisan, nonprofit advocacy group known as Higher Learning Advocates, praised Bloomberg’s plan for recognizing “that the demographics and needs of learners today have changed,” and for including a focus on completion and earning outcomes for low-income students.

But Peller was among those who worry how he’d pay for it. “What tradeoffs can we expect with an ambitious plan like this?” she wondered.

And skepticism emerged, some of it because of Bloomberg’s self-paying, late entry into the race, along with his K-12 track record demanding “data-driven results,” based on student test scores and favoring competition to public education.

“Coming into the race late and with his own finances has given him the advantage of studying other candidate positions, to crib and place himself where he likes among their prior pronouncements,” noted David Bloomfield, a professor of education law at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “He’s photo-shopping his higher-ed plan into a developed picture where it will do him the most good.”

Bloomfield was a frequent critic of the ex-mayor’s K-12 agenda, but gives him props for “a thorough, progressive plan touching all bases – more Bernie [Sanders] than [Pete] Buttigieg, borrowing from [Elizabeth] Warren’s plan – full playbook, even though it comes from arguably the most conservative leading candidate in the race for the Democratic nomination.”

As is typical of Bloomberg, his plan also calls for a fair number of accountability measures. Two-year colleges would have to invest in “evidence-based strategies to increase completion rates,” and eligibility would hinge on students transferring to schools or programs with four-year courses of study or that lead directly to degrees. Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, likes the focus on more effective outcomes.

“Mayor Bloomberg is introducing a plan that appears more progressive than many of the candidates in the race, by focusing on the neediest students and families and including private schools, not just public colleges,” Jenkins said. “It further shows his stripes by not just allowing students to afford pricey tuition at college, but also focusing on students’ other needs like food and transportation, which are significant barriers for low-income students completing college.”

Gail Mellow, the former president of LaGuardia Community College in Queens, N.Y., said she liked the plan as well, particularly his focus “on finding ways to incentivize elite colleges to accept low-income students, while at the same time increasing support of community colleges and HBCUs.”

The former mayor himself wasn’t on the call Monday outlining his priorities to the media or answering questions; instead he had his advisors and Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s Democratic governor, tout them.

“I think it is fantastic,” Raimondo said of Bloomberg’s agenda, although she spent much of her time on the call pushing the success and growth of her own signature plan, which gives students the option of either two years of free community college or a scholarship covering their third and fourth years at a state university.

It is less clear how Bloomberg’s call for ending legacy admissions at colleges that give preference to alumni will go over. His own alma mater John Hopkins recently did so, although it may have helped that Bloomberg gave Hopkins higher-ed’s biggest-ever gift ($1.8 billion), devoted exclusively to financial aid.

Bloomberg’s advisors also did not specify how a tax on the wealthy would work, or explain many of the other particulars, but Rick Hess, director of education policy strategies at the American Enterprise Institute, said he thought that was less important at the moment.

“These [ideas] are more about markers and signals,” Hess said. “He wants to be big and expansive and generous. It’s more of a vision document than one in which details matter.

He is trying to say, ‘I’m planting my flag on bold and progressive plans, but I’m a technocrat with smart people.’ This is what happens if you get a lot of smart progressive experts together and have them dream up something that sounds progressive.”

Dear Commons Community,

The Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy protection today in hopes of working out a potentially mammoth victim compensation plan that will allow the 110-year-old organization to carry on.  The Chapter 11 filing in federal bankruptcy court in Wilmington, Delaware, sets in motion what could be one of the biggest, most complex bankruptcies ever seen. Scores of lawyers are seeking settlements on behalf of several thousand men who say they were molested as scouts by scoutmasters or other leaders decades ago but are only now eligible to sue because of recent changes in their states’ statute-of-limitations laws.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“By going to bankruptcy court, the Scouts can put those lawsuits on hold for now. But ultimately they could be forced to sell off some of their vast property holdings, including campgrounds and hiking trails, to raise money for a compensation fund that could surpass a billion dollars.

“Scouting programs will continue throughout this process and for many years to come,” said Evan Roberts, a spokesman for the Scouts. ”Local councils are not filing for bankruptcy because they are legally separate and distinct organizations.”″

The Boy Scouts are just the latest major American institution to face a heavy price over sexual abuse. Roman Catholic dioceses across the country and schools such as Penn State and Michigan State have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.

The bankruptcy represents a painful turn for an organization that has been a pillar of American civic life for generations and a training ground for future leaders. Achieving the rank of Eagle Scout has long been a proud accomplishment that politicians, business leaders, astronauts and others put on their resumes and in their official biographies.

The Boy Scouts’ finances have been strained in recent years by declining membership and sex-abuse settlements.

The number of youths taking part in scouting has dropped below 2 million, down from more than 4 million in peak years of the 1970s. The organization has tried to counter the decline by admitting girls, but its membership rolls took a big hit Jan. 1 when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — for decades a major sponsor of Boy Scout units — cut ties and withdrew more than 400,000 scouts in favor of programs of its own.

The financial outlook had worsened last year after New York, Arizona, New Jersey and California passed laws making it easier for victims of long-ago abuse to file claims. Teams of lawyers across the U.S. have been signing up clients by the hundreds to sue the Boy Scouts.

Most of the newly surfacing cases date to the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s; the organization says there were only five known abuse victims in 2018. The Boy Scouts credit the change to an array of prevention policies adopted since the mid-1980s, including mandatory criminal background checks and abuse-prevention training for all staff and volunteers, and a rule that two or more adult leaders be present during all activities.

In many ways, the crisis parallels the one facing the Catholic Church in the U.S. Both institutions boast of major progress over recent decades in combating abuse. whether by priests or scout leaders, but both face many lawsuits alleging negligence and cover-ups, mostly decades ago.

Among the matters to be addressed in bankruptcy court: the fate of the Boy Scouts’ assets; the extent to which the organization’s insurance will help cover compensation; and whether assets of the Scouts’ more than 260 local councils will be added to the fund.

“There are a lot of very angry, resentful men out there who will not allow the Boy Scouts to get away without saying what all their assets are,” said lawyer Paul Mones, who represents numerous clients suing the BSA. “They want no stone unturned.”

Amid the crush of lawsuits, the Scouts recently mortgaged the major properties owned by the national leadership, including the headquarters in Irving, Texas, and the 140,000-acre Philmont Ranch in New Mexico, to help secure a line of credit.

Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts have kept confidential files since the 1920s listing staff and volunteers implicated in sexual abuse, for the avowed purpose of keeping predators away from youth. According to a court deposition, the files as of January listed 7,819 suspected abusers and 12,254 victims.

Until last spring, the organization had insisted it never knowingly allowed a predator to work with youths. But in May, The Associated Press reported that attorneys for abuse victims had identified multiple cases in which known predators were allowed to return to leadership posts. The next day, Boy Scouts chief executive Mike Surbaugh wrote to a congressional committee, acknowledging the group’s previous claim was untrue.

James Kretschmer of Houston, among the many men suing for alleged abuse, says he was molested by a Scout leader over several months in the mid-1970s in the Spokane, Washington, area. Regarding the bankruptcy, he said, “It is a shame because at its core and what it was supposed to be, the Boy Scouts is a beautiful organization.”

“But you know, anything can be corrupted,” he added. “And if they’re not going to protect the people that they’ve entrusted with the children, then shut it down and move on.”

Ahead of the Chapter 11 filing, lawyers said that because of the organization’s 50-state presence, as well as its ties to churches and civic groups that sponsor scout troops, a bankruptcy by the Boy Scouts would be unprecedented in its complexity. It would be national in scope, unlike the various Catholic Church bankruptcy cases, which have unfolded diocese by diocese.

“A Boy Scout bankruptcy would be bigger in scale than any other child abuse bankruptcy we’ve ever seen,” said Seattle-based attorney Mike Pfau, whose firm is representing scores of men nationwide alleging they were abused as Boy Scouts.

Illustrating the depth of its problems, the organization in 2018 sued six of its insurers for refusing to cover its sex abuse liabilities. The insurers said their obligation was void because the Scouts refused to take effective preventive measures such as warning parents that boys might be abused.”

A once revered organization in dire straights!

Tony

Tom Cotton

Dear Commons Community,

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) continues to push a debunked theory that the coronavirus is linked to a biological lab in China.

The lab theory, which has been circulating in right-wing publications and on the Internet, also suggests the virus may have started as an unleashed biological weapon. 

Scientists say the virus may have begun with animal-to-human transmission at a Wuhan seafood and wildlife market. But Cotton disagrees.

“We don’t know where it originated,” Cotton said on Fox News on Sunday. “But we do know we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

Although Cotton admitted there was no evidence to suggest the disease actually originated at the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, he then complained about China’s “duplicity and dishonesty.” 

Cui Tiankai, Chinese ambassador to the U.S., denounced Cotton’s theory on “Face The Nation” earlier this month.

“It’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people,” Cui said. “For one thing, this will create panic. Another thing is that it will fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things that will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus.”

Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Washington Post that “we don’t have any evidence” that the general population was exposed to a virus through an accident at a lab. He called Cotton’s speculation a conspiracy theory that was borderline irresponsible.

“Cotton should spend more time funding the agencies in the United States that can help contain and combat the virus rather than trying to assign blame,” Narang said.

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, also told the Post that there was nothing in the genome sequence of the virus that indicated it had been engineered.

“The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded,” Ebright added.

The coronavirus, know as COVID-19, has killed at least 1,666 people and infected more than 68,500 people globally, the vast majority in mainland China.

Cotton is a sad example of an elected political leader’s irresponsibility.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Thursday, California’s Legislature is expected to approve a resolution offering an apology to the 120,000 Japanese internment victims for the state’s role in aiding the U.S. government’s policy and condemning actions that helped fan anti-Japanese discrimination during World War II.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order No. 9066 establishing the camps was signed on Feb. 19, 1942, and 2/19 now is marked by Japanese Americans as a Day of Remembrance.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“California Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi was born in Japan and is one the roughly 430,000 people of Japanese descent living in California, the largest population of any state. The Democrat who represents Manhattan Beach and other beach communities near Los Angeles introduced the resolution.

“We like to talk a lot about how we lead the nation by example,” he said. “Unfortunately, in this case, California led the racist anti-Japanese American movement.”

A congressional commission in 1983 concluded that the detentions were a result of “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.” Five years later, the U.S. government formally apologized and paid $20,000 in reparations to each victim.

The money didn’t come close to replacing what was lost.

The California resolution doesn’t come with any compensation. It targets the actions of the California Legislature at the time for supporting the internments. Two camps were located in the state — Manzanar on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in central California and Tule Lake near the Oregon state line, the largest of all the camps.

“I want the California Legislature to officially acknowledge and apologize while these camp survivors are still alive,” Muratsuchi said.  He said anti-Japanese sentiment began in California as early as 1913, when the state passed the California Alien Land Law, targeting Japanese farmers who some in California’s massive agricultural industry perceived as a threat. Seven years later the state barred anyone with Japanese ancestry from buying farmland.”

The Japanese-American internment is a sad chapter of American history.  The resolution in California is a small but important acknowledgment.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today we honor George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, two presidents who served our country well and with dignity!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In an open letter released yesterday, more than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William Barr to resign following reports he and President Donald Trump intervened in the criminal prosecution of Trump’s friend Roger Stone. 

The letter states that Barr broke Justice Department rules when he overruled federal prosecutors in Stone’s criminal case, seeking a far more lenient sentence than the potential nine years prosecutors originally recommended. As reported by various media.

 “It is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President,” they said. 

In their call for Barr’s resignation, the former Justice Department officials suggested his behavior is a threat to democracy.

“Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies,” they wrote.

Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering in order to impede investigators looking into the Trump campaign. He was one of the highest-profile Trump allies to face prosecution resulting from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

After prosecutors in the Stone case filed a sentencing request on Monday seeking up to nine years in prison, Trump called the decision a “miscarriage of justice” on Twitter. 

The following day, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia filed a new recommendation that didn’t suggest any particular length of time. The move led all four prosecutors in the Stone trial to drop out of the case. 

In their open letter, the former officials said an independent, nonpolitical Justice Department is vital to the “Department’s sacred obligation to ensure equal justice under the law.”

“President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle,” they wrote, “most recently in connection with the sentencing of President Trump’s close associate, Roger Stone, who was convicted of serious crimes.”

The officials praised the prosecutors who withdrew from the Stone case, and they called on anyone who witnesses similar abuses to refuse to carry them out; report all misconduct to the DOJ inspector general; withdraw from cases in which they are given unethical directives; and ― “in a manner consistent with professional ethics” ― alert the American people of the reasons for their resignation, should the time come. 

In an interview with ABC on Thursday, Barr said Trump’s comments and tweets about the Justice Department and specific cases “make it impossible” for Barr to do his job. In their letter, the former DOJ officials say Barr’s interview, which came amid a wave of public concern about the department’s independence, did little to inspire confidence. 

“Mr. Barr’s actions in doing the President’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words,” they wrote, adding that those actions “require Mr. Barr to resign. 

This letter should mean something to Barr coming from his professional associates.  It doesn’t mean a thing to Donald Trump.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd this morning has a column examining the Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg war that is going on in social media. Dowd is in Bloomburg’s corner and concludes that he is up to giving back to Trump anything that is thrown at him.  Dowd speculates whether Hillary Clinton should have done some of this in the 2016 presidential election.  Dowd also points out: “As Charlie Warzel wrote in The Times’s Opinion section, “On Twitter, where some Democratic hopefuls have adopted a ‘they go low, we go high’ mentality, Bloombergians have instead opted to wade into the mud and wrestle with Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed.”

The full column is below.  Here are a couple of Bloomberg’ zingers.

“…Another example of a rival getting unbalanced by Trump’s bullying: Hillary still wonders if she should have wheeled around, when Trump was lurking behind her on the debate stage and making her skin crawl, and said, “Back up, you creep, get away from me.” She overthought it, fearing she would come across as overwrought.

Bloomberg, however, has no such qualms. He can be a bitch when he wants to be. (And certainly, he has gotten in trouble crossing the line on offensive comments to women staffers and on stop-and-frisk.)

When Bloomberg was asked recently about the clash of the billionaires, he snapped back: “Who’s the other one?”

AND

This past week, Trump tweeted that “Mini Mike is a 5’4” mass of dead energy,” to which Bloomberg trash-tweeted back: “we know many of the same people in NY. Behind your back they laugh at you & call you a carnival barking clown. They know you inherited a fortune & squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence.”

I originally was in favor of Democratic candidates taking the high road but from my childhood I remember that the best way to beat back a bully was to punch him hard enough in the nose to have run back home.  Go for it, Mike!

Tony

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As the pols take the fight out back to the web, will the dank memes prevail?

WASHINGTON — In a meta master stroke, Tina Fey made an epic teen movie, “Mean Girls,” in 2004, then turned it into a Broadway musical and is now making a movie out of the musical.

She should do her first casting call here. Politics has never been filled with so many mean girls.

How’s this for a bitchyyy lunch table? Mitch McConnell, Rudy Giuliani, Don Jr., Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, Lindsey Graham, John Bolton, Jim Jordan, Kellyanne Conway, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

Of course Donald Trump, who uses Twitter like the Burn Book, takes the form of Regina George, Queen Bee.

Now comes the new kid in school: Mike Bloomberg, who wants to topple the Queen Bee and is aiming to get there with mean girl — and meme girl — tactics.

Many rivals have struggled to spar with Trump in debates and on Twitter but have found it difficult, demeaning and self-destructive to sink to his level.

They don’t seem authentic when the claws come out and the fur flies. Who can forget Marco Rubio stooping to a joke about Trump’s penis size and then apologizing, saying it wasn’t really who he was?

Another example of a rival getting unbalanced by Trump’s bullying: Hillary still wonders if she should have wheeled around, when Trump was lurking behind her on the debate stage and making her skin crawl, and said, “Back up, you creep, get away from me.” She overthought it, fearing she would come across as overwrought.

Bloomberg, however, has no such qualms. He can be a bitch when he wants to be. (And certainly, he has gotten in trouble crossing the line on offensive comments to women staffers and on stop-and-frisk.)

When Bloomberg was asked recently about the clash of the billionaires, he snapped back: “Who’s the other one?”

Trump, who tweeted in 2012 that Bloomberg was doing a great job as mayor of New York, is now scratching Bloomy’s eyes out. (The president’s post-acquittal megalomania and tweets about softening Roger Stone’s punishment have spurred Bill Barr and Republican senators to urge Trump to cut down the bullying, incendiary tweets. King Donald tweeted back that he can do as he likes. In the spirit of the Brangelina split, conservatives are now left agonizing about which of their stars to support — Trump or Barr.)

The president has been on a prolonged tweet rant about “Mini Mike” and his “vanity project,” claiming his “loser” billionaire rival with “zero presence” wants to stand on a box at the debates. A Bloomberg spokeswoman punched back about Trump: “He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity and his spray-on tan.” (Michael Dukakis did stand on a specially built mound.)

This past week, Trump tweeted that “Mini Mike is a 5’4” mass of dead energy,” to which Bloomberg trash-tweeted back: “we know many of the same people in NY. Behind your back they laugh at you & call you a carnival barking clown. They know you inherited a fortune & squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence.”

As Charlie Warzel wrote in The Times’s Opinion section, “On Twitter, where some Democratic hopefuls have adopted a ‘they go low, we go high’ mentality, Bloombergians have instead opted to wade into the mud and wrestle with Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed.”

Bloomberg has dumped over $188 million into his campaign so far, including a million dollars a day on Facebook ads. A chunk has been thrown at an innovative digital campaign that taps legions of Instagram’s most prolific meme-makers to flood social media with ironic jokes designed to make the 78-year-old Bloomberg seem hip and to get millennials talking about him.

Like the mean tweets, the memes are a success in that people are talking (and DM-ing) about Bloomberg. But, like the mean tweets, they have been grating for some digital natives, who mock the naked bid to buy affection as condescending and inorganic.

The two candidates who inspire the greatest number of memes and web warriors are, funnily enough, two of the oldest men ever to run for president, Bernie Sanders, 78, and Trump, 73. And they don’t have to pay for their meme-makers.

“Bloomberg’s memes are comical in the worst possible way,” said Sarah Matthews, deputy press secretary for the Trump campaign. “Paying for internet influencers and memes proves you don’t understand how meme culture works. President Trump’s supporters create content for free out of genuine love for the president.”

And the president loves his meme-meisters back. Last summer, he invited a bunch of these masters of vicious trolling, conspiracy theories and doctored videos to the White House for a festive social media summit — an ogre with all his digital goblins kickin’ it in the cave.

“The Trumpistas have been buying social media exposure for years,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and former Bloomberg reporter who now is a senior adviser to the Bloomberg campaign. “It’s the only tactic that they actually stay focused on and try to build a strategy around. The idea that there is some grass-roots movement funding this is silly.”

There’s no question that it’s going to get really nasty as these two oligarchs go at it, now that the nastiest place ever — the internet — has become the foreground of political campaigning. The real question is: Who can make fetch happen?

Dear Commons Community,

Elisabeth Rosenthal, the author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back, has an op-ed in this morning’s New York Times, analyzing the cost of healthcare and those who profit by it.  In a word, it is complicated.  Her entire piece is below and should be read by everyone because sooner or later you will face a major medical bill. 

I recently had knee replacement surgery and between the surgeon, hospital, anesthesiologists, and therapists, I have been charged in excess of $80,000. and counting. Fortunately, I have excellent healthcare coverage from the City University of New York and my out-of-pocket expenses have amounted to a couple of thousand dollars. Every time I receive a bill, I thank God that my co-pay is manageable.

I have no idea how those without good coverage can manage their health costs without sinking into crushing debt.

Tony

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Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills?

The same people who should be fixing them.

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

February 14, 2020

Every politician condemns the phenomenon of “surprise” medical bills. This week, two committees in the House are marking up new surprise billing legislation. One of the few policy proposals President Trump brought up in this year’s State of the Union address was his 2019 executive order targeting them. In the Democratic debates, candidates have railed against such medical bills, and during commercial breaks, back-to-back ads from groups representing doctors and insurers proclaimed how much the health care sector also abhors this uniquely American form of patient extortion.

Patients, of course, hate surprise bills most of all. Typical scenarios: A patient having a heart attack is taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital and gets hit with a bill of over $100,000 because that hospital wasn’t in his insurance network. A patient selects an in-network provider for a minor procedure, like a colonoscopy, only to be billed thousands for the out-of-network anesthesiologist and pathologist who participated.

And yet, no one with authority in Washington has done much of anything about it.

Here’s why: Major sectors of the health industry have helped to invent this toxic phenomenon, and none of them want to solve it if it means their particular income stream takes a hit. And they have allies in the capital.

That explains why President Trump’s executive order, issued last year, hasn’t resulted in real change. Why bipartisan congressional legislation supported by both the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Health Committee to shield Americans from surprise medical bills has gone nowhere. And why surprise billing provisions were left out of the end-of-year spending bill in December, which did include major tax relief for many parts of the health care industry.

Surprise bills are just the latest weapons in a decades-long war between the players in the health care industry over who gets to keep the fortunes generated each year from patient illness — $3.6 trillion in 2018.

Here’s how they came to be:

Forty years ago, when many insurers were nonprofit entities and being a doctor wasn’t seen as a particularly good entree into the 1 percent, billed rates were far lower than they are today, and insurers mostly just paid them. Premiums were low or paid by an employer. Patients paid little or nothing in co-payments or deductibles.

That’s when a more entrepreneurial streak kicked in. Think about the opportunities: If someone is paying you whatever you ask, why not ask for more?

Commercial insurers as well as Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans, some of which had converted to for-profit status by 2000, began to push back on escalating fees from providers, demanding discounts.

Hospitals and doctors argued about who got to keep different streams of revenue they were paid. Doctors began to form their own companies and built their own outpatient surgery centers to capture payments for themselves.

So today your hospital and doctor and insurer — all claiming to coordinate care for your health — are often in a three-way competition for your money.

As the battle for revenue has heated up, each side has added new weapons to capture more: Hospitals added facility fees and infusion charges. Insurers levied ever-rising co-payments and deductibles. Most important they limited the networks of providers to those that would accept the rates they were willing to pay.

Surprise bills are the latest tactic: When providers decided that an insurer’s contracted payment offerings were too meager, they stopped participating in the insurer’s network; either they walked away or the insurer left them out. In some cases, physicians decided not to participate in any networks at all. That way, they could charge whatever they wanted when they got involved in patient care and bill the patient directly. For their part, insurers didn’t really care if those practitioners demanding more money left.

And, for a time, all sides were basically fine with this arrangement.

But as the scope and the scale of surprise bills has grown in the past five years, more people have experienced these costly, unpleasant surprises. With accumulating bad publicity, they have became impossible to ignore. It was hard to defend a patient stuck with over $500,000 in surprise bills for 14 weeks of dialysis. Or the $10,000 bill from the out-of-network pediatrician who tends to newborns in intensive care. How about the counties where no ambulance companies participate in insurance, so every ambulance ride costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars?

These practices are an obvious outrage. But no one in the health care sector wants to unilaterally make the type of big concessions that would change them. Insurers want to pay a fixed rate. Doctors and hospitals prefer what they call “baseball- style arbitration,” where a reasonable charge is determined by mediation. Both camps have lined up sympathetic politicians for their point of view.

So, nothing has changed at the federal level, even though it’s hard to imagine another issue for which there is such widespread consensus. Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about being able to afford an unexpected medical bill — more than any other household expense. Nearly eight in 10 Americans say they want federal legislation to protect patients against surprise bills.

States are passing their own surprise billing laws, though they lack power since much of insurance is regulated at a national level.

Now members of Congress have yet another chance to tackle this obvious injustice. Will they listen to hospitals, doctors, insurers? Or, in this election year, will they finally heed their voter-patients?

Dear Commons Community,

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published an article entitled, The purge of higher education:  What do we lose when small colleges close?  in the current edition of Academe.  Written by Eva-Maria Swidler, it takes a candid look at recent college closings and what they mean for higher education especially smaller  schools that are committed to the liberal arts.  Here is an excerpt.

“The litany of small colleges that have closed in just the last three years is chilling: Burlington, Green Mountain, Mount Ida, and College of New Rochelle are among those that have closed in the Northeast alone. State college systems in Alabama, Georgia, Vermont, and Wisconsin have shuttered or merged smaller campuses; other systems, including the Pennsylvania State system, are threatening to do so. Hampshire and Goddard Colleges teeter on the brink, searching for “partners” and rallying their alumni, while Marlboro seems set to be absorbed into Emerson College. Antioch and Sweet Briar are hanging on, but only barely.

The proportion of students who are liberal arts majors is falling, so it is no surprise that colleges focused on the liberal arts are under immense pressure. Simultaneously, small colleges are in a situation that might be described as a higher education version of the admonition to “get big or get out.” Finally, some colleges that are respected but not prestigious are discovering that storied histories and good reputations aren’t enough to keep them viable. All these trends are forcing a growing number of liberal arts colleges to close. But why? Why are so many institutions going under now, at a time when the drumbeat in favor of virtually universal college education is increasing?

Let’s briefly look at three pieces of common wisdom. The most frequently offered explanation for the panic in higher education is that there just aren’t enough students to go around. Numbers of high school graduates are falling, especially in some areas of the country; public skepticism is growing about taking on the high levels of student debt that are often required; and fewer adult students have been returning to college since the recession ended. All of these observations are true enough, but they don’t explain why non-elite liberal arts colleges should be the ones to bear the brunt of the damage. Another familiar explanation for the struggles of liberal arts colleges is the preoccupation of students and parents alike with marketable job skills. Although the beating that teachers have taken in the press has notably reduced the number of education majors, other degree programs that yield certifications and easy job eligibility are doing well, as are at least some of the STEM majors that the public has been assured will be in demand by employers, although those graduates don’t do particularly better than anyone else in the long term. In a society with little confidence in the job market, the liberal arts are facing tough times.”

Swidler makes a number of good points in this article and lays out the pressures (enrollment, funding, curriculum) that are forcing many colleges to address their future viability.

Tony