Mediaboss Marketing

As Republicans have been casting about for legislation to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have offered a consistent message in public: If the GOP drops its demand for repeal, well work with them to improve, or fix, the current law.

Exactly how Democrats would change the bill they enacted seven years ago is less clear. Lawmakers have floated a range of options, from tackling the cost of prescription drugs, to setting up a reinsurance program to shore up Obamacares flagging exchanges, to reviving the idea of a public option that would compete with private carriers and drive down prices.

But party leaders have chosen not to endorse a specific set of reforms, in part because Republicans have shown little interest in considering their ideas and in part to avoid distracting from their more urgent imperative to save Obamacare from destruction. Were not in the majority right now, and our whole focus right now is to keep them from sending us back to a time when insurance companies could sell plans that provided nothing and people found themselves just in a terrible bind, Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, a member of the Democratic leadership, said in an interview.

Are Senate Republicans Really Doomed on Health Care?

Yet the lack of a Democratic alternative also stems from a central disagreement about whether the ACA needs a legislative fix at all. Democrats have accused the Trump administration of sabotaging the law administratively by refusing to guarantee the payment of cost-sharing subsidies to insurers and by sending mixed signals about whether it would enforce the mandate that people buy insurance or pay a tax penalty. If the administration simply implemented the law as intended, they say, Congress could stand down. Theres a very good chance that its sustainable if you just do those things, said Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. Murray told me she absolutely believed the law could stand on its own if the Trump administration implemented it properly.

Other leaders in the party, however, suggested to me the law was not quite as stable. Insurers had been pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges before the November election, and while these Democrats do not agree with Republican characterizations that the law is collapsing, they argue that Congress needs to act at least to stabilize the individual market. The individual market, if youre not buying through an employereven if you do get a subsidyis pretty unstable, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee last year, said in an interview. I do think some legislative fixes would really send signals to the American public, as well as the stakeholders, that were serious about finding improvements.

Kaine and Senator Tom Carper of Delaware on Wednesday introduced legislation to create a reinsurance program to help insurers offset the cost of covering older, less healthy customers. That type of programwhich provides payments to insurers that enroll high-cost individualswas originally part of Obamacare until it expired last year, and Republican legislators in Minnesota and Alaska have embraced the idea as a way to stabilize insurance markets in those states. Thats something that should have some bipartisan appeal, Kaine said.

The Democratic ideas fall roughly into two categories: proposals that might attract support from Republicans as part of a short-term fix if the repeal effort fails, and those that will only be viable if the party can retake one or both chambers of Congress in 2018. Murrays renewed call for a public insurance option which would compete with private insurance in the marketplacealmost certainly falls in the latter bucket. Democrats fell a few votes shy of including a public option in the 2010 law, but the idea faces staunch opposition from Republicans and insurance companies who see it as a slippery slope to a completely government-run health-care system.

A push to allow the government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid would likely run into a similar blockade. But the proposal has had an unlikely ally in President Trump, who earlier this year took meetings with Democrats and pharmaceutical companies after calling for increased competition to bring down prescription costs. Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the cost of prescription drugs was the biggest complaint hes heard from constituents about health care. Democrats, however, suspect Trump isnt serious about confronting Republicans who have long opposed the idea of allowing the government to negotiate prices. Weve never heard from the president again on this issue, said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, a co-chairman of the partys policy and communications committee.

Pallone said Congress should also consider boosting the subsidies it provides to consumers under the ACA, either by increasing the income level eligible to receive them or adding to the aid itself. We have to make sure that the tax credits or subsidies make insurance affordable, he said. Yet as Pallone is the first to acknowledge, its hard to see Republicans switching from trying to repeal the law to agreeing to make its benefits more generous. Were kind of in this never-never land, he told me as I pressed him for ideas that Democrats could offer. I just want to keep stressing that there are no bipartisan discussions. Its nice to talk about, but I think its really importantand Im sure you are going to stressthat this is not real.

If Republicans were to launch a bipartisan effort, the more difficult decision Democrats might face is whether they would be willing to sacrifice parts of Obamacare in exchange for preserving and possibly strengthening the rest. Sometimes more begrudgingly than not, they have agreed in previous years to delay certain taxes in the law and change or repeal smaller policy provisions that proved controversial or unworkable. On that front, Yarmuth broke with many Democrats by calling for the repeal of Obamacares requirement that large businesses offer insurance to their employees. I dont think its necessary, he told me. He said he thought it was a good idea at the time but that studies have shown that companies had not, as some predicted, opted to pay a fine instead of providing insurance. Instead, many had reduced employee hours to get around the mandate. So its actually hurt working families, Yarmuth said. Scrapping the mandate, he said, would eliminate one of the negative, adverse effects of the Affordable Care Act.

All of these Democratic ideas will be mootat least in the near termif Republicans can pass their own health-care overhaul through the Senate on a party-line vote. But despite reports of progress in the last week, the likelihood of failure is still nearly as high as the likelihood of success. And if Republicans cannot deliver on their promise of repeal, the health-care spotlightand some of the burdenwill return to the Democrats once again.

See the rest here:
How Democrats Would Fix Obamacare - The Atlantic

No presidential nominee has ever received more votes from Americas largest cities than Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonOPINION: Both sides responsible for fueling political vitriol, not just the left Trump: Why is Clinton not investigated but I am? Pelosi: GOP sanctimonious to blame left for inciting violence MORE did in 2016. The turnout machine her campaign built attracted a massive coalition of younger voters, well-educated voters and minorities.

But even as Americas urban areas grow at a record pace, Clinton proved that blowing out cities and large metropolitan areas is necessary but not sufficient to a Democrats hopes of winning the White House.

This is the second story in The Hills Changing America series, in which we explore the four divergent trends that are shaping the country: the growing importance and impact of urban cores, the slow wilt of rural America, the rise of the most diverse generation in American history and the radically changing behavior of the largest voting bloc within the electorate.

There is little debate among experts that Americas urban cores are growing in importance, both economic and political. The countrys major metropolitan areas have become the engines of the American economy. Today, fully a quarter of the nations economic output comes from just a handful of the largest metropolitan areas: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

Our economy has become more clustered and concentrated, said Richard Florida, a University of Toronto professor who studies cities and co-founded CityLab, which reports on urban trends.

The clustering has spurred an explosive population boom, too, as younger Americans seek out jobs that are no longer available in exurban and rural settings. For the first time since the invention of the automobile, cities are growing faster than suburban areas.

And at the same time, urban areas have fostered islands of cultural and economic liberalism amid a sea of rural conservatism. The nations largest cities have been pioneers in the movement to raise the minimum wage, embrace the alternative energy sector and ban discrimination against LBGT people.

The 2016 election results illustrate the longer-term trend of liberalized cities: About 22 percent of the 65 million votes Clinton received nationwide came from the 25 most populous counties alone, a larger share than any Democratic presidential nominee has won in the last seven elections.

Clinton pulled 1.3 million more votes out of the top 25 counties in 2016 than President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaBoston Globe floats Obama as possible Harvard president Pelosi: GOP sanctimonious to blame left for inciting violence Trumps EPA budget cuts hit strong opposition at House panel MORE did in 2012.

Clintons success is not a product of population increases alone; political changes are evident in the Republican decline in these major metropolitan areas.

Seeking reelection in 1992, George H.W. Bush won 16 percent of his total vote from the 25 largest counties. The Republican share in large metro areas has spiraled downward in every election since: In 2016, President Trump received just 11.4 percent of his total votes from those 25 counties. Trump received fewer actual votes from those counties than Mitt Romney, John McCainJohn McCainSenate overwhelmingly passes Russia sanctions deal Crash Override malware heightens fears for US electric grid Democrats in an urban box MORE and George W. Bush.

In 2000, Bush won seven of the 25 largest counties. In 2016, Trump won just three Maricopa (Phoenix), Tarrant (Ft. Worth) and Suffolk (eastern Long Island).

Trump won the vast majority of counties across the nation. But Clinton won the popular vote, and she won counties where a majority of Americans live making Trump the first candidate in modern times to win the presidency without winning counties where a majority of Americans live, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.

While clustering may be good economics, it doesnt make a winning political coalition. Democratic voters are overwhelmingly likely to live in deep-blue congressional districts and less likely to live in swing states critical to both parties paths to winning the Electoral College.

Those voters have also changed the Democratic Partys approach to cultural issues, over which there remain deep divides between urban and rural voters.

The urban voters on which Democrats rely most heavily on average younger, more diverse and better educated than the electorate as a whole demand a party that embraces cultural liberalism. Those voters have pulled the Democratic Party to the left; they were the voters most receptive to a message like Stronger Together, Clintons 2016 slogan.

At the same time, some Democrats fear that those cultural messages carry an implicit rejection of exurban and rural voters outside the mainstream left voters the party needs to win over to capture critical swing states.

We have embraced an urban-centered inclusive diversity worldview that truly embraces all types of diversity and shuns dissent from that, said Matt Canter, a Democratic strategist who has conducted polling on the future of his party.

The metropolitan boom is spurred by a changing economy, one in which commodity prices are plunging and the manufacturing sector struggles to survive. In response, the country has increasingly relied on the finance sector, information technology, education and services for growth, economists say.

Theyre picking up a larger slice of the economic pie, said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institutions Metropolitan Policy Program.

Those industries are so concentrated in major cities that they have attracted an incredible number of migrants, both from nearby exurban and rural counties and from overseas. In the last five years, the 100 largest counties have added more than 7.3 million people, an average of 5.5 percent of their population, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Those moving into urban areas make up the most diverse generation of Americans in the nations history. Just under half of the millennial generation is made up of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and other minorities.

The Clinton counties look more like tomorrows America, Frey said.

Those who live in cities, especially among younger cohorts, are more likely to have earned a bachelors degree, too. Couple diversity with high levels of education, experts say, and it makes for a much more liberal electorate.

Clintons campaign spent heavily to turn out voters in these urban cores, especially in places like Miami, Charlotte, Philadelphia and Las Vegas, according to a senior campaign strategist, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal machinations.

But some both Democrats and Republicans believe Clintons focus on the younger, more diverse electorate came at the expense of its appeal to a broad swath of older white voters who still make up the largest voting bloc within the electorate.

The problem for Democrats is that this plumping up of their urban margins has accompanied or perhaps caused them to take such a radical posture on cultural issues that they no longer can sustain their historical margins in rural and industrial counties, said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist who keeps close tabs on party performance in urban areas.

Whats more, turning out higher percentages of urban voters was insufficient to swing many states. By Todds calculations, only five of the nations 50 largest cities delivered margins for Clinton large enough to swing entire states her way: Denver, Portland, Ore., Las Vegas, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., which has three electoral votes.

Americas metro areas are growing geographically as well, thanks in large part to fast-rising housing prices. The search for affordable housing now takes people to farther-out suburbs than ever before: The San Francisco Bay Area now extends to Sacramento, where home prices have almost doubled in the last five years. Milwaukee and its southern suburbs are attracting thousands of new residents who once lived in Chicago. The rural hamlets of eastern Pennsylvania are now booming with refugees from expensive and densely packed New York and Philadelphia.

Those who move to those increasingly far-flung exurbs are still voting as if they live much closer to the urban cores.

As the economy picks up, there may be more movement to the suburbs and rural areas. The people moving to the suburbs are more likely to be Democrats, Frey said.

But the pace of change is glacial, in political terms, and likely insufficient to reverse Republican success in exurban and rural areas. Left alone, it would be years before the geographic expansion of major metropolitan areas translates into political victories for Democrats. What has happened in California, where Democrats control a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature, will only gradually happen in places like Atlanta, or Dallas, or Miami, as those liberal urban enclaves expand.

Demography moves slowly, Muro said, with a shrug.

Owen Eagan, Sara Sirota and Chase Masters contributed research.

Read this article:
Democrats in an urban box - The Hill

The Trump-Russia investigations may be grabbing most of the headlines and sucking much of the air out of Washington these days, but Democrats continue to try and push President Trump and his administration to end the myriad conflicts of interest that are entangling the president and his family.

While the attorneys general for the District of Columbia and Marylandannounced they're suing Trump for making profit off foreign governments, Democrats are seemingly powerless in their attempts to keep the president in check: They no longer have the keys to the White House, and they don't yield any gavels on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Paul Ryan is refusing to comply with Democrats' requests to investigate Trump and his family, and theWhite House has told federal agencies not to respond to the letters flying from Capitol Hill signed only by Dems which broughta scathing rebuke from even the Republican Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Chuck Grassley.

But Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform think they may have found a way around the majority's blockade: They're employing a little known law from 1928 that says if a mere seven members of the panel send a document request to an executive branch agency, the White House must comply with the request.

The so-called seven member rule "is not a regulation or guideline, but a statute that was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President," the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, and his Democratic colleagues wrote in a letter to acting General Services Administration chief Tim Horne.

"Although you may wish to limit oversight from Democratic Members of Congress through a misguided policy that responds only to Republican Chairmen, compliance with federal law is not an optional exercise that may be overridden by a new Trump Administration policy," the letter continues.

For now, Democrats on the panel are only using the provision to request documents on the federal government's lease for the Trump International Hotel, which sits mere blocks from the White House andhas become the place to be for lobbyists, Trump associates and foreign officials alike in Trump's Washington. Democrats say they've been sitting on the seven member rule, but the silence from the White House has forced their hands.

"It's very rare" that the rule gets used, but "within our committee, within Oversight, it's very widely known," Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch tells Rolling Stone."We've threatened to resort to that in the past. We've never had to go there before, but in this case we did."

The Democrats have chosen to focus on the hotel in part because Trump still owns it a clear violation of his lease with the federal government, which owns the building though he denies he's involved in its daily operations. He's said he'd donate any money he makes from foreign entities who stay there seemingly his way of addressing potential constitutional violations though the hotel hasinformed Congress it has no intention of doing that.

The hotel has become "the symbol of complete disregard for the lines of ethics, the boundaries of ethics, the conflicts of interest" in the Trump administration, says Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes. "I think it's something that resonates in people's minds, and frankly every day you see people trying to curry favor with the administration booking receptions and other kinds of things at the hotel."

Unlike every other modern president, Trump has refused calls to put his assets in a blind trust. His son, Eric, has also said he plans tokeep giving his father profit reports on the family's sprawling global business enterprise, which Democrats say is the very definition of a conflict of interest for a sitting president whose every tweet, proposed policy and speech can move global markets.

"It's breathtaking," Sarbanes says. The administration passes "an ethical policy that has so many waivers in place that it swallows it up and completely negates it. They say they're going to observe certain lines but in the next breath almost, they demonstrate that they have no concept of what those lines and boundaries are."

Republicans say Democratic complaints are sour grapes that they haven't gotten over Hillary Clinton's stunning loss to a rookie politician known for being a reality TV star and real estate magnate who fathered birtherism and ran a campaign steeped in racism, sexism and xenophobia. They also accuse Dems of highlighting things like the hotel lease because they're merely gearing up for the next election that's why many in the GOP support the White House effort to keep Democrats from conducting oversight on their own.

"Do I think that the White house is correct that 540 House and Senate members and delegates should all get anything their hearts desire? No," Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who chaired the Oversight Committee when President Obama was in office, tells Rolling Stone. "It's a question of the rules. But during the time when the Democrats were in the majority, they never considered a rule that gave the minority any standing, and President Obama never recognized that standing."

But Democrats say their effort to peer inside the Trump business operations isn't about electioneering, and is rather about basic ethics. They say this White House from its billionaire cabinet members to the lobbyists who are now high up in agencies "overseeing" sectors of the economy they used profit from has shown a stunning disregard for transparency and ethics.

"It's cynical and it's wrong, and importantly it's part of a broader pattern of the darkness with which this administration is progressing toward: removing access to visitor logs, threaten[ing] to cut off daily briefings, failure to keep with modern American history [by releasing his] tax returns," says Democratic Rep. Dennis Heck. "He's headed towards increasing darkness. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and unfortunately he is slowly but surely shutting out the sunlight."

Sign up for our newsletter to receive breaking news directly in your inbox.

See original here:
Democrats Take on Trump's Conflicts of Interest - RollingStone.com

California Republicans are wrong to try to recall Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) from office for casting a vote they dont like, and they have compounded the offense by doing it in a dishonest way. Voters in this mostly Orange and Los Angeles County district are being told that signing a recall petition will stop the car tax that they say Newman voted for which it wont.

And besides, thats not what the Newman recall is really about, anyway. The states GOP sees a chance to strip the Democrats of their supermajority in the Senate by forcing this one legislator into a special recall election where turnout might swing more conservative. The so-called car tax (which is really a desperately needed plan to invest $52 billion in Californias aging transportation infrastructure) is just a fig leaf for political power play.

But Democratic lawmakers have responded to this nakedly political act with, were sorry to say, an even more nakedly self-serving political act. They are trying to ram through last-minute changes to the states long-standing recall process that would slow if not stop this one particular recall election. The new provisions include an extension of the time voters have to rescind a signature from a recall petition and a requirement that county registrars verify every single individual signature rather than use the standard sample method of verification, among other changes that collectively would cause the process to drag on for months.

Because the rule changes are in whats known as a budget trailer bill, they will be voted on Thursday without a full public hearing process and, if passed, will go into effect immediately. The new rules would be retroactive, meaning that the Newman recall would have to adjust mid-course.

Democrats say the hastily written rules are justified because of what they say is a new tactic of using recall elections to undo legitimate elections, and because of the unprecedented level of deceit in this campaign. But neither misleading campaigns nor recall attempts are new to California politics. Just two years ago, Sens. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) and Bill Monning (D-Carmel) were the subject of recall attempt by people furious about the passage of SB 277, a law making it more difficult for children to avoid having public school vaccinations. Over the years, dozens of recalls have been launched against legislators and governors from both parties. The difference is that most of those recalls did not have the money or momentum to qualify for the ballot, and the one against Newman just might.

Were not saying theres no merit to the proposed changes. Perhaps it makes sense to give voters a longer time to retract a signature. Maybe a 3% sampling of signatures on a petition isnt sufficient. But there are many questions that need to be answered before a wholesale rewrite of the election law is approved, and they wont be answered without hearings and public testimony from elections experts, county registrars and voters. This bill is being slipped into law too quickly.

And whats most irksome is that the new law, if approved, would be applied retroactively to the Newman recall. Its simply not fair to change the rules in the middle of the process. Recall proponents in this case followed the legal process that has been in place for years and that few had suggested were problematic until now. If the proponents broke the law by lying about the content of the recall petition and its not clear they did then theres a legal remedy. In fact, Newman's supporters on Wednesday filed a complaint with state and local authorities asking for an investigation into the recall tactics.

For the record, it seems hasty and irresponsible to recall a lawmaker like Newman over a single vote. If an elected official is proven corrupt or incompetent or makes a practice of casting votes at odds with the will of his or her constituents, then, yes, a recall shouldnt be out of the question.

Newman cast a hard vote on the transportation funding package, and it was the right choice. Both Republicans and Democrats have made wrong ones in response.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

View post:
The Democrats' cynical move to protect one of their own - Los Angeles Times

Camille Paglia is one America's smartest and most fearless writers. Like Elvis, she's the kind of superstar who really needs no introductionthough it is worth pointing out that Pantheon has just published a collection of her essays on sex, gender, and feminism, titled Free Women, Free Men. It's fantastic and if you love her work, it's must-reading. (And there's another collection due out in the Fall of 2018, which is more good news.)

Last week I sat down with Paglia over email to talk about Donald Trump, Islamist terrorism, and the transgender crusade. Here's a transcript of our conversation:

JVL: Donald Trump has recently feuded with Jim Comey, Bob Mueller, Sadiq Kahn, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, NATOwe'll stop the list there. You were one of a very small number of people who understood Trump's populist appeal early on. Looking at his presidency so far, do think he's continuing to deliver on that appeal? What is he doing right? What is he doing wrong?

Camille Paglia: Some background is necessary. First of all, I must make my political affiliations crystal clear. I am a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and for Jill Stein in the general election. Since last Fall, I've had my eye on Kamala Harris, the new senator from California, and I hope to vote for her in the next presidential primary.

Like many others, I initially did not take Donald Trump's candidacy seriously. I dismissed him as a "carnival barker" in my Salon column and assumed his entire political operation was a publicity stunt that he would soon tire of. However, Trump steadily gained momentum because of the startling incompetence and mediocrity of his GOP opponents. What seems forgotten is that everyone, including the Hillary Clinton campaign, thought that Marco Rubio would be the Republican nominee. The moment was ideal for a Latino candidate with national appeal who could challenge the Democratic hold on Florida.

Thus Rubio's primary-run flame-out was a spectacular embarrassment. Under TV's unsparing camera eye, he looked like a shallow, dithery adolescent, utterly unprepared to be commander-in-chief in an era of terrorism. Trump's frankly arrogant self-confidence spooked and crushed Rubioit was a total fiasco. Ben Carson, meanwhile, with his professorial deep-think and spiritualistic eye-closing, often seemed to be beaming himself to another galaxy. With every debate, Ted Cruz, despite his avid national following, accumulated more and more detractors, repelled by his brittle self-dramatizations and lugubrious megalomania.

There were two genial, moderate Mid-Western governors who could have wrested the nomination from Trump and performed strongly versus Hillary in the generalOhio's John Kasich and Wisconsin's Scott Walker. But they blew it because of their personal limitations: On television, Kasich came across as a clumsy, lumbering blowhard while Walker shrank into a nervous, timid mouse with a frozen Pee-wee Herman smile.

The point here is that Donald Trump won the nomination fair and square against a host of serious, experienced opponents who simply failed to connect with a majority of GOP primary voters. However, there were too many unknowns about Trump, who had never held elective office and whose randy history in the shadowy demimonde of casinos and beauty pageants laid him open to a cascade of feverish accusations and innuendos from the ever-churning gnomes of the cash-propelled Clinton propaganda machine. In actuality, the sexism allegations about Trump were relatively few and minor, compared to the long list of lurid claims about the predatory Bill Clinton.

My position continues to be that Hillary, with her supercilious, Marie Antoinette-style entitlement, was a disastrously wrong candidate for 2016 and that she secured the nomination only through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee, assisted by a corrupt national media who, for over a year, imposed a virtual blackout on potential primary rivals. Bernie Sanders had the populist passion, economic message, government record, and personal warmth to counter Trump. It was Sanders, for example, who addressed the crisis of crippling student debt, an issue that other candidates (including Hillary) then took up. Despite his history of embarrassing gaffes, the affable, plain-spoken Joe Biden, in my view, could also have defeated Trump, but he was blocked from running at literally the last moment by President Barack Obama, for reasons that the major media refused to explore.

After Trump's victory (for which there were abundant signs in the preceding months), both the Democratic party and the big-city media urgently needed to do a scathingly honest self-analysis, because the election results plainly demonstrated that Trump was speaking to vital concerns (jobs, immigration, and terrorism among them) for which the Democrats had few concrete solutions. Indeed, throughout the campaign, too many leading Democratic politicians were preoccupied with domestic issues and acted strangely uninterested in international affairs. Among the electorate, the most fervid Hillary acolytes (especially young and middle-aged women and assorted show biz celebs) seemed obtusely indifferent to her tepid performance as Secretary of State, during which she doggedly piled up air miles while accomplishing virtually nothing except the destabilization of North Africa.

Had Hillary won, everyone would have expected disappointed Trump voters to show a modicum of respect for the electoral results as well as for the historic ceremony of the inauguration, during which former combatants momentarily unite to pay homage to the peaceful transition of power in our democracy. But that was not the reaction of a vast cadre of Democrats shocked by Trump's win. In an abject failure of leadership that may be one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the modern Democratic party, Chuck Schumer, who had risen to become the Senate Democratic leader after the retirement of Harry Reid, asserted absolutely no moral authority as the party spun out of control in a nationwide orgy of rage and spite. Nor were there statesmanlike words of caution and restraint from two seasoned politicians whom I have admired for decades and believe should have run for president long agoSenator Dianne Feinstein and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. How do Democrats imagine they can ever expand their electoral support if they go on and on in this self-destructive way, impugning half the nation as vile racists and homophobes?

All of which brings us to the issue of Trump's performance to date. The initial conundrum was: could he shift from being the slashing, caustic ex-reality show star of the campaign to a more measured, presidential persona? Perhaps to the dismay of his diehard critics, Trump did indeed make that transition at the Capitol on inauguration morning, when he appeared grave and focused, palpably conveying a sense of the awesome burdens of the highest office. As for his particular actions as president, I am no fan of executive orders, which usurp congressional prerogatives and which I was already denouncing when Obama was constantly signing them (with very little protest, one might add, from the mainstream media).

Trump's "travel ban" executive order in late January was obviously bungledissued way too fast and with woefully insufficient research (pertaining, for example, to green-card holders, who should have been exempted from the start). The administration bears full responsibility for fanning the flames of an already aroused "Resistance." However, I fail to see the "chaos" in the White House that the mainstream media (as well as conservative Never Trumpers) keep harping onor rather, I see no more chaos than was abundantly present during the first six months of both the Clinton and Obama administrations. Trump seems to be methodically trying to fulfill his campaign promises, notably regarding the economy and deregulationthe approaches to which will always be contested in our two-party system. His progress has thus far been in stops and starts, partly because of the passivity, and sometimes petulance, of the mundane GOP leadership.

There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of "compassion" (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It's no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge "barnyard language" out of English.

Last week, that conceptual gap was on prominent display, as the media, consumed with their preposterous Russian fantasies, were fixated on former FBI director James Comey's maudlin testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. (Comey is an effete charlatan who should have been fired within 48 hours of either Hillary or Trump taking office.) Meanwhile, Trump was going about his business. The following morning, he made remarks at the Department of Transportation about "regulatory relief," excerpts of which I happened to hear on my car radio that afternoon. His words about iron, aluminum, and steel seemed to cut like a knife through the airwaves. I later found the entire text on the White House website. Some key passages:

We are here today to focus on solving one of the biggest obstacles to creating this new and desperately needed infrastructure, and that is the painfully slow, costly, and time-consuming process of getting permits and approvals to build. And I also knew that from the private sector. It is a long, slow, unnecessarily burdensome process. My administration is committed to ending these terrible delays once and for all. The excruciating wait time for permitting has inflicted enormous financial pain to cities and states all throughout our nation and has blocked many important projects from ever getting off the ground

For too long, America has poured trillions and trillions of dollars into rebuilding foreign countries while allowing our own countrythe country that we loveand its infrastructure to fall into a state of total disrepair. We have structurally deficient bridges, clogged roads, crumbling dams and locks. Our rivers are in trouble. Our railways are aging. And chronic traffic that slows commerce and diminishes our citizens' quality of life. Other than that, we're doing very well. Instead of rebuilding our country, Washington has spent decades building a dense thicket of rules, regulations and red tape. It took only four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge and five years to build the Hoover Dam and less than one year to build the Empire State Building. People don't believe that. It took less than one year. But today, it can take 10 years and far more than that just to get the approvals and permits needed to build a major infrastructure project.

These charts beside me are actually a simplified version of our highway permitting process. It includes 16 different approvals involving 10 different federal agencies being governed by 26 different statutes. As one exampleand this happened just 30 minutes agoI was sitting with a great group of people responsible for their state's economic development and roadways. All of you are in the room now. And one gentleman from Maryland was talking about an 18-mile road. And he brought with him some of the approvals that they've gotten and paid for. They spent $29 million for an environmental report, weighing 70 pounds and costing $24,000 per page

I was not elected to continue a failed system. I was elected to change it. All of us in government service were elected to solve the problems that have plagued our nation. We are here to think big, to act boldly, and to rise above the petty partisan squabbling of Washington D.C. We are here to take action. It's time to start building in our country, with American workers and with American iron and aluminum and steel. It's time to put up soaring new infrastructure that inspires pride in our people and our towns.

No longer can we allow these rules and regulations to tie down our economy, chain up our prosperity, and sap our great American spirit. That is why we will lift these restrictions and unleash the full potential of the United States of America. We will get rid of the redundancy and duplication that wastes your time and your money. Our goal is to give you one point of contact to deliver one decisionyes or nofor the entire federal government, and to deliver that decision quickly, whether it's a road, whether it's a highway, a bridge, a dam.

To do this, we are setting up a new council to help project managers navigate the bureaucratic maze. This council will also improve transparency by creating a new online dashboard allowing everyone to easily track major projects through every stage of the approval process. This council will make sure that every federal agency that is consistently delaying projects by missing deadlines will face tough, new penalties

Together, we will build projects to inspire our youth, employ our workers, and create true prosperity for our people. We will pour new concrete, lay new brick, and watch new sparks light our factories as we forge metal from the furnaces of our Rust Belt and our beloved heartlandwhich has been forgotten. It's not forgotten anymore.

We will put new American steel into the spine of our country. American workers will construct gleaming new lanes of commerce across our landscape. They will build these monuments from coast to coast, and from city to city. And with these new roads, bridges, airports and seaports, we will embark on a wonderful new journey into a bright and glorious future. We will build again. We will grow again. We will thrive again. And we will make America great again.

Of course this rousing speech (with its can-do World War Two spirit) got scant coverage in the mainstream media. Drunk with words, spin, and snark, middle-class journalists can't be bothered to notice the complex physical constructions that make modern civilization possible. The laborers who build and maintain these marvels are recognized only if they can be shoehorned into victim status. But if they dare to think for themselves and vote differently from their liberal overlords, they are branded as rubes and pariahs.

In summary: to have any hope of retaking the White House, Democrats must get off their high horse, lose the rabid rhetoric, and reorient themselves toward practical reality and the free country they are damned lucky to live in.

JVL: One of the other big news stories for the last few weeks has been terrorism in Great Britain. Everyone goes to great pains to say that this isn't "Islamic" terrorism, but rather "Islamist" ("Islam-ish?") terrorism. Does nomenclature matter here? Does the fact that Western liberalism gets so wrapped up in knots over how to talk about its antagonists mean anything?

CP: You've nailed it about Western liberalism's obsession with language, to the exclusion of wide-ranging study of world history or systematic observation of present social conditions. Liberalism of the 1950s and '60s exalted civil liberties, individualism, and dissident thought and speech. "Question authority" was our generational rubric when I was in college. But today's liberalism has become grotesquely mechanistic and authoritarian: It's all about reducing individuals to a group identity, defining that group in permanent victim terms, and denying others their democratic right to challenge that group and its ideology. Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas. It is repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.

The reluctance or inability of Western liberals to candidly confront jihadism has been catastrophically counterproductive insofar as it has inspired an ongoing upsurge in right-wing politics in Europe and the United States. Citizens have an absolute right to demand basic security from their government. The contortions to which so many liberals resort to avoid connecting bombings, massacres, persecutions, and cultural vandalism to Islamic jihadism is remarkable, given their usual animosity to religion, above all Christianity. Some commentators have suggested a link to racial preconceptions: that is, Islam remains beyond criticism because it is largely a religion of non-whites whose two holy cities occupy territory once oppressed by Western imperialism.

For a quarter century, I have been calling for comparative religion to be made the core curriculum of higher education. (I am speaking as an atheist.) Knowledge of the great world religionsHinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, Islamis the true multiculturalism. Everyone should have a general familiarity with the beliefs, texts, rituals, art, and shrines of all the major religions. Only via a direct encounter with the Qu'ran and Hadith, for example, can anyone know what they say about jihad and how those strikingly numerous passages have been interpreted in different ways over time.

Right now, too many secular Western liberals treat Islam with paternalistic condescensionwaving at it vaguely from a benevolent distance but making no effort to engage with its intricate mixed messages, which can inspire toward good or spur acts of devastating impact on the international stage.

JVL: I keep waiting for the showdown between feminism and transgenderism, but it always keeps slipping beneath the horizon. I've been looking at how the La Leche Leaguewhich stood at the crossroads of feminism once upon a timehas in the last couple years bowed completely to the transgender project. Their central text is (for now) The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, but they've officially changed their stance to include men and fathers who breastfeed. The actual wording of their policy is wonderful: "It is now recognized that some men are able to breastfeed." Left unsaid is the corollary that some women are biologically unable to breastfeed. Though this would go against the League's founding principles, one supposes. What does one make of all of this?

CP: Feminists have clashed with transgender activists much more publicly in the United Kingdom than here. For example, two years ago there was an acrimonious organized campaign, including a petition with 3,000 claimed signatures, to cancel a lecture by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University because of her "offensive" views of transgenderism. Greer, a literary scholar who was one of the great pioneers of second-wave feminism, has always denied that men who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery are actually "women." Her Cardiff lecture (on "Women and Power" in the twentieth century) eventually went forward, under heavy security.

And in 2014, Gender Hurts, a book by radical Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, created a heated controversy in the United Kingdom. Jeffreys identifies transsexualism with misogyny and describes it as a form of "mutilation." She and her feminist allies encountered prolonged difficulties in securing a London speaking venue because of threats and agitation by transgender activists. Finally, Conway Hall was made available: Jeffrey's forceful, detailed lecture there in July of last year is fully available on YouTube. In it she argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories "trans-man" and "trans-woman" are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a "woman" or a "man" simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.

As for the La Leche League, they are hardly prepared to take up the cudgels in the bruising culture wars. Awash with the milk of human kindness, they are probably stuck in nurturance mode. Naturally, they snap to attention at the sound of squalling babies, no matter what their age. It's up to literature professors and writers to defend the integrity of English, which like all languages changes slowly and organically over time. But with so many humanities departments swallowed up in the poststructuralist tar pit, the glorious medium of English may have to fight the gender commissars on its own.

Excerpt from:
Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, Transgenderism, and Islamist Terror - The Weekly Standard