SAY WHAT?

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue attend a bill signing ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House on March 27, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

Two Democratic members of Congress on Thursday accused the Department of Labor of quietly "twisting the law" to limit the scope of already inadequate paid sick leave provisions contained in a coronavirus stimulus package that President Donald Trump signed into law last month.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Among politicians all across the United States and even the world, few have even come close to being the force that freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has managed to become in the year that she has held office. Other than Bernie Sanders, I don’t think anyone has restored my faith in the electorate and in the future quite like AOC has. 

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--On a Tuesday just before Halloween in 2018, a group of federal prosecutors and agents from Texas arrived in Washington. For almost two years, they’d been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice. 

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Should Trump lose the 2020 election, someone is going to die. The offices of a left-wing organization will be bombed. A mosque will get shot up. Someone’s skull will crack open in street battles. Possibly all three. While such a macabre prediction might strike readers as alarmist, it’s an outcome so probable it approaches absolute certainty.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--When I last saw Rudy Giuliani for lunch, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington four weeks ago, his most pressing concern was that he had been locked out of his Instagram account. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and current personal attorney to President Donald Trump, had a young woman named Audra, who told me she had won the “hottiesfortrump” Reddit channel’s “Miss Deplorable” contest three years in a row, there to assist him. As Giuliani and I spoke, roughly a dozen tourists asked him to pose for photos and congratulated him on the “work” he was doing for the country.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Go ahead and take a look at the chart above. What does it tell you? It tells me I’m looking at a society having the economic equivalent of a heart attack. From which there might well be no recovery. Let me explain.

The chart above is the “labour share of GDP.” What? It simply means how much of the economy goes to people who..work for a living. Who earns incomes from wages and salaries and tips and so forth.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--A critical factor accelerating the spread of coronavirus in the United States is our lack of universal health care.

As we debate the costs of providing medical treatment for all, and as the virus tears through the fabric of our society, it’s become clear that many of the factors accelerating the spread of illness and death associated with this new plague are associated with the for-profit nature of our health care system.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Former Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander has been charged with obstructing an investigation into him accepting cash, female escort services, hotel rooms and expensive meals from a businessman during trips to Las Vegas and Palm Springs, federal officials announced Monday.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING-- Primaries can be long drawn-out affairs. The Obama-Clinton struggle of spring-summer 2008 went down to the wire, still being contested in June. As I write Tuesday evening, the delegate count for Super Tuesday is still not known, and the actual count for California could take a long time to nail down.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING --While Donald Trump’s alleged wrongdoing in the Ukraine Affair has been the focus of impeachment proceedings, there are bigger problems afflicting the president hiding in plain sight that he may be more concerned over. Trump is widely known to hold that the president can’t be prosecuted while in office and that the Constitution places him above the law, something that Congress and most constitutional scholars scoff at.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--If one thing drives me to write, especially these posts, it is the urgent need for us to start understanding power. Power is the force that shapes almost everything about our lives and our deaths. There is no more important issue. Understanding power and overcoming it through that understanding is the only path to liberation we can take as individuals, as societies, and as a species. 

Which is why it should be simply astonishing that no one in the media, supposedly a free marketplace of ideas, ever directly addresses matters of power – beyond the shadow play of party politics and celebrity scandals.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--It’s true.

If it wasn’t, he wouldn’t.

Now, I know what half of you (or 53.9% of you, to be precise) are saying, “Not the president I deserve!”

Au contrair mon frère!

Apologies for the French, but I write this as I am flying over France on my way from London to Barcelona, after a quick trip to Rome.

Three European cities in three different countries in six days on a business trip that often turned into something quite unique.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Right off the bat, I must disclose my perspective: I am a lifelong liberal Democrat who was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Elizabeth Warren’s. I am very concerned about income inequality and the influence of money in politics. I would really like to see a woman lead the Democratic ticket, and I think we need a person of color either at the top of the ticket or as the running mate. Although I favor gun control, it is far from the top issue I care about.

Based on the above, you can see that I am no Bloomberg fanboy. He is not a dedicated partisan, as I am. His commitment to economic equality is not at the level of Warren or Sanders. He is an older, white male. He is trying to buy the nomination. The issue he appears to be most passionate about is gun control.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Why some people still believe that the president of the United States of White Nationalism is still a salvageable piece of roadkill is beyond me. But some reporter found it in himself to ask the president of people who hate seasoning if he’d learned anything from his impeachment acquittal, and the first used colostomy bag to cheat his way into office offered this sound bite:

“The Democrats are crooked,” he said. “They got a lot of crooked things going. That they’re vicious. That they shouldn’t have brought impeachment,” CNN reports.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--One of the clearest ways to see America’s collapse is through the lens of its eerie mirror image: the Soviet Union.

 The similarities, by now — ideology, a collapsed middle, masses living in shortages of basic goods, elites too arrogant and clueless to understand, much less care — should be striking to any thoughtful person. And those resonances lead me to ask a tiny question: is Bernie America’s Gorbachev?

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--I don’t know a lot about white history.

I also don’t know much about green bean casserole, Creedence Clearwater Revival or shampoo-and-conditioner-in-one. I am, however, familiar with seasoned salt, the nuances of Blue Magic vs. Dax vs. Pink Oil Lotion, and the musical stylings of Frankie Beverly and Maze.

And, unlike many of my educated white counterparts, I know a lot about American history.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--Donald Trump once made fun of a journalist for having a “t****y dad,” according to a new book co-authored by two Daily Beast journalists.

Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng’s new book, Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump’s Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington, bills itself as an “eyewitness account” of how the Trump administration brought an “unprecedented awfulness” to Washington in the form of “charlatans, conspiracy theorists, ideologues, and run-of-the-mill con artists” who were given powerful political jobs.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--If you’re like me, you spent the weekend depressed after reading Nate Cohn’s column in The New York Times or David Wasserman’s post on the NBC website.

In each, the two data science-focused reporters looked at the Presidential election polling. Rather than simply looking at the national results, they considered the state by state results and analyzed what these results mean for the election.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--US President Donald Trump looks back as a question from the press is shouted after a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 22, 2020. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

While attending the World Economic Forum's summit of global elites in the Swiss mountaintop retreat of Davos on Wednesday, President Donald Trump openly admitted he would—if reelected in 2020—consider cutting back funding for key social programs including Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--While scratching around for some Christmas cheer through the oft disgraced but equally celebrated ‘Poet Laureate of LA Low Life’, Charles Bukowksi, I wandered upon an old favourite.

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING--There’s an old joke about how Richard Nixon was the kind of politician who’d cut down an endangered giant redwood, then climb on the stump and make a speech about conservation.

Fast forward to 2020 and Donald Trump, who with every breath plunges Nixonian hypocrisy to heretofore unimagined depths: “I want clean air,” he declared the other day. “I want clean water. I want the cleanest air, want the cleanest water. The environment is very important to me."