Delaware Dem

Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor

These signs are popping up all over President Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia. I spent some time in airports terminals yesterday, so I got to see most of President Carter’s news conference concerning his cancer diagnosis. Saying that his life was in God’s hands and that he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” Mr. Carter added, “I’m ready for anything. And I’m looking forward to the adventure.” I can only hope I’d look at things this way in his situation. Then again, it helps that he is 90, and it helps that he has completely and thoroughly used his life in the service of others. If I were President Carter, I would have no fear of death, and I would look forward to giving God a good talking to.

Typically, presidential maladies are for hiding. And among all of us generally, we don’t like to talk about the fact that we are ill. I myself did not like saying I had a heart condition last year, because you can feel, as soon as the words escape your mouth, that you are then diminished in the eyes of everyone, that you are somehow weaker, less than.

I would like to thank President Carter for being so open and honest about his illness, with such ease and courage. May he instill it in all of us. For many years to come.

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Thursday Open Thread [8.20.15]

At this very moment, I am flying above your heads returning from a business trip to the Midwest. So have at it.

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Full Circle

The reason for the 14th Amendment in the first place was due to the racism of those wanted to disenfranchise African Americans. And it was the Republicans of their day that fought for this amendment, that fought for the citizenship of those who did not look like your white bread framer of the past. And now we have come full circle, with Republicans wanting to end birthright citizenship because don’t want people who don’t look, or act, or speak like them to be citizens.

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Wednesday Open Thread [8.19.15]

Jonathan Chait: “It is tempting to treat the lack of specifics in the Republican health-care plans as a problem of details to be filled it. But it is not a side problem. It is the entire problem. They will not finance real insurance for the people who have gotten it under Obamacare, nor will they face up to the actual costs they’re willing to impose on people. The party is doctrinally opposed to every available method to make insurance available to people who can’t afford it. They have spent six years promising to come up with an alternative plan, and they haven’t done it, because they can’t.”

Indeed. And it is because they do not believe healthcare is a right. They believe it is a privilege for those who can afford it. If you are poor and sick, then you die. If you are rich and sick, then you don’t. That is the Republican healthcare plan.

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Tuesday Open Thread [8.18.15]

Eric Jaffe at CityLab reports on a good thing that our own Tom Carper has proposed. Indeed, I am personally shocked, and I am sure Jason is currently being resuscitated at Christiana.

The federal gas tax that pays for America’s highways hasn’t been raised in decades, but that doesn’t stop some determined lawmakers from trying. The latest effort comes via Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, who has introduced a plan to raise the tax four cents a year for four years then index it to inflation so it remains effective over time. The move would ultimately bring the fuel tax to 34 cents a gallon—nearly double the existing rate of 18.4 cents.

That might seem like a big bump, but even a gas tax twice as high the current one would be incredibly low by global standards. A U.S. Department of Energy review of fuel taxes among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in 2011 placed the U.S. just about at the bottom of the pack. Kyle Pomerleau of the Tax Foundation recently updated these figures to reflect 2013 tax rates via OECD data—and found very little change.

The U.S. rate of 53 cents a gallon reflects the federal gas tax as well as the average state tax. Adding Carper’s 16 cents wouldn’t budge the U.S. position way back of the pack—nor would doubling the entire 53 cent average. As the numbers stand, lawmakers would have to raise the average gas tax at least eight-fold for Americans to pay the steepest rate in the world.

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Governor Markell’s Inexplicable Veto [Updated with the Governor’s Explanation]

From the bill in question’s sponsor, Representative Kim Williams:

I found out today that Governor Markell is vetoing a bill that I sponsored, House Bill 130, Unlawful Sexual Contact. It passed the House and Senate unanimously. The Criminal Justice Council voted in support of this bill and whose members are Delaware judges, AG Denn, and other respected folks. I never heard a word from the Governor’s office until the day he decides to veto the bill that his office had an issue with it. I filed this bill early May. The only group that I heard a peep from was the Medical Society and that was after it was released from the House Judiciary Committee. I spoke to them briefly and never heard another word from them. Currently, if a healthcare worker (person of trust) has sex with a patient it is a misdemeanor, this bill would make it a felony. If a prison guard has consensual sex with an imate it is a felony but a healthcare worker who is treating a patient who has been sexually abused and the healthcare worker gains the individual’s trust and has sexual relations it is not a felony. This is unbelievable to me.

I look forward to Governor Markell’s explanation, and I do not envy his spin doctors. For the General Assembly, override.

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No Joe. Not That.

Donors are not especially anxious about Joe Biden getting into the race. If he did declare this late in the game, he would be in at least a $45 million dollar fundraising deficit against Clinton, with no real hope to catch up since virtually every major fundraiser in the party — including many who were once Biden people — are now on Clinton’s team.

For this reason, as I have said many times here, I am not a fan of Joe Biden getting into the presidential race, for I believe it will tarnish his legacy. Instead, I viewed him as a Plan B that could step in should Clinton die or drop out.

But it seems that Joe Biden, while on vacation down in South Carolina, was actively considering a campaign, if not planning for it. And one of the trial balloons that was floated as a result, through the fingers of one Carl Bernstein, was this notion of a one term Presidency that would finally bring this country together.

“[O]ne thing that I keep hearing about Biden is that if he were to declare and say, because age is such a problem for him if he does, I want to be a one-term president. I want to serve for four years, unite Washington. I’ve dealt with the Republicans in Congress all my public life,” Bernstein told CNN’s “New Day.”

“I think there’s a conversation going on to that effect among his aides and friends,” he said. “It could light fire to the current political environment.

Fuck. No.

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Monday Open Thread [8.17.15]

Molly Ball asks “What on earth do Republican voters want?”

“The candidates, at this stage, are as clueless as the pundits, and the pundits have no idea. They certainly never foresaw Donald Trump, this election season’s flesh-colored gap in the space-time continuum. Trump has inspired horrified bouts of introspection within the GOP, as shocked party stalwarts try to figure out where the tycoon’s momentum is coming from—and how it can be stopped.”

I think they just want to scream.

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