Month: August 2016

Presidential: some of his best friends are his Mexican servants

by digby

This is some of the rhetoric the press corps is saying showed Donald Trump to be presidential today, hitting a home run with his photo-op trip to Mexico City.

I happen to have a tremendous feeling for Mexican Americans, not only in terms of friendships but in terms of the tremendous numbers I employ in the United States. They are amazing people. Amazing people. I have many friends, so many friends and so many friends coming to Mexico,and in Mexico,  I am proud to say how many people I employ. And the United States, first, second and third generation Mexicans are beyond reproach. Spectacular, spectacular hard working people.

First of all he’s being very clear there that he thinks Mexican Americans are ok but their relatives in Mexico aren’t so “spectacular.” He said this to the president of Mexico.


Second of all, who talks like that? All the Mexicans he “employs?”  What the hell? Are they his servants?   Is it really necessary to go to Mexico and talk about how many Mexican friends he has and  vouch for how spectacular they are?

Seriously, this is exactly how white people used to talk back in the 1960s when they were trying not be racist. He might as well have pulled out a taco bowl.

If the US press corps thinks this now qualifies as presidential we’ve gone much further down the rabbit hole that I thought.

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by digby

Last night Trump told his audience in Everett Washington (where the polls show him running 17 points behind) the “country is going to hell, folks.”

Actually, not so much, at least most people don’t think so:

How Americans feel about the state of their lives have improved markedly in the eight years since Barack Obama was elected president, according to Gallup data released Tuesday. 

In 2008, fewer than half of Americans said their life was good enough to be considered “thriving,” according to Gallup. But that’s changed: “The 55.4% who are thriving so far in 2016 is on pace to be the highest recorded in the nine years Gallup and Healthways have tracked it,” according to the report.

Not only that, members of each ethnic or racial group in Gallup’s study feel better about their lives. 

“The percentages of U.S. whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians who are thriving have all increased during the Obama era,” Gallup notes. The percentage of blacks thriving has risen by about 6 points, as has the percentage of whites and Hispanics. Asian thriving has risen by about 10 points since 2008. 

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Let Trump be Trump. Buhleev ‘im.

by digby

They don’t really have a choice, do they?

Michael Tomasky has a good piece in the Daily Beast reminding us of that time when Mitt Romney backed off all of his wingnutty primary policies in the debates and Obama was briefly behind in the polls. He says Romney came up because people never believed the wingnutty stuff in the first place and because most Americans are decent, mainstream people he benefited from showing his true colors, however belatedly. Trump is different because his ugly positions are the real ones and decent people will not believe him if he tries that.

I agree with that. But Tomasky also thinks Trump’s base is going to rebel if he backs off of his draconian immigration stuff even if he just hints at it:

[I]f they give Trump a pass on this stunning a flip-flop on the hard right’s core issue, these people are pathetic. My instinct is that they won’t, or enough of them won’t. None of these people will be Hillary voters, of course, but some may stay home, distraught that their hero caved into the very same dark forces he won their ardor by maligning. Illegal immigration is The Big Issue for the hard right. Has been for a decade. It was the No. 1 issue for Tea Partiers, despite much media misunderstanding about this; Tea Partiers viewed immigrants as a bunch of freeloaders.

If Trump drops deportation in his big speech Wednesday night, it’s hard for me to see how he doesn’t lose huge chunks of that base. Even if he speaks words something like “I’m not dropping deportation” but then proceeds to outline steps that smell like he’s dropping deportation, he’ll lose big portions of the base…

Honestly, I don’t think so. They don’t like him because of policy. They like him because of attitude. They’re cheering all this blather about “helping” African Americans at his rallies and they don’t give a damn about African Americans. They’re all in.

Tomasky correctly points out that all those racist policies from the primaries are hurting him badly with college educated whites (as well as people of color, obviously) which is why he’s attempting to “pivot.” But again, it’s hard to believe those folks will believe it. Trump’s character and personality are not obscure. His completely over exposed on TV and they all saw what he was at the Nuremberg Convention in Cleveland. His fundamental grossness is clear to everyone. That’s what his followers like about him. The question is how many of them there really are and how many people are going to vote on both sides.

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The ugliest American

by digby

I feel so proud today that this person is going to meet the leader of Mexico as a candidate for president of the United States.

That’s just for starters.

And remember, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them.

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Mylan didn’t lower EpiPen Prices — they just appeared to

by Gaius Publius

These days have seen a number of stories about the Mylan EpiPen scandal, the essence of which is captured in the graphic at the top (note, though, that the graphic understates the EpiPen price; it’s now around $640). Heather Bresch, Mylan’s CEO, decided to increase corporate profit by increasing the price of a mature product, EpiPen, a device that delivers life-saving epinephrine to people who suffer life-threatening anaphylactic shock from allergic exposure to, for example, bee stings and peanuts.

In the view of most observers, she did it simply because she could.

There’s no economic reason for the price increases, any of them. Epinephrine (basically adrenalin) is not proprietary. As Dr. Lee Rogers notes in the first link below, “As a hormone, it’s a product of nature and cannot be patented.” And the delivery mechanism (the “pen”) has been around since 1977. All of the R&D is done, and the medicine is cheap. All told, each EpiPen contains just one dollar worth of medicine. (And it seems the original EpiPen was at least partly developed with taxpayer money.)

Yet under Heather Bresch, Mylan has steadily raised the price from about $50, its price when Mylan acquired the 50-year-old product, to more than $600 — because they could. In 2009, the year Bresch became president, the price of the EpiPen was increased 19%, followed by 10% hikes each year from 2010 through 2013. Then:

After successfully pushing for legislation requiring all public schools to carry emergency epinephrine [devices], Mylan jacked up the price by 15 percent every other quarter from the end of 2013 to the second quarter of 2016 [emphasis mine].

And that’s how the game is played.

A shakedown scheme with a sidecar of murder

As I noted here, this is basically a shakedown scheme with a sidecar of murder — “Got a peanut allergy? Pay my new price or the kid dies.” In the meantime, corporate profit went through the roof, as did CEO compensation, as the graphic shows.

Dr. Lee Rogers, a medical doctor and former progressive House candidate, broke the story at DownWithTyranny:

There’s a good follow-up here:

Two side wrinkles and you’re up to date:

First, CEO Bresch may have engaged in insider trading when she sold over 100,000 shares of Mylan stock in advance of the latest price increases. As noted in the second link above, the stock price fell drastically after Dr. Rogers’ piece was published.

Second, Bresch has taken Mylan through a corporate “inversion,” a scheme by which a U.S. company buys a foreign subsidiary, then becomes a foreign corporation, with nothing else changing but its U.S. tax status. LA Times reporter Michael Hiltzik has written a full report on Mylan’s inversion here.

Shamed by the scandal, Heather Bresch pretended to lower EpiPen’s price

Mylan’s price-gouging on its EpiPen business is indeed a scandal, not just on the business pages because of the sudden stock decline, but in the larger press because of the “vulture CEO” angle. Even MSNBC, which tends to keep hands off of Democrats, covered it, and tagged Sen. Joe Manchin in the story. (For more on Manchin and his responsibility for his daughter’s career, do read Dr. Rogers’ well researched story. Manchin’s been involved at almost every stage of it.)

As a result of the horrible press, Mylan responded. It was initially reported that Mylan would lower the price of its EpiPen package by 50% in response to public outrage. For example, from The Hill:

EpiPen maker lowers price after uproar

The maker of EpiPens announced Thursday that it is reducing the price of the device following an uproar in Washington over the cost of the treatment for serious allergic reactions.

Mylan, the company that makes EpiPen, said it will provide a savings card worth up to $300 for people who had been paying the full price out-of-pocket, effectively reducing the cost by 50 percent.

The company is also making it easier to qualify for its patient assistance program, which eliminates out-of-pocket costs for uninsured and underinsured people….

Mylan announced the changed a day after Hillary Clinton denounced the company for hiking the cost of EpiPens 400 percent in recent years. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill had also sounded the alarm, sending letters to the company and to the Food and Drug Administration pressing for answers.

Mylan also pointed to insurance companies in its Thursday statement, noting that higher deductibles have left patients picking up more of the cost of drugs like EpiPens.

I hope you noted that last sentence, in which Mylan says “higher deductibles have left patients picking up more of the cost of drugs like EpiPens.” Remember, each EpiPen contains about $1 worth of medicine. Patients are actually picking up the cost of CEO Bresch’s nearly 700% compensation increase.

But it didn’t take long for that “50% reduction in cost” claim to be more carefully looked at. For example, from USuncut:

EpiPen did not actually lower their price — it’s just another Pharma scam

Mylan Pharmaceuticals is now running a slick PR campaign to try and convince Americans they lowered the price of the EpiPen. Don’t buy it.

On Thursday morning, it was widely reported that Mylan responded to consumer outrage by lowering the price of the drug by 50 percent. While that may be true on the surface, the company didn’t actually change the price at all. The drug company’s rollout of EpiPen price cuts only applies to uninsured and underinsured consumers, who are given a $300 savings card while still having to pay roughly $300 more for a [$640] package of two EpiPens.

The bottom line?

However, the market price of the EpiPen remains the same.

And that’s how the game is played.

This is Heather Manchin Bresch, by the way, in case you see her on the street. I’m sure she’d be glad to explain the numerous price increases at length. Maybe there’s a nuance she can point you to that I’ve missed.

Or maybe not. This really is shakedown scheme, with a sidecar of “or your kid dies.” Is predator too strong a word for this behavior? Or is predation just business as usual in drug company CEO suites and the DC political offices that take their money?

Hate the drug companies? Support California’s Prop 61 in November

If you think predator is not too strong a word for drug company “shakedown or death” profit schemes, consider supporting California’s new Proposition 61, which will end Big Pharma’s hold on unchecked and sky-high prices. Prop 61 is a serious attack on drug pricing, and it will work if it’s passed. It will also appear in a number of other states if it’s passed — hope for us all.

More on Prop 61 here.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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Vote for me, you dupes
by Tom Sullivan

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway is bragging on Trump’s “boldness” for going after votes in black communities:

This entire conversation had to be had. Republican presidential nominees usually aren’t bold enough to go into communities of color and take the case right to them, and compete for all ears and compete for all votes. They’ve been afraid to do that. So, Mr. Trump deserves credit for at least taking the case directly to the people.

Good luck with that. In Pennsylvania and Ohio Trump polls at zero percent among black voters.

Jamelle Bouie is similarly skeptical. It is typical for Republicans to blame their poor showing among black voters on their “plantation mentality”:

The simple answer is that it’s patronizing, ahistorical nonsense that’s not at all unique to Trump. The problem goes beyond the mere optics of his “outreach”—producing dystopian portraits of black life for predominantly white audiences. And it’s not just the extent to which Trump is talking about black Americans rather than to them. The central issue is that Trump portrays black Americans not as able citizens who need to be convinced, but as mindless followers of a failed regime.

[…]

In this narrative, black Americans are mere objects—means to a partisan end. They do not choose or act as political agents. There are no black politicians or activists or leaders of any stripe. Instead, they are acted upon, tools of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. And worse, despite the horrors of Democratic governance, they don’t understand that they’ve been used and “betrayed.” They still vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers. They are dupes.

Yeah, that should do it. That will make them forget Trump’s birtherism, Rep. Joe Wilson’s “you lie,” voter ID, and the implication that white people go to polls to do their civic duty on Election Day while African-Americans go to commit multiple felonies.

by tristero

Ironies of ironies. I literally finished making Mark Bittman’s dead simple granola recipe when I read this:

A cup of Nature Valley Oats ’n Honey Protein Granola has 24 grams of sugar and actually contains more sugar than protein by weight. Nature Valley also has a Peanut Butter ’n Dark Chocolate Protein Granola that has 30 grams of sugar per cup. Bear Naked Honey Almond Granola has 20 grams of sugar per cup. 

By comparison, a slice of chocolate cake with frosting has 26 grams of sugar. A cup of ice cream has 28 grams of sugar. A regular Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut has 10 grams of sugar, according to the Krispy Kreme website.

There are three reasons I made Bittman’s recipe. #1: we recently bought some Trader Joe’s granola that was so sweet that I was literally gagging. A deep-fried Snickers Bar has less sugar and a more nuanced flavor. Second, I got tired of paying $7 for a scoop or so of yuppie granola which, given the ingredients and effort,  should cost – I’m guessing here – about $3 a pound. Finally, I had made a great recipe from Cook’s Illustrated (this is basically the same recipe) but I wanted to see if I spent less effort whether it would make much difference.

I’ll let you know. And meanwhile, next time I’m halving the maple syrup. No, it’s not that healthy, but every once in a while, it’s delicious. And you can freeze it like forever.

And now it’s time to return to your regularly scheduled politics.

Because nobody can stand him

by digby

An excerpt from the forthcoming Washington Post Trump book:

He had never really had close friends. As far back as 1980, he had told TV interviewer Rona Barrett, “My business is so all-encompassing that I don’t really get the pleasure of being with friends that much, frankly.” She pressed him: Whom would you call if you were in trouble and your family wasn’t around? “Maybe I’d call you, Rona,” he said.

Thirty-six years later, when we asked Trump about his friendships, he took a considerable, unusual pause, and then said: “Well, it’s an interesting question. Most of my friendships are business-related because those are the only people I meet. The people I meet, really, I guess I could say socially, when you go out to a charity event or something. . . . I have people that I haven’t spoken to in years, but I think they’re friends.” And he named — off the record — three men he had had business dealings with two or more decades before, men he had seen only rarely in recent years.

“I mean, I think I have a lot of friends,” Trump continued, “but they’re not friends like perhaps other people have friends, where they’re together all the time and they go out to dinner all the time.” But was there anyone he would turn to if he had a personal problem, or some doubt about himself or something he’d done? “More of my family,” Trump said. “I have a lot of good relationships. I have good enemies, too, which is okay. But I think more of my family than others.”

And truthfully they don’t seem truly close to him either. They were raised by their mother and their relationship with him is all about the business and now the campaign. In other words, it’s all about him.

A classic narcissist, according to Dr. Seth Meyers, a clinical psychologist who specializes in relationships and parenting, sees people as objects and their children as mirrors. Such characters, preoccupied with their image, are indeed most pleased when their children more closely reflect the image that they themselves want to project to the world. The Trump kids, Meyers posited to me, were very much raised to reflect their father’s image of himself. “They learned very early on to be loved and to fit in with the image their father prized so much,” he said. “What narcissistic parents usually do is they want compliance, and boy, we have no better example of children who seem to be complying with their father and his agenda than these children.” (Growing up, “what he cared about was respect,” Ivanka recalled in a recent Politico Magazine profile. “You would never hear us yelling at our parents or using a tone that was inappropriate or disrespectful. Even a tone.”)

Trump, after all, is not only their father; he is also their professional mentor and boss. (Ivanka does have her own successful fashion line outside the Trump Organization.) “Mustn’t they have feared they could get fired if they didn’t mirror their father’s exact wishes?” Meyers asked.

I think the narcissist description is self-evident and those people aren’t really interested in others. So it’s not entirely weird that he would have gotten to the age of 70 without any friends. It’s odd, however, for a politician. They usually cannot count how many they have gathered along the way. Just another way in which Trump is unique.

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Throwback error number 763

by digby

More evidence Trump’s stuck in the 1970s:

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by digby

From Sarah Kliff at Vox:

The teen birthrate has plummeted rapidly since the mid-2000s — and a new study suggests better use of birth control is entirely responsible.

There are 42 percent fewer teen births now than just seven years ago. In 2007, 4.2 percent of teenage girls in the United States gave birth. In 2014, the rate was 2.4 percent.

This is an incredibly fast change in a public health trend, and it’s left some researchers puzzled over how it happened so quickly.

But researchers Laura Lindberg, John Santelli, and Sheila Desai say it’s not a mystery at all. Writing in the Journal of Adolescent Health, they find that teenage girls in 2012 were just as likely to be sexually active as girls in 2007. Survey research shows that 43 percent of girls between 15 and 19 said they’d ever had sex in 2007, compared with 45 percent in 2012.

What changed was how teenage girls used contraceptives. The percentage of sexually active teens who used at least one type of birth control the last time they had sex rose from 78 percent in 2007 to 86 percent in 2012. More teens gravitated toward better types of birth control — like pills, IUDs, or implants — rather than relying on lower-quality birth control like condoms.

This is one of those easy answers to difficult questions. Having sex is a very normal thing for adolescents. Hormones etc. Duh. But there is no reason in this modern world that young women cannot do what comes naturally without taking a risk in getting pregnant. (It could still happen, of course. No birth control is perfect. ) These statistics show that we can reduce the teen birth rate significantly, giving women better chances in life and often sparing them the need to get an abortion if only we take the practical approach to the problem instead of dealing with it as if it’s a moral matter.

Not that anyone couldn’t have predicted this beforehand…

Perhaps we could start taking some practical measures to reduce gun deaths too.

Nah … what am I thinking?


Update: Unfortunately, these people aren’t going away either:

Wayne Allyn Root, a Donald Trump admirer who often claims to be in frequent contact with the GOP candidate has led campaign rallies for him in Nevada, said yesterday that people who receive federal benefits such as Medicaid, welfare and food stamps should lose their right to vote, as should women who use “free contraception” under the Affordable Care Act. 

Root’s plan would cut a large swath of Americans from the voter rolls: Roughly one in five Americans benefit from means-tested benefit programs, while 67 percent of women with private health insurance use copay-free contraception through the Affordable Care Act (which, by the way, is paid for by insurance companies, not by the federal government). 

Root told Virginia radio host Rob Schilling yesterday that much of the energy behind Trump’s campaign, as he discusses in his new book “Angry White Male,” is that the country is “evenly divided between the makers and the takers,” so “the middle class is basically paying, paying, paying and the poor get everything free, and it’s a disaster.” 

Root said that he had recently seen a map on the internet showing that if only “taxpayers” had been allowed to vote, the 2012 election would have been “a Republican sweep.” 

“So if the people who payed the taxes were the only ones allowed to vote, we’d have landslide victories,” he said, “but you’re allowing people to vote. This explains everything! People with conflict of interest shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you collect welfare, you have no right to vote. The day you get off welfare, you get your voting rights back. The reality is, why are you allowed to have this conflict of interest that you vote for the politician who wants to keep your welfare checks coming and your food stamps and your aid to dependent children and your free health care and your Medicaid, your Medicare and your Social Security and everything else?” 

Root quickly amended his statement to say that receiving Social Security and Medicare shouldn’t disqualify someone from voting, but “in general most of the things I just rattled off should preclude you from voting.”

Nice save… if they don’t allow older, racist white people to vote they have a big problem. Unfortunately, the world seems to create new racist white people all the time.

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