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bluewater's JournalJimmy Carter says he couldn't have managed presidency at 80
Weeks shy of his 95th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter said he doesn’t believe he could have managed the most powerful office in the world at 80 years old.
Carter, who earlier this year became the longest-lived chief executive in American history, didn’t tie his comments to any of his fellow Democrats running for president in 2020, but two leading candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, would turn 80 during their terms if elected.
Biden is 76. Sanders is 78.
“I hope there’s an age limit,” Carter said with a laugh as he answered audience questions on Tuesday during his annual report at the Carter Center in Atlanta. “If I were just 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president.”
Carter’s observation came in response to a jovial inquiry about whether he had considered running in 2020 since he’s still constitutionally allowed another term. The 39th president left office in 1981 at the age of 56 after losing his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, who served two terms and left office as the oldest sitting president in history, at 77.
Either Biden or Sanders would be older upon their inauguration than Reagan was on his final day in the Oval Office. At 73, President Donald Trump is a record setter, as well. He eclipsed Reagan’s mark as the oldest newly elected president in history and would become the oldest president to be reelected. Age has been a flashpoint for some critics of Trump, Sanders and Biden.
Carter, who turns 95 on Oct. 1, said the Oval Office requires a president “to be very flexible with your mind,” particularly on foreign affairs. He was speaking on the 41st anniversary of the Camp David Accords, a peace agreement he negotiated with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
“You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way, like I did between Begin and Sadat with the peace agreement,” Carter said.
“The things I faced in foreign affairs, I don’t think I could undertake them at 80 years old,” he continued, before adding with a smile: “At 95, it’s out of the question. I’m having a hard time walking.”
Carter said he remains undecided in the 2020 primary.
https://thegrio.com/2019/09/18/jimmy-carter-says-he-couldnt-have-managed-presidency-at-80/
Well, President Carter might be 95 years old, but he remains sharp as a tack. He has been president AND he has been 80 years old... so he is speaking on a subject he is uniquely qualified to comment on.
Let's respect that.
President Carter is both a very honest and very humble man.
NBC/WSJ POLL: Warren leads with liberal dems, Biden with moderate/conservative dems
https://twitter.com/CarrieNBCNews/status/1174068926403272704NBC/WSJ POLL: Warren leads on enthusiasm, best combined 1st and 2nd choice of any candidate.
https://twitter.com/CarrieNBCNews/status/1174066955067830272Elizabeth Warren Declared War on Corruption in the Heart of Lower Manhattan
Corruption is not merely unethical or undemocratic. It gets people killed. That was what Elizabeth Warren sought to illustrate to the many thousands who gathered Monday night to hear her speak beneath the towering marble arch in New York's Washington Square Park. The Massachusetts senator and Democratic candidate for president held her biggest rally of the campaign a block or so from the building that once housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the site of a 1911 fire that, in the space of 18 minutes, became the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city. 146 garment workers perished, mostly women and many of them new Italian and Jewish immigrants. They were locked in the facility to prevent unauthorized breaks or theft of materials, a standard practice of the time that condemned them to the inferno.
The fire was the opening and centerpiece of Warren's speech Monday night, because for her, the fire was about power. The appalling conditions in garment factories were widely publicized by the time of the Triangle atrocity, yet the industrial bosses had captured enough of city government to stop any kind of reform. Workers, many of them the most marginalized people in society, were subjected to excruciating hours and horrific conditions and inadequate pay while the people up top made a killing. "Sound familiar?" Warren asked the crowd just after 7:30, and soon enough she was off to the races, regaling the crowd—which her campaign said numbered at least 20,000, though that was not independently verified—with all the familiarities.
Warren’s podium was crafted from wood gifted from the homestead of Frances Perkins, the activist who led labor reform efforts after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
"Giant corporations have bought off our government," she told the crowd to boos and cheers. She listed off the offenders: fossil fuel companies, the gun lobby, health insurance companies, drug companies. She spoke in plain terms about the current state of lobbying in this country: "It's the very definition of bribery," she declared, her voice rising, "and we're going to put a stop to it." For this, she said, she had a plan—"the biggest anti-corruption plan since Watergate," featuring a lifetime ban on lobbying for federal officials like senators or congressmen or Cabinet members. Warren wants every meeting between a lobbyist and a politician on the record, so constituents can know who's got their representative's ear. She wants anyone who enters public life to give up their private business interests while they serve.
"Take care of the people's business or your own business," she said, "but you can't do both at the same time." It wasn't hard to decipher who had entered the piece. "Donald Trump," Warren said simply, "is corruption in the flesh."
It's this combination of detailed policymaking and straight-and-simple communication that has drawn people towards Warren's campaign in growing numbers, even if she and Bernie Sanders still consistently trail Joe Biden in Democratic primary polling. Many of the rallygoers cited Warren's ability to make complicated things simple, at least on the stump, as fundamental to her appeal.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29085183/elizabeth-warren-rally-washington-square-park-corruption/
'One Woman, and Millions of People to Back Her Up.'
How Elizabeth Warren Made Fighting Corruption A Feminist Rallying Cry
By Charlotte Alter
If winning the Democratic nomination requires wooing the party’s progressive wing and harnessing the power of activist women, then Senator Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that.
At a rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park on Monday evening, just hours after she beat Senator Bernie Sanders for the coveted endorsement of the Working Families Party, Warren laid out a far-reaching anti-corruption plan that rooted her campaign in a long history of women reformers.
But the speech also served as a road map for her path to the nomination, positioning Warren as the only candidate in the race who can knit together the women voters and progressive activists who propelled the Democrats to midterm victories in 2018.
Standing before a huge crowd just steps from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building, Warren outlined a plan to curb the influence of corporate money in Washington. She proposed a lifetime ban on lobbying for ex-Presidents, Senators and Members of Congress; a ban on hiring corporate lobbyists on federal government staff; a ban on lobbying on behalf of foreign governments; a ban on corporate lobbyists “bundling” campaign donations; a ban on secret meetings between public officials and lobbyists; a ban on elected officials owning businesses or trading individual stocks.
“Enough is enough,” Warren said. “We will take down the ‘for sale’ signs hanging outside of every federal building in Washington.”
It came as no surprise that Warren, who has been railing against corruption since her time as a Harvard Law School professor, seized on the theme. But if the policy was familiar, the narrative was new. Warren used the speech to situate her campaign in a long history of women reformers and labor organizers who have taken on big corporate interests and won.
https://time.com/5678605/one-woman-and-millions-of-people-to-back-her-up-how-elizabeth-warren-made-fighting-corruption-a-feminist-rallying-cry/
Joe Biden's sister dismisses calls for Justice Kavanaugh's impeachment
In an interview with CBS News, Valerie Biden Owens — former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign co-chair and younger sister — dismissed calls to impeach Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"I don't think you'd call for impeachment proceedings because of a story in The New York Times," Biden Owens said.
After The New York Times' report of Kavanaugh was published, Biden released a statement saying "we need to get to the bottom" of Kavanaugh's confirmation process.
"This weekend's report in the New York Times raises again profoundly troubling questions about the integrity of the confirmation process that put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in the first place," the statement said.
"We need to get to the bottom of whether the Trump Administration and Senate Republicans pressured the FBI to ignore evidence or prevented them from following up on leads relating to Justice Kavanaugh's background investigation, subsequent allegations that arose, and the truthfulness of his testimony to the Senate."
At least five other candidates — including Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren — have called for Congress to move to impeach Kavanaugh, following a new report detailing allegations of sexual misconduct from his time in college.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-bidens-sister-dismisses-calls-for-justice-kavanaughs-impeachment/
Why doesn't the USA have universal health care? one word: Race
https://twitter.com/jcgreenfield/status/1173622724108808192In 1945, when President Truman called on Congress to expand the nation’s hospital system as part of a larger health care plan, Southern Democrats obtained key concessions that shaped the American medical landscape for decades to come. The Hill-Burton Act provided federal grants for hospital construction to communities in need, giving funding priority to rural areas (many of them in the South). But it also ensured that states controlled the disbursement of funds and could segregate resulting facilities.
Professional societies like the American Medical Association barred black doctors; medical schools excluded black students, and most hospitals and health clinics segregated black patients. Federal health care policy was designed, both implicitly and explicitly, to exclude black Americans. As a result, they faced an array of inequities — including statistically shorter, sicker lives than their white counterparts. What’s more, access to good medical care was predicated on a system of employer-based insurance that was inherently difficult for black Americans to get. “They were denied most of the jobs that offered coverage,” says David Barton Smith, an emeritus historian of health care policy at Temple University. “And even when some of them got health insurance, as the Pullman porters did, they couldn’t make use of white facilities.”
In the shadows of this exclusion, black communities created their own health systems. Lay black women began a national community health care movement that included fund-raising for black health facilities; campaigns to educate black communities about nutrition, sanitation and disease prevention; and programs like National Negro Health Week that drew national attention to racial health disparities. Black doctors and nurses — most of them trained at one of two black medical colleges, Meharry and Howard — established their own professional organizations and began a concerted war against medical apartheid. By the 1950s, they were pushing for a federal health care system for all citizens.
That fight put the National Medical Association (the leading black medical society) into direct conflict with the A.M.A., which was opposed to any nationalized health plan. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, the group helped defeat two such proposals with a vitriolic campaign that informs present-day debates: They called the idea socialist and un-American and warned of government intervention in the doctor-patient relationship. The group used the same arguments in the mid-’60s, when proponents of national health insurance introduced Medicare. This time, the N.M.A. developed a countermessage: Health care was a basic human right.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/universal-health-care-racism.html
As our candidates discuss Medicare for All in the primary debates, this article seemed especially pertinent. I wish Warren or Sanders, as supporters of Medicare for All, would raise this point explicitly in the next debate -- systemic racism has greatly affected the healthcare system in America. Heck, I wish all the candidates would raise this point.
Bidencare... honoring or usurping Obama's healthcare legacy?
https://twitter.com/jeneps/status/1173376222455373826Hmmm.
One person responded:
https://twitter.com/aury91/status/1173381578090790914
I dunno… to be honest I don't think it will go over well.
There is something just a little bit self aggrandizing for Biden himself to try and start labeling it "Bidencare".
Obamacare got it's name when the rThugs branded the ACA that in an attempt to slur President Obama. President Obama turned the tables by embracing the term and it remains popular today.
If I were Biden, I'd drop the "Bidencare" self promotion. He sorta has ruined that as a brand name by self promoting it.
David Axelrod: Hilarious cartoon!
https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod/status/1173231783162331141ABC's debate moderators don't understand what universal healthcare is
Corporate news media has turned universal health care into a wedge issue to protect their Big Pharma paymasters
Omitted entirely from Thursday's Democratic Presidential debate segment on the American healthcare system was any real discussion of how sick and inhumane of a system it really is, and what a high price we pay for it — not merely in terms of exorbitant costs, but in the preventable pain and suffering of millions.
For a while now, the corporate news media, whose profits are increasingly reliant on ad revenue from the predatory pharmaceutical industry, have done their best as debate moderators to frighten Americans into believing that the universal health care model proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is a threat to them and all they hold dear.
In the last debate, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulus set up former Vice President Joe Biden nicely to slam this “menace” from the left by framing the health care question on what Americans stood to lose with the boogie monster of radical reform.
“Both Senators Warren and Sanders want to replace Obamacare with Medicare for All,” he said. “You want to build on Obamacare, not scrap it. They propose spending far more than you to combat climate change and tackle student loan debt. And they would raise more in taxes than you to pay for their programs.”
He continued the softball windup: “Are Senators Warren and Sanders pushing too far beyond where Democrats want to go and where the country needs to go?”
Stephanopoulos played Biden’s wing man, by reducing the terms of the health care debate to money, raising the specter of tax hikes — playing into a strategy the right often uses to ward off social welfare programs.
[snip]
There was absolutely no reference to what Americans are actually getting, or not getting, for the $3.5 trillion we spend annually (which comes out to $10,739 per capita).
What a different course the debate might have wound had Stephanopoulus opened by asking the candidates to comment on how American life expectancy has declined over the last three years — something that has not happened since World War I.
What does that say about the American health care system?
https://www.salon.com/2019/09/14/abcs-debate-moderators-dont-understand-what-universal-healthcare-is/
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