March 8, 2023

Wednesday, March 8,2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

Joe Biden unveils his plan to save Medicare — by taxing wealthier Americans.

What happened: With Medicare projected to be insolvent by 2028, the Biden administration on Tuesday morning unveiled its plan to extend the life of the senior health care program.

Keeping the program going would largely be paid for by a hike in taxes on wealthier Americans, an expected theme of the president's fiscal 2024 budget slated for release on Thursday. The White House has said Biden's proposed budget would outline plans for cutting the deficit by $2 trillion over the next decade while boosting the amount that billionaires pay in taxes.

What it means: As usual, Congress isn’t likely to act on Biden’s budget blueprint. But Biden is likely trying to draw a contrast with Hill Republicans, as certain members have called for amending entitlement programs, including Medicare and Social Security.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised those specific programs are not on the table as the party seeks major spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling later this year.

Three key changes: Biden wants to raise Medicare taxes on those making more than $400,000, sticking to a pledge not to hike taxes on those making less than that amount.

The Medicare tax rate on Americans earning more than $400,000 would increase from 3.8 percent to 5 percent. “By asking those with the highest incomes to contribute modestly more, we can keep the Medicare program strong for decades to come,” the White House said in a fact sheet.

Biden’s proposal also looks to close “loopholes” that have previously shielded some wealthy business owners and high earners from paying that tax.

The administration is also pushing to allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of more prescription drugs, building on new rules included in Democrats’ signature health bill last year and funneling about $200 billion in savings into the program to help keep it solvent. (Politico).

Guest Essay, New York Times. Joe Biden: My Plan to Extend Medicare for Another Generation.

Millions of Americans work their whole lives, paying into Medicare with every working day — starting with their first jobs, even as teenagers. Medicare is more than a government program. It’s the rock-solid guarantee that Americans have counted on to be there for them when they retire.

For decades, I’ve listened to my Republican friends claim that the only way to be serious about preserving Medicare is to cut benefits, including by making it a voucher program worth less and less every year. Some have threatened our economy unless I agree to benefit cuts.

Only in Washington can people claim that they are saving something by destroying it.

The budget I am releasing this week will make the Medicare trust fund solvent beyond 2050 without cutting a penny in benefits. In fact, we can get better value, making sure Americans receive better care for the money they pay into Medicare.

The two biggest health reform bills since the creation of Medicare, both of which will save Medicare hundreds of billions over the decades to come, were signed by President Barack Obama and me.

The Affordable Care Act embraced smart reforms to make our health care system more efficient while improving Medicare coverage for seniors. The Inflation Reduction Act ended the absurd ban on Medicare negotiating lower drug prices, required drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare if they increase prices faster than inflation and capped seniors’ total prescription drug costs — saving seniors up to thousands of dollars a year. These negotiations, combined with the law’s rebates for excessive price hikes, will reduce the deficit by $159 billion.

We have seen a significant slowdown in the growth of health care spending since the Affordable Care Act was passed. In the decade after the A.C.A., Medicare actually spent about $1 trillion less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected before the A.C.A. reforms were in place. In 2009, before the A.C.A., the Medicare trustees projected that Medicare’s trust fund would be exhausted in 2017; their latest projection is 2028. But we should do better than that and extend Medicare’s solvency beyond 2050.

So first, let’s expand on that progress. My budget will build on drug price reforms by strengthening Medicare’s newly established negotiation power, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for more drugs and bringing drugs into negotiation sooner after they launch. That’s another $200 billion in deficit reduction. We will then take those savings and put them directly into the Medicare trust fund. Lowering drug prices while extending Medicare’s solvency sure makes a lot more sense than cutting benefits.

Second, let’s ask the wealthiest to pay just a little bit more of their fair share, to strengthen Medicare for everyone over the long term. My budget proposes to increase the Medicare tax rate on earned and unearned income above $400,000 to 5 percent from 3.8 percent.

As I proposed in the past, my budget will also ensure that the tax that supports Medicare can’t be avoided altogether. This modest increase in Medicare contributions from those with the highest incomes will help keep the Medicare program strong for decades to come. My budget will make sure the money goes directly into the Medicare trust fund, protecting taxpayers’ investment and the future of the program.

When Medicare was passed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans didn’t have more than five times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined, and it only makes sense that some adjustments be made to reflect that reality today.

Let’s ask them to pay their fair share so that the millions of workers who helped them build that wealth can retire with dignity and the Medicare they paid into. Republican plans that protect billionaires from a penny more in taxes — but won’t protect a retired firefighter’s hard-earned Medicare benefits — are just detached from the reality that hardworking families live with every day.

Add all that up, and my budget will extend the Medicare trust fund for more than another generation, an additional 25 years or more of solvency — beyond 2050. These are common-sense changes that I’m confident an overwhelming majority of Americans support.

MAGA Republicans have a different view. They want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. That means they want to take away the power we just gave to Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices. Get rid of the $35 per month cap for insulin we just got for people on Medicare. And remove the current $2,000 total annual cap for seniors.

If the MAGA Republicans get their way, seniors will pay higher out-of-pocket costs on prescription drugs and insulin, the deficit will be bigger, and Medicare will be weaker. The only winner under their plan will be Big Pharma. That’s not how we extend Medicare’s life for another generation or grow the economy.

This week, I’ll show Americans my full budget vision to invest in America, lower costs, grow the economy and not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000. I urge my Republican friends in Congress to do the same — and show the American people what they value.

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Warnings of danger.

Charlie Sykes on Trump.

Retribution, Eradication, and the Coming Storm.

Hello darkness, my old friend.

If you want a preview of what’s coming our way, take a look at the vocabulary of CPAC, including the former president’s promise of retribution, obliteration, and war.

Attention, perhaps, should be paid.

“Retribution”

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Donald Trump told his acolytes at CPAC. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

In case anyone missed it, Trump repeated the phrase: “I am your retribution”.

It was probably the strongest line of his speech, and the threat was intentionally unsubtle and unmistakable. He would “totally obliterate the ‘deep state,” and wreak vengeance on the sinister scum who opposed him.

Ronald Reagan proclaimed “It’s Morning in America”; Trump declared, I am Nemesis.

This is not, to put it mildly, normal political rhetoric, at least in the English language. But it gives a taste of the bleak storm to come. The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson writes:

For much of the speech, Trump’s voice took on more of a soft and haggard whisper than the booming, throaty scream that characterized his campaign rallies. His language, by contrast, was bellicose.

Tonight’s address was among the darkest speeches he has given since his “American carnage” inaugural address. Trump warned that the United States is becoming “a nation in decline” and a “crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare.”

He spoke of an “epic battle” against “sinister forces” on the left.

He repeatedly painted himself as a martyr, a tragic hero still hoping for redemption. “They’re not coming after me; they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump told the room. He pulled out his best, half-hearted Patton: “We are going to finish what we started. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.”

He was heavy on adjectives, devastating with nouns. “We will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said…

And he is all-in on the Insurrection:

After seven mind-bending, soul-crushing years, it’s easy to get numbed by this sort of thing. But, as former congressman Joe Walsh writes in this morning’s Bulwark, we ought take this sort of language seriously. Tom Nichols agrees, writing yesterday,

“We need to stop treating support for Trump as if it’s just another political choice and instead work to isolate his renewed threat to our democracy and our national security.(The Bulwark)

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Mike Bloomberg joins the voices speaking out against Netanyahu.

Michael Bloomberg: Israel Is Courting Disaster.

An Israeli protester blocks a main road to demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

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In more than 20 years of public life, I have steadfastly supported Israel and its people in both word and deed, including by building medical facilities there, co-founding a leadership center, supporting its innovative local programs and funding other good causes. I have never gotten involved in its domestic politics or criticized its government initiatives. But my love for Israel, my respect for its people and my concern about its future are now leading me to speak out against the current government’s attempt to effectively abolish the nation’s independent judiciary.

Under the new coalition’s proposal, a simple majority of the Knesset could overrule the nation’s Supreme Court and run roughshod over individual rights, including on matters such as speech and press freedoms, equal rights for minorities and voting rights. The Knesset could even go as far as to declare that the laws it passes are unreviewable by the judiciary, a move that calls to mind Richard Nixon’s infamous phrase “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is courting disaster by trying to claim that same power, imperiling Israel’s alliances around the world, its security in the region, its economy at home and the very democracy upon which the country was built.

The economic damage is already being felt, as the pummeling of the shekel has showed. A broad swath of business leaders and investors have spoken out against the government’s proposal, publicly and privately. And in a disturbing sign, some people have already begun pulling money out of the country and re-evaluating their plans for future growth there. As the owner of a global company, I don’t blame them.

Companies and investors place enormous value on strong and independent judicial systems because courts help protect them — not only against crime and corruption but also government overreach. Just as important, they protect what their employees value most: individual rights and freedoms.

Companies are in a global competition for talent. So are countries. The best and brightest want to live in countries where they can be assured they will not be persecuted or discriminated against because of what they believe or whom they love. Israel’s commitment to those legal protections played a crucial role in its development as a so-called start-up nation, able to compete with Silicon Valley and other tech centers for high-skilled workers.

In fact, the extraordinary rise in Israel’s economic standing over the last generation may be Mr. Netanyahu’s greatest achievement. It’s fair to say that no prime minister has done more to transform its economy into a global powerhouse. Yet unless he changes course, Mr. Netanyahu risks throwing all that progress — and his own hard-earned legacy — away. The economic damage could make the cost being paid by the United Kingdom for Brexit look like bubkes.

But it’s not just the economy, of course. Israel’s security is based partly on a relationship with the United States built on shared values — freedom, equality, democracy — that can only be sustained by a commitment to the rule of law, including an independent judiciary capable of upholding it. If Israel retreats from that long-term commitment and moves its model of governance toward one that mirrors those of authoritarian countries, it risks weakening its ties to the United States and other free nations.

That would be a devastating loss for Israel’s security, harm prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian conflict and could even imperil the future of the Jewish homeland. It would also undermine the deep attachment millions of people around the world feel toward the country, often because of the pride our parents instilled in us not only for its Jewish character but also for its strong commitment to freedom.

In the United States, our founding fathers’ insistence on checks and balances to control the tyrannical tendencies of majorities was part of their genius. Our Constitution is not perfect — no law is — but its many checks and balances have been essential to protecting and advancing fundamental rights and maintaining national stability. It was only through those safeguards that the United States has managed to withstand extreme shocks to our democracy in recent years — including a disgraceful attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power — without a catastrophic fracturing.

In withstanding those shocks, the United States also has had a luxury that Israel does not: friendly neighbors on our borders. We could afford some painful national divisions without fearing that our neighbors might exploit them militarily. Israel cannot. It is in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods, facing threats from Iran and others that Mr. Netanyahu rightly calls existential. The more divided it is at home, the weaker it appears to its enemies.

Countries bordered by external enemies have even greater need to seek internal compromise, and it is my fervent hope that Mr. Netanyahu will convince his coalition of the need to heed President Isaac Herzog’s plea to pull back and slow down.

In 2014, when the Federal Aviation Administration prohibited U.S. airlines from flying to Israel after a Hamas rocket landed near Ben-Gurion airport, I boarded an El Al flight, never fearing any danger. Israel takes extraordinary measures to ensure the security of airline passengers, and it correctly argued that banning flights amounted to a capitulation to Hamas that would effectively close the country’s economy, given air travel is the only practical way to get in and out for nearly all travelers. I wanted to stand with Israel against Hamas, by highlighting the safety of travel to Israel and urging the Obama administration to reverse course — which it soon did, to its credit.

Greeting me on the tarmac that day was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He thanked me for my support, and I thanked him for Israel’s support of New York City and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks. Close allies bound together by shared values stand together in times of need — not only to support each other but to reaffirm the inviolable obligations we have to defend those values. And that is why I am standing up again now. (Op-ed, New York Times).

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Statement from Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick's family on Fox News: "Every time the pain of that day seems to have ebbed a bit, organizations like Fox rip our wounds wide open again and we are frankly sick of it. Leave us the hell alone.."

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The MAGA-fication of North Idaho College.

Not just New College in Florida, where DeSantis has taken control, but all over the country, academic speech, a version of free speech, is under attack.

Brent Regan, right, the chairman of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, with Todd Banducci, a trustee for North Idaho College.

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The North Idaho College board of trustees was, by recent standards, civilized.

There were no shoving matches or speeches from far-right podcasters. Nobody pulled the fire alarm. The parade of community members who, under the wary eye of campus security officers, took turns at the microphone mostly kept their voices below shouting volume, until an hour or so before midnight, when a woman cried “Shame on you!” and stormed out of the room.

Mostly, people seemed stunned that it had actually come to this.

For most of the past two years, the college’s governing board has been a volatile experiment in turning grievances into governance. Trustees backed by the county Republican Party hold a majority on the board. They have denounced liberal “indoctrination” by the college faculty and vowed to bring the school administration’s “deep state” to heel and “Make N.I.C. Great Again.”

The injection of such sweeping political aims into the routine administration of a community college that had 4,600 students enrolled last year, one better known locally for its technical training programs than the politics of its faculty, has devolved into a full-blown crisis. The school has faced lawsuits from two of the five presidents it has had since the start of the previous school year. A district court judge ordered one of those presidents reinstated on Friday in a ruling that castigated the trustees for “steering N.I.C. toward an iceberg.” The college has lost professors and staff and had its debt downgraded by Moody’s, which cited the school's “significant governance and management dysfunction.”

regional higher education commission, which warned that the 90-year-old college could be stripped of its accreditation if changes were not made in a matter of weeks — an effective threat of closure and a potential catastrophe for Coeur d’Alene, a town of 56,000 in the Idaho Panhandle. The college is the sixth-largest employer in Kootenai County and a source of skilled labor for much of the local economy.

“As a businessperson here, it’s heartbreaking to me to be standing on the brink of the loss of this institution,” said Eve Knudtsen, the owner of a Chevrolet dealership in the neighboring town of Post Falls. Ms. Knudtsen, a Republican, attended N.I.C., as have both of her daughters, and she said a third of the technicians hired by her dealership came out of the school.

“It’s pretty much a dystopian farce,” said Kathleen Miller Green, an assistant professor of child development who attended the nearly six-hour, capacity-crowd meeting at the school’s student union building on Feb. 22. “It’s laughable if you don’t have to live it.”

Rick MacLennan, a former president of the college who was ousted by the trustees in 2021, describes the school as “a canary in the coal mine” — a warning of what awaits local institutions across the country as fiercely partisan and disruptive cultural battles spread into new corners of public life. He and other critics of the trustees see parallels with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to remake New College, a state-run liberal arts school in Sarasota, Fla., as a conservative bastion.(NY Times)
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How long can this madness continue.

U.S. surpassed 100 mass shootings in only 64 days.

A person sitting outside Berkey Hall at Michigan State University, the site of a mass shooting on Feb. 13.

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The U.S. has surpassed 100 mass shootings in 2023 on Sunday, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which defines mass shootings as situations in which at least four people are shot and either injured or killed, not including the shooter.

Why it matters: Only 64 days have passed so far this year, meaning there have been more mass shootings than days in the U.S. thus far.

• The 100th mass shooting of the year left three people, including a child, dead and another person injured in Bolingbrook, Illinois.

The big picture: The U.S. didn't exceed 100 mass shootings until March 19 in 2022 and March 22 in 2021, according to GVA data.

• There were 52 mass shootings in January, 41 in February and 11 so far in March — a total of 104 so far.

• At least 7,537 people have also died as a result of different forms of gun violence in the country so far this year.

Flashback: The U.S. didn't exceed 100 mass shootings until March 19 in 2022 and March 22 in 2021, according to GVA data.

• There were 647 mass shootings in 2022 and another 690 in 2021.

• Firearm-related injuries, like homicide and suicide, surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in 2020, according to an analysis of new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data published last year.

Of note: Since passing and signing into law the bipartisan gun safety bill in 2022 — the most significant piece of federal gun legislation in nearly three decades — it's unlikely a divided Congress will pass stricter gun laws.

Go deeper: All U.S. extremist mass killings in 2022 linked to far right, report says (Axios)

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Odds and Ends on J6 and the video footage.

The Senate Republican Leader [Mitch McConnell] said Tuesday afternoon he aligned himself with remarks issued earlier Tuesday by U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger to his rank-and-file slamming Carlson's "offensive and misleading conclusions" about the siege. He held up Manger's one-page statement — called "Truth & Justice" — near the Senate chamber. "It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that's completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks," McConnell told reporters. (NPR).

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Street near Miami named for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that having her name “so prominently displayed on a street in a community that has given me so much” is an incredible honor.
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CUTLER BAY, Fla. — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson came home to South Florida on Monday to celebrate the renaming of a street in her honor in the community where she grew up.

“I hope that this street naming will also serve as a testament to what is possible in this great country,” said Jackson, the first Black woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

During 40-minute ceremony in Cutler Bay attended by local dignitaries, members of the community and her parents, she noted how proud she is to have grown up in this area south of Miami. The newly named Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Street winds through a suburban neighborhood where peacocks stroll through yards and roost in oak trees.

This in many ways is as much a celebration of us as it is of me, and I’m saying that because I grew up among all of you.” she said. “This is where I got my start, and I really do believe that there is an important connection between my experience growing up in this area and my current position as associate justice.”

Jackson is a graduate of Palmetto Senior High School, and she acknowledged teachers and coaches who she said helped her become who she is today.

“It was while I was studying and competing and growing up here in this community that I gained self confidence in the face of challenges,” she said. “I learned how to lean in, in spite of obstacles, to work hard to be resilient, to strive for excellence and to believe in myself and what I could do if given the opportunity.”

Jackson said that having her name “so prominently displayed on a street in a community that has given me so much” is an incredible honor.

“I hope that people who are driving by might have a moment of reflection about what it means that a person from this neighborhood, and someone with my background, could take what this place has to offer and be well-equipped enough to then go out into the world and do what it takes to not only become the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court of United States, but also the first former public defender and the first associate justice who is from the great state of Florida.”

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And The Pritzker Prize for Architecture goes to….

Pritzker Prize 2023: David Chipperfield wins the 'Nobel of architecture.’

Throughout its 44-year history, the Pritzker Prize — regarded as the "Nobel of architecture" — has often been awarded to individuals with distinct design signatures: Frank Gehry's irregular forms, Zaha Hadid's sweeping curves, Tadao Ando's textural concrete.

It may be a sign of the times that 2023's laureate, Sir David Chipperfield, has been praised by the prize's judges for precisely the opposite.

"A gifted architect can sometimes almost disappear," reads the jury's citation, published Tuesday as the 69-year-old was unveiled as the latest recipient of his profession's highest honor. "We do not see an instantly recognizable David Chipperfield building in different cities," it adds, "but different David Chipperfield buildings designed specifically for each circumstance."

These feats of architecture have been named the best of the year

Although best-known for cultural institutions, like Des Moines Public Library in Iowa, the UK's Turner Contemporary gallery and his reimagined Neues Museum in Berlin, the English architect's firm has completed over 100 buildings around the world. Spanning residential, commercial and public uses, the understated works are not defined by trademark motifs but by Chipperfield's insistence on answering what he calls the unique "questions" posed by each project.

"I'm not that interested in architecture as an autobiographical exercise," he said on a video call from London. "(We) are sort of a midwife in this process. When we finish a building, we go home — we leave it, and it belongs to somebody else (and) we're not there to justify it and sell it anymore. It has to sell itself." (CNN).

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The new Pritzker has arrived. It was David Chipperfield who won the timpani. The 69-year-old British architect is the author of a hundred buildings whose formal intelligence, sovereign elegance, programmatic pragmatism, luxury of space, light and materials, embody a very high idea of ​​the discipline, which one could say heir to that of Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). This prize, endowed with 100,000 dollars (93,800 euros) and awarded on Tuesday March 7, distinguishes the entire work, as does the Nobel in other disciplines. (NewsinFrance.com).

David Chipperfield, in front of the James Simon Gallery, in Berlin, on July 10, 2019.

America's Cup Building — or the "Veles e Vents" building — in Valencia, Spain, was completed in 11 months to host the America's Cup sailing competition in 2007.

The central courtyard of the Amorepacific Headquarters in Seoul.

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Today is International Women’s Day.

“Here's to strong women, may we know them, may we be them, may we raise them.”

Have a strong day. Pass the ERA.