White House adviser Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday suggested that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is picking a woman vice president to have sex with her "like co-ed at the end of a frat party."
During an appearance on Fox News, Conway was asked about the possibility that Biden could pick former National Security Adviser Susan Rice as his running mate.
"You've seen the long short list of Joe Biden's V.P. choices," Conway said. "They all happen to be female. He sounds like co-ed at the end of a frat party.... 'I need a woman!'"
"So now he has binders of women and he's looking through," she added. "And he's got people like Sally Yates and Susan Rice on this list. And those who are two women who were very involved in the shenanigans that were happening in the days before [Trump took office]. She can't be trusted and she's proved that."
It’s no secret that Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any other developed nation in the world. Per capita spending exceeds US$1,000 a year; the Germans and French pay about half that. For many drugs, prices are dramatically higher than the international average: Dulera, an asthma drug, costs 50 times more, while Januvia, a drug for diabetes, and Combigan, a glaucoma drug, cost about 10 times more.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have recognized this problem. President Donald Trump has called the situation “wrong” and “unfair”; presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has called to end the “abuse of power” by drug companies while his former competitor Sen. Bernie Sanders has complained about “unfettered capitalism” and “greed.”
So why aren’t prescription drug prices coming down? As a health policy scholar and political scientist, I believe the roadblock to change is the immense political power wielded by the enormously wealthy – and politically powerful – entities within the pharmaceutical supply chain. For decades, they have been reaping tremendous profits. It is not surprising they are now ready to invest those resources to defend their turf. Their power is and will remain a formidable obstacle to reform. And, coronavirus may have given them an assist by diverting attention away from the problem.
US prescription drug prices: Higher than anywhere
Countless studies have shown that Americans pay much more than other citizens of other development nations for their prescription drugs. This high spending on prescription drugs happens even though it does not use more drugs than other countries. The U.S. is also more likely to use generic versions of the drugs. But as I’ve written, much of the discrepancy can be traced back to prices, a central issue plaguing the entire U.S. health care system.
Americans are paying higher prices than anyone else for a number of reasons. First, the U.S. generally lacks any price controls on prescriptions drugs. The largest payer in the system, the federal government, is mostly banned from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, the U.S. is one of the few countries that allows direct-to-consumer advertising. Those television commercials you see drive up consumer demand for lots of high-priced drugs. Meantime, the pharmaceutical distribution system, full of complexities, lacks any semblance of transparency. Loopholes, easy to find, are readily used to maximize profits.
Importantly, high prices have a tremendous impact on American families. One in 4 Americans say it’s difficult paying for the prescriptions. One in 5 skip medications because of the cost. No wonder nearly 4 of 5 Americans (79%) consider the cost of prescription drugs unreasonable.
You may not be familiar with many of the major players in the U.S. health care system.
Five major entities make up the U.S. supply chain. Manufacturers, like Pfizer and Mylan, develop and produce the drugs. They are distributed by pharmacies, like CVS and Walgreens, via wholesalers, like McKesson or Cardinal Health. Health plans – Anthem and Aetna, for example – then contract with pharmacy benefit managers (Express Scripts, Optum Rx) to manage their drug benefits. This includes the development of formularies – that is, the availability and out-of-pocket price of the drugs – and the potential discounts from manufacturers.
Most Americans have probably heard of Anthem or Cigna; they insure millions of people. But far fewer are familiar with McKesson or AmerisourceBergen, despite respective revenues of $208 billion and $168 billion (compared to $92 billion for Anthem and $42 billion for Cigna). Still, it’s clear all entities are making a dollar: Gross profits range from about 70% for manufacturers, to 20% for insurers and pharmacies, to about 5% for pharmacy benefit managers and wholesalers.
That’s enough money to throw a rather large wrench into any attempts at reform. In 2019, the pharmaceutical sector employed about 1,500 lobbyists and spent close to $300 million on lobbying the federal government. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, some of the biggest lobbyists are the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer ($11 million in 2019), Amgen ($11 million), Roche ($10 million), and Bayer ($9 million). Their industry association, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, kicked in an additional $29 million.
Along for the ride: the pharmacies (CVS, $9.5 million on lobbying; Walgreens, $3.1 million), insurers (BlueCross/Blue Shield, $25.1 million; Centene, $3 million; UnitedHealth, $3.8 million), and pharmacy benefit managers (Cardinal Health, $2.7 million; AmerisourceBergen, $2.4 million; McKesson, $2.1 million). All told, since 2010, they have spent more than $2.5 billion on lobbying and almost $250 million in political contributions to both parties.
With that sort of political clout, any reform proposal to rein in prices is bound to run into significant opposition. This does not mean that policymakers are simply being bought off. But it does mean that pushing reform comes at a political cost.
Reforming the system, says the author, will come slowly.
Most current proposals only nibble at the edges of the problem. This includes the Trump administration’s recent proposal to lower costs by restructuring drug discounts that occur between pharmaceutical companies, health insurers and entities called pharmacy benefit managers. It also includes proposals to import drugs from abroad requires the unlikely cooperation of both drug makers and foreign nations. Even allowing the federal government to negotiate prices for Medicare will not reduce costs for most Americans. Indeed, drug companies are likely to recoup discounts for Medicare by raising prices for everyone else.
Given these challenges, I have previously suggested the U.S. focus on assessing, then publicizing, the cost-effectiveness data and cost-benefit analyses for all drugs. To keep politics out of it, one or more independent research institutes would perform the analyses. Knowing the value provided by specific drugs would benefit consumers, providers and payers – a meaningful first step toward connecting the prices we pay for prescriptions to the value we derive from them.
Long-term, I believe the best approach to reforming the unquestionable shortcomings of the U.S. health care system is an incremental one. Small-scale improvements would eventually expand as the share of government expenditures increase for health care costs. Eventually, once the government is left holding a large enough share of the burden – perhaps roughly two-thirds of all health care expenditures – more progressive, consumer-oriented political incentives will have the power to take on the health care sector.
"Michigan sends absentee ballots to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election," the president wrote. "This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!"
Trump's threat against Michigan was sparked by Michigan sending out absentee ballot applications to all of its registered voters as a way to give them the opportunity to vote by mail and thus avoid having to head to the polls in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many Twitter users responded to Trump's threat by pointing out that he incorrectly said that Michigan residents were getting ballots when they were actually just getting applications, while others said that the president threatening a state's funding was an abuse of power similar to the one he was impeached for when he held up aid to Ukraine until it launched an investigation into presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and John Heilemann agreed President Donald Trump was in a "bad place" politically, six months out from Election Day.
The "Morning Joe" host said the president's support from seniors has been wiped out by the coronavirus crisis, and Scarborough said the campaign was spending money in some reliable Trump strongholds -- which he said was a bad sign for his re-election chances.
"Time to look at your operation and see how you got in such bad shape in May, or start looking at yourself and asking why you keep inflicting damage on your own campaign," Scarborough said. "Insulting women, insulting doctors, the medical community. Donald, the conspiracy theories, they're not working."
Heilemann agreed that Trump's focus on his base was a warning sign for his 2020 campaign.
"At this moment in Donald Trump's political operation, there is so much panic over the erosion of the president's base," Heilemann said.
"When you're president of the United States and you run for re-election, the year that you run, by the time you get to the spring, if you're in any position to win, you are already so confident of your base vote, that you have got it locked down and locked away and you know that you have the win number that you need with the core of your electorate and with the right percentage of Republicans," Heilemann added.
A popular president would have solidified his base and party behind him by now, but Heilemann said Trump's spending reveals deep worry within his campaign about November.
"By the spring you're thinking about how do you destroy the other guy and build your own vote?" he said, "and go to states that you didn't win last time and improve your margins with groups that you didn't do that well last time. That's not the campaign that they're running. Their base is hemorrhaging. He's down with non-college whites against Joe Biden versus 2016, he's down with men overall against Joe Biden versus 2016. He is down, or as you just pointed out, with seniors dramatically, like fatally if the election were held today."
"That is what the [Barack] Obama fixation is about, it's about trying to shore up his base," he added, "and the cost of it is everything you just said. The cost of it is the suburbs, the cost of it is educated voters across the board of all races and genders, and the cost of it is, of course, any chance to even make small gains with African American voters. But that's the position they're in right now. They're in the position where their base is not nailed down, so that's job one for Donald Trump right now, and for that to be job one for an incumbent president in the middle of May of a re-election year, you are in some deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep bad business -- bad place to be."
On Tuesday, at a virtual town hall on food security, former Vice President Joe Biden took on President Donald Trump's continued promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment — and laid into him for taking it as a prophylactic with no scientific evidence.
"Come on, man! What is he doing?" said Biden. "What in God's name is he doing?"
He blasted the decision as "absolutely irresponsible" — and compared it to Trump's recent suggestion that doctors look into injecting household cleaners into people.
President Donald Trump has recently been promoting a far-right conspiracy theory known as “Obamagate,” which claims that in 2016 and 2017, former President Barack Obama and his allies in the Democratic Party committed illegal or unethical acts to harm Trump and his allies — including Michael Flynn.
Legal expert Ryan Goodman, who teaches at the New York University School of Law, addresses the “Obamagate” theory in an article for Just Security and explains why it is a “disinformation campaign.”
“President Donald Trump insists, against all evidence, that there is something called ‘Obamagate’: some crime, or perhaps series of crimes, that the preceding administration committed against him — or against his adviser Michael Flynn, or maybe against even more of the Trump team,” Goodman explains. “Yet the president fails to say what the crime(s) might be. Instead, he seizes on the language, alludes to improprieties, and — increasingly — wields it all to tar his rival for the presidency, Joe Biden.”
Goodman notes that while there “may well be a lurking truth to a serious allegation against former government officials in how they handled the counterintelligence file involving Michael Flynn…. there is no evidence that those actions implicate President Barack Obama or Vice President Biden personally, or discredit the legitimacy of the investigations of Russia’s 2016 election interference, the investigation of Trump campaign associates’ support for the Kremlin’s effort, officials’ requests to ‘unmask’ a U.S. person appearing in intelligence reports who turned out to be Flynn, the FBI’s decision to interview Flynn, or the Justice Department’s charging Flynn for lying to the FBI.”
Since Goodman wrote the piece, Attorney General Bill Barr publicly affirmed that he doesn't see any indication that Obama or Biden did anything illegal.
But Goodman goes on to explain that there is a “Phase One” and a “Phase Two” when it comes to promoting the “Obamagate” theory.
Phase One is where Trump and his allies are now: “Make grossly unfounded claims of misconduct by former and current U.S. officials, such as a Deep State conspiracy to undercut the Trump 2016 campaign and the Trump presidency,’ anticipating a reaction among experts and partisans to challenge those claims.”
And the blueprint for Phase Two, Goodman writes, will be to “reveal true official misconduct that has some, even if limited, connection to the original conspiracy theory, with experts and partisans failing to adequately anticipate or recognize the true misconduct — and some even quick to dismiss it.”
Barr, Goodman anticipates, will be an ally to Trump as he promotes “Obamagate.” And he's key to any implementation of Phase 2.
Goodman warned that critics of Trump and Barr's tactics need to avoid being blindsided and discredited if they assert now that there's no chance any wrongdoing occurred under Obama's watch:
... there has been a rush by many to say that no crime has been credibly alleged, and that no serious wrongdoing by former administration officials has been identified. That’s an oversight, and fails to grapple with a potential outcome: the prospect of well-founded criminal indictments against one or more former officials who leaked the content of the classified intercept of the Dec. 29, 2016 phone call between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Flynn’s identity in that communication.
But he adds:
...there is no evidence that those actions implicate President Barack Obama or Vice President Biden personally, or discredit the legitimacy of the investigations of Russia’s 2016 election interference, the investigation of Trump campaign associates’ support for the Kremlin’s effort, officials’ requests to “unmask” a U.S. person appearing in intelligence reports who turned out to be Flynn, the FBI’s decision to interview Flynn, or the Justice Department’s charging Flynn for lying to the FBI.
“In the final analysis,” Goodman concludes, “‘Obamagate' should be best understood as the scandal in which a president manufactured false accusations against former government officials, including his political rival, using the full power of the Justice Department and Kremlin-style information warfare tactics to orchestrate it.”
On Tuesday, when President Donald Trump was asked to comment on America leading the world in confirmed coronavirus cases, he replied that he views it as a "badge of honor," since it means we must be doing a lot of tests.
Trump's remark drew instant outrage on social media, with some commentators noting the line would make for a devastating attack ad from former Vice President Joe Biden in the fall.
Soccer star Megan Rapinoe revealed in an interview that she's not ruling out an entry into politics with her own candidacy, TMZ Spoors reported.
Speaking to VICE TV's Anand Giridharadas, Rapinoe said: "I'm not totally shutting the door [to the presidency], but it seems wild."
"If I'm going to do it, I want the biggest, baddest post," she added.
When it came to her choices for the presidency, Rapinoe has said she absolutely supports former Vice President Joe Biden, even offering to be his vice president. She turns 35 on July 5, which would make it legal for her to serve as the VP.
But her focus of the VICE interview was on President Donald Trump's leadership.
"We have a white nationalist -- I think -- in the White House," Rapinoe said of the president. "And, the spewing of hate and the other'ing of the rest of the country has only led to more rife between people and more despair and more anxiety and more fear going forward."
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump's officials declassified the full text of the email former ambassador and national security official Susan Rice sent herself on the day of Trump's inauguration, according to Politico.
But several reporters and commentators said that key elements of the text contradict Trump’s conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama sought to corruptly influence the FBI into fabricating charges against incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and derail his administration — a narrative he and his allies have referred to as "Obamagate."
"The email, which memorialized the meeting two weeks after it happened, said Obama wanted to be sure “every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities 'by the book,''" reported Betsy Woodruff Swan. “'The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective,' the email continued. 'He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.'"
This stands in contrast to the idea that Obama wanted the DOJ to politically target Trump or particularly disfavor his allies.
Rice also wrote that then-FBI Director James Comey "worried about sharing classified information with the Trump team because of incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn’s frequent conversations with the Russian ambassador," although Comey had no proof Flynn was giving them classified information.
Despite all of this, according to Politico, "Trump and his allies ... pointed to the document as evidence to claim the Obama administration illegally spied on his campaign. Some of those claims were not particularly subtle. .JOE BIDEN IS GUILTY,. read the subject line of a recent Trump campaign fundraising email."
One longtime Democratic operative decided to spend an entire week consuming nothing but pro-Trump media -- and he came away feeling as though he had traveled to a "parallel universe."
Philippe Reines, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and adviser to Hillary Clinton, writes in The Daily Beast about his experiment spending an entire week watching Fox News, listening to Rush Limbaugh, and reading right-wing blogs such as Gateway Pundit to get an idea of what the average Trump voter was learning about the world around them.
What Reines found was an entire media ecosystem dedicated to downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic, hyping up the Mike Flynn unmasking as the scandal of the century, and relentlessly attacking presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
While he found himself enjoying some of what he watched, heard, and read, he said he found Sean Hannity's radio show "unbearable," and he found it creepy how so many pro-Trump blogs never wavered even once in justifying whatever the president happened to be saying at a given moment.
Most disturbing, according to Reines, was the upstart One America News, which he said was even more aggressive about injecting misinformation into the political discourse than Fox News.
"OAN -- the newest media outlet to join the fray -- is more dangerous than I believed in 2018 when I tweeted that its emergence was not to be ignored," he writes. "It by far creates the most web content. Between the volume and the steady tenor, it can easily feel like one-stop shopping."
In conclusion, Reines writes that he felt tempted to take the president's advice and inject bleach after watching nothing but right-wing news.
"As a State Department official I traveled to 111 countries," he writes. "All felt less foreign than the parallel universe I visited for a week. When it was over I was left with one overarching thought: if someone develops an ingestible disinfectant, I volunteer for clinical trials."
North Carolina Republicans fear the stock-dumping scandal that has landed Sen. Richard Burr under investigation will endanger the state's other GOP senator.
Burr stepped aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week after federal agents seized his cell phone as part of the investigation, but that cloud over his future could also complicate Sen. Thom Tillis' re-election this fall, reported The Daily Beast.
“It don't matter which party you are, but anytime somebody is being under investigation it is going to fallout with everybody that they're associated with,” said Ron Wyatt, chairman of the Iredell County Republican Party. “We've got two senators in North Carolina, so if one is being investigated, rightfully or wrongfully, then it is absolutely going to draw extra criticism and scrutiny on that other person that's in the same party, running for the equal position.”
Burr is under investigation for selling up to $1.7 million in stock after receiving a Senate-only briefing on coronavirus before the pandemic wrecked the markets, and Tillis issued a stern statement after news broke demanding an explanation from the state's senior senator.
"While nobody is surprised that people go to D.C. poor and come out millionaires, it will be utilized to probably drive people away from Tillis," said Chris Weaver, chairman of the Person County GOP. “It’ll be used opportunistically by people opposed to Republicans.”
Democrats are feeling confident that Joe Biden could potentially win the state's growing bloc of swing voters, and they believe the likely Democratic nominee and incumbent Gov. Roy Cooper, also a Democrat, could boost Tillis challenger Cal Cunningham's chances.
“Anything that’s a distraction for a campaign can become fatal,” said one Democratic operative who works on Senate races.
As of late, the president has been holding his fire on Obama Vice President Joe Biden who is the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, using the Justice Department's attempt to dismiss the charges against former Trump adviser Michael Flynn to push an "Obamagate" conspiracy theory --including calling for the former president to be investigated.
According to Robinson, going after the extremely popular Obama is a huge mistake on Trump's part.
"President Trump’s increasingly frantic attempts to smear former president Barack Obama reek of panic. As disgusting as these efforts are, they are likely to backfire, perhaps in spectacular fashion," the columnist began.
Noting that Trump has been presented with internal polls showing him losing to Biden, Robinson stated that Trump appears to have fallen back on the strategy that helped him win in 2016 -- appealing to his follower's racism. And that means going after Obama instead of Biden who is white.
That, in turn, is likely to motivate black voters who are already solidly behind Biden.
Polls show the Republican Party in danger of losing not only the presidency but also the Senate in November, " the columnist explained. "You will recall that if Hillary Clinton had squeezed just a total of 80,000 more votes out of three Democratic strongholds — Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia — she would now be campaigning for reelection and Trump would be just another Twitter troll."
"In those cities, and across the nation, African American turnout in 2016 was lower than Democrats had hoped for and expected. But there is one political figure who has demonstrated an unprecedented ability to bring black voters to the polls in tidal-wave numbers: Obama," he suggested before adding, "In 2008, Obama’s historic triumph, the rate of black voter turnout nationwide essentially equaled white turnout for the first time in history. In 2012, black turnout actually exceeded white turnout, 66.6 percent to 64.1 percent, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center."
Writing he doesn't see "Trump’s tirades and tweets as anything resembling a strategy," Robinson said there is nothing tactical about the president's attack on Obama -- it's "personal."
"Maybe Trump just cannot abide the fact that Obama is a Nobel laureate, respected around the world, while he has had to endure being snickered at by world leaders and portrayed as hapless and ignorant by the 'fake news' media he claims to hate yet compulsively devours. Increasingly, his imagined victimizer is Obama himself. Trump even tries to blame Obama for his own administration’s botched response to a disease that did not exist when Obama was in office," he wrote before concluding, "I thought everyone knew you don’t tug on Superman’s cape. But apparently Trump still thinks you can get somewhere by spitting into the wind."
President Donald Trump is pouring campaign funds into battleground states he won in 2016, and MSNBC's John Heilemann said that should be a "flashing red warning sign" for his re-election chances.
The "Morning Joe" contributor told host Joe Scarborough that recent indicators show the president is concerned about losing support from his base, which he said was dangerous position for an incumbent.
"Think about the 'Obamagate' thing, Joe, all the stuff you're talking about," Heilemann said. "We talked earlier about the notion of elections, especially with incumbents, won or lost in the spring of the election year, not the fall. You're Donald Trump -- what's the Obamagate thing? About in all of these conspiracy theories, purely about your base, right? All base reinforcements, not about expanding your vote."
"Axiomatically, if you're an incumbent president in the spring of the election year and you're in trouble worried about your base, as opposed to having your base locked down and trying to expand your vote, you're in trouble," he added.
The Trump campaign purchased TV spots for negative ads against Joe Biden last week, and Heilemann said the markets they chose were revealing.
"Where he's on the air last week, was for the sixth core battleground states, right?" Heilemann said. "Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan -- those are the six we know both sides will fight for, and then they're on in Iowa, right? The seventh state, so in the spring of Donald Trump's re-election, he's putting money into a state he won by nine points in 2016. That's a dangerous time for the Trump team and then you look at those battleground states. The markets on the air -- Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, in the panhandle of Florida."
"Joe, you tell me what it means for Donald Trump in May that he needs to reinforce, shore up his base in the panhandle of Florida in may of 2020?" he added. "That is a flashing red warning sign, not just they're in trouble, but know they're in trouble."
