Tag Archives: Elizabeth Warren

This Matters, Although It’s Not the Only Thing

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From Paul Krugman in the NY Times:

“Wednesday’s Democratic debate was far more informative than previous debates. What we learned, in particular, was that as a presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg is a great businessman — and that Elizabeth Warren remains a force to be reckoned with.

Both lessons ran very much counter to the narrative that the news media has been telling in recent weeks. On one side, there has been a palpable eagerness on the part of some news organizations and many pundits to elevate Bloomberg; on the other side, complaints by Warren supporters about her “erasure” from news coverage and polling aren’t wrong.

What does all this mean for the nomination? I have no idea. But maybe the Warren-Bloomberg confrontation will help refocus discussion away from so-called Medicare for all — which isn’t going to be enacted, no matter who wins — to an issue where it matters a lot which Democrat prevails. Namely, are we going to do anything to rein in the financialization of the U.S. economy?

During the U.S. economy’s greatest generation — the era of rapid, broadly shared growth that followed World War II — Wall Street was a fairly peripheral part of the picture. When people thought about business leaders, they thought about people running companies that actually made things, not people who got rich through wheeling and dealing.

But that all changed in the 1980s, largely thanks to financial deregulation. Suddenly the big bucks came from buying and selling companies as opposed to running them.

In many cases, these financial deals saddled companies with crippling levels of debt, often ending in bankruptcy and job destruction — a process that continues to this day. There was also an epidemic of financial fraud and racketeering, exemplified by the career of Michael Milken, the junk-bond king Donald Trump just pardoned.

And the financial sector itself doubled as a share of the economy, which meant that it was pulling lots of capital and many smart people away from productive activities.

For there is no evidence that Wall Street’s mega-expansion made the rest of the economy more efficient. On the contrary, growth in family incomes slowed down as finance rose — although a few people became immensely rich. And the runaway growth of finance set the stage for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

It also made Michael Bloomberg a billionaire.

Now, I wasn’t being sarcastic in calling Bloomberg a great businessman. He is. And to his credit, he himself hasn’t, as far as I know, engaged in destructive financial wheeling and dealing. Instead, he got rich by selling equipment to destructive wheeler-dealers.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to the famous Bloomberg Terminal, a proprietary computer system that gives subscribers real-time access to large quantities of financial data. This access is incredibly expensive — a subscription costs around $24,000 a year. But it’s a must-have in the financial industry, because traders with Bloomberg Terminals can react to market events a few minutes faster than those without.

It’s an extremely profitable business. But is it good for the economy? No.

After all, does getting financial information a few minutes earlier do anything significant to improve real-world business decisions that affect jobs and productivity? Surely not. Bloomberg has, in effect, made his billions off a financial arms race that costs vast sums but leaves everyone pretty much back where they started.

Which brings me to Elizabeth Warren.

Warren stumbled badly, making herself a long shot for the nomination, by trying to appease supporters of Bernie Sanders. She endorsed proposals for radical health care reform that have almost no chance of becoming reality, and she was raked over the coals about paying for those proposals even though Sanders himself has offered few clues about his own plans.

But before all that, Warren had made a name for herself as a crusader against financial industry fraud and excess.

It wasn’t just talk. One key piece of the reforms instituted after the 2008 financial crisis, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was Warren’s brainchild. Furthermore, by all accounts the bureau was wildly successful, saving ordinary families billions, until the Trump administration set about eviscerating it.

And here’s the thing: Financial reform, unlike health care, is an area in which it might make a big difference which Democrat becomes president. It’s true that other candidates — including Bloomberg! — have endorsed Warren-type reforms. But it is, I think, fair to ask how committed they would be in practice, and also whether they would squander their political capital on unwinnable fights, which is my big concern about Sanders.

Again, aside from the clear damage to Bloomberg, I have no idea how or if Wednesday’s debate will affect the Democratic race. But it may have helped remind Democrats that corruption, fraud and the excesses of Wall Street in particular can be potent political issues — especially against a president who is both personally corrupt and so obviously a friend to fraudsters.”

Unquote.

The title of Professor Krugman’s column is “Warren, Bloomberg and What Really Matters”. I’m sure he’d agree that issues like climate change and poverty really matter too, but he makes an excellent point that relates to Warren’s fundamental message: we will only make progress on things that really matter if we make our democracy stronger and address the corruption in Washington.

Those were the goals of the first bill the House Democrats passed in 2019, H. R. 1, a bill “to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics and strengthen ethics rules for public servants”. They are also the goals at the top of the list of plans on Warren’s site: “End Washington corruption and fix our democracy”.

Little will get done unless we fix and enforce the rules. After we elect enough people who want to.

This Happened Tonight

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This was posted before tonight’s Democratic “debate”:

Here’s a few comments from people who watched tonight:

https://twitter.com/HeatherMatarazz/status/1230329854089785344

We need someone on our side in the White House, someone exactly like Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Loving Elizabeth Warren Means Having a Plan If America Breaks Your Heart

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That’s not exactly the title of Monica Hesse’s article in The Washington Post. The Post’s title is “Loving Elizabeth Warren Means Having a Plan For When America Breaks Your Heart”. I’m not ready for the “when” yet.

Quote:

Within three minutes of getting in line for an Elizabeth Warren rally, I’ve been handed a business card for a woman-empowerment organization called Brass Ovaries, and the founder, my linemate, has drawn me into a conversation about Warren that has begun to feel like the only conversation to have about Warren: the kind that’s about hope, and despair, and how it’s possible to love America and also want to throw it out the window.

“I went to one of her events before and I gave her one of my Brass Ovaries pins,” Michelle Johnson says. “And I started to explain how it’s about fed-up women — but she said, ‘Oh, I get it,’ and I said, ‘I knew you would,’ because Elizabeth always gets it, doesn’t she?”

This is the first part of the Warren conversation. It involves dreaming of a version of the country where leaders are excellent at explaining certain things, like the current shortcomings of health care and child care; and where they don’t need other things explained to them at all, like what it feels like to be an exasperated woman.

But Michelle, who plans to vote for Warren in her state’s Tuesday primary, also finds herself having a second, more maddening part of the Warren conversation. When she told her mother that she thought Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) would be a good running mate, her mother blanched. “America isn’t ready for two women on the ticket,” she said, then added that America might not even be ready for one.

That part is about fear. It’s about fearing a version of America that was certified as the real version four Novembers ago, when Hillary Clinton lost to D—- T—-. Or so people keep saying.

It’s a conversation that isn’t really about Elizabeth Warren at all; it’s about the rest of us.

There we were in New Hampshire, in the exhaust fumes of Iowa’s caucuses, which had been such a spectacular fiasco that Warren’s supporters in Keene now believed it was up to them to sort things out and, ideally, to sort things out for Warren. For all the chaos in Des Moines, one thing was clear: Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg wrestling through a tie with a quarter of the votes apiece.

And Warren, who had topped polls in October, had finished a distant third.

This alone didn’t faze her New Hampshire supporters. She’d outpaced the erstwhile front-runner Joe Biden, after all, who took his fourth-place finish as a “gut punch.” Plus, while Iowa was “a bunch of people running around in a gymnasium,” as one voter here put it, their state’s election was a civilized primary, and was also in the Massachusetts senator’s backyard.

But then a Boston Globe New Hampshire prediction came out. It had Warren polling at 13 percent in the Granite State. Behind Sanders. Behind a rising Buttigieg. In the loam with Biden.

Then Warren’s campaign announced that it was pulling ad dollars in Nevada and South Carolina.

Then it was time to really think about Elizabeth Warren. Which really means sorting through what version of America you believe in — the one where we are ready to vote a woman into the Oval Office, or the one where we aren’t — and whether it’s the believing, one way or another, that makes your version true.

“The thing is, I can picture her up there on the debate stage with T—-, and she’s debating him to pieces,” says Deb Wilson, a retired New Hampshire educator. “To pieces.”

“We need her,” says Wendy Keith, a social worker. “We need her so badly. We need someone that strong and that smart.”

“I think having a woman in the White House — I think she’ll care for us,” adds Esther Scheidel, standing next to Wendy.

“Of course, I’m not voting for her because she’s a woman …” another supporter chimes in a few minutes later, having overheard the earlier conversation…“Of course, I’m not voting for her because she’s a woman; I don’t even think of her as a woman,” another supporter chimes in a few minutes later, having overheard the earlier conversation…

It’s a preposterous, relatable, vexing statement. It’s impossible not to see Warren as a woman. Many of her policies were explicitly shaped by that identity, as she readily acknowledges. Is “not thinking of Warren as a woman” supposed to be a compliment?

What I think this man means is that ever since 2016, we have been trapped in a vague debate about electability, and whether it’s only men have who have it. In the fog of uncertainty over Hillary Clinton’s complicated defeat (she neglected Wisconsin, she used a private email server, she was a “nasty woman” slain by weaponized misogyny, she still won the popular vote), the debate has mutated into an abstract panic about whether any woman can get elected in 2020.

Trying to ignore Elizabeth Warren’s femaleness is an attempt to neatly sidestep the whole problem. To pretend that we have the capacity to vote entirely on merits. To behave as if each election can happen in a vacuum, uninformed by the elections and the hundreds of years of history that came before it.

Can you ignore that while Pete Buttigieg might be a millennial wunderkind, a female 38-year-old mayor of a midsize town would have a hard time being taken as seriously if she up and ran for president? Can you ignore that Bernie Sanders’s shouting is seen as righteous but if Kamala Harris ever raised her voice, it was seen as anger? How did Joe Biden automatically get to wear the cloak of electability for nearly a full year before Iowa tore it off?

…. These days, of course, people don’t say, “I won’t vote for a woman”; they say, “I’m scared my moderate father-in-law needs a man on the ballot to motivate him to the polls.”

This isn’t progress. This is treating the election as a psychic reading.

“I’m leaning toward Warren,” says Frank Brownell, a retired editor who relocated to Keene from Upstate New York. “I’m not a big Buttigieg fan. But I want to pick someone to win.” He sighed, deeply troubled. “Women have such a burden. I actually wish women ran the world.”

If he wished women ran things, I asked him, was there a reason he was still merely leaning toward Warren? Here was a woman he liked who was offering to run the country, and he literally had the chance to give her the job.

“I’m going to vote for her,” he decided, then waffled. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

His qualms weren’t with Warren. He loved Warren. His qualms were about everyone else, everyone else who might not be ready to vote for a woman. “I’m hopeful but I’m not hopeful. I don’t think America is what I always hoped it was.”

Here are some things that happen at Elizabeth Warren events: Warren sprints onstage, much tinier and slighter than she appears on television, to Dolly Parton singing “9 to 5.” She shares that she was her parents’ late-in-life baby, and her mother never stopped referring to her as “the surprise.” She talks about her first marriage, and then she jokes that it’s never good when you have to number your marriages. She tells a story about a toaster, and the toaster becomes a metaphor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she helped create, and the CFBP becomes a metaphor for how things can change, but only if you are willing to believe they can change.

You have to believe; that’s the key. You have to jump into the void of possibility. Ready or not.

She is optimistic and upbeat, almost comically so, as if she is Elizabeth Warren playing SNL’s Kate McKinnon playing Elizabeth Warren. She is empathetic in a way that could feel phony if you’re not accustomed to that sort of thing in a politician.

At one event in New Hampshire, a little girl approaches the microphone, accompanied by her mother.

“My name is Elizabeth,” she says.

“Your name is Elizabeth?” Warren reels back. “Oh wow! Double Elizabeths! I feel the power.”

“I’m seven years old.”

Warren pauses, deadpan. “I’m . . . not.”

“I want to know if you will close the camps,” the 7-year-old Elizabeth asks.

Here, Warren’s response grows impossibly soft and intimate, so soft that it feels almost indecent to listen to, like this has become a private conversation. The camps in Texas where they are holding children? Warren asks. The 7-year-old nods. Those camps.

“Yes,” Warren says. “Yes.”

And then people in the audience tear up because in that moment they did seem to believe things could change, that Warren was the best candidate, that others thought so too and just needed to be convinced that it’s safe to vote for her. That there’s nothing to fear in nominating this woman but fear itself.

“If everyone is trying to play that [electability] game,” offers Nancy Loschiavo, a Warren supporter, “then what has our country come to?”

But, Loschiavo hastens to add, she’ll absolutely vote for whoever the nominee is.

Everyone at the Warren events hastens to add that.

A survey had come out a few days before, asking each candidate’s supporters whether, assuming their own first choice dropped out, they would vote for whoever was the Democratic nominee. Some supporters professed a my-guy-or-bust attitude… But Warren’s supporters, more than anyone else, said they’d vote for whomever they needed to vote for.

One way to read this is that Warren doesn’t have crossover appeal: She appeals only to the folks who would have voted Democratic no matter what. Another way to read this is that her supporters are as practical as they are passionate: There’s an outcome they’d prefer, but if it doesn’t happen, they’ll move on to the next best thing. They’ve got a plan for that.

After talking to enough of her fans, I think it’s the second explanation. The second explanation, mixed with something deeper:

Loving Elizabeth Warren means planning for America to break your heart.

It means watching her tweet out an optimistic message after Iowa, and then watching how all of the early replies instruct her to defer to Sanders and drop out…

It means listening to people complain about her schoolmarmishness and quietly wondering what was so wrong, exactly, with sounding like a schoolmarm. What’s so wrong with sounding like a grandmother? What’s so wrong with her animated hand gestures, her cardigans, her preparedness, her laugh, her husband, her brain, her work, her femaleness, her voice?

It means hoping things will break your way, but accepting that they probably wouldn’t, because America never quite seems to work that way, does it?

America doesn’t just render a verdict on the acceptability of women and their clothes and laughs every four years; America does that every day, in a lot of different ways. That’s the reason Michelle Johnson feels moved to make “brass ovaries” pins, and the reason Elizabeth Warren doesn’t have to ask her to explain why.

“The biggest reluctance I hear is ‘Can a woman win?’ ” says Ron Jones, who … has been canvassing for Warren and had come to see her speak in a Nashua community college gym. “I point out that a woman has already won,” he said, referring to Clinton’s popular-vote victory.

“I tell them, look at other countries with successful female leaders,” says Harris. “I tell them, look at successful female CEOs.” … Or just look around you….

Inside the gym, attendees filled the folding plastic chairs, and when those were full, leaned against the walls, parkas draped over their forearms. Seatmates introduced themselves to each other and talked about why they liked Warren, and why there were still reasons to be hopeful, maybe.

“I just want someone to bring energy back,” M.K. Hayes tells the fellow New Hampshirites sitting next to her. “And with her, there’s no cynicism, but there’s urgency. With her, you can say, ‘I’m liberal and I’m proud.’ ”

Her husband likes Warren, too, but he’s not here today. He likes her, she explains, but he might not vote for her; he’s not sure it’s the practical thing to do.

“I am trying to get him to vote with his heart,” Hayes says. “I am trying to get him to have the courage to risk.”

The music in the gym gets a little louder. When “9 to 5” comes on, Warren sprints onstage. She talks about her family. She talks about her toaster. She says she is running a campaign from the heart, because she believes 2020 is “our moment.”

“I believe in that America,” Elizabeth Warren says, and then she tries to convince the audience that they believe in that America, too.

Unquote.

Going All In

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Tom Sullivan of Hullabaloo shares a theory:

Not even overwhelming public outcry is likely to move Senate Republicans to waver in support of their Leader, nor from helping cover up his crimes. Last night in a Facebook post, historian Rick Perlstein … offered a theory for why:

Germans who left behind evidence during World War II that they knew … committing war crimes was wrong … were more likely to … commit war crimes. This was because (1) they had passed a point of no return, and (2) the motivation became even more frenzied devotion to “winning” as the state defined it, because they realized that if Germany lost, they would be punished–because, again, they knew they were breaking the law.

…. now that all these Republican “moderates” are on the record advancing what Jerold Nadler correctly call a coverup with their votes again evidence and witnesses, it becomes all the more important for T—-ism to prevail so they never have to face the music for their sins–and they may work with ever greater frenzy to make sure T—-ism never loses. To liberals who think to themselves, “The House managers’ presentation is so airtight and inarguable, surely one of these Republicans will break”: well, the very air-tightness might have the opposite effect. They may commit themselves ever more strongly to the ratchet toward dictatorship. Because if T—- loses, they can now imagine themselves in the figurative dock.

A key difference between Perlstein’s example and ours is Germans had seen punishment after World War I, that is, in recent collective memory. They had reason to fear accountability as a real prospect. Republicans over the last half century, on the other hand, saw Gerald Ford pardon Nixon, Reagan dodge impeachment, and George H.W. Bush pardon six of Reagan’s Iran-Contra co-conspirators.

They saw the administration of George W. Bush lie the country into war and commit war crimes with impunity courtesy, in part, of Barack Obama’s wanting to “look forward,” not back. They witnessed the financial industry bring the world economy to its knees and go unchastened, only to get richer and more powerful courtesy, again, of Barack Obama’s wanting to “look forward,” not back.

Yet, even if they fear no punishment, Republicans may have reached their own “point of no return.”

Meanwhile, … the rich just get richer, nonwhite people get more numerous, and T—-’s base gets more anxious [that] its accustomed social and political dominance will be lost to the multicultural ….

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has pledged if elected to “investigate corruption during the T—- administration and to hold government officials accountable for illegal activity.” That ought to have at least sent shivers up some spines. Because Warren appears to mean it. First she has to get to the White House.

In justifying his Iran-Contra pardons, Bush argued that the prosecutions amounted to “the criminalization of policy differences.” Expect to hear that phrase again soon. William Barr sits atop Trump’s Department of Justice just as he did under Bush 41. As things sit now, Republicans and the donor class have little reason to fear punishment.

The rest of us had best get busy giving them reason to.

Unquote.

Obvious Crime and Possible Punishment

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I still think the Democrats should have impeached the Toddler for obstruction of justice as soon as Robert Mueller delivered his report. Mueller said the president would have been indicted for obstructing the Russia investigation, except that he’s president.

Better late than never though. The two articles of impeachment now before the Senate are supported by so much evidence, it’s only Republican fealty to their Dear Leader that will keep him in the White House. That he abused his power for personal gain, and that he committed a crime in doing so, is obvious, despite his interference with the House’s investigation. That the president has obstructed Congress by not turning over a single subpoenaed document and by ordering everyone and his sister not to testify is as plain as the orange cast of his face.

Impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff opened today’s proceedings, speaking for two hours and twenty minutes. He was brilliant:

Jennifer Rubin wonders if some Republican senators were exposed to the evidence for the first time:

Given how firmly some Republican senators are ensconced in the right-wing news bubble, and how determined they are to avoid hearing facts that undercut their partisan views, it is possible many of them are hearing the facts on which impeachment is based for the first time. [Schiff] took them through in meticulous detail the scheme President T—– devised to pressure Ukraine to help him smear former vice president Joe Biden.

Schiff was confronting not only the public but also the Republicans with an indisputable factual account for which T—–’s lawyers have no answer. So how are they to acquit?

… Nope, the claim there is no evidence of a corrupt quid pro quo is unsustainable; in fact, there is overwhelming and uncontradicted evidence. Nope, you do not want to adopt the crackpot theory that abuse of power is not impeachable. Schiff is leaving them no legitimate basis on which to acquit. He mocked [White House Chief of Staff] Mulvaney’s comment that we should just “get over it,” challenging the senators to tell their constituents that none of this mattered.

And that is what the trial is about. It’s about making clear to the entire country that Trump did exactly what he is accused of, but that his own party, suffering from political cowardice and intellectual corruption, do not have the nerve to stop him.

Rubin’s colleague at The Washington Post, Paul Waldman, reminds us how we got here:

President T—– is on trial in the Senate, but so is the entire Republican Party. And 1,300 miles away in Guantanamo there’s another trial taking place, one that implicates the [Grand Old Party] just as much.

In these two trials we can see the complete moral wreckage of their party, and how they’ve carried the country down with them.

What does the trial of a group of alleged terrorists have to do with impeachment? When seen from the perspective not of one president but of what Republicans ask all of us to accept and how they frame their own moral culpability, they are waypoints on the same devolutionary road.

To understand how, we’ll have to briefly revisit one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history, the torture program initiated by the George W. Bush administration as part of its “War on Terror.” After the September 11 attacks, the administration began scooping up suspected members of al-Qaeda all over the world and interrogating them to stop future attacks. Worried that they weren’t getting enough information, they decided that the prisoners should be tortured. The problem was that no one knew how to go about it.

So the CIA hired two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to design a torture program. Neither had ever interrogated a prisoner in their lives, but they somehow convinced the government to pay them $81 million to devise a series of techniques they essentially cribbed from a 1950s-era military program meant to teach service members how to survive the kinds of torture American POWs had endured at the hands of China and North Korea during the Korean War.

From the beginning, the Bush administration attempted to minimize what it was doing, portraying it as the gentle application of pressure to encourage prisoners to be more forthcoming. They devised the euphemism “enhanced interrogation” as though it were some kind of sophisticated program….

The truth of what went on was utterly horrific….

The use of torture was a clear violation of both U.S. law and international treaties to which the country is a signatory. So the Bush administration’s lawyers drew up legal opinions with new and bizarre ideas to justify their actions; one such document claimed that if the torture wasn’t so unbearable that the victim went into organ failure, then it wasn’t technically torture….

Mitchell and Jessen are now defending the program in pretrial proceedings in the case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other al-Qaeda defendants. If you’re wondering why Mohammad is on trial almost 17 years after he was captured, it’s in large part because convicting him in court — where rules still apply — has been complicated by the fact that he was tortured for so long. But as Mitchell said on the stand Tuesday, “We were trying to save American lives.”

So what does this have to do with the Trump impeachment? In the early 2000s, a Republican administration and nearly the entirety of the Republican Party discarded what we assumed was an almost-universal moral position, that torture is wrong. But when they did so, they felt it necessary to clothe their ethical abdication in a combination of euphemism, bogus legal justifications, and fear-mongering.

Consider where we are today. The Republican Party is in a loosely analogous situation: The president of the United States did something awful, and they are attempting to defend it. But this time around, they can barely muster the energy to dress up what he did in a covering of moral argument.

Their defenses of Trump’s behavior are halfhearted at best. Instead, they’re finding the safest harbor in arguing that sure, Trump did what he was accused of, and if you don’t like it, you can shove it….

But here’s a key difference: You can’t argue that Trump’s actions, like Bush’s, were in some way a misguided attempt to save U.S. lives or even serve U.S. interests. The point of Republicans’ final moral descent is to protect Trump himself. And that of course is why he’s being impeached: Not just because he coerced a foreign leader, but because he did so to serve his own personal interests.

Republicans now believe that if T—– can get away with this, then he should get away with this. There are no more principles, not even ones they feel they need to pretend to believe in. There is only [Dear Leader]; he alone is what they serve.

The story of the Republican embrace of torture reminds us that T—– didn’t create the moral vacuum that lies within the [Republican Party]. He exploited it to get elected and counts on it to survive, but it was there before. And their pathetic sycophancy toward him shows that there are absolutely no actions they will not defend, even those done for the worst possible reasons.

As bad as this is, we can choose a different president, a much better president, less than ten months from now. Charles Pierce of Esquire called attention to news very few people noticed on Tuesday [Pierce always adds an asterisk to “administration” and “president”, when referring to T—– and his crowd, for obvious reasons]:

The biggest news about this corrupt administration* was not made in the Senate chamber on Tuesday. It was made out on the campaign trail by Senator Professor [Elizabeth] Warren. From CNBC:

“If we are to move forward to restore public confidence in government and deter future wrongdoing, we cannot simply sweep this corruption under the rug in a new administration,” Warren wrote in [her] plan. The progressive Democrat cited a report by a nonpartisan good government group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which found “unprecedented” corruption in the Trump administration, as well as other reports of self-dealing among administration officials and the president’s family members.

“That’s why I will direct the Justice Department to establish a task force to investigate violations by Trump administration officials of federal bribery laws, insider trading laws, and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws, and give that task force independent authority to pursue any substantiated criminal and civil violations,” she said.

Make no mistake. If we ever are going to repair the damage done by this administration*, it is going to have to include a thorough fumigation of every corner of the national executive. The first big mistake made by President Barack Obama was his determination to look forward, and not back. Too many of the criminals working for the last worst president in history skated. Too many Wall Street vandals got away clean. That cannot be allowed to happen again. The corruption of this administration* is unprecedented. It demands this kind of unprecedented response.

…. we might as well look to the future, because the present is too dismal to contemplate.