On Thursday, Dmitriy N. Andreychenko walked into a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, wearing full body armor and carrying a semiautomatic handgun loaded with one round in its chamber and an “AR-style rifle.” He was also in possession of 100 rounds of ammunition. Andreychenko, aged 20, says he had no intention of hurting anybody. He was just making a video of himself swaggering around armed to the teeth in a Walmart to reaffirm his 2nd Amendment rights, or something.

Shoppers did not think well of Andreychenko’s stunt. They panicked and stampeded out of the store. Fortunately, there are no reports anyone was trampled. Another store patron, identified only as an off-duty fireman, pulled a gun on Andreychenko and held him until police came to take him into custody.

Like a lot of “red” states Missouri is pretty much anything goes as far as guns are concerned — carry what you want pretty much anywhere you want. Missouri also has the sixth highest rate of firearm deaths in the nation. The state motto should be changed to “The Shoot-Me State.” There was an open question whether Andreychenko would be charged with a crime, since state law allows him to openly carry lots of loaded firearms as long as he’s not doing it in a “threatening manner.”

But, apparently, a judge decided that what he did was threatening enough. Andreychenko has been charged with making a terrorist threat in the second degree, a Class E felony punishable by up to 4 years in prison. It’s not clear whether this charge was based on anything in Andreychenko’s cell-phone video or captured by store surveillance cameras, or the fact that he obviously just plain scared the stuffing out of a lot of people and caused a panicked evacuation of the store.

Andreychenko claimed he did not anticipate customers’ reactions, a Friday statement from a Springfield police officer says.

“This is Missouri,” he told investigators, according to law enforcement. “I understand if we were somewhere else like New York or California, people would freak out.”

Andreychenko’s wife and sister tried to talk him out of pulling the stunt. The wife allegedly told the police that Andreychenko is an “immature boy.” Yeah, that marriage is doomed.

This also points to the obvious stupidity of “open carry” laws. It’s fine to say that you can carry lots of guns as long as you don’t do so in a threatening manner. But the very act of openly carrying weapons is threatening in most contexts. Put another way, why else would somebody show up in a public place brandishing weapons if not, at the very least, to intimidate people? That’s really the whole point, isn’t it? It’s a dominance display, or at least an attempt at one:

Josh Marshall:

We should recognize these actions as precursor acts to mass shootings.

Indeed, yesterday the FBI announced the arrest of 23 year old Conor Climo for plotting to stage a mass shooting or bomb attack at either a synagogue or gay night club in Las Vegas. Three years ago he was in the news in Las Vegas as one of these self-styled open carry activists who’d decided he would patrol local neighborhoods uninvited with an AR-15 and various other military paraphrenalia. Here’s a local news report from September 2016. Police said he what he was doing was legal so long as he didn’t go within a certain distance of schools or certain government buildings.

Yep, the guy in the 2016 news story is the very same Conor Climo that the FBI just arrested. Back to Josh Marshall:

This isn’t just one example. It’s fairly obvious that anyone who carries off one of these stunts is worth monitoring for future mass casualty attacks. Despite the claims about acclimating people to the ‘normalness’ of being around random civilians with military style weapons and the language of “rights”, the obvious motivation behind these stunts is to feel power as evidenced by the ability to scare and terrorize people. That is to say, to experience the fear or terror or sense of powerlessness others feel when someone they don’t know or have any reason to trust is strutting around with an AR-15. The language and politics of extreme gun rights activists is consistently highly similar to those of far-right or white nationalist groups. They are of a piece both psychologically and ideologically.

I don’t expect the hard-right Missouri legislature to do a dadblamed thing about the phenomenon of play-pretend commandos shopping in Walmart. That would be for the best; the whackjob Texas legislature likes to respond to mass shooting by making sure the next shooter has an easier time arming himself by making their already absurdly loose gun laws even looser.

Folks, this is not freedom. Having to live among heavily armed Men With Issues whose personalities are somewhere on the Bozo spectrum is not my idea of freedom.  Further, if your “freedom” hinges on having to intimidate and dominate other law-abiding citizens, then your definition of “freedom” leaves a lot to be desired. And the “gun rights” crowd has a long history of using arms and intimidation to stomp on everyone else’s freedoms, especially freedom of speech when people speak up for gun control.

Charles Pierce wrote back in 2013,

The Republican party, a number of timid Democrats, and the conservative “movement” have played footsie with dangerous woodland characters for far too long. This stuff can be used, but it cannot be fully controlled. This is not political debate. This is empowered, enabled paranoia, with firearms. This is not an exercise in democracy. This is a little touch of Munich, 1923 come to the forested exurbs. This stuff can be used, but it cannot be fully controlled, and something very bad is going to happen.

Something very bad has happened a lot, and it keeps getting worse.

The subtitle of this post is “Who took Epstein off suicide watch?”

Like all federal prisons, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan has a suicide prevention program designed for inmates who are at risk of taking their own lives.

After an apparent attempt three weeks ago, Jeffrey Epstein — the financier who was at the facility awaiting trial on charges he sexually abused dozens of girls — was a prime candidate.

Yet Mr. Epstein, 66, was not on suicide watch when he hanged himself and his body was found in his cell early on Saturday, raising questions about the steps officials took after the first incident to keep him from harming himself.

The New York Times article linked goes on to explain how these decisions usually are made but sheds no light on who made the call in Epstein’s case. “The federal Bureau of Prisons did not immediately respond to requests for information,” it says.

But, gee, who is in charge of the criminal justice system these days? And who has a history of interceding in the prison sentences of, um, certain convicts?

Nobody in the U.S.A. believes that Epstein alone was responsible for his death. The Right is certain that Hillary Who Can Bend Time and Space to Her Evil Will Clinton, She Who Is Behind All Nefarious Plots, ordered the death to protect Bill. The Left, of course, is very certain the person being protected is Trump and/or someone close to him. But there are a great many people with money and power with a keen interest in this case. Charles Pierce:

How in the hell do they let this happen? The guy was incarcerated in the Manhattan Correctional Center. He already had made one try. He had to be on suicide watch. And the suicide happens the day after a massive document dump in which a woman who said she was one of Epstein’s victims implicates an entire brigade of celebrity “clients,” up to an including some European royalty? There almost can’t be a dog more reluctant to hunt than this one.

A whole bunch of Somebodies need to get fired behind this. Beyond it, of course, a thousand conspiracy theories will now bloom across all the Intertoobz. The other people involved have to be nervous. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged accomplice who has yet to be charged, has to be looking over her shoulder. Is she looking over her shoulder to see if the FBI is back there, or to see if something darker is closing in? This country is losing what’s left of its mind.

So many people have been implicated in this scandal that I don’t believe Epstein’s death will end it, but it might take the criminal justice procedings off the front pages. I’m sure we’ll learn more eventually.

William Saletan makes some interesting points at Slate. Among other things, he notes that today’s white nationalists seem to be claiming they must dominate America not because they are superior to those other races, but because they aren’t.

Racist terrorists who have left behind manifestos or other writings—Dylann Roof (Charleston, 2015), Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh, 2018), John Earnest (Poway, California, 2019), and others—generally regard whites as victims. That’s their standard excuse for murder: that they were acting in self-defense. They’ve fretted about “ethnic replacement,” “demographic annihilation,” and “white genocide.” Crusius claimed to be fighting a “Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me,” he wrote. “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

The alleged El Paso shooter, Patrick Crusius, actually wrote that whites were threatened  “as stronger and/or more appealing cultures overtake weaker and/or undesirable ones.” In other words, he was less about white supremacy and more about white preservation. The “invasion” of nonwhite immigrants would overwhelm “white culture,” whatever Crusius imagines that is. Further, he fears whites themselves would disappear though intermarriage.

I find the culture thing annoying. In the realm of the fine arts, “white” culture is more or less European culture, which includes Spain. Your average wingnut wouldn’t know a work by Murillo or Velazquez from one by Rembrandt, and wouldn’t care. So it’s folk and popular culture that concerns them. Apparently wingnuts feel oppressed by mariachi bands, which is a damn shame because mariachi music makes me happy. If mariachis don’t cheer you up, there’s something wrong with you. And dare I say — La Bamba?

And speaking of invasions, let us not forget that Texas used to be a state of Mexico. But I digress.

So we’ve got these pathetic weenies who feel oppressed by frijoles and accoustic guitar music and are terrified their supposedly recessive DNA will be wiped out by aggressive, curly-haired dominatrix DNA from someplace not European. And these bozos think they deserve to be protected and preserved, why, exactly?

An article at Psychology Today on the Psychology of Racism says, “racism (and xenophobia of all kinds) … is primarily a psychological trait — more specifically, a psychological defense mechanism generated by feelings of insecurity and anxiety.” Well, of course it is.

In other words, racism — and xenophobia of any kind — is a symptom of psychological ill-health. It is a sign of a lack of psychological integration, a lack of self-esteem and inner security. Psychologically healthy people with a stable sense of self and strong inner security are not racist, because they have no need to strengthen their sense of self through group identity. They have no need to define themselves in distinction to — and in conflict with — others.

Do read the whole article, it’s quite good. So, your average racist is an individual with a badly integrated personality, low self-esteem and a deep sense of insecurity. Note that none of this rises to the level of “mental illness,” unless you want to define half the population as “mentally ill.” Marching around with tiki torches and assault weapons makes them feel stronger. I would add that men who are abusive of women have similar issues.

These specimens see themselves as big, strong men, but they aren’t strong at all. They are armored. They are defensive. People who go through life armored, whether with weapons or just belligerence, are weak people. Genuinely strong people don’t need armor except on a battlefield.

Trump is a very armored man, I have noticed. He is all belligerence and self-defensiveness. He is so insecure he wouldn’t allow press to cover his recent visits to Dayton and El Paso, but the White House public relations people assure us Trump was “greeted like a rock star.” Sure he was. And then there’s this:

While visiting a hospital in El Paso, Texas on Wednesday after a mass shooting that left 22 people dead, President Donald Trump found time to boast about the crowd size at a campaign rally he held in the city several months ago.

Trump was meeting with a team of medical staffers at the University Medical Center, where eight victims of the shooting are still in recovery, when he suddenly brought up the rally he held in El Paso (for which his campaign still hasn’t paid back its debt of over $400,000 to the city).

“I was here three months ago and we made a speech,” he said before shaking the hand of a hospital employee who said he was at the front row of that rally (which was held in February, not three months ago).

“That was some crowd,” Trump bragged. “And we had twice the number outside.”

That led to a tangent about 2020 Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke and the counter-protest he had led on the day of Trump’s rally.

“And then you had this crazy Beto,” he continued. “Beto had like 400 people in the parking lot. They said his crowd was wonderful. But we had some—”

Trump then interrupted himself to admire a hospital worker’s Trump-themed socks.

“Oh wow! Look at that,” he exclaimed. “Don’t tell it to the press because they won’t even believe it.”

I started to say Trump must have intestines of jello, but even jello beats whatever he’s got. Total wimp.

Here’s a headline from the New York Times that ought to give us pause:

Frankly, this one scares me even more, from the Washington Post:

Trump is increasingly relying on himself — not his aides — in trade war with China

If it appears the Trump Administration is veering even more out of control, that’s probably because it is. Anyone in the administration with half a brain has been fired or forced to resign. We’re now down to the hard-core morons and the Moron in Chief, Trump himself.

This is from the Ready to Rumble article:

The swings in financial markets Monday are hard to justify in narrow terms. A slightly cheaper Chinese currency shouldn’t have huge consequences for the global economy. Rather, investors are coming to grips with the reality that the trade war is escalating and spreading into the global currency market.

While the drop in the stock market gets the attention — the S&P is down 5.8 percent in the last week — it is global bond markets that are flashing the most worrying signs about the outlook for growth in the United States and much of the world. Ten-year Treasury bonds yielded 1.72 percent at Monday’s close, down from 2.06 percent a week earlier — a sign that investors now believe that weaker growth and additional interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve are on the way.

The “relying on himself” article basically says Trump is not listening to anybody any more. He decided he wanted to label China a “currency manipulator,” so that’s what he tweeted. Then his aides and Steve Mnuchin scrambled to make that official policy. Trump is convinced that China will be hurt much more than the U.S. in this game. I think he underestimates the degree to which China’s leaders, who aren’t worried about being voted out of office, are willing to inflict pain on their own people.

“We’re learning that maybe China has a higher pain threshold than we thought here,” said Stephen Moore, who was an economic adviser to Trump during the 2016 election and remains close to the White House. “They don’t seem to care that this is having extreme negative effects on their economy. It’s kind of a mutually assured destruction game right now.”

Do tell. Here’s another headline, from yesterday:

U.S. farmers suffer ‘body blow’ as China slams door on farm purchases

Chinese companies have stopped buying all U.S. agricultural products, China’s Commerce Ministry said yesterday. All of them. And we might remember that last year Vladimir Putin said Russia was ready to provide China with all the agricultural products it wanted. One wonders if it was Putin who put the trade war idea in Trump’s empty head.

Here’s another headline, from Steve Benen at MSNBC:

‘A body blow’: farmers grow frustrated with Trump’s trade failures

The president occasionally singles out parts of the country he doesn’t like, but he clearly sees farmers as being on Team Trump. In January 2018, he spoke at the American Farm Bureau’s annual convention, where the Republican strutted like a man who assumed he was among adoring fans.

“Oh, are you happy you voted for me,” Trump said, straying from the prepared text. “You are so lucky that I gave you that privilege.”

A year and a half later, many farmers are increasingly desperate – and openly skeptical that their president knows what he’s doing.

For his part, Trump has already approved a couple of bailouts for the industry – some of the money ended up going to foreign companies – and the Republican suggested this morning that he’s prepared to do a third.

The president added in his tweet that American farmers “know that China will not be able to hurt them,” which is plainly wrong, since Trump’s trade war has already hurt them.

Trump often praises farmers for being “patriotic,” which in his mind seems to mean they will stand by him no matter what. Farmers have stuck with him a lot longer than I thought they would, but there’s always a breaking point, and we might have reached it. From Yahoo Finance:

U.S. farmers are exasperated by latest trade war moves: ‘Another nail in the coffin’

“This is just another nail in the coffin,” Tyler Stafslien, a North Dakota-based soybean farmer, told Yahoo Finance. “To see this thing only seems to be getting worse rather than better is very concerning, and the American taxpayers may have to foot another round of funding if this keeps up — or we could see a ton of farmers’ loss throughout this nation.”

American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said that the pain extended across the country.

“China’s announcement that it will not buy any agricultural products from the United States is a body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by,” Duvall stated.

So, Trump’s trade war is causing extreme pain in large parts of the U.S., and Trump doesn’t understand this or doesn’t care. Chinese leaders probably do realize the pain they are causing but are sticking to their long game.

The stock market is up a bit today, and the financial press is bubbling with all kinds of feel-good stories about “corrections” and August often is a bad month for stocks anyway, etc. But they were bubbly and optimistic until the day Lehman Brothers failed, too. See also:

Economy may be weaker than generally recognized

Keep some money in a safe place, folks. Like maybe your sock drawer.

Just thought I’d mention it. The Dow Jones lost 766 points today. Ain’t winning grand?

Last week after the mass shooting in Gilroy, California, Alexandra Petri wrote a gut-wrenching column that I heartily recommend. It is first-rate writing. But I just want to call out this little bit:

Imagine being careless enough and cruel enough to allow someone to punch such holes in the world deliberately, repeatedly, in the name of a lie. The lie is that we have no choice in this matter. The lie is that any effort, however common-sense, to restrict firearms or lower the capacity of magazines, is part of a vicious scheme to strip you of your freedoms. The lie is that this imaginary, vast conspiracy is more to be feared than these deaths that occur so frequently that we are almost out of synonyms for “horror.” How do you tell someone he is a sacrifice worth making to preserve this lie? How do you tell a child?

So the Republicans are already mouthing pious things about God and whatever, and you know they will not do a damn thing about gun violence and the threat of right-wing domestic terrorism. Indeed, the first instincts of wingnuts is to misdirect —

Authorities hadn’t even released the official number of dead and wounded from a mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart on Saturday when Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick began complaining on Fox News about Antifa.

I am not aware that antifa is responsible for even one death in the U.S., although I acknowledge they’ve probably broken some windows. But never fear, Texas Republicans are on top of what needs to be done!

Texas Republicans have been steadfastly avoiding the topic of gun control in the wake of the El Paso shooting on Saturday that left 20 people dead, instead placing the blame on mental health, video games, and even lack of school prayer.

“I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) told reporters on Saturday when asked about his stance on gun legislation.

Did you know that 4 of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern US history havetaken place in Texas? The shooters were Devin Patrick Kelley (2017, 25 dead, Sutherland Springs); George Hennard (1991, 23 dead, Killeen), Charles Whitman (1966, 18 dead, University of Texas), and the alleged shooter at the El Paso WalMart was Patrick Crusius (20 dead, so far). All white men. The Sutherland Springs shooting was in a church; I assume they prayed there. Didn’t stop the bullets.

Wingnuts are telling each other that Crusius is a Latino name, but I checked — although it looks sort of Latin, it’s mostly found in Germany. Notable people with the name Crusius include Christian August Crusius (1715–1775), German philosopher and Protestant theologian; Ludwig Friedrich Otto Baumgarten-Crusius (1788–1843), German Protestant theoloian; and Otto Crusius (1857–1918), German classical scholar.

I have not read the alleged shooter’s manifesto, and I wouldn’t link to it if I had. Josh Marshall has read it and makes some interesting points:

There’s abundant evidence the shooter is a big fan of President Trump and certainly of his worldview. And yet the manifesto includes a sort of preemptive rebuttal of any claims that he is a Trump supporter or that Trump influenced. He predicts that “the media” will identify him as a white supremacist and blame President Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric for radicalizing him and provoking the attack. Such claims would be “fake news” and such claims will indeed only prove that “the media” is “fake news.”

After these horrors, we expect rightwing talking heads to attack any suggestion that these attacks might be related to the President’s politics and rhetoric. But here the assailant is doing so himself in advance. Indeed he denies Trump’s influence by using Trump’s signature attack lines. For someone who specifically denies Trump radicalized him, he’s very focused protecting the President. He doth protest rather too much.

We don’t yet know enough about yesterday’s Dayton, Ohio, shooting to know if it fits the white supremacist pattern. The alleged shooter’s name was Connor Betts; his sister was among the nine killed, suggesting the motivation might have been more personal than political.  But Andrew Marantz points out at The New Yorker that most recent mass shooters seem to have been radicalized in the same way.

Each killer, in the moment, may have acted alone, but they all appear to have been zealous converts to the same ideology: a paranoid snarl of raw anger, radical nationalism, unhinged nihilism, and fears of “white genocide” that is still referred to as “fringe,” although it’s creeping precariously close to the mainstream. On many social networks that bill themselves as bulwarks of “free speech,” including Gab, 4chan, and 8chan, this way of thinking is so dominant that it is often taken for granted. In April, the Anti-Defamation League wrote that such platforms “serve as round-the-clock white supremacist rallies.”

Would it help if these platforms were shutdown? Could the platforms be shut down? This is a point Marantz addresses; the answer is, probably not. And if they were, would not other platforms spring up in their place?

White supremacy has been hardwired into American culture as soon as Europeans began moving here. The whole rise of Trump and right-wing domestic terrorism might be interpreted as the fight of a wounded animal, or white supremacy’s last hoorah. We have reached a moment in our culture in which white supremacy really isn’t acceptable any more. This is not to say that systemic racism isn’t still in place, or that racial equality finally reigns o’er the land. But for those pathetic losers — who have always been among us — who take their pride and identity and self-worth from nothing but their whiteness, our culture is, finally, beginning to deny them that. And in their own minds they have no where else to go.

Update: I just noticed that this post is getting a big influx of traffic, I assume from some right-wing site. Please read the commenting rules before posting comments.

If you read nothing else today, be sure to catch Dana Milbank’s McConnell’s new posture toward Moscow. Here is just a bit:

After the Trump administration last year exempted Deripaska-related enterprises from sanctions, a bipartisan rebellion attempted to reinstate the sanctions (House Republicans joined Democrats in a 362-to-53 vote), but McConnell led a successful effort in the Senate to thwart the rebellion, which he called a “political stunt.” (In exchange for sanctions relief, Deripaska agreed to reduce his ownership in Rusal’s parent company, but Deripaska could retain de facto control .)

Three months later, the Russian aluminum giant announced its $200 million investment in Kentucky. McConnell declared in May that his vote to exempt Deripaska enterprises from sanctions was “completely unrelated.”

Of course.

It was also unrelated, no doubt, to the fact that Len Blavatnik, a Ukrainian American whose SUAL Partners owns 22.5 percent of Rusal, contributed $3.5 million to the McConnell-affiliated Senate Leadership Fund between 2015 and 2017, making McConnell his top recipient. Blavatnik — whose partner in the Rusal investment, Putin-allied oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, has been hit by U.S. sanctions — gave millions more to other Republicans and to Donald Trump’s inauguration. (Another Rusal owner, Russian state-owned VTB Bank, is also under U.S. sanctions.)

There’s a lot more. Damning stuff. Back when Mitch first killed the attempt to reinstate Russian sanctions people assumes he was just trying to please Trump, but now it seems Mitch is in on the oligarch action up to his mandible.

This may have some traction.

I endorse what David Dayen writes about the atrocious job CNN did as debate host. I would add that whichever Democratic Party official(s) approved that format should resign immediately. Night #2 was such a mess nobody could be said to “win.” Cory Booker, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Julián Castro, and Jay Inslee were the least wince-inducing, IMO. And I’m not endorsing any of those people. Just saying they did not annoy me overmuch. Everybody else more or less just got on my nerves last night.

Never Trumpers and centrist Democrats are celebrating today because Joe Biden remembered his own name and managed to not trip over his podium. “Joe Biden was brilliantly and gloriously adequate,” Dana Milbank writes.

Biden was .?.?. perfectly adequate. He wasn’t the most eloquent or stylish debater on the stage. He struggled to find words at times, he seemed over-rehearsed, he seemed not to grasp how texting works (“Go to Joe 30330”), he cut himself off when his allotted time expired and, at times, he seemed stunned by the ferocity of the barrage — which, in fairness, was stunning.  …

… Biden’s triumph over mediocrity has a ready explanation. Correctly or not, voters believe this nonthreatening old white guy of moderate leanings is the one to beat President Trump. In the Quinnipiac poll, fully 51 percent of Democrats said that Biden has the best chance of doing so.

Biden fumbled around clumsily with a question on deportations in the Obama Administration. He revealed some fundamental ignorance and tone-deafness on health care issues. Running in the general election on Barack Obama’s legacy is not going to work to get independents to the polls. The only reason Biden wasn’t torn up worse is that the format made everyone ineffectual. This is the guy people want on a debate stage with Trump? Seriously?

I also think Gillibrand’s persistent challenges of an op ed Biden wrote in the 1980s just made him look sympathetic, and she’d been doing well up to that point. People need to choose which bricks they throw more carefully.

We can hope that the next debate will have a much smaller field. The New York Times says that Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, O’Rourke, Sanders, and Warren have already qualified for the next debate. Castro, Yang, and Klobuchar are close. I sincerely hope no one else gets a bump and is included. And I hope ABC, the host for the September debate, learns from the CNN atrocity and does it differently.

Before getting into all the things I’d like to say to John Delaney and Tim Ryan just before leaving them alone in a cold and desolate wilderness with no matches or shoes, some general comments on last night’s debate:

One, MSNBC did a much better job moderating the June debate. CNN seems to think it was moderating America’s Ninja Warrior; it was more yelling and drama than substance. I agree with Joshua Holland, Bad moderation and a flood of conservative talking points made Tuesday’s Dem debate almost unwatchable.

The Vox editorial team even listed the Republican Party as one of the night’s winners:

If you were Donald Trump or another Republican lawmaker running for reelection in 2020, you probably had a good time watching Tuesday night’s debate. Several of the major issues were framed by the moderators in terms Republicans would love: Will you take private insurance from Americans to give them Medicare-for-all? Will you raise taxes on the middle class to do it? Will you decriminalize illegal border crossings and give unauthorized immigrants free health care? Are Democrats going too far to the left?

The extremely tight time limits, in which candidates could barely begin speaking before Jake Tapper cut them off, favored talking points over substance. The entire evening, from the razz-ma-tazz, rah rah patriotism introduction to the end, seemed more like a frantic game show than a debate. Clearly, CNN was going for “optics,” for entertainment, not for informing the public.

See also CNN’s Debate Questions Were for Losers and Attack of the Mini-Bidens, both at Slate.

I’m not looking forward to what they present tonight except to predict Jake Tapper will go easier on Joe Biden than he did on Liz Warren. Just watch. Fortunately Warren was savvy enough to be one of the evening’s winners, in spite of being set up for an ambush. The lady has skills. Bernie Sanders also did a bit better than in the first debate, I thought.

Now, on to Delaney and Ryan. Which is not to say I don’t have equally low opinions of John Hickenlooper and Steve Bullock, but they didn’t piss me off as much last night as Delaney and Ryan. Here is Delaney’s opening statement:

DELANEY: Folks, we have a choice. We can go down the road that Senator Sanders and Senator Warren want to take us, which is with bad policies like Medicare for all, free everything and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump re-elected. That’s what happened with McGovern. That’s what happened with Mondale. That’s what happened with Dukakis. Or we can nominate someone with new ideas to create universal health care for every American with choice, someone who wants to unify our country and grow the economy and create jobs everywhere. And then we win the White House.

Got that? He’s channeling the fears of all Third Way – Democratic Leadership Council – neoliberal and “centrist” Democrats who turned FDR’s Democratic party into Republican Party Lite. We can’t have single payer health care because George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in bleeping 1972.

Delaney was called out last week in a Paul Waldman column for perpetrating Republican talking points about Medicare for All. “We should have universal health care, but it shouldn’t be the kind of health care that kicks 150 million Americans off their health care,” Delaney had said. What he means is that people with employer-based health insurance love their health insurance and want to keep it. But it sounds as if he’s saying Medicare for All would take health insurance away from people. Waldman wrote,

The generous interpretation of this line is that it’s warning about widespread disruption; the other interpretation is that it’s meant to stoke the fear that if you now have coverage and single payer passes, you could be left with no insurance at all, which is just false. If we passed single payer, you’d move from your current plan to a different plan, one that depending on how it’s constructed would probably offer as good or better coverage at a lower cost.

Delaney was back on the same point last night —

DELANEY: Well, I’m right about this. We can create a universal health care system to give everyone basic health care for free, and I have a proposal to do it. But we don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal. My dad, the union electrician, loved the health care he got from the IBEW. He would never want someone to take that away. …

…SANDERS: The fact of the matter is, tens of millions of people lose their health insurance every single year when they change jobs or their employer changes that insurance. If you want stability in the health care system, if you want a system which gives you freedom of choice with regard to a doctor or a hospital, which is a system which will not bankrupt you, the answer is to get rid of the profiteering of the drug companies…

TAPPER: Thank you, Senator.

SANDERS: … and the insurance companies, move to Medicare for all.

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: Congressman Delaney?

DELANEY: But now he’s talking about a different issue. What I’m talking about is really simple. We should deal with the tragedy of the (ph) uninsured and give everyone health care as a right. But why do we got to be the party of taking something away from people?

Delaney kept evoking union workers and reminding listeners his dear old dad loved his benefits. Well, my dad was a union guy, too, and those benefits were great for the family and for my parents in their old age. But what about the enormous majority of U.S. employees who are not unionized? And what happens to benefits when factories close or workers are laid off? Which happens a lot.

Tim Ryan also wanted everyone to know that union workers want to keep their union benefits.

RYAN: So here we are in Detroit, home of the United Auto workers. We have all our union friends here tonight. This plan that’s being offered by Senator Warren and Senator Sanders will tell those Union members who gave away wages in order to get good healthcare that they’re going to lose their healthcare because Washington’s going to come in and tell them they got a better plan.

As Jonathan Tasini wrote on Facebook, in recent decades unions have had to make major concessions on wages and working conditions in order to keep the health benefits. This is, Tasini says, a big reason for the meager raises workers have had to accept. An argument could be made that de-coupling health care from employment would be good for unions and workers.

Delaney’s other lie, which he has told before, is that Medicare for All would cause widespread hospital closings.

DELANEY: Listen, his math is wrong. That’s all I’m saying — that his math is wrong, it’s been well-documented that if all the bills were paid at Medicare rate, which is specifically — I think it’s in section 1,200 of their bill, then many hospitals in this country would close.

I’ve been going around rural America, and I ask rural hospital administrators one question, “If all your bills were paid at the Medicare rate last year, what would happen?”

And they all look at me and say, “We would close.”

But the question is, why do we have to be so extreme? Why can’t we just give everyone health care as a right, and allow them to have choice?

Delaney got Four Pinnochios from the Washington Post for a similar statement earlier this month. The problem with Delaney’s claim is that it ignores one of the primary reason hospitals are closing now, which is not because of Medicare rates, but because of the number of people who are treated and can pay nothing. This is a widespread problem in all impoverished rural areas, but hospitals in states that did not expand Medicaid are especially hard hit.

Hospitals in rural areas are losing money and sometimes closing down, taking away jobs and limiting health care options for some of the nation’s poorest citizens, according to a study published earlier this week by the Pittsburg Morning Sun and GateHouse Media. And the decision to reject a key part of Obamacare by Republican politicians in red states is exacerbating the problem.

The hospital closure crisis is most pronounced in states that have declined Medicaid expansion, the policy in the Affordable Care Act that offers coverage for individuals whose income is at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. Of the 106 rural hospitals that have shut down since 2010, 77 were located in states that hadn’t expanded Medicaid, the study found.

The dirty secret behind health care costs is that health insurance premiums and medical bills are jacked up to cover the costs of non-paying patients. So those who do pay are shelling out a hefty surcharge to keep the system afloat. Delaney’s argument assumes that hospitals would be deprived of their surcharges, but if treatment for all patients were compensated, the equation changes considerably.

To Delaney’s question, why do we have to be so extreme? Why can’t we just give everyone health care as a right, and allow them to have choice? —  rights one cannot exercise aren’t rights at all. If we call health care a “right” but don’t provide a means for people to obtain it, what’s the point? Delaney’s health care position is, IMO, no more or less pie-in-the-sky than Bernie Sanders’s.

Delaney sees himself as the adult in the room on a major issue — health care — for the Democratic primary debate. He has a universal health care plan, though it is more limited in benefits and scope than single payer plans. (He is also, notably, still heavily invested in the health care industry; about $3.2 million of his $280 million fortune comes from the health care sector, per Sludge.)

Now, let’s switch back to Ryan:

RYAN: Now in this discussion already tonight we’ve talked about taking private health insurance away from union members in the industrial Midwest, we’ve talked about decriminalizing the border, and we’ve talked about giving free healthcare to undocumented workers when so many Americans are struggling to pay for their healthcare.

In the post-debate spin room, Ryan could be heard repeating the charge that undocumented workers shouldn’t be getting “free” health care while citizens have to work to earn it. But the people proposing that undocumented workers should be able to receive health care are proposing some form of single-payer system, meaning that we are de-coupling employment and health insurance and instead paying for health care through taxes. And undocumented workers pay a ton of taxes — billions in taxes, it says here. Undocumented workers wouldn’t be getting anything “free” that citizens also aren’t getting “free.”

And the fact is that undocumented workers are going to get health care from the health care system — not good, preventative care, but they’ll be taken to trauma centers when they are injured on construction sites. And are we going to let women in labor give birth on the streets? Are we going to leave undocumented children unvaccinated (bad idea) or babies sick with flu untreated? I doubt that, which takes us back to the costs of uncompensated care. Ryan (or maybe it was Delaney) kept blathering that undocumented people can just pay for health care, but people living on subsistence wages are not in a position to do that. Do we let them die? Do we let their children die?

Of course, this touches on the undocumented immigrants issue and the need for comprehensive reform that would stop forcing law-abiding people into hiding. It shouldn’t be that hard for a person who has been living and workng here to obtain some kind of official status. And then, voila! They are documented! Why is that so hard? Why is forcing people to stay underground better?

It wasn’t just Ryan and Delaney being stupid last night. Paul Waldman wrote this today:

Did you know that if liberals get their way and pass Medicare For All, you’ll have to actually pay for health coverage for the first time, when obviously everyone now gets it for free?

That was what you would have thought if you knew nothing about health care and listened to the way Jake Tapper of CNN framed the question during the Democratic presidential candidate debate on Tuesday night. And it showed just how difficult it is to have a meaningful, informative debate about a complex policy issue when the media are so determined to focus on squabbling and “newsworthy” moments.

Those moments usually happen when a candidate says something that they’ll be criticized for, often when their comments are taken out of context. So in the debate, Tapper relentlessly demanded to know whether taxes could increase for the middle class if health care reform was passed, as though that is the only real question worth considering. He asked Elizabeth Warren if she’d have to raise taxes, twice. He asked Pete Buttigieg, also twice. He asked Beto O’Rourke.

Seriously obnoxious. Tapper should be in the cold, desolate wilderness also. No shoes, no matches, no signal, not even a granola bar. Tapper kept going to Delaney to get him to challenge the front runners, and on a split screen Delaney would smirk and grimmace and smile the fake smile of someone who has been told to smile on television but doesn’t really want to. I do not like him. He needs to go away.

And after all the stupid shit Ryan said yesterday? What is he being called out for today in our dear mass media? He didn’t put his hand over his heart for the national anthem. Argh.

July 30, 2019 – Detroit, Michigan, United States: CNN Democratic Presidential Debate Detroit, Michigan 2019. L to R: Candidate author Marianne Williamson, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, Minnesota US Sen. Amy Klobuchar South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Vermont US Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts US Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. (John Nowak / CNN / Polaris)

Feel free to leave comments on tonight’s debate here, if you feel inclined.

Meanwhile — I recommend Martin Longman’s Why the American People Have No Say in Our Foreign Policy.