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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston).

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]:

“What we’re discovering is that the Constitution is not a mechanism that runs by itself. Ultimately, we are a government of men and not law. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it. The ball is now squarely in the court of the Republican Party, and particularly Senate Republicans. Will they ever be prepared to say enough is enough?” ~ William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution who graduated from college just before Watergate.

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Make sure you are registered to vote! (Show information begins after Item 5, after voting and election information.)

1. “Obamacare” (gov) & Medicare Enrollment (Medicare.gov)
   1. ACA 2020 Open Enrollment is here – and ends Dec 15. Questions? Call 1-800-318-2596 (Healthcare.gov)
2. Medicare 2020 Open Enrollment is here – and ends Dec 7. Click here for contact info.  (Medicare.gov)
3. HarrisVotes.com (Election Information Line (713) 755-6965) Dr. Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk
   1. Last Day to Register to Vote was Monday, October 7, 2019
   2. Make sure you are registered to vote!
      1. December 2nd – December 7^th 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
      2. December 8^th 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
      3. December 9th – December 10^th 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
      4. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
      5. Next Election: December 14, 2019 – Joint Runoff Election
      6. If you are denied your right to vote any place at any time at any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote..
4. Voting info hasn’t gone away. Unchanging or rarely changing info has been moved to make the show page info easier to search. FOR GENERAL VOTING INFO, CLICK HERE.
5.  
6. Second Amendment Case May Fizzle Out at the Supreme Court, BY Adam Liptak | NYTIMES.COM | DEC 2, 2019 1 hr ago
   1. The Supreme Court’s first Second Amendment case in nearly a decade may not end up changing anything, judging from questioning at arguments on Monday that focused largely on whether the repeal of a New York City law made the case challenging it moot.
   2. “What’s left of this case?” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked. “The petitioners have gotten all of the relief they sought.”
   3. The other three members of the court’s liberal wing made similar points. “The other side has thrown in the towel,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told a lawyer for the challengers.
   4. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a member of the court’s conservative majority, asked questions that seemed aimed at making sure that the case was truly moot. But two other conservatives, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch, seemed ready to decide the case, saying that the repeal of the law did not settle every question before the court. …
   5. … After the Supreme Court granted review, the city repealed its law, apparently fearful of a loss that could sweep away other gun-control regulations, too. …
7. Forgiving Student Debt Would Boost Economy, Economists Say, By Chris Arnold  | Heard on NPR’s Morning Edition | November 25, 20195:11 AM ET
   1. MY POSTS ON THIS TOPIC:
      1. Debt-free college (or no college at all): THAT is the question.Posted on May 9, 2015 by Thinkwing Radio, By Michael R. Honig (9-May-2015)
      2. Is Slow Growth and a Sluggish Economy the New Normal? Ask College Grads. Posted on December 2, 2011 by Thinkwing Radio
   2. Presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to tear up your student loans and set you financially free. …
   3. Other Democratic candidates have more modest plans. But economists say the dramatic proposals from Sanders and Warren to free millions of Americans from the burden of student debt could boost the economy in significant ways and help combat income inequality.
   4. Warren would forgive up to $50,000 for most people. Sanders would go further with total loan forgiveness. But with these plans having a price tag north of $1 trillion, such legislation would come with plenty of risks.
   5. The reason debt forgiveness could have a big impact on the overall economy is that a generation of Americans is making major life decisions differently because of student loans.
   6. “Children, it’s not about if you want them,” says Laura Greenwood in Montpelier, Vt. “It’s about can you afford them?” Greenwood works for the state education agency. She’s 30 years old and makes $63,000 a year. “I make probably a better salary than a lot of my peers.”
   7. … But after paying for college and grad school, Greenwood owes $96,000 in student loans. …
   8. … So if people like Greenwood suddenly had this millstone of debt lifted from their necks, it stands to reason that would unleash pent-up desires and spending that would be good for the economy. A lot more people would have kids, or start businesses, or buy houses.
   9. “In the short term, it would be very positive for the housing market,” says Lawrence Yun, the National Association of Realtors chief economist. He says his group’s surveys show that student debt has people delaying homeownership by five to seven years.
   10. He’s not endorsing any particular plan, but he estimates that broad loan forgiveness would push up the number of home sales quite a bit. “Home sales could be, say, 300,000 higher annually if people were not saddled with large student debt.” Yun says that would be “a boost to the housing sector as well as the economy.”
   11. The effects would go beyond the housing market. William Foster is a vice president with Moody’s, which just did a report on student debt forgiveness. “There’ve been some estimates that U.S. real GDP could be boosted on average by $86 billion to $108 billion per year,” which is “quite a bit,” he says. “That’s if you had total loan forgiveness.” Foster says it wouldn’t have to be total forgiveness to see significant results. And he says it could also help address rising income inequality.
   12. “Student loans are now contributing to what’s perceived as lower economic prospects for younger Americans,” Foster says. After all — millions of people are delaying homeownership. And that’s the most powerful way for most working and middle class people to build wealth.
   13. “A typical homeowner has net worth about $230,000, while a typical renter has only $5,000,” Yun says. …
   14. …while the idea of loan forgiveness is enticing, it would not be free. And this is a big reason plenty of politicians and policy experts are not on board. This would be expensive. Foster says Americans owe a lot of money on those student loans. “About 1.5 trillion. …
   15. … Foster says most of these loans are from the federal government, and it could forgive them. But that would mean giving up the $85 billion in annual revenue it’s currently collecting on these loans. And, he says, “That would result in a wider fiscal deficit.”
   16. Also, taxing people to make up the difference would be a drag on the economy. Economists say whether the boost from the stimulus of debt forgiveness was stronger than the drag from raising the revenue another way would depend on the details of the legislation should it come about.
   17. And there are other issues. Many people would oppose a giveaway to, say, lawyers and doctors who stand to make a lot of money in the future but happen to have a lot of student loan debt. And you probably wouldn’t want to tax the working class to pay for higher-income college graduates’ loan forgiveness. That’s why presidential candidates are proposing to tax the wealthy to pay for it — which, by the way, Foster says would also create less drag on the economy from the taxes because wealthy people’s spending patterns are less influenced by such changes than people in lower income brackets. …
8. Trump renews tariff threat on Brazil and Argentina, By Maegan Vazquez and Donna Borak, CNN | Updated 2:38 PM ET, Mon December 2, 2019
   1. “Brazil and Argentina have been presiding over a massive devaluation of their currencies. which is not good for our farmers. Therefore, effective immediately, I will restore the Tariffs on all Steel & Aluminum that is shipped into the U.S. from those countries,” Trump tweeted early Monday morning from Washington. He also called on the Federal Reserve to “act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies.”
   2. Formal notices of the tariffs were not immediately announced by the Treasury or Commerce Departments or the Office of the US Trade Representative. Both Brazil and Argentina were exempted from 25% steel and 10% aluminum tariffs last year when Trump was attempting to avoid a trade war with those countries.
   3. Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, said Monday that he has an “open channel” of communication with Trump, according to state news agency Agencia Brasil. …
   4. … Argentina’s Production and Labor Minister called Trump’s decision to impose the tariffs “unexpected.”
   5. “There was no sign given to our government, to the Brazilian government or to the public sector that there would be a change in the deal with the United States,” Dante Sica told state-run news agency Telam on Monday.
   6. Sica said he met with Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie after seeing the tweet in order to “analyze the course of action” and told Telam that he had contacted the US Embassy in Argentina, as well “all contacts in Washington DC” to get more clarity on the situation.
   7. The President’s decision amounts to retaliation against two countries that have served as alternative suppliers of soybeans and other farm products to China, grabbing market share away from American farmers, a key constituency the President will need to win reelection in 2020.
   8. But Bolsonaro contended during a radio interview on Monday that he doesn’t view the tariffs as retaliation.
   9. “Their economy does not compare to ours, it is 10 times bigger than ours. I don’t see this as retaliation, I’m going to speak to him to see if (Trump) doesn’t over penalize us,” Bolsonaro said. “I’m certain he will be open to the conversation.” …
9. Ukraine to fire hundreds of prosecutors by year’s end, including Giuliani-linked official: report, By John Bowden – 12/02/19 08:05 AM EST 494
   1. The Washington Post reported Monday that Kostiantyn Kulyk was one of the first prosecutors to be ousted after he failed to appear for a required examination earlier this year. Kulyk previously served as deputy head of the Department of International Legal Cooperation under Ukraine’s office of the attorney general, the newspaper noted.
   2. Hundreds of prosecutors have reportedly been fired as part of the review process, which was ordered by Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, earlier this year. A total of at least 570 are expected to be ousted by December’s end, according to the Post.
   3. The newspaper noted that Kulyk was a central figure in Giuliani’s efforts to obtain damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine on behalf of Trump, though the former prosecutor has denied personally meeting with the former New York City mayor.
10. Want Trump to Go? Take to the Streets – Another moment for public protest has arrived. By David Leonhardt, Opinion Columnist | COM | Oct. 20, 2019
    1. On Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump’s election, Obamacare looked to be doomed. Millions of Americans, it seemed, were going to lose their health insurance. …
    2. … Fortunately, some progressives understood that politics isn’t only an inside game. The outside game — of public protest and grass-roots lobbying — matters, too.
    3. Even before Trump took office, activists began planning a strategy to make repeal as politically painful as possible. On the day after Trump’s inauguration, some four million Americans took to the streets for Women’s Marches (which obviously were about much more than repeal). In the months that followed, groups like Indivisible organized people to attend town halls, visit Capitol Hill and inundate members of Congress with phone calls.
    4. The efforts transformed the debate. Obamacare repeal was no longer a bloodless legislative matter, in which public opinion was measured merely with poll results and pundit analysis. The story became rawer, more human and much harder for politicians and ordinary citizens to ignore. …
    5. … Consider what happened last week alone. Trump created a foreign-policy disaster in Turkey and Syria, for no apparent reason, while multiple administration officials testified that he views diplomacy largely as a way to advance his personal interests. His attitude, evidently, is: America, c’est moi. Even more so than a month ago, Trump is a national emergency, flagrantly violating his oath of office and daring the country to stop him.
    6. Yet the chances of removing him appear as dim as Obamacare’s chances of survival did on Nov. 9, 2016. Trump even has plausible paths to re-election, some of which involve again losing the popular vote.
    7. A. Kauffman, a historian of protest movements, has said that effective ones often throw “a monkey wrench into a process that was otherwise going to just unfold smoothly.” That’s the role that an outside game can now play in the impeachment saga.
    8. It can wake up more Americans to the gravity of the situation. It can mobilize progressives to work as hard as they did during the 2018 midterms. It can confront congressional Republicans with their cowardice.
    9. “Protests work,” as Kauffman has said — not always, of course, but often “when groups are willing to be bold in their tactics and persistent in their approach within the broad discipline of non-violent action.” As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote last week, public protest “serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.” If anything, protest may be more important than in the past, because the elite institutions that helped bring down Richard Nixon, like political parties and the national media, are weaker today.
    10. So it’s time for a sequel to that first Women’s March — an Americans’ March, in which millions of people peacefully take to the streets to say that President Trump must go. And it’s time for a more intense grass-roots campaign directed at his congressional enablers, one that conjures the respectful intensity of the save-Obamacare campaign. Even if the Senate still acquits Trump, a new protest movement can help galvanize people to defeat him, and his enablers, next year.
    11. The country is in crisis. Right now, that crisis feels all too normal.
11. Air Force spaceplane returns to Earth after 780-day mission, By William Harwood | CBS News | October 27, 2019 / 8:33 AM /
    1. An unpiloted Air Force X-37B spaceplane, one of two winged orbiters used to carry out classified research, made a surprise landing at the Kennedy Space Center early Sunday to close out a record 780-day mission. It was the fifth flight in the secretive Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) program, pushing total time aloft to 2,865 days.
    2. “This program continues to push the envelope as the (Air Force’s) only reusable space vehicle,” Randy Walden, director of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, said in a statement. “With a successful landing today, the X-37B completed its longest flight to date and successfully completed all mission objectives.”
12. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows, By Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle | COM |Oct. 29, 2019
    1. Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.
    2. The authors of a paper published Tuesday developed a more accurate way of calculating land elevation based on satellite readings, a standard way of estimating the effects of sea level rise over large areas, and found that the previous numbers were far too optimistic. The new research shows that some 150 million people are now living on land that will be below the high-tide line by midcentury. …
    3. Southern Vietnam could all but disappear. … More than 20 million people in Vietnam, almost one-quarter of the population, live on land that will be inundated. …
    4. In Shanghai, one of Asia’s most important economic engines, water threatens to consume the heart of the city and many other cities around it. The findings don’t have to spell the end of those areas. The new data shows that 110 million people already live in places that are below the high tide line …
    5. The new projections suggest that much of Mumbai, India’s financial capital and one of the largest cities in the world, is at risk of being wiped out. Built on what was once a series of islands, the city’s historic downtown core is particularly vulnerable.
    6. Over all, the research shows that countries should start preparing now for more citizens to relocate internally, according to Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental group that coordinates action on migrants and development.
13. The Federalist Society Says It’s Not an Advocacy Organization. These Documents Show Otherwise. By AMANDA HOLLIS-BRUSKY and CALVIN TERBEEK | com | August 31, 2019 (Amanda Hollis-Brusky is an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and author of Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Calvin TerBeek is a Ph.D. candidate in political science)
    1. MIKE NOTE: The Federalist Society  – The Federalist Society is a tax–exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Our federal tax identification number is 36-3235550.
    2. This past March, when the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies held its 37th annual national gathering for conservative law students, the lineup of speakers and panelists included an impressive number of Republican Party and conservative movement stars. …
    3. Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party “or engage in other forms of political advocacy,” as its website says. The society does not deny an ideology—it calls itself a “group of conservatives and libertarians”—but it maintains that it is simply “about ideas,” not legislation, politicians or policy positions.
    4. Federalist Society documents that one of us recently unearthed, however, make this position untenable going forward. The documents, made public here for the first time, show that the society not only has held explicit ideological goals since its infancy in the early 1980s, but sought to apply those ideological goals to legal policy and political issues through the group’s roundtables, symposia and conferences.
    5. The question of whether the Federalist Society is properly characterized as a “society of ideas” or a political organization has significant ramifications. The Code of Conduct for United States Judges, a set of guidelines administered by the federal judiciary’s Judicial Conference, was revised earlier this year to bar sitting federal judges from participating in conferences and seminars sponsored by groups “generally viewed by the public as having adopted a consistent political or ideological point of view equivalent to the type of partisanship often found in political organizations.” (The Code does not “explicitly” apply to Supreme Court justices, though they have looked to it in the past.) One former federal judge argued that under the new ethics opinion, the Federalist Society is now a “no-go zone for federal judges.” The Society’s president, Eugene Meyer, responded, calling the former jurist’s argument an “absurd and ludicrous” interpretation of the rule, adding that the Federalist Society has said “time and again” that it is nonpartisan and does not take official policy positions.
    6. But the newly unearthed documents—a 1984 grant proposal and cover letter, written by Meyer on the Federalist Society’s behalf and now housed in the late Judge Robert Bork’s papers at the Library of Congress—provide evidence that the Federalist Society, in contravention of what the new Code states, in fact “advocates for specific outcomes on legal or political issues.” This suggests that federal judges, by attending Federalist Society events, are transgressing the Code’s new guidelines. Given the importance of active federal judges to the Federalist Society’s long-term goal of reshaping the law, barring them from the society’s events could hamper its continued ability to exert the political influence it has impressively built over decades. …
    7. …The Federalist Society’s founders and conservative patrons understood early on that the battle for control of the law would not be won on campuses alone. In the January 1984 grant proposal, Meyer, then the Federalist Society’s executive director, asked the conservative-leaning Smith Richardson Foundation for “seed money” to fund a new entity, a “Lawyers Division.” The central goal, Meyer wrote, was “to build an effective national conservative lawyers organization.” Meyer began the proposal by asserting that an alternative to “an increasingly radicalized bar,” exemplified by the American Bar Association, was now necessary because “lawyers continue to fill key positions in the modern instrumentalities of the welfare state.”
    8. SHORTER VERSION OF ARTICLE ABOVE- REVEALED: New documents show the Federalist Society has lied about its mission — and could blow up on sitting judges, By Matthew Chapman | COM | Published on August 31, 2019
       1. On Saturday, political science academics Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Calvin TerBeek wrote an exposé in Politico revealing that the Federalist Society, an association of conservative and libertarian lawyers infamous for forming a semi-official pipeline of right-wing academics into the federal court system, have deliberately misled the public about the purpose of their organization’s existence for years.
       2. “Despite what appears to be an obvious political valence, the Federalist Society and its high-profile members have long insisted the nonprofit organization does not endorse any political party ‘or engage in other forms of political advocacy,’ as its website says,” they wrote. “The society does not deny an ideology — it calls itself a ‘group of conservatives and libertarians’ — but it maintains that it is simply ‘about ideas,’ not legislation, politicians or policy positions.”
14. The hidden hunger affecting billions, By Michael Marshall | BBC.COM | 7-JULY-2019
    1. Two billion people do not get enough micronutrients in their diets, which can lead to severe health conditions.
    2. New kinds of crops could help to create better, more nutritious foods to beat these deficiencies.
    3. When children do not get enough iron in their food, the results are heartbreaking. They are slower to acquire language, struggle with short-term memory, have poor attention spans and ultimately do less well at school.
    4. “They can never live up to their full physical and mental potential,” says Wolfgang Pfeiffer, director of research and development at HarvestPlus, an organisation that develops nutritionally improved crops in Washington DC. “If they are deficient in their childhood, they learn 20% less as adults.”
    5. In the poorest parts of India and China, millions of children have their lives stunted through lack of iron. In South Asia, an estimated50% of pregnant women have iron deficiency, and it is also prevalent in South America and sub-Saharan Africa.
    6. But iron is only one small part of the story. There are several dozen other “micronutrients” – substances that we need to consume, in small quantities but regularly, to remain healthy. They include zinc, copper, vitamins and folates such as folic acid and vitamin B9.
    7. The traditional solution to micronutrient deficiencies has been to add more micronutrients to common foods, or to supply pills … But these strategies have limits. If people can’t afford pills or don’t have access to a pharmacy, they may still not get enough micronutrients. What’s more, adding micronutrients to food is a constant process: every batch of breakfast cereal has to be artificially dosed with iron and vitamins.
    8. A much simpler approach would be to go back to the crop plant from which the cereal is made, and ensure that it packs itself full of the micronutrient in the first place.
    9. This is the thinking behind “biofortification”, the process of creating crops that have unusually high levels of micronutrients like iron. HarvestPlus was founded in 2003 by economist Howarth Bouis, after a decade of lobbying and raising moneyto create biofortified crops and make them available where they are needed. Today HarvestPlus has members in more than 20 countries and has biofortified over a dozen crops, from rice to sweet potatoes.
15. India’s blowout election is a lesson for US Democrats, By Annalisa Merelli | COM/ | May 24, 2019
    1. Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, defied expectations when he won his second election in an even bigger landslide than the first one. He did so at the expense of India’s Congress party, which campaigned on a secular and pluralist platform.
    2. Turns out the nationalist message of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hugely popular with voters. It was a massive defeat—the second in a row—for India’s more liberal Congress party. It’s a bitter loss that came with many lessons, ones that Democrats in the United States would be wise to heed. …
    3. … Politics in India have traditionally been about the economy. This time, however, Modi and the BJP’s support of Hindu nationalism took a more prominent position than it had in past campaigns, exploiting tension with Pakistan to redirect the debate toward national security and anti-Muslim sectarianism. As Modi’s message grew stronger, [the once-dominant Congress Party] failed to really fight for India’s long-established secular ideals. …
    4. … The Congress isn’t known for its ability to learn lessons, but there are some more to note. And given that a left-leaning party promoting pluralism just lost to a right-leaning party promoting nationalism, the Democratic Party in the United States should probably read a long as it prepares for its own election season.
    5. Don’t make it about the candidate: Modi’s leadership of the BJP is strong, and there is no separating his party or government’s success and work from his own. His party capitalized on this, turning the election into a referendum on him—rather than his government’s record. Polarizing figures like Modi tend to benefit from these kinds of politics. His party understood this. His adversaries did not.
    6. Turning the campaign into a vote for or against Modi prevented the opposition from asserting its own ideas. Even when the Congress proposed policies that could have appealed to a broad electorate — for instance, guaranteed minimum income … — they received little attention. As George Lakoff explained in his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, obsessing over a candidate’s flaws only makes him or her more popular.
    7. Democrats in the United States made this mistake in the 2016 election, running a campaign against Donald Trump instead of for their own policies.
    8. Dare to be different: … For many voters, the Congress party is associated with old-school elitist politics, corruption, and a perceived inability to bring change to India. Gandhi’s candidacy didn’t do much to change anyone’s minds.
    9. Make friends: Congress also failed to make strong alliances with other, smaller political parties…. Progressives seem to make this mistake a lot. While conservatives often stick together (the Republican Party’s support of Trump during the campaign is a textbook example), liberals often fail to find common ground. In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic primaries went on long after Trump was the presumed nominee. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent more time tearing each other apart than focusing on the bigger fight. The extremely crowded field of potential democratic candidates suggests the same thing could happen again.
    10. Focus the narrative: Modi’s narrative of a new, strong, corruption-free India—one with international power, credibility and gravitas—appealed to many voters. It delivered a clear vision of what he was promising, and one that Indians were fast to embrace. Congress never presented a clear vision of its own.
    11. [The Congress Party] decried the threat to secular values [Modi’s Party] posed, and held itself up as its defender. But rather than communicating how those values could help India succeed, the party focused more on what would happen if protections further deteriorated.
    12. This is not unlike what happened during the 2016 election in the United States. Just look at the campaign slogans: Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had a clear if suspect mission. Clinton’s “Stronger Together” described a status, not an intention. Democrats could face the same problem they did in 2016—and the same problem India’s Congress party faced this week—unless they forget about the opposition, stop playing defense, and promote their own, clear vision.