CONCORD, N.H. — Pete Buttigieg is getting grilled by voters about his work at the corporate consulting firm McKinsey — a chapter of his career that's increasingly dogging his campaign.

The repeated questions about McKinsey on the trail here — Buttigieg was asked about it once on Thursday and twice Friday — come amid recent media scrutiny of Buttigieg's stint at the firm. The New York Times ran a lengthy article and an editorial this week titled "Buttigieg’s Untenable Vow of Silence."

... Buttigieg was confronted by one of them at a packed house party on Friday. Alan Cantor told the candidate that McKinsey is more interested in maximizing shareholder value than in helping communities or workers.

“They've done a lot of bad things,” said Alan Cantor of Concord, who is undecided in the race. “I don't think it's a good place. What do you think?” Buttigieg mentioned, as he often does, his work at McKinsey analyzing grocery store pricing. He said McKinsey's work for Purdue upset him.

... Cantor said he wasn't sold on Buttigieg's answer about McKinsey, though he thought the candidate was thoughtful. The Concord resident favors Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) for now. “I think his answer was very good as far as it went,” Cantor said. “The next question is: I'm trying to figure out where his values are?”

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/12/06/pete-buttigieg-mckinsey-work-077173?__twitter_impression=true

https://twitter.com/NicoleSganga/status/1203015202003996673

(CNN) - Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign on Friday released the results of the senator's most recent annual physical exam, as well as a letter from her doctor that said Warren is a "very healthy 70 year old woman" with no medical conditions that would prevent her from serving as president.

Warren's latest physical was conducted on January 14, according to her long-time physician, Dr. Beverly Woo of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Woo said that the exam showed Warren's blood pressure, heart rate and blood tests were all normal, her cholesterol was "excellent," and that Warren also had a mammogram to screen for breast cancer. Warren is 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 129 pounds, and received a flu shot in October, Woo wrote in the letter.

Woo said that Warren's one medical condition is hypothyroidism, and that she takes levothyroxine every day to restore her thyroid hormones to normal levels. Hypothyroidism is a condition where the thyroid doesn't produce enough of certain hormones. It most often affects women who are middle-age and older, according to Mayo Clinic.
"Senator Warren has never smoked, used drugs or had any problem with alcohol use. She exercises regularly and follows a healthy diet despite her very busy schedule," Woo wrote in the letter. "In summary, Senator Elizabeth Warren is a very healthy 70 year old woman. There are no medical conditions or health problems that would keep her from fulfilling the duties of the President of the United States."

...The campaign's disclosure of Warren's medical exam comes as several of the top Democratic presidential candidates, who are in their 70s -- along with President Donald Trump, who is 73 -- have faced questions about their physical fitness.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, 77, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78, have also pledged to release their medical records before the Iowa caucuses in early February...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/06/politics/elizabeth-warren-physical-exam/index.html

https://twitter.com/magpiewdc/status/1202820465967947776

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Jeanne Trachta was a strong Joe Biden supporter during his 2008 presidential campaign, serving as a precinct captain. A dozen years later, she still likes the 77-year-old former vice president, but as she waited for his event here to begin, she gushed about a candidate less than half Biden’s age.

“He’s so articulate and charismatic and intelligent,” Trachta said of Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., whom she had seen here just a few days earlier. “He’s so organized. I’m getting something from the Buttigieg campaign a couple times a day.”

Trachta personifies a challenge facing Biden in Iowa and elsewhere as he tries to regain traction with the argument that he is the experienced, tested candidate best able to beat President Trump. Among centrist voters inclined to like Biden, the 37-year-old Buttigieg is becoming plausible as an alternative, and he highlights what Biden is not: energetic, articulate and young.

“I’ve narrowed it to Joe and Pete,” said Ed Neddermeyer, a farmer in Schleswig, Iowa. “Joe comes from a tried-and-true administration. Pete has a fresh face. I like what he’s saying and how he is saying it. When he first came out, there is no way I’d say that.”

These are difficult days for the Biden campaign. Although he has maintained his lead in national polls, Biden plummeted to a third-place tie last month in the Des Moines Register/CNN poll of Iowa while Buttigieg leapt into first. Those results, along with other polls showing Biden doing poorly in New Hampshire, which holds the other first contest of the primary season, set off renewed alarms about the former vice president’s prospects...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-12-03/joe-biden-woos-iowa-voters-pete-buttigieg-increasingly-in-his-way

Lobbyists either helped draft or made extensive revisions to opinion columns published by three state lawmakers in a way that warned against the dangers of Medicare-for-all and other government involvement in health care, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

Montana state Rep. Kathy Kelker (D) and Sen. Jen Gross (D) acknowledged in interviews that editorials they published separately about the single-payer health proposal included language provided by John MacDonald, a lobbyist and consultant in the state who disclosed in private emails that he worked for an unnamed client. Gross said MacDonald contacted her on behalf of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a multimillion-dollar industry group founded in 2018 and funded by hospitals, private insurers, drug companies, and other private health-care firms.

Additionally, an aide to Ohio state Sen. Steve Huffman (R) confirmed in a brief interview that the lawmaker’s op-ed criticizing Medicare-for-all was written with the help of Kathleen DeLand, an Ohio-based lobbyist. None of the lawmakers’ columns disclose that they were written with the help of a lobbyist.

The emails show how, even at the state and local levels, lobbyists are trying to bend public opinion away from an idea that has seized much of the debate during the current Democratic presidential primary. Two candidates, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (Vt.), have proposed a massive redesign of the health-care system that would place all Americans on a single government health insurer...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/02/state-lawmakers-acknowledge-lobbyists-helped-craft-their-op-eds-attacking-medicare-for-all/

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1201456502520852481

Tomorrow, President Trump arrives in London for the annual Nato summit. Despite the boasting and the trappings of superpower status, he is an emissary from a country whose economy and society are in increasing difficulty, and whose global leadership is under challenge not just from the usual suspect, China, but from Europe. With the unerring capacity to be wrong that defines the Brexit right, Britain is about to decouple itself from a continental economy beginning to get things right, and hook up with one that is palpably beginning to fail.

... Except the latest research demonstrates the reverse is true. Britain is about to make a vast mistake. In the recently published The Great Reversal, leading economist Thomas Philippon of New York University and member of the advisory panel of the New York Federal Reserve, mounts a devastating attack on the conventional wisdom, so perfectly embodied by the witless Boris Johnson. The news is that over the last 20 years per capita EU incomes have grown by 25% while the US’s have grown 21%, with the US growth rate decelerating while Europe’s has held steady – indeed accelerating in parts of Europe. What is going on?

Philippon’s answer is simple. The US economy is becoming increasingly harmed by ever less competition, with fewer and fewer companies dominating sector after sector – from airlines to mobile phones. Market power is the most important concept in economics, he says. When firms dominate a sector, they invest and innovate less, they peg or raise prices, and they make super-normal profits by just existing (what economists call “economic rent”). So it is that mobile phone bills in the US are on average $100 a month, twice that of France and Germany, with the same story in broadband. Profits per passenger airline mile in the US are twice those in Europe. US healthcare is impossibly expensive, with drug companies fixing prices twice as high or even higher than those in Europe; health spending is 18% of GDP. Google, Amazon and Facebook have been allowed to become supermonopolies, buying up smaller challengers with no obstruction.

This monopolising process gums up everything. Investment in the US has been falling for 20 years. Because prices stay high, wages buy less, so workers’ lifestyles, unless they borrow, get squeezed in real terms while those at the top get paid ever more with impunity. Inequality escalates to unsupportable levels. Even life expectancy is now falling across the US. But why has this happened now? Philippon has a deadly answer. A US political campaign costs 50 times more than one in Europe in terms of money spent for every vote cast. But this doesn’t just distort the political process. It is the chief cause of the US economic crisis. Corporations want a return on their money, and the payback is protection from any kind of regulation, investigation or anti-monopoly policy that might strike at their ever-growing market power...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/america-is-not-the-land-of-the-free-but-one-of-monopolies-so-predatory-they-imperil-the-nation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other