Skip to content

Beaten to the punch

Monday, March 18, 2024

Gone are the days when I felt it my duty to post here every day. I often get an idea for a post, and figure I’ll write it up the next day. But alas, sometimes the next day is too late.

Yesterday I read this post over at the Palmer Report. Again, before I go on, while I don’t always agree with their conclusions, they usually have their facts right. In this case, they reported that Trump is cutting back on his rallies and is going to concentrate on some sort of on-line campaign. In this particular post they attributed the change in direction to his financial troubles, which do in fact exist.

But I thought there might be another reason. It seems that lately every time Trump has got in front of a crowd he has provided his opponents some sort of ammunition, usually a combination of symptoms of senility and embrace of fascism. The latter breaking the rule that you don’t say the quiet part out loud. It seemed to me that the folks running his campaign probably figured they could do better by keeping him out of the public eye.

Brilliant, right?

Well, what do I see on the Palmer Report this morning, before I’m able to sit down and reveal my brilliance to the world. This post, in which they make precisely the point I was about to make, thereby qualifying/refuting the point they made originally.

By using money problems as an excuse, Trump’s handlers are now getting him away from the rigors of the campaign trail. They’re setting him up to campaign from a safe, stress free environment in which he can literally roll out of bed and babble for an hour into a Zoom app before lying back down. And because virtual events don’t tend to be considered “real” campaign events, fewer in the media will pay attention. Which is of course the whole point. Trump’s babysitters don’t want the media or the public to notice Trump at all. They just don’t want to face questions about why Trump isn’t appearing in public.

Trump, for his part, appears to be at a stage of dementia where the people around him can convince him of anything just by repeating it enough times. So he’ll presumably go along with this idea that he’ll mainly be campaigning from home because Letitia James and E. Jean Carroll stole all his money. Of course the real reason he’ll be “campaigning” from home is that he’s a fully senile man who can’t appear in public without making himself even more non-viable.

To a certain extent, the Republicans and their rich backers are stuck with Trump and have to make the best of things. They’ve created a voter base that refuses to let him go, so their only alternative is to run him, hope he wins, and then basically control him. It is very likely that by January he will be even farther gone, and all they’d have to do is put a pen in his hand and tell him to sign on the dotted line, guiding his hand if necessary, though you have to wonder how they’ll get around the tradition of the inaugural speech, which he’d surely be unable to carry off.

You also have to wonder how effective he has been at schmoozing the rich contributors, as the New York Times reports he’s been doing. It’s hard to believe they can’t see the signs and you have to wonder whether they eventually conclude that their money is better spent on other Republican candidates.

Finally, on a sort of related subject, you can see why so many Republican politicians are kissing his ass, hoping to be named his VP. The eventual nominee loses nothing if they lose, but if they win they can always invoke the 25th Amendment a week or so after the inauguration.

Filed in The Very Stable Genius | | Comments (0)

They can only preach to the choir

Monday, March 11, 2024

I’ve written a number of posts about the Democrat’s seeming inability to grab control of the narrative. They always seem to be on the defensive and rarely, if ever, speak in unison, unlike the Republicans who will come up with a line of attack which is repeated endlessly and by practically all of them.

One of the reasons that the press “both-sides” everything, even when they know the Republicans are either lying or full of shit is that the Republicans accused them of liberal bias for years, and in their attempt to prove that’s not true they have essentially become Republican biased. A great example is the fact that they fell all over themselves emphasizing Biden’s age and alleged cognitive decline, while ignoring the fact that Trump is practically as old and is showing clear signs of senility, which amplify his underlying mental illness.

I don’t think the Democrats have improved much, but it does appear that maybe the Republicans are losing it. Case in point is Katie Britt’s widely mocked response to Biden’s State of the Union address. Republicans have managed, with the help of Fox and other purveyors of right wing propaganda, to train a certain number of people to believe anything they are told by said propaganda purveyors, even if it directly contradicts what they were told yesterday. “Reprogrammable meatbags” I believe Driftglass calls them. There are far too many of such people, but there aren’t enough of them to win enough elections to maintain control of Congress or the Presidency, even though our sainted Founding Fathers did fix the deck so states with a minority of the population (and coincidentally more propaganda imbibers) control the Congress and the Electoral College.

The problem for Republicans is that folks like Katie Britt have come to the conclusion that everyone is a reprogrammable meatbag, and they are incapable of speaking in a manner that can reach those of us who program ourselves. Thus we have them criminalizing abortion and now IVF, and getting all excited about non-issues like trans kids. They haven’t even been able to sell the Hunter Biden laptop story and their entire Biden impeachment effort has, to the extent anyone has paid attention, drawn nothing but derision.

Their strategy since Nixon has been to distract from their real agenda, the enrichment of the already rich, by distractions usually centered on some sort of vilification of an out group. The Southern strategy involved coded racism, which continues to this day. Along the way they’ve attempted to demonize other groups, though the problem is that those demons tend to become de-demonized in the process. Remember when they were pushing anti-gay referenda to whip up hatred and of course distract from their real agenda? That doesn’t work well anymore because, I would suggest, as a result of the gay rights movement too many people now have friends and acquaintances who are openly gay, so they had to move on, trying it out now on trans people. Of course there’s always racism in the background, but the appeal of anti-gay and anti-trans stuff, as well as anti-immigrant stuff, is that they are perfectly comfortable saying the quiet part out loud, and they can even get their black flunkies like Tim Scott to join in.

I would suggest that the Democrats should constantly make the point that all this hate has only one purpose: to distract from their real agenda. They should constantly be asking this question: What have Republicans done for you lately. For that matter, what have Republicans done for you since they freed the slaves? Along the way, of course, it’s not hard to find examples of ways in which they intend to do things to most voters rather than for them, such as destroying Social Security.

Filed in Politics, Republicans | | Comments (0)

Please sign our petition

Friday, March 8, 2024

This is a bit different type of post, as I won’t be dissing on any stable geniuses, talking about grifters, or bemoaning the failure of Democrats to get together on effective messaging.

Besides being a now sporadic blogger, I am the chairman of the board of SEC-TV, the public access station that serves most of New London and part of Windham County. Anyone who wants (even if they’re a right-winger!) can have a television show on our station, all of which are also available over the internet. While it’s true that anyone who wants can start their own youtube channel, we offer something more, in that we have a professional studio with experienced support staff to assist in the creation of a show. We also provide coverage of meetings of town board and commissions in our service area.

Our funding comes from a very small cut of the subscriber fees paid by cable customers. There are two problems with that. First, and this may not change, the cable companies do their best to avoid paying the proper amount of fees as required by current law. Second, a lot of people are cutting the cord and switching to all internet, that internet being provided by cable companies and/or internet provides that still provide access to the services we provide. We get nothing from the fees charged to those subscribers. As a result our revenues are declining, making it difficult to maintain the level of service we have provided in the past.

There is a bill pending in the Connecticut legislature that would address this problem by imposing a gross earnings tax on “communication services”, a portion of which would be paid to community access stations, the amount to be adjusted yearly based on the rise or fall of the consumer price index.

It’s important that we get as much support from Connecticut residents as possible, so I’m asking that you sign a petition to the legislature in support of HB 5446, the legislative proposal to address this issue. You can read the bill here and you can sign the petition here.

Filed in Local issues | | Comments (0)

A shocking decision…not

Monday, March 4, 2024

Was there anyone on the planet that thought the Supreme Court wouldn’t reverse the Colorado court’s action taking Trump off the ballot? Some of the many organizations filling my inbox with solicitations for money certainly pretended that they thought it could happen, but I don’t for a moment think any of them truly believed it.

The only surprise to me is the fact that the liberal members of the court signed onto this opinion, which as I understand it, basically means that an insurrectionist need not fear repercussions unless Congress takes up the issue, even if that Congress is filled with insurrection supporters.

Maybe the fact that the liberals joined in is a hopeful sign. Maybe a deal was made. Maybe the court fascists said: “You vote to keep Trump on the ballot, and we’ll vote to hold that he’s not immune from criminal prosecution. Sure, it’s obvious that he’s not immune in any reasonable interpretation of the constitution, but the constitution means whatever we say it means.”

Update: This is interesting. It appears that the sane members of the court originally planned to dissent in part, but ended up not doing so. Joe Patrice, at Above the Law, speculates that we might see why when the immunity decision finally comes down.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Lawyer stuff | | Comments (0)

The experts agree…

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Okay, I admit that I still get some guilty pleasure reading the Palmer Report. While the conclusions they draw don’t always flow from the facts, the facts they report are usually just that: facts. Today they relate another fact, also reported over at Hullabloo:

You don’t have to be a medical expert in order to piece together that Donald Trump is showing worsening signs of dementia. He no longer knows who the people around him are, in his political and personal life. He can’t figure out what the current period of time is. He sees the name “Donald Trump” on the teleprompter and doesn’t understand that he’s that person. And his brain keeps shorting out mid sentence, causing him to start randomly babbling about the last word he heard himself say.

But if you want confirmation of what you think you’re seeing, it turns out an expert in the field very much agrees. Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, says that “Trump appears to be showing gross signs of dementia.”

Dr. Gartner points to Trump’s frequent use of non-words, known as “phonemic paraphasias,” as a medical indicator of how advanced Trump’s dementia is. Trump typically makes up fake words that sound similar to real words, as he tries and fails to remember what the real words are.

The cited symptom isn’t the sole symptom, as anyone who is paying attention would know. It is, however, according to Gartner, a sign of “moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer’s”. The sad fact is that not everyone is paying attention, and much of the media is making no attempt to bring this state of affairs to their attention, preferring instead to concentrate on the senility from which Joe Biden is not suffering. It is to be hoped that as the days go on, particularly given the pressure from his various court cases,that his condition will further deteriorate to such an extent that even the mainstream media will pay sustained attention to it.

I wonder though. I remember that shortly after Reagan was elected I watched one of his press conferences and it struck me that he wasn’t all there mentally. During one of his debates with Mondale in 1984 he wandered off into an irrelevant anecdote that actually caused a bit of comment, but it quickly receded and he declined further into his senility as his second term progressed. Of course they were successful in keeping it all under wraps, because after all, who needs a functioning president if the people who pull his strings can still get all they want. In the end, all he has to be capable of doing is signing his name where they tell him to, and if he has trouble with that, they can always guide his hand. It never became an issue with Reagan, but it’s also the case that his condition wasn’t as advanced while he was in the White House as Trump’s condition appears to be.

It may be a bit of a different story if the man has to run for president while in the grip of senility, because he has to go out in public, at least sometimes. Of course, he’ll refuse to debate and will avoid all but friendly media, but the press will not question whatever lame excuses they put forward for his actions. But it will become more and more difficult to make the issue about Biden as Trump’s public displays become more numerous and less open to bullshit explanations. Plus, give the Biden folks credit, they are tweeting out videos of all Trump’s senile moments (on Truth Social too) and that has to have at least some affect on other coverage.

I suppose that from a potential VP’s point of view, it is an enticing prospect. Assuming they steal the election fair and square this time, the VP could simply wait until January 21st and then invoke the 25th Amendment.

Filed in The Very Stable Genius | | Comments (0)

A sure bet

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

I wrote a few weeks ago about the church in New London that god chose to strike down. It was a former Congregational Church, but they sold the historic structure to the Engaging Heaven Ministries back in 2015 for $250,000.00.

We learn today that the City of New London has put a $244,646.00 lien on the property to cover the costs the city has incurred (doubtless there are more to come) cleaning up the mess:

Mayor Michael Passero on Monday said the lien was not “an aggressive move” by the city, but rather a way to protect the city’s interests.

“When (Engaging Heaven) pays us, the lien comes off,” he said, adding the ministry was informed about the lien before it was imposed.

Passero said the city would likely pull the owed amounts from various capital project accounts.

“And as we get paid back, we’d reimburse those accounts,” he said.

… James Levesque, founder of the Engaging Heaven Ministries group, which operates churches in West Haven, Montana and Florida, previously said the ministry was prepared to reimburse the city for all costs related to the collapse.

Levesque, who met with city officials earlier this month, could not be reached to comment on Monday at his ministry’s Madeira Beach, Fla., headquarters.

Levesque assured the city, immediately after the fire, that he had insurance on the building, but somehow the insurance company has failed to take an interest in the situation. My guess, also, is that his other “ministries” are structured in such a way that none will have any legal liability for his operation in New London.

Passero isn’t stupid, so he doubtless knows that he’ll never see a dime from Engaging Heaven. The holy man is a grifter, like 99% of the people who operate churches these days. My guess is that Passero feels it’s good politics not to say out loud what he surely knows. The New London Day, from which the quote above is garnered, has also been a bit reticent about calling a grifter a grifter. So, you heard it here first. If, by some miracle, Engaging Heaven comes through, I’ll print a retraction, but I’m not terribly worried.

Filed in Grifters, Local issues | | Comments (0)

You heard it here first

Monday, February 19, 2024

In what should come as no surprise a panel of experts polled by the Los Angeles Times opines that while Biden is a respectable 16th best in the list of presidents, Trump is dead last:

Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such lowlights as Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who died a mere 31 days after taking office.

Trump’s impact goes well beyond his own ranking and Biden’s. Every contemporary Democratic president has moved up in the ranks — Barack Obama (No. 7), Bill Clinton (No. 12) and even Jimmy Carter (No. 22).

Being as this is reported by the mainstream media, the Times goes on to cast doubt on the conclusions of its own selected experts, but not to the extent of casting doubt on the conclusion about Trump.

I take this occasion to point out that I reported Trump’s dismal standings in this blog many years ago, on December 20, 2015 to be exact:

It’s official. The American Historical Society announced today that it had taken a poll of its members, and there was surprising unanimity: Donald Trump is the worst president in American History. Well, actually, Donald Trump will be the worst president in American history, once he’s sworn in.

“There was a bit of debate about whether we should declare him the worst before his inauguration”, an Historical Society spokesperson said, “but in the end, we reached consensus that there was really no reason to wait, since he was such a clear winner….er… loser”.

Trump replaces George W. Bush as the Society’s worst president ever. Bush, unlike Trump, was not a unanimous pick for the highly coveted award. A history professor from Bowdoin College held out for Franklin Pierce, stating that while he saw the merits of the argument for Bush, as a matter of institutional pride, he felt it was important to stick up for a Bowdoin alum. That same professor was recently quoted as saying that “next to Trump, Pierce looks like Lincoln”.

The professors pointed to a variety of reasons for their unanimous decision. “We’ve had mentally ill presidents in the past”, one pointed out, “but you can argue that Lincoln’s occasional depression was part of what made him great, and while Andy Jackson was a bit of a megalomaniac, he simply can’t compare to Trump. ”

Another pointed out “that there’s no indication that any other president ever solicited payments from foreign powers, something that the constitution forbids, Trump has been pretty open about it, and then there’s the whole collusion with Russia thing prior to the election. It appears that a foreign power will have something on the president of the United States, and that as a result he may be forced to do its bidding, though I do admit that if the collusion did come out, it’s quite likely that Congress would do nothing about it.”

Many also felt that using the presidency for personal enrichment was a bit tacky, to say the least. Others pointed out that while there have been ill prepared presidents in the past, no prior president has ever lacked so much of the basic knowledge needed to do the job. “This guy makes George W. Bush look like a genius”, noted one historian.

Others pointed out that while most former presidents, with the possible exception of George Washington, sometimes told a lie, Trump will be the first president who has never told the truth.

I hereby confess that I made it all up. But it all turned out to be true, didn’t it, including the part about Republicans not giving a damn about him subverting the constitution and kowtowing to Putin, and now the experts agree.

Filed in History, The Very Stable Genius | | Comments (0)

Good day, yesterday

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

So, the Democrat won convincingly in New York yesterday, cutting the Republicans’ razor thin majority in the House down even more. It was supposed to be close, but wasn’t. 2022 was supposed to be a Republican wave, but wasn’t. In fact, it appears to be the case that Democrats have outperformed the polls quite a bit over the past few years, which makes you wonder whether the polls themselves are as accurate as they once seem to have been.

There are, no doubt, several pollsters, such as Rasmussen, whose polls are designed to achieve results that can then be used by pundits to pontificate about the dismal fate of the Democrats. I was polled by Rasmussen recently, and I could tell by the way the questions were phrased that the point was to try to get results in line with Republican talking points.

I also wonder whether the methodologies used to select poll respondents are able to get a representative sample of the population as a whole. On line polls can’t help but being skewed, and I’m not sure it’s possible to get a representative sample by telephone these days. In any event, it seems clear that one can’t necessarily put one’s faith in polls these days.

Getting back to yesterday’s election, from what I’ve read it appears that the Democrat attacked the Republicans effectively on the immigration issue, making sure people were aware of their hypocrisy in refusing to vote on the Senate bill because the very stable genius told them not to do so. He made Trump the issue, and it worked. Every Democrat running for office this year should make Trump the issue.

The Republicans have put themselves in an awkward position in all but the districts that are chock full of idiots, of which, unfortunately, there are still quite a few. But in any district in which the electorate is somewhat rational, they are now faced with a choice. Embrace Trump, and keep the MAGA types, but lose a hefty proportion of the independents. Or, alternatively, keep your distance from Trump and try to appeal to the independents by lying about your intentions to pursue a “moderate” agenda, thereby losing the Trumpers. It’s a situation they created for themselves. Back in 2021 they should have dumped Trump down the memory hole like they did to Bush in 2008. Sure, he would have refused to be dumped, but if they were consistent about it they could have accomplished it. In fact, if they’d done the right thing and convicted him after he was impeached, he’d be disqualified from running and they could just run another nut case that they could sell more easily to the low information types.

Anything can happen, and there’s no doubt the Republicans are planning on stealing as many states as they can, but my money is on Biden at this point, though the media will continue to work hard to both sides the senility issue, emphasizing meaningless slips by Biden while ignoring Trump’s obvious mental decline, which, to be fair, is not that steep, since the starting point was not that high.

Filed in Politics, Republicans | | Comments (0)

Fun reading

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Just got finished reading the decision in United States v. Trump, which you can read here.

Like some others, I thought that the Republican judge on the panel was holding things up indefinitely, and I still sort of think that the other two judges had to work on her to get her to join in what is definitely a strong decision.

One ironic thing in the decision is that the most difficult issue facing the court, and the one most likely to prevent them from issuing a decision at all, was a jurisdictional argument made by one of the amicus briefs, to the effect that the issue was such that it could not be raised until after the conviction, i.e., that an appeal was not yet in order procedurally. The court spent a lot of time dealing with that issue, and I think it was the only issue raised by anyone that had a chance to prevail over the government’s position. Trump couldn’t argue in favor of it, since he was the appellant, meaning he’d taken the appeal in the first place, and he could hardly argue that the court had no jurisdiction over his appeal. Actually, with Trump and his lawyers you never know.

The rest of the opinion makes long shrift of Trump’s absurd immunity arguments, in that it devoted more ink to them than was logically necessary, though not politically. None of his arguments make sense, particularly the double jeopardy argument that, having been acquitted in an impeachment, he could not be tried again. The argument is absurd on its face, but the court treated it, along with the other frivolous arguments, as if it was a serious issue, but did get in the fact that Trump’s lawyers made the exact opposite argument at his impeachment trial.

I’m fairly hopeful that with the exception of Clarence, the Supreme Court (even Alito) will take a pass on Trump’s inevitable appeal to that august body.

Filed in Lawyer stuff, Trump Crimes | | Comments (0)

I’m a Swiftie now!

Monday, February 5, 2024

I just realized that I have not weighed in on what appears to be the most important issue of the day, so I want to make my position clear:

  1. I am positively glad that Taylor Swift won another Grammy even though, so far as I know, I’ve never heard one of her songs. I’m even thinking about checking up on her music one of these days, if I can stop listening to stuff from the sixties and seventies for a while.
  2. I’m rooting hard for the Kansas City Chiefs to win the Super Bowl even though in past years I have prided myself on being among the last to know who won said Super Bowl, which is an indication of how much I care about football generally.
  3. I’m positively in awe of the fact that Taylor Swift has been secretly carrying on psy-op operations for years and has managed to keep it under wraps until just recently. Also, I have to reluctantly hand it to the folks at Fox that did the uncovering. It must have taken a lot of hard working journalism to do it, and who ever heard of the people at Fox committing journalism!

I know these positions are controversial, but I feel I owe it to my readers (if they exist) to be upfront about these things.

Filed in Issues | | Comments (0)