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Book report

Friday, February 17, 2023

I’m currently reading Myth America, a collection of essays edited by Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer. I am informed by the cover image on my e-reader that it is or was a New York Times bestseller, a fact of which I was unaware, in part because we can no longer get home delivery of the Times here in the wilds of Eastern Connecticut. I ran across the book by chance and decided to get it, as both my wife and I follow Kruse, she on Twitter and I on Mastodon, and we usually agree with what he has to say.

As the name implies, the book seeks to deflate a number of myths about this country, primarily by eschewing the both siderism so prevalent in our media today, except for the right wing media, of course, which exempts itself from what it demands of others. The book has a clear leftward slant, but that’s because facts have a liberal bias.

Needless to say, if one is relatively well informed, a reader is likely to already know that the myths in question are just that. It is, for example, self evident to almost anyone that the right wing trope that not only should the “Free Market” be left to develop on its own without governmental interference, but that doing so will solve all our problems, is an absurd notion. One need only imagine what the state of our rivers would be today had the government not stepped in to stop the free enterprisers from dumping anything they like into them. Why, the Cuyahoga River, in the immortal words of Randy Newman, would still “burn on”. The list could go on into infinity.

Still, it’s good to have the rebuttals to these myths presented in well documented form. Some of the essays delve into matters that are not so familiar, and are well worth knowing about, such as that by Kathleen Belew that documents the history and tactics of the right wing militia movement in this country. While I’ve been aware of these groups, I was unaware of the manner in which they organize and the extent to which what appear to be “lone wolf” actions are often actions taken consistent with goals spread through the network the militias use to coordinate their actions while making it quite hard to legally prove that coordination.

The book is well worth a read.

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An interesting case

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

I’m just sort of passing this along. It’s a fascinating case covered at this post on Above the Law.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court is about to decide whether a convicted defendant who is black is entitled to a new trial because his public defender was a rabid racist.

The issue under debate is whether a public defender’s bigotry, evidenced by 20 racist social media posts that he made while representing his client, constitutes a conflict of interest. That would grant the defendant an automatic new trial, without having to pinpoint specific ways in which his attorney’s representation impacted his case.

Based on the questions from the judges that the post quotes, I’m guessing the court is going to do the right thing, though it may open a colossal can of worms. The lawyer in question was a public defender who represented more than 6,000 defendants in his career. Given certain realities, which of course by no means demonstrate systemic racism in our society (we are not Woke!) it is a sure thing that a hefty percentage of those defendants were black. If the court rules in favor of the individual in question, it would seem to follow as the night the day that all those other defendants deserve new trials as well.

Personally, I can see no way for the court to logically rule against the guy, and given that we’re talking about Massachusetts, I’d bet he will win. I’m sure, however, that courts in other states (and the feds, of course) will find a way to rule the other way should the issue come their way.

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A brief Super Bowl day rant having nothing to do with the Super Bowl

Sunday, February 12, 2023

There are a lot of things to rant about these days, and this rant is likely on one of the least important topics, but it’s still indicative of something that is seriously wrong with our media ecosystem.

There are certain politicians who should be nonentities, yet they tend to attract about 90% of the media attention. I refer to people like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, et. al. All they have to do to get attention is say something absolutely absurd. Meanwhile, serious legislators, like our own Joe Courtney, go about doing their jobs and go unnoticed.

If the media reported on the nonentities, but treated them as they deserved, that would be one thing. But they get to bloviate endlessly while those who seriously want to get things done are largely ignored. What, for example, has Majorie Taylor Greene ever actually accomplished, other than reducing Kevin McCarthy to a bowl of quivering jelly? Has she ever done anything of use to her consitituents, never mind the country? She’s in it for the attention, and she gets all she wants.

The more the system rewards such people, the more such people we will get. We have a tenuous hold on our democracy at the moment, and the more such politicians we get the more tenuous that hold will become.

End of rant.

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Friday Night Music, Giddens and Woody

Friday, February 10, 2023

My wife and I don’t disagree on much, but for reasons I can’t fathom she isn’t a folk music fan, so I listen to Folk Alley when she’s not around.

So a few days ago, my wife being elsewhere, I was listening to a song and thought I recognized the voice of the truly great Rhiannon Giddens, and was a bit intrigued by the line “All You Fascists Bound to Lose”. I did a search and it was, indeed, Giddens with the Resistance Revival Chorus singing a song Woody Guthrie penned when the prospects for the Fascists, at least in this country, were indeed a bit dimmer than today.

Here’s the Giddens version:

And, for your listening pleasure, here’s Woody, from back in the day.

We can only hope that Woody was right.

As a side note, it’s been many a moon since I put up music, something that used to be a regular Friday night feature on this blog. Maybe I’ll start again.

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Today’s rant

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

As this is my blog I have every right to gripe endlessly about certain subjects. Today I’m combining one old gripe with one I don’t think I’ve ever bloviated about before.

First up, yet another gripe about the inability of Democrats to get their message across. What led to this was this article at the Boston Globe which tells us:

Two years into a presidency that the White House casts as the most effective in modern history, President Biden is set to deliver a State of the Union address Tuesday to a skeptical country with a majority of Americans saying they do not believe he has achieved much since taking office, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll finds that 62 percent of Americans think Biden has accomplished “not very much’’ or “little or nothing’’ during his presidency, while 36 percent say he has accomplished “a great deal’’ or “a good amount.’’ On many of Biden’s signature initiatives — from improving the country’s infrastructure to making electric vehicles more affordable to creating jobs — majorities of Americans say they do not believe he has made progress, the poll finds.

While the Democrats had a thin majority (thanks Manchin and Sinema), against strong odds they still accomplished a lot, but it’s not surprising that the American people are largely unaware of that fact, inasmuch as Democrats suck at messaging. The Republicans have been more successful demonizing a group (transgender folks) who are totally harmless and are a microscopic percentage of our population, at the same time that they’ve glorified guns. If they can sell that sort of stuff Democrats can sell improved Medicare benefits, infrastructure improvements, etc.

It’s not just the Democrats fault, of course. The media, and not just Fox, would rather cover the latest tweet by idiots like Gaetz and Greene than enlighten the public about mundane stuff like solid Democratic achievements. After all, everyone already knows that only Democrats ever do anything that actually improves the life of normal people. It’s old news. Why bother to cover such things when Donald Trump just issued another deranged tweet.

Still, if the Democrats kept pounding, and attacked the media for not covering this stuff, the media would come around. They did when Republicans attacked them for “liberal bias”, thenceforward bending over backwards to both sides everything. (I mean, some people say the earth is flat, so who are we to be dogmatic?)

Now, on to my other gripe. I only learned today that back in November France required every parking lot to install solar panels over all their parking spaces. How can we let France beat us at this sort of thing! As the linked article demonstrates, t’s a no-brainer, as is a requirement that all new construction incorporate solar systems whenever feasible. This may happen in the USA sometime before the year 2100, assuming we haven’t gone full fascist by then, but don’t count on it.

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Judicial Intellectual Dishonesty (Who would think!)

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Just before he died at the hands of someone who should never have had a gun, John Lennon gave an interview to Playboy, in which he asserted that “everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it”.

I won’t go into details on Lennon’s thinking or reasoning, but it looks like right wing judges are following his lead. Here’s an interesting analysis of a recent concurring opinion by a federal circuit court judge holding that a man could not be held criminally liable for possessing guns after he had voluntarily agreed to a court order forbidding him to own guns.

The judge, Judge James Ho, cited numerous cases in support of his concurrence. The only problem is that the cases don’t support his position that the right to bear arms is an unqualified one, they point out the absurdity of the position.

It’s always difficult for conservative judges to find support for their “deeply historical” analysis of the Second Amendment since it doesn’t exist. Even the majority opinion explicitly notes that, “In Emerson, we held that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms—the first circuit expressly to do so.” Since Emerson was decided in 2001, this is just letting pride get in the way of Originalist gaslighting. Come on, Fifth Circuit! You can’t go around admitting that the individual right to gun possession is barely old enough to drink.

So kudos to Judge Ho for trying to build a historical case! Unfortunately, neither of these cited opinions have much to do with the Second Amendment.

And they both… prove the opposite of what he’s arguing.

The discussion at the link is an extended one, so I won’t quote more. Suffice to say that the thrust of the cases Ho cites is that the rights enumerated in the constitution are not unlimited, even freedom of speech and religion. In each, the judge from the saner period of our history uses the second amendment as an example of the absurdity of treating any of the rights as unqualified because obviously the right to bear arms is not unlimited.

But to too many of our current judges, everything is the opposite of what it is, whenever it’s convenient. And remember, Ho wasn’t the only judge basically deciding that the right to bear arms is unqualified. He was merely agreeing with the majority of judges on the Fifth Circuit case that a man who agreed to a court order not to bear arms could still bear arms.

Just to expand a bit on what the sane judges in the cases Ho cited were saying, it is self evident that none of the rights enumerated in the Bill or Rights are unqualified. If I say that my religion requires me to sacrifice the lives of random strangers (or even willing victims) I will end up in jail. Or I should, but with the present Supreme Court, you never know. After all, they are quite willing to allow gun owners the right to the weaponry needed to take the lives of random strangers. As another example, which is still valid assuming it’s a Democrat doing the speaking, I have every right to libel someone, but I am going to end up paying damages if I do.

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A step too far?

Sunday, January 29, 2023

It is a political fact of life in this country that Republicans get themselves elected by distracting their base, inasmuch as their actual priorities consist mainly in screwing that base. It always reminds me of the Bob Dylan song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, that taught me as a young teen about the political methodology employed by the right. In those days, that included Southern Democrats, but those days are long gone. Republicans now have a monopoly on the tactic. It’s against the rules to explicitly demonize black people nowadays, though the implied demonizations are becoming closer and closer to explicit. Gays don’t work very well any more, so they’ve gone on to transgender people, who have to be the most vulnerable and least threatening people in the country. But for people who need a bogeyman, they apparently work.

Still, it seems to me that you have to be a bit careful in terms of how you screw the base while you distract them. At some point, you risk them getting wise to the fact that they’re getting screwed and, more importantly, precisely who is screwing them.

Which brings me to the latest Republican proposal: abolition of the income and payroll taxes, replaced by a 30% national sales tax, which would presumably be on top of the various state sales taxes. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s indicative of where these people are coming from, and as the linked article notes, the Democrats have actually opened fire.

The objective, of course, would be to screw the base by shifting the tax burden even more onto them, while relieving the rich from what little remains of their own tax burdens. The thing is, even the yahoos, or lots of them can understand that they’d be screwed by such a system, though they might not realize that besides hitting them hard in their pockets, it would likely destroy social security, something upon which they all rely, though they’d never admit they only get it because of us libtards.

I remember sometime in 2013 predicting on this blog that the next Republican presidential candidate would be nutjob, and that they could no longer get by appealing to the crazies but nominating “centrists” like Romney or McCain. Sure enough, we got Trump, and we’re not likely to see a reasonable Republican candidate (are there any reasonable Republicans?) in 2024 that gets any measure of primary support.

The inmates have taken control of the asylum, and it’s only a matter of time before they insist on pushing proposals like the national sales tax, because though they have risen to power by utilizing distraction etc., rightwingers who think like their nutjob base (but who still want to screw them) are now actually members of Congress, and they don’t have the brains to realize that you have to make sure you disguise the stuff you’re doing to your voters. You don’t say the quiet part out loud.

The Republicans have, in the past few years, lost quite a few former Republicans, the type of person who inherited their party affiliation from their parents, and who only now, with Trump, have come to realize that the party of their parents is no more. The party, now more than ever, can’t afford to lose the nutjobs, but proposals like the national sales tax might even make those folks take notice. It might help if the Democrats made it a point to keep asking those type of people precisely what the Republicans have actually done for them lately.

Meanwhile, folks like DeSantis are trying to insure that the base stays as ignorant as possible. The attack on public education is all about keeping the majority of the country as ignorant and as open to propaganda as possible.

We have to hope that the Democrats will get their act together and highlight this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter that it went nowhere. It’s indicative of what they want, and if they play it right it we can use it against them like they used “defund the police” against us.

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A look back

Sunday, January 22, 2023

I’ve mentioned before that I keep a journal, usually consisting of only a few paragraphs a day. Back in the Trump years I would normally devote a few paragraphs to the latest crimes, etc.

Every day I look back at the “On This Day” feature to see what was happening “on this day” in prior years. So I just thought I’d pass on the fact that today is the sixth anniversary of the day that we all learned from KellyAnne Conway that there are such things as “alternative facts”. At least it was the first time that we were explicitly told about such things, since Republicans had been spouting them for years.

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George Santos again

Friday, January 20, 2023

I have tried to confess on those rare occasions (well, I say they’re rare!) when I’ve been wrong, but in this case I have an excuse. When the George Santos story first reared its head, or at least first came to the attention of the wider population, I predicted that it would soon fade, as he was just a Republican being a Republican, and lying being no big thing for Republicans, the media would give him the same pass it ultimately gives all lying, hypocritical Republicans.

But Santos (assuming that’s his real name) has refused to go gentle into that good night. Just about every day another lie or criminal deed of fairly major proportions is unearthed, so he’s still in the news and the story, so far, has been impervious to both siderism.

In the post to which I’ve linked, I questioned why the Democrats didn’t make an issue of Santos’s lies, as I had reason to believe they were aware of them. Well, we learned recently from the New York Times that they did try to publicize his lies, but the media wasn’t interested. I love the way Times Reporter Nicholas Fandos puts it:

Democrats then labored unsuccessfully to convince the news media, which had been weakened by years of staff cuts and consumed by higher-profile races, to dig into the troubling leads they did unearth. Aside from The North Shore Leader — a small weekly newspaper on Long Island, which labeled Mr. Santos “a fake” — and a few opinion pieces in Newsday, New York’s media machine paid Mr. Santos scant attention.

Funny, I always thought that the Times was part of New York’s media machine, and I have a bit of trouble believing it didn’t have the staff to dig into the story, since it apparently did after it was too late to keep the guy out of office.

That doesn’t excuse the Democrats, of course. Had they launched a media blitz of their own, it would have forced the “New York media machine” to cover the story. Of course, it may be that they didn’t bother to invest in the race as they should have.

Fandos’s story, to which I’ve linked, is worth reading in full as he details the extent of the Republican’s knowledge of Santos’ dishonesty.

He doesn’t mention something that came up after his article. I love the fact that Santos, who has embraced the Republican hate campaign against drag queen story hours is himself a drag queen, something he has both admitted and denied. You have to wonder whether the guy has any self awareness. He appears to believe that he can tell any lie and be hyper hypocritical without consequences. Of course, maybe he’s right. He is a Republican, after all.

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A typical case of American Blind Justice

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Isn’t this great?

On Friday, the former President’s namesake company, the Trump Organization, was sentenced to pay the state $1.6 million in fines. That is the maximum allowed by law.

I would be willing to bet that the state of New York spent more than $1.6 million dollars to get the guilty verdict (remember, it was a criminal case) against the Trump organization. It may be the maximum allowed by law, but one suspects that law is ages old, and it now amounts to a slap on the wrist. No, not a slap, a tap.

Corporations have always been a legal method for those who control them to avoid the legal consequences of their own wrongdoing. Some of those legal protections make sense. A mere investor should not be criminally liable if the corporation engages in criminal activity. As the Trump case demonstrates, the actual corporate officers can be held criminally liable for those criminal acts, providing, of course that they haven’t shielded themselves behind an impenetrable wall of legal dodges, as Trump himself likes to do.

Historically, corporations were at first rare. It took an act of the legislature to form a corporation, and they were authorized only for very special purposes. Gradually things changed, and anyone could form a corporation for almost any purpose, thereby shielding themselves from the civil and criminal consequences of their acts, unless the “corporate veil” could be “pierced”, something I can testify is easier said than done, having been involved in some cases involving that very concept when I was practicing law.

It would seem self evident that in a country that has the death penalty for human beings, there should be a death penalty for corporations. The Trump Organization should be placed under the control of a court appointed special master and its holdings (if any) liquidated with every dollar realized in the process forfeited to the state of New York.

It is probably a fact that, as the genius often alleges, the New York case was brought against his corporation because he owned it, and the prosecutor wanted to get him. This was entirely appropriate as it is only right that malefactors such as Trump keep their heads down and not basically publicize their criminality. There was, in other words, a payoff for the prosecutor other than the trivial penalty that could be imposed on the corporation. It is likely the fact that one reason more corporations are not brought to court for their wrongdoing is the expense involved in doing so compared to the fairly trivial penalties that can be exacted against them in the event of convictions. Perhaps we would see more corporations brought to some measure of justice if the punishment fit the crime.

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