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Another crushing defeat for Trump

Friday, July 2, 2021

Some might think, judging by the title of this post, that I will be bloviating about the recent indictment of the Trump Organization. While that might be well worth the bloviating, this post bloviates elsewhere:

Historians: Trump Was Only the Fourth-Worst President of All Time

Today, C-SPAN released its Presidential Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, which asks historians and professional presidential observers to rate commanders-in-chief on a scale of one to 10, focusing on 10 key leadership areas, like moral authority, vision, economic management, and more. At the top is Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the very bottom is James Buchanan. Just above that bumbler is Andrew Johnson (first President to be impeached), then Franklin Pierce, then the most recent Oval Office occupant, the twice-impeached Donald Trump at number 41. Trump came in lower than James Garfield, who was President for 200 days, and William Henry Harrison, who lasted only 31.

This is a shocking injustice to the former guy. He’s far and away worse than Buchanan and Pierce, though as a Bowdoin alum I can’t help agreeing with the fictional Bowdoin history prof in this old post that Pierce deserves to be closer to the bottom. As I said then, it’s a matter of institutional pride, he being a fellow alum. Still, we don’t talk about Pierce much. His classmates Longfellow and Hawthorne have a library named after them, but it there’s anything at Bowdoin named after Pierce, it must be a toilet.

But, back to the former guy. Leaving Johnson aside for the moment, was he really better than Buchanan and Pierce? As much as I’d like to give Pierce the crown, he had far less impact on the course of history. The country was headed toward Civil War, and Pierce did nothing to stop it, though it’s arguable that in those times, it was Congress that held most of the power, and it’s not at all clear Pierce could have done much to stop it, though like the former guy he was beholden to the forces of reaction, which were his base. But, at least so far a I know, he never encouraged a violent attempt to overthrow the government. Nor did Buchanan, he just stepped aside and did nothing while the Southern states seceded and took over the U.S. Army’s military bases and stole their arms. Really trivial when compared to the genius.

Now Johnson is the guy who can give the Donald a run for his money. If there was anyone worse that the genius, it was him. He succeeded Lincoln at a time when presidential leadership in the right direction-toward equal rights for blacks- would have made all the difference. Instead, he did all he could to set the country on the road to Jim Crow, a road that would develop few potholes until 1965.

But time will tell. The genius has left a fully formed fascist party behind him, something Johnson did not do. If the Republicans manage to pull off massive voter suppression (see, e.g., the recent Supreme Court decision sanctioning said suppression) and the installation of corrupt election officials, as he has encouraged and demanded, then we are in for a full blown fascist state, and he will surely steal Johnson’s crown.

Or maybe not. They say that history is written by the winners, and, in that case, he’ll rise to the top.

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Pence goes off the reservation

Sunday, June 27, 2021

You have to wonder if Pence has plans that might prove somewhat disruptive in 2021:

During a speech at Ronald Reagan Library Thursday, former VP Mike Pence publicly broke with Traitor Trump’s unconscionable lies about so-called “voter fraud” in the 2020 election.

He did that liberal thing where you remember the past accurately: “January 6 was a dark day in history the United States Capitol,” Pence said.

…

He continued, “We reconvened the Congress the very same day to finish the work of counting electoral votes from every state in the union. Now, there are those in our party, who believed that, in my position as presiding officer over the joint session, that I possess the authority to reject or return electoral votes, certified by the states.”

“But the constitution provides the vice president with no such authority,” Pence stated.

“The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

“The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone.”

It has been put about that Pence actually thinks he has a future in politics, and given the reception he got at a recent whackjob conference, it may be the case that he has concluded that no amount of sychophancy to the former guy will restore him to the good graces of either said former guy or his adherents.

If Pence really wants to run for president in 2024, he will have to do it as a sort-of-anti-Trump. That is, never directly attacking Trump, but pushing back at the Big Lie and presenting himself as a true conservative who supports the constitution.

It won’t work, particularly if Trump runs again, but if Pence does make such a run, it may roil the Republican Party somewhat. If Liz Cheney, by that time former Congresswoman from Wyoming, runs as a third party candidate, Pence’s failed candidacy may have the effect of pushing his followers (if there are any) into the Cheney camp. A third party run, in the words of the Bard “ ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d”. It would guarantee a Democratic victory on the presidential line, despite the fact that a number of traditionally red states will be stolen as a result of voter suppression and outright theft. What effect it would have on the Senate is, unfortunately, an open question. Odds are that if Congress hasn’t passed a voting rights law by 2024 the Republican Party will have effectively created one party states in those states in which it has suppressed the votes. There’s not much doubt that the Supreme Court will give a thumbs up to the voter suppression laws, so states such as Georgia and North Carolina, where an electorate allowed to vote would likely vote for Democrats, will be safely in the Republican camp.

AFTERWORD: It’s interesting that Bill Barr, arguably the most sycophantic of them all, is putting distance between himself and the former guy. Given his willingness to abuse his office for the genius while he held it, it may say something about where these people think things are heading. Of course, in Barr’s case, he may just be trying to head off obstruction of justice charges.

AFTER THE AFTERWORD: As usual, Driftglass has a perceptive take on Pence.

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An easy prediction

Thursday, June 24, 2021

I have ranted on several occasions about the inability of Democrats to get their message across and their tendency to undermine themselves by their inept communications strategy. The Republicans, by contrast, have done a great job of manipulating the media and their base, enabling them to pursue policies that hurt their own voters at least as badly as they hurt everyone else, moreso in some cases. But the Republicans are not perfect, and I hereby predict that they are about to embark on a public relations disaster.

The Republicans are nonentities in cities, and are rapidly losing the relatively affluent suburbs, maintaining maximum strength in those places where folks are losing intellectual capacity through extensive inbreeding. That’s why they need to suppress votes, but they wouldn’t have to suppress quite so many if they could pump up their numbers back to where they were when they once ruled in the suburbs. One of the many things driving suburban types away from the Republicans is their attempt to transform the insurrectionists into a band of harmless tourists. It will work on the brain dead, who they already own, but it won’t work with people who saw it live at the time and whose brains have not been thoroughly Foxified. Not everyone lives in an Orwellian world in which, despite the evidence of their own senses, they believe whatever they are told to believe.

Which brings us to the news that Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is going to form a special committee to investigate the attack on the Capitol. Kevin McCarthy will presumably decide which Republicans will be on that committee. He could appoint people who would sit quietly through the hearings and investigative process, neither helping very much nor impeding. If he did that it would not rankle any of those former Republican leaning types who might, properly coddled, return to the fold. But he won’t do that. He will appoint folks in the Jim Jordan/Devin Nunes mode, maybe even the more extreme nutcases (seemingly impossible, yet true) like Lauren Boebert. They will proceed to argue incessantly that nothing happened that day; that they weren’t hiding out from a rampaging mob, and those conspirators testifying to the contrary in the hopes of getting their sentences lowered are actually Antifa or FBI plants. That sort of thing will simply solidify Democratic gains among the suburban demographic, a demographic that, for the most part, the Republicans have not marked for suppression and which would be harder to suppress if they tried.

It is to be hoped that Pelosi will appoint a chair who is a skilled media manipulator, but that may be asking too much.

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Theological Ruminations

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Oddly enough no one has asked me to weigh in on the Biden communion controversy, despite the fact that I’ve made known on several occasions that I have an advanced degree in theology, strictly of the Roman Catholic variety, from Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School, late of Hartford, Connecticut.

As has been reported, the Bishops are proposing that Biden be denied communion, because while he is personally opposed to abortion, he has not seen fit to impose his views on others.

First a little background. Communion is a “sacrament”, allegedly instituted by Christ at the last supper. During Mass, the priest waves his hands over some foul tasting wafers, says some magic words, and presto-chango, the wafers become Jesus, and every good Catholic gets to eat him. (The magic doesn’t change the taste at all) Well, you don’t exactly eat him, as you’re not allowed to chew. You have to wait until he sort of melts in your mouth, then get him down in a single swallow. You get used to it.

You are supposed to be free from sin before receiving communion. The easiest way to get free from sin is to go to confession right before Mass, as regardless of what you’ve done, as long as you say a sincere act of contrition, and the priest buys into it by saying the magic words, you’re sins are washed away. But the truth is, generally, everyone’s on the honor system, all you have to do is walk up to the communion rail and stick out your tongue, and the priest is going to give you your wafer. But, the priest can always just walk on by a really notorious sinner, say, someone who has been divorced multiple times and has more or less publicly committed adultery while married to one of the women he eventually divorced. Or someone who, for another instance, publicly supported a political leader who tore innocent children away from their parents and put them in a concentration camp. The priest could do the same thing to a politician, who supported the death penalty, something the church now opposes, though truth to tell, there was a time when the church spent a lot of time imposing that sort of penalty. But that was long ago in a continent far away and it is not convenient to remember such things at the moment, nor should we dwell on the abuses in which the Church engaged here in North America, not to mention the odd sexual predilections of so many Catholic priests. In any event, politicians who are all in favor of doing terrible things to people who have actually been born have nothing to fear from the Bishops or the priests, the theoretical right of the priest to pass them by notwithstanding. They can get their wafer, no questions asked. Despite some offhand remarks by Jesus, the church establishment has no problem with whited sepulchers.

It is also the case that the Church has always put its own interests ahead of some narrow minded principles of equity or fairness, and right now it sees itself in competition with the evangelical right for the ever more dwindling stock of sectarian adherents in this nation These people need red meat and the Church has every right to serve it up. Whether it will ever be able to compete in the whackjobbery department with the more experienced fundamentalists is quite another story, since it may have trouble disassociating itself from its troubling past, such as its recognition that the Earth may actually be more than 4,000 years old, humans may in fact have evolved from monkeys, and the earth actually does orbit the sun.

So my considered opinion is that what the Bishops are doing is thoroughly consistent with Catholic doctrine and the Church’s historical mission. Some might argue that the Church could gain more adherents by trying to appeal to the non-Foxified who might still be interested in a religious affiliation consistent with reason and mutual respect, but the Catholic Church has a long history of rejecting the rational until it’s far too late to derive any benefit from accepting it. So while the Bishop’s obnoxious proposal is thoroughly consistent with Catholic theological teachings, we OLS graduates (most of whom, of which I’m aware, have made the transition to agnosticism, if not atheism) can take some comfort in the fact that it will likely drive more of today’s Catholics into our ranks.

AFTERWORD: Speaking of my Alma Mater, Our Lady of Sorrows School, once located on Grace Street (how did they get the city to give it that name?) in Hartford: it is with mixed emotions that I learned that the convent in which the nuns who taught at OLS resided is being converted into housing units for anyone who wants to buy or rent them. You don’t even have to be Catholic! The few remaining nuns are getting a “modest portion…for their housing, offices and a worship space”. The actual chapel is being converted into a gym!

I lived a block away from the convent when I was a very little kid. At the time, there were lots of nuns and they even had cows that they milked. That part was sort of neat, and truth to tell, while the net effect of their teaching was pretty horrible, individually some of the nuns were good people. The truth is that nowadays women have more options, so they are less inclined to follow Hamlet’s advice and get themselves to a nunnery. I often wonder if, and hope that, the nuns I liked escaped the convent, but I’ll never know. Anyway, one more brick torn from the wall.

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What we have here is a failure to communicate

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

This article at Hullabaloo should be required reading for the folks currently running the Democratic Party, but there’s little question that while it correctly identifies a fairly obvious problem with the Democrats, it would be completely ignored.

The article, which refers initially to a New Republic article by Alex Pareen, relates that the Democrats are sort of stuck in a prior error, and have failed to adjust to the realities of the modern age.

The Republican Party does not control the conservative propaganda network that keeps it relevent despite the party’s failures. Conservative media drives the party. But the two are at least symbiotic. Democrats rely on an outdated model of staging events and votes designed to get corporate mainstream media to tell their story for them for free (“earned media”). It is a strategy, Pareene suggests, that dates to when there were only three network news outlets. But after decades of the right “working the refs,” the media’s framing of Democratic narratives often goes sideways.

One thing the article notes would be effective, and which of course the Democrats don’t do, is sell the party as an entity, rather than solely individual candidates:

Some political science professors summarized a recent research experiment in Politico Magazine earlier this month. Alexander Coppock, Donald P. Green, and Ethan Porter “conducted a series of randomized experiments to test whether parties can win over new loyalists” with ads that promoted a party rather than a particular candidate. What they found was that, with repeat exposure, “people changed their partisan identification ever so slightly after seeing the ads,” and that “higher doses of party-promoting ads” could influence people’s voting decisions and feelings about Donald Trump. “Partisan identity is usually understood as a root cause of political behavior,” the political scientists wrote. “By moving it, we also appear to have moved real-world political decisions.”

Here at this humble blog I’ve been arguing forever that the Democrats have to come up with a narrative that they repeat like a drumbeat. Everyone should be singing from the same page, as the Republicans do, with those not inclined to sing obediently sitting quietly on the sidelines, doing what they’re told when the time comes. Right now, Republicans are actually trying to sell themselves as the party of the working class, and they’ll be successful if the Democrats don’t effectively counter them, and they can’t rely on MSNBC or CNN to do that for them. As the article notes, there are plenty of skilled writers who would be more than happy to help craft a message to shape the Democratic Party’s brand.

The article implies what appears to be the case with the Democrats who have seized control of the national party apparatus: they care more about keeping the money flowing and directing it to their favored recipients than in winning, much less actually effectively governing.

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Worth reading

Friday, June 11, 2021

The Boston Globe is in the process of publishing a series of editorials containing its recommendations to prevent future presidents from engaging in the criminality in which the former guy engaged. It is well worth reading. Oddly enough, while the daily paper is only up to the fourth editorial, you can read all of them on-line already. The recommendations all make sense, though for some of them to work we would have to rely on the good behavior of future Congresses and future courts, both of which have themselves become deeply corrupted for a number of reasons, each of which is directly attributable to the Republican Party in one way or another. Still, the editorials have identified an urgent need. If we went to avoid another corrupt attempt at democracy destruction by a future president, a necessary if not wholly sufficient precondition is a change to our laws to clearly bar the most egregious acts in which the former guy engaged. So give it a read.

DISCLAIMER: By no means am I suggesting that one should read these editorials because my Pulitzer Prize finalist son may (he never tells us these things) be the author, or one of the authors. That possibility is merely coincidental.

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No threat to society

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Those of us paying attention were aware that much of the violence taking place at Black Lives Matters protests was fomented by right wingers who rightfully expected it to be blamed on the left, primarily the almost non-existent Antifa. While there was substantial evidence that this was happening, it got very little notice from the press, either that of the right wing such as Fox (predictably) or the allegedly neutral press, such as the New York Times.

However, when part of your violence fomenting involves killing cops, it’s a good bet that even the cops will decide to take you down, right wing or not, which is what happened to one Steven Carrillo, who killed one cop and tried but failed to kill another.

But he didn’t act alone. He was part of a group that called itself the Grizzly Scounts, who organized via WhatsApp:

The men created a so-called “Quick Reaction Force” intended to perpetrate acts of violence against their perceived enemies, and sent one member to scout a protest in Sacramento. They also cooked up an “Operations Order” document describing police officers as “enemy forces,” and described taking some law-enforcement officers prisoner: “POWs will be searched for intel and gear, interrogated, stripped naked, blindfolded, driven away and released into the wilderness blindfolded with hands bound.”

On May 26, three days before he shot Underwood, along with another federal officer who survived, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland, Carrillo had messaged Ybarra that he wanted to conduct a “cartel style” attack on police, and the two men then met in person in Ybarra’s van to discuss the idea. Before leaving his home in Ben Lomond for Oakland on May 29, Carrillo had texted Ybarra that he was heading out to “snipe some you know what’s.”

His co-plotter have been indicted, but would you believe it:

Even more disturbing, according to the San Jose Mercury-News, most of these conspirators, following their arrests for destroying evidence in the case, have been released on bond by federal magistrates who have deemed them not a risk to the community.

Of course you’d believe it! And wouldn’t you also believe that had they actually been Antifa they would very much be deemed a risk to the community?

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An infrastructure story

Saturday, June 5, 2021

As I write this I’m sitting in a house we own in Vermont. It is at the end of a dirt road, just down the road from the piece of land Michael Douglas owns, which explains why on some maps this road, properly known as Ethan Allen Road, is misnomered Michael Douglas Road. Even Garmin uses the name, though it is not official by any means.

But this post is not about Michael Douglas or the road. It’s about infrastructure, in this case broadband.Apparently the state of Vermont did something very smart some time ago, and required internet providers to actually provide high speed internet. You know-the kind of internet the providers in Connecticut all promise (they’re each and everyone the fastest you can get) but never deliver. Here in the middle of nowhere my Speedtest App tells me I’m getting 72.3 Mgbs download speed and 84.9 Mgbs upload speed. That’s right, I can upload faster than I can download. And I know that the app is not leading me wrong, because when I’m up here, I can upload pictures to Flickr or another cloud service I have for photos in a fraction of the time it takes in Connecticut.

Which leads to the point of this post. We would get the same type of service in Connecticut if we demanded it, and by “we” I mean the government of the state of Connecticut and the relevant regulatory agencies. We’re not paying any more for internet here in Vermont than we are in Connecticut, but we’re getting a whole lot more. The internet truly is a vital part of our infrastructure, and it’s about time that those we allow to bleed us dry to provide that infrastructure at least deliver a quality product.

I should add that all is not perfect here in the Green Mountain State. Cell phone service is horrible. Apparently whoever made sure that Vermonters got good internet dropped the ball when it comes to cell service.

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The Second Most Powerful Person in the Country

Thursday, June 3, 2021

After Mitch McConnell:

.A new ruling from the Senate parliamentarian could make it harder for the Democratic majority to pass legislation, including measures to improve access to affordable health care.

Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, whose role is to advise the Senate on interpretations of the body’s rules and procedures, reportedly has determined that under the Senate’s complicated rules, the Democratic majority can circumvent a filibuster on fiscal policies only one more time this year.

It is a fact that if the Republicans were in charge she would make no such ruling, as her job would be at risk, since Republicans fire parliamentarians that don’t do their bidding. Alternatively, the Democrats could overrule her ruling.

Of course the Democrats would never think of doing such things! Better to let the country slip toward fascism than do something so unseemly! Besides, what would Joe and Kyrsten say?

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People for whom my heart doesn’t bleed

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

We liberals are reputed to have bleeding hearts, but mine appears to be blood free, at least when I read about people like this:

“I am not going to be vaccinated. I’m going to be one of the survivors. I’m going to survive the genocide,” right-wing pastor and universal bigot Rick Wiles proclaimed on Friday, April 30th’s episode of his TruNews television program.

We shall see. On Sunday, TruNews sent a letter to its “friends and ministry members” informing them that Wiles, along with his wife, Susan, are both in desperate need of prayer because they had fallen seriously ill.

“Today, he was taken to the emergency room, and under medical advice, was admitted to the hospital. He is currently on oxygen and is expected to remain there for a number of days. Susan remains ill, but also needs your prayers as well. We would request that you would pray for healing for her body, but that you will also pray that the Lord will give her peace regarding Rick’s condition,” the letter states.

I believe the various missives his scam group has sent out have avoided acknowledging that it’s COVID, but it is. It is also the case, as the link above documents, that he has claimed that the COVID deaths of others who he dislikes were God’s judgments, so what are we to conclude about his impending demise?

And then there’s this:

Betsy Hargreaves wanted to save a few bucks on health insurance a couple of years ago so she switched to a religious-based plan.

For a while it worked, cutting her monthly premium by hundreds of dollars.

Then, in March, she had double hip-replacement surgery to relieve acute pain, followed by a four-day stay in the hospital and extensive physical therapy.

The surgery was successful, but Hargreaves’s “insurer” refused to cover any of the costs, saying her surgery was the result of a preexisting condition. She was saddled with nearly $75,000 in medical bills.

Wait!, you may be saying. It’s illegal for an insurance company to fail to cover people with pre-existing conditions! But hold on there! You didn’t read the fine print on the OneShare Health website, where it says quite clearly where you’d never notice it that they’re not an insurance company. Nor did you remember that “nonprofit” “health care sharing ministries” are exempt from covering preexisting conditions. In fact, as the article makes clear, they’re pretty much exempt from covering anything unless they feel like doing so.

Now, one might argue that my heart should still bleed a little for Ms. Hargreaves, since she says she opted out of her former insurance policy and went with the religious plan “without understanding all the ramifications”, but frankly I have no sympathy for people who get sucked in by charlatans, whether they be conspiracy peddlers, religious frauds, very stable geniuses, or folks who claim to talk to the dead (and that the dead talk back). If you’ve reached the alleged age of reason then you have an obligation to recognize a scam, and these days, any outfit that wants your money and claims to be religiously based is almost by definition a scam.

Purely as I side note: I’ve mentioned before that I have an advanced degree in theology from the late, but not at all lamented, Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School, and I can tell you authoritatively that Jesus saw fit to cure anyone who came to him. No exceptions for pre-existing conditions. Funny how “Christians” these days don’t pay much attention to what he either (according to their Bible, I’m not saying it’s historically accurate) said or did.

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