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Liberal bias runs rampant! Well, actually, not so much

Monday, February 22, 2021

First, let me recommend this site, to which I’m linking for purposes of this post. Eric Boehlert covers media bias, the real kind, that routinely consigns Democrats to the bench. In this instance, he points out something that is both outrageous and perfectly predictable:

After creating new programming rules for the Trump administration and airing virtually every minute of every White House press briefing live and in its entirety, CNN has quietly cut the cord with the new Democratic administration.

Just one month into President Joe Biden’s term, the all-news cable channel last week stopped airing the daily White House press briefings. Perhaps the events weren’t entertaining enough, as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki has routinely declined to insert Biden into cultural war debates, refused to castigate reporters, and won’t make stuff up in the name of partisan warfare, the way her Republican predecessors did.

Read the whole thing.

The fact is that this bias, which is standard fare on the Sunday shows (how many times has the idiotic Lindsey Graham been on Meet the Press?) makes the press complicit with the ongoing destruction of democratic norms in this country. If you give the liars prominence, you are implicitly endorsing their point of view, whether you want to admit it or not.

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Politics is a funny business

Sunday, February 21, 2021

My wife and I get three newspapers every morning, the execrable New London Day, which I rarely read, the New York Times, because I need my dose of Paul Krugman, and the Boston Globe.

As a result I’m somewhat up on Massachusetts politics. The tendency of the folks in Massachusetts to elect Republican governors has always somewhat mystified me, though I have to admit that maybe the corrupt Massachusetts Democrats do need some counterbalance. Specifically, I’ve always been amazed at the popularity of their governor, Charlie Baker, who has always seemed a mediocrity to me. Baker, though, is fairly good at making sure he is perceived in a positive light, i.e., good at self promotion.

Lately, Baker’s popularity has taken a bit of a hit, due to his administration’s fairly disastrous vaccine rollout, which followed a fairly poor record on dealing with the pandemic in the first place.

Consider also, the fact that until recently Andrew Cuomo was a pandemic golden boy, more out of his ability to be a self promoter than his actual accomplishments.

And that brings me to the whole point of this little piece. It is a sad fact of life that a politician can thrive more as a result of self promotion than on the merits of his or her performance.

Consider our governor, who entered the pandemic with one of the lowest approval ratings in the country. What had he done to deserve such low ratings? His job and nothing but his job. If he has a horn, he doesn’t toot it.

His ratings have improved somewhat since COVID, but my guess is that he’s still lagging both Baker and Cuomo. From the start, his inability to engage in self promotion has been his most obvious flaw, and that is certainly the case in the midst of this pandemic.

A week ago the Globe ran an article about Baker’s fairly disastrous vaccine rollout, which included this graphic:

Connecticut was number 6 so far as effectiveness was concerned, and appeared to be first among the densely populated states. It may have slipped a bit since then, but we’re still doing pretty well. During his daily press conferences Lamont comes across as totally earnest, doing his best to do his job, but in such a low key way that he fails to earn the plaudits that were heaped on Cuomo, who even got a boost from Randy Rainbow.

From a political point of view it is almost better to be a loud and pandering non-achiever or obstructionist than a low key achiever. Consider the state Senator from my district, Heather Somers, who spends her time on Facebook firing up the anti-vaxxers. She’ll probably get more political return for that than Lamont will for doing his job well. Or consider Greg Abbott, who is very much responsible for the disaster in Texas, who will probably skate to re-election, as quite likely, will Ron DeSantis in Florida, who has been steering vaccinations to his wealthy supporters.

It seems like the state Democrats should step up and start talking up Lamont’s response to this crisis, but Connecticut Democrats are like their federal brethren. Republicans will all repeat the latest lie, but Democrats will never pound away at the truth.

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Rush Limbaugh is dead

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

It’s days like this when it saddens me that I no longer believe in Hell.

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Some things never change

Tuesday, February 16, 2021

While my wife and I await our second shot, after which we will feel free to, you know, do things, and as I wait out the weather, which has pretty much put an end to daily biking, I’ve been doing more reading than usual. Among the books I’m currently reading is Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man. It’s not on the Moby Dick level, but it’s still reasonably amusing.

It’s the story, humorously told, of a grifter who boards a Mississippi Riverboat and plies his trade, trading personas and grifts as he passes various stops on the trip.

At one point he is peddling snake oil to the rubes, and comes upon a backwoodsman who won’t buy into his con. During the course of their back and forth the backwoodsman asks the grifter if he’s an abolitionist.

And here’s where we come to the part that’s relevant to today. Here’s the grifter’s reply:

“As to that, I cannot so readily answer. If by abolitionist you mean zealot, I am none; but if you mean a man, who, being a man, feels for all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody’s interest, and therefore, rousing nobody’s enmity, would willingly abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among mankind, irrespective of color, then am I what you say.”

To which the backwoodsman replies:

“Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.”

As the title of this post says, some things never change.

I am sorry to say that after this scene, the grifter “disembarks” in one guise and reboards in another, and manages to work a new grift on the backwoodsman. Let us hope that the grifter down in Florida is not able to pull off that trick.

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Be careful what you ask for

Friday, February 12, 2021

The Republicans are making a deeply dishonest argument.

I know, every argument they make is deeply dishonest, so I really have to be a little more specific.

As the FCC gets closer to restoring net neutrality, a new and bizarre GOP talking point has emerged. It goes something like this: if you’re going to restore some modest rules holding telecom monopolies accountable, you just have to dismantle a law that protects free speech on the internet! This of course makes no coherent sense whatsoever, but that’s not stopping those looking to demolish Section 230, a law that is integral to protecting speech online.

via Above the Law

This is an interesting piece of dishonesty, because it might be an instance in which the Democrats should call their bluff.

As I understand it, Section 230 grants various content providers on the web protections from libel and slander actions that other publishers do not have. The underlying rationale makes sense, and made even more sense when the statute was passed, as the harm that social networks could cause was not yet obvious. The difficulty of policing such large volumes of speech was just one of many factors that led to Section 230. A newspaper can easily police its own content, but it’s not so easy when the content is uploaded by millions of users a day. In any event, the net result is that Facebook, for instance, is not liable for most if not all of the misinformation, libel, slander, and conspiracy theorizing that takes place on its platform. If it were a socially responsible company it would do its best to make sure that its platform was not abused, but it is owned by Mark Zuckerberg.

The Republicans have chosen to try to make “Big Tech” out to be the bogeyman, but I ask you, who is most likely to suffer if “Big Tech” has to police the content on its sites, and cleanse them of hate speech, misinformation, libel, and incitements to violence? Wouldn’t it be the political party and ideology that traffics in hate speech, misinformation, libel, and incitements to violence?

Personally, I think it might be productive to take another look at Section 230, in light of the way in which it has shielded actors like Facebook from the obligation to police the content it inflicts on the world. There’s no question that there are competing interests involved, but it certainly appears that there may be a need to impose some obligations on content providers that would protect the public’s interest in decreasing hate speech, misinformation, libel, and incitements to violence. One can certainly make a cogent argument that the unfettered “speech” in which the rioters and their Führer engaged prior to the insurrection was a necessary precondition to their attempt to overthrow the government. We do have a right to protect ourself from people who want to overthrow the government, even at the stage when their planning is taking place. I won’t even bother to explain why cries of “free speech” are inapplicable in this context.

So, while the Republican’s arguments make no sense, which they almost never do, it might not be such a bad idea to take them up on it. It would be interesting to see how long it takes for them to come up with some way of attacking Democrats for daring to even consider amending Section 230, which will, overnight, transmogrify into the guardian of our liberties.

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Super Sunday rant

Sunday, February 7, 2021

This is my blog, and since no one reads it anyway, I figure I have a perfect right to write about two unrelated things in one blog post. So, here goes.

As a still licensed, though retired lawyer, I’m interested in the series of lawsuits that have been filed against, Fox, Giuliani, and their ilk by the voting machine companies. During the time I practiced I had only some tangential experience in an actual libel case, but I think I’m up on the law, and it seems to me that these cases are slam dunks from a legal perspective, even if the plaintiffs qualify as “public figures”. There is no question that those spreading these lies knew or should have known that they were untrue, and knew or should have known of the potential harm to those they were libeling.

So, this makes me wonder. If these cases don’t settle, and the plaintiffs win at trial, what will the Supreme Court do if and when the cases reach it? As I’ve noted before, we are now burdened with a deeply dishonest Supreme Court, which may be motivated to give Fox and Friends a get out of jail free card. After all, this sort of lying works best to motivate the right wing base that helped get them their jobs in the first place. Without a license to lie, it’s doubtful that Trump could have won in 2016, and the worst of the worst would not be on the court now. There’s probably no way to rule in favor of the defendants in these cases without rendering the libel laws a dead letter, but the court would want to preserve plausible deniability so far as that outcome is concerned. The trick is to do it in such a way that you leave an opening to stick it to the libs should one of them end up at the defense table in one of these cases. That would take some fancy wordplay, but remember what they pulled off in Bush v. Gore. We’ll see how it all plays out, but in the meantime I would really enjoy watching Dobbs, Giuliani, Baritomo, Pirro, Powell, and their ilk being cross-examined by a competent lawyer.

Okay, so on to the next topic, which at least has a bit of a legal angle to it. It appears that Kyle Rittenhouse, who traveled across state lines to murder BLM protestors, who is out on $2 million dollars bond, has gone to parts unknown. His attorneys know where he is, but they’re not telling, as they’re pretending he’s in danger. This, as I understand it, is a no-no, but then he is a white guy, and it’s not like he wants to vacation in Mexico.

$2 million dollars is a lot of money, but it’s not really that much if not a dime of it is your own. The purpose of bail is to provide an incentive for the defendant to actually appear in court when required. Otherwise, he or she runs the risk of forfeiting whatever amount has been put up as bail, and, in many cases, earn the wrath of a bail bondsman who might make sure you come back. Some states even allow bounty hunting. None of these incentives apply, however, if the money that’s been put up is not your own, and if no one will be in a position to take umbrage if you skip out. That’s precisely the case in Rittenhouse’s case. His bail was raised on line from other right wing whackos, who will never see their money again, in any event, and even if they are supposed to get their money back at some point, none of them will be in a position to do much about it if they don’t. In other words, the prospect of forfeiting bail holds no fear for Rittenhouse.

The solution to this is fairly simple. If on line sites like GoFundMe won’t do it voluntarily, it should simply be made illegal to raise funds for someone’s bail on line. Sitting judges might also condition release on proof that the funds being used as bail are derived either from the defendant’s (or his family’s) personal funds or from a bail bondsman to whom the defendant is personally liable. It is to be hoped that Rittenhouse will rot in jail for a good part of the rest of his life. If he forfeits the bail and is then re-arrested that might be even better, as it would put $2 million dollars into the coffers of the State of Wisconsin and enhance his eventual sentence, assuming his likely all white jury votes to convict.

Afterword: A reader may notice that this was posted while the Super Bowl was happening. At least I think it’s happening. I take a certain amount of pride in saying that I have learned the Super Bowl result from the newspapers more often than not in the last 20 years or so, and when I’ve learned it in other ways, it was entirely by happenstance. I have no television, but even if I did, I wouldn’t tune in. I do hope Tom Brady loses, but other than that, I really don’t care.

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How Stupid to you have to be to teach at Harvard Law? (Part 2)

Friday, February 5, 2021

Alan Dershowitz is apparently not alone.

Back in May I wrote a post about Larry Lessig, Harvard Law Professor who brought a case to the Supreme Court claiming that presidential electors should be free to vote for the person of their choice, in spite of state laws requring them to vote for the candidate to which they were pledged. His stated aim was to “make the Electoral College so wacky and unpredictable that the entire country turns against it, then adopts a constitutional amendment creating a nationwide vote for president”.

In my post, I proved beyond doubt that a favorable Supreme Court ruling would not result in such an amendment. But that case had one merit. A favorable ruling would have done little harm, because one must assume that the campaigns make sure that the electors they choose to put on the ballot will, by and large, remain faithful to the candidate to whom they are pledged.

The Supreme Court ruled against him.

Now Lessig is at it again, along with some other lawyers, including David Boise (who helped George W steal the 2000 election). This time they are claiming that winner take all state elections, in which the candidate with the most votes gets all the electors from that state, are unconstitutional.

The case is brought by a pair of California Republicans and a pair of non-profit organizations and alleges that the “winner take all” system of awarding presidential electors that prevails in every state except Maine and Nebraska amounts to an unconstitutional dilution of their right to vote.

They are claiming that the electors should be distributed to reflect the vote in each state.

I’m sure Lessig and his brethren would argue that the end result of a favorable ruling would bring us a near equivalent to a popular vote constitutional amendment. But this requires us to adopt a very Pollyanish view of the current Supreme Court, for it presumes that the court would issue a decision that would not be infected with partisanship, bad faith, and intellectual dishonesty of the first order. Given that the current Supreme Court is partisan, operates in bad faith, and is as intellectually dishonest as a court can be this is a leap of faith that no Olympian could accomplish, yet Lessig and his compatriots appear to have jumped into the abyss.

There are, roughly speaking, two ways in which the court could render a favorable opinion in this case.

The first way would strike down winner take all systems as unconstitutional and require that electors be apportioned strictly on the basis of the percentage of the vote that each candidate got in the state in question. If a state had 10 electors, and the vote was split 50-50, each would get 5 electors. This would, if applied nationwide, likely guarantee that the popular vote winner would win the presidency, though I suspect that the states having few electors, such as Wyoming, would cause the final electoral college vote to skew red-ward. Proving that speculation would require more math than I’m willing to do, but even if I’m right, the popular vote winner would still likely come out on top.

Because in the current day and age the popular vote winner is overwhelmingly likely to be a Democrat, the present Supreme Court would never choose this option.

The court would take the second route. It would leave it entirely up to the states to determine how to apportion the electors, basically greenlighting an apportionment by Congressional district. This would mean that a heavily gerrymandered state such as Pennsylvania, which gave Biden a majority of its votes, would have given the majority of its votes to the Republican candidate whose name shall not be needlessly mentioned in this blog. There is literally no state in the union that is as heavily gerrymandered in favor of the Democrats as are 10 to 20 states in favor of the Republicans. Had such a system been in place in 2020 the crowds of folks currently being arrested for sedition would have been goose stepping at the genius’s inaugural parade on the 20th of January last. The fact is that such a system would be less likely to favor the popular vote winner than the current system.

Anyone paying attention to this Supreme Court would have to know that this is how they would rule. This is the court, after all, that blessed partisan gerrymandering, a step it would never have taken had it been Democrats doing the gerrymandering. It is also the court that is looking the other way while the states of the South attempt to re-institute Jim Crow.

So, are Lessig and his fellow lawyers just stupid, or are they really just trying to hand the Republic over to the Republicans?

I suspect the court will either refuse to hear this case, or rule against the Lessig team, but we should all fear the possibility that it will take this opportunity to game the system in favor of the Republicans.

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Are they really this crazy, or just playing crazy for the press?

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

I just got finished reading this post at Crooks & Liars, and my mind is truly boggled. The post is a sort of a state by state summary of the extent to which the nutcases have taken over state and local party organizations. But this is what struck me as the craziest thing of all:

“The Republican Party right now is relatively divided, but it’s not the traditional ideological divisions that used to be in place, as much as it’s between the sane and insane wings of the party,” RightWisconsin editor James Wigderson told the Madison Capital Times. “I think that there’s a chance of a real fracture coming.”

Establishment Republicans such as former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, however, defended the Trumpists for their paranoia and embrace of partisan disinformation: “That is the perspective they have, that is the view that they have and it’s valid; you can’t say someone’s opinion of a subjective matter is invalid,” she said. “I mean, what gives us the right to judge someone’s opinion like that?”

Where do you even start? Of course Kleefisch is obviously a hypocrite, as I would be willing to bet my life savings that she’d have no trouble arguing that the opinion of a Democrat is invalid, be it objective or subjective. But it’s just the monumental stupidity of it, the pretzel twisted illogic, that leaves you wondering how anyone could be stupid enough to volunteer such a statement instead of simply having no comment.

These folks set out to create a monster that would vote against its interest to keep them in power. It worked for a while, but now the monster is demanding that they work for it rather than solely for their corporate and evangelical masters. This only ends in fascism if it isn’t stopped, and there’s no one in the Republican Party interested in stopping it.

Postscript: Just for the record, I came up with the monster analogy in the last paragraph (not original, I know) before running into the article to which I’ve linked in that paragraph. Give it a read, it’s fun.

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The Democrats appear to be getting it

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Some years ago an occasional reader complained to me that I never had good news on this blog. I tried for a while to reform, and even created a “Good News” category, but if you click on it, you’ll see that it’s sparsely populated. But if this post goes as planned, it will join that group.

First, to be clear, the good news is not an intent on my part to stop blogging, though I find that the absence of he whose name has never been connected to the word “president” in this blog does make it a bit harder to come up with material.

No, the good news is that the Democrats who represent us in Washington have finally appeared to learn the facts about Republicans, facts which we lefty bloggers have been screaming about for — well, for as long as there have been lefty blogs.

Specifically, it now appears that both the Democratic President of the United States and the majority of Democrats in Congress, very much including leadership, are now aware that one cannot assume or even hope that Republicans will bargain in good faith. Nor can they be expected to play by the rules to which they insist Democrats must adhere when Democrats are in the majority. The current debate about the stimulus package looks to be a re-run of 2009, except this time the Democrats aren’t falling for it.

Another piece of good news, or maybe a subset of the above, is the fact that, so far, Joe Biden seems to get it. Several years ago I was a regular listener to Pod Save America, and I recall hearing Joe tell the hosts that the Republicans would have a come to Jesus moment after the election and that it would be a mistake to take away the filibuster. He has obviously changed his mind, particularly as to the first of those, as one gets the distinct impression that he is very much trying to give the impression that his meeting with those 10 Senate “moderate Republicans” (a terribly overworked oxymoron by the way) was simply a perfunctory exercise.

Now, if only the Democrats would up their game in one other way. I’ve been saying for years that they have to learn to get on the same page, come up with talking points regarding the issues of the day, and repeat them endlessly, in the same way Republicans have done for years. Case in point is today’s Republican talking point to the effect that the Democrats really must take the views and feelings of the 74 million idiots who voted for Trump into account, by, if you follow the logic, not doing anything of which Republicans disapprove. The press has, to a certain extent, bought into some of this bullshit, and it’s important that the Democrats come up with a rejoinder that not only hits the Republicans but makes the point that the press is constantly expecting Democrats to do things for which they give Republicans a pass. It really isn’t that hard. I just hope it doesn’t take them 12 more years to learn that lesson, which is how long it took them to figure out that you can’t expect Republicans to bargain in good faith.

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DC Statehood’s likely fate

Thursday, January 28, 2021

A bill has been introduced in Congress to make the District of Columbia a state. The overriding purpose, besides giving people who are subject to taxation some representation, is to increase our Senate majority by adding a fairly populated state to balance off some Senators from sparsely populated wastelands like Wyoming. I’ve read elsewhere, but can’t remember where and can’t find the link, that there’s also a movement to do it by constitutional amendment.

I’ve written about this issue in the past, and a quick Duck-Duck-Go search (Google is evil, use the Duck) leads me to conclude that, as I suspected, the right would attack any bill granting DC statehood as unconstitutional, for the very reasons I gave in my previous post.

My solution was for the Congress to redefine the boundaries of the seat of government to exclude all but the very center of DC, keeping within the district only the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the White House, and whatever other bits of geography that of necessity would have to be included in such a carve out. I’m fairly sure you could create a District that had virtually no “residents” who weren’t registered to vote elsewhere.

All of this still runs up against the fact that we now have possibly the most partisan and intellectually dishonest Supreme Court in our history, so I’m betting they would find a way to declare the statehood bill unconstitutional even if my fix, or something like it, was utilized. The obvious dodge is the one I suggested: that they would rule that the areas in question that were carved out of the District would revert back to the states from whence they came. That would mean a few extra Congressfolks from blue areas of Maryland and/or Virginia, but not the extra blue Senators that we really need.

Puerto Rican statehood would be easier; they couldn’t do much about that. But, personally, given the state of this nation at the present time, if I lived in Puerto Rico, I’d opt for independence. DC residents don’t have that luxury.

NOTICE: Comments still inoperative. I still can’t face the prospect of spending hours on hold waiting for tech support from the hosting service. I thought I could just disable some plug ins, and see if one of them was causing the problem, but I don’t really have any that interact with comments, so I don’t see that as being a solution.

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