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A delicious irony

Monday, December 7, 2020

I haven’t seen this noted elsewhere, though no doubt it has. It is a somewhat delicious irony that Brian Kemp, who most assuredly stole his own election, has been rather up-front about leaking the fact that he told Trump to shove it when Trump asked for similar treatment.Trump, after all, must be aware of Kemp’s previous transgressions, so that must make Kemp’s refusal all the more difficult to take.

Of course the times are a bit different. Kemp stole the governorship in plain sight, but with enough deniability that a cooperative judicial system, had the results been legally challenged, would have found a way to minimize Kemp’s criminality. No so this time, as the avalanche of adverse decisions against Trump’s almost comedic series of lawsuits has demonstrated.

This time around, the theft would have had to be both open and retroactive, and apparently that’s where Kemp drew the line. And after all, why should he take any risks for Trump, who is on his way out anyway? The fact is, they should have put some effort into stealing the election prior to the vote, like Kemp did when it was his turn. But whether it was due to Stacey Abrams work, or complaisance on the part of Republicans about their prospects in Georgia, they just didn’t do enough spadework to enable an Election Day theft. Don’t be surprised if some gerrymandered legislatures start looking at their current method of selecting electors to see if it might be a good idea to write in a method of overriding the popular state vote if the legislature is so inclined.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Grifters gotta grift

Saturday, December 5, 2020

When you think about it, the Republican Party is one massive grifting operation, inasmuch as even before Trump came along, in fact long before Trump came along, it relied on conning its “base” into not just voting against their own interests, but in ponying up money to aid in their own destruction.

It’s worked really well, but it does have its drawbacks, one of which is that grifters gotta grift; they can’t help themselves, and if that means the grift hurts the Republican Party then that’s the way it goes.

It’s debatable whether Trump could have legitimately won the 2020 election if his campaign had been well run, but it couldn’t have helped that various grifters, possibly including Trump himself, were siphoning money away from the campaign. Here’s the latest:

In August, Salon reported that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had paid about $5 million to a mystery marketing services company called Digital Consulting Group LLC, starting with a $2 million expenditure in February, just a month after the company was formed.

Now, filings with the Federal Election Commission show that the RNC paid Digital Consulting Group more than $42 million for media buys, consulting and marketing between February and October. The company went from nonexistent to being the Republican Party’s highest-paid vendor of the 2020 election, all in the space of eight months.

But Digital Consulting Group presents a mystery. No other political campaign or committee has reported any payments at all to the company. While a number of organizations share the name, this particular Digital Consulting Group — a Delaware company founded Jan. 15, 2020 — does not appear to have a website, and a Delaware business entity search does not reveal an owner or location. The RNC’s spending reports list a virtual address in Wilmington, but beyond that the company cannot be traced.

That $42 million in expenditures makes this anonymous company the RNC’s highest-paid vendor of the last two years, pulling in nearly $3.5 million more than the next-largest vendor, the direct-mail firm Communications Corporation of America (CCA), and topping third-place JDB Marketing, another direct mail provider, by about $19 million.

Salon was unable to ascertain the identity of the person or persons behind Digital Consulting Group, but the evidence appears to point to Brad Parscale, the grifter who was officially offloaded as Trump’s campaign manager after, among other things, he suddenly became the proud owner of a very expensive yacht, two million dollar condos, a 24 million dollar waterfront house, and other goodies after he soaked $40 million from the campaign. That’s $40 million that has nothing to do with Digital Consulting, so it’s very possible that his total haul was more than $80 million dollars.

Just think. If the Republican Party were not infested with grifters, that money might have been used to actually try to get Trump reelected. It might have worked, in which case we’d be living in an alternative universe in which the American Republic had already been destroyed. As it is, we’ve deferred that unhappy denouement for at least four years. Here’s hoping the grifters continue to destroy the Republican Party from within.

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One born every second

Friday, December 4, 2020

There’s been a lot of speculation about the nature of the grift that Trump will embark on when he’s escorted out of the White House. It will likely be multi-faceted, the up-side being that if he runs true to form, part of the grift will be an assault on the people who he claims let him down-the Republicans. He has sent mixed signals about the Georgia Senate race, and once he’s out for good there’s a good chance he’ll see an opportunity in making mischief for the Republicans. If nothing else he’ll likely make noises about running for President, whether he’s serious about it or not, as that will bring in the bucks from the suckers.

And that’s what this post is actually about: the suckers. Because if recent events prove anything, they prove that P.T. Barnum was wrong, if in fact the quote is attributable to him. There’s not a sucker born every minute. They’re born every nanosecond in this country alone. The recent election proved there’s upwards of 75,000,000 of them in this country alone, and there’s plenty of grifters out there planning on taking advantage of them.

A certain slice of Americans has an insatiable hunger for conspiracy theories, and they are thus easy marks. This one really got to me.

If you’re scared of 5G giving you COVID-19 or otherwise polluting your precious bodily fluids, then some companies on Amazon would love to sell you a cage for your router. According to sellers, the metal cages block 5G. According to reviews, they’re destroying people’s Wi-Fi signal, which makes sense. The metal boxes are just Faraday cages marketed to people who believe in baseless conspiracy theories about 5G.

A Faraday cage is simply a metal cage designed to block signals, so these folks are plunking down money so they can interfere with their own Wi-Fi signal. This really makes the anti-vaxxers look almost rational. It’s yet more proof that if Trump avoids jail he’ll have a huge number of suckers to grift, though given his track record, it’s not a sure thing he can avoid yet another bankruptcy, this time, perhaps, of the personal sort.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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More voter fraud uncovered!

Thursday, December 3, 2020

If you made this stuff up the media would accuse you of outrageous partisanship, but here we go again, with Republicans encouraging voter fraud while accusing the Democrats of…, what else: voter fraud:

Guys – we FOUND voter fraud! And it is ON VIDEO! And it is SHOCKING! WSBTV in Atlanta is reporting that a Florida attorney was in a Facebook live video, taped just hours after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners of the Presidential election.

In the video, he encouraged viewers to pretend to move to Georgia to allow them to vote in the Senate runoff on January 5th.

This is illegal.

It will be interesting to see if this gets any attention in the mainstream. I have yet to see an article in any of the three newspapers I read pointing out that the only documented voter fraud in recent times has been the work of Republicans, and that’s not even counting the systematic voter suppression and unconscionable gerrymandering that allows a minority party to govern in so many states.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Democrats playing hardball!!?

Wednesday, December 2, 2020

We are constantly bombarded with news articles about Democrats being in disarray, but it often happens that Republicans can be in that state as well. It’s great that Trump is encouraging Georgians to believe the election there has been rigged, as it will likely dampen turnout.

A few days ago my wife and I were talking and agreed that the Democrats should be doing what Republicans would do: reinforce Republican beliefs in a rigged election to discourage turnout. Well, it may not be the Democrats officially doing it, but someone, calling themselves the Really American PAC is doing it.

Here’s the billboard they’re putting up in Georgia.

It is rather amazing that this is simply reinforcing Trump’s complaint that Loeffler and Perdue didn’t steal Georgia for him, but if it gets us the Senate, then I’m all for it.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Hypocrisy in America

Monday, November 30, 2020

It’s hardly news that modern day Republicans are hypocrites of the first order. Here’s the latest example-actually probably not the latest as it’s some hours old, but it’s illustrative:

Republicans have now decided the tax returns of nominees and people in power matter, as they want to scrutinize Biden’s nominees.

Outgoing Senate Finance Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wants to examine Biden Treasury nominee Janet Yellen’s tax returns:

…

Just a few months ago in September, Grassley complained Trump’s tax returns got out, “That information should have never gotten out, and whoever got it out violated the law…All I’ve got is the president saying he’s paid millions of dollars in taxes, and you’ve got the New York Times printing what they think, and we don’t have the facts to make a judgment. But let me say that I’d be very concerned about how it got out.”

Republicans defended Trump and his nominees hiding their tax returns and brushed off any red flags that were in the financial dealings of Trump and his cabinet nominees.

Lest we forget, hypocrisy has a long and hallowed tradition in this country.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of history, including some Connecticut history. I just finished a biography of William Williams, who few Connecticans (yes-that’s a word) know was a Connecticut born and bred signer of the Declaration of Independence, and I am now working on a biography of Sam Adams, who did more than make beer. Williams, by the way, was from Lebanon, Connecticut, which was a powerhouse town back in those revolutionary days, and his house still sits near the green, the only commons left in America.

The revolutionary generation did a lot of complaining about English assaults on their liberty, and I am constantly amazed at the frequency with which they claimed that the English were trying to reduce them to slavery, a charge that appears in both of the books I’ve mentioned, and which I’ve seen countless times in other history books. After the revolution, that complaint continued, directed at Northerners by Southerners, who constantly complained that Northerners were trying to reduce them (the white thems) to slavery. This is at the same time they were defending slavery as an institution and maintaining that the slaves just loved being slaves. Give Sam Adams credit, he, at least, refused to own slaves, but you have to wonder how slave holders could make this charge without feeling just a bit hypocritical. Well, not just a bit.

Sam Adams, by the way, had something to say about this sort of hypocrisy that’s still relevant today. This quote could be just as much about the Koch Brothers and their ilk as the libertarians of Adams’ day:

It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it than their own liberty, -to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all those who are poorer or weaker than themselves.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Has the mainstream learned from bloggers?

Saturday, November 28, 2020

I’ve been reading the Political Animal blog for years, and I generally agree with them, but I’m not sure about this particular piece.

Political blogging was born in the Bush years, peaked under Obama, and mostly died in the Trump Era. The decline is partly explained by the mainstream media adopting some of blogging’s strongest features and hiring some of its talent—think Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent. But the most important factor is that straight journalists finally internalized that it’s part of their job to tell the reader when they’re being lied to.

…

A good example of this admirable adoption of blogging sensibilities can be found in Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey’s coverage of Trump’s Thanksgiving appearance from a diminutive desk in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, where he took questions for the first time since he lost the November 3 election.

Trump said he planned to continue to make claims of fraud about the results and said, without evidence, that Biden could not have won close to 80 million votes. His legal team has been widely mocked — and has lost almost every claim in every state, as officials certify results for Biden.

I try to imagine what it would have been like in 2002-03 if the Washington Post had written, “Bush said he planned to invade Iraq and said, without evidence, that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. His foreign policy team has been widely mocked­­ – and the United Nations inspectors have contradicted almost every claim as they’ve scoured the country in vain looking for weapons of mass destruction.”

Not that I was ever in the big time, but I’ve been blogging since 2005, and I think what really destroyed, or at least reduced the reach of, blogging, was Twitter. That’s a shame, in my humble opinion, because it is a format that encourages simplistic thinking, confined as it is to a certain number of characters.

I don’t think that journalists have “internalized that it’s part of their job to tell the reader when they’re being lied to”. The very words “lie” or “liar” are still very much verboten. In the very limited case of Trump, it’s true that the euphemisms are getting more direct. I think they now feel that they can let loose on Trump, because he’s on his way out the door, and they have probably always disliked him. But he is not the only liar out there. Make a list of every Republican in the Senate. Now, attempt to strike out the names of every one that is not a liar. Funny how your list doesn’t shrink much, if at all. Mitch McConnell is the most high profile of those liars, but it is doubtful we will see stories in the mainstream about him that are even as direct as that cited in the Political Animal piece.

Come January 20th the press will be anxious to retreat to a Republican biased both siderism. If Biden tries to get the funding we need to get the economy on track, Republicans will spout tropes about the deficit, and the press will not recall that the deficit didn’t matter at all during the Trump crime spree, when it was increased in order to shovel money towards the rich. Pointing out the hypocrisy will be the job of the bloggers and non-mainstream tweeters. The media will very much want to get back to normal, and normal means never calling out a Republican liar, though it’s okay to imply that a Democrat is a liar, even when he’s not. See, Gore, Al.

I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Some Fancy Legal Footwork in the future

Thursday, November 26, 2020

The Supreme Court, compliments of the newest addition to that once august body, has made another dent in constitutional law and advanced us a step further toward theocracy, ruling as it has that the state has no right to protect its citizens from a plague if a religious entity insists on spreading said plague.

I’ve written before that these religous cases are simply part of a long term strategy of the right to legalize all sorts of behaviors that have been declared unlawful. All one need do, in the future, to avoid complying with any law that the right does not like, is plead that one’s religous convictions are offended. Even before Barrett arrived a Supreme Court majority came to the rather absurd conclusion that a corporation clearly involved in commerce can somehow have a religion, and that said religion can exempt it from following a law with which it purports to disagree. Discrimination against gay people has been countenanced, and we can expect more of that. A few interesting questions arise from this trend.

  • Will the court have any problem getting Clarence Thomas on board when it rules that a person or corporation running a restaurant, hotel or other place of public accomodation need not serve black people if it offends their religious sensibilities?
  • What legal principles will the court invoke when it explains that religious objections relieve a person from obeying laws or regulations promulgated by liberals, but not those promulgated by conservatives.
  • How will the court explain that the new rules apply only to religions of which it approves, and can’t possibly be used by religions that are not Christian or certain forms of Judaism? This is an issue generally, but it will be extremely relevant when the court re-legalizes mandatory prayer in the public schools.

We need not fear that the court will be unable to come up with some rationale to accomplish the last two items on my list. It will likely be transparently irrational and unmoored from any respectable precedent, but that doesn’t matter anymore. This is now a completely “results oriented” court, and while I’m sure they prefer to have some sort of rational basis for their decisions, that’s now entirely optional. And, oh, by the way, everything they might decide with respect to religous rights is completely consistent with the original intent of the deists who wrote the constitution.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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Just a reminder

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Amazon is Evil. Buy elsewhere.

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I believe I’ve made this point before

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Recently I added Eric Boehlert’s Press Run to my RSS feed. I can highly recommend it, though one might argue that he simply makes the same points as Driftglass, but less colorfully. Still, these are issues that must be raised, though as I’ll get to later, they don’t seem to make a dent in Establishment Democratic thinking. The latest makes what should be an obvious point about both the press and Trump’s recent shenanigans:

Trump’s election sabotage campaign is running out of time, but the damage he’s inflicting will have long lasting consequences. Covering this unprecedented attack on American election integrity, the press is still not being honest about Trump’s ruinous final chapter.

The Daily Beast last week reported on Trump’s “quixotic and potentially destructive effort” to steal a victory. “Quixotic” and “possibly destructive”? He’s the first president in 240 years who has not accepted the election results, after losing by six million votes. Worse, he’s been on a three-month crusade to denigrate free and fair elections in America, and he’s making it impossible for there to be a smooth transition of power.

This is so far beyond “quixotic.” Of course it’s destructive to our democracy — does anyone think the Republican Party will soon return to the days of rationally accepting ballot results? The GOP has blown a permanent hole in our election process.

A hallmark failure of the press for four years has been that it refuses to use the proper language to describe the truly lawless nature of Trump and today’s GOP.

You can’t argue with him. The only possible quibble is that he’s pointing something out that is painfully obvious. I have yet to see an article in which it is clearly stated that Trump is trying to steal the election, yet by any, even the most kind measures, that’s precisely what he’s trying to do. We are just lucky that he’s so incompetent, because a competent Trump, backed by the current corrupt Republican Party, could probably have pulled it off.

This post isn’t about the press, though, it’s about the Democrats.

The press responds to pressure. The Republicans accused them of being liberal, so they stocked the Sunday shows with Republicans and adopted both siderism, which on the surface preaches that both sides are responsible for our current situation, while at the same time expecting and accepting Republican corruption and obstruction while holding Democrats to a higher standard. They would not have done this had they not been relentlessly beaten with the “liberal media” claim by Republicans.

Once again, we don’t see that from the Democrats, and that’s one reason the press treats the issue the way it does. It shouldn’t be up to Biden to make these claims, it should be Schumer, Pelosi, and all the rest, up and down the line. The press is not going to cover this as Boehlert rightfully claims they should until the Democrats start pushing them.

Trump’s attempt to steal the election and our democracy once again illustrates the Democrat’s inability or refusal to even attempt to control the narrative coming from the media. Were the situation reversed, the Republicans would be beating the drums in a coordinated fashion claiming that the Democrats were trying to steal the election; that they were trying to destroy our democracy, and that the press was refusing to call it what it is. And if the situation were reversed, they’d be right.

Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.

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