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Some revisionist history

Thursday, March 7, 2019

I have to admit that I’ve always felt the Clinton impeachment backfired on the Republicans, but Philippe Reines, a former Hillary Spokesperson, makes a trenchant case that it was not:

The other thing that drives me crazy is this notion that the…Republicans suffered for impeachment in ’98. I’m not sure what that what that means. They lost a couple of Senate seats, but they held the Congress, they held the House in 2006, and they won the presidency in 2000 for eight years, they’re back here with Donald Trump. I would make the argument that the Republicans did a damn good job of poisoning impeachment forever more and that they are benefitting from that right now because all we’re doing is saying, well, it didn’t work out so well for them — for Bill Clinton so we shouldn’t do it again. How, exactly, did it NOT work out so well for them?

He’s right. Sure there were some minor inconveniences. Two of their major hypocrites (Livingston and Newt) had to retire because they’d done exactly what they accused Clinton of doing, and they lost a couple of seats in the midterms just prior to the impeachment trial, but all in all it worked out quite nicely. You could make a strong argument that it was the lingering effects of the impeachment that made the difference in the 2016 election, since they were able to get their actual crook elected by playing on a media enhancedand echo chamber claim that she was a crook. You could make just as strong a case that they won in 2000 because, besides stealing the election, they had persuaded enough people that there was just something wrong with those Democrats because Clinton was such a bad man.

Something to think about, particularly because the Democrats could put on an impeachment trial that would present persuasive evidence that the genius is a traitorous crook. The Republicans weren’t very persuasive during the Clinton trial. They changed no minds. The Senators who vote to acquit Trump might end up having lots of explaining to do.

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Dems ready to disgrace themselves again

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Back in the olden days, way way back around 2007, the Democrats cravenly joined Republicans in voting for a resolution denouncing MoveOn for daring to criticize General David Petreaus. They had to demonstrate something, the First Amendment and truth be damned. It was never clear what they expected to gain by condemning their base. The irony in that particular situation is that it turned out that MoveOn was right in more ways than one. The good general barely escaped prison when it was revealed that he was funneling state secrets to his mistress.

Fast forward about 12 years, and we now have the Democrats prepared to directly or indirectly condemn one of their own for having the temerity to tell the truth: that Israel, through its lobbying arm at AIPAC, exercises far too much control over American foreign policy. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely verboten for an American politician to criticize Israel in any way. If one does so, one is accused, by AIPAC and its adherents, of being an anti-Semite, even though there are substantial numbers of American Jews that feel the same way about Israeli influence over our foreign policy. See, e.g., the author of the piece to which I’ve linked. Democrats are now lining up for a chance to pile on to Ilhan Omar, it not being sufficient that she is a GOP whipping girl. They have to demonstrate something, just like they did with Petreaus. The fact that what she said is true makes her offense all the worse.

There have, it should be pointed out, been examples of GOP racism too numerous to list over the course of the last several years (make that decades), the latest being the dog and pony show put on by Mark Meadows at the Cohen hearing. And, of course, the very stable genius has by any measure engaged in racist behavior and is unquestionably a racist. How long is the line of Republicans willing to condemn the racism of their Dear Leader or any of their colleagues? Bear in mind, we’re talking real racism here as opposed to policy differences. If a demand were made on them to condemn one of their own, they would simply accuse those making the demand of impugning them, because, according to them, acting like a racist, voting like a racist, confirming racist judges and racist attorneys general, and talking like a racist doesn’t make you a racist.

This vote will do the Democrats no good. It is wrong on the merits. It will curry favor with no one. It will win them no votes. It will lose them some. They will do it anyway.

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Random thoughts on 2020

Sunday, March 3, 2019

I don’t have a firm favorite for the 2020 Democratic nomination. I know who I don’t want to get it. That would be Kristin Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, and Amy Klochubar. I also don’t want Sherrod Brown, but for a different reason than the other three. We can’t afford to lose that Ohio Senate seat.

Putting all that aside, my main concern is that Trump’s numbers being where they are, and the high probability that the rest of his family as well as a number of his other hanger ons will be indicted or in jail by 2020, that we may be getting too confident about the ultimate outcome of the race. I agree with digby:

Personally, I think that most people want to beat Trump more than anything. But at this stage, they’re thinking of the things that affect their lives and want to be sure that Democrats nominate someone who reflects those values and commitments. Primaries are the mechanism by which we sort all that out in a big, diverse coalition.

But it’s also possible that more than a few people think there’s no way Trump can possibly be re-elected and that’s just not true. I really hope that people who know better make that clear. Trump’s base is mesmerized by him. And there’s a reason for that:

That base is amazingly solid and all it’s going to take is for him to siphon off a few percentage points and sneak in again.

I can’t help but hark back to 2016. On this date three long years ago I wrote the following in my journal:

I have begun to think, however, that the odds of Trump’s winning are swinging in his favor. We may be electing our Hitler. He’ll be running against Hillary, which he can do from both the right and the left. It’s truly rather scary. She is unbelievably uninspiring. In addition, I read today that one of her former aides has been given immunity to testify about the email server issue. That’s scary because it’s something he can harp on, and the press will run with. I think it’s a nothingburger and I’m really surprised that the Justice Department is even looking into it, never mind feeling the need to grant anyone immunity. But it may be all we hear about in the summer, after the press comes around and decides that after all, Donald, by virtue of having gotten the nomination, is now respectable and responsible, being that he’s a Republican.

Maybe she’s got her shit together to take him down, but I doubt it. She’s bought into beltway wisdom before, and she may still believe that he’ll crash and burn on his own. All it will take to make him the new Fuehrer is for the economy to tank, which it very well may, a result, ironically, of Obama’s refusal to rein in the banks.

I wasn’t entirely right. He didn’t need an economic downturn. He beat her for the other reasons I mentioned. But the fact is that by the time November rolled around, I had bought into the conventional wisdom and was absolutely certain she’d win. We can’t afford to do that this time around. Nor can we afford a third party milquetoast candidate to drain off the small percentage of “centrists”. Howard Schultz may become the man responsible for ending democracy in this country and insuring that the climate crisis goes unaddressed.

Timing may be all in 2020. Some sort of economic downturn is inevitable. The nation and the world would be well served if it happened soon enough to have maximum impact on the 2020 election. The last time around (2008) it happened too late to have that much impact on the election itself, though Obama still won, but it left him to take the political heat for a situation caused by his immediate predecessor. FDR, by contrast, got in when the impact had already been felt, so everyone knew where to place the blame. It is remarkable that Trump is so unpopular given the superficial health of the economy, but that could easily change. The Republicans are good at staying on message; the Democrats are terrible. The media is reflexively both siderist, so we can look forward to them glomming on to some minor imperfection in our candidate and equating it with Trump’s criminality. After all they did that last time.

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The Church of Perpetual Bullshit

Monday, February 25, 2019

The Catholic bishops, many of whom are probably secret abusers themselves, are gathering in Rome to discuss the deeply complex issue of what they should do about the legions of sexually abusive priests. They have, according to this article, concluded that, shockingly, the problem is not restricted to the U.S., but is worldwide. Imagine that, people are the same everywhere. The linked article was in yesterday’s paper. Today we learn that Pope Francis has hit on the only solution he can think of: calling priestly abusers even worse names than he ever did before. That ought to solve the problem!

You have to wonder about the fact that they never appear to discuss the fact that the job requirements for being a priest may have something to do with the prevalence of sexual deviants within their ranks. After all, while sexual abuse is not unknown among the clergy of other sects, it is comparatively rare. According to the Church of the One True Faith (that overstates the number by one, by the way), god created man, installed within him a sex drive, ordered him to be fruitful and multiply, and decreed that the act of sex was the sole manner through which new life could be created. But, oddly enough, god also decreed that sex was evil, and that one could not truly prove his (it’s always a him) love for god unless he ditched all that “be fruitful and multiply” stuff. So, only abstainers are admitted to the priesthood, and the bishops are still surprised that it turns out that people willing to claim compliance with that requirement include a lot of deviants. 

The obvious solution to the Church’s problem is to abolish the medieval requirement of priestly celibacy, but that’s never discussed. You have to wonder why. There are probably a lot of decent, though deluded, men who would be glad to be priests if they could live normal lives. Given a few generations, they’d crowd out the deviants. Jesus never ordered the apostles to live celibate lives, and for hundreds of years priests could marry. The only ones that didn’t were, as Randy Newman sang in a slightly different context, “some fools in the desert, with nothing else to do, so scared of the dark they didn’t know if they were coming or going”. Celibacy was the alleged answer to nepotism. It didn’t work and it’s still not working.

But I blather. End of post. One more thing. Randy Newman’s Faust album from which the above quote is taken, is a great and, as is usual with his stuff, underrated album. (Do they still call them albums?)

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A learned legal opinion

Friday, February 22, 2019

A few thoughts on the legality of Trump’s emergency!declaration.

If we had the same quality of courts we had even 20 years ago, there would probably be little question that the declaration would not survive judicial scrutiny. But we live in a time when the court is very possibly a more partisan and ideological institution than it has ever been. Every once in a while Roberts will want to preserve his reputation by not going too far over the line, but in the end, decisions will be made consistent with the preferences of the judges, and not the law or the constitution. In all likelihood, while a lower court judge or judges may call it for what it is (after all Trump said out loud that he didn’t have to do it), but the Supreme Court is likely to duck the issue by calling it a political question, or by ruling that for one reason or another the plaintiffs bringing the case lack standing to object to the institution of a dictatorship.

The Democrats have been making the argument that if his declaration is upheld, the next president (if the dictator allows new elections during an emergency) can declare climate change an emergency, etc. That’s a good argument, and, who knows, may actually give Roberts pause, but I doubt it. I think we’re getting into an era where the courts will begin implicitly ruling that IOKYAR, but not if you’re a Democrat. It’s easy enough to draw distinctions when you are playing with standing rules or the political question doctrine. That’s surely what they would do, so any Democratic emergency would be quickly squelched. Still, worth making the argument, as it appears to be working with some Republican lawmakers. I don’t know why, since they should know better than me that the court is now a corrupt institution.

But speaking of potential unintended consequences, I got a kick recently out of the fact that Clarence Thomas wants to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan. In that case the Warren Court (oh, blessed days) held that when the plaintiff is a “public figure”, he or she must prove actual malice in order to prevail in a libel case. In a regular peanut butter and jelly libel case, you need only prove that you’ve been libeled. You don’t even have to prove that the libel was untrue. Back in the olden days, the English courts actually held or are reputed to have held that the greater the truth the greater the libel. Nowadays truth is a defense that must be proven by the defendant, though the curious case discussed at the foregoing link calls even that into question.

Anyway, this may be a case in which the good justice (well, he’s not actually a good justice) should perhaps be careful what he wishes for. He is, probably at least in part, responding to Trump’s desire to have libel laws relaxed. Trump too, might consider being more careful in what he wishes for.

Libel actions can be brought in both state and federal courts. For the most part, a federal court does not apply federal law to such a case. It applies the law of the state with jurisdiction. Generally speaking, each state is free to develop its own tort law, including libel law. Sullivanis a limitation on states libel law to the extent that it limits the degree to which the states can punish certain speech. If Sullivanis overturned, then the State Supreme courts will, in the absence of any federal limitation, be allowed to develop libel law in any way they choose. So let us suppose that a given state, say, New York, decides to go back to the pre-Sullivan days and treat libel of a public figure no differently that any other libel case. Ask yourself, who is more likely to be at the losing end of the following lawsuits:

  • Trump versus anyone who has called him a serial liar.
  • Hillary Clinton vs. Trump for calling her a crook.

Remember, “anyone” would bear the burden of proving the truth of the statement that Trump is a serial liar. How hard do you think that would be? Trump would bear the burden of proving Hillary a crook. No one has done that so far, and a lot of people have tried. Since these cases would be heard in state courts, and the decisions of the highest state courts would be final (absent a federal question) then the Supreme Court would have a very difficult time imposing an IOKYAR rule.

I should think, as well, that the folks at Fox might not be happy about such a change, as it doesn’t sit well with their business plan. I actually think that some Democrats should think seriously about bringing libel cases even under the current rules. Trump’s lies about Hillary, for instance, probably meet the actual malicestandard.

I really think Judge Thomas would not be happy if he got his way on this one.

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What’s in a word?

Friday, February 22, 2019

The word socialism is being bandied about lately. Some of the Democratic presidential candidates are being asked if they’d describe themselves as socialist, and of course, Republicans sling the word around as an all around dismissal of any and all Democratic proposals. It’s a tactic at least as old as the New Deal. Social Security was socialism, and Saint Ronald got his political start by labeling Medicare as socialism. Once socialisticprograms pass and become popular with the American people, the right drops the label as applied to those programs, because keeping it up risks cleansing the word of all those terrible associations. In fact, there are a few indications that they’ve already gone to the well a bit too often, and a lot of Americans are beginning to say that if, for instance, Medicare for all is socialism, then bring it on.

One of the things I’ve never understood about Democrats confronted with this word, or, for that matter, journalists who bandy it about, is the fact that no one ever bothers to either demand a definition of the term or to offer such a definition. The so called Tea Party threw the term around constantly, but no one ever asked them what they meant by the term. It was just generally understood that it was a bad thing, and if Obama was one (which he’s not) he must be a bad man. The right has gone Humpty Dumpty one better. When they use a word it means exactly what they want it to mean in that moment, nothing more and nothing less.

Were I a Democratic candidate asked if I was a socialist, I’d demand that my interlocutor define the term. Chances are good they’d be unable to do so, or that any definition they provided would be a cartoon version of the real thing. Were I debating a Republican opponent, I’d demand he or she state whether Social Security and/or Medicare are socialist (they are), reminding them as I did about Saint Ronald, et. al.

In typical Democratic fashion, too many of our candidates accept the implied bogeyman definition of the term when queried on the subject. This is part and parcel of the Democratic tendency to adopt Republican terminology, e.g., allowing the right to get away with pro-lifeinstead of any number of terms the Democrats could use that would be far more accurate, e.g., anti-woman.

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Book report

Thursday, February 21, 2019

I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent posts that I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a history of the U.S. Given it’s subject, it’s a predictably long read, almost 800 pages not counting about 100 pages of footnotes. I’ve just finished it. I slowed down a bit toward the end, as, to be frank, it was a bit painful reading about times through which I’ve lived, knowing how they’ve turned out so far. There have been other times in our history when things have looked pretty bad, e.g.,1860, but not having been there, I can read about them with a bit more detachment.

My original statement that I highly recommend the book still stands, but I have to point out that the last chapters, documenting the years from Vietnam forwards, are a bit infested with an unwarranted and poorly documented both siderism, which sadly approaches the level of the “both sides are equally bad” meme spread by so many mainstream journalists.

Part of this meme arises from the idea that if there are two sides having trouble getting along and finding common ground, it must be the fault of both. This ignores the fact that if one side insists on a world view that dismisses real facts out of hand and insists on basing policy on “alternative facts”, e.g., denying global warming, denying the existence of racism, claiming tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves despite multiple such cuts that had no such effect, claiming that massive amounts of drugs are coming across the Southern border rather than ports of entry, etc., then it becomes impossible to find common ground, no matter how hard one tries. Obama spent about six years in a vain attempt to do just that, and look what it got him and us.

There is, in sum, such a thing as truth. If one side is insisting on adherence to truth, that is not the same as insisting on falsehood.

Additionally, just because one can identify some strain on the left that can be cast as a mirror image of something happening on the right, doesn’t mean they are actually equivalent. Being an academic, Lepore often “balances” descriptions of right wing extremism with some campus craziness like speech codes or claims of cultural appropriation. That claimed equivalence may make some people feel comfortable,but it ignores the fact that those campus movements have extremely little impact on society at large, while the right wing movements with which they are contrasted have a significant impact on public policy. The PC police don’t run the Democratic Party or have much influence in it; the latter day Nazis and racists most certainly have outsized influence in, and arguably control, the Republican Party.

In the world of the internet, for instance, it may be true that Tumblr is a left wing version of Reddit (I don’t read either), but there is no left wing equivalent to Infowars or the Drudge Report, nor do Democratic politicians take up any left wing fantasies equivalent to the right wing fantasies cooked up by the likes of Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, nor do they, as Trump and other influential Republicans have done, give such fantasists credibility by genuflecting to them, as Republicans routinely do. No one, particularly no prominent Democrat, ever claimed, for instance, that Donald Trump is actually an android programmed to hand our foreign policy over to the Russians, though the evidence for that is stronger than the evidence that Obama was born anywhere but in Hawaii. Republican politicians either embraced that meme outright, or refused to dismiss it.

One paragraph particularly struck me. In one section of the book, Lepore discusses right wing internet fabrications at length, detailing them extensively. She concludes the section as follows:

Jaundiced journalists began to found online political fact-checking sites like PolitiFact, which rated the statements of politicians on a Truth-O-Meter. “I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books: they’re elitist,” the satirist Stephen Colbert said in 2005, when he coined “truthiness” while lampooning George W. Bush. “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today.” But eventually liberals would respond to the conservative media by imitating them-two squirrels, chasing each other down a tree. (Emphasis added)

That’s the end of the discussion. After exhaustively documenting right wing media factual distortions and outright lies, she accuses liberals of doing the same thing, without specifying a single instance. None of the left wing squirrels are identified. I am sure if you dug deep enough you could find a left wing website that has spread lies, but I can’t think of one. Spreading the truth, larded with opinion, is not the same thing as spreading lies larded with opinion. If there is a left wing equivalent of InfoWars, I’m unaware of it, and I’m familiar with most of the left wing websites. You can probably find inaccuracies at both Daily Kosand Talking Points Memo, two of the most popular lefty on line sites, but you would be hard put to find anything that is simply made up, like Alex Jones allegation that Sandy Hook was a fake. Nor, again, will you find any Democratic politician lending credence to such a site or its creators. They’re too busy running away from their quite rational progressive base, so they don’t have the time to genuflect to extremists it would take them hours of research to find.

There’s no question in my mind, after reading her book, that Lepore would situate herself to the left of center if you asked her where she stood. It’s a shame she felt obliged to engage in an unwarranted both siderism.

Nonetheless, the book is worth reading. Like so many works of current history, it brings home the fact that at least in terms of historical writing, the North has finally won the civil war. When I learned American history in the ‘50s (I was a history fanatic early on) and ‘60s, it was a given that the “Radical” Republicans, who gave us the 13th through 15th Amendments (without which our democracy would have long since perished), were the bad guys, standing in the way of the reunification that the country so sorely needed. That meme, which sub silentiojustified the Klan, segregation, and the virtual re-enslavement of black Americans, has been overturned, and Lepore does a good job of dispensing with other myths that dominated the teaching of history in the past.

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A gang of idiots takes on a stable genius

Friday, February 15, 2019

When I was a mere lad, along with the comic books I bought religiously using the money I earned on my paper route, there was a monthly magazine I also bought religiously. I bought it because it was funny. Little did I suspect that I was being indoctrinated into the political ideology I profess today. Back then I couldn’t figure out why this magazine kept making fun of Richard Nixon, who had been beaten by JFK, and, I thought (though I was wrong), was a total has been. I left the magazine, along with the comic books, behind when I dropped my paper route, but the lessons I learned stayed with me. When Nixon made his comeback in ‘68 I knew him for the criminal snake that he was, and feared the worst, all due to the lessons I learned from this magazine and the left wing gang of idiots that churned it out every month. 

I’m sure I’m not the only faithful reader whose mind was shaped by the gang.

In the summer of 2017 I chanced upon an issue of this magazine, which is still in existence, and was delighted to see that it was savaging a certain stable genius. Such good work should be rewarded, I thought, so I subscribed on my Ipad. Truth to tell, I haven’t read it very often, but I feel I’m supporting a worthy cause, in the hopes that it is shaping the minds of a rising generation.

Today I pulled it up on my Ipad. It featured the 20 most horrible things that happened in 2018, about 16 of which involved a certain genius in one way or another. Here’s a sample.

 

Yes, Mad magazine survives. I don’t know if it anywhere near as popular with 10 to 14 year old boys as it was, but I hope so.

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Stockholm Syndrome afflicting the Democrats

Thursday, February 14, 2019

On Tuesday Paul Krugman pointed out,once again, Republican hypocrisy about the deficit:

Much of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was devoted to describing the menaces he claims face America — mainly the menace of scary brown people, but also the menace of socialism. And there has been a lot of discussion in the news media of what he said on those topics.

There has, however, been little coverage of one of the most revealing aspects of the SOTU: what Trump said about the menace of America’s historically large government debt.

But wait, you may object — he didn’t say anything about debt. Indeed he didn’t — not one word. But that’s what was so revealing.

As always, it’s worthwhile reading, but Krugman fails to mention the extent to which Democrats have allowed Republicans to shape Democratic policy using this issue, while Republicans themselves have merrily had it both ways.

There’s something akin to the Stockholm Syndrome about the way in which Democrats have allowed the Republicans and the media to thwart their (proclaimed) policy objectives by catering to deficit concerns, when the Republicans have proven time after time that those concerns mean nothing to them when they themselves are in power and when the political payoff for deficit responsibility is, in a word, non-existent.

In theory, the Democrats are Keynsians, i.e., they understand that there are times when it makes perfect sense to run up deficits, particularly during economic downturns. It also makes sense to borrow money to, in effect, invest in the future. To put it in simplistic terms, it makes sense to borrow money to buy a house, but not to hold a party. Republicans borrow money to throw money at the rich, their equivalent of a party, and there is no blowback on that score from the media and precious little from the Democrats. When Democrats borrow money (not often enough, and when they do, they don’t borrow enough, e.g., Obama’s pathetic stimulus package) they borrow to invest.

Despite the fact that they are Keynesians in principle, in practice the Democrats have been bludgeoned into adopting only halfway measures which, like Obama’s stimulus, don’t achieve enough for anyone to notice. That is precisely the outcome the Republicans want, because they can then argue that government can solve no problems. This has happened so often that one must wonder whether Washington Democrats are all insane, since they continually do the same thing, and react in the same way, always expecting something different to result.

This brings us to the present Democrats. I think Nancy Pelosi has amply demonstrated that she was a good choice to lead the House Democrats. Trump can’t figure out how to bully her, and she has stood up for the members of the freshman class as they’ve been attacked. But she adamantly insists that the Democrats must continue with the insanity, refusing to consider ditching the pay-gorules to which only Democrats adhere. Fondly do we hope, and fervently do we pray (actually, I don’t pray, there being no god) that the new faces in Congress will ultimately prevail on this issue and that someday the Democrats will simply tell the hypocritical Republicans to shove it when they start moaning about deficits. This is particularly true now, when nothing substantive they pass in the House will ever become law anyway. Come 2020, voters will want to see what the Democrats have to offer and a bunch of halfway measures won’t be particularly attractive.

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GE to repay (sort of) bribe

Thursday, February 14, 2019

This story may make Dan Malloy’s day:

General Electric says it will reimburse the state for the massive incentive package that helped convince the company to move its headquarters here from Connecticut, as it looks to sell its future Fort Point headquarters property and scales back its ambitions.

The board of MassDevelopment — a quasi-public agency that owns part of the property — approved a plan on Thursday to jointly market the 2.7-acre site with GE. The sale proceeds will reimburse the agency for the $87.4 million in state money that has been used to acquire and prepare the Fort Point parcel.

GE, however, is not leaving Boston. The struggling company said it will still move into two brick buildings at Necco Court after renovations are completed, but won’t come close to creating the 800 jobs it originally promised.

GE didn’t leave Connecticut because of taxes, it left because it thought it could attract young workers because Boston is cooler than Stamford. It was and is a failing company, however, and would have eventually failed in Connecticut just as it will in Boston.

Here’s an odd thing. The above article was, as I write, just added to the Boston Globe’s site, but there was another article in the Globe this morning that I found a bit surprising. Guess who’s coming to Boston (or, more accurately, beefing up in Boston) without, apparently, getting a massive infusion of taxpayer money to do so?

Google on Wednesday confirmed long-rumored plans that it will fill a new Kendall Square office tower, giving the company room to double its workforce here.

The tech giant said it will lease most of a 16-story tower on Main Street in Kendall Square on which construction will soon begin — on the site of the four-story office building the company currently occupies. Eventually, Google’s Cambridge workforce could grow to as many as 3,000, from its current 1,500.

There’s no indication in the article that Boston or Massachusetts paid any bribe money to Google (ala New York’s ridiculous bribe to Amazon) to entice it to add to its Boston presence. Not only that, Google will add 1500 jobs, while GE was only going to add 800. That means, going by the cost per estimated GE job, that Google passed up a potential bribe of over $163 million. Of course, that’s chump change to Google, but that didn’t stop Amazon. It may make sense for cities in the Rust Belt to bribe these companies, but it seems pretty obvious it’s unnecessary for cities like Boston and New York. Still, I’ve a feeling that the Google situation will remain an outlier.

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