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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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Oh Ye of Too Much Faith

Thursday, May 27, 2021

There may be something to the “Ivory Tower” thing:

Dozens of legal scholars have come together for a new letter to congressional leaders detailing why "there is no constitutional barrier" to D.C. statehood legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last month and federal lawmakers should not avoid establishing a 51st state "because of meritless threats of litigation."

"As scholars of the United States Constitution, we write to correct claims that the D.C. Admission Act is vulnerable to a constitutional challenge in the courts," says the letter (pdf), first reported on Monday by NBC News and addressed to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

It is legal to allow the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth—the name proposed by House-approved H.R. 51, in honor of abolitionist Frederick Douglass—to enter the union through a congressional joint resolution, "just like the 37 other states that have been admitted since the Constitution was adopted," the letter continues.

"Furthermore, Congress’s exercise of its express constitutional authority to decide to admit a new state is a classic political question, which courts are highly unlikely to interfere with, let alone attempt to bar," the letter notes.

Reading the above made me think that these people have had their heads in their books reading old case law while being blissfully ignorant of the real world around them.

I’m not saying they’re wrong on the law, and they’re certainly not as far off base as the Harvard Law Professor who thought that he could get a popular vote constitutional amendment by getting the court to rule that it was legal for electors to vote for anyone, rather than the presidential candidate to whom their vote was pledged.

I’ve written about this issue here and here, and I won’t repeat myself too much, but suffice to say that under the present Supreme Court precedent, logic and reason are totally irrelevant. If there are five “justices” that want to keep Joe Manchin in power, then they will find a way to declare DC statehood unconstitutional. This court is beyond even caring about its reputation in the legal community. It’s aim is to hand the country over to a permanent Republican “majority” and DC statehood would interfere with that.

I was especially amused by the claim that the court would decline to interfere because DC statehood is a “political question”. The “political question” dodge has typically been used by courts to decline to interfere with legislation they like, even though it’s constitutionally suspect. The present Supreme Court used the political question dodge when it legalized partisan and racist gerrymandering recently. You can bet your bottom dollar that case would have turned out differently had the gerrymandering been done by politicians with a D after their names. If this court wants to prevent DC statehood it will brush the “political question” argument aside and proceed to write an elaborate fictional history proving that our sainted Founding Fathers would be aghast at the prospect of enfranchising a largely black electorate.

Now, to be fair, these law professors may be just as cynical as me and fully realize the chances are slim that this Court would let the people of DC have two senators. They may figure it’s worth a try, and that means convincing Joe Manchin of something, alas, of which he has no interest in being convinced.

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Nice Work if you can get it

Monday, May 24, 2021






Gordon Sondland is suing Mike Pompeo for 1.8 million dollars:

Gordon Sondland, the former U.S. ambassador to the European Union who was fired by Donald Trump after his explosive impeachment inquiry testimony against the then-president, is reportedly suing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for $1.8 million in unpaid legal costs from that probe. The Washington Post reports the lawsuit claims that Pompeo promised Sondland that the State Department would pick up his fees ahead his November 2019 testimony—but then reneged on that offer after Sondland testified that there was a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine and declared: “We followed the president’s orders.”

Given the identity of the defendant, I wish him well, but as a former practicing lawyer, now blessedly retired but still legally qualified to practice law, I must admit to a certain amount of jealousy. At $1,000.00 an hour, it would take 1800 hours to rack up a bill for $1,800,000.00. To put that in more perspective, 1800 is forty five 40 hour weeks. And that assumes an hourly rate that, I am abashed to say, exceeded my own rate by several 100 percents. The bill for this one client exceeded my total earnings for a significant number of years.

I have to take my hat off to the law firm that represented this guy. It would seem, just based on what I know of course, that the work involved would consist mostly of advising the guy to tell the truth, going over the likely testimony, and assembling whatever documentation you might think is relevant. If Sondland can justify paying $1,800,000.00 for the legal representation he needed, imagine what Rudy would be asking for if he could ever get Trump to spring for his legal fees, as he has demanded. Again, I’m just a country lawyer, but my guess is that the hours his lawyers will spend defending those libel cases, not to mention his criminal cases, will be one or two orders of magnitude greater than the Sondland lawyers racked up.


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To Mask or not to Mask

Thursday, May 13, 2021

Over at Press Run Eric Boehlert documents a new media obsession, yet another right wing whining point. Why, they ask, does Biden, a fully vaccinated person, continue to wear a mask. For that matter, why should any vaccinated person where a mask.

He observes:

It’s slightly jarring that in the wake of the Trump presidency, when Americans were urged to inject bleach as a way to combat Covid-19, that Biden sometimes wearing a cloth facial covering is treated as a pressing news story by the Beltway media. And the recent emphasis isn’t just on Biden. More journalists are setting their judgmental sights on those vaccinated liberals who remain cautious and continue to wear masks, dubbing them “pandemic addicts,” “irrational” and “odd.”

As Digby points out here, this line of attack comes straight from Fox, Tucker Carlson especially.

Perhaps I’m odd, but I don’t continue to wear a mask when I’m with other people, such as in stores or at the Y. I do it because we are not yet out of the woods, and if the vaccinated stop wearing masks now, it would make any policy requiring only the unvaccinated to wear one totally unenforceable. I wear a mask primarily because we are still in a phase of this plague in which it is advisable for certain people to wear masks, and if I and other vaccinated people stop wearing them, so will the unvaccinated. It’s social cooperation. An alternative might be “vaccine passports”, but the very people that are aghast at the vaccinated wearing masks are those opposing, and in some case making it illegal, for places of public accomodation to restrict their facilities to the vaccinated. It is also the case that these are the very people who would be attacking Biden for not wearing a mask, if he chose not to do so in certain contexts. (Update: Well looky here, here it is ) It isn’t surprising when the Foxists and the other right wing media types push these points, but when the “mainstream” press goes along, it’s particularly outrageous.

Afterword: After writing the above, I heard the news that the CDC is saying that as of next week, we vaccinated folks can ditch the masks and social distancing. If we lived in a country chock full of sane people, that would be great news. But I think we’re in store for an uptick in COVID cases, as the unvaccinated Foxistas take advantage of this move and also ditch their masks. I suppose that for the most part it will be the crazies getting sick, since the rest of us are vaccinated, but I’m sure that Tucker will find a way to blame it all on Joe Biden.

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Hard Times at the Times?

Friday, May 7, 2021

I have noticed over the last couple of days that the New York Times has run short of euphemisms. I don’t know if it’s because they used so many during the Trump years that they can’t come up with any more, but lately they’ve been running some euphemistic free articles in which Trump’s lies are referred to as—are you ready for this?— LIES!

Many of us thought that there was a policy against calling lies lies, but either that policy has been abandoned or the writers at the Times have simply abandoned any effort at originality and have come to the sad conclusion that they must fall back on the most accurate term.

I think we have to chalk this up to a lack of writing skills over at the Times, because I’ve checked with my Roget and there are plenty of artifices, indirectnesses, mollifications, obfuscations, overelaborations, pedantries, preciosities, and vague phraseologies that they have failed to use, such as cock-and-bull-story, inveracity (that’s a good one), mendacity, prevarication, song and dance (another good one), and trumped-up story (it’s really there!). The latter phrase has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few years!

Anyway, for whatever reason, so far as Trump is concerned, a lie is now a lie, and that’s apparently the case when Republicans repeat his lies, though euphemisms still prevail when Republicans tell their own homegrown lies. Still, it’s a start, a beginning, a step forward, a dawning, an initiation, a new departure, an onset, a point of departure, and a take off.

Afterword: I just paid $8.00 for a new Roget for my Ipad, as the one I had won’t run on the current IOS. I figured I had to get my money’s worth.

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Running out of demons

Monday, May 3, 2021

The Republican Party has been the party of hate since the late 60’s, when Nixon and his ilk decided they could win by pandering to Southern racists. It has worked for a while. The rules at first were that it was against the rules to be explicitly racist, but the dog whistles were clear enough. Along the way, especially in places where racism didn’t sell so well, the party chose other demons to pursue. But there’s been a problem because in most cases, the demonizing has lost its effectiveness over time. Commies, hippies, and gays are largely passé as demons. Just a few years ago anti-gay measures helped win states like Ohio, but nowadays, targeting gays is completely ineffective. Even the nutcases on the right don’t care about it anymore.

Every time one demon loses its effectiveness, the Republicans start searching for another. Some are largely fictitious, like Antifa, and even here in America, where people are ready to believe almost anything, that hasn’t really worked. Some demons physically exist however. The latest are transgender children and teens. There has rarely been a less threatening demon. Nonetheless, legislatures in at least a score of states are targeting these kids, and the only reason they are doing so is to stir up hate so they can garner votes from the people they must convince to vote against their own interests.

It’s hard not to conclude that this is an act of desperation by a party devoid of ideas, which refuses to embrace policies that might actually help people. The threat is non-existent, as the West Virginia governor implicitly admitted, though he signed a hate bill anyway. We are even looking toward a political campaign in which a Republican transgender candidate has come out against transgender people.

Back when the former guy was first running for president he made gestures toward supporting popular policies, though folks with brains knew he was lying. He was going to protect our social security and get us the greatest medical care ever, remember? Today’s Republicans have thrown away that part of his playbook, and are increasingly playing strictly to the Foxwashed segment of the population. It shouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work, if they weren’t also in a position to steal the upcoming elections. Still, you would think they’d make sure that the folks they are planning on duping into voting for them would have some reason to do so other than fear of transgender kids.

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A look ahead

Friday, April 30, 2021

Back in 2012, when the latest Republican Establishment candidate lost the popular vote and the Electoral College (Republicans don’t ever win the popular vote anymore; they rely on our archaic constitutional provisions to impose their candidates on an unwilling electorate) I predicted that for the next election, the Republican base would demand that the party go full whackjob, which they did. Even Mr. S., who I wrote about here, will back me up on this. Recall, that just about every 2016 candidate in the mix was a whackjob; the “moderate” candidates went nowhere (remember Jeb!), and the biggest whackjob of them all came out on top.

So, what’s in store for 2024?

Yesterday I read this at the Palmer Report. Again, to emphasize, their facts are usually right though you must take the conclusions they draw from those facts with massive piles of salt:

Donald Trump’s favorability rating is down to 32% in new NBC polling. This helps confirm other recent polling showing Trump bottoming out. It means he’s completely non-viable. You can’t win a national election with just your base; they’re always too small. Trump has little left but his base. It’s why lost badly in 2020, and why he isn’t a serious consideration for 2024.

Trump was able to pull it off in 2016 because there were still enough somewhat non-insane Republicans willing to give him their votes despite their reservations, because, after all, Hillary. The numbers above show, I think, that not only have these people left Trump, but they’ve also likely left the Republican Party.

What follows, by the way, assumes that Chuck Schumer will somehow find a way to get through to Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema and get them to help pass HR-1. If we don’t end voter suppression then all bets are off.

Again, assuming that voter suppression is somehow stopped, how exactly can Republicans approach 2024. That 32% is their hard core base, and at that point those people will likely be among the suppressed if the party fails to nominate someone sufficiently whacky. The voter suppression laws are certainly aimed at Democrats, but they are also making it harder for everyone to vote, and if these people are not sufficiently inspired by a Whackjob Supreme, they are quite likely to just stay home. So, initially this brings up an interesting question. What current Republican politician has the necessary blend of conspiracy driven talking points and showmanship to appeal to these folks? There are lots of pretenders to the throne, but folks like Cruz and Hawley just don’t have what it takes. They can dish out the hate with the best of them, but they can’t entertain the way Trump did. In addition, which of them is capable of entertaining the meatheads and, at the same time, giving a sufficient number of semi-rational people a reason to add their votes to the meatheads? They won’t have Hillary to kick around, the Hunter Biden thing never stuck, and, assuming that Biden sticks to his guns and doesn’t run again, they will likely be unable to make anything stick against whoever runs for the Democrats because everyone but the Fox faithful pretty much discounts everything they say. Trump himself, in my opinion, won’t be coming back. Even if he’s not in jail by then, he’s a psychologically beaten man, and I doubt he’d be able to rev them up in 2024 like he could in 2016. He wasn’t even that good at it in 2020.

The reality is that it will be almost impossible for the Republicans to win a fairly run presidential election in 2024. That’s why they have concluded they must steal it. Rather than taking the constitutional route of simply returning the choice of electors to the legislatures, they prefer to maintain the pretense that the electorate actually has a voice. So, consistent with a decades long pattern, they will do precisely what they have baselessly accused the Democrats of doing this year: they will steal the election, or at least try to do so.

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New Libel rules for thee but not for me

Friday, April 23, 2021

There are rumblings on the right that the landmark case of Sullivan vs. New York Times should be overruled. The Sullivan case requires proof of actual malice on a libel defendant’s part when the plaintiff is a public figure. The case does have it’s problems. For instance, it’s not unknown for a plaintiff to become a public figure by virtue of having brought the libel suit in the first place. Still, properly interpreted, on balance, the rule makes sense.

Clarence Thomas has suggested overruling the case, and recently, a right wing court of appeals judge called for completely overturning the case:

Last month, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia joined Justice Thomas’s plea. In a complicated case involving the sale of oil plots, two Liberian officials sued a watchdog group for implying they had received bribes in order to facilitate the sale. The D.C. Circuit panel found that the officials did not make out a plausible case of actual malice on the part of the watchdog. Judge Laurence Silberman, one of the judiciary’s most prominent conservatives, disagreed with much of the majority opinion, including the interpretation of the evidence. What was newsworthy about his dissenting opinion was the virulence of his attack on the actual malice rule. Sullivan has become “a threat to American democracy,” Silberman wrote. “It must go.”

Silberman’s disdain for the actual malice rule was directly tied to its protection of what he dubbed liberal media who, he wrote, “manufacture[] scandals involving political conservatives.” Finding their bias against the Republican Party shocking, he wrote, “The ideological homogeneity in the media—or in the channels of information distribution—risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.” He specifically identified as culprits The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the news sections of The Wall Street Journal. (Silberman approves of the Journal’s editorial stance.) He declared that “a biased press can distort the marketplace. And when the media has proven its [sic] willingness – if not eagerness – to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’ power.”

One can draw one of two conclusions from Silberman’s diatribe and, for that matter, from the push on the right to overrule the case:

Silberman and his ilk actually think that the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post would be more endangered by overturning the Sullivan case than right wing outlets such as Fox, Newsmax and their brethren, all of which are currently potentially on the hook for billions in damages sought by Dominion and Smartmatic, the voting machine manufacturers. If Sullivan free libel law were fairly applied, no reasonable person could agree with such a conclusion.

The other possibility is that Silberman expects that in a Sullivan free environment, he and his brethren and sisthren (I know that’s not a word, but I’m trying not to be chauvinistic here) would find a way to protect right wing media while slamming the mainstream types. Judges can be endlessly creative and can manufacture distinctions out of thin air, and Silberman must believe that he and his ilk could take care of Fox and Friends. We’ve already seen one judge deny a libel claim against Tucker Carlson, so maybe Silberman thinks they can simply go the same route by declaring that no reasonable person could believe anything they hear on Fox or that anything on said network is just “opinion” and therefore sanction free, while reasonable people do expect to get the truth from the New York Times and nothing therein is merely opinion. Of course, they may come up with something a little less obviously absurd, but in a pinch these rationales would do.

My guess is that Silberman would go with door number two and so would the present court. We’ll know a lot more when we see how the voting machine cases go. It makes no sense to find those companies to be “public figures” for purposes of those cases, nor does it make sense to find that there was no actual malice involved in the various allegations of fraud, nor does it make sense to find that those allegations were merely “opinions”, but my money is on the defendants escaping for one or more of those reasons.

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