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Saturday, July 4, 2020

I just came across this:

It is easy to imagine [Trump] is the worst leader the US has ever had. It is a view endorsed by the American Political Science association, which canvassed some 170 historians who ranked Trump dead last—a largely bipartisan verdict, too, since even self-identified Republicans on the panel rated him fortieth against the forty-four other contenders. C-Span has conducted similar surveys of presidential historians in 2000, 2009, and 2017 (none of these, naturally, include Trump). The bottom ten in the most recent survey were James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, Chester Arthur, and Martin Van Buren. (There were some shifts in the group over the three surveys, with, for example, George W. Bush making the bottom ten in 2009, but just missing the cut in 2017.)

My faithful readers will recall that I covered this story back in December, 2016, in a post which surely bears rereading. I reported:

It’s official. The American Historical Society announced today that it had taken a poll of its members, and there was surprising unanimity: Donald Trump is the worst president in American History. Well, actually, Donald Trump will be the worst president in American history, once he’s sworn in.

Unfortunately, the concluding paragraph was far too prescient:

Journalists attending the press conference at which the Society announced its conclusion went away puzzled. They noted that while all of the points the Society made about Trump were well founded as a matter of fact, that facts themselves clearly didn’t matter anymore, and that to them, Trump’s presidency was looking more normal by the day. Trump himself tweeted: “History on the way out. No one reads it and no one learns anything from it. So repetitious. Sad!”

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Math Lesson

Friday, July 3, 2020

I was a bit struck by this from an article on Crooks & Liars about a poll that found that Trump has not had much luck painting Biden (of all people) as a dirty fucking hippie:

There is at least one cause for hope for Trump in the poll: Forty-one percent of voters agreed with the statement that Biden is “more liberal than me,” and 20 percent didn’t know or had no opinion on the matter, meaning that they may be persuadable.

Okay, first let me say that I am going to skip any rant about this question presuming that “liberal” is a pejorative term, understood by all in that sense, even though literally everything we have in this country that’s any good was a product of liberalism, such as, by way of a microscopically small partial list:

  • Public schools
  • The end to child labor
  • Workplace protections and legalized unions
  • The New Deal
  • Social Security
  • Medicare
  • The 13th through 15th Amendments
  • The 19th Amendment

Okay, now that I’ve skipped that rant, let me get to the math lesson. Trump has a solid base consisting of the 41% of the most stupid people in this country. They all watch Fox News and all consider liberals to be evil. They will never vote for Biden under any circumstances. Since they consider themselves to be the chosen people and conservative, by definition, to them, all Democrats are more liberal than them. All this question proves is that the nutcases are the only people with a (presumably) negative opinion of Biden’s liberalism. Biden more than likely has a bigger problem with people who don’t consider him liberal enough. You know, the Bernie dead-enders. We all know one or two of them.

This question might have some upside value for Trump if it could be shown that somehow a significant number of the same people who told the pollster they were voting for Trump also felt Biden was not more liberal than they. What are the odds that any Fox viewing nutcase thinks he or she is more liberal than Biden, or even as liberal as Biden?

As to the 20% with no opinion or didn’t know, the overwhelming likelihood is that these are people who don’t think in ideological terms. As the article points out “ roughly the same percentage of voters said they didn’t know or had no opinion on whether Trump was more liberal or conservative than them”. We don’t know for sure, but I’d lay odds that almost everyone who “didn’t know” about Biden also “didn’t know” about Trump. Some people just don’t think in those terms. It’s unlikely that Trumpian name calling is going to make much difference to them.

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The Enemy of my Enemy…

Thursday, July 2, 2020

…is my friend.

For as long as my enemy is a threat, but after that, maybe not so much. This is a lesson that we must hope the national Democrats will finally learn.

This is all by way of directing the attention of the reader to Driftglass’s latest post, in which he documents the history of the Never Trumpers, and makes an unfortunately obvious prediction about what we can expect if Trump doesn’t steal the upcoming election. Read the whole thing, but this is the meat of it:

A future where virtually all of the inconvenient Republican history prior to 2016 will be swiftly and efficiently bulldozed down the memory-hole. Just as all the hugely inconvenient fuckery that Republicans were up to during the Clinton Administration was bulldozed down the memory-hole the moment five Republican Supreme Court justices helped Dubya steal the 2000 election.

And all of those inconvenient Republican catastrophes that took place during the Dubya Administration were bulldozed down the memory-hole the minute the Kenyan Usurper was sworn into office.

And all of that embarrassing Republican slander and sedition that took place during the Obama Administration was bulldozed down the memory-hole the day President Stupid was sworn into office.

See the pattern? Because it’s perfectly plain to anyone with eyes.

No one gets a bigger kick out of the Lincoln Project ads than me, but we must bear in mind who these people are. We shouldn’t forget that these folks cut their teeth developing malicious and mendacious ads against Democrats. This time, their job is easier, because they don’t even have to make up any lies; they can just tell the truth using the techniques so well honed by destroying Democrats. They deserve no moral credit for what they’re doing now, as they bear a good share of responsibility for the right wing propagandizing that has created the Republican base, composed now mostly of the brain dead and/or racists. They have never, and will never, acknowledge that they had a front and center role in creating the polarized society in which we now live.

As Driftglass predicts, if Biden wins, their pasts will once again be forgotten. It is an unfortunate fact that Biden may have been the only Democratic contender who would want to burnish his credentials with such people. The only way the Democrats can hope to retain control after a Biden victory is by delivering real reforms that help real people in concrete ways that actually make an immediate difference in their lives. These guys will be in the forefront of those opposing anything of the sort, and they will use their reputations as “Never-Trumpers” as a lever to argue that their opposition is principled and reasonable. Their actual history will be forgotten by the media, unless Democrats loudly remind everyone of that history.

In a word, they are friends now, but they’ll be enemies quite soon.

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Am I missing something?

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

This has me wondering:

Washington Post reporter Robert Costa says that things are so bad for Trump’s reelection hopes, they’re hoping Clarence Thomas resigns and gives them a Supreme Court nomination to run on.

Joe Scarborough was discussing just how dire things look for the Trump team, especially with the Supreme Court.

“Well, to that point about nailing down the base first, Joe, I have a little bit of new reporting,” Costa said.

“There are some people inside of the White House that are around this president who are hoping at this point, knowing that it may not happen, but they are hoping that there might be a Supreme Court vacancy. Clarence Thomas, the justice since the early ’90s, could decide to retire. and as this White House really looks to galvanize that base, they are quietly preparing for the possibility of a Supreme Court vacancy, looking like people, like the judge Amul Thapar, a favorite of majority leader Mitch McConnell, Amy Coney Barrett from Indiana, another federal judge, and they’re looking at the possibility of an opening.”

Costa said they’re hoping to stoke the base with a SCOTUS culture war, but the suburbs are more focused on bringing back the economy

The only rational explanation I can think of for this sort of thinking is that their internal polling shows waning enthusiasm among the whackjobs. That’s a good thing, if it’s the case, though the fact is that rational explanations aren’t usually relevant when it comes to the very stable genius. If this is his idea, his minions may have no choice but to push it in order to make him happy.

Let’s deconstruct it and start by putting aside the fact that replacing one nutjob with another doesn’t make any substantial short term change on the court, except that the new judge will likely outlive the loathsome Thomas.

In order to please the base, which is already committed to vote for him, he would have to pick a total whackjob to replace Thomas, which is apparently true of both of those mentioned in the article. That person would have to be nominated, but not confirmed, prior to the election, in order to galvanize the base. McConnell would have to defer ramming the nomination through until after the election in order to keep the juice flowing.

Almost by definition, that person would be anathema to the now vast majority of people who have pretty much decided they will never vote for Trump, and the nomination would only provide further incentive for them to turn out and vote against him. Moreover, it would spell trouble for those Senators (looking at you, Susan) who are running for reelection in non deep red states. They will have to commit themselves one way or the other, and, particularly Susan, would not be able to get away with claiming to be “concerned” but waiting to hear what the nominee has to say.

The strategy hitherto has been to appeal to the nutjobs sub silentio (sort of) but minimize the perception of craziness to the maximum extent possible. That’s why they are seeking to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional, but also urging the court to not make it official until after the election. The public perception of the base is not good, and if they wind them up even more, it will simply rebound on the genius.

In short, it’s hard to see how an open Supreme Court seat helps them given the current state of polling, unless it is true that the base is getting tired of the genius. If that’s the case, the media appears to have missed it entirely, but then, most of the diners in the Midwest are probably closed, so they have no way of checking up on the deplorables.

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Logic Puzzle

Monday, June 29, 2020

The fact that the Russians offered the Taliban bounties on the lives of American and other soldiers has now been confirmed by multiple news outlets (including Fox!) and the British government.

Today, this happened:

During today’s press briefing Trump’s outgoing press secretary was asked if Trump had a message to Moscow about Russia’s bounty program.

“Does the President have a specific message for Moscow given these reports?” a reporter asked.

Kayleigh replied as though she didn’t understand the question., “A specific message for Moscow?”

That’s what he asked.

“No, because he has not been briefed on the matter,’ she said. “As I’ve noted there is no consensus in the intelligence community and in fact there are dissenting opinions.”

Here’s my question, or series of questions. If Kayleigh knows that there is no consensus, then she has been briefed. If she has been briefed, why hasn’t Trump? Since when does the press secretary get briefed before the president?

On the other hand, of course, Kayleigh might just be lying again, but considering she’s leaving the job, you’d think she might give that a rest.

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A sign of hope?

Friday, June 26, 2020

Is it possible that both siderism is dying a slow death, and that it’s demise will be brought about from the bottom of the media heap?

Right now, I know of only one person in the national media who doesn’t play the both siderist game, and that would be Paul Krugman (see, e.g., today’s column), who nobody listens to because he is almost always right, whereas we must all listen to David Brooks, the finest exemplar of both siderism, who is always either wrong or too busy gushing platitudes to say anything of substance that is capable of being fact checked, even in retrospect. 

The New London Day, our local newspaper, has been a tithes paying member of the high church of both siderism for quite a while, which, oddly enough, as with most both siderists, has given it a clear rightward tilt. But one of its columnists, Dave Collins, went off the reservation today, and actually called out a common Republican tactic which, guess what, is not common to both sides:

I was stunned this week that Sen. Paul Formica of East Lyme proclaimed during a virtual forum with legislators that he and every other lawmaker in Hartford support an expansion of absentee ballot voting in Connecticut.

The devil is in the details, he seemed to suggest.

If I were drinking something at the time, I would have had to spit it out.

Not only are Formica’s Republican colleagues already in court to try to stop Secretary of the State Denise Merrill from expanding absentee voting for people with health risks in the pandemic, but he was a prominent Senate vote last year against an early voting measure that would not have helped in the coronavirus pandemic but would have put the question on the ballot this fall.

Connecticut is one of only 11 states that don’t allow early voting.

This is a familiar Republican dodge tactic, used when they try to cater to their base or appease party leaders and then justify those votes that are generally unpopular with everyone else.

Oh, sure, I’m for gun control, many Connecticut Republicans have said, while voting against gun control legislation, with lame excuses about the language of the bills or the length of the public hearings.

Dave goes on to mention that the even more loathsome Heather Somers, who is the Senator from my district, uses the same dodge always, though at times she’s more forthright, for when she voted against the constitutional amendment, she opined that we shouldn’t hand people their right to vote “on a silver platter”. We still don’t know what element or alloy the platter should be fashioned from, but I’m sure Heather would tell us if asked.

The important thing here is that Dave didn’t feel the need to assure us that “both sides” do it. He correctly identified this obfuscatory method as a common Republican tactic.

We won’t save this country unless the media too (Fox excluded, of course) forthrightly recognizes the Republican Party for what it is: an authoritarian institution dedicated to the proposition that this is a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, achieved by the dissemination of propaganda to, and the intentional fostering of divisions among, the non-rich, primarily along racial lines. In other words, they are American Nazis. We won’t get to that point until the media stops propagating the delusional fiction that both parties are somehow to blame for the current state of this nation. The Republican response to COVID-19 is just the latest example of this divide at all costs strategy. The Democrats took no part in making the wearing of masks a “partisan issue”. It was Republicans who chose to spread the meme that this common sense health measure was a deep state plot.

Who knows, if folks like Dave continue to eschew both siderism, the movement may percolate up to the folks in the national media. Someday the major media might even acknowledge that there are such things as facts.

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Bad Moon Rising

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

I didn’t practice criminal law, so I never had any reason to bone up on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, but the D.C. Circuit’s decision on the Flynn case baffles me.

Well, not really. Given the makeup of the panel, I figured it was at least a 50/50 probability. But it’s difficult to see, looking objectively at the matter, why a judge should be constrained to drop a case after a defendant has either pleaded or been found guilty. One would think, at least on first blush, that after a finding of guilt, the prosecution’s sole role would be a sentencing recommendation. It’s even worse, of course, that this court ruled that the government’s motives are completely immaterial. It may be true that legal experts will be proven right, and that the full court, sitting en banc, will reverse the decision, but that is small comfort, for the fact is that the decision illustrates that our courts, thanks to McConnell, Trump, and Democratic pusillanimity, have become a branch of the Republican Party, for no one in their right mind would argue that this decision would have gone the way it did had the defendant been a Democrat. Our courts are now well stocked with right wing ideologues, and nothing the voters do for the next 25 years or so can free us from their grip. This decision is Exhibit 1 for the concept of “result oriented” judicial decision making that we learned to despise in law school. It is now accepted practice.

If Biden is allowed to win, and the courts may ultimately have something to say about that, we can expect that anything remotely progressive that a Democratic Congress or a Biden administration tries to do will be struck down by the courts. Not only will they see no need to apply the law as written, or follow established precedent, they will have no problem distinguishing between cases, so that rulings they made favoring Republicans will no longer apply if they might benefit Democrats or Democratic policies.

This decision is, more or less, simply the opening shot in the war on the American Republic. The dilemma is that any attempts to effectively deal with the problem would themselves be destructive of the system, as the only real solution would be court packing: adding a couple of justices to the present Supreme Court, and making life as difficult as possible for lower court judges.

The Constitution is an imperfect document, primarily because it gave too much power to a determined minority. Those imperfections are now, as they have before, leading us toward disaster. A completely new constitution might be a good idea, but the methods set forth in the present constitution for doing that are designed to guarantee that the same minority that has brought us to the brink of ruin could frustrate any attempt to correct the glaring deficiencies in that document.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Lawyer stuff, Our Liberties Threatened, Republicans | | Comments (0)

Martha Marx gets some press

Monday, June 22, 2020

Many years ago this blog was instrumental in starting the New London chapter of Drinking Liberally. Like the blog, the chapter is still going, but unlike the blog, it’s still going strong. Our last few meetings have been held on Zoom, but like everyone else, we’re hoping that will not be a permanent situation. Among our regulars is Martha Marx. Martha is a visiting nurse. During our Zoom meetings Martha has been sharing how the pandemic has affected her and others in her profession. I like to think that our DL Zoom meetings have been, in part, good therapy for Martha, as it’s pretty clear she has good reason to be concerned both for herself and for her patients, and anyone doing that kind of work needs to vent a little.

My wife often goes to a website called The Nib, which features comic strip type art. She checked it out today, and lo and behold, there’s a story about Martha. Check it out. It’s really good. We are lucky to have people like Martha.

Besides being a dedicated nurse, Martha is a dedicated Democrat, presently making another try to take out Senator Paul Formica, who “represents” parts of New London, Waterford and East Lyme. Her website is here. I’m guessing she’s qualified for state financing as I didn’t see a donation link. If you live in her district, vote for her. We need people who care about people.

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Trump’s people issue a challenge

Friday, June 19, 2020

I haven’t seen reference to this anywhere else, but as I’ve written before, though I won’t bank on the conclusions the Palmer Report draws from the facts, it usually presents actual facts:

So now the Trump campaign is trying the bizarre desperate last ditch move of demanding that Joe Biden agree to more than the three customary debates. When you consider Donald Trump’s visibly worsening physical health and collapsing cognitive abilities, sending him out there for any debates at all is a risky move. Sending him out there for additional debates is an extremely low percentage play that’s likely to backfire.

Back in the days when there was still hope we’d field a different candidate, I believe I wrote, and I know I said, that Biden was the only potential candidate that Trump would dare to debate, as I thought that Biden was the only one who might not be able to handle Trump.

I don’t believe that anymore, for a number of reasons. First, Trump is declining in real time, is not capable of putting together a coherent sentence, and is not capable of holding himself in check. He will treat any debate like a rally and will expect a wider audience to swallow his lies. In addition, I have to hand it to Biden. It appears he has been quite open to taking advice about his public statements, and that advice has been generally good. It won’t be hard to anticipate Trump’s lines of attack, and it won’t be hard to turn them against Trump. Just as a small example, we can expect Trump, who is obviously in the early stages of dementia, to accuse Biden of precisely that. A response such as “Well, I’m not the one who suggested people inject disinfectant, …(here insert litany of crazy Trumpisms)”. In fact, the best Biden strategy would be to simply keep reminding people of Trump’s repeated failures.

I agree with Palmer that Biden ought to call their bluff, as there’s no doubt in my mind that come debate season the genius’s campaign managers will have zero interest in having any debates, never mind more than three.

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A Monumental Modest Proposal

Thursday, June 18, 2020

As the statues of the traitors and assorted genocidal monsters come down, it seems fitting that we consider raising monuments to people who deserve our recognition, which brings me to the book I am currently perusing, The Slaves Cause, by Manisha Sinha. It is a densely written history of the Abolitionist movement, and through its pages troop legions of people, black and white, who worked hard on behalf of the rights of the slave, and, an early off-shoot of the abolitionist movement, the rights of women. Some few are well known to history, but many more have faded into history, victims to a large degree of the whitewashing of history (literally and figuratively) after the Civil War. Why is it only now that historians are beginning to recognize the central role that multitudes of free black Americans, other than Frederick Douglass, played in the abolitionist movement? I’ve been a history buff all my life, but only recently have I become aware of this fact, which, after a moment’s thought, seems to be something you should know intuitively. Of course free blacks would have been a force in the abolitionist movement. As for the white abolitionists, many of whom have also been forgotten, many preached true racial equality, a concept to which the majority of white people felt no need to even pay lip service. Needless to say, these folks were subjected to more ridicule than respect while they were alive.

Okay, I’ll stop preaching and get back to my main point.

These spaces, from which these statues have been removed, could be repurposed as memorials of historic events of which we should all be made aware or to commemorate the often forgotten people who worked to make this a better country.

A couple of local examples.

Many years ago now, the Town of Groton removed a statute of John Mason from the site of the Native American village in Mystic where he led a massacre of men, women and children so brutal that, if I remember my history right, even some of his own men were literally sick to their stomachs. Mason’s statue is gone, though regrettably, his name still graces an Island just off the Mystic coast. It would be fitting to erect a memorial on the spot to memorialize the people who were massacred on that site. We need to be reminded of our history, and those people deserve to be remembered.

A few days ago the City of New London removed a statue of Christopher Columbus, originally put there, no doubt, at the behest of the Italian American community. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to replace that statue with a memorial to a New Londoner, and one who truly deserves remembrance? There is a New London Historical Society, and surely it could conduct a search for some worthy New Londoner(s) who deserve recognition, much like the mostly forgotten people who are so prominent in Sinha’s book. It need not be an abolitionist, but it should be someone who fought to make this country one that truly reflected its alleged belief that all were created equal. As the statues come down nationwide, they could be replaced in like manner elsewhere. I would hazard a guess that, at least in the non-Southern states it would not be hard to find such people if one looks hard enough. Placing memorials to such people would serve to educate the living about those who came before who struggled to make this nation better. No one is perfect, and many of the folks mentioned in Sinha’s book had their flaws, but their forgotten contributions to the nation far outweigh any cavils the inevitable right wing blowback might advance against memorialzing them or people like them.

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