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No, he doesn’t get it

Monday, March 20, 2017

I must take issue with this:

Democrats don’t seem to be united on how to deal with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, which is “no way, no how.” Richard Blumenthal gets it:

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said Sunday that he would filibuster Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and “use every tool that we have” if Gorsuch fails to disavow litmus tests on abortion and guns, among other things.

     Gorsuch’s multi-day confirmation hearing is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. ET on Monday.

Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, began by saying on MSNBC Sunday that Gorsuch would have to tell the committee that a ban on any religion is unconstitutional. Judges have said that religious bias motivated President Donald Trump’s recently blocked travel ban.

“Even if he can’t comment on the specific immigration case, he has to at least show that he respects the principle that the government can’t discriminate on the basis of religion; that a Muslim ban would violate the Constitution,” he said.

Blumenthal said he would hold Gorsuch to the same standard on Roe v. Wade, which set a precedent establishing abortion as a fundamental right, and gun control laws.

via Crooks and Liars

Sorry, if this is an accurate reflection of Blumenthal’s position, then he doesn’t get it.

Gorsuch has a record. He should be judged by that, not by anything he might say at the hearing. Blumenthal is a lawyer. He knows very well that Gorsuch could say that of course we cannot discriminate against Muslims, while leaving himself free to rule that Trump’s orders do not, in fact, discriminate against Muslims, for any of a variety of bullshitty legal reasons. I could write the decision for him if he wants.

Same goes for abortion. He can spout some gibberish that gives Blumenthal cover but still leaves himself wide open to rule to overturn Roe v. Wade. In any event, we know perfectly well that he would vote to overturn Roe, and that’s a fact. Nothing he says during that hearing can outweigh a lifetime record of reaction. If Blumenthal really “got it”, he would be on board with a filibuster with no ifs, ands or buts. And if that means the end of the filibuster, well, it’s no good having it in theory if you can’t use it.

What is wrong with Democrats? Can’t they see that after Merrick Garland, there must be payback? Even if Gorsuch were reasonable they should consider filibustering. But he’s not. He is anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-consumer, pro-corporate and securely in the pocket of the .01%. He’s worse than Scalia and likely to live a long time. No real Democrat would even consider allowing a vote to go forward if they could stop it.

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Allow me to repeat myself

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Republicans speak (and usually lie) with one voice. Democrats don’t even harmonize. I have griped about this for years. One consequence is that Republican memes, no matter how ridiculous they may be when logic is applied, dominate the discourse.

Here’s yet another example I just chanced upon, as I scanned the Crooks and Liars posts in my RSS reader. Here and here two Republicans lie about Trumpcare, spouting exactly the same lie. In this case it’s the explicit and implicit lie that the Medicaid expansion is a welfare program, that participants in Medicaid expansion are lazy louts, and that “able bodied” people should not be allowed on Medicaid. They both also spout tripe about wanting to bring the free market to health care, which will surely solve all our problems.

All a load of bullshit, of course, but that doesn’t mean it is ineffective, particularly if there is no coordinated response, which there never is.

As a side note, Joy Reid does a good job of destroying the Georgian congressman in the video at the first link, but it left me wondering about something. She was ready with facts and figures but, at least in the part I watched (there’s only so much bullshit a sane person can stand), she never made an obvious point about the “free market” meme. That being, if the free market worked in the health care context, why would we have had to pass Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare in the first place. Shouldn’t we have been in a state of health care bliss back in 1964 when the free market was successfully inpoverishing the elderly and ripping off the rest of us? Of course, they were pikers back then compared to the vultures that run insurances companies today, but still…

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Grammar lesson

Friday, March 17, 2017

Typing remains painful for me, but I feel I must pound my keyboard, nonetheless, in defense of the English language and its punctuation marks.

I refer to the Trumper’s defense of his wiretapping lie, an example of the reporting thereon here:

“I think there’s no question that the Obama administration, that there were actions about surveillance and other activities that occurred in the 2016 election,” Spicer said. “The President used the word wiretaps in quotes to mean, broadly, surveillance and other activities.”

So far as I know, no one has asked Mr. Spicer for another example of the use of quotation marks to imply that the words contained within those marks are not to be taken literally, but are meant to be interpreted in a broader sense. That is, in fact, the exact opposite of their commonly accepted use. One uses quotation marks as a means of precisely reproducing what someone else has said.

I use quotation marks a lot, both in this blog, and in legal briefs, and it has always been my understanding, an understanding that is absolutely correct, that the words within quotation marks are the exact words used by a source, whether named or unnamed. Trump’s use of quotation marks, if one follows the universal understanding, means that he intended to convey to his mindless followers that someone with knowledge had used the very words he was using to describe what Obama was doing. It usually implies, additionally, that the writer (in this case, Trump) believes the source is to be trusted, though with Trump we can be certain that the opposite is true.

Recently people have started using “air quotes” when they speak. We’ve all seen it. Someone pauses, puts two fingers of each hand in the air, and brings them down as they utter the air quoted words. The use of air quotes implies two things: that the speaker is using the same terminology as the person they are quoting, and that the speaker is metaphorically rolling their eyes and calling bullshit on the quoted person. You can probably use air quotes in a piece of writing, but you have to telegraph your meaning, and in any event, it’s obvious that Trump was not calling bullshit on his source, although if he had any sense he would have known that the stuff he read was, in fact, bullshit.

There is one other use of quotation marks, which I utilized in the previous paragraph when I put quotation marks around “air quotes”. Quotation marks are also used to indicate that a word or phrase is being referred to in its capacity as a word or phrase. If Trump were using his quotation marks in that sense, his current defense still makes no sense.

This is today’s grammar lesson.

You’re welcome.

UPDATE: I am currently reading Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style and I came across this passage on quotation marks. I think I’m fairly consistent:

Quotation marks have a number of legitimate uses, such as reproducing someone else’s words (She said, “Fiddlesticks!”), mentioning a word as a word rather than using it to convey its meaning (The New York Times uses “millenniums,” not “millennia”), and signaling that the writer does not accept the meaning of a word as it is being used by others in this context (They executed their sister to preserve the family’s “honor”).

I don’t think Pinker would go along with the Donald’s understanding, whoever he might grope to define it, of the use of quotation marks.

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Earth to Trump voters: tough shit

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Are these people stupid, or just Fox viewers. Probably both. One of several Trump voters now facing reality:

Los Angeles Times: Kathy Watson- A 55 year old former small business owner who credits Obamacare with saving her life, said that when she voted for Trump she dismissed his pledge to scrap the ACA as bluster

After struggling for years without insurance, the 55-year-old former small-business owner — who has battled diabetes, high blood pressure and two cancers — credits Obamacare with saving her life. Watson also voted for Donald Trump, believing the businessman would bring change. She dismissed his campaign pledges to scrap the Affordable Care Act as bluster. Now, as she watches the new president push to kill the law that provided her with a critical lifeline, Watson finds herself among many Trump supporters who must reconcile their votes with worries about the future of their healthcare.

via Hullabaloo

She believed all his lies, but the one thing he was telling the truth about, she didn’t believe. Anyone with brains could see that if a Republican captured the White House, Obamacare would be under attack. My heart ain’t bleeding for her or any of the rest of the Fox watching idiots profiled in the linked article. They voted to lose their healthcare. They should be happy, cause after all, he’s keeping his promises.

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Excuse my cynicism

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

I wish I could agree with this article, which argues that Michael Flynn has retroactively registered as a foreign agent in order to set himself up for leniency when Trump and Pence are investigated.

It still begs the question of why Michael Flynn is suddenly doing this. By registering now as a foreign agent, he’s admitting he broke the law by not registering while he was on the take. He’s voluntarily implicating himself in a past crime in an attempt to now get himself on the right side of the law. You know who does that? Someone who’s listening to his lawyer. And you know what else lawyers tell their guilty clients? Flip on your bosses and sing like a canary in exchange for leniency or immunity. Flynn is already Trump and Pence’s worst nightmare – and it’s just getting started.

I think we are past the point where Republicans can be held accountable for anything. They control all three branches of government, and they will quite blatantly misuse their power to avoid both investigations and prosecutions. I hope I’m wrong, but I think the rank and file are more interested in enriching the rich than preserving (or should l say, recovering) our form of government.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Decline, Dysfunction, Equal Justice, Impeachable, Republican Corruption | | Comments (0)

A certain justice 

Monday, March 13, 2017

Interesting chart here. It appears that the extent that Trumpcare will screw the states is roughly proportional to the extent they voted for Trump. So they’re getting what they asked for.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks. It speaks volumes about how confident the Republicans are that they can continue to manipulate their base while continuing to screw them.

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A year ago today

Friday, March 10, 2017

In addition to writing on this blog, I’ve been keeping a journal on my iPad. It has a feature that shows you entries from previous years. My entry from last year on this date, among other things, reproduced a post I put on this blog giving my reasons for considering Hillary Clinton a flawed candidate. It stands up rather well, though I was wrong about Hillary being scandal proof.

I honestly don’t remember being quite so pessimistic about Hillary’s chances, but my other diary entries from this period are along the same lines. By the time the election rolled around I’d convinced myself she was going to win. Well, mostly convinced myself.

Only a year ago, but it seems more like a lifetime.

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On Sabattical

Thursday, March 9, 2017

I’ve gone silent lately, not for lack of anything to say, but due to an inability to say, or more accurately, type it. An old shoulder injury, I think, has come back to haunt me, and typing more than 30 seconds is almost impossible. I am ensnared in the health care system. I am keeping track of the impeachable offenses that are piling up and will have a full report once I’m able to pound a keyboard again.

Something to ponder: would it be a good or bad thing if Trump had the same problem I do? Do we went him tweeting, or do we not?

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Bozo of the Day

Thursday, March 2, 2017

Maybe this will be a new feature.

Anyway, the Bozo featured here is a member of the State legislature in Iowa. He has proposed a bill that would require that there be an equal number of Democrats and Republicans teaching at the state universities. Current employees would not be affected, but new hires would. So, his thinking is, everyone hired for the next few years would be a Republican, until the balance is redressed.

Anyway, I think it’s a good idea. It’s a way of making sure that everyone teaching in Iowa is a Democrat. At least it’s a way of making sure that every new hire is a Democrat. This Bozo may not be aware that you aren’t baptized into a party, and your party affiliation is not, as we were taught about baptism in Catholic School, an indelible mark on your soul. Also, he may not be aware that you don’t have to be registered as a Democrat to vote for Democrats.

Let us assume that 80% of the teachers in Iowa are currently registered Democrats, which is probably accurate given that Republicans aren’t into things like facts, science, or intelligence. If, lets say, even 60% of them change their registration to Republican, that would mean that Republican teachers would predominate. All new hires would have to be Democrats.

Of course, there are endless other ways to game this system, but that just proves he’s a true Bozo. (Am I being unfair to Bozos?) Regrettably, it also proves that the district that vomited him into the state legislature is populated predominately by Bozos.

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True intentions

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

I just read this on Daily Kos:

For perhaps the first time, the national punditry and the White House’s team of white nationalists can both agree on something: they’re both bubblingly pleased with last night’s Donald Trump speech.
…
White House aide Sebastian Gorka, who at Trump’s inaugural ball wore a Hungarian military medal associated with Nazi collaborators and who has been pilloried for his ties to anti-Semitic groups, was particularly pleased with Donald Trump’s explicit enunciation of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”

…

But it wasn’t Politico or the New York Times that asked Trump to “back down” on this one: It was his own national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who like nearly all military men, government officials, terrorism experts, and anyone else whose expertise on the subject extends past writing angry screeds on racist websites was quite explicit that the conflation of Islam and terrorism is both incorrect and counterproductive.

[Racist Anti-Semitic White House Aide Sebastian] Gorka isn’t gloating about the Bannon, Miller, Gorka-demanded approach winning out over the delicate sensibilities of the national press; he’s gloating that the extremist language won out over the administration’s own national security team. Team Chaos is insistent that they’re going to do the opposite of whatever all previous experts advised—seemingly just for spite.
…
Trump’s approach of banning “Muslim immigration,” inflating and propagandizing immigrant-linked crime, and otherwise treating non-white, non-Christian Americans with open contempt will not make us safer. To Trump’s team, that’s beside the point. The anti-Muslim rhetoric was never intended as a tool against terrorism, but against refugees, immigrants, and the ever-dangerous non-white other.

I won’t argue with the conclusion in the last paragraph. I just think it should be recognized that they have another objective here as well. In fact, it’s their primary objective. They are not trying to avoid a terrorist attack, they are trying to provoke one. They know only too well what President Cheney was able to do in the aftermath of 9/11, and they fully expect that they will be able to go full fascism if they are able to justify it because of a terrorist attack. I’ll say again, the Democrats should be openly accusing them of just that intention. It’s the only way to possibly inoculate the country against a fascist takeover when the inevitable happens. It may not work, but it’s probably our only hope.

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