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Told you so

Friday, February 8, 2019

Almost two weeks ago (ages in Trump time), I observed that although Trump’s followers would never admit they were scammed, they’d be more than willing to admit that they’ve been betrayed. Betrayal is, of course, exactly what happens to you after you’ve been conned, but it’s easy to talk yourself into believing there’s a distinction, which relieves you of any responsibility for falling for the con man in the first place.

I like to point out when I’m right, so I direct your attention to this column in the New York Times, the subtitle of which is If Trump betrays his most loyal supporters, he’ll deserve his fate, in which that point is made with reference to Trump’s soon to be final failure to get the wall. As a side note, the fact that the wall, even if built, will not be paid for by Mexico is never mentioned as a betrayal, though it was clearly part of the con.

Another issue is raised by this column, to wit: why is this mendacious word salad occupying space in the editorial pages of the New York Times? You can find the answer to that question here.

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He ain’t leaving

Thursday, February 7, 2019

Here’s an article titled SNDY May Soon Indict Trump’s Kids to Force Him Out of Office. 

I’m not disagreeing that there’s a real possibility that Erik and Don, Jr., even (oh please God!) Ivanka, will soon be indicted.

I just don’t buy into the “force him out of office” logic.

We all know enough about Trump to know that he is totally narcissistic and cares only about himself. Sure, he’d probably ratherthat his kids weren’t in jail, but if it’s him or them, then it’s him. So this means there are two possible Trump reactions to such indictments.

First, he could issue a wholesale pardon. I’d put this at a 40% probability, as it puts him at risk.

Second, he could bloviate about the unfairness of the unfounded persecution of his family and do nothing else. I’d put this at a 60% probability.

That adds up to 100%. The chance of him resigning in some sort of deal that gets his kids off the hook: 0%.

If he does pardon them, and the charges are handed off to state authorities, then he is left with two options: cut a deal or let his kids rot in jail. Odds that he chooses “let them rot”: 100%.

The above presumes no indictment of Individual-1 himself, or any clear cut indication that such an indictment will be handed down on January 21, 2021. If he is capable of absorbing the fact that he might face prison himself after that date he might work a deal that also gets his kids off the hook, as long as he is dehooked in the process.

That raises the question of whether the prosecutors should cut such a deal. I am willing to give Gerald Ford the benefit of the doubt. I think he thought his Nixon pardon would heal the nation’s wounds, etc. I never believed it, but I think he really did. But time has proven beyond doubt that it was the wrong thing to do, since it taught the right that the consequences of political crimes were not significant enough to deter the crimes. Sort of like the fact that the banks never learned anything from tanking the economy in 2008, given that they got a pardon in the form of a bailout.

It remains my firm opinion that the genius is more likely to die in office than resign or be impeached. The question is: what will he do to distract from his crimes over the course of the next two years. If we can avoid a pointless war we’ll be lucky indeed. 

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There’s a word for that

Monday, February 4, 2019

Erik Prince is once more in the news. One must truly wonder about how any given two parents could raise siblings as loathsome as he and Betsy DeVos, but pondering that is for another day.

This time he’s been caughttrying to make money by helping China persecute Muslims:

But Mr. Prince scrambled on Friday to distance himself from the latest announcement: that his company, Frontier Services Group, had struck a deal to build a training camp in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been detained in indoctrination camps that have drawn condemnation in Washington and abroad.

My beef is with the New York Times. (What else is new?) Why, when dealing with right wingers, does the Time feel the need to airbrush things? Prince made a name for himself, we are told, as “a private military contractor”. He has “employees”. There’s a perfectly good word that the Times avoids as much as it avoids the word “lie” when talking about a certain genius. The word is “mercenary”. Look it up in any dictionary. It says it all and obfuscates nothing.

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Count your blessings, always look on the bright side of life, and every time it rains it rains pennies from heaven

Monday, February 4, 2019

The fact that Trump spends all his time watching television instead of working is once again in the news. 

What I can’t understand is that people seem to think it’s a bad thing that the genius spends so little time presiding. As I’ve pointed out every Good Friday since this blog started, one should always look on the bright side of life. So I say, just imagine how much harm he could do if he was more engaged. Sure, it would be nice, and a lot less harmful, if he watched cartoons instead of Fox and Friends, but one can’t have everything.

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Saturday Night Rant

Saturday, February 2, 2019

This is a rant, but it is political, in a sense.

I recently retired, and have therefore been spending a lot of time at home, though it obviously hasn’t increased my productivity so far as blogging is concerned.

We still have a land line. Every day I get phone calls from scammers. Brenda, a “Medicare Adviser” for example, calls me almost every day, from assorted locations, to scam me. I never listen long enough to find out the precise nature of the scam, because I hang up on her, but I figure she doesn’t take it personally, since she’s not a person. Yesterday, “Mike”, “Dave”, and another Guy with an Indian accent whose Americanized name I can’t recall, each called separately on behalf of Senior Advisersto scam me. They called again this morning and my wife got the call, apparently it’s an insurance scam.

When I was working I was the go to guy for some of my co-workers to examine emails to determine if they were from scammers, so I’m not likely to fall for one of these things, but it’s clear simply from the volume that they must be successful in quite a few cases. I even know someone who fell for the scam about fixing your Windows computer. We geezers are being fleeced right and left and one must wonder, why isn’t anyone doing anything about it. Couldn’t the FCC, when it isn’t busy handing the internet over to the ISPs, spend a bit of time on this? How about the FTC? How about Congress itself? Why isn’t anyone pressuring the phone companies themselves to do something about them? Or how about the banks, through which most of the money they scam must flow?

My phone tells me the alleged location of many of these callers. It is often random locations within Connecticut, places I’m sure Brenda, for instance, has never visited. I mean, unless you live there, have you ever gone to Jewett City?

These are criminal enterprises, and although I’m sure they go to lengths to make it hard to track them down, it shouldn’t be all that hard if the relevant people and corporations made a concerted effort to get them.

End of rant.

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A common dodge

Thursday, January 31, 2019

I was struck by a great example of a common right wing/corporate dodge whilst perusing the editorial page of today’s Boston Globe. It is one I think often goes unnoted, so I’m going to note it here.

Massachusett’s governor, Charlie Baker, has proposed a set of laws designed to bring down prescription drug prices for Medicaid patients in Massachusetts. The Globe editorial board (which loves Charlie Baker) lauds his proposal in an editorial here. Baker is the last of the throwback Republicans, he has even proposed raising taxes. Still, he’s a Republican, but that’s not what this post is about, nor is it a defense or attack on his prescription drug proposal. It has good points, which the Globe’s editorial summarizes, and may be the best a state can do given federal inaction.

No, this post is about an op-ed pieceby one Robert K. Coughlin, which, because when corporate interests are concerned, both sides must always be presented, sits below the Globe’s editorial. Coughlin is president and CEO of MassBio, and therefore has an unstated but obvious financial interest in keeping the price of prescription drugs high. 

He begins his op-ed piece by attacking Baker for engaging in “ political gimmickry on drug pricing rather than attempting a more serious approach to improving health care for Massachusetts residents while reining in spending.” Right away the reader assumes that Mr. Coughlin is going to enlighten us as to the “serious approach” he is espousing.

The bulk of the piece though, is a sustained attack on the (Charlie) Baker proposal, based generally, on the universal Big Pharma dodge that if they can’t gouge us on drug prices, they simply won’t be able to innovate. (See Dean Baker’s papers on this, one here.).

Are you still waiting for Mr. Coughlin’s solution to the problem of high drug prices? Well, here it is:

Instead of following the governor’s political gamesmanship, the Legislature should pull together a group of experts from all corners of health care to work on a series of real reforms that can both improve health outcomes for our residents and cut unneeded spending without risking harm to our most vulnerable patients.

In case you missed it, there’s nothing there. Mr. Coughlin has preserved his ability to oppose any and all proposals that might actually reduce the cost of prescription drugs. This is a common right wing/corporate dodge. Sure there’s a problem, they say, so lets study it and think about it and stuff, but let’s not actually doanything about it, especially if doing something about it would cut into corporate profits or take a dollar from the pocket of a billionaire. Coughlin’s piece is a particularly glaring example of this dodge, but it’s very common. For, after all, when they really have to come up with solutions, like they were supposed to do to improve Obamacare, they come up empty. 

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A conversation starter

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Looks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have started something.

As an aside, she sure has made an impression. My auto-complete worked on her last name. 

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Beware the law of unintended consequences

Monday, January 28, 2019

Nancy Pelosi is talking about legislation to end shutdowns, the thrust of it being that spending levels would automatically continue at present levels during any period when appropriations were not made. This articlesuggests that’s not such a good idea, and the author (Ian Milhiser) makes a good case. His essential argument is that such a mechanism would make it easier for Republicans to refuse to vote on new appropriations, as the immediate political cost would be negligible, while continued intransigence would amount to a slow defunding of vital programs due to inflation.

It’s a helpful reminder that before suggesting any type of corrective legislation, it’s a good idea to put yourself in the shoes of your opponents and try to figure out how they would or could use it to cause havoc.

I’m not sure the courts would allow it, but Milhiser suggests the following:

One possibility is a law providing that, for each week that Congress fails to pass appropriations, marginal tax rates on Americans earning more than a million dollars a year will automatically increase by one percent. That way, a powerful Republican constituency will have a major incentive to end the shutdown, and Republican lawmakers will be pushed into a weaker and weaker bargaining position the longer the shutdown continues.

As he points out, since Republicans are the problem, the solution has to target Republicans where it hurts, so they will have an incentive to act responsibly. On the same subject, I agree somewhat with the writer here, who says the Republicans may have learned their lesson, but the lesson isn’t that they shouldn’t shut down the government, it’s that they should do it in a way that benefits them. The fact that some of them are suggesting we look at an automatic continuing resolution merely means they see the possibility of abusing it in the way Milhiser discusses.

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We haven’t been conned, we’ve been betrayed

Sunday, January 27, 2019

There’s an oft repeated trope in the left wing blogosphere that, to the right, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. I’d like to suggest a sort of corollary. 

In the past few days a number of right wing loonies have attacked Trump’s cave on his wall. Ann Coulter is, yet again, one of them, but there are others. Unfortunately, I’m too lazy to search for a blog post I read recently that catalogued a number of them, but take my word, there are lots more.

One of the things seldom mentioned about the right, but which is nonetheless obviously true, is that it is far more comfortable in opposition. This is particularly true of the Limbaughs, Coulters, etc. They can stir up all kinds of grievances without any responsibility on their part or on the part of the politicians they foster to actually do anything about the causes they exploit, because, particularly in economic matters, they usually make things worse for the people upon whom they depend for financial support; that is, the idiots who imbibe their information from right wing radio and Fox. Even when they controlled all three branches of government, they still took every opportunity to bemoan their subjugation by the libs. Sure, it helps them in the short term if the right can control things long enough to give them a tax cut, but after that, right wing book sales and radio audiences, like gun sales, go up when Democrats are in control. So, they are not averse to being in the political wilderness. The money is good when the Democrats are in control.

It is also the case that right wing politicians, once they’ve outlived their usefulness, become non-persons or transmogrify. W, for instance, once the darling of the conservative movement, is now practically a non-person, and certainly not a true conservative.

So, it may very well be that in the coming months we will see the movement move beyond Trump. Most of the country understands that he’s a con-man. But the last people to admit that someone is a con-man are those who have been successfully conned. However, being conspiracy addicts, they are more than willing to admit that they’ve been betrayed, and that, I think, is the line Coulter and her ilk are pushing. It amounts to the same thing, when you think about it, but putting it that way puts the blame on Trump, and absolves the herd of any responsibility for their susceptibility to his snake oil. Once again they can claim that conservatism has not failed, but has been failed.

Update: Something along the same lines here.

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Who could have known Roger Stone was actually guilty?

Friday, January 25, 2019

We woke up to the good news (culled from Twitter by my wife) that Roger Stone had been arrested and carted off in the early hours of the morn. I looked for details, as at the time we weren’t sure when, precisely, it had happened. None of my other feeds had any news so I went to the New York Times feed, and there is was. The story is old news by now, but I must comment on my reaction when I read this paragraph from the story in the Times:

He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian election interference. His brash behavior made him less of a subject of news media scrutiny than other current and former aides to President Trump — like the character in a whodunit whom readers immediately dismiss as too obvious to have committed the crime.

Newsflash to the Times: Life isn’t like mysteries. They are fiction, and we read them precisely because they aren’t like the cut and dry details of regular life. In real life, the obvious guy is usually the guilty guy, particularly when a lot of the evidence is out there in the open and, on occasion, he practically confesses.

Almost seems like the Times is justifying the fact that it ignored an obvious story, doesn’t it? Then again, we can’t fault them, because they were right on top of the Hillary Clinton email story, and there was a lot of the obvious about that one, so they don’t miss every obvious story. Of course, in that case, it was obvious all along that it was a ginned up non-scandal, but that didn’t stop the Times from covering its front page with email stories a week before the election that brought us Individual-1.

By the way, one has to wonder why the Times never explored the curious connection between Roger Stone and the allegations against Al Franken. Maybe it was just too obvious. 

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