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Trump’s logic: in the Republican tradition

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Donald J. Trump said Sunday that a Muslim judge might have trouble remaining neutral in a lawsuit against him, extending his race-based criticism of the jurist overseeing the case to include religion and opening another path for Democrats who have criticized him sharply for his remarks.

The comments, in an interview with John Dickerson, the host of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” come amid growing disapproval from fellow Republicans over his attacks on Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, a federal judge in California overseeing a suit against the defunct Trump University, whose impartiality Mr. Trump questioned based on the judge’s Mexican heritage.

via via The New York Times

It’s really sort of hard to know where to start on this one. The appropriate follow up question should be, but apparently was not: Would you agree that a black, brown, or Muslim defendant should be allowed to disqualify a white or Christian judge? We all know, of course, what the answer would be. It has also been observed that the very Republicans who are expressing “growing disapproval” of Trump’s attitude toward the judiciary are holding a Supreme Court seat hostage in the hopes that he will get to fill it.

But, I think it should be noted that Trump’s argument here is no different than that expressed by so much of the loony Republican base, which not only Republican politicians, but Republican judges have embraced. The basic argument is that bigots are a repressed minority; victims of political correctness. It’s most obvious in the patently absurd religious liberty claims that are getting so much traction these days. Trump is arguing that, as a racist (and presumably as a misogynist), he is entitled to be judged only by white male judges. There isn’t much difference between his argument, and that of the religious loonies, who argue that their right to practice their religion includes the right to impose their religious views on others. If I am against birth control, they argue, it violates my religious liberty rights if others have access to birth control. If I undertake to fill a governmental post in which it is my duty to issue marriage licenses, I have the right to withhold those licenses if I disapprove of the people who come to me for a license, so long, of course, as I dress up my objection in religious terms. To a certain extent, these arguments are winning. Witness the Hobby Lobby case where a corporation, no less, was allowed to deprive its employees of access to contraceptive services because of its asserted religious scruples. These “religious liberty” claims are certainly being embraced by Republican politicians, as the Kim Davis controversy proved. Trump is simply extending this logic. He is arguing that the merely bigoted are entitled to the same rights as religious bigots. In other words, bigots should be considered a protected class, whether their bigotry has a religious basis or not. So despite the official clucking of some Republican tongues, there’s not much doubt that Trump’s base is totally with him on this one. They can no longer claim superior rights merely by virtue of being white, but they can claim, along with Trump, that they deserve special treatment in light of their bigotry.

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A nomination for surrogate

Friday, June 3, 2016

Good article here about HIllary’s recent speech skewering Donald Trump. There is a silver lining, however alloyed it might be, in having Hillary as our candidate. The Donald doesn’t know how to handle strong women, and it is beginning to show.

I’ve said before that I really think Hillary should have a band of female surrogates going after the Donald. I really don’t think the Donald could handle it. I have a nominee for a member of the band, by the way.

I went to the Connecticut Democratic Progress dinner last night. I think that’s what they call it. You know, it’s the dinner that used to be named after a couple of racist presidents and a fairly unobjectionable machine politician.

Anyway, the featured speaker was Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan. She was great, and I’ve no doubt she could skewer the Donald quite effectively. The Democrats have never done surrogates very effectively, but this is a year in which they should definitely take it up with a vengeance. Not only would the surrogates be effective in going after the Donald, but they would draw fire that would otherwise be relentlessly aimed at Hillary. Trump has a short attention span, and he’s just going to go after the last person that attacked him. Granholm could more than hold her own. In fact, she might even be able to make the “small hands” charge stick. It’s truly a shame she was born in Canada. I’d rather she was the candidate than Hillary.

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Times to Donald: You hurt our feelings. When can we do it again?

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

The New York Times is taking a bit of heat (example, here ) about its article this morning, in which it spends several introductory paragraphs bemoaning how mean Donald Trump is to the media, while only hinting at, rather than explicitly saying, that he lied about his donations to Veteran’s groups. To my mind, the broader problem is embedded in the first paragraph of the story:

He called a news conference ostensibly to answer questions about his fund-raising for charities that benefit military veterans. But Donald J. Trump instead spent most of his time on live television Tuesday berating the journalists covering his presidential campaign in unusually vitriolic and personal terms.

via New York Times

He called a news conference, and they dutifully came, and put it on live television, as they always do when it’s Donald Trump. They’re at his beck and call. And lest you think they’re being even-handed:

MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN are so in the bag for Donald Trump that they ignored Hillary Clinton’s campaign speech in Las Vegas in favor of showing an empty podium before a Trump speech.

While Hillary Clinton was speaking to the United Food and Commerical Workers in Las Vegas about raising wages for working families and offering a rejection of Trump’s immigration policies[, the cable networks were showing an empty Trump podium]

via Politicus, USA

True, the whiners at the Times are of the print media, which by its nature can’t be as much in the tank as cable media, but they are fellow travelers, as the Times article shows. The story, as any reasonable person can see, is that Donald Trump is a liar. The story according to the Times is that if Donald Trump is elected president he intends to continue to beat up on them. Why should it matter? The press has already developed the full blown equivalent of battered spouse syndrome so far as Trump is concerned. Trump knows that the more he beats on them, the more free press they’ll give him. The Times article proves that, as it artfully dances around the central fact that Trump is a liar.

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We (apparently) don’t need no education

Monday, May 30, 2016

Apparently, that’s what our State Boards of Education, under Democrats and Republicans alike, seem to believe. It’s far more important to hand our educational system over the rent-seeking for profit (whether they call themselves non-profit or not), charter school chains.

In Pennsylvania, the charter schools call the shots and the public school system is being slowly destroyed. See here and here, for example, although apparently the New Democratic governor there is trying to stem the tide, but he’s running into headwinds due to the gerrymandered state legislature.

In California, they are stuffing charters down the throats of the people, regardless of their wishes:

This article provides an inside view of the charter racket in California.

If local districts oppose charter schools, it doesn’t matter. No matter what they say or how well the community organizes, the die is cast. State officials will approve the charter application, regardless of its flaws.

Rocketship charter chain wanted to move into the Mt. Diablo district. It had a federal grant to expand, and the chain wouldn’t let community opposition stand in its way. The district did not want Rocketship’s computer-based approach. It did not want a corporate chain whose headquarters was sixty miles away. Neither did the county board of education, which rejected Rocketship.

“This is the opposite of local control,” said Nellie Meyer, the superintendent of the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, who called the proposal deeply flawed and was followed by MDUSD’s general counsel, Deborah Cooksey, who said Rocketship had collected its petition signatures “under false pretenses,” by telling people—including parents who were non-English speakers—their kids could get kicked out of school if they didn’t sign.

“This is going to be something that will divide our community,” said Gloria Rios, who has lived in the Monument Corridor near the northeastern Bay Area city of Concord for 20 years and has three children in the district’s public schools. “Our children will suffer the consequences, and these funds can be used for the schools we already have.”

Rejected by the local community and the county board of education, Rocketship went to the State Board of Education.

Slam dunk.

via Diane Ravitch’s Blog

We no longer have an interest in educating our children to think, at least not the children of the bottom 99.9%. We are mainly interested in manufacturing worker drones, who have been taught to believe that they live in the best of all possible worlds and they can’t really do much better than making $9.00 an hour working at Wal-mart. The charter school movement is designed to achieve that end, while shoveling money towards the top .01%.

The linked article points out that Rocketship has a 20% per year teacher turnover rate. That alone should disqualify it from consideration to operate a school with public funds. But charter schools have an interesting business plan. They hold that if you disempower teachers and pay them less you will get better educational outcomes, provided, of course, that money keeps flowing to the CEOs of the charter chains. This would be considered reasonable only in America, where 40% of us don’t consider climate change a serious threat, and a like amount of Americans believe God rolled his big sleeves up and a brand new world began. That means basically, that we start out with a base of 40% of the people who you can fool all of the time, meaning you only have to fool another 11% on any given issue. As I’ve said before, Lincoln forgot to note that you only have to fool most of the people most of the time to get your way.

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Impressive stupidity

Friday, May 27, 2016

Ask yourself, is there a tax break that benefits the rich that is so overwhelmingly stupid that even the Oklahoma legislature would repeal it? Believe it or not, the answer is yes.

Last week, the Oklahoma legislature sent Gov. Mary Fallin a bill—at her request—eliminating just such a break: a state income tax deduction for state income taxes paid.  Oddly enough, Oklahoma taxpayers who happen to claim itemized deductions can currently write off their state income tax payments when calculating how much state income tax they owe.  This bizarre, circular deduction did not come into existence because of its policy merits (there are none), but rather because Oklahoma accidentally inherited it when lawmakers chose to offer the same package of itemized deductions made available at the federal level.

via Tax Justice Blog

Congratulations to Oklahoma, I guess, for sacrificing it’s whack job conservative principles on this one occasion. According to the article there are other states that have the same deduction as Oklahoma, which are apparently taking no steps to end it.

Actually, Oklahoma is not really sacrificing much by way of principle. The Republican governor and legislature, after years of cutting taxes on the rich, have suddenly found, to their (but nobody else’s) surprise, that they can’t meet state expenses. This particular break is so absurd that it was low hanging fruit, but it probably would have stayed put if the hole they dug themselves into wasn’t quite so deep.

Still, while one can see how the mistake leading to this deduction could have been made in Oklahoma and other states, it’s a mystery how any state could let it stay put once anyone pointed it out. Well, maybe not that much of a mystery:

Making matters worse, these purposeless tax breaks actually exacerbate the unfairness built into state and local tax systems.  According to an ITEP analysis, over half (58 percent) of the revenue lost through Oklahoma’s deduction flows to just the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpayers

Filed in Economics, Inequality | | Comments (1)

A real Clinton scandal?

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

It’s well known that neither candidate likely to be nominated by the major parties is particularly popular with the electorate at large. One major difference between them is that Trump actually has a base of people who are enthusiastic about his candidacy. Apart from some folks on Wall Street, there’s not a whole lot of people out there who are truly enthusiastic about Hillary. Of the two, only Hillary can’t count on a core of diehards, meaning she will have more difficulty that he in getting potential “hold your nose and vote” types to get out and hold their noses. The last thing she needs is widespread publicity about something that gives people yet another reason not to trust her.

I’ve said in the past that she’s pretty much invulnerable to scandal allegations, just as Trump is, but this one may be a horse of a different color:

Remember Harry Markopolos? That’s the tenacious financial expert that pounded on the door of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for years, providing it with detailed, written evidentiary support for the premise that Bernie Madoff, the respected former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, was running a massive Ponzi scheme. The SEC never confirmed the fraud before Madoff confessed as he ran out of money in December 2008 because it skipped the most basic of investigation techniques: it failed to verify if real stocks and bonds actually existed in Madoff’s client portfolios. They didn’t.

There’s a new Markopolos in town with that same brand of leave-no-stone-unturned tenacity and he has his sights set on the charity operations of Hillary and Bill Clinton, known as the Clinton Foundation and its myriad tentacles. Ortel’s actions come just as Hillary Clinton makes her final sprint for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States with Bill in tow as her economic czar. Like Markopolos, Charles Ortel does not mince words.

In a 9-page letter dated yesterday and posted to his blog, Ortel calls the Clintons’ charity the “largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever attempted,” adding for good measure that the Clinton Foundation is part of an “international charity fraud network whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion, measured from 1997 forward.” Ortel lists 40 potential areas of fraud or wrongdoing that he plans to expose over the coming days.

via Wall Street on Parade

The difference between this scandal and all the other Clinton scandals is that this one might be real, and it matters. Besides the article from which I’ve quoted, there’s more here including blatantly incomplete tax returns, etc.

Unlike the folks at Wall Street on Parade I take no joy from this, as Bernie is no longer in a position to win, and HIllary is not the sort of person to take one for the country and step aside, even if this were to cause real pain. One hope is that the Republicans will ignore it. They tend to go after the patently ridiculous scandals (Benghazi, anyone?), while ignoring the stuff that might have merit, most likely because their candidate is usually far more vulnerable on similar issues. But this year is different. Both the press and the electorate are giving Trump a free pass on financial skullduggery. After all, as Trump says, he’s a businessman, and that means if he exults in the chance to profit off of other people’s misery, it’s perfectly alright.

If Clinton loses (I’m not ready to say “when Clinton loses”) the Democratic Establishment will blame Bernie, but it will be the cumulative effect of stuff like this, along with the media’s ever more unanimous refusal to call out Trump for what he is, that will be the real cause.

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Your point being?

Sunday, May 22, 2016

This morning’s Boston Globe has an article entitled In Custody case, Clinton took the side of a father. When she was a thirty year old lawyer Clinton represented a father in a custody case and she won. For that era, it was quite a feat. I didn’t do much family work back then, but I know that in those years it was almost an automatic thing that mothers got custody of minor children. But the article implies, if it doesn’t outright state, that there is something hypocritical going on here:

Hillary Rodham — as she was known at the time — was building her legal case with an argument that runs counter to a central theme of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign nearly four decades later: Now billed as an unwavering advocate for women, she then argued that a father should be granted full custody of his 6-year-old-daughter over the objections of the mother.

Umm, no. By no means does her advocacy for a man run counter to any theme of her campaign. Clinton has been an unwavering advocate of equal rights for women. It is not by any means the case that equal rights implies that a woman should always be granted custody of her children, just as it was not the case, as it was the custom many many years ago, that a man should automatically get custody. We call what Clinton was advocating “judging each case on its merits”. It is a highly fallible system, but overall it works better than one that works by irrefutable presumptions. The above quoted paragraph implies that an advocate for the rights of women should maintain that a woman who wants custody of her children should always get it, the relative parental qualifications of the parents be damned.

The article goes on to describe a fairly routine custody battle, remarkable only for the outcome, which was rare at the time. Yet, we are invited to believe there is a whiff of impropriety here. Clinton, we are told, argued that men are entitled to equal protection under the constitution, which means she “played what now could be called “the man card’”. No, she was just pre-riffing on Kramer vs. Kramer (see below) and making a perfectly legitimate argument on behalf of her client.

The press has long been frustrated by its inability to take down the Clintons, and maybe this is just another somewhat feeble and halfhearted attempt to do so, though to give it its due, the Globe has never been as single mindedly focused on such a takedown as some other publications one might mention (cough, cough, the New York Times, cough cough Whitewater).

But I have to ask, so far as this story goes: So what? There’s nothing to see here except a competent lawyer doing her job.

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Something completely different

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Some time ago my wife and I gave a camera to my son that had belonged to my father in law. It’s a World War II era Leica. As part of the gift, we paid for refurbishing it, provided he did the work of finding someone to do it, which he did. In the course of getting that done, he researched the serial number, and found that the camera was originally issued to someone in the Luftwaffe. There is no family lore as to how it ended up in the hands of my wife’s father, but it did. He was in the army assigned to Italy, and spent a bit of time there after the war before coming home.Besides the camera, we had a number of negatives my father in law took while he was in the service, primarily in Italy after the war ended. My son undertook the job of scanning them.A great many of the pictures were taken from the air, and aren’t particularly interesting. He took a number of tourist type snaps, some of places we can identify, and some we can’t. He also took pictures of the Italians and his fellow soldiers. I think the people pictures are the most interesting. I’m a bit of an amateur photographer, but I don’t have it in me to walk up to people and ask to take their pictures. Apparently, he did. So, here’s some pictures from Italy, circa 1945 and 1946.

All I can say about this one is that their school uniforms are even worse than what I had to wear at Our Lady of Sorrows.

See what I mean about getting people to pose. This must have been a project.

A bit blurry, but this guy has character.

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Thank you grifters

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Even grifters aren’t safe from other grifters:

As Donald Trump rushes to start collecting the $1 billion expected to be necessary to compete for the White House, one of his biggest challenges may come from those claiming to support him.

An increasing number of unauthorized groups are invoking the presumptive GOP nominee’s name to raise money, suggesting that they’ll use the cash to support his campaign, even as some appear to be spending most of their money on contracts with favored consultants.

 

via Politico

I’ve said before that the grifters primarily inflict themselves on the folks on the right, mostly because they are much stupider on average than the folks on the left. Even the rich ones get taken in on a regular basis by big name grifters like Karl Rove. It is deliciously satisfying to see the con-man candidate being victimized by his peers.

But we are not immune. The grifters on our side, by contrast, are the official committees, like the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC. They call their base raising money to elect Democrats, and then use it to try to replace real Democrats with Republicans-lite (Some examples here, but they are legion). Luckily we have Act Blue, which, in the main, lines up behind real Democrats.

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More from the Cranky Old Man

Monday, May 16, 2016

This is so heartwarming:

The day Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen told his prominent parents about his new gender identity, he did so in a letter that he left on their bed. Then he grabbed a packed bag and, unsure of whether he would be welcomed back, went to a friend’s house to see if his family would love him or leave him.

His shocked parents, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami Republican, and Dexter Lehtinen, who served as the top federal prosecutor here, did not hesitate. They grabbed the phone and told him that they loved him and that family trumped all, and asked him to come home. But as with many parents of transgender children, they were also overwhelmed by fear: The future they saw for their then 21-year-old, whom they had named Amanda, would be pockmarked with discrimination and bullying, if not outright violence.

It was this visceral reaction to want to protect her child that drove Ms. Ros-Lehtinen to break from her party’s skepticism or hostility on gay and transgender issues — a stance evident now in North Carolina’s battle over transgender bathroom visits — and become a conspicuous advocate in Congress and more recently in public service announcements. On Monday, Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, her husband and her son, now 30, will appear in the latest one for SAVE, a longtime South Florida gay rights group that hopes to engage the Latino community here.

via The New York Times

Isn’t it heartwarming? I mean my heart isn’t just warm, it’s burning. It is simply wonderful how Republicans will break with their party when it affects them personally, while remaining in lockstep on everything else. Empathy, it appears, stops at the front door. Among the many slimy things Ros-Lehtinen has done, according to her Wikipedia page (and I’d point out that politician’s Wikipedia pages are sometimes edited favorably by supporters or aides):

Ros-Lehtinen played a key role in keeping the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2010 from being passed into law. Although the bill had unanimously passed the Senate with bipartisan support, she persuaded enough Republicans in the House to vote against the bill so that it did not receive the required two-thirds majority. She reportedly invoked concerns about the legislation’s cost and that funds could be used to promote abortion.

This is standard stuff for Republicans. Here in Groton we had a state Senator with a son who was intellectually disabled. She couldn’t do enough for that group of people, yet her empathy for the unfortunate seemed to stop right there. Republicans have difficulty walking a mile in anyone else’s shoes; if the shoe doesn’t fit exactly, it is simply far too uncomfortable for them to wear.

The result for Ros-Lehtinen? A puff piece in the New York Times, with nary a word about the fact that in all other respects, she is a right wing horror show and that the odds are that if it were not for Rodrigo, she’d be with the rest of the Republicans, protecting us from those bathroom monsters we didn’t even know existed a year ago. Far more worthy of praise that they never get are the many Democrats with no personal stake in the issue that support the gay and transgender communities.

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