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Local Boy Wanders through Europe

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Audrey Heard sent this link to me a few minutes ago. It has very little to do with politics. It’s written by her grandson, Sam Greenfield, brother of Jay Greenfield, who was an avid volunteer campaign worker in Groton a few years back. Sam is a junior at NYU, but this year he’s studying in Prague. He and two friends saw fit to take the Red Bull Challenge:

The team was Brett Morell, Will Lawton, and myself. Three juniors in college, studying together at New York University in Prague; one might say with stars in our eyes. The week-long challenge pitted 200 teams of three college students each in a rat race from one of five starting points (Rome, Madrid, Budapest, Manchester, or Berlin) to arrive in Paris, France on Halloween.

The challenge part consisted in the fact that the participants were allowed no money, credit cards or cell phones. All they started with was 24 cans of Red Bull, which they proceeded to barter for the wherewithal to make their way across Europe. At various milestones, their supply of Red Bull was replenished.

Since Sam is from Noank, and from a family of mostly good Democrats (I’m not sure about his Dad) it seemed like a good idea to give his piece a plug. There’s some very funny bits. Here’s the last section, at a point just after (this is just before the election) they had obtained some Obama paraphernalia from an American in Geneva, who was working on the Obama campaign. When they got to Lyons they put the Obama stuff to good use.

Random people on the streets, the Red Bull girls, our competition, they all loved the pins. They all loved Obama! A handful of French men and women tried to buy them off of us and we actually sold one for 8 euros. Amazing, as only Brett spoke patchy French, but at least we weren’t considered imperialist villains. And finally, the abilities of American iconography were put to the ultimate test.

We crossed the park from the Lyon checkpoint to the train station and let Obama do the real work. We found a conductor dressed in blues and explained our story. Of course, he loved our pins. Suddenly there were two conductors, three, now four TGV conductors dressed in their blue suits with black trim eagerly listening to the circumstances of our trip.

“Will you help us to Paris, today?” we pleaded.

They spoke in rapid-fire French, and then the dark-haired woman spoke.

“You will wait here for an hour. We will come back,” she instructed with a wink.

And in an hour she returned, grabbed one of the three trays in our possession and guided us out of the waiting lounge and down an escalator. It was on that descent I saw a crowd of nine TGV conductors and controllers talking and pointing. We approached the crowd, and a tall black man stepped towards us.

“Two can travel in front, one in back. Enjoy your trip.”

Quickly I looked over my shoulder, and couldn’t stop myself from smiling at the sight of a Hungarian CYMI team with their faces pressed up against the lounge’s glass window, jaws dropped, glaring in jealousy.

He began walking away in strict fashion, paused, and turned around. He pressed the palms of his hands together and said in broken English.

“We hope for Obama too. Pray for change.”

Red Bull Can You Make It?

Yes we can.


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City Headquarters Opening

Sunday, March 29, 2009

A few pictures from the Grand Opening of the City Democrats Headquarters Opening. First, by way of a reminder that next month the Town Democrats will be hosting a fundraiser to honor the two Nancys, DeMarinis and Driscoll, here they are with Ted Moukawsher:

While this picture doesn’t reflect it, the turnout was actually pretty good. Dick Blumenthal spoke, as did Nancy Wyman.

Finally, here’s Council Candidate Lisa Luck, with Dick Blumenthal

The City, as opposed to the Town, has been reliably Democratic. The Democrats have swept all the Council seats for several elections now, if I am not mistaken. The Republicans have fielded some strong candidates this year, but my money is on the Democrats to sweep again. Dennis Popp has been an excellent mayor.


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Groton City Headquarters Opening

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Better late than never. I mean to put this up yesterday.

The Groton Democratic City Committee (as distinct from the Town Committee, for those of you not familiar with the labyrinthine nature of Groton government) will celebrate the opening of their election headquarters (City elections are in May) on Sunday, March 29th from 4 – 6 PM at the Boilermakers Union Hall, 33 Sacred Heart Dr., Groton. Nancy Wyman and Dick Blumenthal will be guest speakers. There will be refreshments and, of course, raffles.


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High Moral Dudgeon in the Sports World

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Sports writers as a group seem to have a marked capacity for moral outrage. Witness, just as an example, Mike DiMauro’s column in today’s Day, in which he expresses a high degree of outrage about a recruiting violation at UConn, the precise details of which I don’t care to know. This is not unusual for DiMauro. His capacity for outrage is unlimited. Nor, as my introductory sentence points out, is DiMauro unique. In fact, I would venture to say he is fairly typical of that part of the Fourth Estate that covers sports. Steroids, doping, you name it, any form of sports cheating gets them going. Why, Mike Francesca and the Mad Dog even deigned to notice women’s basketball when given the chance to natter on about Nykesha Sales’ free basket. Not only are they able to summon up a high degree of outrage, but they see the world in absolutes, having little interest in shades of gray or in making allowances for human weakness, even when the individual involved is young, and perhaps entitled to a few screw ups.

To those of us more interested in those world events that really matter, this is quite frustrating, since it is a marked contrast to the media’s attitude, including that of most editorialists, toward things like torture and constitution shredding, about which the media reaction is most often a world weary shoulder shrugging, or an insistence on concentrating on superficialities.

Nor, unfortunately, is this skewed sense of moral outrage confined to the press. Barry Bonds is being prosecuted for perjury, as the hapless Roger Clemens may be, because they lied about the relatively trivial question of whether they used steroids. They have drawn the attention of both Congress and the Justice Department, both of which have been aggressively quiescent about the obvious perjury of Alberto Gonzales about an issue far more important to the nation.

Why is it that the media appears able to summon up outrage about the trivial world of sports when it is unable to do so about political events? Is there a qualitative difference between those who choose to cover sports and those that choose to cover reality? Maybe so. I often roll my eyes when reading purple prose like that which drips from DiMauro’s pen (today’s column is typical), but maybe I’ve got it all wrong. After all, the only person in the national media that has expressed the appropriate amount of outrage about the direction in which the Bush folks led this nation was Keith Olbermann, who is a former sportscaster. Maybe the sports minded are more revolted at the idea of cheating than those who choose to cover the more cynical world of politics. After all, a fundamental principle of most sports is an adherence to the rules, with consequences for those that stray. It’s an ethos that leads to outrage when the rules are broken. Maybe we need to draft more sports writers into the political side of things, so the moral outrage they are so capable of expressing can be directed at more appropriate targets.


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Friday Night Music-Rick Derringer

Friday, March 27, 2009

I actually represented this guy many years ago. When he called me he told me he was Rick Derringer, expecting I would recognize the name, but it meant nothing to me (I don’t think I ever heard Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo), but I was mightily impressed when he told me he was the guy who did Hang on Sloopy (with the McCoys).


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Dooming us to repetition

Friday, March 27, 2009

Several days ago I wondered whether we really needed the various financial instruments that have led us into the mess in which we currently find ourselves. I am, at best, merely a relatively well informed citizen, but it has always appeared to me that these instruments serve no useful purpose. They simply allow their creators to skim massive amounts of money out of our economic system, leaving us to pick up the pieces when things go wrong.

This morning, I was delighted to see that Paul Krugman, he of the Nobel Economics Prize, agrees:

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

…

Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization — and the business of finance — can resume where it left off a year or two ago.

…

As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

Alas, it seems only too true that Geither’s objective (and therefore Obama’s) is to return us to the status quo ante. If they are successful that merely means that at some point in the not too distant future we will return to the just plain status quo. Undoubtedly, had McCain been elected, he would have sought to do the same, but that is scant solace. The truth is that it is always a mistake to bring in an insider to reform any system; only the most singular of insiders can avoid buying in to the assumptions of the group. Geither is clearly not a singular individual. It’s as if Franklin Roosevelt had dedicated the New Deal to restoring the excesses of the 20’s.


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Zero

Friday, March 27, 2009

Good web-ad from the DNC


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Disconsolate

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The Norwich YMCA is closing. It’s a great loss to the Norwich community.

But I come not to grieve for the town, I come to grieve for me. For the past 20 years or so, unless I’ve been in court, I have made my way at lunchtime to the Y’s excellent swimming pool to log another mile. I would venture to say that I’ve swum more laps in that pool than anyone else. Before it opened, I would get up early in the morning to swim at what was then the Mystic Community Center, sharing a lane with as many as three other swimmers at 6:00 o’clock in the morning. At the Norwich Y I could swim at high noon; always with my own lane, often alone in the pool. Not only that, but when other people were in the pool, I was almost always far faster than them, a real shot in the ego for someone who nearly always came in dead last during a less than lackluster competitive career.

Of course the fact that the pool was so often near empty was emblematic of the problems that led to the closure. I was always mystified about the fact that so few of the folks who worked in downtown Norwich took advantage of the facilities at the Y. Come April 30th I’ll have to find some alternative to my daily swim. If I was a little older I could just throw in the towel and retire completely but that’s not a viable option at the moment, as indeed, given the state of my 401(k) it may never be.

I have quite speedily skipped the first three stages of grief, zooming right through to depression. There I’ve been stuck, at least since this morning when I first heard the news. Acceptance will come, I am sure, but right now I’m singing the blues.


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A Short Lesson in Constitutional law

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Just before Obama’s press conference (which I thought went well) I happened to catch a snippet of Chris Matthews opining with certainty that the bill recently passed by the House, which seeks to tax those bonuses, was obviously a bill of attainder and quite obviously unconstitutional.

This, along with a related meme that the bill is an ex post facto law and unconstitutional for that reason, has been spewed by many a talking head. Both claims are laughably false.

A bill of attainder is a legislative act declaring that an individual is guilty of a crime (or merely a person that the legislature doesn’t like), which act imposes criminal sanctions on that person, i.e., imprisonment or death. The victim of a bill of attainder gets no trial. He or she just goes directly to jail or to the hangman.

An ex post facto law is a legislative act that retroactively declares a completed act to be a criminal. The person charged has the right to a trial, but the act for which they are being prosecuted was not illegal at the time. Elementary notions of fairness dictate that a person should be on notice, before they commit an act, that the act is illegal and subject to criminal sanctions.

Each of these involves criminal sanctions. The tax bill does not.

Civil statutes can be, and often are, retroactive or retrospective. Retrospective civil legislation can raise constitutional issues, but it isn’t necessarily easy to get a law knocked out just because it’s retrospective.

In any event, this legislation appears to be changing the law for the present tax year, and not previous tax years, so it doesn’t appear to qualify as retrospective. It is not unusual for changes to be made in tax laws that either increase or decease taxes for that tax year.

I myself had an unhappy experience regarding retrospective legislation. One of the first appeals I ever took involved a guy who had some retrospective liability imposed on him (or more precisely, a class of people to which he belonged). I can’t remember the precise facts anymore, but I do recall that the case law is all over the place regarding what is and what is not allowed. I lost the case, and as I recall, it wasn’t even close.

The fact that this legislation is aimed at a fairly narrow class of people is also a not uncommon thing, apparently. Normally this sort of narrowly crafted legislation is designed to grant special treatment to a very narrowly defined class, and such legislation has been upheld. It is not immediately obvious why legislation aimed at disadvantaging a narrow class of earners couldn’t be upheld.

This is not to say that there are not some constitutional questions raised by the tax bill. My guess is that the strongest might be made under the due process clause, but the case would by no means be a slam dunk. Given our corporate friendly Supreme Court, it’s not unlikely that the bonus recipients would win in that arena. But even this Supreme Court would likely refuse to rely on either the ex post facto clause or the bill of attainder clause.

In sum, there are legitimate policy reasons to oppose the bill, and there may even be some constitutional issues involved, but these blatherers who casually invoke the bill of attainder clause should really be required to do a little research. It it truly amazing how ignorant are the people who monopolize our discourse.


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A Lamb prepares for the slaughter

Monday, March 23, 2009

According to the Norwich Bulletin, at least one Republican is ready to take on Joe Courtney in 2010:

Glastonbury Republican Matthew M. Daly has declared his candidacy for the Second Congressional District, challenging two-term incumbent Democrat Joseph Courtney.

Daly said he will campaign on a platform of “bringing efficient, effective governance to Congress, restoring core values and sound economic policies.”

It would be interesting to hear about the sound economic policies he wants to restore. Would those be the policies that got us into our present mess? Or, is he hearkening back to the 19th century, back to the days of freewheeling capitalism and child labor?

Unless someone else gets into the mix quickly, Daly will be the guy. It takes the better part of two years to put together a respectable campaign against a popular incumbent. I don’t expect Daly, who was crushed by Edith Prague in a State Senate race, to put together much of a campaign, but he may be all they have.

I look forward to Daly’s candidacy. I was somewhat hampered last time around by the fact that Sean Sullivan occupies a desk at my law firm within my line of sight. It wouldn’t have done to get all full throated about someone if you know you’ll be working with them after the election. No such inhibitions will be in play this time around, though this guy sounds like such a loser there might not be much need to pay attention to the race.


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