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Something fishy here

Thursday, May 24, 2018

A few days ago I drafted a post, but I ultimately decided not to post it, due to the fact that the point I was trying to assert, that Elliot Broidy had been handsomely paid for taking the fall for Trump’s affair with yet another Playboy bunny, which affair had led to an abortion. Here’s what I wrote then:

Here’s one that may end up in the impeachable file. The AP has a storydocumenting that there is more than a whiff, let us say there’s a stench, suggesting something is amiss with the way the genius makes policy. It is, in a few words, up for sale.

In this particular case, a couple of fellows, Elliot Broidy and George Nader, were probably acting as unregistered foreign lobbyists as they tried to influence American policy toward various countries in the Middle East. In the most blatant case, they tried to push an anti-Qatar policy on behalf of Saudi Arabia, which involved money in the general direction of the genius.

Nader is now cooperating with Mueller, which can’t make Broidy happy. >

But there’s another thing about this that makes one wonder. As we already knew, and as the AP notes:

Broidy, it turned out, was also a Cohen client. He’d had an affair with Playboy Playmate Shera Bechard, who got pregnant and later had an abortion. Broidy agreed to pay her $1.6 million to help her out, so long as she never spoke about it.

“I acknowledge I had a consensual relationship with a Playboy Playmate,” Broidy said in a statement the day the news broke. He apologized to his wife and resigned from the RNC. There is no indication Broidy is under investigation by Mueller’s team.

There has been some speculation that Ms. Bechard really had the affair with the genius, and that Broidy agreed to take the fall. I’m not ready to sign on to that theory entirely, but this story makes it seem more probable. Broidy is making tons of money off of his relationship with Trump and a little thing like confessing to paying for an abortion wouldn’t stand in the way of keeping that money flowing.

Things move fast, and over the last couple of days, the evidence has mounted. (The internet has been down at my humble abode the last few days, so this follow up is somewhat delayed).

Consider these pieces of evidence: the bunny herself is sticking to her NDA, but she seems to be dropping hints and, as demonstrated here, the events related to this situation line up rather suspiciously. Bearing in mind that when it comes to the genius, he should be considered guilty until proven innocent (the truth of this maxim has been demonstrated too often to leave it open to question), I am more inclined than I was just a few days ago to buy into the theory that Broidy took the fall for Trump, and was so handsomely paid that even Broidy’s wife surely won’t complain, as she was probably in on the con from the start.

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More echoes of the Gilded Age

Thursday, May 24, 2018

I continue to plow through Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands. Here’s yet another way in which that age paralleled our own.

First, it goes without saying that income inequality was as much of a problem then as it is now. At the time, as now, American productive capacity exceeded consumption. Americans did not consume as much as they could produce because so many of them were impoverished, a direct result of inequality.

But, lets put that aside for the moment. In 1892 the wise men running the country took it as an article of faith that the country must stay on the gold standard. This kept the supply of money low, which had multiple catastrophic consequences, leading directly to a major depression in 1892, the worst depression until that in the 30’s. But none of this shook the faith of the wise men of finance. It mattered not what experience showed, the stuck with gold with religious fervor.

The gold standard is now a thing of the past, remembered fondly only by kooks like Ron Paul. But in our own age, we have the shibboleth of the balanced budget and fiscal austerity during bad times. We are now seeing fascism once again show its ugly face in Europe (as I predicted some time ago here), most recently in its home town of Italy, as a reaction to austerity there. It has two faces here, one when it comes to benefitting the masses, when austerity is absolutely required, and one when it comes to benefitting the rich, in which case, not so much. 

Give the folks in the Gilded Age credit for one thing; their opinions were based on what was then considered to be sound economic theory, whereas the entire notion of austerity, as it has been practiced here and in Europe, is embraced by a portion of economists so tiny that it has to be considered a fringe belief. It serves only to maintain high levels of inequality, but it is not good, and never has been, for the economy as a whole. Another point of satisfaction in the Gilded Age: the plutocrat’s insistence on the gold standard took down more plutocrats then than insistence on austerity has done in our own Gilded Age.

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An eternal question

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Why do the cable news networks (and I’m not talking about Fox, where it’s a given) constantly give airtime to the most insane members of Congress? Even when the interviewer pushes back, the mere fact that they put these people on television validates their mendacity. There are sane members of Congress. There are probably even Republicans that are sane, though I admit they’d be hard to find. Joe Courtney is sane. I would estimate he’s been on television one time for every thousand times the idiot at the link, Peter King, has polluted the airwaves. 

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The Democratic Convention-a survivor’s reflections

Sunday, May 20, 2018

I now know why I wasn’t really all that enthusiastic about being a delegate to the state convention this year. It was some instinct, some nagging recollection from conventions past, and some premonition about the long slog this one, with all those contested nominations, was likely to be.

I’m not complaining about the outcome. Not everyone I voted for prevailed, but, then again, I didn’t feel strongly about some of those I supported and I wasn’t strongly opposed to any of their opponents, with the exception of Joe Ganim, whose primary win, were it to happen, would be an unmitigated disaster. But I don’t think we need worry about that.

It’s just that there has to be a better way to run a convention. Lon Seidman’s electronic voting system worked fine, after an initial bug was ironed out, but the efficiencies gained by that process were more than offset by the inefficiencies introduced or retained. After the votes were processed, time was set aside for people to change their votes. I suppose the thinking was that if a given candidate was oh-so-close to the 50% mark, a few changes might put him or her over the edge, and save the need for a second ballot. Well, if you think about it for a few seconds, you will quickly realize that the chance of that happening is fairly microscopic. In the one instance where it might have worked-when Clare Kindall dropped out and signaled her support for William Tong- the vote change period was almost over, and the changes that occurred were few and not all went to Tong. The process would actually have been faster had they simply used the initial results, no changes allowed, and swiftly gone to a second ballot, stopping only to let folks like Clare let their intentions be known. I suppose the opportunity to change votes is in the rules because politicians can’t cope with a system that doesn’t have a built in opportunity for arm twisting.

In brief, the process was interminable, exemplified by the fact that Ned’s victory party, slated to start at 5:00 PM, didn’t get started until around 8:30, at the earliest, by which time I was, blessedly, on my way home, having done my duty and stuck around until the last vote, if not the last speech. I suspect Shawn Wooden spoke to a near empty hall.

I would like to pause to salute William Tong, though I didn’t vote for him. His acceptance speech was refreshingly brief, a happy change from the long platitude filled speeches (and what else could one expect?) of those that had gone before. Perhaps he realized that people were becoming exhausted, so he kept his platitude filled speech short. I wouldn’t be surprised if his brief speech convinced many of his opponent’s supporters that he really was the best choice.

All this being said, I think we will end up, after the primaries, with a pretty good slate. We here in Connecticut have an uphill battle, given Malloy’s unpopularity, but I really think the candidates we have give us a decent shot. The Republicans will be running against Malloy, and we’ll no doubt, be running against Trump, who I sincerely hope will come here to Connecticut to campaign for the Republican slate. Let’s just hope the blue wave (caveat: I’m still confident the national Democrats can erect a dike to prevent it causing any damage to the Republicans) will deposit some Democratic winners on Connecticut’s shores.

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The Times reaches for its Thesaurus

Sunday, May 20, 2018

It’s been noted repeatedly across the internets that whenever a white male engages in a mass shooting (and it’s almost always a white male), the American media almost always gives him a partial excuse because he is a “loner”, implying some form of mental illness. We don’t see that sort of mental illness excuse advanced for killers of other hues.

Anyway, let it be noted that the New York Times has eschewed the “loner” tag. Taking advantage of the nearest Thesaurus, the Times is now using introvert.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, May 18, 2018

This is posted a bit early, it not actually being Friday night at the moment, because I’ll be in Hartford later casting my vote for Chris Murphy at the convention. 

I will freely admit that I am woefully ignorant about current music, though what I’ve heard doesn’t impress, but on occasion I’ve followed up on the giants of the past. Some of them have lost that creative spark, and some haven’t.

I recently got David Byrne’s new album, American Utopia. Putting aside the oxymoronic title, I think it’s really good, on a par with some of the best of the Talking Heads. I think the CD versions of these songs are sonically better, but his performances are fun to watch.

First up, I Dance Like This, which, I guess, makes at least passing reference to the trials and tribulations of geezerdom. He always danced oddly, but if you want to call what he’s doing on this video dancing, then that’s great, because I’ve got a 50th high school reunion coming up, and if this is dancing, we are probably all going to be up for it.

 

Next, Every Day is a Miracle. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OQt_0j3ZT28
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A little trip down memory lane

Thursday, May 17, 2018

I keep a journal, in which I catalog the trivial events of my day and, since January of 2017, on most days I document some of the atrocities emanating from Washington. The app I use automatically displays entries from the same date in past years. It’s actually a good feature, since it’s sort of fun to see what you were doing on this day one, two, or three years ago. It’s not so much fun to see what the genius was doing, but it’s generally interesting to recall what, coming from anyone else, would long be remembered, but coming from the genius, had long since slid into the memory hole.

One year ago today, the genius came to New London to address the graduating cadets at the Coast Guard Academy. I noted:

In typical Trump narcissistic fashion his speech was about himself. He actually said that no politician in the history of the world “and I say this with surety” has been treated as unfairly as he. The man has no self awareness. He also talked about how hard he had to fight to get to where he was. The son of a rich man, who probably paid other people to take his tests or write his papers to get through school.

I submit that if Obama had ever said something of this sort, it would have taken longer than a year for everyone in the world to forget about it. The folks at Fox & Friends would be talking about it still. I don’t know if it is part of some conscious strategy, or just the working out of his mental illness, but Trump has hit upon a perfect way of getting away with behavior so outrageous it would be considered too laughable to put into a work of fiction. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for our media to note the anniversaries of the genius’s outrages, lest we forget. The above is just a minor star in the Trump constellation of iniquity, but it happened just across the river, so it got me thinking. We forget about these things at our peril.

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Quit meets quo

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Yesterday I vowed to do better in cataloging the genius’s criminality, and like manna from heaven, here’s proof of yet another impeachable offense. When the genius tweeted that he was going to help save thousands of Chinesejobs, it set all our spider senses tingling, didn’t it? You just knew there was some sort of corruption involved. The short story is that the Chinese paid for the change in Trump’s policy by lending money to his businesses. The quid is as blatant as the quo. The details are at the link above.

Of course, ultimately impeachment is a political act. While I think it is useful to note each criminal act in which Trump engages, I’m with the Democrats that are arguing that the last thing you want to campaign on in the fall is Trump’s criminality. Let that simmer in the background. It will leave a sour taste in people’s mouths, making them more receptive to campaigns based on progressive ideas, which, whether the DCCC wants to believe it or not, are popular with most voters when packaged well.

Oh, did I forget to say that the odds are increasing that the Democrats will blow it? 

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A new twist on gerrymandering

Monday, May 14, 2018

We’ve all read various news stories about the fact that many of Trump’s policies will adversely and disproportionately affect the idiots who voted for him. Turns out that might not be the case, as Republicans resort to a new twist on one of their favorite ways to insure that the will of the minority prevails.

Let’s step back a bit and recall that it is practically Republican dogma that people who are not working are not working by choice. They are simply lazy. That’s why they argue for getting rid of food stamps, Medicaid, etc., which they claim without end or evidence encourage people to remain in idle poverty. Well, it turns out, much to the surprise of absolutely no one, that white people are not affected by this laziness virus; when they are out of work it is through no fault of their own.

A number of states have asked for permission to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and of course Trump has granted that permission. But they don’t want to impose such requirements on deserving white people, so they have fallen back on gerrymandering. They have proposed exempting people who live in high unemployment areas. Of course, how you define a high unemployment area makes all the difference, doesn’t it:

Those waivers include exemptions for the counties with the highest unemployment, which tend to be majority-white, GOP-leaning, and rural. But many low-income people of color who live in high-unemployment urban centers would not qualify, because the wealthier suburbs surrounding those cities pull the overall county unemployment rate below the threshold.

To no one’s surprise, the end result is that the work requirements will exempt multitudes of white people (who also happen to vote Republican), and almost no black people. If the geographical units used were municipalities rather than counties black people would benefit as well, but of course, in their wisdom, the Republican legislators in the affected states could see that doing it that way would merely encourage shiftless and lazy people to continue to opt not to work.

All of this probably violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, if current precedent were to be followed. However, I’d say it’s even money that this gerrymandering will be upheld by the courts. We have entered a phase of our history when open racism is once again practiced on the political hustings. Those racists are appointing judges, who will license that racism. It will turn out, against all the evidence, that the acts of these legislatures were both race neutral and devoid of disparate impact. Or, the entire notion of disparate impact will be thrown into the trash.

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A mea culpa

Monday, May 14, 2018

I get very few comments, and I just found out that some comments are being blocked, for reasons I can’t fathom, as it is none of my doing. Anyway, in the course of trying to figure out what I could do about this (and I couldn’t figure it out) I came across a months old comment from a friend of mine (the very one who is now mysteriously blocked), who took me to task for failing to deliver on my promise to catalog the impeachable offenses of the individual who was sworn in as president of the United States in 2017. 

He’s right.

In my own defense, I can only plead that the impeachable offenses have been coming so fast and furious that no one can track them all, at least if he has a day job, and I still do. I mean, the man gets up in the morning, tweets a confession to an impeachable offense that we were’nt quite sure about the night before, and then commits a few more offenses in the course of the day. By the time I’ve gotten home from work, the list is a mile long and every blog and newspaper in the land has already moved on waiting for the next shoe to drop. Half the time, I feel like there’s no point writing about the morning’s crime, because it’s old news by the time I have a spare moment and no one is talking about it anymore.

And that, perhaps, is the genius of the very stable genius. He has all but normalized habitual lying, criminality and corruption. Once again, this brings to mind a shocked John Chancellor, reporting on the Saturday Night Massacre, saying over and over again with a stunned look on his face: “Nothing like this has ever happened before”. Perhaps it’s a measure of the decline in quality of television journalists, but if words to that effect ever pass through the lips of television reporters today, they’re likely to have a bored look on their face, since practically every day brings more destruction of our institutional norms. 

Notwithstanding the foregoing excuses, I am going to try to do better in the future. Just to check off a few of the obvious offenses, here’s a few impeachable offenses I don’t think I’ve specifically cited as such previously: conspiring with the Russians to subvert the electoral process; soliciting, through his “attorney”, Michael Cohen, cash for favorable governmental action; and continuing to obstruct justice by attempting to subvert the Mueller investigation. As to the second of those, there’s no direct proof yet, but you know he’s guilty, don’t you?

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