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They must be cruel rather than be kind

Friday, January 12, 2018

One of the things I like about Paul Krugman is that he totally steers away from blaming our current state of affairs on Trumpism, and puts the blame squarely where it belongs: the Republican Party. This morning’s column, in which he castigates Republicans for their predilection for inflicting pain on the poor is a good example. In this case, he points out that the Republican drive against health care is truly more about inflicting pain than saving money. Along the way, he states:

Second, there’s the issue of work requirements for Medicaid. Some states have been petitioning for years for the right to force Medicaid recipients to take jobs, and this week the Trump administration declared that it would allow them to do so. But what was driving this demand?

The reality is that a vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients are in families where at least one adult is working. And a vast majority of those who aren’t working have very good reasons for not being in the labor force: They’re disabled, they’re caregivers to other family members or they’re students. The population of Medicaid recipients who “ought” to be working but aren’t is very small, and the money that states could save by denying them coverage is trivial.

The policy in question supposedly requires the able bodied to work, and grants benefits to the disabled. Something Krugman didn’t mention is the fact that the states in question get to define what is able bodied, and I can tell you, based on over 20 years of representing disabled people (or is it 30, we geezers have bad memories) that lots of people who you, I, or any right minded person might consider disabled will be deemed able bodied. After all, if the point is to be cruel, as Krugman rightly alleges, why stop at denying benefits to the undoubtedly able bodied when you can declare anyone you like to be able bodied and deny a whole slew of people.

I won’t bore you with war stories, but I can tell you that right now, even in the federal disability system, cruelty reigns. I should add that one relative bright spot is the state run SAGA system. I can’t begin to count the number of people deemed disabled by the folks running that system that were deemed able bodied by the sadistic administrative law judges holding court in Connecticut nowadays. There’s no reason to think the states clamoring for work requirements will do anything but deny benefits to disabled people in huge numbers.

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Sound like anyone you know of?

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

So, yesterday I started watching some lectures I got from the Learning Company. The course is called An Introduction to Formal Logic.The first lecture is an introduction to the course, and the lecturer spends the time disabusing his students of any notion that man is an essentially rational creature. In all sorts of ways we have tendencies to behave irrationally. It often takes some effort to behave rationally. The tendency toward groupthink, for example, is quite strong. We often actually talk ourselves into believing things we know to be untrue, provided the members of a group of which we are a part believe it. Sound like any group of people the New York Times can’t get enough of? (See my previous post.)

But I digress.

Among the various logical fallacies into which many of us fall, one sort of struck me as pertinent today. Here’s the description from the course book:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the name given to the fact that the less people know about an area or how to do something, the more likely they are to overestimate their ability to do it or understand it. The more ignorant we are, the more brazen we are in our belief about our abilities and knowledge.

Sound like any very stable geniuses you know of? If not, here’s a hint:

President-elect Donald Trump said he doesn’t need intelligence briefings every day because he is “a smart person” and doesn’t “have to be told the same thing in the same words” every day.

In an interview on Fox News that was taped Saturday and aired Sunday, he was asked about reports that he is getting the presidential daily intelligence briefing only about once a week rather than every day.

“I get it when I need it,” Trump said. “These are very good people that are giving me the briefings … You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years … I don’t need that. But I do say, ‘If something should change, let us know.'”

The above was somewhat randomly selected, but you get the picture.

I think the course was recorded long before the Age of the VSG, as it’s hard to believe there wouldn’t at least have been a veiled reference to him otherwise. How could any rational person withstand the temptation?

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New York Times doing it again

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

The New York Times wants to hear from people who voted for the Very Stable Genius. I’m not providing a link, as I’m too lazy to look for it, but there’s a little box on the letters page today inviting VSG voters to let the Times know how they thing the genius is doing. I guess their reporters are getting tired of going to diners in mid-America and looking for these cretins, something they’ve been doing on a weekly basis hitherto.

Funny, I simply can’t remember a similar invitation to Obama voters in 2010. And perish the thought they’d be interested in knowing how the majority of the country thinks the Very Stable Genius is doing.

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A word of thanks to The Very Stable Genius

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Ever since a certain small handed person won more electoral votes than the only qualified person running for president at the time, I’ve struggled with trying to figure out how to refer to him. I was certainly not going to call him P#######t T###p, as I wasn’t willing to recognize his legitimacy or to afford him even the minimal amount of respectability that the title carries with it, or, more accurately, that it carried with it before it was applied to him.

So, I’ve had to resort to different nomenclatures, depending on the context.

Now, he has made things easy for me, and for that I thank him. My intention is to refer to him hereafter as The Very Stable Genius, a moniker I would seriously advise elected Democrats to apply to him at every opportunity. After all, he can hardly complain, can he? It can’t hurt to constantly remind the American public that a substantial minority of the American People voted to make a seriously mentally ill person president.

There must be a term for this sort of thing. It is somewhat akin to an oxymoron, but that term doesn’t quite apply, since the actual words don’t contradict themselves. Perhaps the diagnosis oxymoronic personality disorder might be applied. I know it’s not in the DSM, but I am hereby adding it. It’s characterized by self descriptions that falsify themselves merely be being uttered. It’s not the first time he’s acted consistent with this diagnosis. Consider the fact that, by his own account, he is the most humble person on the face of the earth.

Caveat: I can’t quite believe the tweet I’ve linked to is authentic, though it certainly appears to be, but the Very Stable Genius has without question touted his own humility.

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Sue, Donald, Sue

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Donald Trump’s lawyers have demanded that publication of a new book about him be halted and have threatened to sue the author and publisher for libel. Apparently, the threat has inspired a great deal of fear and anxiety on the part of both author and publisher, as my wife tells me they’ve pushed up the publication date to tomorrow. Who knows, maybe Trump has a financial stake in the book and is just trying to push up the sales figures. That seems doubtful, however, which makes one wish to have been a fly on the wall (one that comprehended human speech, of course) while Trump was demanding that his lawyers write the demand letter. For there are only two possibilities here. One is that the lawyers tried to explain to Trump that nothing could be worse than for him to bring such a suit. The other is that he has the most incompetent lawyers in the country, and they advised a reluctant Trump to authorize them to write the letter.

I fervently hope Trump sues. There are always questions about the susceptibility of a sitting president to be civilly sued or prosecuted for a crime, but those questions go out the window if he chooses to be a plaintiff. He would have to respond to discovery requests, meaning he could be deposed along with almost everyone else in the White House, and there’s a better than even chance (assuming the case is assigned to a halfway impartial judge) that the fact that he filed suit at all would be considered a waiver of privileges that might otherwise attach. Truth, after all, is a defense, and if he’s going to sue someone, even a right wing judge would probably rule that the defendant gets to develop their defense. And remember, they don’t have to prove that Trump is an idiot, though that might be easy enough to prove. They just have to prove that everyone around him says he’s an idiot, and they have tapes.

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Taking a page or two from Orwell

Saturday, December 30, 2017

I’m pretty sure that when Orwell wrote 1984 he meant it as a warning, but it really looks like Republicans consider it a how-to book. Recently we heard that the folks at the Center for Disease Control were barred from saying certain words. Now we learn that when the facts don’t fit the narrative, you just throw them down the memory hole:

Ten days before Christmas, Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a rare press conference to discuss one of his top priorities in his first year at the Justice Department. “We’ve seen a deadly increase in violent crime,” he said, announcing that the department was dispatching 40 additional federal prosecutors across the country to combat what Sessions believes is a dawning new era of violent crime. “The overall violent crime rate is up by nearly 7 percent, a reversal of a downward trend. Robberies are up. Assaults are up. Rape is up by nearly 11 percent. And murder is up by more than 20 percent.” (It’s true that the violent crime rate has ticked up over the past two years, but it’s still barely more than half of what it was 15 years ago.)

The administration’s focus on crime made it all the more surprising that the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States report, the gold standard of crime statistics, lacked a significant amount of data that experts have relied upon for years to assess crime trends. Until this year, the report contained 81 main tables that allowed researchers to track everything from the rate of violent crime to the racial breakdown of arrests. But when the 2016 report came out in September, there were only 29 tables. The information needed to understand and verify the crime stats cited by the attorney general, as well as the work of local law enforcement around the country, was suddenly harder to obtain.

The decision to remove the data hampers the ability of criminologists and journalists to analyze crime trends at the same time that the administration is transforming the justice system to respond to rising violent crime rates. There’s little clarity on why and when the decision to withhold the data was made, although the FBI has claimed the move was part of a years-long process to revamp how it collects and disseminates crime data to the public. FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional panel earlier this month that the missing tables will be added back into the latest report. But beyond 2016, it remains uncertain whether researchers will have access to all these critical crime data.

via Mother Jones through Daily Kos.

The story goes on to document the fact that outside experts very much doubt the spin the Trump gang is putting on the unreleased crime statistics, but, of course, there’s no way to conclusively rebut something like this if you lack a shared set of data. Somewhere in the FBI there’s a Winston Smith throwing this stuff down the memory hole, probably questioning what he’s doing, but doing it nonetheless. This is the sort of stuff that goes on under the radar while Trump distracts with his erratic behavior. He may not know what he’s doing, but the people around him do. Stuff like this may get some attention for a day, but that attention fades quickly, and they can then go about their business. Unless and until the Democrats take over at least one house of Congress, they can count on a lack of oversight. It is worth mentioning, by the way, that while the Republicans have attacked the FBI for non-existent wrongdoing with regard to the Russia investigation, they will, I predict, be entirely uninterested in the fact that it is cooking the books to support the Trump gang’s lies.

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Spines in short supply

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Sort of a follow up to my post of a few days ago about the probability that the Democrats will find a way to blow it in next year’s election, provoked by a piece at Hullabaloo, with which I totally agree. Titled, We must ensure that the Resistance keeps up the pressure. Without it Democrats will cave., the post makes the point that next month’s vote on the debt limit may be the make or break point for the Democrats:

The latest (hopefully temporary) cave on DACA is not reassuring. If the Democrats lose their spines going into this election and allow Trump to be seen as a “winner” by bringing them around to his side, if they even think of kissing his ring like those Republicans have done, in the midst of a strong economy, the GOP will win. And we will be done.

It is vital that they stay strong and resist. Any capitulation to Trump will demoralize the Democratic base and give the other side a good reason to come out and vote for their team next year. Keep in mind that Democrats must have an unusually high turnout in a mid-term which is always very difficult for them and the Republicans must stay home in a midterm which is uncommon.

The Resistance is called what it’s called because of a massive grassroots demand that Trump not be normalized or validated. We must push these Democrats to hold the line.

In order for the Democrats to use the leverage they have on the debt limit they must do two things. First, they must stand together, something which, amazingly, they have been pretty good about so far during this presidency. Second, they must have their talking points ready so as to shift blame for any actual shutdown to the Republicans, who, after all, are in control of all three branches of government. They have not been particularly good on this score, but prior to now, circumstances have been such that it wasn’t critical. It will be critical if they decide to grow spines and actually refuse to increase the debt limit unless some of their demands are met.

My own guess is that the message won’t be needed, because in the end, the spines will not be grown. They’ve already gone along with two “temporary” extensions, and they will likely go along with more. The Republicans will be perfectly happy to adopt the expedient of using short term resolutions to avoid dealing with the issue. This would all be part of the Democrats long term strategy to lose (or at least not win) in November, by convincing as many of the currently energized members of the resistance as possible that it doesn’t matter who gets elected in November. Right now the odds are against the Democrats pulling off a defeat, but, hey, they managed it last year and they can do it again.

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Yet another in a seemingly endless series of modest proposals

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

The Republicans have passed their tax bill, designed from top to bottom to shift money from the bottom 99.9% to the top .1%, with those of us in the top 20% being robbed the least, while those in the bottom are being robbed the most. It is class warfare on an unprecedented scale, and given past Republican attacks in the class war, that’s saying a lot.

Despite the best efforts of the Fox propagandists, and the sometimes ludicrous both siderism of the mainstream press (Dean Baker points out here that the Washington Post claims that the bill had working class roots), the bill, if the pollsters are to be believed, is the most unpopular piece of major legislation in the history of polling.

This presents a challenge to Democrats: How, in the face of Donald Trump’s unpopularity and the unpopularity of this, the Republicans only major legislative accomplishment, are they going to manage to blow it in 2018? I, for one, think they’re up to the challenge.

But lets, for the moment, assume that the Democrats wanted to take maximum advantage of these gifts? How would they do it, with respect to this tax deform bill?

As I pointed out above, the bill amounts to class warfare. Normally there are two sides in a war, and I would strongly suggest that the Democrats throw in their lot with the folks the Republicans are attacking. That means accepting the fact that this is class war and being unabashedly on the side that’s being attacked.

We have a funny tradition in this country. The Republicans stage an attack in this war and when the Democrats feebly protest, it is the Democrats who are accused of being class warriors while the Republicans get a pass. They get it because the Democrats meekly back down. Despite the fact that it is Republicans who are the aggressors in this war, it is the Democrats that consistently take the blame for the war itself.

Once again, what’s needed is a consistent Democratic message. My modest proposal here is that part of that message consist of commercials contrasting the effects of this tax bill on ordinary Americans with the benefits conferred on specifically identified Americans, such as the Koch Brothers and various members of the Trump Crime Syndicate, including Trump. A variant: there are rich people out there who are perfectly willing to say that they don’t need or want this gift. Find them, and put them on such a commercial, contrasting the benefits they are getting that they don’t need, with the human costs being inflicted on the rest of us, particularly on people living on the margins. Add in, by the way, some clips of people like Marco Rubio admitting that the tax bill represents the opening wedge in the achievement of the Republican Holy Grail: the final destruction of Medicare and Social Security. It really shouldn’t be difficult to put together some truly effective spots driving these messages home, and, unlike the Republicans, we wouldn’t even have to lie.

Of course the Democrats will be attacked once again for engaging in class warfare. And here I have a stunning suggestion: ignore the attacks and keep fighting. It is class warfare. They’ve got the money but we’ve got the numbers (apologies to Jim Morrison and the Doors for that one). We can win if our side gets out and votes; but that’s not going to happen if the Democrats assume their typical defensive crouch.

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A time to wallow

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

A few things about the Jones win last night.

First, now this means I won’t get an email from him every hour. I should add that I responded to several.

Second, thank you black people of Alabama for doing the country a huge favor.

Third, the victory is made the sweeter by the fact that I refused to let myself believe that he could win. I recommend this as a strategy. Along the same lines, I would suggest that we stop talking about wave elections, and run scared and hard everywhere. But what this election does prove is that we should run everywhere, and stop conceding huge swaths of the country to Republicans. We can make inroads in the South if we start playing the long game and start pushing a message to the people down there that they are being consistently screwed by the Republican Party and that, whether stated explicitly or implicitly, they have more in common with the black people they’ve been trained to hate and blame, than they do with the people that are manipulating them.

Finally, now that the wildly improbable has happened, we all deserve at least a few days of wallowing. And as a friend observed in an email sending this photo, this sums it up nicely:

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More on zero tolerance

Saturday, December 9, 2017

A few days ago I wrote about my fear that the Democrats would adopt a zero tolerance position regarding allegation of sexual impropriety. Not surprisingly, some have:

As calls for Senator Franken’s resignation rose yesterday, there was talk about the need for zero tolerance of sexual misconduct. For example, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) tweeted: “We must commit to zero tolerance—which is where I believe we as a country and Congress should be—and that means Senator Franken should step down.”

This sort of extreme view seems to have become almost settled wisdom among Democrats in DC, but if my own observations are any guide, it is not so widely shared outside the DC bubble. Opinions were almost unanimous, and most strongly voiced by some of the women at our recent Drinking Liberally group, that Franken should not have resigned.

It does appear that people not totally immersed in the bubble are beginning to see that a bit of nuance, and, at times, cold political calculation, are necessary, particularly in the political clime in which we now find ourselves. Nancy LeTourneau, the blogger whose post I linked to above, went on to make an observation similar to that I made in my post:

The arena in which I am most familiar with the use of zero tolerance is schools. It began as a slogan over 20 years ago to suggest that schools should draw a clear line about what was unacceptable behavior and administer harsh consequences to any student who crossed it. The entire effort was a huge failure that became the feeder for the school-to-prison pipeline. Here is an ABC News report on zero tolerance that aired back in 2003.

…

At this point, a lot of people (especially politicians) are trying to position themselves as “tough” on this issue by gravitating to simplistic responses like zero tolerance. Those of us who are actually interested in real change need to speak up on behalf of responses that help all of us grapple with a difficult issue and set the stage for some common understanding of a complex problem. We shouldn’t settle for anything less.

It should be noted here that already Republicans are taking advantage of the Democratic zero tolerance push. The Republican governor of Michigan has put off a special election to fill John Conyers position, thus depriving his consitituents (mostly black, so who cares, right?) of representation for almost a year, while, the Democratic governor of Minnesota has done what all Democrats seem to do:

Now Gov. Mark Dayton is throwing a wrench in the works by evidently appointing a caretaker on the condition she not seek to keep the seat, which opens the seat up to the real possibility of Republican capture in 2018 (maybe by Norm Coleman, the Republican Franken defeated in 2008). I wonder how many Senate Democrats calling for Franken’s head would have thought twice if they’d known Dayton was going to pull that boneheaded move, instead of appointing a younger star like state Attorney General Lori Swanson who could build a real Senate career.

As the post above goes on to point out, there’s something not quite right about demands that people resign without any form of due process. Democrats were unwilling to let the ethics process play out, and, if Heitkamp’s statement is any guide, will be unwilling to do so in the future. So, someone like Franken, who acknowledges wrongdoing, the seriousness of which is not yet really known, must go, while politicians who simply deny, deny, deny, get to stay. This, of course, yet again favors the Republicans.

The national Democrats act as if they have Senate seats to spare, and can easily throw a few away in service to a zero tolerance policy that make no real sense. I suspect with good cause that their constituents don’t see it in such black and white terms, but the beltway bubble is a real cultural phenomenon. A lot of us are more concerned about the fact that by throwing Franken under the bus, the Democrats may have destroyed any chance we have to prevent a Trumpian takeover of the Supreme Court. Our always marginal chances of taking over the Senate have not been enhanced by this move and that’s the point most of the Liberal Drinkers, male and female alike, were ranting about at our recent gathering. The future of the planet is at risk. We really have to think twice about imposing purity tests on our own, when we have no capacity to impose like standards on the Nazis who currently control our government.

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