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Who says skunks stink?

Thursday, April 28, 2016

We live in funny times. I would have thought that if you see a dead skunk in the middle of the road, and something is stinkin’ to high heaven, you can conclude beyond reasonable doubt that the smell is coming from the skunk, especially if the smell gets worse the closer you examine the skunk. But apparently not:

The Supreme Court heard former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s appeal of his sentence on political corruption charges Wednesday, and appears to be leaning in his favor. McDonnell was convicted and sentenced to two years for accepting gifts from a businessman, including a $20,000 Fifth Avenue shopping spree, more than $5,000 for a monogrammed Rolex and the use of a convertible Ferrari, a custom-made golf bag, and a sizable personal loan. The questions from the justices raised concerns that “the government’s concept of bribery was so broad as to criminalize many routine actions by public officials.”

via Daily Kos

He actually argued that “buying access and influence with public officials is protected by the 1st Amendment“, and the Supreme Court, apparently, has got his back. I remember back in the olden days Justice Stewart said he couldn’t define obscenity, “but I know it when I see it”. Not a great standard to judge pornography, but it comes to mind when reading about the McDonnell case.

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Another petard hoisted

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

I just heard about this, and, as a lawyer, I am mightily impressed:

Travis Kalanick, the chief executive of Uber, failed on Thursday to win the dismissal of an antitrust lawsuit accusing him of scheming to drive up prices for passengers who use the popular ride-sharing service.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said Kalanick must face claims he conspired with drivers to ensure they charge prices set by an algorithm in the Uber smartphone app to hail rides, including “surge pricing” during periods of peak demand.

Passengers led by Spencer Meyer of Connecticut claimed that drivers conspired with Kalanick to charge fares set by the algorithm, with an understanding that other Uber drivers would do the same, even if they might fare better acting on their own.

via Fortune

The delicious part about this is that they are taking advantage of the legal fiction that Uber drivers are truly independent contractors. By any reasonable standard they aren’t, but Uber sticks to that fiction, so that it can avoid paying decent wages and benefits. To rub salt in the wounds of the “contractors”, they also apparently lead their customers to believe that a tip is built into the pricing structure, when in fact it is not. So that’s one petard hoisted.

Why, you might ask, is the Uber CEO a defendant, and not Uber itself. Well, that’s yet another petard hoisted:

“In creating Uber, Kalanick organized price-fixing among independent drivers who should be competing with one another on price,” Meyer’s lawyer Andrew Schmidt said. “Today’s decision confirms that apps are not exempt from the antitrust laws.”

Uber was not named as a defendant, despite being valued at well over $50 billion in recent funding rounds.

Rakoff said in a footnote that Uber passengers are subject to “user agreements” requiring them to resolve various disputes through arbitration.

In other words, Kalanick is a defendant because he deprived people, by stealth, of their right to go to court against Uber but he forgot to exempt himself.

So, hats off to Andrew Schmidt, or whoever came up with this idea. It won’t happen, but it would be nice to see them truly hammer Kalanick. Rakoff might rule for the plaintiffs, but the Appeals Court will reverse.

As a side note, this tendency to deprive people of their rights to go to court (a feature, we’re told, and not a bug in the TPP) is becoming more and more widespread. It should be among the injustices people like Bernie rail against, though most people are not informed enough to resent it. It is endemic in our system right now. I recently found, buried in the fine print of an owner’s manual for a hard drive I bought, that by buying the drive I had agreed to arbitrate any disputes I might have. On closer inspection, I could have also discovered this on the outside of the box, had I Superman’s super vision. And here’s a story of hedge fund managers shifting the responsibility for their own criminal behavior onto investors who had no part in their wrongdoing, yet another way of cooking the legal books to exempt the .01% from responsibility for their crimes.

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Immune from attack

Monday, April 25, 2016

I’m a Bernie guy, but I try to be rational and realistic. There are some Bernie folks out there, otherwise reasonable people, who believe that Bernie will get the nomination when Hillary is indicted because of her email server. Not only is that not going to happen, it shouldn’t happen, because she didn’t do anything seriously wrong. It’s depressing to see people buy into Republican memes when it serves their purposes. And as I’ll develop, unless she does get indicted, which I repeat won’t happen, the “scandal” will come to nothing.

Here’s a more superficially realistic concern, yet one that we can easily dismiss:

The other day I was listening to a political show on the radio, and a guy called into say that, although he was “Cruz guy”, he believed that Trump could beat Hillary because of Hillary’s sordid past, as detailed in a book by Roger Stone.

That’s when it hit me: if Trump is the nominee, it will be five months of Vince Foster, the Mena drug operation, the Clinton body count, and so on.   I hope the Hillary campaign wishes a motherfucker would, but they’d best be prepared for a media that says “some say the Clinton personally murdered upwards of 50 people, some say they do not, the truth lies in the middle.”

As crazy as the last eight years of anti-Obama have been, I don’t think it quite touches the insanity of the anti-Clinton stuff in the mid-to -late ’90s, at least within mainstream political discourse.  The Republicans never even got around to impeaching Obama the way I thought they would.

via Balloon Juice

The Cruz guy who thinks Trump could beat Hillary is the very model of the person who would never vote for Hillary (or any Democrat) in the first place, so the fact that he buys into these smears means Hillary has a net loss of exactly 0 votes. The question is, how many people, who might otherwise vote for her, will choose to vote for Trump instead because of any of these smears that Roger Stone fabricated? The fact of the matter is that Hillary is well-nigh scandal proof. Why did the Republicans get no traction with Benghazi? For that matter, why are they getting no traction with the email issue? On issues like that, they have essentially immunized her. She has been the victim of so many specious attacks that people’s eyes glaze over when they hear another attack of that ilk.

True, people don’t trust her, but it’s not because of her emails or even Benghazi. People distrust her because of stuff like Iraq, speeches to Goldman Sachs, equivocation on the TPP, her reflexive warmongering, etc. You know, issues. Note that on the issues that cause that mistrust, she is in lock step with the Republicans, making it difficult for them to attack her where she’s weakest. That sort of distrust is mostly on the left, and we’re going to be stuck with her. Bear in mind too that the Dems have been doing their oppo research on Trump, and there’s a mother lode there. Anyone who is actually going to compare candidates based on their involvement with Trumped up scandals will find more reason to vote against Trump than Hillary. In addition, Hillary will not sit passively by while she’s attacked. She will not be swift boated.

In truth and in fact, Bernie is more at risk from the swift boaters than is Hillary. He’s a relatively unknown quantity, and no one really knows how much damage attacks on an avowed socialist atheist would do in this land of the ignorant. He may be polling better than Hillary at the moment, but that is quite likely because he has not yet been subjected to the types of attacks that simply no longer work when directed at Hillary. I still think he’d be a better president, and I think we may be losing our last chance to put down the oligarchs, but I don’t believe that Hillary will lose to Trump or any other Republican because Roger Stone says she killed Vince Foster.

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This cracks me up

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Nothing even vaguely political about this, but I can’t stop laughing whenever I read about it:

Ships can bear the names of former presidents, war heroes, long-lost loves, or clever puns. However, the U.K. public appears to have taken a different tact when it comes the naming of a new polar vessel from the National Environment Research Council.

The NERC announced the online voting contest to name the nearly $300 million boat to be launched in 2019 recently, and the leading vote-getter so far is the simple but silly “Boaty McBoatface.”

Via CBS News

What can you expect from the land of Monty Python?

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Rejected by the Day

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Recently I alluded to the fact that the New London Day, and in particular, its columnist, Dave Collins has been conducting a bit of a jihad against our State Senator, Andy Maynard. Andy suffered a brain injury before the last election. He now suffers from aphasia, which means he has trouble articulating his thoughts. As the Day knows, his constituents re-elected him with full knowledge that he had had the accident and had possibly suffered brain damage, but Collins in particular, and the newspaper in general, has insisted that Andy should not vote, because he is being manipulated by the evil Democratic Senate leaders.

Last week, on the 13th, the Day printed an article about a letter former (thank God) Congressman and current Stonington first selectman Rob Simmons wrote in which he basically pushed the same meme. Naturally, the Day gave the letter front page treatment.

I took pen to hand and wrote this:

Rob Simmons’s recent attack on Senate Democrats for allegedly manipulating Andy Maynard was an exercise in precisely what he was accusing the Democrats of doing: manipulating Andy Maynard for his own purposes. Mr. Simmons wants us to believe that he can speak for Andy, and tell us what Andy would do if only Andy were not being manipulated by those terrible Democrats. We are to believe that Simmons has only Andy’s best interest at heart, politics having nothing at all to do with it. We are also to believe that if only Andy were the Andy Rob once knew, he would vote as a Republican, like Rob always did.

Simmons undoubtedly knew the Day would give him maximum exposure, as he’s just repeating the meme the Day has been pushing for over a year in its columns and news stories. There is, in fact, no reason to believe that Andy’s aphasia has affected his ability to make his own decisions, and the constituent service offered by his office has not suffered as a result of his disability. His disability renders him an easy target. Since he can’t verbalize a response, he loses no matter what he does.

The Day called me to confirm I’d written it, but it has yet to see print and it probably never will.

This is the second letter in a row that I’ve written that the Day has rejected. My wife wrote a letter, which it did print, attacking our local (Republican) state representatives as do nothings. It drew a printed response from a letter writer, with a defense so lame as to be laughable. I wrote a response to that letter, which the Day refused to print unless I was identified as my wife’s spouse, using her name. My wife preferred not to become the issue. I didn’t fight about it, but the logic escapes me. If my letter made sense, which of course it did, what difference does my relationship to my wife make?

The Day used to be a good paper, but it is rapidly becoming Fox on the Thames.

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Trump aides: Don’t worry, he’s lying

Friday, April 22, 2016

I’m not alone in pointing out that we really have no idea what Trump would do if he were elected President. I don’t know if I’ve said it here, but I’ve often said to friends of mine that I could envision Trump, the day after his inauguration, telling the press: “You didn’t really believe all that stuff I said, did you? I just said that to get elected.”

Well, it looks like his people have jumped the gun:

Trump’s newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage.

“When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” Manafort said in a private briefing.

“You’ll start to see more depth of the person, the real person. You’ll see a real different way,” he said.

The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange.

via Associated Press via Daily Kos

You see, the message has been focus grouped, and he’s giving the Fox propaganda saturated people what they want. When the time comes, he’ll do an about face. It is sort of rare to see such a bald faced admission that a candidate is essentially lying his way into office. I mean, all Republicans do it, but most don’t admit it.

Now, if it came out that Hillary’s people were telling anyone this sort of thing, the press would go into a full throated outcry. But coming from Trump, they’ll welcome it, because it will enable them to continue to push the meme that the state of our politics is the joint responsibility of both parties, their being no qualitative difference between the two. Trump was making it hard for them to do that, to the point where they were having to come up with ways to make Cruz look like a moderate. Now that they know that Trump is lying his way into office, (which the rest of us already knew), they can take comfort in their tired bromides.

This will have no effect on Trump’s supporters of course. They purport to be tired of being played, as they have been over and over, but they’re true believers and, to amend the Who’s song a bit, “will be fooled again”. Sadly, we on the blue side are not immune from that disease. Witness the large number of Hillary supporters who just need to believe that she’ll be anything but a Wall Street shill once she gets into office.

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Stopped clocks, etc.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

It’s not often that I find myself in even partial agreement with Republicans from Texas, but I have only a few minor quibbles about this:

A handful of Texas Republican district or county conventions in March passed resolutions calling for a vote on secession, paving the way for a potentially awkward debate at the state GOP conference in May. 

A Nederland-based pro-independence activist group, the Texas Nationalist Movement, said at least 22 of the hundreds of conventions passed secession items. Texas GOP chairman Tom Mechler said he “would be very surprised” if that many had indeed passed the conventions.

via The Houston Chronicle

If they had done this 20 years ago, we wouldn’t have had to endure George W. Bush or the Iraq War, and we would not now be faced with the possibility of a Ted Cruz presidency. Only Texas could give us the worst president in history and then follow up by putting up someone even worse.

Long time readers (if there are any) know that I have advocated secession of the sane states myself. But if these Texas folks get their way, we accomplish the same result without having to lift a finger. Imagine a country unburdened by the idiocy of Texas. The great thing about this sort of secession is that it leaves us with possession of the U.S. Treasury and things like the Social Security Trust fund.

But, as I said, I have some minor quibbles. First, some provision has to be made for the people of color of that benighted land, as well as the persecuted minority of rational white people. There’s better than even odds that Texas would bring back slavery once it’s gone its separate way. Also, we don’t want them leaving alone. They have to take the rest of the old Confederacy with them, or they can’t go. We might consider letting Florida stay, given the number of snowbirds living there, but they would have to promise to be good, and they could start out by chaining Rick Scott to a pillar next to the ocean and let him drown in the rising sea.

This leads me to a related observation. Yesterday Ted Cruz got his ass whipped in New York, which was not surprising since he accused Trump of having “New York values”, which we are to understand are very very wicked values, which, presumably, he is accusing other New Yorkers of sharing. Isn’t it odd that politicians from the dark backwaters of our nation feel privileged to insult us here in the North, where we are expected to take no offense, while any negative comment about the brain dead denizens of the old Confederacy provokes outrage from the Southern yahoos? Personally, I think that Trump does not share the values of the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers, who by and large reject the politics of racism that he has borrowed from our Southern neighbors. If anything, Trump has simply shown the Southerners how to do it right. Sure, New Yorkers are reprehensible in some respects, but you really can’t blame them for being Yankee fans. That aside, they’re alright, and certainly far preferable to Texans.

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John Kasich is not a moderate 

Saturday, April 16, 2016

I’m a deeply disappointed guy. Today, the New London Day endorsed John Kasich for the Connecticut Republican primary, as I expected it would. I’m not disappointed by that, it was inevitable. What I am disappointed by is the Day’s failure to apply the term “moderate” to Kasich. When I saw they’d endorsed him, I figured I could write something fairly clever about the plasticity of the English language, using the ever shifting meaning of moderate as a point of departure. But the Day failed me. Rather than call him a moderate, they settled for implying that he was one, by engaging in cherry picking and historical revisionism, actions that have become the media norm when writing or talking about Kasich. You see, it is impossible for them to shed their religious faith that the Republican Party must contain some reasonable people, and if that means redefining the term “reasonable” then— well, we’re all reasonable people here, aren’t we, and allowances must be made. So the Day preferred to whitewash Kasich’s record, carefully avoiding the extreme right wing positions he has taken. I won’t go into great detail. All you need do is Google (or, as I do, “Duck-Duck-Go”) “John Kasich is not a moderate” and get all the details you like. The first hits on Duck-Duck-Go were here and here, and they pretty much cover the field. Anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-public education, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-gay, pro guns, and pro discrimination disguised as religious freedom. What more could a right winger want?

If you put a gun to my head and made me choose among the three remaining Republican contestants, I’m not sure I’d pick Kasich, though it’s the conventional wisdom that he’s the more “moderate” of the three. Kasich has a track record. We know for certain that if he were elected, he would be the extreme right winger that he has been in Ohio. We can suspect, with reason, that on the national stage he would be even more extreme, since Ohio is not Mississippi, and there are forces which keep him from being too extreme. The only reason to prefer Kasich is that he couches his positions in language designed to appeal to people who are desperately seeking Republican “moderates”. That doesn’t make him one. Such people are on the road to extinction, even in their native habitat here in New England.

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Local Developments

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Recently my wife posted a mocked up newsflash on the Groton Democrats Facebook page, attacking local Republican state reps, John Scott and Andre Bumgardner, as “do-nothings”. That meme is in the news lately, as Groton has taken quite a hit on education funding, with both of them whining about how unfair it was that they could simply do absolutely nothing about it.

Oddly enough, the post itself caused John Scott to do something. He dashed off a Facebook comment to the effect that the attack was a “cheap shot”. This seemed like an odd riposte, coming from a guy whose 2014 campaign consisted of nothing but cheap shots. But while the shot wasn’t cheap, it pains me to say that the “do-nothing” charge was not quite accurate. As I’ve written before, as soon as he got into office, he sprang into action and tried to get a law passed requiring UConn students who are eligible for free health insurance to nonetheless buy health insurance through insurance agents who have contracted with the state to write such policies. Did I mention that John is an insurance agent who has contracted with the state to write health insurance policies for UConn students? So, as I’ve noted in the past, John has certainly tried to serve his constituent, though it didn’t work out so well. Andre, on the other hand, can honestly say that like any good Republican who believes that the government can do no good, he has done his best to prove it so, by doing–well, by doing no good.

While I’m on the subject of John’s self interested dealings, I must again express my utter astonishment (just kidding, I’m not astonished at all) at the fact that, with the exception of one article about John’s conflict of interest, the New London Day has been silent. Maybe it has something to do with all those ads John takes out in the Day. Dave Collins, a columnist who devoted at least 20 columns to criticizing Democratic senator Andy Maynard for having a disability, has been curiously silent about John’s blatant attempt to divert money into his own pockets. But it’s not necessarily the case that Dave is in the tank for John. He’s in the tank for all Republicans, so John just comes along for the ride. The Day once was a reasonably good local paper; it is rapidly degenerating into a Republican rag. Oh how I wish Kasich would drop out so we would get to read their rationale for endorsing either Donald or Ted Cruz in the upcoming primary.

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Lovin Cruz

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Today’s Boston Globe has a mock edition of the paper, a sort of preview of what we might expect to be reading should Donald Trump be elected president. (Full disclosure: my son works at the Globe and likely worked on the mock edition) This is a worthy endeavor, but we must remember that each and every one of the remaining candidates presents a clear and present danger to the future of the Republic, including the candidate the Globe endorsed in the Massachusetts primary (John Kasich). Each of them is extreme, Kasich having proven it in his present job as governor of Ohio.

The downside of the push to demonize Trump (and he should be demonized), is that the press as a whole (the Globe is not yet guilty of this) feels obligated to pump up his rivals. As I’ve written before, it’s a given that the press will sooner or later start selling the loathsome Ted Cruz as a reasonable alternative to the Donald.

In fact, that process has apparently begun. Time Magazine has fulfilled a prediction made by the Onion months ago, and put a picture of Ted Cruz on the cover with a supportive headline (“Likable enough”). Time noted that it’s headline was not identical to that posited by the Onion, but then, they would have been incredibly stupid to replicate the Onion’s satirical headline. The burden of the piece is to suggest that contrary to what everyone says about him, including many of his supporters, Ted Cruz is not one of the biggest assholes on the planet.

TIME’s cover story is headlined, “Likable Enough?” with a fetching portrait of Cruz with a mischievous look on his face and a lovely ice blue tie. He looks exceedingly likable and once you read the stories within, you’ll have to conclude that the man who virtually everyone who’s ever known him finds repulsive is terribly misunderstood. Where you might have thought the man was a doctrinaire right winger, steeped in religious fanaticism and radical free market extremism, you will find out that he’s actually a good old boy, salt of the earth populist. (One hopes for his sake that nobody leaves a copy lying around on the yachts of some of the billionaires who’ve been writing ten million dollar checks on his behalf. It could get awkward.)

via Hullabaloo

This is probably what we can expect on a wider scale as the convention approaches. Until and unless it becomes clear that Paul Ryan is the most likely beneficiary of a stolen convention, the media will be peddling some variant of this line. If that does become conventional wisdom, expect to see Cruz morph back into, well, into an asshole. There really isn’t a word in my Thesaurus that works as well.

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