Skip to content

Local grifter suffers another setback

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Local Grifter John Scott, who has represented John Scott in the legislature for the past year or so, suffered yet another setback recently.

I reported back in January of 2015 that John, an insurance agent who had a contract with UConn to sell health insurance to students, had selflessly (or is that selfishly?) proposed a bill that would have required UConn students to buy his insurance, even if they were entitled to free insurance through Medicaid. Unfortunately, John wasn’t able to convince those nasty Democrats about the justice of his constituent’s cause, proving at the start that he’s not a terribly effective legislator. Let us give thanks for that.

Yesterday, we learned that John suffered yet another setback. He really could use some face time with Ben Carson:

A Freedom of Information Commission hearing officer has dismissed a complaint filed last year by state Rep. John Scott against the Poquonnock Bridge Fire District.

Scott filed the complaint in August 2015, saying the district held an illegal meeting about purchasing property and casualty insurance.

Scott owns Bailey Agencies Insurance, which had provided insurance to the fire district for about 20 years.

The district switched insurance carriers in August.

A hearing officer issued a decision on Feb. 18 in favor of the fire district and recommended the complaint be dismissed. The commission is scheduled to consider the matter on March 23.

Scott said Friday he would let the matter rest.

“I don’t agree with the decision, but I’m not going to pursue it,” he said.

Ron Yuhas, vice president of the fire district, said the complaint cost the district about $8,000 in attorney’s fees.

via The New London Day

John is definitely looking out for number one. Now, don’t be fooled by the fact that the New London Day reported this story. They will never refer to it again. Dave Collins, one of their columnists, has been on a jihad against Andy Maynard ever since Andy suffered a brain injury in an auto accident. His constituents re-elected Andy to the Senate in full knowledge of that fact. Andy suffers from dysphasia. Even after he announced his intention not to seek reelection, Collins has continued to hector him, and the Day even had the bad taste to get him on the phone and mock his inability to speak correctly. But the Day has become a Republican rag, and the fact that John Scott, who is, need I say, a Republican, represents only himself, while it must be reported once, will not be considered a story worth pursuing.

Filed in Grifters, Local issues, Media | | Comments (0)

Economics made easy

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The folks, alas a “bipartisan” group, supporting the Trans Pacific Partnership have been touting a “study” by the Peterson Institute for International Economics that purports to show that everything will be rosy if we ultimately pass the treaty.

We have a prejorative term in the legal profession that is applied to some judges. (Scalia comes to mind) It is “results oriented”. A judge is results oriented if he or she basically decides how they want a case to turn out and then figures out a rationale, no matter how specious, for arriving at the chosen destination. Bush v. Gore comes to mind. But Scalia had nothing on the Peterson Institute. Apparently they proved that nothing bad could happen by assuming nothing bad would happen:

Optimistic claims about the TPP’s economic impacts are largely based on economic modeling projections published by the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.2 Its researchers used a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to project net GDP gains for all countries involved. These figures have been widely cited in many countries to justify TPP approval and ratification. Updated estimates, released in early 2016 and incorporated into the World Bank’s latest report on the global economy,3 now stress income gains for the United States of $131 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP, and a 9.1 percent increase in exports by 2030.4

The projections methodology assumes away critical economic problems and boosts economic growth estimates with unfounded assumptions. The assumption of full employment is particularly problematic. Workers will inevitably be displaced due to the TPP, but CGE modelers assume that all dismissed workers will be promptly rehired elsewhere in the national economy as if part of labor ‘churning’. The full-employment assumption thus inflates projected GDP gains by assuming away job losses and adjustment costs.

The modelers also dismiss increases in inequality by assuming no changes to wage and profit shares of national income. Again, this is not supported by empirical evidence, as past trade agreements have tended to reduce labor’s share.

Finally, foreign direct investment (FDI) is assumed to increase dramatically, which contributes a significant boost to economic growth in the Peterson Institute projections, accounting for more than 25 percent of projected U.S. economic gains in the recent update. This assumes that: 1) income to capital owners will be invested; and 2) this will result in broad-based growth. Neither is supported by the evidence. A U.S. Department of Agriculture study,5 which did not assume such FDI-related investment gains, found zero growth for the United States and very modest growth elsewhere at best.

The methodology of the Peterson study is flawed; consequently, growth and income gains are overstated, and the costs to working people, consumers and governments are understated, ignored or even presented as benefits. Job losses and declining or stagnant labor incomes are excluded from consideration, even though they lower economic growth by reducing aggregate demand.

via Naked Capitalism

The report, of course, is taken seriously in our Nation’s Capital and will be swallowed whole by the Beltway media. This sort of reminds me of Paul Ryan’s way of doing things. You know, where he tells the Congressional Budget Office to assess his budgets making ridiculous assumptions:

But Rep. Ryan actually boasts a history of using gimmicks and trickery to make his tax numbers work. When he released his “Roadmap for America’s Future” several years ago, claiming it would balance the budget and eliminate the debt, he relied on one very key assumption—that his enormous tax cuts for the rich would nevertheless result in a stable amount of federal revenue. Sound familiar? In fact, when he submitted his plan to the Congressional Budget Office for official review, he explicitly told them to make the same assumption, ignoring the actual revenue effects of his proposals. Lo and behold, when the CBO score came back, it looked remarkably similar to Rep. Ryan’s own projections.

via Center for America Progress

Ryan is still considered a serious guy. The Peterson Institute’s study will continue to be cited with respect. Maybe we deserve Donald Trump.

Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

Say, what?!?!

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

I have been getting most of my news for more than 15 years now by cruising the net, rather than relying on newspapers. I remember reading Matt Yglesias in those very early days, and he always seemed like a guy who had his head screwed on right. Not so much, anymore, at least judging by something I read today. Maybe this is just some sloppy thinking on his part, which he’d delete if given a second chance.

Trump is winning because he understands that the 2016 race is about the very definition of America itself. For candidates like Rubio — following the pace set by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — it’s about embracing a new, more diverse, more tolerant country. For Trumpers, it’s precisely the opposite. They want to put the Obama genie back in the bottle and fight vigorously for the traditional notion of Americanness, at home and abroad, even if it means jettisoning some of the GOP donor class’s ideological bugaboos.

via Vox (Emphasis added)

What? In what way is Rubio “embracing a new, more diverse, more tolerant country”? He was a tea party darling when he got elected, and that set of bigoted puppets is not about tolerance or diversity. Let us count the people that he hates. That would be immigrants (despite a long abandoned fling at cooperating on immigration reform), gays, women who want to control their own bodies, voters (and we all know what voters he’s thinking about), and workers. Who have I missed? Rubio is not opposing Donald Trump by drawing a humanitarian contrast between his positions and Trump’s; he’s trying to prove that he can deliver the hate better, sometimes arguing that he got there first.

There is no Republican candidate that is embracing tolerance. Tolerance doesn’t sell in the GOP, and it hasn’t since Nixon went with his Southern Strategy. We all know that the press has accused both sides of those bad things, you know, obstruction, partisanship, etc., when only one side is guilty. We really must draw the line at attempts to claim that both sides are trying to embrace the better angels of their nature, if only the big bad Donald didn’t stand in their way. The Republican Party does not do tolerance. It does not like diversity. It is the party of hate; Donald Trump is proving that, and Rubio is doing nothing more than claiming that he can deliver the goods better than the Donald.

Filed in Media, Republicans | | Comments (0)

What a wonderful idea!

Monday, February 29, 2016

There are few people more fascinated with technology than me, though I definitely defer to fellow Dem Lon Seidman on that score. So, how could I resist this modern miracle:

By connecting its latest water pitcher to the Internet, Brita is hoping you’ll never again stretch a filter too thin.

The Brita Infinity is $45 water pitcher with built-in Wi-Fi for connecting to home networks. It’s the first to hook up with Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service, which can automatically order product refills as supplies run low. In Brita’s case, Amazon sends out a new filter whenever the old one nears its 40-gallon filtering limit.

Each replacement filter costs $5.99, automatically billed to the user’s Amazon account. To Brita’s credit, that’s only a buck or two more on average than a big multi-pack of filters. Perhaps the company is hoping Amazon’s service will lead to more frequent refills (or planning to raise prices down the road once users are hooked on the convenience).

via TechHive

Nothing I want connected to my home network as much as a water pitcher. And to think, the filters only cost a few bucks more than if I ordered them myself and I honestly do trust Amazon and Brita to order the filters only when I actually need them. Just like I always run out and buy a new cartridge for my laser printer as soon as I get that message that the cartridge is running low. I mean why take a chance when it could run out completely in a month or so?

Filed in Computer Stuff | | Comments (0)

Getting ready for Hillary

Monday, February 29, 2016

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, and unless I miss my bet, by the end of the day, it will be well nigh mathematically impossible for Bernie to get the nomination. The fix has been in for a while, given the existence of Super delegates, who are there to make sure that you and I have a limited voice in choosing our presidential candidate. Even if Bernie comes out somewhat ahead tomorrow, his path to the nomination is all but blocked.

There’s been some talk about the possibility that Democrats won’t close ranks around the eventual victor (or should that be victress). See here for example, and Hillary boosters like Krugman (for whom I still have a great deal of respect, despite his flirtations with intellectual dishonesty on Hillary’s behalf) are intent on having us believe that Bernie backers are wild eyed radicals who constantly question the honesty of their intraparty opposition, while Hillary backer are, what else, Very Serious People.

So far, I’ve met no one among my fellow Democrats who would refuse to vote for the candidate they currently oppose, nor have I met anyone who usually mans the phones, etc., that has said they will refuse to work for either candidate. I’m sure there are such people, but I hope and believe they are a tiny fraction of the electorate. Here’s hoping that when and if the time comes, Bernie will bow out gracefully and give Hillary his full-throated support. She doesn’t deserve it, but we do.

I’ll support Hillary. I’ll even give her money, though with all that Wall Street dough coming her way I’m not sure she’ll need it. She is a deeply flawed candidate, who promises to continue us on each path that Obama has wrongly chosen, while probably leading us down new ones we should fear to tread. The .01% will have nothing to complain about should she get elected, nor will the neocons. When she started this campaign she promised to listen, which she’s done. But she listens harder to the folks who pay those speaking fees, and when it comes to doing more than listening, well, in this case past performance is a sure indicator of future performance. Nonetheless, she’s all we’ll have to stop the Donald, and that’s of paramount importance. There is every reason to believe she’s reverting to the Goldwater girl of old, but Goldwater was a progressive compared to the crop of crypto-fascists that are on offer from the ex-party of Lincoln.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see a way through to a true progressive Renaissance with Hillary as president. We’ll have Debbie Wasserman Shultz or a clone heading the DNC; we’ll have Steve Israel or a clone recruiting closet Republicans to force on local Democrats, which candidates will continue to lose as they have reliably done in the past. The party will likely continue to drift right, not because that’s where the votes are, but because that’s where the money is.

Filed in Democrats | | Comments (0)

Proof positive, Trump’s a real Republican

Friday, February 26, 2016

There have been a lot of charges against Donald Trump. Many on the right have accused him of not being a real Republican (after all, he had good words to say about Planned Parenthood!!). Some on the left even harbor some hope that, if elected, Trump will do an about face and revert to some of his long ago “beliefs”, such as single payer (assuming he even knows what that means).

Well, Marco Rubio put all these questions to rest last night, when he convincingly argued that Trump is, indeed, a real Republican:

Rubio, the leading aggressor during the debate, picked up where he left off Friday morning. In several television interviews, he questioned Trump’s business background, his ability to lead the nation, and repeatedly called the billionaire businessman a “con artist” who has spent decades “sticking it to the little guy.”

via Daily Kos

Trump couldn’t be more Republican. The Republicans have been spending decades sticking it to the little guy too! Trump fits right in. The fact that the little guy doesn’t know who’s sticking it to him doesn’t change the facts. The Republican Establishment can relax now. Trump is just another mainstream Republican, and if he can get elected by speaking directly, rather than in code, they can hardly take offense at that. In fact, my guess is that soon we’ll see other Republicans putting aside the dog whistle and being loud and proud about their various bigotries. After all, the point has always been to mislead the rubes into voting against their own interests, and if Trump’s method is effective, and it appears to be, there’s no reason to think he won’t have imitators.

But Rubio made a few other points, all of which prove that Trump is a good Republican. True, not every Republican has a business background, but those that do are usually in the Trump tradition. And so far as ability to lead the nation, no matter how badly Trump performs, he’d have a tough time doing any worse than any Republican president since 1980, and that includes the sainted Reagan, who specialized in sticking it to the little guy (massive inequality began on his watch), running the economy into the ground, and selling weapons to Iran. Turns out poor leadership is also a Republican strong point! 

And as for con-artists: Rick Santorum, Ben Carson, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee, to name just the most recent. 

So, is Trump a real Republican? Sure looks like it. Oh, by the way by no means am I implying that Rubio and Cruz aren’t Republicans. For instance, they measure up to Trump, except, being younger, they haven’t spent as many decades sticking it to the little guy. 

Filed in Republicans | | Comments (0)

Rubio, the moderate 

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Paul Krugman noted recently that Rubio, the establishment choice and media darling, is hardly the moderate they are so desperately trying to make him out to be. He’s all they’ve got left, and he’s only hanging on by a thread. They still can’t bring themselves to cast Cruz in the “moderate” mold, and Kasich is too laughable to hang their hopes on. Should Rubio flame out, we might very well be told that Cruz is, in fact, the moderate choice. It is essential for their narrative that at least one Republican fill that role, because we all know that both parties are being pulled apart at the extremes; the Democrats by a guy indistinguishable from FDR, the Republicans by a guy indistinguishable from Adolph Hitler.

But I digress. Back to Rubio. Krugman highlights his extremism well, but I think there’s a good way to highlight the ever rightward drift of the political center as perceived by our betters. Ask yourself this: In what substantive way does Rubio differ from Rick Santorum? Santorum, in years past, never made it into the ranks of the moderates, but, had he managed to grift his way into the front of the pack this year, he might very well have. He hasn’t changed. But the laws of partisan equivalency demands that there be moderates in both parties, so the definition of that term becomes ever more fluid and the goalposts keep moving.

The probability is that the punditocracy, in converting Rubio to a moderate, is only getting in shape for the heavy lifting they’ll need to do once Trump gets the nomination. Once that happens, they will desperately search his record and utterances for signs of moderation. We’ll see newspaper stories about things he said 20 or 30 years ago that prove that he’s not the extremist he’s painting himself to be. Oh, and PS, should Bernie overcome the superdelegate fix, there will be no such coverage of him. He will always remain a wide eyed radical. That’s the asymmetry that has driven this nation ever rightward.

Filed in Presidential Politics | | Comments (0)

White male beats the odds

Monday, February 22, 2016

Times are tough for white males these days. They just don’t get no respect.

Take serial murders, which unlike sports such as basketball, is totally dominated by white males. Time was that so long as you took two or three people down, you could count on front page headlines and a moment of fame far longer than the standard 15 minutes.

Not any more. Unless you play your cards right, a mass killing that would have been front page news years ago, might not even make it into the national papers and might struggle to garner headlines in local rags that no one even reads.

So congrats to Jason Dalton for beating the odds. Dalton, who is not a terrorist, by the way, seeing that he’s (apparently) not Muslim, made it to the front page of the New York Times. He realized that stories about gunmen killing people in theaters or in a workplace that left them disgruntled are old hat. Sure, you can still make the front page with those kinds of shootings, but it takes extra effort and an extra high body count. Dalton realized that just picking people totally at random was something new, guaranteed to get him his 15 minutes and more, so long as he got a reasonable body count.

Of course, he could never have done it if the victims hadn’t been so cooperative. If they’d all been packing heat, as the NRA-if it feels the need to respond at all- will tell us, they could have defended themselves. What could be easier than shooting first when someone picks you out at random? The streets would be a lot safer if each of us carried a gun and shot first at anyone who might possibly be thinking of causing us harm. “Us” meaning white people of course. There’s no need to get carried away, after all.

UPDATE: Looks like Dalton’s 15 minutes are up. 

Filed in Crazies | | Comments (0)

Trump, the sometime soothsayer

Monday, February 15, 2016

A case can be made that of all the Republican candidates, Trump is the lesser liar of them all.

Hear me out.

There are certain lies that have become so ingrained in the Republican psyche that they have become articles of faith. There is objective truth, and there is Republican truth. No one, not even the “moderate” John Kasich, challenges these articles of faith. Trump takes many of them on directly and forcefully.

All the world knows that George Bush and his administration lied us into a disastrous war in Iraq. All the world, that is, except for Republicans. All the world knows that the World Trade Center was destroyed on George Bush’s watch, and most of the world also knows that he and his administration ignored warnings from their predecessors about Al Qaeda. All the world, except Republicans and compromised Beltway insiders.

Trump isn’t just telling Republicans what all the rest of the world knows, he’s rubbing their noses in it.

And it’s not just Iraq. Trump is also closer to the truth on other foreign policy issues, and despite the bombast, he’s the least inclined to get us into a war in the Mideast. At least words are coming out of his mouth to that effect. Meanwhile, the other candidates cling to the lies (and I would guess that a certain HRC would cling to the one about not knowing Saddam didn’t have WMDs). It’s not just Republicans, it’s also official Beltway dogma: sure, there were no WMDs, but Bush, Cheney and the rest of the criminals truly believed there were, and there was no one who felt otherwise. Witness Joe Klein at Time telling us:

And then he [Trump] launched himself into cloud-cuckooland by asserting that Bush had knowingly lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He “lied us into war…” was, I think, the Trumpian term of art. This is a position that only the left of the left has entertained. The truth is, the U.S. intelligence community was absolutely convinced Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, but not so certain about nuclear capability. The Bush Administration—especially the Cheney-Rumsfeld phalanx—did many questionable and some outright sordid things, but they went to war actually thinking there were WMD in Iraq. It was still one of the two or three worst decisions ever made by an American president, but the casus belli wasn’t faked.

via Time

Klein was a pro-war liberal, who ignored the many voices who were saying at the time that the evidence was fabricated, or at best weak, and he’s heavily invested in covering up his own complicity in legitimizing the war. Here’s someone who knows better:

The actual history is that Iraq had disarmed and the Bush-43 administration did everything it could to prevent the UN from verifying that disarmament so that the draconian sanctions would continue on Iraq indefinitely and could lead to a “regime change” war. [See my time line: accuracy.org/iraq.]

But many Republican candidates and neoconservative ideologues don’t want to give up the false history. The worthies at the Weekly Standard now write: “Interviewers should press Trump on this: What evidence does Trump have that George W. Bush and his top advisers knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? How many other government officials does Trump believe were in on the deception? What does Trump believe would have been the point of such a lie, since the truth would soon come out?”

In fact, it’s quite provable that the Bush administration lied about Iraqi WMDs before the invasion. I know, I helped document such lies at the Institute for Public Accuracy, where I work, before the 2003 invasion:

In October, 2002, John R. MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, noted: “Recently, Bush cited an IAEA report that Iraq was ‘six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.’ The IAEA responded that not only was there no new report, ‘there’s never been a report’ asserting that Iraq was six months away from constructing a nuclear weapon.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what was knowable at the time. See other such news releases from before the invasion: “White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit” and “Bush’s War Case: Fiction vs. Facts at Accuracy.org/bush” and “U.S. Credibility Problems” and “Tough Questions for Bush on Iraq Tonight.”

via Sam Husseini at Consortium News

I remember those days all too clearly. It wasn’t hard to find people with credentials who said that Bush was cooking the books. So, oddly enough, on Iraq and a host of other issues, Trump is the sole truth teller in a cadre of liars. This is not to say he always tells the truth. Far from it. But compared to the competition, he is George Washington himself. Well, not really, but he still sometimes tells the truth, which is unusual for a Republican. I have no idea what he would do as president, but this one fact gives some (extremely) meager grounds for hope that he wouldn’t be the disaster everyone expects.

Filed in Republicans | | Comments (0)

Ding Dong, Scalia’s dead

Saturday, February 13, 2016

My wife tells me I’m not the first person to hark back to the Wizard of Oz today, but since I thought of it before she told me that I can still say it was original with me. Sort of.

Anyway, predicting what is going to happen going forward is far too easy. I would bet my much reduced 401k on Scalia’s seat still being empty on January 20, 2017. The situation reminds me a bit of LBJ’s attempt to replace a retiring Earl Warren in 1968, as his own term drew to a close. History would have been far different had he been successful.

Political junkies have been painfully aware over the last several elections that the Supreme Court is the most important, though rarely mentioned, issue. Now it will be front and center, and hopefully it will, on our side, assure that the rabid Bernie and Hillary supporters will come together when the insiders hand the nomination to Hillary. It’s wrong. Obama should get the next choice. But he won’t. It will be either Hillary, Bernie, or one of the insane folks in the clown car. It’s a republic, or it’s a plutocracy, and this nomination could be the decider.

Filed in Politics | | Comments (0)