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JJB Dinner

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

My wife and I joined 4 other Southeastern Connecticut Liberal Drinkers at the JJB Dinner last night, where we ate really palatable food and listened to select politicians blather on. Actually, the featured speaker, Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, gave a very entertaining keynote speech, capped off by an auction of his bolo tie for the benefit of the Connecticut Democrats. It fetched around $3,500.00, if memory serves, though I may have gotten distracted toward the end. I happened to be standing when the bidding started, and one of my tablemates was kind enough to urge me to sit, or I might own the thing right now.

A few pictures. Here’ are the Liberal Drinkers (minus me) with sometime Liberal Drinker Senator Andy Maynard and (she says) future Liberal Drinker (and union activist) Nancy Driscoll (on the right).

And here are the full contingent of “cts”, CTblue (me), CtBlogger, and CTBob. You can see why I prefer to remain behind the camera.


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A chance for Dodd to step up

Monday, June 1, 2009

We live in an era in which a sense of shame is for wusses. The banks and their trading partners created a world wide financial crisis, primarily through the use of unregulated financial instruments, such as credit default swaps. In the process they made a lot of money, much of which is up in smoke, replaced by taxpayer money. Anyone with any sense of shame or decency would be somewhat chastened. Not the bankers. According to the Times, they are in full lobbying mode (indirectly, of course, paid with our money) to defeat meaningful regulation of derivatives.

The method of choice is the old stand-bye: the build in loophole; the exception that swallows up the rule. According to the banks, some credit default swaps are so “customized” they can’t be priced on the open market. Therefore, rather than the obvious solution of banning such swaps altogether, they propose allowing things to remain just as they are for such swaps. As Senator Harkin points out, suddenly every CDS will be customized. The banks also want these instruments traded through an institution that is essentially a captive creature of the banks, all the better to escape meaningful oversight.

What’s galling, of course, is that the banks are trying to preserve financial instruments that yielded phony profits. Credit default swaps are like insurance contracts, except in the case of the CDS, the company took in the premiums, but when it came time to pay off, the taxpayers paid the bill. In the end there would have been no, or little profit, had the bailout never happened (look who got the money we funneled through AIG) and even with taxpayer help, as a bookkeeping matter, companies like AIG lost big time on these instruments. But the folks who packaged them- well, that’s a different story. They got fat paychecks and fat bonuses. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the banks (on behalf of their shareholders) that are doing the lobbying, it’s the bankers (on behalf of their paychecks).

This is where the rubber meets the road, and it’s an opportunity for Chris Dodd, who should be in the thick of this, to prove his bona fides. As is typical with Geithner, Obama’s terrible pick for treasury secretary, the Administration’s proposal is half hearted.

In truth, the recent credit card legislation, for which Dodd gets credit, was pretty feeble; it mainly requires that the credit card companies tell us in simple language exactly how they’re screwing us and stops some particularly egregious practices, but without rate limitations it doesn’t afford much real relief. The credit card issue was important, but this issue is bigger by several magnitudes, and if they don’t get the regulations right, we’ll soon be back where we are now, only in worse shape. If Dodd wants to show he’s for real, this would be an excellent place to start. Real, effective regulation of these financial instruments, along with outright banning some of them, is critically important. If Dodd can bring that about, then he’ll have accomplished something worth bragging about.


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Making Groton Look Good

Sunday, May 31, 2009

I’ve railed in the past against the Groton Town Council’s penchant for granting tax breaks to hotels. In the most recent case, they granted a tax abatement to a hotel developer who had forgotten to ask for an incentive before he built his hotel. Not to worry, the Council voted to give him his incentive after the building was complete. I’m generally opposed to these special tax breaks, but in the case of hotels they seem doubly objectionable. Hotels are built where they people are; a developer can’t threaten to take a hotel proposed for Mystic and build it in South Carolina. One would think that logic would apply in spades to a hotel planned for the Disneyland environs.

But no (via Atrios):

The Anaheim City Council voted Tuesday to extend a $76.3-million tax break to a developer to build two Disney-operated luxury hotels, despite strong opposition from a council member, community activists and union members who called the deal a corporate handout.

The council voted 3 to 1 to make up to 15 years of assistance payments to GardenWalk Hotel I, LLC, the developer planning to build two, 12-story hotels with 866 rooms for $242.4 million. The payments would begin once the hotels began operation.

So this is not just a tax break, in essence the City is becoming an investor:

Keyser Marston Associates, a real estate consultant hired by the city, concluded in a report that “the proposed hotel cannot be constructed or operated without economic assistance, and that the assistance is warranted because the costs are estimated to exceed the owners’ ability to finance the project.”

If one accepts free market principles, the owner’s inability to finance the project means either that the project is not feasible, or the owner is too big a risk. Even if neither is true, note that this is not just a tax break, the town will be making payments to this developer, meaning it is favoring one hotel over the others that clutter up Anaheim.

Sounds like the dreaded socialism, doesn’t it? But, that’s not the case, according to the head of the Orange County Visitor and Convention Center; this is just business as usual:

Charles Ahlers, president of the Orange County Visitor and Convention Bureau, told the council that the incentive was needed to bring more first-class hotel rooms, and supported the subsidy.

“A subsidy is the normal course of doing business,” he said.

Apparently, socialism is bad only when it helps normal people. Now, it’s true that Anaheim derives a lot of revenue from hotel taxes, but in this case it is not clear that the revenue will match the outgo. In any event, if the developer (which expects to have Disney operate the hotels) had to scale its plans back to something for which it could get financing, Anaheim would get tax revenue without a countervailing expense.

This reminds me somewhat of a developer who, during my tenure, came to the Groton Council seeking an abatement, telling us he wanted us to “share the risk”. He never offered to share the profits. Our sole incentive was that somewhere down the road he would pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else.

It looks like the Anaheim City council has basically agreed to “share the risk” but not the rewards. If things go well, they get only the taxes to which they would be entitled in any event; if things go poorly they have no recourse. In the normal world of finance, an investor shares both the risks and rewards, but in the topsy turvy world of corporate socialism, the taxpayer shoulders the risks, and the corporations reap all the rewards.


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Take the Oath

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Entirely optional of course, this being a secular humanist sort of thing.


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Friday Night Music-Radiohead

Friday, May 29, 2009

My son is staying with us for a few days, and I asked him to suggest a video, and he directed me to Radiohead’s video of “House of Cards”. It is unclear if this video breaks the no lip synching rule, since it’s somewhat sui generis. Here’s how it was made:

In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards”, no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

Here’s the video itself:

And here’s a brief video about the making of the video:


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Groton Hearts Dodd, by a slim margin

Friday, May 29, 2009

Yesterday the Groton Democratic Town Committee adopted a resolution I authored supporting Dodd. The vote was close, there being three Merrick Alpert fans on the committee (including Merrick), and a number of people who voted no because they felt it was too early to endorse anyone, though I carefully avoided the word “endorsed” in the resolution.

Given the potential for acrimony, the debate was relatively friendly, though I must admit that I have very little patience with politicians who try to use their military experience as a trump card. It appears that Merrick fought in Bosnia for the right to hold elections, and somehow a Groton Democratic Town Committee vote supporting Dodd undermined his war effort and endangers free elections in this country. Apparently, it is undemocratic for the Democrats to express their opinions.

Speaking of Dodd, he’ll be coming to Groton on July 25th for a fundraiser for our committee. Time and place to be announced; we’re still calling around to find a good place.

UPDATE: Amazing how these things get around.


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The memes keep on a coming

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Yet another right wing meme has sprung up about Sonia Sotomayor. Her alleged high reversal rate in the Supreme Court proves that she is far too radical to be on that court. Nate Silver demolishes math here.

But I suggest that it’s wrong to buy into the basic premise. First, from a purely partisan point of view, there’s not much reason for any Democrat to want a judge with whom the present Supreme Court agrees. One of the reasons it was so important to get a new president was because it was a necessary condition precedent to getting a new court. The Supreme Court is the only court in the country from which there is no appeal, so the fact is that the judges on that court can vote any way they please. Sotomayor, from what I’ve read in the last few days, is a judge who has adhered pretty strictly to precedent. As an lower rung judge it is her obligation to do so. That is not quite the case for a Supreme Court judge. We must all fervently pray that she disagrees with the current majority more than she agrees.

The fact that three of her five cases that the Supreme Court reviewed were reversed is therefore not troubling. What we should be more concerned about is the fact that two of her decisions were upheld.

Okay, the above is a bit facetious. I don’t know anything about the cases in question, nor do I know who constituted the majorities in any of those cases. It may be that she was reversed by the four “liberals” plus Kennedy, which might in fact be troubling. Of course, the folks attacking her on this score have not been interested in doing that analysis either. What I can say in all seriousness is that we should definitely not buy into the argument that a high reversal rate should be considered somehow disqualifying. Given the present extreme right-wing make-it-up-as-you-go-along Supreme Court (see, e.g., Bush v. Gore) a high reversal rate should be expected for any fair minded judge who adheres to settled precedent.

On a somewhat different note, why is it that the media (example here, but I’ve seen others I’m too tired to locate) gives valuable space to Wendy Long, of the Judicial Confirmation Network, a person who can say the following, apparently with a straight face:

Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, said Sotomayor “has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court.”

The “current liberal activist Supreme Court” – the Bush v Gore court- the corporations can do no wrong court, is without a doubt the most reactionary court we have had in about a hundred years. No serious person can doubt this. Yet these remarks are printed uncritically. It’s a bit like passing along a quote to the effect that the world is flat without pausing to remark that the statement is unquestionably false.


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A trip down memory lane

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

I was perusing a front page article in the Globe this morning (co-written by a brilliant young reporter who coincidentally shares my last name), and I noted that Republicans are taking offense at the idea that someone’s life story should be considered in determining his or her fitness for the bench:

Obama, however, was quickly challenged by critics who contended she was picked more for her personal story – and her gender and ethnicity – than her legal credentials.

Now, hypocrisy is a bi-partisan disease in Washington, and memories are notoriously short, but let us hearken back to the confirmation of a man who was one of the objectively least qualified nominees to the Supreme Court bench ever. In what was surely one of the most cynical nominations ever, the first Bush nominated a right wing opportunist to replace Thurgood Marshall, a true civil rights hero.

As always, the hearings revolved around abortion. This was at about the time when the Democrats finally began to realize that abortion could be a winning issue for them; though they never really had the guts or brains to mount a full throated attack on the American Taliban. Thomas, of course, was clearly anti-abortion, and just as clearly wanted to avoid saying so. His strategy was to talk about his rags to riches rise (so far as I know, he never got around to explaining why he decided to kick the ladder to the ground after he made it to the top). For instance, when confronted with a quote in which he clearly endorsed an anti-abortion screed, he preferred to talk about his background:

In responding to Senator Biden’s question, Judge Thomas also made a point to mention his grandfather and mother several times. Part of the White House strategy in the hearings is for Judge Thomas to talk as much as possible about his rise from poverty.

Those of us who lived through those hearings remember that strategy well. Thomas cast himself as the victim of racism (by the way, he apparently feels he was the last such victim) whenever anyone questioned his views, and, whenever possible, he would talk about his personal story. Given the time and his color he effectively cowed the Senate Democrats, who were deathly afraid of being pictured as racists, much to the delight of the Republican racists that nominated Thomas and expected exactly that reaction from the Democrats. Thomas, of course, dwelt on his story prior to the time that affirmative action got him into Yale Law School, and prior to the time that he signed on with Ronald Reagan to try to destroy affirmative action for those still mired in the poverty he escaped. He also stopped the story prior to the time he sexually harassed Anita Hill, and when that came out his nomination was temporarily derailed, but she was easily smeared and the tawdry excuse for a judge got his confirmation, and has gone on to be exactly the right wing judge we all expected.

Thankfully, there’s more to Sotomayor than a good story, and she stacks up well beside Thomas.

Thomas was judged minimally qualified by the American Bar Association. Expect that Sotomayor will earn their highest accolade. She is being unsuccessfully criticized for saying that she can still empathize with the less fortunate; he has never been accused of that particular “failing”. Her life story is icing on the cake. His life story was all the cake there was.


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Prop 8 upheld

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The California Supreme Court, as expected, upheld the validity of Proposition 8. A quick reading: before we held that same sex couples were constitutionally entitled to the legal use of the term “marriage” to describe the legal relationship to which they, along with opposite sex couples were entitled to enter. I.e., civil unions with the same rights and responsibilities of marriage just wouldn’t do. Now we hold that it’s not really that important what you call it. The majority can deprive the minority of the right to call themselves “married”, so long, as they haven’t deprived them of any other substantive rights. In other words, so long as same sex couples can enter into domestic partnerships with all the legal incidents of marriage, everything is hunky dory. It has to walk like a duck and talk like a duck, but you don’t have to call it a duck.

I wonder if they would have felt the same way if, in some topsy turvy world, a majority of the states voters had decided that only same sex couples could legally be called “married”. That’s a question, I assume, that must forever remain a conjecture.

On his show tonight Olbermann suggested the case might go to the U.S. Supreme Court. If I’m not mistaken, the case was litigated entirely with reference to the California Constitution, and it’s pretty clear that it would be a major mistake to try to establish the right to same sex marriage in the federal courts. At the moment, the best you could hope for is a five to four loss on the rather narrow issue facing the California court. Worst case: the court grabs the opportunity to declare that same sex couples don’t have any constitutionally protected interests at all. You easily have four votes for that position on the present court. Best to leave this issue percolating in the states, particularly because it looks like the state legislatures in many states are giving the concept a stamp of legitimacy that no court can give. It’s a lot harder for the right to attack a legislative enactment as illegitimate (though, of course, they will) than a judicial decision.


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Obama’s pick

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Obama has picked Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. I don’t know much about her, so I have no opinion about her legal philosophy, although she certainly appears to have the paper credentials. Of course, so did Alito and Roberts, though I’m sure we can be confident that she won’t be fellow travelers with them on the road to the 19th century.

I’m more interested in what this appointment has to say about Obama. Of all the names being bandied about, it was Sotomayor that drew the most opposition, for reasons it’s hard to fathom, since she is apparently no more liberal than the others mentioned as possibilities. Maybe it was just reflexive racism, but as soon as her name surfaced, the whispering campaign began in earnest, and very serious people counseled Obama not to nominate her, given the blow that would be to the spirit of bi-partisanship abroad in the land. It’s important, recall, for a moderate to liberal president to assuage the extreme right, though an extreme right president was never expected to moderate his choices (and never had to).

The fact that Obama decided to go with Sotomayor speaks well for him. He took the Republicans up on their implicit challenge, and once again, if my guess proves true, he will have shown himself to be an astute politician, able to see as many moves ahead as a chess grandmaster. He just continues to run rings around them, or to paraphrase Hamlet, he “delve[s] one yard below their mines, and blow[s] them at the moon.” The more they oppose her, the more they are likely to lose, looking more and more like what they are: the party of white racists. In the end, no matter what they do, she will be confirmed. They may raise some money off the fight, and they may temporarily energize their dwindling base, but they will lose where it counts. Obama wins in another way; this sweeps the absurd Guantanamo controversy off the front page and out of the discourse. Everyone knows the beltway crowd is too stupid to follow two issues at once.

I know some pundits are saying the Republicans will quickly back off, but I’m not sure they can afford to alienate their base by doing so, and I’m not sure they can stop themselves even if they know they should. It’s not like they’re particularly good at avoiding self destructive behavior. But either way, in the end, Obama wins and he’s shown them that he’s not going to be pushed around.

Now, if only Scalia would get elected Pope or something, we’d be on our way to a decent court.

UPDATE and ASIDE: I can’t let this subject go without mentioning the fact that John Yoo is opposed to Sontomayor because-get this-she is guilty of “results oriented” jurisprudence. For the non-lawyers who may not be sure of the meaning of the term, “results oriented” refers to legal analysis that begins with a desired result and then comes up with a rationale to achieve that result.

Generally speaking, those with whom we disagree engage in “result oriented” legal analysis, while those with whom we agree are original legal thinkers. That’s human nature.

In fact, every judge engages in at least a bit of results oriented behavior, but if one wanted to teach a course on the subject, Yoo’s torture memos would be the example par excellence of results oriented legal work.


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