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A bit about Biden

Thursday, April 27, 2023

It’s my understanding that Joe Biden isn’t terribly popular. He is with me, though in all truth in a perfect world I’d be happy if he was replaced by someone a lot younger, but given current realities, he is our bulwark against fascism, and, give him credit, he seems to understand that. He’s done better than I thought he would. In particular he has apparently long given up on his campaign prediction that the post-Trump Republicans would have a come to Jesus moment.

The fact that he is not overwhelmingly popular is not surprising. I think he has flaws similar to those I perceived in Ned Lamont. He seems to think that the job of the president is to do the job of being president, and not spending your time telling everyone how great you are. Lamont did a decent job as governor from the day he was elected, but his numbers were not great. I think the COVID crisis was good for him, because it actually got through to people that he had done a good job responding to it. But still, as a self promoter, he wasn’t great, and neither is Biden.

The genius, on the other hand, couldn’t stop bragging about what a terrible great job he was doing, and of course the press dutifully covered his boasts. Perhaps they didn’t endorse them, but they certainly helped spread them. He also had Republican flunkies that continually sang his praises, while Democrats don’t do that sort of thing. Far be it from them to try to influence the narrative.

Lucky for us and for Biden, the probabilities are that the Republicans will be so unpopular by 2024 that he’ll have no problem getting re-elected, though you never know. Right now the Republicans are doing their best, and it is unquestionably their intent, to tank the economy and blame the results on Biden. It might work, unless the Democrats finally learn something about pushing their message.

After I wrote the above I happened on this post at Crooks and Liars. Here’s the relevant quote:

The unemployment rate is now at its lowest since 1969. According to recent GDP data, the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Trump knows this. Democrats are not very good at messaging. If Trump had accomplished that, he would post about it daily while shouting the numbers from the rooftops.

So, someone out there agrees with me.

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Good news today

Monday, April 24, 2023

So, Tucker Carlson has been fired by Fox. It truly couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I’ve read all kinds of speculation about why Fox canned him, with the weight of the evidence seeming to be that he documented his hypocrisy in texts and emails, which included criticisms of Fox management for not consistently lying to its audience because, for instance, it accurately called the election for Biden. It is extremely unlikely that they are firing him for lying to their audience, since he might very well have been less of a liar than the likes of Maria Bartiromo.

It will be interesting to see where he goes from here. Will he stoop to going to OAN or one of the other fringe purveyors of right wing filth, or will he try to go back to pretending to be a responsible conservative like he played on MSNBC? There may be an opening at CNN, whose CEO has been trying to move right. I don’t think he’d have any problem condemning the filth he pushed at Fox, since, after all, he was just asking questions.

It will also be interesting to see who Fox finds to replace him. When he took over for Bill O’Reilly I actually thought he’d be unable to fill O’Reilly’s shoes. I was wrong about that, as he was both more toxic and more popular than the loofah/falafel guy. I’m sure there’s someone out there who can out-Tucker Tucker, and you can be sure Fox will find him. (My bet is that it will definitely be a him.)

Afterword: After writing the above, I heard that the likely reason for his firing is that, like Bill O’Reilly before him, he is being sued for sexual harassment, in his case by a woman who worked at Fox. One must wonder why Murdoch doesn’t get all his women employees to waive their rights to be free of sexual harassment, or perhaps they should pull out the old defense employers used against employees injured as a result of unsafe conditions before the days of worker’s compensation: assumption of the risk.

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It takes all kinds

Sunday, April 23, 2023

I’ve never been a big Twitter fan (or a fan at all), and I deleted my hardly used account shortly after Elon Musk took over. Still, I can’t avoid reading about his serial displays of ineptitude as he continues to do his best to destroy the platform. This article at Above the Law discusses the possibility that he has exposed Twitter to possible defamation actions by celebs like Stephen King and Lebron James by falsely stating that they have paid for or otherwise endorsed his recent move to charge users for blue checkmarks that allegedly verify that the account is the genuine account of the given user. Apparently Musk left the blue checkmarks on the accounts of the aforementioned celebrities, and presumably other celebrities, despite their refusal to pay up. Their account information states “This account is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Neither statement is true, and Twitter knows the statements are untrue.

Whether any of the affected celebrities would bother to sue is an open question, but as with almost everything else about Musk’s Twitter acquisition, this leaves him looking very inept. It makes you think about the nature of human intelligence. It’s a multifaceted thing.

For reasons I can’t quite fathom, Musk is one of the richest people on earth, and he must have had some sort of intelligence, or a certain sort of capability, to get himself there. An obvious parallel is the person who was elected to be president in 2016, who is obviously not a very intelligent person if one were to apply the sort of definition to intelligence that one would utilize in an academic setting.

Still, Trump obviously has a deep seated understanding of a certain type of human nature. He is a born snake oil salesman, and he’s good at it. Before becoming president, he never had to worry about the folks who weren’t suckers, as he stuck to fleecing the gullible, which he did well, and evading the law, which his access to money allowed him to do. He wasn’t intelligent enough, fortunately or unfortunately, to realize that he was exposing himself by entering the political arena. Musk too, has a bit of Trump’s talent, perhaps more in some respects, as he has managed to found a profitable (Trump never really turned a profit on anything) car company even while hyping bullshit like self driving cars and tunnel boring machines that never seem to deliver the goods. We can only hope that he will crash and burn like the genius, as he too presents a clear and present danger to the nation.

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What is a centrist?

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

This article over at Hullabaloo got me thinking about the term “centrist” as it is used in the media. The article is about Joe Lieberman’s “No Labels” group, which is in the process of trying to put together a presidential ticket in 2024.

A funny thing about centrists is that they never tell you what they are actually for. You do know what they’re against: the “extremes” on both sides, which they insist are equally extreme, though, so far as I’m aware, they never explain how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party can be meaningfully compared with the Republican Party as a whole, which is now a full on fascist party. Beyond that, they are silent on policy issues, though they may emit a mishmash designed to get you to hear what you want to hear. We must also bear in mind that the “center” has been moving rightward for years, as the media and people like Lieberman pretend that the extreme right has always been just about where it is at the moment, when any reasonable person can see that the Republican Party has been relentlessly marching to the right, while the “left wing” of the Democratic Party bears an uncanny resemblance to your peanut butter and jelly Democrat of the 1960s.

It’s unclear what Joe and his compatriots expect to accomplish, particularly if this is true:

No Labels is already gathering signatures to get on the ballot and is trying to recruit a Democrat and a Republican to run as a bipartisan ticket. Joe Manchin D-W.V., Kirsten Sinema, D-Az., Susan Collins, R-Me., and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan are the names mentioned most often.

We can only hope they settle on Sinema, who is having trouble polling in double digits in the state she allegedly represents. None of those mentioned above are likely to be able to generate any great enthusiasm among the general public.

It’s unclear at this point which party would lose more votes if No Labels fields a candidate. My guess is that the point is to draw from the Democrat, as almost every third party movement has done over the course of the last 30 years or so. Whether it would work out that way is an open question, but the way things are looking now, barring outright theft by the Republicans, a possibility we can’t dismiss, the Democratic candidate should have a reasonably easy time beating the Republican in a two way race. The Democrats don’t need a third party to win; the Republicans might.

It’s also an open question whether Lieberman and his ilk can sell their third party to a substantial number of voters. When you dig into it a bit, you see easily enough that “centrists” are people who want to serve the interests of the rich without resorting to racist dog whistles and other culture war issues to get Fox watching idiots to vote against their own interests. The problem is that these idiots want to hear those whistles, as the evidence unearthed in the Dominion case has so well established.

These “centrists” claim to have the best interests of the country at heart, but in fact they are consciously attempting to put the country at risk of a complete fascist takeover. They know they can’t win, and they also know their presence in the race might contribute to accelerating our rush toward fascism.

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Another modest proposal

Saturday, April 15, 2023

Now that we have evidence that Clarence Thomas has committed a crime by failing to report the “sale” of his house to his rich benefactor, who proceeded to let Clarence’s Mom continue to live there (rent free I’m sure) while paying for improvements to the place and the property taxes, it would seem that Clarence should get the same treatment any other criminal should get. Of course we wouldn’t want politics to factor in, so appointment of a special prosecutor would seem the thing. I think John Durham is still busy, so we’d have to find someone else, but I’m sure there’s someone out there of Durham’s stature (or even greater stature!) who can take on the case.

Poor Clarence. It must be terrible to be subjected to the unfair attacks on him. I mean he’s telling everyone that he never discussed pending cases with Harlan Crow, and we should all believe the guy who told us that he prefers to vacation at Walmart parking lots.

I’m not practicing anymore, but had I known that a judge hearing a case of mine was enjoying a lifestyle costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year subsidized by a person whose interests might be adverse to the position I was taking, I would worry that the judge in question might not want to jeopardize that flow of money by ruling against his or her rich benefactor’s interests. That’s just me, I guess, since Republican politicians are assuring us that Thomas has no conceivable conflict of interest.

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Fellow alum makes good

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

I am quite proud of the fact that Justin Pearson, one of the two legislators thrown out of the Tennessee legislature, apparently for the crime of being black, is a fellow alum of Bowdoin College, as is Deray McKesson, a well known Black Lives Matter activist.

Speaking of Black Lives Matter, I seem to recall that when it began, the right wing response was to quibble that “all lives matter”. Pearson and his fellow legislator were thrown out of the Tennessee house because, in addition to being black, they were joining in a demonstration the subtext of which was that all lives do matter and that they certainly matter more than a fictional constitutional right to own guns.

The legislators in Tennessee have merely demonstrated once again that as far as Republicans are concerned, No Lives Matter.

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A trip down memory lane

Saturday, April 8, 2023

The recent news about Clarence Thomas’s corruption (I assume the reader will know of what I speak, so no link) reminded me of something that happened many years ago.

It seems there was a time when Republicans cared about the appearance of financial impropriety on the part of a Supreme Court justice, even when there was only a whiff of impropriety. Of course even then it was only when their target was a Democrat. Years ago there was a Supreme Court Justice named Abe Fortas. He was a liberal and a Jew, two strikes against him. LBJ nominated him for Chief Justice, but racist (and presumably anti-Semite) Strom Thurmond led the charge against him:

Fortas’s acceptance of $15,000 for nine speaking engagements at American University’s Washington College of Law became a source of controversy. The money had come not from the university but from private sources that represented business interests connected to 40 companies; Senator Strom Thurmond raised the idea that cases involving these companies might come to the Court, and Fortas might not be objective. While the fee was legal, the size of the fee raised much concern about the Court’s insulation from private interests, especially as it was funded by former clients and partners of Fortas. The $15,000 represented more than 40 percent of a Supreme Court justice’s salary at the time, and was seven times what any other American University seminar leader had ever been paid.

He was subsequently hounded off the court due to another “scandal” that paled into insignificance next to what Thomas has done.

You can argue that Fortas’s actions had the “appearance of impropriety”, but they never actually appeared as improper as what Thomas has done. But rest assured Thomas will remain on the court until he dies or chooses to leave at such time as he can be replaced by another fascist.

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It’s Good Friday again

Friday, April 7, 2023

Almost forgot to keep up the tradition.

This year I am going to dedicate this video to a certain very stable genius whose followers keep comparing him to Brian by claiming he’s being crucified. Maybe he should follow Eric Idle’s advice instead of constantly confessing to his crimes on his failing twitter rip-off.

As to the rest of us, Happy Easter if you celebrate it.

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Nothing wrong with a “politically motivated” prosecution if the defendant is guilty

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

One of the Republican talking points about the indictment of a certain very stable genius is that the prosecution is “politically motivated”. I won’t belabor the obvious point that this is rich coming from a party that has called for the prosecution of its political opponents (“lock her up”, “Hunter’s laptop”, etc.) on a routine basis. One obvious difference between the Republicans and the current situation is that the targets of the Republicans did nothing wrong, while Trump is obviously guilty.

But there’s a kernel of truth in the claim that this prosecution is “politically motivated”.

Let’s start with stipulating that it’s pretty obvious that Trump has been committing crimes throughout his lifetime, and he came to what he thought was the justifiable conclusion that he was exempt from criminal prosecution. In fact, the kind of crime in which he engaged during his business career is routinely ignored by the authorities, who much prefer to go after the little guy.

A criminal of Trump’s sort who had a tad more prudence in his or her intellectual arsenal would avoid running for political office. Buying politicians is one thing, but actually being one puts you in a spotlight that you’d rather avoid and might just attract too much attention to stuff you’d just as soon keep under wraps.

Had Trump merely remained the comic self promoter that he was before running for office he would not be subject to criminal charges today, no matter the extent of his crimes. It was his entry into politics, the spotlight that entry cast on his criminal nature, and the obvious fact that he committed crimes while in office (he did attempt to overthrow the government, after all) that “motivated” prosecutors to go after him.

So, there’s a bit of truth to the charge that Trump’s prosecution is politically motivated. The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with that, particularly because that motivation is impelled by the imperative need to save the country from fascism. What we should really be worried about is the fact that there may be more Trumps out there, routinely breaking the law without consequence, awaiting their turn to destroy our democracy.

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Time to check out the diners

Sunday, April 2, 2023

There’s been a lot of breathless bloviating by our media about how unprecedented and foreboding it is to have an ex-president indicated indicted, though I don’t recall such bloviation when an obvious career criminal was elected in the first place. We have been and will be treated to a lot of reaction from the genius’s deluded followers. The diners in the Midwest are no doubt filling up with Trumpers waiting to be interviewed by the New York Times.

I’m not really sure why it is that only Trumpers go to diners in the heartland. There’s a diner in Chester Vermont that my wife and I visit regularly when we’re staying at our second home up there, and I’d be willing to bet that many of the diners are Democrats, but possibly I’m deluding myself. In any event, the Times wouldn’t send its reporters to Vermont to find out what real Americans think, since you can only find real Americans in Trump country.

I wonder if the Times has given any thought to going to other venues to interview people who think that Trump’s indication indictment is a good thing. There do seem to be such people, like the people who cheered like crazy when Stephen Colbert mentioned it in his opening monologue the night of the indication indictment (sorry, it’s such an easy mistake to make!).

Anyway, I’ve given it some thought, and it seems to me that even in the Midwest one might find such people if you looked in the right places. A few venues pop to mind: bookstores and museums for example. Universities and colleges not of the Hillsdale variety. I’m sure there are others. I don’t expect the Times to seek these people. The diner stories, after all, have an underlying subtext. These people, the Times wants us to know, exist, and isn’t it odd that they are out there in such numbers? Whatever could explain it? Surely our readers are more interested in these oddities than they would be in hearing from people who are rational and have not had their brains neutralized by Fox.

I look forward, by the way, to the media amplifying the argument that surely the jury should be well stocked with Fox addicts, because, after all, he deserves a jury of his peers.

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