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Those were the days

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that the United States of America was capable of rational environmental action. But it was, and though it gets little attention, we are reaping the benefits of our past rationality:

It’s the beginning of the end for the Antarctic ozone hole. A new analysis shows that, on average, the hole — which forms every Southern Hemisphere spring, letting in dangerous ultraviolet light — is smaller and appears later in the year than it did in 2000.

The 1987 global treaty called the Montreal Protocol sought to reduce the ozone hole by banning chlorofluorocarbons, chlorine-containing chemicals — used as refrigerants in products such as air conditioners — that accelerated ozone loss in the stratosphere. The study shows that it worked.

“We as a planet have avoided what would have been an environmental catastrophe,” says Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a pioneer in the field of Antarctic ozone loss. “Yay us!”

via Scientific American

If things continue along our present path, the ozone hole will close by 2060. I’ll be dead by then, but it’s nice to know that my kids and their kids (still hoping) won’t have an ozone hole to worry about. All because 29 years ago, the world came together and did the right thing, something it could not have done absent U.S. leadership and involvement. I mean, there was even a Republican president, Saint Ronnie, who was a terrible president but at least capable of listening to scientists.

Republicans were not exactly rational back then, but they were not totally batshit crazy like they are now. So, it’s unlikely that 29 years from now someone at MIT will be saying “Yay us!” about our response to climate change, though I suppose there’s always hope. There are a lot of people who have a lot to answer for. I almost wish there were a hell, so people like Tom Coburn could go there.

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Trump’s future?

Friday, August 19, 2016

This got me thinking when I read it:

Minutes ago Conor Friedersdorf published a piece in The Atlantic speculating that when the Trumpanzee loses his consolation prize may be a whole new right wing media juggernaut, “that challenges Fox News for supremacy on the right across all platforms.” Even discounting Mercer, he wrote that “If today’s polls hold through election day, Trump and associates will be proved failures at electoral politics. But even if that proves so, I wouldn’t bet against a right-wing media behemoth that brought together Trump, Roger Ailes, Stephen Bannon, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, and Sarah Palin” and reminds us that O’Reilly, Hannity and Greta Van Susteren could all legally follow Ailes if they want to.

via Down with Tyranny

I pride or delude myself (depending on your point of view) that I’m able to game out how things will play out under certain conditions. I was right, for instance, when I predicted way back in 2013 that 2016 would be the year when the whackos finally got their man.

But, I’m having trouble gaming out how this would play out. Imagine, two Fox Networks, battling for the same (we are told) rapidly dying viewership. One almost certainty is that one of them would go even further to the right than Fox is at present, perhaps to full blown, no holds barred, explicit racism and nativism. Would the other tack leftish? Or would they do battle with each other to see who could spiral further into the muck? And what would it do to the political conversation in this country. Would the rest of the media dutifully conclude that the center must have moved rightward and follow Fox and its new friend? Stay tuned, as it seems to me that there is a very real possibility that a defeated Trump will in fact take this path.

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Giuliani explains

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

By now, everyone who has access to the Internet knows that Rudy “9/11, 24-7” Giuliani recently said this:

“Under those eight years before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States,” Giuliani said.

Now, looking at it logically, there are three possible reasons why Giuliani might have said this:

  1. He forgot about 9/11. Yes, I know, but we are talking about logical possibilities. If the multiverse theory is true, then there has to be at least one universe in which Giuliani could forget 9/11, if only for a moment, and there’s no reason why that particular lightning bolt couldn’t strike here.
  2. He was intentionally lying.
  3. He has, as a result of his interactions with the Trump campaign and Trump himself, descended into a delusional madness in which facts are fluid things, and in which a statement can be be both true and not true, in a way totally unlike the way Schodinger’s cat can be both dead and alive. Trump appears to be suffering from such a disease, and perhaps it is contagious.

Well Rudy has now spoken again, and we can apparently eliminate the first possibility, but it’s quite difficult to figure which of the other two applies:

I’m not there to give a major 45-minute policy address,“ he told the New York Daily News on Tuesday, referencing his introduction ahead of a speech by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on foreign policy.

“You speak in somewhat abbreviated language,” Giuliani said. “All human beings speak in abbreviated language at times.

“I didn’t forget 9/11. I hardly would. I almost died in it.” (Bloggers note: actually he didn’t. Other people did die, and lots of others almost died in it, but not Giuliani)

…

“Could I have repeated it at that point? In a way that you wouldn’t be asking me this question today? Sure,” he told the paper when asked if it was likely he would “find his foot in his mouth again.”

“But will I again say things in the future that can be taken out of context or misinterpreted? Of course I will,” Giuliani said.

via The Hill

Now, on the one hand, he is saying that he did in fact remember about 9/11 while he was speaking, so we can eliminate the “I forgot” defense. So, let’s turn to the other two possibilities.

Here’s the relevant definition of a lie, taken from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

  1. An act or instance of lying; an intentional false statement; an untruth. oe.

So, at one point Giuliani is saying that he made a statement that he knew to be false at the time. That means he lied and the sentence within which he makes that statement can be read, in isolation, as an admission that he lied.

But the rest of the statement appears to veer toward the delusional belief in shape shifting truth. He was speaking in “abbreviated” language. I won’t bother you with the dictionary definition of “abbreviated”, but I can assure you that Giulani’s usage here is pathbreaking. It can only be interpreted to mean that when one speaks in an abbreviated fashion, one is licensed to ignore facts that are at variance with said abbreviated statement, making the abbreviated statement true in the moment it is uttered, albeit it may not be true when an unabbreviated statement is more in the speaker’s interest. Thus, 9/11 both did and did not happen, depending on which set of facts (or, perhaps, which multiverse) is more convenient to the narrative Giuliani is pushing today.

One can almost feel Giuliani’s pain here. Even Trump has never had to weasel out of a lie this big, and to be perfectly honest, given the fact that Giuliani ran for president on the platform of “I was in New York on 9/11 and therefore know how to deal with terrorists”, it is difficult to see how even the finest Republican spinmeisters could put lipstick on Giuliani’s pig. One has to wonder why Giuliani even spoke to the Daily News about his “gaffe”, if he couldn’t come up with anything better than the standard Trumpian “taken out of context or misinterpreted” excuse, particularly because it’s fairly obvious that the statement 1) hasn’t been taken out of context, and 2) can’t be misinterpreted.

Assuming Trump loses, he will be doing the country a big favor, as he will be destroying Giuliani in the process, not to mention Chris Christie and Mike Pence. Who knows, maybe Bill Clinton really is behind all this.

Filed in Language, Lies and Lying Liars | | Comments (1)

I just got an email

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

I have been getting lots of emails from the DNC, “begging” me for money, totally confused about why I have not responded to pleas from a galaxy of Democratic stars. My primary reason for not giving to the DNC is that it still has not removed the stench left by the recent exit of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

So, you can guess my reaction at what just came into my inbox. An email from Debbie herself, begging for money for her new PAC, “Democrats Win 2016”. She wants 500 new members real fast, and I even get a little gold card if I contribute. It would be interesting to know which “Democrats” will benefit from her largesse. I would click the “unsubscribe” link, but I’ve long since learned that in the world of politics, unsubscribing is really not an option.

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If this captain goes down, he’ll take the ship with him

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

This is delicious:

More than 120 Republicans have drafted a letter to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, begging him to cut off Trump.

“Given the catastrophic impact that Donald Trump’s losing presidential campaign will have on down-ballot Senate and House races, we urge you to immediately suspend all discretionary RNC support for Trump and focus the entirety of the RNC’s available resources on preserving the GOP’s congressional majorities,” says the letter, whose draft CBS reported on last week when there were already 70 signatures.

The extensive list of signatures includes sitting members of Congress, congressional aides, former RNC officials, and officials from every Republican administration dating back to Reagan.

via Daily Kos

Trump has already threatened to stop raising money for the RNC as an initial response to an early draft of the letter. But that’s not where the real danger lies.

Should the RNC actually dump Trump (how can you resist that rhyme), I would be willing to risk serious money on what his response would be. My guess is that he’d urge his Kool-Aid drenched followers to refuse to vote for vulnerable House and Senate Republicans, whom he would name. If Trump is going to go down, it’s an odds on bet that he’ll want to take as many Republicans down with him as possible. Then he can make the plausible (to him) case that he lost because the Republican Party is run by a bunch of losers. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to game this out, so even Priebus is probably aware that he’s in a no-win situation. He’ll probably stick with Trump, though it would make for a pleasant night watching the returns if he followed this advice.

Keep in mind that should Trump go after endangered incumbents, which he’s already done on occasion, only a few percent of his followers would need to heed his advice in order to doom the endangered to extinction.

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Ethically challenged John Scott flunks Trump Test

Thursday, August 11, 2016

It’s not every day that a Republican Congressman is both less ethically challenged than my local State Representative and is, nonethless, facing ethics charges in the House, so I really must submit the facts to a candid world:

Texas Rep. Roger Williams is an auto dealer, and he has come under scrutiny by the House Ethics Committee over an amendment he offered to a wide-ranging transportation bill that would have allowed auto dealers to rent out vehicles even if they’re subject to recall. Williams has said the amendment was intended to address recalls aimed at trivial defects, but critics said it would apply more broadly.

via Talking Points Memo

The gravaman (look it up, it’s a word at least to lawyers) of the complaint is that Williams has a direct financial interest in the amendment.

Well, Williams is a piker, and his conflict of interest is remote, compared to that of Groton’s Republican representative, John Scott, about whom I’ve written before. Scott is an insurance agent, who is one of a few agents in the state who writes health insurance policies for UConn students. Here’s a summary of the bills John sponsored and co-sponsored as soon as he got elected:

Proposed H.B. No. 5062: “To require that the sale of a qualified health plan offered through the Connecticut Health Insurance Exchange be transacted by an insurance producer.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5255: “To study the potential benefits of applying Medicaid funds to the cost of health insurance for college students who are eligible for Medicaid.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5354 :“ AN ACT PREVENTING STUDENTS OF INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION FROM OPTING OUT OF A STUDENT HEALTH CARE PLAN FOR PURPOSES OF QUALIFYING FOR MEDICAID.
To prevent an over reliance on Medicaid when an affordable health insurance alternative is available.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5497 : “AN ACT INCREASING THE MINIMUM FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY COVERAGE REQUIRED FOR PRIVATE PASSENGER MOTOR VEHICLES”

Maybe John should run for Congress. The New London Day, by the way, wrote one article about this blatant conflict, and then let the matter drop.

Speaking of John and the Day, faithful readers (if there are any) will recall that Dave Collins, a Republican touting columnist at the Day, recently made the mistake of saying that as far as he was concerned, any Republican running for office should be disqualified if he or she refused to denounce Donald Trump (the “Trump Test”). He hasn’t exactly walked that back; it’s more accurate to say that he has let the matter drop, since as it turns out, the Republicans he tried to contact avoided his calls or avoided the issue, and he let them get away with it. It’s apparently more important to elect Republicans than stop Donald Trump.

But the Groton Democrats haven’t forgotten, and they put up a post on their Facebook page demanding that Scott, and his fellow Republican candidates in the various Groton Districts, out themselves on the Trump test. Bizarrely, John chose to respond. Here’s what he had to say:

The President of the United States has no direct say over the day to day operations of the state of Connecticut. As the State Representative for the 40th district I will support the choice that my constituents make in this election and do my absolute best to serve their individual needs in Hartford. With respect to the Presidency, I see that there are three, perhaps four, choices that could be made. My decision will be made in the privacy of the voting booth as that is my right as a citizen of this country. If you want to know who I am supporting for state representative, state senate, or in future years governor; then that is fair game.

Well, it so happens I was listening to Randy Newman’s Faust, (a vastly under appreciated album, by the way) earlier today, and John’s comment brought to mind these lyrics Randy sings in his role as the Devil, as he calls out God:

In all my life

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard such bullshit

Even from You

A master of bullshit

You know it

I know it

It’s bullshit

Bullshit

In case I haven’t made myself clear, John’s comment was pure bullshit. I doubt that Dave Collins reads this blog, inasmuch as I’m a Democrat. But if he does, or if someone brings it to his attention, I believe it is fair to say that John has not passed the Trump test, and Dave should make that known, and should urge his readers to vote for Chris Conley, Scott’s very able opponent. I can assure Dave that Chris will willingly take and pass the Trump test. I’m not holding by breath on this though, as, like Randy’s God, Dave is a master too.

Filed in Local issues | | Comments (0)

I feel his pain

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Matt Bors, a cartoonist who posts at Daily Kos, has a problem:

I feel his pain. Many of the blogs I visit regularly spend a lot of time explaining why Donald is wrong about this or that, or why we can indeed interpret his most recent (I think it’s his most recent) moronic statement to be a veiled invitation for someone to kill Hillary Clinton. Anyone who can’t see the obvious is past help. To paraphrase Hamlet and his buddy Horatio:

HAMLET

There’s ne’er a villain Trump dwelling in all Denmark the USA,
But he’s an arrant knave.

HORATIO

There needs no ghost , blogger, my lord, come from the grave Internet,
To tell us this.

I miss the good old days, when there some non-obvious points to be made about our benighted opposition. Even the extras in this particular historical-comedy are uninteresting or obvious. Of course Paul Ryan is a fraud. What else is new? Of course Donald Trump is a case of the chickens coming home to roost. We’ve seen him, or someone like him, coming, and I for one, was predicting starting in November 2012 that the next Republican candidate would be a whack job, since the whackos would settle for no less. The fact is that if it hadn’t been Trump, whatever other turd floated to the top of that pool of candidates would have been just as bad. Jeb, the “reasonable” one, never had a chance. I miss loathsome Joe Lieberman. I even miss Dubya. They weren’t much, but they posed way bigger challenges than Trump or the rest of the yahoos that make up the modern Republican Party.

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A loathsome person

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

The only time I ever voted for a Republican was in 1988, when I voted for Lowell Weicker, who was running against the loathsome Joe Lieberman. The only time I voted for Joe Lieberman was once by mistake, when I forgot to skip his lever on the old voting machines, and once in 2000, when I had no choice, given that he was on the ballot as Al Gore’s biggest mistake ever.

I was proud to do my little bit in 2006 to deprive him of the Democratic nomination for the Senate, when I voted for Ned Lamont at the state convention and in the primary, and regularly vilified Lieberman, to the best of my ability on this blog.

All of this is by way of saying that this in no way surprises me:

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said he’s thinking of supporting Donald Trump for president, Jewish Week reports.

He’s still undecided but added there are “a lot of us, I think, who can’t feel quite comfortable either way yet.”

via Political Wire

In my last post I questioned how the folks in Maine could countenance Susan Collins, but really, we in Connecticut have a lot more to answer for. At least we got rid of him in the end.

UPDATE: Connecticut Bob reminds us that it is 10 years ago today that the Connecticut Democratic Party expelled Lieberman from its ranks. I remember that day vividly. We were vacationing in Vermont, and I spent the evening refreshing my browser every 5 minutes to follow the results. Ned may have lost, but he helped move the party away from Lieberman and the nation away from Iraq, and he deserves our eternal thanks.

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Profile in Courage-Not

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

I have a very soft spot in my heart for the state of Maine, as that is where I got my college education, but I’ve never understood how Mainers cannot see through Susan Collins, and before that, her compatriot in “moderation”, Olympia Snowe.

Until we were freed from him in 2006, we denizens of Connecticut’s Second District had a “moderate” Congressman, one Rob Simmons. Here’s a definition of a Republican “moderate”: a Republican who votes with the rational side whenever his or her vote won’t make a difference. I recall that with Simmons and his ilk, the folks who called the shots used the term “catch and release” to describe the process. Simmons and his fellow moderates were allowed to vote against crazy things when the leaders were sure they had enough votes to pass them anyway. If they needed his vote, they got it. In other words, like Collins, he never cast a “moderate” vote where that vote would have made a difference.

So count me unimpressed that Collins has now come out against Trump, who is now trying to incite someone to kill Hillary, probably because he can’t see any other way to beat her. Collins is not up for re-election, and may never run again. I believe there may be one Republican incumbent who is both running for re-election and unambiguously against the Donald, and it ain’t Collins. If she were up for reelection, she’d be walking the same tightrope as Kelly Ayotte, especially if there were still time for a Trumpite to run against her as an independent. Mainers are into that sort of thing; they have time and again shown their independence by choosing governors, like LePage, who could never get elected in a two person race, and should never get elected in any race.

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Running in place, and other observations

Saturday, August 6, 2016

“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

This quote came to mind when I stumbled on this post by Wolf Richter, which demonstrates that the “good” news on the job front is nothing more than keeping in the same place:

On average, 205,300 jobs need to be created every month just to keep up with population growth and not allow the unemployment situation to get worse.

Last months good news was that we netted out 255,000 jobs, meaning that while we’re not quite keeping in the same place, we’re not exactly getting somewhere else. Richter points out that most people who don’t live within the Beltway or some other bubble somehow know we’re not moving, and their perception is absolutely correct. It would be ever so nice if the Democrats more vigorously addressed that well founded pervasive anxiety.

Speaking of Lewis Carroll (see the quote above), it occurred to me while thinking about this subject, that another quote that might apply here is “the faster I go, the behinder I get”. So I looked it up to find the source, and what I found was strange. It’s often stated as “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get”, both versions of which are attributed to Carroll. There’s even a website that features 10 quotes from Carroll, one of which is the “hurrier” quote.

I was interested to see which was genuine, so I searched the full text versions of both Alice and Through the Looking Glass, and couldn’t find the quote in either. I searched for the word “hurrier”, assuming it would only appear once. It certainly sounds like a Carroll quote, and in a way, it echoes the quote above, but I must conclude that it’s a misattribution, unless someone’s able to find it. By the way, when I started looking, I thought it likely that it was something Andy Devine might have said on Wild Bill Hickok.

By way of explanation for this pathetic, meandering, post, I just got back from vacation, and am still feeling quite lazy. I’m hoping to get back in the thick of things any day now, though I have to admit that for a guy with a day job, blogging is getting harder. By the time I get in front of my keyboard to point out yet another crazy thing the Donald has said, a million people have beaten me to it, and at least 10% of them have the same take that I do. If this keeps up I’ll have to take to Twitter. Anyway, I’m back, rested and ready to go.

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