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Friday Night Music

Friday, December 16, 2011

Okay, at first I figured I really should put up something Christhmasy, but then I remembered we liberals are waging war on Christmas, and anyway there’s one more Friday to go before the big day arrives. So I decided to stick to just regular music for one more week and do something seasonal next week, giving me one more week to find something that I haven’t put up in the past. There’s really not that many good videos of Christ as music that suit this feature. 
 
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about putting up Harry Nilsson, a somewhat unappreciated songwriter from the 60s. Here he’s singing what must have been his biggest hit, which was featured in Midnight Cowboy. 
 
 
According to the squibs on YouTube this is a live performance, and while I admit that he was alive at the time this was filmed, I’m not at all sure he was actually singing at the time. But I look over that, and waive my usual ban on lip syncing, because this is the best video of this song out there, and it really is a good song and deserves its moment of glory. 

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Wyden steps up to help the Republicans

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Ron Wyden (D? Oregon) has teamed up with Paul Ryan on a plan to destroy Medicare and deprive people my age of affordable heatlh care as we enter our “golden” years. But we can count ourselves lucky, as the plan is clearly the opening salvo toward returning those in the generation after us to the good old days, when if you wanted health care you paid yourself, bought non-existent insurance, or you died.

 

You can always count on the fact that there will be some Democrat out there who will take a perfectly good Democratic campaign issue and undermine it. The fact that this particular plan is also bad policy is just icing on the cake for the Republicans.

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I Pledge Allegiance…to anyone who asks

Monday, December 12, 2011

We learn here that Newt Gingrich just pledged to never ever commit adultery, among other things. Luckily, for him at least, he was not required to affirm that he had never ever committed adultery, but as the article at the link points out, this is still at least the fourth time he’s taken such a pledge, given that he took one each time he married. I suppose you could argue that he’s batting 500, which isn’t bad in baseball, but when it comes to adultery, well..most of us do better.

But I come not to condemn adultery, but to condemn pledges. The pledge Newt signed, for the Family Leader, one of many whacko groups that extract pledges from Republicans, also contains pledges about gays, abortion, imposition of Christianity on the rest of us (he’s for it), performing his Christian duty to destroy Social Security and Medicare, and overturning judicial decisions that aren’t sufficiently right wing, if he can find any.

Republicans seem to have a particular affinity for both extracting and giving such pledges. Candidates happily agree to tie their hands in advance, changed circumstances be damned. Not only that, they now find themselves in the position of actually having to keep their pledges, or Grover will come and get them, and make sure there’s no cushy lobbying job awaiting them as the door hits them on the way out.

Are there any that refuse to give these pledges, which even a child can see are irresponsible, no matter where you are on the issues? Maybe Huntsman? I suppose when you approach politics as a matter of religious dogma, rather than as an exercise in attempting to determine what works, and implementing it, then they make a tad of sense, but that’s only because you are starting from a position that itself makes no sense.

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Apparently, the people have risen up and demanded an end to privacy

Sunday, December 11, 2011

If any proof were needed that we live in an oligarchy, where sometimes the rest of us are thrown a bone, consider the “Mobile Informational Call Act of 2011“, which would amend federal law to allow corporations to pester cell phone users with robocalls. I first learned about it in a fundraising email from the Democrats. This is, we at least can hope, an example of a situation where the Democrats might actually, but probably ineffectually, play their assigned role as the party that sometimes thinks people have rights, but, we’ll see. Other than fundraising off it, they may do little to stop it.  
If this were a truly representative democracy, this bill would go nowhere. How many people do you know who are clamoring to be annoyed day and night with unwanted cell phone calls? In addition, unlike with landlines, many people will have to pay to receive these calls. This basically amounts to a tax imposed by the callers, a tax that will fall heaviest on the poor, who often buy their cell phone plans by the minute. Only in a country in which corporations totally called the tune would this bill go anywhere. Even the Tea Party hasn’t managed to get its puppets to demand stuff like this.
 
At the same time, another bill of similar ilk has already passed the House. As the Times reports this morning, the House has passed a bill at the behest of Netflix that would make each person with a Facebook account and a Netflix account a source of free Netflix advertising. Under current law, a person’s video watching habits are protected. Oddly enough, in a round about way, we have Robert Bork to thank for that fact. Netflix wants to “allow” consumers to give a one time consent to “share” every movie they watch. No doubt this would be done by a take-it-or-leave-it change to their terms of service. Every Itunes subscriber knows the drill. Periodically we have to agree to a change in service, and we can actually try to figure out what the changes are, providing we are interested in wading through 40 or 50 pages of legalese. Netflix’s spokesman’s defense of the bill is the kind of laughable pile of BS only the American media could report with a straight face:
 

“It really is meant to empower the consumer to be able to share with their friends,” says David Hyman, the general counsel of Netflix. He says the bill simply updates an outmoded law so that it matches the way we live now. “It really kind of levels the playing field in social media.”

 
Isn’t their concern for our welfare touching? If you don’t believe him, then take it from the Future of Privacy Forum, a group which, judging by its name, is obviously devoted to protecting privacy:
 

People prefer frictionless sharing, a convenience hindered by the current law, says Christopher Wolf, a lawyer who is co-chairman of the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington research group that receives financing from Google, Facebook and other digital media companies.

 
Did I say protecting? Sorry, that would be destroying. Again, only in an oligarchy could such a bill be considered, never mind passed by one House. 

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Friday Night Music

Friday, December 9, 2011

One source of rather dismal inspiration for this feature is the obituary page. This week Dobie Gray died. According to the Times he was both a singer and a songwriter, having written hits for a number of major artists.

I’ve chosen two videos, one from 1965, one from 1974. In a way they illustrate the tremendous changes that took place over the period of just nine years. From black and white to color; from fairly conservative clothes to full on 70s anything goes (and probably shouldn’t have). This first song is the In Crowd, which I believe was Gray’s first hit, which Ramsay Lewis later turned into a jazz classic.

At least the 70s can take credit for losing those background dancers.

I much prefer Drift Away to the In Crowd, which is performed here in a non lip synced version on the BBC.

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I’m so prescient

Thursday, December 8, 2011

A while back I had this to say about the fact that Wall Street is pouring so much money into Scott Brown’s campaign:

One must wonder how much money Wall Street will have to raise for Scott Brown to overcome the harm articles like that in today’s Times (Wall Street Rallies Around Scott Brown for Senate Race) will do. As we proved here in Connecticut in 2010, at least in the more intelligent parts of the country, after a certain amount more money produces no additional return, provided the good guy has a reasonable sum of his/her own to spend. Warren will have plenty of money, both of her own and from third party groups. If Wall Street pours in extra millions, that very fact may lose Brown more votes than the money can buy.

Today, at the Daily Kos, discussing the results of a new Massachusetts poll showing Warren opening a 7 point lead:

While 23 percent say they are less likely to vote Warren for her support of Occupy Wall Street, 37 percent say they are less likely to support Brown for receiving so many donations from Wall Street.

In other words, even though Wall Street is panicking over Warren and dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into negative ads against her, their support for Brown is actually hurting him.

Okay, granted. Only a beltway pundit could have failed to see it coming. But in the pundit trade, even here in the boonies, the absence of failure is itself a major accomplishment.

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Miracles do happen: bought and paid for politicians looking at a financial transactions tax

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Sometimes the stars align, and what once seems far fetched suddenly becomes possible. For years people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman have been recommending a financial transactions tax. It brings in immense amount of revenue, discourages useless and non-productive speculation, and has negligible impact on people who are buying stocks for actual investment. Since it makes so much sense, it has of course been a non-starter, except, curiously, Britain has had one for years, and it has worked well.

Now, according to the Times, even the corporate puppets are starting to talk about it:

Driven by populist anger at bankers as well as government needs for more revenue, the idea of a tax on trades of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments has attracted an array of influential champions, including the leaders of France and Germany, the billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, former Vice President Al Gore, the consumer activist Ralph Nader, Pope Benedict XVI and the archbishop of Canterbury.

…

The Robin Hood tax has also become a rallying point for labor unions, nongovernmental organizations and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which view it as a way to claw back money from the top 1 percent to help the other 99 percent. Last month, thousands of demonstrators, including hundreds in Robin Hood outfits with bright green caps and bows and arrows, flooded into southern France to urge the leaders of the Group of 20 nations to do more to help the poor, including passing a financial transactions tax.

Oddly enough, according to the article, the British PM seems to feel that such a tax would destroy the financial sector in London, even though they’ve had a fairly large tax on certain transactions for more than a century. One would think if the tax were going to drive traders from London it would have done so already.

The Obama White House, predictably, prefers to talk about a more ineffective, politically less appealing approach, which is equally impossible to get through Congress at the present time. Why appeal to your base when you can waste time trying to satisfy people who will never even accept your legitimacy? Maybe it has something to do with all those Wall Street dollars the Obama campaign is raking in.

Still, it’s good to see that this idea is gaining traction. It may be that it has high profile advocates, but for my money, it would never have come up for discussion had the Occupy movement never taken place. It’s amazing what a bunch of kids in tents and a few cops with a liberal supply of pepper spray can do.

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Willard’s Massachusetts coverup

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

It’s actually hard to make the argument that anything could make Mitt Romney look worse, so lets just say that the latest revelation about his preemptive coverup of his record in Massachusetts is getting even more interesting. I give him credit for the gambit, by the way. Most politicians wait until they’re accused of something before they start covering it up, but Willard realized that by that time it’s too late.

As most people know, at the end of Romney’s tenure in Massachusetts, when he declined to face the voters wrath and seek a second term, his aides all developed a strange yet burning desire to own the hard drives in their state computers. Not the computers mind you, just the hard drives.

Turns out that there were some other computer shenanigans going on.

Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret, Reuters has learned.

The move during the final weeks of Romney’s administration was legal but unusual for a departing governor, Massachusetts officials say.

…

The cleanup of records by Romney’s staff before his term ended included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor’s office, according to official documents and state officials.

In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost – $108,000. Lease documents obtained by Reuters under the state’s freedom of information law indicate that the broken lease still had 18 months to run.

As a result of the change in leases, the cost to the state for computers in the governor’s office was an additional $97,000.

The article doesn’t say whether the computers in question contained the hard drives that the governor’s lackeys were so anxious to purchase. If they did, then one must ask how the state was in a position to sell portions of leased equipment, and whether the sale of the hard drives is what led to the termination of the old lease.

You have to wonder, too, whether the computer deal is an example of Romney’s much touted business acumen at work and whether we can expect more deals like this should he become president. The deal was good for business, or one business, at least, but not so good for the state. A great deal for Romney too, who got to show his contempt for the people of Massachusetts and make them pay for his pleasure.

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Tip of my hat

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Never let it be said that I don’t give credit where credit is due, though I suppose sometimes I don’t. But I want to do so today, to Commissioner of Consumer Protection William Rubenstein. 
 
I happen to represent a tenant’s association at a mobile home park. The tenants have found themselves in a dispute with the park owner. There’s no need here to go into the details. The DCP regulates mobile home parks. Being unable to get anywhere with the park owner’s lawyer, and hoping to avoid litigation, I contacted the department to see if it could be of assistance. 
 
I’ve been doing consumer work, in greater or lesser concentration, for more years than I care to admit, but I’ll do so anyway:35. Good lord, can I really be that old? Anyway, I have had many occasions to contact DCP, usually without much of a response. In this particular case I was asking only whether the department would entertain a complaint. 
 
I was more than surprised to get an email from one of the lawyers at DCP inviting my clients and me to meet with the Commissioner to discuss our problem. We met with him today, and he proposed what I believe was a practical solution to the problem. He may or may not get co-operation from the park owner, but that’s not the point. There was nothing about this issue that was qualitatively different than the types of problems I’ve written to DCP about on the past. In fact, my clients had contacted DCP about this issue when the last governor was in office, (what was her name?) without much response. The fact that the Commissioner took the time to meet with us and offer to deal with the issue was extraordinary. I have never had anywhere near that kind of response to any complaint I’ve made in the past. Of course, we’ve had Republicans protecting us consumers for the past 16 years (20 if you count Weicker) so we’ve grown used to a certain measure of benign neglect. 
 
And lest anyone think he did it because he was dealing with a world famous blogger-well, I didn’t use my nom de plume, so that doesn’t explain it. 

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Glass have empty, or glass half full?

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Sometimes it takes an act of bigotry to see how far we’ve come. A church in Kentucky took what its members no doubt thought was a perfectly reasonable racist action recently: 

When Stella Harville brought her black boyfriend to her family’s all-white church in rural Kentucky, she thought nothing of it. She and Ticha Chikuni worshiped there whenever they were in town, and he even sang before the congregation during one service.

 
Then, in August, a member of Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in Pike County told Harville’s father that Chikuni couldn’t sing there anymore. And last Sunday, in a moment that seems from another time, church members voted 9 to 6 to bar mixed-race couples from joining the congregation.

 

Actually, it’s hard to believe she thought nothing of it, but lets not interrupt the story. No doubt much to his surprise, the act of bigotry set off a firestorm, and the pastor had to backpedal, complete with the now standard denial that acts of religious bigotry don’t mean the religious are bigots:

“We are not a group of racist people,” said Keith Burden of the National Assn. of Free Will Baptists. “We have been labeled that obviously because of the actions of nine people.”

Not really just nine. You really have to count the abstainers, who in a situation like this must be accorded fellow traveler status. There were about 40 people there, so more than half didn’t vote. No doubt the nine active racists are simply stunned at any implication that they are racists, as the prime mover, former pastor Melvin Thomas explains:

“I am not racist. I will tell you that. I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil” about a race, Thompson said last week in a brief interview. “That’s what this is being portrayed as, but it is not.”

Certainly not. It’s something else, though nobody can quite put a finger on what it actually is.

For myself, I think this is a glass half full event. Churches are the last bastions of governmentally sanctioned racism in this country. (It often seems that religion has a monopoly on bigotry and ignorance, but that’s not true. See, e.g., the Republican Party and Fox News) The First Amendment probably requires that the government keep hands off, so only social pressure can bring this sort of thing to an end. The fact that this church is scrambling to reverse itself speaks volumes about how far we’ve come. I doubt they’d have felt the need even 10 years ago, and I’m sure the event would have passed unnoticed 20 years ago. Prior to that, there’s a good chance the church would have been driven out of town if it had allowed mixed-race couples.

We’ll know we’ve almost made it when we hear a similar story coming out of Alabama.

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