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Verbal Gymnastics

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

We lawyers are often called upon to formulate rather elaborate ways of avoiding saying something that we would rather not say. It’s a bit of an art, really. The trick is to avoid conceding a point while sticking to the literal truth. Sadly, when you need to do such a thing, you’re probably fated to lose anyway.

Despite years of practice in the trade, and having come up with many ways to avoid stating the obvious, I must take by hat off to the headline writer at the Day. By way of background, I have noticed that this person, whoever he or she may be, has a slight rightward tilt (the headline are not, or so I understand, penned by the reporters that write the articles). Anyway, here’s the headline that impressed me no end:

COURT DECLARES FRANKEN LEADING VOTE-GETTER

Okay, I’ll admit that the term “vote-getter” is a little clunky. The only “word” that comes close in artlessness is the baseball term “come-backer”. But really, you have to hand it to the unknown author. Anyone else might simply say: “Court Declares Franken Winner”, which is, after all, precisely what the court did. But if you want to avoid conceding that point, it would be hard to beat the Day’s formulation.


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The Day Shills for the Right

Monday, April 13, 2009

The right wing population in this area is small, but it has disproportionate influence with one of our institutions: the New London Day. Over the years the Day has been inundated with letters accusing it of right wing bias (while it was endorsing Republicans such as Simmons and George Bush). In response, the Day has gone to great lengths to appease its critics. Some time back it decided that it made eminent good sense to offer those critics regular gigs as op-ed writers, despite the fact that they had a lot of trouble constructing reasonably coherent sentences.

Today, on the front page, the http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=3ab94dd0-131c-436b-970e-a81143193f7c. (It is my understanding that the term “tea-bagging” has a sexual connotation that the demonstrators prefer to ignore. To be honest I’m not entirely certain of the mechanics of that kind of tea-bagging. In any event, I will resist the temptation of making any puns or cheap sexual wordplay. ) In any event, these folks will be gathering locally and “across the nation” in favor of positions that are contrary to their own interests, to the extent that they have a coherent message at all.

The Day plays it straight. This is a grassroots effort. Is the Day covering up the fact that this is an astroturf movement from first to last, or is it simply uninformed. Who knows?

The Day isn’t Fox News, but maybe it’s auditioning. Why else would it give handy directions for getting to these demonstrations “If You Go”? I can’t recall the Day being quite so accommodating when the protests concerned real things, such as wars. Isn’t it amazing how these sparsely attended gatherings are getting media coverage far in excess of that garnered by the literally millions of people who protested Bush’s Iraq adventure, or the demonstrations at both Bush inaugurals, each of which was ignored by the media and each of which drew a great number of participants (real grass above those roots, too).

I have no problem with the Day covering these events. They are news, of a sort. It wouldn’t hurt, though, if the Day would take the trouble to inform its readers of the folks that are behind these events: the usual suspects such as Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Richard Mellon Scaife, etc, with a healthy push from “fair and balanced” Fox News. The poor fools attending these demonstrations are wasting their precious time in order to preserve low tax rates for millionaires. This is not just an opinion, this is fact and it should be reported.


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Leave Tom Paine alone

Monday, April 13, 2009

Some people can never rest easy. Consider Poor Tom Paine. During the latter years of his life he was hounded, even on his deathbed, by what passed at the time as the American right-both secular and religious. His name was mud from the early nineteenth century until the mid twentieth, despite all he had done to bring about and sustain the American Revolution. Why? Because he wrote The Age of Reason, a frontal assault on faith based mental processing (we can’t call it thinking).

But far worse has been his treatment since 1980 when the American Right, starting with Ronald Reagan, tried to adopt him as their own. As with so much of their fact free cogitating, there is no evidence that Paine would be at all sympathetic to their creed. He was, after all, not sympathetic to any creed.

Apparently, Glenn Beck is now trying to wrap himself in Paine’s mantle, encouraging folks to follow where, he asserts, Paine would surely lead in the struggle against creeping socialism.

Some of us actually believe that it might not be such a bad thing if there were some truth to Beck’s fears about socialism, but let’s put that aside for the moment.

Paine as a free market, Ayn Rand acolyte? Has Beck read any Paine lately? (answer, no.) Well, I’ve read it all and I agree with this Kos diarist that Paine was a socialist in all but name. This diary is well worth a read for those not familiar with Paine’s thinking. It discusses Paine’s Agrarian Justice. I remember thinking, when I first read that pamphlet, that Paine was something of a proto-Marx.

In Agrarian Justice Paine develops a theoretical justification and a practical program for a system akin to social security. The theoretical basis is interesting. Paine argues that we own the earth in common, and those that have secured large portions for their own use owe the rest a “rent”. It’s socialist thinking from first to last. The practical program may or may not have been all that practical, but he was clearly not a fan of social security privatization. It’s government run and government funded from first to last, and let’s not even get into the class warfare aspect of it.

We on the left can’t let the right confiscate Tom Paine. He’s ours, from his socialist ravings, to his most effective promoters (e.g., Howard Fast, who wrote Citizen Tom Paine, a book I’ve owned since I was eight, and Moncure Conway, slave-holder turned abolitionist and free thinker) to his religious principles. They can have Alexander Hamilton. He’d probably turn in his grave to be in their company, but who cares?


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This should not be an option

Sunday, April 12, 2009

According to the Times the big banks are suffering from a brain drain as the best and the brightest, their work done at the failed banks, go on to other things:

Top bankers have been leaving Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others in rising numbers to join banks that do not face tighter regulation, including foreign banks, or start-up companies eager to build themselves into tomorrow’s financial powerhouses. Others are leaving because of culture clashes at merging companies, like Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, and still others are simply retiring early

If we allow a financial system to rise out of these ashes in which anyone doesn’t face tighter regulations, we will deserve the inevitable recurrence of this bubble and bust cycle.


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Easter Pictures

Sunday, April 12, 2009

This is a holiday, and though it’s decidedly low key, I’m taking the day off from thinking, so I’m posting a few pictures documenting the ever approaching (but perhaps never arising) dawn of real Spring. You know, with reasonably warm weather, birds, flowers and sunshine. Here along the coast we suffer through many years when Spring is merely a damp, cloudy interlude between the cold of Winter and the heat of Summer, but hope springs eternal.

There’s no action in the vegetable garden this week, but there are some flowers blooming. This is a humble vinca:

This Hellebore is blooming near the house, which accounts for the less than satisfactory backgrounds:

The daffodils are beginning to bloom:

And finally, though this is cheating, a few shots of a yellow Clivia Miniata, the yellow color being rather unusual, according to my wife. This is cheating because it’s an indoor plant, but I posed it outside.

No lilies, as my wife isn’t a fan.


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An Easter Homily

Saturday, April 11, 2009

I have to finish my blogging early today to leave time for one of my two annual Easter traditions. I will be viewing the Life of Brian tonight, and I’ll listen to The Messiah (What can I say, it’s beautiful music) at some point before the weekend ends.

Before I commence watching the heretical movie, I must say a few words about the sad state of religious apologists today.

Two recent posts at Pharyngula (here and here) are almost enough to make me forgive and forget Christopher Hitchen’s shameful apologism for the adventure in Iraq. Recently he’s been descending into the pit, so to speak, debating (if you can use the word with these folks) the religious. I confess that I couldn’t bear to listen to this entire debate, (they ganged up on Hitchens five to one, including the moderator) but I did listen to the following audios in full:

Part One:

Part Two:

The utter intellectual bankruptcy of these people is amazing. The fellow in the audio’s argument goes something like this:

1. Assume that I am right.

2. Then it follows that I am right.

Would anyone make such an argument about any other subject? The people in the video aren’t much better. The circularity of their arguments is amazing. But then, the only argument they have is one from authority. There is a God because the Bible says there is one, or because someone else said there is one, or because I can’t imagine that life would be worthwhile if there wasn’t one.

Isn’t it self evident that these same arguments could be mustered by a Muslim in favor of Islam, or a pagan in favor of Zeus? If your argument could prove anything, it proves nothing. Is this the best that they can do? If people like Hitchens and Dawkins continue to get exposure in the media, the forces of darkness are going to have a tougher time hanging on to their sheep.


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The sancity of contracts, revisited

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Remember how we were told that AIG just had to pay those bonuses, because contracts are sacred? Some of us had some questions, since union contracts didn’t seem to be so sacred, but then, these days, we are all supposed to join in the general disdain for unions. Why are those people always demanding pay and healthcare, anyway?

But now, there is shocking news that the very same folks that considered their executive compensation contracts to be sacred, don’t feel their own contracts with the government should be sacred:

President Obama emerged from a meeting with his senior economic advisers on Friday to say “what you’re starting to see is glimmers of hope across the economy.” But there were also signs of growing tensions between the White House and the nation’s banks over the next phase of the financial rescue.

Some of the healthier banks want to pay back their bailout loans to avoid executive pay and other restrictions that come with the money. But the banks are balking at the hefty premium they agreed to pay when they took the money.

…

Both large and small banks have pressed the Obama administration to make it less costly for them to exit the bailout program by waiving the right to exercise stock warrants the banks had to grant the government in exchange for the loans. At a meeting last month, the chiefs of three of the largest banks separately asked Mr. Obama to direct the Treasury not to exercise the warrants, Mr. Fine said.

Try suggesting to your bank or credit card company that it should waive any part of its contract with you, should you decide to prepay your loan early. See how much consideration you get. Yet here’s a bank executive feeling the shoes when he has to wear them:

Douglas Leech, the founder and chief executive of Centra Bank, a small West Virginia bank that participated in the capital assistance program but returned the money after the government imposed new conditions, said he complained strongly about the Treasury Department’s decision to demand repayment of the warrants. That effectively raised the interest rate he paid on a $15 million loan to an annual rate of about 60 percent, he said.

“What they did is wrong and fundamentally un-American,” he said. “Even though the government told us to take this money to increase our lending, the extra charge meant we had less money to lend. It was the equivalent of a penalty for early withdrawal.”

Don’t be fooled. These folks are saying they were pushed into taking this money, but they wouldn’t have taken it if they didn’t need it, or think they could turn it to their advantage. Now they want the government to give up its contractual rights, because they would rather risk going under than abide by the modest restrictions the government has imposed.

We might be able to muster up a bit of sympathy for these folks, if they were getting out of the program because they truly were in great financial shape. But this is, in the main, about preserving their own rights to rape their stockholders, whether or not they sink the listing ships that they command. This is all about trying to restore the status quo ante, a consummation we should all want to avoid.

Then again, we may have to thank the bankers for doing what folks like Paul Krugman could not do: convince the Treasury that it has to crack down on the banks. It may finally dawn on them that restoring they have to make a choice between placating these greedheads and saving the economy.


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History Lesson

Friday, April 10, 2009

Apparently the Fox folks and other right wingers are attacking Obama for saying that America is not a Christian nation. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. Here is Article 11 of the 1796 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, negotiated by Connecticut’s own, and too much neglected Joel Barlow:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The treaty passed with not a murmur about Article 11.

How far we have fallen.


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Friday Night Music-Devil in a Blue Dress

Friday, April 10, 2009

Just returned from NYC, where we celebrated Good Friday by visiting our son. This is by way of explaining the fact that this is being posted fairly late.

This is one of my wife’s favorite songs, if not her favorite. There are no old videos of Mitch Ryder that I could find, but in this very recent one he seems to be still able to belt it out. It must be a strange life for him. He only had one or two hits, and if he’s still performing he must have to perform this song every time he performs. He’d be lynched if he didn’t. It must be hard to get excited about singing the same song every day for more than 40 years.

Anyway, here he is:

And, by way of compare and contrast, here’s the Boss singing the same song, back in 1975.


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A reasonable request

Thursday, April 9, 2009

My intellectual batteries, or at least the cells that are capable of writing, are pretty tapped out today. I spent six hours doing a rush job writing a brief, and to be frank, I’m just not that into it tonight.

But I thought I would pass this on (via Huffington Post)to anyone who might have missed it. As someone who has to spell his name countless times a day, I feel a certain sympathy with the Asians who are at the receiving end of this foolishness. It makes you wonder if having a negative IQ is a prerequisite for holding elective office in Texas, or just for being nominated as a candidate by the Republicans.

A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

…

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”


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