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You learn something new every day

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Deray McKesson, of Black Lives Matter fame, and I, have something in common. We both went to Bowdoin College. Today he tweeted that he was proud of Bowdoin for taking down a plaque honoring Confederate alumni. I guess I’m proud of the college too, but I have to say I’m also a little embarrassed.

When I went there I knew very little about Bowdoin’s Civil War history. I can’t recall ever seeing the plaque in question. I think at some point I heard something about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, one of the heroes (on the Union side) at Gettysburg. I think I even had a seminar in his former home. But the Vietnam war was raging, and Chamberlain was more known on campus for being the college president that mandated that every student had to participate in the 1870s equivalent of ROTC. The students actually went on strike, something that didn’t happen again until the nationwide student strike after Kent State.

Anyway, I was shocked to learn that the plaque in question was placed in 1965, at the end of the Civil War centennial. I assumed it had been erected back in the mists of time. Look, you might say, even back in 1965 people, especially white people, weren’t sensitive to the issues that are being debated today. Times were different. All true. But, gag, guess whose name is on that plaque along with the other traitors? Ready?

Jefferson Davis!

My alma mater gave him an honorary degree before he betrayed his country in order to preserve slavery. So, technically, he was an alum, but even in 1965 you’d think they’d think twice about putting his name on a plaque up in the northernmost state in the continental U.S. Did it never cross their minds to simply rescind the honorary degree, or conveniently forget about it? They should have done that in 1861.

But to quote Mr. Dylan: “..you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears, take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears.

Yes, indeed, this would all be bad enough, but consider this. The college will replace the current plaque:

This panel will update and replace a previous panel installed in the Pickard lobby in the fall of 2015 that explained Bowdoin’s connections to the Civil War and described the College’s relationship with Davis. It was at that time that the Bowdoin Board of Trustees agreed unanimously to discontinue an award in Davis’s name that had been presented annually from 1973 to 2015 to a student or students excelling in constitutional law, and to return the full value of the award’s endowment to the original donor, the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

In 1973, the year after I graduated, the College started giving an award in Davis’s honor for, of all things, excellence in constitutional law, paid for by a group of racists. And they kept giving it until 2015! There are deposits of irony there that I simply can’t mine. It’s hard to believe they were able to get away with it back in ’73. There was already a fairly active and outspoken African American society and 60s radicalism had not yet been totally squashed. In all those years, did it never happen that the winner of that award was a person of color, who by Davis’s lights should have been toiling on a plantation? How do you give an African American an award named after Jefferson Davis? Maybe they handed it out in the dead of night, and never told the honoree about it. Maybe they just called it the “Davis” award, and left out the “Jefferson”. Whatever.

Well, I’m still a loyal alum, and like McKesson I’m happy that Bowdoin did the right thing, but absolutely stunned that it had the need to do so.

Oh, one more thing. Fondly do I hope, fervently do I pray, that the college does not see fit to give a degree to the current occupant of the White House.

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Meanwhile, under the radar

Saturday, August 19, 2017

It may very well be that Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party from within. He is apparenlty (whether intentionally or not, who can say?) fomenting a civil war in the party, and he is certainly setting the stage for an electoral turnaround that even the Democrats may not be able to blow. So, things may be looking somewhat good for the long term, (The Democrats do have a track record, after all) but lets not forget about the short term.

Donald Trump is widely acknowledged to have accomplished absolutely nothing, but that’s not the case for his cabinet. Since Trump doesn’t care about policy, the odds are that he ceded the choices for cabinet positions to Pence and his ilk. The result is, that apart from the dunderhead Rick Perry and the empty headed Ben Carson (who has permanently ended the use of the cliche “you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to…” thereby ceding that terrain to rocket scientists), the cabinet is full of fairly competent, albeit evil, people. While Trump distracts, they operate as unobtrusively as they can and have been quietly screwing the people of this country, in service to corporate interests.

Case in point in today’s Times:

The Trump administration is pushing to scrap a rule that would have made it easier for nursing home residents to sue nursing homes for injuries caused by substandard care, abuse or neglect, bringing its campaign to relax federal regulations to the delicate business of care for older Americans.

The push would undo a rule issued by the Obama administration that would have prevented nursing homes from requiring that consumers agree to resolve any disputes through arbitration rather than litigation. Nursing homes routinely require consumers to sign an arbitration agreement as a condition of admission to the home.

via The New York Times

Bravo for the Times for bringing this up, though it’s far from the front page. But we’re not likely to hear about it again until the rule becomes final. As with all the other evil done by Trump’s cabinet, it flies mostly beneath the radar.

Arbitration actually makes some sense in the context in which it originally arose: dispute settlement between business interests. The arbitrators were paid by both sides and they had no incentive to be biased in favor of either side. Not so with business vs. consumer arbitration. The arbitrator knows precisely who is paying his or her salary, and who has the power to see that he or she never arbitrates again should the decision go the wrong way. It just doesn’t pay to rule for the consumer. This type of mandated arbitration makes Kafka’s The Trial look like due process. The fix is in from the start. It’s true, as the Trump folks claim, that arbitration “allow[s] for the expeditious resolution of claims without the costs and expense of litigation”, but they forgot to add that it also relieves the business interest from ever being held responsible for its negligence or malfeasance.

This is just one example of what is happening in this country. I’m overjoyed that the people of Boston beat back the Nazis, but while we concentrate on that very real threat, our country is being silently destroyed from within.

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Time to call a fascist a fascist

Sunday, August 13, 2017

I’ve written before (some might say ad nauseam) about the inability of the Democrats to push a consistent message; the ability of the right to label themselves in palatable ways (they’re “pro-life”!); and the willingness or helplessness of a compliant press to go along with their labeling.

We’re seeing that in spades so far as the fascists among us are concerned. They have branded themselves “white nationalists” and a compliant press had gone along. I was struck by this article (hardly an outlier) in the Boston Globe, in which the phrase is used repeatedly to describe people who are undoubtedly fascists. After all, they proudly displayed Nazi and fascist symbols in the banners they carried, though in the linked article we learn only that “Confederate flags and other banners” made an appearance. As with the concession of the term “pro-life” to a political movement that is anti-abortion and anti-people, the use of the term “white nationalists” concedes too much to these fascists. It obscures their racism and for many Americans (I just read somewhere that 25% of Americans think the sun goes around the earth) the term “nationalist” probably sounds patriotic.

It may be asking too much for the press to call a fascist a fascist, but they should at least come up with a term of their own, rather than going with the term the fascists want them to use. How about “avowed racists” or something of that sort? As for the Democrats, they should be avoiding the terms “alt-right” and “white nationalist” and call a fascist a fascist. Fox won’t like it, but we should be way past the point where anyone cares what the people on Fox say about Democrats. (I’m assuming by now they’ve arrived at a way to blame yesterday’s carnage on Obama.) In fact, the Democrats should simply be calling Fox the propagandists that they are. One of the reasons the press is so subservient to Republicans these days is that for years the Republicans (and they’re still doing it) labeled them the “liberal media”. It was mildly true at one point (facts do have a well known liberal bias), but nowadays they bend over so far backwards that the opposite is true. So it worked, and it might work for the Democrats if they only made some noise about it.

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On Second Thought

Monday, August 7, 2017

I was reading this post at Hullabaloo about the oft debunked claim (which nonethless never dies) that businessmen make good politicians, and I said to myself: “I’ve written about this at one point”. So, I looked for it, and found it here.

Re-reading your old stuff can sometimes be embarrassing, but sometimes it can be pretty satisfying. You read along and say, “Wow, this makes sense, and I turned out to be right”. In this case, I was right, mostly, and feeling pretty good about the old post, until, sadly, I got to the final paragraph:

Fortunately, while we citizens, like the pundits, hold politicians in contempt, as a result of which they’ve become contemptible, we have not followed the pundits when it comes to believing that business experience is good training for politics. If we did, Donald Trump might be president right now, and, perish the thought, Linda McMahon would be a United States Senator.

Well, at least Linda McMahon isn’t our Senator, and after all, most of us did vote for the other candidate.

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Bigots lament: Google unfair to bigots

Saturday, August 5, 2017

There are times when one searches for just the right analogy to put something in just the right perspective, but the search is in vain. So it is with me as I struggle for just the right set of words to describe the fellow who circulated a memo among his fellow Google employees explaining that the company should not be seeking a diverse mix of employees, because women and minorities just can’t measure up to white men. This is the part that has me racking my brain in vain:

The document’s author also wrote that employees with conservative political beliefs are discriminated against at Google and lamented about how “leftist” ideology is harmful. They argue that the company should have a more “open” culture where their viewpoint would be welcomed. The document said that improving racial and gender diversity is less important than making sure conservatives feel comfortable expressing themselves at work.

via Motherboard

The poor bigot is upset because he’s not made to feel welcome. He simply can’t understand why women wouldn’t welcome his view that they should not be welcomed at Google. Somewhere, there’s someone who can come up with the perfect analogy to encapsulate the absurdity of that position, but alas, I am not that person.

Somewhat off point, I recommend the Motherboard blog to which I’ve linked. Interesting tech news leavened with a consistent left wing perspective.

Filed in Hypocrisy | | Comments (1)

Just a thought

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Jeff Flake, the other hypocritical Senator from Arizona, has “written” a book in which he strenuously criticizes Trump. Yet, as Crooks and Liars reports, he is very reluctant to say the same things on television that are in the book. The writer at Crooks and Liars speculates that Flake doesn’t want to be recorded saying the stuff that’s in the book, as those recordings might be used against him.

That’s possible. But there’s an alternative, more likely explanation. Flake probably hasn’t read the book.

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Tony, we hardly knew ye

Monday, July 31, 2017

This is quite depressing. See the title of this post? I googled the phrase, “we hardly knew ye”, just to make sure I had it right, and what do I find but that lots of other people have already come up with it.

The fact is, I’m sitting here on a porch overlooking Lake Pauline in Ludlow, Vermont, and I’m a bit behind the times, as I’ve been away from my computer for hours at a time, vacationing. Or is it vacating? There we were, having lunch in Londonderry, when one of our phones lit up, and we got the news flash. No sooner had the Mooch been hired, then he threatened to fire everyone else, after which he himself was fired. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, and by that I mean that if it happened to anyone else, except maybe Trump, it would be happening to a nicer guy.

From what I’ve read, the Trump defenders in the media, who were heralding the appointment over the last few days, are not going to have to do back flips and tell everyone what a smart move it was to get rid of him.

I think it’s probably the case that all over the country people with brains have been wrestling with this question: is it better for the chaos to continue? On the one hand, it keeps them from getting anything done. On the other hand, you’ve got a guy so unhinged that he could lash out in unpredictable ways, and he’s got that button so close.

Well, as I said, I’m on vacation, so I’m going to pretend that all this isn’t happening. This, by the way, is the view from the house we’re renting. We’ve been on this lake before, but this house has the advantage of being pretty far from the main road, and at times it gets preternaturally quiet, except for the cries of the loons and the quacks of the ducks.

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Still No Maverick

Friday, July 28, 2017

I’ve seen a bit of the media reaction to McCain’s vote. Once again, they fall all over themselves praising the guy, with nary a word (or maybe one word) about the fact that it was two women senators, neither one of whom is usually a Profile in Courage, who led the way on the Republican side, not to mention that for once the Democrats stuck together on something. I’m not sure what motivated McCain, but I like the theory I’ve read elsewhere that it was sweet revenge against Trump, who allowed, as you might recall, that McCain was no hero to him. In any event, he did leave the corral for a bit, and we must give him the small amount of credit to which he’s entitled. He’s not as big a coward as the many Republican Senators who did what they were told, and voted to give Paul Ryan and his “Freedom Caucus” carte blanche to write the final bill.

Speaking of the media, I thought I had heard everything on the both sides front, but this takes the cake: Brian Williams wants to know “when do the Democrats get off the bench and have to own part of this process?”

Umm. That is a ridiculous question, even if you put aside the fact that the Republicans chose to put the Democrats on “the bench”. But within the beltway, it’s an article of faith that both sides are equally to blame for everything.

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Yes Virginia, John McCain is a hypocrite

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

If I had any qualms (which I didn’t), about dumping on McCain a few days ago, the events of today would surely have eased my conscience.

It’s bad enough that he left his taxpayer funded sickbed in order to make sure other people never leave theirs, but the icing on the cake was the brazen display of hypocrisy in which he chose to engage. First, there’s this, straight from the hypocrites mouth:

Our responsibilities are important, vitally important to the continued success of our republic. Our arcane rules and customs are deliberately intended to require broad cooperation to function well at all. The most revered members of this institution accepted the necessity of compromise in order to make incremental progress on solving America’s problems and defend her from her adversaries. That principle mind-set and the service of our predecessors who possessed it come to mind when I hear the senate referred to as the world’s greatest deliberative body. I’m not sure we can claim that distinction with a straight face today.

via Daily Kos

It reads like an all out assault on the process that he left a sick bed to enable, and for which he cast the deciding vote. He doesn’t even bother to give a principled reason why it was necessary for him to discard Senate rules and traditions to pass a law (to the extent there’s even a proposal out there) supported by a whopping 12% of the American people. And of course he’ll never explain why he should get gold plated free health care while 22 million lose their bare bones plans.

But no McCain hypocrisy would be complete without a “both sides do it” lie that the media can loudly second:

And then he lied. He said that they should step back and hold hearings, report a bill out of committees with “contributions from both sides. “Something that my dear friends on the other side of the aisle didn’t allow to happen years ago.” That’s a flat-out lie. There were hearings. There were committee meetings. There were one-on-one bipartisan meetings. There were more than 100 Republican amendments included—like the one that provides for how senators get their health coverage

The man has been coddled by the press for 17 years, and he’s grown used to being able to spout lies and bullshit while retaining his “maverick” image that was never deserved in the first place. Even the diarist at Kos buys into it somewhat, for the post is titled: Spare us the lectures, Sen. McCain, and vote your principles instead. McCain has no principles, just like the rest of his ilk on the Republican side of the aisle. Right now he’s saying that he won’t vote for the bill “as it is today”, but there is no bill to speak of, so that’s just another way for him to say that when the shit hits the fan, he’ll step up and turn the fan’s speed to high.

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Hang in there, Jeff

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Life is funny. If, a year ago, you had told me that someday Jefferson Beauregard Sessions would be attorney general; that he’d be under pressure to resign, but that I wouldn’t want him to resign, I’d have questioned your sanity.

Yet here we are. Trump’s new golden boy has allowed as if it sure does look like Trump wants Jeff to resign, so that he can make a recess appointment of a new AG to fire Robert Mueller. And here I am, hoping that Jeff doesn’t resign.

Look at it this way. A Sessions successor is unlikely to lighten up on Jeff’s racist agenda, but he is pretty much certain to do Trump’s bidding on the obstruction of justice front. If you’re Jeff Sessions, you might not enjoy being publicly humiliated, but you might cherish the opportunity to obstruct your tormentor’s obstruction of justice, even if you may be in the investigatory cross hairs yourself.

Anyway, hang in there Jeff. You’re a disgusting, loathsome, despicable specimen, but hey… the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

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