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A short poem

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Senator Andy Maynard shared this with me yesterday at the Groton Federation of Democratic Women’s fundraiser, and I’m passing it along.

Does this sound like anyone you know:

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig, I dared not rob
and so I lied to please the mob
Now all my lies are proved untrue
and I must face the men I slew
What tales will serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young.

Oddly enough, it’s by the elderly Rudyard Kipling, written in 1924. Perhaps the old Imperialist was disillusioned towards the end by the results of the Great Game and other imperialist ventures he did so much to popularize.

Some things never change, as the poem illustrates. Unfortunately, as a non-believer, I can’t even take solace from the thought that the person whom the poem evokes today will ever have to face the multitudes he has slain. All the more reason, I suppose, that we should do our best to speak for them.

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Groton Federation of Democratic Women event

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Yesterday the Groton Federation of Democratic Women, over which my wife presides, hosted a “tea”. The object was to raise money, which they did, to as great an extent as we can ever do in Groton. The usual suspects were there, including State Comptroller Nancy Wyman and Attorney General Dick Blumenthal.

The event took place at the Zbierski house in the City. In attendance were the present and immediate past (Democratic) mayor of the City, Catherine Kolnaski and Dennis Popp, seen below:

june-9-tea-2007-06-0914-56-50.jpg

For my Groton readers I’ve posted some pictures on a separate page, the link to which you’ll find on the upper right hand corner of this page, or you can click here.

We heard from most of the elected officials present, including Dennis, State Reps Ed Moukawsher and Elissa Wright, State Senator Andy Maynard, and both Wyman and Blumenthal. Lon Seidman also spoke on behalf of Joe Courtney.

I thought Wyman’s remarks were the most interesting, because she talked about the budget negotiating process between the Democrats and Rell. Well, not really Rell, it turns out, because she herself attended none of the sessions. Wyman says there’s a rumour about that Rell was going to attend a session, but Lisa Moody wouldn’t let her. Whether the rumour is true or not is almost beside the point, it illustrates something everyone knows: that Rell is simply a figurehead.

My wife has organized so many of these fundraisers (this one included) that I’m sure we couldn’t remember them all. Since this is my blog, and I can say anything I want, I am hereby recognizing the tremendous amount of work that she, and a few others, do to put these type of events together. It sometimes seems it would be easier to just write a check and avoid the work, but the real value of these events is the opportunity everyone has to get together, spew venom on Republicans, and listen to our officeholders and candidates.

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Blackwater sues families of dead mercenaries

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Talk about ambivalence.

Blackwater has sued the families of the mercenaries (I try to keep this a no-euphemism zone) killed in Fallujah in what may be the ultimate SLAPP suit :

Blackwater has now lifted this atrocity to a whole new level by going on the offensive and suing the families for $10 million. The families now find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun as Blackwater, armed with a war chest and politically-connected attorneys, is aggressively litigating against them. Blackwater has also threatened to hold the administrator of the estates personally liable to scare him into abandoning his position, and has threatened the families’ attorneys as well.

I have no sympathy for the “victims” of Blackwater’s criminality, since there is perhaps no profession more revolting than that of the mercenary. However, as is often the case, sometimes the cause of justice is advanced unwittingly by those on the dark side of the force. The families have a defense fund, and are accepting contributions here .

It’s a battle between the heirs to the flunkies of evil and the uber-evil. It’s not easy to decide whether it is better to support the families, or leave them all to their own devices. I’m still mulling it over.

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People with scruples need not apply

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Does there come a point when death qualification deprives a defendant of a jury of his or her peers. In Today’s Times we learn that 60% of the people in this country may now be effectively disqualified from sitting on death penalty juries. All a prosecuter has to do to disqualify someone with the slightest qualms about the death penalty is to get them to express a preference for life without parole (a position that 60% of us take), and then get them to make some “equivocal statements”, not a tall order for a reasonably skilled prosecutor. In fact, I would venture to say that in the hands of a skilled questioner another 10% of the population could be led to express a preference for life in prison. So, what do you have left:

Jurors eligible to serve in capital cases are “demographically unique,” said Brooke Butler, who teaches psychology at the University of South Florida. Professor Butler has interviewed more than 2,000 potential jurors over the past seven years and has written several articles on the topic.

“They tend to be white,” she said. “They tend to be male. They tend to be moderately well-educated — high school or maybe a little college. They tend to be politically conservative — Republican. They tend to be Christian — Catholic or Protestant. They tend to be middle socioeconomic status — maybe $30,000 or $40,000” in annual income.

In a study to be published in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, a peer-reviewed journal, Professor Butler made an additional finding. “Death-qualified jurors,” she said, “are more likely to be prejudiced — to be racist, sexist and homophobic.”

Not only are they bloodthirsty little devils, but as you might expect, death qualified jurors are not troubled by ideas like presumption of innocence, or legal standards like “beyond a reasonable doubt:

The jurors who remain after people with moral objections to imposing the death penalty are weeded out, studies uniformly show, are significantly more likely to vote to find defendants guilty than jurors as a whole.

There’s a silver lining around every cloud. At least here in the rational states, there is a better than even chance that, sooner or later, the state judiciary will recoil with disgust at our bloodthirsty Supreme Court and its insistence on gaming the system in favor of the prosecution and in favor of death.

A death penalty supporter is quoted as follows in the article:

“We don’t have jury nullification in this country,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “If you have jurors who cannot look at the evidence fairly given their moral and philosophical beliefs, the state is not going to receive a fair trial.”

The problem with this argument is that the people who can look at the “evidence fairly” on the penalty phase don’t seem to be able to look at it fairly on the underlying question of guilt or innocence. If the evidence shows that we have created a system in which the state gets a “fair trial” only if the defendant gets a rigged trial, then, of course, there is no fair trial at all. If it is impossible to guarantee a fair trial to both sides if the death penalty is at issue, then the obvious solution is to take the death penalty off the table, since it is impossible to impose it without tilting the balance toward the state. Parenthetically, I always thought the core value in our system was to provide a fair trial to the defendant, not the state, but I suppose that’s pre-911 thinking. Also parenthetically, we do have juror nullification in this country.

If only a minority of people in this country can sit in judgment in a capital case, isn’t the defendant deprived of a jury of his or her peers. Isn’t there a point beyond which you can’t go before the “death qualification” system becomes incompatible with the constitutional guarantee of the right to a trial by jury, which has always (maybe until now) been assumed to imply a jury broadly representative (or at least potentially representative) of the community. Can it be constitutional for the state to vest the right to sit as a juror in an ever smaller minority of individuals? At some point might it not be possible to argue that the death penalty is unconsittutional because the jury selection system it requires deprives the defendant of his or her right to a constitutionally chosen jury. The Supreme Court will not buy this argument, but some state courts might.

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A confession of error

Thursday, June 7, 2007

I owe Mark Colella an apology. Colella, as you probably recall, is the guy that Lou Deluca accused of beating his granddaughter. I said something in a post yesterday about Deluca sending two thugs to beat up one thug, thus implicitly buying Deluca’s story that Colella really was beating his wife.

I don’t know what came over me. Now, my normal rule of thumb is to assume that everything a Republican politician says is a lie. The burden of proof rests with them, so to speak, on every utterance that comes from their mouths.

For some reason, which is certainly mystifying in retrospect, I bought so much of Deluca’s story as alleged that he had told the cops about the “abuse” and they refused to take action unless the granddaughter complained. Today, we learn in the Courant that even that part of Deluca’s story was a lie.

Waterbury’s police chief Wednesday contradicted state Senate Minority Leader Louis S. DeLuca’s explanation of why he asked an alleged mob associate to intervene in what DeLuca has called an abusive relationship involving his granddaughter.

DeLuca said last week that he sought help from a businessman with alleged mob affiliations only after local police told him they could do nothing about his family’s repeated complaints that his granddaughter was the victim of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband.

But on Wednesday, Waterbury Police Chief Neil O’Leary said in an interview that DeLuca and other family members had come to him only with informal concerns about the granddaughter’s involvement with an older man – and none of them ever said “that she was being abused.”

The chief went on to say that the police don’t require a complaint from the victim to investigate possible abuse. Now, I believe the chief on this one because:

1. There is only a rebuttable presumption that he is a Republican, whereas we know that Deluca is a Republican, and

2. There’s no question that if that’s the policy, which clearly seems to be the case, that he would have followed up for a guy as powerful as Deluca.

So I apologize to Colella, but most of all I apologize to my readers. I’ve let you down. I took the uncorroborated word of a Republican. Oh, I know this is sort of a minor matter in the larger picture, but it was a shameful act. It will never happen again.

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Breaking away

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

The Vermont Secession movement is alive and well. I think it’s terribly selfish of them to not invite the rest of New England along. We could detach Fairfield County if they wanted, so our sole Republican Congressperson would feel more at home.

The folks in Vermont have it right:

“The argument for secession is that the U.S. has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable _ it’s too big, it’s too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens,” said Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a quarterly newspaper dedicated to secession.

“We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war,” Williams said. “If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what’s left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire.”

In truth, this country can’t last forever. Someday it will disintegrate, or descend into tyranny. Disintegration is certainly preferable.

Since we all know that nothing lasts forever, most of us would agree that at some point, this country will no longer exist, at least in anywhere near its present form. But we tend to believe that day is in the far off distant future, eons away. But that may not be the case. One of the things that struck me as I plowed through the Story of Civilization, that massive tome by Will and Ariel Durant, is how often a seemingly invincible society was swept aside, with little warning, in the historical blink of an eye.

So I’m quite serious when I advocate secession, except that I think a New England nation (we could invite New York as a member, but the Yankees must go) would be a better breakaway state than valiant little Vermont.

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Consequences, or the lack thereof

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

It’s not that I disagree with the Day’s call for Lou Deluca to resign. I just find it hard to understand why our crusading local newspaper finds it so easy to see that consensual blowjobs or mafia hits merit removal from office, while premeditated wars of choice apparently don’t. What kind of country do we live in when our opinion leaders think that anyone calling for George Bush’s removal is a deranged leftist? The reason impeachment is not an option is because “respectable” voices like the Day’s remain silent. Deluca tried to send two thugs to beat up one thug, Bush sent a whole army to kill hundreds of thousands of people on the basis of a series of lies. Presumably the Day doesn’t find that a compelling reason for Bush to step aside. Apparently, if one’s crime rise to a certain level of enormity, one acquires an immunity from serious reproach.

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A modest suggestion from Tbogg

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Tbogg politely discusses the contributions of Bill Kristol and his ilk, Libby apologists all, to the national discourse. His conclusion sums it up:

If there was a shred of decency or an ounce of courage in any one of them, take your pick, they would each be making an appointment with Mr. Heavy Rope and Mr. Stout Overhead Beam, and their last act on earth would be to pin a note to their shirt that simply states: “I’m sorry. I was wrong.”.

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They write letters

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

I’ve been spending a little quality time reading the Libby Letters. You can download the full text here at the Smoking Gun, where they’ve also posted them in order of despicableness, starting with Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, and Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton. With friends like those…

I loved Wolfowitz’s opening:

I am currently serving, until June 30th of this year, as President of the World Bank.

You don’t say.

It should be noted here that Dick Cheney, who would certainly have had pride of place in the Raw Story parade of odiousness, chose to stay silent in his lair.

Among the more bizarre features of these letters is the fact that in at least two of them the writers praised Libby’s sex with animals (or was it sex between two animal species, I forget) novel.

What comes across most spectacularly is the refusal of the Beltway nobility to wrap their minds around the fact that the law really does apply to them too. There is virtually no recognition in these letters that Libby did anything wrong. In fact, in many, there is an out and out rejection of the jury verdict, despite the massive evidence against him. Others make the implicit claim that what Libby did doesn’t matter, because he was working on the side of truth and justice. Others support his “memory” defense. Not a single one of his supporters acknowledges the harm he helped cause to Plame or the fact that he has essentially acted as a firewall for Cheney. There is an implied consensus among them: the little people have no right to know what’s going on in their government, and the rules don’t apply to the big people.

You can see why these letters didn’t appear to have much affect on the judge, who said during sentencing that “Evidence in this case overwhelmingly indicated Mr. Libby’s culpability“.

It’s hard to believe that the judge could have been impressed by pleas from the privileged that explicitly or implicitly rejected that judgment. A little less hubris might have helped.

The judge indicated that Libby will do time pending appeal. Whatever the Beltway types may think, the judge obviously thinks that Libby needs to do time, and he’s not about to let Libby run out the clock until November of 2008. Here’s hoping he sticks to his guns on that point.

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Lou goes to Jim in friendship

Monday, June 4, 2007

It seems like you can’t go away for even a few days. If you do, you miss something good.

Take this weekend, when folks in Connecticut discovered that Senate Minority Leader Louis Deluca (R-Naturally) was arrested and has now pled guilty to misdemeanor threatening charges. I was in Maine, and missed the unfolding story, an Oscar winner if ever there was one.

Lou goes hat in hand to James Galante. Can Galante help him save his innocent granddaughter from the abusive man with whom she is entangled?

Sounds like a movie you’ve already seen, doesn’t it?

Melancholy notes on a trumpet open ”The Godfather,” along with an undertaker’s emotional insistence that ”I believe in America.” He is talking to a man in shadow, seeking revenge against the punks who brutalized his daughter. The man, of course, is Don Vito Corleone. Why didn’t you come to me in friendship, he asks? And not until the undertaker kisses his hand and calls him Godfather does he grant his request.

Later on, the undertaker repays his debt, but he’s got nothing on Lou:

DeLuca told the undercover operative that “anytime [Galante] needs anything, within my power, that I can do, I will do.” Later in the conversation, DeLuca said he was “shocked” when Galante was indicted because “he is not a careless guy.” When the undercover operative suggested that Galante got indicted because someone “spilled something,” DeLuca replied that “it had to be some bastard, but, you know, he’s not a careless man.”

Believing that the undercover operative was a Galante employee, DeLuca left instructions on how to arrange future meetings “if you guys need me anymore.” The best way to make contact, DeLuca said, was through a third party because his “relationship” with Galante was a secret.

DeLuca met the undercover operative a second time, on September 7. He promised that “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“And understand that anything that could hurt [Galante], I’ll try to blunt it as best I can.” He promised to be helpful in killing legislation or state regulations that could adversely affect Galante’s business interests. “I can’t influence it at this point, because it’s out of my hands,” DeLuca told the undercover operative, “but if it gets to the point where I have appointments, I can influence it that way. You know … if it’s a commission … generally I get an appointment.”

Of course, this being Connecticut, things have to be more comic than tragic. It turns out that Galante never really delivered for DeLuca, he just told him he did.

Meanwhile, the right side of the Connecticut blogosphere, that pathetic rump, overflows with sympathy for poor Lou. After all, it’s totally undestandable that a guy would turn to a mobster to beat the crap out of someone that the cops wouldn’t even arrest. I refuse to link to this, but take my word that Chris Healy really wrote this:

Senate Republican Leader Louis DeLuca’s arrest yesterday on charges of threatening to assault is a misdemeanor accusation prompted by his frustration over physical abuse heaped on his granddaughter by her boyfriend. Many people in this area will tell you, one of the great mysteries of domestic abuse, is the inability to provide protection to the abused when they don’t prosecute their tormentors. 

From this endless doubt and uncertainty of what would happen to his granddaughter, Sen. DeLuca sought out help from someone he shouldn’t have – James Galante, a reputed mobster and trash hauler from Danbury who is under federal indictment for racketeering.

It should be noted that at the time DeLuca sought Galante’s help in “talking” to the abuser, Galante was not under indictment nor were his mob ties validated by the prosecutors.
…
We are all fallible, this writer included. We all make mistakes in life and try to make amends for them if we are ready to ask forgiveness. Lou has asked for forgiveness and he is entitled to it. This is a personal matter. The undercover FBI agent who had infiltrated the Galante empire, tried to offer DeLuca a bribe and the senator refused. And while some of DeLuca’s comments in the affidavit raise questions, no one has accused DeLuca of doing anything other than try and protect his family.

Lou DeLuca is a gentleman, a good father, grandfather, civic volunteer, political leader and friend to all. He has always been there for people who need him and loyal to a fault. We should all pray for him and hope the best for him and his family who he loves so much and tried to protect.

Absolutely, Chris. We all couldn’t agree more, knowing as we do that you’d extend the same loving sympathy to a Democrat who sought help from an as yet un-indicted mobster. And lest we forget, DeLuca was charged with a mere misdemeanor only because the state police prevented an actual assault by Galante’s thugs. Had Deluca gotten what he wanted, he’d be facing felony charges.

P.S. Lest anyone read any ethnic slurs into the above, rich as it is with Italian surnames, I claim immunity, as my mother’s family hearkens from Sicilia. Family legend has it, in fact, that my grandfather came here to avoid killing a man at the Mafia’s behest. I do not vouch for the truth of the story, by the way.

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