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My take, as if it matters

Thursday, June 28, 2012

 

I would never have predicted that Roberts would be the fifth vote for the health care law, but as a blogger I have the absolute right to give an opinion about why it’s not surprising, now that it's happened.

So here’s my theory. It’s not the Scalia court, and it’s not the Alito court. It’s the Roberts court, and Roberts was probably keenly aware that what the minority was proposing to do was at variance with years of precedent, and that a contrary ruling would have resulted in a great deal of scorn heaped on his court by folks in the legal community, people whose opinions he cares about. In addition, this opinion will not disturb his core corporate constituency, in fact it enriches them, and he cares about them more than he cares about a bunch of easily manipulated teabaggers.

 

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Casey wants my money, he’ll stick it to me later

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

 

I get at least 10 distinct fundraising emails a day, so I normally just scan the subject lines and go on, but for some reason I read an email I received today from Ed Rendell on behalf of one of my least favorite (Democratic) senators, Bob Casey. Casey is one of those guys you can always count on to undermine the Democratic message. Now he’s got a teabagger opponent, so he’s out there sounding the alarm and trying to get money from the people to whom he regularly gives a metaphoric finger.

I found this quote interesting:

We can’t afford another politician campaigning on the Tea Party platform of partisanship and gridlock in Washington. That’s why I’m asking you to join me in supporting Bob’s campaign. Bob has a proven record of reaching across the aisle in order to deliver results for Pennsylvania – and that’s the kind of leadership we need in order to keep creating good middle-class jobs and growing the economy.

Maybe he’s talking about stuff like this where we see Casey undermining the president, not to mention women’s rights, by carrying water for the Catholic bishops and parroting their deceptive line on contraceptive coverage. Or maybe he’s talking about all the reaches across party lines described here. So maybe he’s reached across party lines, but like almost any such reach a Democrat can make these days, the result, for Pennsylvania and the nation, is destructive.

Yes, Casey wants my money. His pitch is that if I don’t give him my money and let him betray me in ways great and small for the next six years, I might get something worse. Well, if I were a rich man I might actually think about that, but things being as they are, I think I’ll send my money where it might get a Democrat elected.

 

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Is it possible? One small step?

Monday, June 25, 2012

A stopped clock is right twice a day, so why can’t a stopped Congress get it right once in two years? Suggesting that something good can even come from the reflexive anti-Obamaism of the modern day Republican party, we learn that there is a bi-partisan movement afoot to severely curtail the government’s use of the “state secret” defense, a defense born in fraud, which continues as a device to shield government wrongdoing from public exposure or accountability.

Obama and his successors in the White House would be banned from using false claims of national security to conceal “embarrassing or unlawful conduct” by the government, under new legislation proposed by lawmakers on both sides of the House.

The proposed State Secrets Protection Act, H.R. 5956, introduced by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), would be the first law to rein in the president’s “state secrets privilege,” a nearly limitless power to kill litigation by claiming a lawsuit would expose national security information to the benefit of America’s enemies. First recognized by the US Supreme Court in a McCarthy-era lawsuit in 1953, the privilege has been increasingly and successfully invoked in the post-9/11 era to shield the government and its agents from court scrutiny in cases involving rendition, torture, warrantless wiretapping, and the lethal targeting of U.S. citizens.

“The ongoing argument that the state secrets privilege requires the outright dismissal of a case is a disconcerting trend in the protection of civil liberties for our nation,” Nadler said of the bill, unveiled last week. ”This important bill recognizes that protecting sensitive information is an important responsibility for any administration and requires that courts protect legitimate state secrets while preventing the premature and sweeping dismissal of entire cases.”

Also signing on to the legislation is Tom Petri (R-Wisconsin), John Conyers Jr. (D-Michigan), and Zoe Lofgren (D-California).

(via Wired)

If, as the article reports, this act truly has widespread support among Republicans, then the country stands to reap at least some benefit from the Republican penchant for opposing everything Obama does. It goes without saying that this bill would have zero Republican support were George Bush still president, or were Mitt Romney in office. The fact that Obama wields this power at the moment apparently blinds at least some Republicans to the possibility that what they do now could tie the hands of one of their own. But that’s all to the good, as it is a pernicious doctrine, and no one, Obama included (and he’s shown no real inclination to stop the abuse) should have the power to decide when he or his administration can be called to account.

All in all, it’s not much of a return for four years of obstructionism, but it’s not nothing, and if the bill should pass it will be one small step forward.

 

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The ACLU at the right wing money trough

Monday, June 25, 2012

 

A couple of years ago I became involved with a local branch of the ACLU, but I found that I just didn’t have the time to attend the meetings. Even then, I had my doubts about the organization, when I learned from a state legislator that the ACLU had opposed attempts to outlaw political robo-calls. I know that they’ve been analogized to door knocking politicos or religious fanatics, but analogies often obscure as much as they enlighten. Robo-calls are not only a corrosive force in politics, but they are inexcusable incursions into one’s privacy. But to the ACLU, the right of the individual to be left alone must be subordinated to the “right” of a machine to intrude with a message more often than not consisting of lies. But as this article makes clear, the ACLU, along with some other rights organizations, have turned a blind eye to worker’s rights, while remaining solicitous of the “rights” of corporations. To my mind the author, Mark Ames, makes a persuasive case, and since the ACLU has been the recipient of Koch brothers largesse, it will have no further need of mine:

And that brings me to the ACLU today—the most depressing part of this story. I had an inkling that the ACLU had abandoned labor before my simple exercise check of their website. Mike Elk has shared with me some of his research into this subject. And it’s well known that the ACLU vigorously supported the disastrous Citizens United decision; the ACLU also took $20 million dollars from the Koch brothers, whose libertarian outfits have played a major role in making Citizens United a reality. Supposedly that money was meant to “fight the Patriot Act”—which is odd, considering that the director of the Koch brothers’ Center for Constitutional Studies at Cato and Vice President for Legal Affairs at Cato, Roger Pilon, explicitly supported the Patriot Act from 2002 through 2008, and that the Kochs’ Cato Institute hired John Yoo to serve on their editorial advisory board for the Cato Supreme Court Review. One should be skeptical when it comes to Koch “donations” sold to the public as charity work in the service of human rights.

Maybe there’s no connection there whatsoever between the Kochs’ $20 million gift to the ACLU, and the ACLU’s advocacy for the Kochs’ pet political issue, Citizens United, which transferred greater power from democracy and into the hands of billionaire oligarchs like the Kochs. Maybe it’s all a coincidence, I don’t know. But we do know that there is precedent for the ACLU taking money from corporations, advocating their cause under the guise of “protecting free speech” and hiding the conflict of interest from the public in order to make their defense seem more convincing.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ACLU vigorously defended the interests of the tobacco lobby under the guise of protecting their “first amendment rights”—and they did it for payments in-kind. Leaked tobacco documents in the 1990s exposed the ACLU working out explicit deals with the tobacco industry to take their money in exchange for advocating their interests in public, without disclosing that gross conflict of interest and violation of the public trust. The documents and memos revealed that the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to the ACLU by the tobacco companies were payments in kind to for the ACLU’s defense of Big Tobacco, a relationship that both parties tried to hide in order to confuse the public into believing that the ACLU’s arguments for tobacco were motivated by purely altruistic constitutional arguments, rather than sleazy under-the-table cash payments. The ACLU is, after all, a trusted institution among progressives—that made them the ideal “Third Party Advocate” in PR terms for the tobacco industry’s interests.

(via Naked Capitalism)

It’s problematic in the extreme that the ACLU has abandoned labor, but even more problematic that it has lost sight of the free speech forest for the trees. The essence of the guarantee is that no subject matter is off-limits, which implies that there should be a wide ranging public debate. That also implies that government has a role, to be exercised judiciously to be sure, in making sure that no man or group of men (it’s always men) dominates the debate. I truly believe that James Madison was too keen a student of human nature to buy into the idea that money equals speech, or that a corporation was entitled to constitutional rights equivalent, and therefore by operation of reality, superior, to those of flesh and blood humans. A corporation is a creature of statute, and as the state’s creature it should be subject to whatever limits the state chooses to set. Lord knows that in the recent past, the state has chosen to set very few. We live in a nation where the discourse is dominated by corporations and billionaires. The ACLU, unfortunately, accepts this as an unfortunate by-product of a sacrosanct constitutional imperative, and has pretty much bought into the idea that if a person has the money to drown out other voices, than he has the right to do so. Money equals speech, and the more money you have, the more you get to talk, and the more other people have to listen.

Give a man a bullhorn, and he drowns out all other speakers, and imposes himself on his audience, whether it wishes to hear or no. The ACLU has helped hand that bullhorn to the corporations, and the end result will be the destruction of the republic.

 

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Friday Night Music-Heat Wave

Friday, June 22, 2012

Not a great video, but this, in one or more reincarnations, is pretty much it for this song. It’s a great song, and we’re certainly having a heat wave, so…

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Low hanging fruit

Friday, June 22, 2012

 

Thank God the SEC is out there protecting us from the guys that are really destroying the economy!

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a Florida man with running a Ponzi scheme whose trading was dictated by celestial forces.

In a civil suit filed in U.S. District Court in Florida, the SEC alleges Gurudeo “Buddy” Persaud, 47, made “numerous misrepresentations and omissions to investors, foremost among them failing to disclose his trading strategies were based on lunar cycles and the gravitational pull between Earth and the moon.”

According to the SEC’s complaint, Persaud raised more than $1 million between July 2007 to January 2010 from 14 investors in three states: Florida, Connecticut, and New York. At least two of his investors were “unsophisticated investors.” Persaud is accused of keeping $415,000 of the money he collected for himself and his family. He allegedly used the money to pay for a mortgage, his kids’ tuition, family vacations, and clothes. Of the $530,000 in investor money Persaud did invest in stocks, futures, and options, he lost approximately $400,000, which, go figure, with a trading principle like this:

The primary principle underlying Persaud’s trading strategy was that the gravitational pull between the moon and Earth affects mass human behavior, which in tum affects the stock markets. For example, Persaud believed that when the moon is positioned so there is a greater gravitational pull on humans, they feel down and are therefore more inclined to sell securities in the markets.

(via Talking Points Memo)

Talk about low hanging fruit. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t go after the guy, though the case could probably have been handled by a local US Attorney, but this seems to be the only type of guy they do go after. Weren’t credit default swaps about as transparently phony? If I offered to issue insurance policies without bothering to set aside reserves to pay up in case My bets went bad, I would be considered to be a scam artist, as indeed I would be. If I’m AIG, not only does the government cover my bad bets, but it lets me pay big retention bonuses to the geniuses who cooked up the scheme, not to mention the fact that the guys on the other side of the bets, who got paid in full, knew all along that AIG lacked the resources to pay if the bills ever came due. Mel Brooks said that “It’s good to be the King”. It’s also good to be too big to fail.

 

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A liar for the ages

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

 

To say that Willard Romney is a liar is to say nothing new to anyone who has been paying attention, but alas, quite a few people aren’t paying attention. And while, in 2000, the press worked vigorously to spread the false meme that Al Gore was a fabricator, we can rest assured that having learned its lesson (I jest, of course, IOKIYAR), it will fail in its duty to spread the truth about Romney. So, it’s up to each of us to arm ourselves with the facts, and spread them far and wide. In that spirit, I recommend this article from Mother Jones, which explores some of Mitt’s lesser known lies. In some cases, of course, one can make the argument that there is a literal truth buried in the artful language, but really that sort of thing is still lying. If your object in speaking is to get the listener to believe something you know is not true, then you are lying.

The Mother Jones article focuses on three stretchers about his personal life, including the one about his burning desire to go to Vietnam, a desire frustrated by those deferments Uncle Sam kept forcing on him. The folks at Mother Jones just can’t seem to understand how hard it was for him:

So his story—he yearned to be fighting for the United States in Vietnam and did nothing to keep himself out of the reach of Uncle Sam—is false. And he has not acknowledged in public a particularly interesting wrinkle. At Stanford, Romney led a protest against demonstrators who mounted an anti-war sit-in at the university. He held a sign that proclaimed, “SPEAK OUT, DON’T SIT IN.” Yet five years later, in 1970, after George Romney had turned against the war, Romney told the Boston Globe, “If it wasn’t a political blunder to move into Vietnam, I don’t know what is.”

Romney wished he could have gone to war, but he didn’t enlist. He took no steps to prevent himself being drafted, but he did. He supported the war, then he didn’t. As a politically-minded son of privilege and politics, Vietnam was a confusing matter for Romney, and he has not addressed that publicly.

(via Mother Jones)

Imagine, if you will, that this was Obama’s story. Would we ever hear the end of it?

 

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A plug

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

 

Ever since I got my Ipad, I have searched for the perfect app on which to write these blog posts. I now think I’ve found it. Actually, a combination of apps, that together do everything I need.

The first is called Writing Kit, which allows you to edit Markdown documents. There are lots of apps that do that, but Writing Kit has built in researching capabilities (a mini-search app and a web browser) and support for pinboard, which means if I find an interesting article on my RSS reader (Mr. Reader, also the best after a long search) I can save it to pinboard, easily access it in Writing Kit, and instantly paste a selected quote into a new post, along with a nicely formatted link. Once I’m done writing, I can export the entire document as HTML and paste it into Blogsy, which, (and I’ve tried them all) is the best blog editor on the platform.

The only problem is that I have to remember to use a special apostrophe character rather than the keyboard apostrophe, because Markdown uses the apostrophe as some sort of marker, and it translates to a string of characters when it’s translated to HTML. (See, I deliberately screwed up back there, and the word “it’s” turned to gibberish).

So, if you happen to be looking for an excellent tool for drafting stuff to post on-line, take a look at the Writing Kit app.

 

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Obama’s gambit

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

 

According to Ed Kilgore at Political Animal, there’s a conservative number cruncher who doesn’t see Obama’s move on immigration as being all that much of a game changer, given that Hispanic voters are only truly significant in two tossup states, Nevada and Arizona:

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics (a conservative numbers-cruncher whom I greatly respect) says he doesn’t quite get Obama’s DREAM Lite gambit last week. After all, only three swing states have “significant” (which he defines as over 10%) Hispanic populations, and one of those is Cuban-heavy Florida, so we’re really just talking Nevada and Colorado, who only have 15 lousy EVs, and Obama’s real problem is with white voters who don’t like liberalized immigration policies.

Trende’s depiction of DREAM Lite as at best a wash for Obama may be more than a little off, per the first national poll measuring reaction, from Bloomberg:

Sixty-four percent of likely voters surveyed after Obama’s June 15 announcement said they agreed with the policy, while 30 percent said they disagreed. Independents backed the decision by better than a two-to-one margin.

Only self-identified Republicans bucked the trend, opposing DREAM Lite by a 36-56 margin.

(via Political Animal – DREAM Lite Reaction)

Kilgore makes some good points in response, but there’s one that I think he missed. Besides motivating Hispanics to vote for him, Obama has potentially undermined Romney’s always shaky support in the Republican base. Romney is behaving exactly like one would have suspected, and I’m sure he was expected, to act. He is ducking, bobbing and weaving, refusing to say he would repeal Obama’s edict, and refusing to say he would not. His dodge is totally unconvincing, particularly to a base that has grown increasingly to expect absolute fealty from its candidates. It’s not just this issue; it reinforces the quite accurate perception that, once elected, Romney will proceed to ignore everything he’s said in the past that proves at all inconvenient to his re-election prospects, and that means he’ll be moving away from the crazies. They feel it in their bones, and this just confirms their suspicions. The more they feel that way, the more of them will decide not to vote, or to vote for a third party. It’s a more subtle, and totally morally defensible form of the voter suppression in which Republicans engage by the use of brute force. It also, secondarily, reinforces Romney’s image among the rest of us as a man who will say – or refuse to say – anything to get elected.

 

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Art mystery

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Yesterday my wife, son, and I went to the MFA in Boston, which has been renovated and expanded recently. I don’t claim to be an art expert, but I do know that in portraiture prior to the twentieth century, the objects around the subject usually were symbolic in some sense. A scholar might hold a weighty tome for example. So this picture got me thinking? Is the artist making a not so subtle jab against the Father of our Country?

 

Now, I know that Washington was a superb horseman and all, but it seems rather strange to feature the horse’s ass so prominently.

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