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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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Indictable

Saturday, July 22, 2017

This is interesting. Over the last several weeks I’ve read a number of articles in which the writer asserted rather blandly that a president was immune from criminal prosecution. There is usually no caveat, even to the extent of noting that perhaps a president could be prosecuted once he or she had left office. One would never know that no court has ever ruled on the issue. The linked article notes that not only did the execrable Kenneth Starr reach a different conclusion, but the far more honorable Leon Jaworski did as well.

I think it is fair to say that if a president cannot be indicted, neither can he or she be simply arrested and charged with a crime, since the two acts are functionally equivalent.

So, lets do a little imagining. Imagine you had a president who was a bit mentally ill. This president happens to be of a member of a party that controls both houses of Congress, and that party happens to be in the hands of corrupt party hacks who feel this mentally ill president is a useful idiot that is convenient for them to achieve their political objectives, which for the sake of argument we will say are, generally speaking, enacting laws that transfer the nation’s wealth from the mass of people to the rich. Let us imagine that nothing this president could do would impel this corrupt political party to consider impeachment or the invocation of the 25th Amendment.

Now let us imagine that this president takes it into his head to go to 5th Avenue and shoot and kill random people on the street. Now, he would no doubt expect his base to continue to love him, and they no doubt would, as would the folks at Fox and Friends, but the rest of us, not to mention the family and friends of the victims, might feel differently. According to the “president is immune from prosecution” theory, this imaginary president could continue to kill random people throughout his term, with the sole remedy being the possibility that he could be brought to justice after the end of his term.

Let us assume further that after an imaginary president is inaugurated, evidence surfaces that he or she committed a string of illegal acts prior to that inauguration, including illegal acts in furtherance of a conspiracy by and with a foreign government to tamper with the electoral process. According to the “president is immune from prosecution” theory, that president became immune from prosecution the minute he or she took an oath swearing to defend the constitution he or she had so recently attempted to destroy.

There are plenty of legal concepts available to the courts to protect the president’s legitimate interest in being able to carry out his or her duties without improper interference from the courts. I don’t think there’d be any argument against the position that the president should be immune from criminal prosecution for action taken within the scope of his or her duties. If, for instance, he ordered a military attack on a civilian population, he couldn’t be brought up before a US court on charges of war crimes, though he could be impeached for the same act if Congress saw fit. On the other hand, if he or she chose not to pay income taxes duly owed to the federal government, there is no earthly reason why he or she should not face the same court system to which the rest of us would be consigned if we committed the same offense. A president’s obligation to pay taxes is simply outside the scope of his or her official duties.

In the present case, Trump’s crimes all predate the day of his inauguration, though the coverup has continued. He can argue that colluding with a foreign government and then covering it up comes within the scope of his duties, but that would be a stretch that even the present Supreme Court might not be willing to make, and even if they were willing to go there for acts taken prior to the inauguration, his pre-inauguration acts cannot be retroactively assigned to his presidential duties.

Given the present Supreme Court, it is entirely possible that we might get a blanket immunity ruling, limited, of course, as was Bush v Gore, to the present circumstances so that a future Democratic president could still face criminal prosecution, but I doubt the court would go there, since they have the equally useful idiot Pence waiting in the wings.

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Some historical revisionism

Thursday, July 20, 2017

There are certain memes that become embedded in our national conversation, despite the fact that they are in no way fact based. Being of an age when I get to be a curmudgeon, I feel I have the right to protest. Consider this:

Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee known for his independent streak over more than three decades representing Arizona in the Senate, has brain cancer, his office disclosed Wednesday night in a statement from the Mayo Clinic.

via The New York Times (Emphasis added)

Let’s see now. Three decades would bring us back to 1987. But we didn’t find out about John McCain’s “independent streak” until he ran for president in 2000 and announced to the world that he was a “maverick”. The press fell in love with him because he sometimes said some stuff that sounded mavericky (i.e., reasonable), for a Republican. He’s been on television almost every Sunday since then. But while he sometimes says things that run against the Republican grain, a funny thing tends to happen when it comes time to vote. He runs with the herd. It would be interesting to ask any of the reporters that are so enamored of the man to name one actually important issue in which he has strayed. (I’m sticking with the maverick metaphor as long as I can) When the pressure’s on, Mitch McCowboy has no trouble roping him in. Consider health care, in which he hasn’t strayed from the corral at all, except to assert that the Republican plan is dead, but not by his hand.

I realize he’s ill, and he may, by leaving the corral at this point, and in no way due to any independent streak, be doing the greatest public service of his political career . But remember that’s because he’s one less vote they can count on to screw the people of America.

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Democrats continue to chase the ever moving center

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

This is why I won’t give money to the DCCC, the DSCC, or the DNC, from a Down with Tyranny post about the DCCC courting Blue Dog candidates:

A problem for progressive voters is that few Democrats run as Blue Dogs. They mouth the words normal Democrats say and then when it’s too late, when they’re in office, they take off the masks and expose the ugly truth. Chances are good that if the DCCC is backing a candidate in a primary, they’re backing either a Blue Dog or New Dem. Chances are going when someone claims to be a “centrist” (like Dave Min in Orange County or Andrew Janz in the Central Valley) we’re talking about Blue Dogs or New Dems not Democrats. Be careful– and everyone on this list you get to by hitting the Blue America thermometer on the right is a progressive and not a Blue Dog and not a New Dem. And one more thing to remember, if an anti-Trump tsunami elects a batch of slimy Blue Dogs in 2018, they’ll all be defeated in 2022 when their constituents realize they got tricked by the DCCC again.

via Down with Tyranny

Read the entire post. This is the main theme of the DWT blog, but it is an unfortunate fact that their posts are generally spot on. While the Republicans have been moving ever rightward, the Democrats have been following them, and have for years been actively recruiting candidates who are indistinguishable from Republicans. Why should people vote for a party that’s selling Republican lite, when they can get the real thing?

I’ve been around quite a while now, and I’ve been interested in politics since I was 14 or so, and I remember a few things. The most left wing radical Democrats, the Sanders, Frankens, et. al., are themselves indistinguishable from the run of the mill Democrat of 1968. “Left wing” proposals, such as single payer, increased social security benefits, raising the social security tax cap, etc., poll well. Yet our party has never gotten behind them, because at its center, it is controlled by Wall Street. It’s a kinder, gentler version of the Republican Party, and the more Republican it gets, the more it loses. And as soon as, in rare cases, it wins, it throws away its victory by doing nothing. As much as I support the current effort to prevent the Republican evisceration of Obamacare, the fact is that it’s nowhere close to being the program it should be. As Paul Krugman has repeatedly noted, it is entirely derived from a Republican healthcare plan, and the only reason the Republicans opposed it, and still oppose it, is because it was proposed by a black Democratic president. Had John McCain been elected, and had he pushed for a healthcare program as he promised, it would probably have been much like Obamacare. We lost in 2010 because we adopted a healthcare program no one understood or really liked, and a stimulus package designed to get the vote of a single Republican Senator from Maine, that did nothing more than prevent things from getting worse. That was the result of Republican lite and we are going in that direction yet again.

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Yet another modest proposal

Monday, July 17, 2017

There is evidence of widespread hacking of the voter databases in the months prior to the election, and on Election Day. It is impossible to say this had no effect on the outcome of the election, and it appears increasingly likely that Russian interference did, in fact, tip the scales the tiny bit necessary to throw the election to the man who is already, without a doubt, the worst president in history, and I should add, that is no mean feat. Just ask George W. Bush, who had to fuck up royally to win the crown for himself.

In the olden days there was no internet and even it its early stages, many computers were not connected. If one wanted to get information from one computer to another, in the absence of a local area wired network, one put the data on a “floppy disk” and walked it from one computer to another. This is admittedly an inconvenient way of doing things, but it has the advantage of being hackproof, unless one is able to get direct access to the computer on which the source data is maintained.

It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that, if we must use computers in the election process, that they be stand alone computers, unconnected to the internet in any way, shape or form. That doesn’t mean data could not be provided to interested parties. Again, in the olden days, our town committee was able to obtain computer files from our local town clerk containing registration data. We got them on the “floppy disks” I mentioned. We could make whatever changes we liked to that data, but we couldn’t affect the data maintained on the town computers. Only duly authorized people could do that.

There is no reason in the world why a system could not be adopted that made use of computers not connected to the internet and therefore not easily hackable. It might slow things down a bit, but I’d rather have had to wait until Wednesday morning to find out that Hillary had won, rather than learn early Tuesday evening that the end of the Republic was at hand.

It is also scarcely credible that there are still people advocating “secure” voting over the internet.

Almost entirely off this subject, but this hacking reminds me of one of the very first episodes of the old Mission Impossible television series, in which our heroes decided to accept a voting related mission, knowing full well that if they were caught or killed “the Secretary [would] disavow any knowledge of [their] actions”. They went to a banana republic somewhere and hacked the (non-computerized, mechanical) voting machines just before an important election. At the time (mid 60s) it seemed perfectly plausible that a top secret US force would undertake such a mission to insure a fair election, as the voting machines had been manipulated by a sinister force to insure a predetermined result. Alas, such a scenario is no longer plausible, nor was it ever, but we didn’t know that quite yet.

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No one could have predicted…

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Today’s Times has a lengthy article about the extent to which Iran is now calling the shots in Iraq. I confess, I haven’t read every word, but I couldn’t find any mention of the fact that many of the opponents of the Iraq war (a war for which the Times beat the drums) predicted just this result. So file this as yet another outcome that no one could have predicted, except that plenty of people did.

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Why Republican sometimes do the right thing

Thursday, July 13, 2017

I’ve commented on this phenomenon before. I’ve been tempted to give it a name, after a local politician who exemplified it, but I’ve held back on that.

By way of background: Today, something remarkable happened in the House of Representatives. The house rejected an opportunity to do something small minded and hateful:

Two dozen House Republicans voted with 190 Democrats to sink the amendment that would prohibit military funds for soldiers seeking medical treatment related to gender transition.

via McClatchy

Amazing, isn’t it? But lets hear from one of those Republicans:

“It’s a hurtful amendment, it’s not needed,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, a noted advocate for LGBT rights who has a transgender son. “I view it as a personal issue, because as a mom I’m impacted, but it’s an issue of fairness for everyone. You don’t have to know someone that’s transgender or have someone in your immediate family to feel this impact. It’s just needlessly hurtful and serves no useful purpose.”

She’s absolutely right, of course, but why, one might ask, is this normally right wing Congressperson making such sense? It’s because the issue personally affects her. If not for the fact that she has a transgender son, there’s little reason to believe she would have cast the vote she did. This is a common phenomenon with Republicans. One example here. It’s truly remarkable how incapable of empathy these people are.

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Watergate Memories

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

There have been a lot of Watergate comparisons lately, and I’m going to join in. One thing I haven’t seen noted, although I don’t see everything, is the fact that both Watergate and Russiagate are election related scandals, each driven by the desire to steal an election. The difference between them is that Watergate was stupid, in the sense that Nixon was fated to win the election whether his two bit burglary was successful or not, whereas it now appears that the Russians may indeed have swung the election to Trump. That’s a conclusion that I had resisted in the past, but the fact is that the Russians quite skillfully distributed fake news in exactly the places where it would do Trump the most good. I’ve read speculation, which makes sense, that the Trump folks were assisting the Russians in this endeavor, for it would take someone with insight into the American electorate to figure out where the effort should be made and what type of propaganda to feed. So, give the Trumpies credit for the fact that they committed their crime for a good reason; had they not done so, Hillary would be president today. On the other hand, the crime itself is far more serious, and their attempts to get away with it are ham handed, to say the least.

The timeline says that Trump knew about Junior’s meeting before it happened. He promised a blockbuster Hillary exposing speech prior to the meeting, but when the day came for the speech he had nothing, since the Russians, for whatever reason, didn’t deliver the goods. Of course, the Trump people are denying that he knew anything about it:

Privately, Trump has expressed dismay that Trump Jr. agreed to meet with the Russian lawyer, according to a Republican source, who said the President believes it wasn’t a smart move – but also that his son did not run afoul of the law.

via Hullabaloo quoting CNN

I’m assuming digby isn’t buying in to that part of the story. The evidence appears to be too strong that Trump knew about the meeting (what did the pr- -ident know), and knew about it before it took place (and when did he know it). After all, the three top figures in his campaign were all there.

The real difference between Watergate and this is the likely outcome. I’ve written before about the fact that I knew in my gut that Nixon would be impeached once it became known that there were tapes. I could feel that way because, fundamentally, the system worked, and the Republican Party was not then as it is now. I was not alone in expecting that plenty of Republicans would bail on Nixon as the evidence mounted. I don’t see that happening now. I think they’d look the other way if he did, in fact, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. If the Democrats took over both houses of Congress in 2018 the Republicans might dump Trump, but not until such an unlikely event occurs, and if they do, it will be purely as a matter of political strategy, and not because he is a traitorous criminal.

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