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Distraction free

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

First, a bit of a trip in the Wayback machine. As Reagan was sinking deeper into senility in the waning years of his presidency, it was revealed that he had surreptitiously sold weapons to Iran, our ostensible adversary. My guess is that had this been properly investigated, it would have been seen as payback (or perhaps the result of blackmail) for whatever deal was made with Iran by the Reagan people to keep the hostages safely in Iran until after the 1980 election. But I digress a bit.

They had Reagan dead to rights. It didn’t matter what motivated the deal, it was an impeachable offense par excellence. It was admitted by all concerned that Reagan knew all about it, though how much of it his befuddled brain understood is, perhaps, a question. But the Reaganites pulled a brilliant move. Reagan’s loathsome AG, Ed Meese, (almost as loathsome as Sessions) announced that the money from this deal had been paid to the Contras in Nicaragua, and that Reagan didn’t know anything about it.

Well, that threw everyone off the scent. Both the press and the politicians, including, of course, the Democrats, forgot all about the confessed crime, and concentrated on whether Reagan did or didn’t know about where the money went, as if it mattered. I was beside myself. I couldn’t believe they could so easily manipulate the press and, by extension, the public debate. Probably not the first time the Republicans engaged in this sort of distraction, but one that really left an impression on me.

So, it’s something of a pleasant surprise when you see signs that the press is resisting distractions. Yesterday, I didn’t get to read about Sally Yates testimony until somewhat late in the evening. The blogs I frequented couldn’t get enough of the fact that Yates had made Cronyn and Cruz look like idiots when they attacked her for refusing to defend Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban. Good example here, but trust me, it’s not unique.

It occurred to me that this couldn’t be better for Trump. If everyone concentrated on the fact that Yates made mincemeat of Cruz, they’d forget all about the main event: Trump was warned about Flynn in no uncertain terms, and ignored the warning.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Cruz was intentionally making a fool of himself. He would never do such a thing for Donald Trump. Nonetheless, he was trying to distract. Cruz thinks he’s always the smartest man in the room, and he seems to believe that every man in the room is smarter than any woman in the room. It’s clear from the video that he thought he would crush Yates, and that by doing so he would change the subject of the hearing and the coverage. By making an idiot of himself, he merely unintentionally increased the chance that the distraction tactic would work, and, as I said, it seemed to work with the left wing blogs I visited, though their audience is already convinced that Trump is in the tank for the Russians.

So, I was pleasantly surprised this morning to read the Boston Globe’s article on the hearings. It was actually a reprint, or perhaps first draft, of this article from the Washington Post. It has since been replaced at the Globe (I don’t know why) by an article from the Times, which I’ll get to in a minute. The Post’s reporters appear to have made a conscious effort to avoid even mentioning the subject, at least in the printed version. It is covered incidentally in the on-line version, to which I’ve linked. In the print edition it was alluded to like this:

Her brief tenure in the top job ended days after her meeting with McGahn, when she was fired by Trump over an unrelated issue. (Emphasis added)

Over at the Times, the issue is also largely ignored, despite the White House’s attempt to shift the focus.

The Globe’s website has a bunch of articles about the Cruz and Cronyn story, and that’s okay. They are in the nature of a sidebar, not the main story.

Could it be that the press is beginning to get wise to this tactic? If so, Trump has no one but himself to blame. He engages in it in too blatant a manner. Not only does he insult their intelligence, he insults them personally. School yard bullying may work on Republican presidential aspirants, but it won’t necessarily work on reasonably intelligent adults. Also, if you threaten them, as he has done, they fight back if they can.

So, a sign, perhaps, of a newly invigorated press. On the other hand, perhaps just an aberration. Time will tell.

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Enablers

Friday, May 5, 2017

I’m not sure who I detest more: the outright propagandists at Fox News, or the faux intellectual conservatives who put lipstick on the pig of Republican racism and corporate greed. No, I am sure. Those folks on Fox and Friends are just doing what they’re paid to do. They make no pretense of having anything between those ears of theirs.

Today we learn from George Will that Donald Trump has “a dangerous disability”. Can’t argue with that conclusion, but how did we get here. Not entirely due to folks like Will, but he played his part. His job has been to put an intellectual veneer on a party that has now been convincingly exposed, by this recent health care law, as a mere tool of the rich (Yes, I know lots of us have known that for years, but some people don’t pay attention). Folks like Will and the ghastly David (“Please think Edmund Burke when you read my columns”) Brooks have specialized in putting a phony intellectual gloss on political positions that can’t withstand moral scrutiny. They get away with it largely because we have a media that has been browbeaten by Republicans into adopting an official religion of bothsidesism that has no basis in reality. In Will’s case he does it by using multi syllabic words. In Brooks’s case, he does it by appealing to cultural traditions and moral principles that shapeshift to suit the argument he’s making.

Will helped legitimize the Donald Trumps of this world whether he wants to accept that fact or not. Is Donald Trump mentally ill, as Will charges? Of course he is. Is he pursuing policies any different than, say, a Ted Cruz would be pursuing had he gained the White House last November? That would be a hard case to make. It is now obvious that besides the inability to think that Will decries, Trump has no interest in policy when it has no obvious impact on his own personal wealth. His sole interest is in “winning”. If that means destroying health care for millions of people, he’ll do it. Same goes for destroying the environment or democratic institutions. But he’s not doing these things because he necessarily wants to destroy health care, the environment, or democratic institutions. He’s doing it because if he doesn’t do those things, he can’t “win”. He can only “win” if he aligns his objectives, and his definition of winning, with the objectives of the Paul Ryans and Koch Brothers of the world.

Had Cruz been elected, would Will have any problem with his policies, which would differ in virtually no respect from Trump’s? No, he’d have that lipstick case out, and that pig’s lips would be a shiny red.

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Free Speech for Me, but not for Thee

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

It seems that some of our friends on the right are demanding that CBS fire Stephen Colbert because, among other things, his latest monologue about 45 was “homophobic”. These people have no sense of irony.

It has been only a few day since these same people were condemning the University of California for abridging Ann Coulter’s right to free speech, yet here they are, not only pretending to care about homophobia (Colbert was, in fact, not homophobic) but seeking to, by their recently professed opinions, seeking to deprive Colbert of his right to free speech.

But, I must be fair. Their demand that Colbert be fired is no more a denial of his right to free speech as was the student opposition to Coulter, or the boycotts that led so man advertisers to abandon Rush Limbaugh. Coulter has just as much right to spread her lies as Colbert does to spread his truths (and his truthiness, can’t forget that), but neither has the right to demand a forum provided by a third party in which to speak. CBS has the right, should it wish to do so, to fire Colbert for his statements, and his first amendment rights would not be infringed in any way. It will doubtless not do so, since he’s giving the audience what it wants. It might be different if the pressure was coming directly from the White House, in which case there would be some First Amendment concerns. Nonetheless, it’s richly ironic that a group of people who get their news from Fox, Limbaugh and Infowars are demanding Colbert’s head because he said something they characterize as homophobic. The real problem, of course, is that he scored some direct hits on 45. The American right has no monopoly on hypocrisy, but they make everyone else that dabbles in it look like amateurs.

As a public service, I am embedding the offending video below. Speaking of richly ironic, it is supremely ironic that if we survive this administration, we may owe that survival to the comedians, which reminds me, if you haven’t watched Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about his new born son, you should do so here.

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More Democratic Incompetence

Sunday, April 30, 2017

If you go to this link you will find yet another story about Trump’s criminality. But let’s put that to the side. I want to concentrate on this paragraph:

Senator Schumer released a statement on Friday about Trump’s tax reform principles: “Until President Trump releases his full tax returns, a cloud of suspicion will remain and make it much more difficult to get tax reform legislation through the Congress.”

My beef is with the word “reform”. Here is the definition from my OED:

  1. The removal of faults or errors, esp. of a moral, political, or social kind; amendment, change for the better; reformation of character. m17.
    ?b A particular instance of this; an improvement made or suggested; a change for the better. l18.

Etc.

There is absolutely no chance that the tax bill proposed by Republicans will be a “change for the better”. It will be yet another vehicle for shoveling money to the rich from the rest of us. The word “reform” not only means a change for the better, it is widely understood to mean just that. Note that in the above paragraph even the writer at Crooks and Liars used the term. When people hear a Democrat call this rape of the taxpayers “reform”, they get the message that overall, it’s a good thing.

If the Republicans were opposing a Democratic plan, you can bet your ass the wouldn’t tolerate the word reform being applied to that plan. They would call it something else, and they would carp at the news media for using the word. I would suggest “tax deform”, but I’m not wedded to that. I’m only saying you shouldn’t give away the game by once again accepting the Republican frame.

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Market forces

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Surely anyone reading this blog has read a lot of stories making this basic point:

There’s a reason that Donald Trump didn’t have a crowd of wind power workers standing behind him at his rallies, and it goes beyond just his disdain for windmills off the coast of his Scottish golf course. The reason is that anyone who knows how to build or service wind power was out building and servicing wind power. It’s not just the fastest growing segment of America’s energy picture, it’s the fastest growing occupation, period.

The fastest-growing occupation in the United States — by a long shot, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — might surprise you: wind turbine technician. …

In 2016, for the first time, more than 100,000 people in the United States were employed in some manner by the wind industry, according to an annual report released Wednesday by the American Wind Energy Association.

But Trump lined up coal miners. Why? First because Trump’s anti-regulatory bent was beloved of coal mine operators who expect to increase their profit per ton by using cheaper practices requiring less labor. Second, because … they make great props. Coal miners are the go-to occupation when it comes to dangerous, under-appreciated labor. They also happen to be in a failing industry that’s in a steep decline on its way to extinction, so they’re always available.

via Daily Kos

This is by no means a new phenomenon. I’ve read a lot of history, though I freely admit I may have missed some things. But I’ve never heard of a major political party, candidate or office holder suggesting that we turn back the hands of time. I don’t recall Teddy Roosevelt promising to squash the auto industry to preserve the jobs of carriage makers, or Franklin Roosevelt trying to stop refrigerator production in order to keep the icemen comething.

Oddly enough, this is being pushed by the party that is supposed to believe in market forces. In fact, of course, it’s a party that disrupts market forces whenever those forces threaten the interests of the carriage makers and icemen of our day, provided, of course, that those carriage makers and icemen fill the campaign coffers of the Republican party. It’s a recipe for national disaster, since it discourages innovation here. It’s also a recipe for worldwide disaster, since it reduces the chance of a effective response to climate change to almost zero, for make no mistake, the Republican Party is filled with climate denial because that’s where the money is.

I should add that I am not a believer in allowing the market to bring us anywhere it wants to go. There are certainly times when market forces should be diverted or channeled. That, for instance, is why we have laws protecting the environment, which laws have pushed the market toward wind power rather than coal. It’s why we have laws protecting us from snake remedies.

It’s a major failing of the present day Democratic Party that it has failed to articulate an argument to win over the icemen of our age. Their decision to back Trump was not entirely irrational (90% irrational is about it). Nothing Hillary had to say gave them any hope, and, for many of them, they listened to Trump’s advice to black people: “What have you got to lose”, and applied it to themselves. Black people know the system all too well, and were perfectly aware they had a lot to lose, but the white males from the backwoods still think they’re special and that the system is supposed to work for them. It will be interesting to see if they ever wake up and listen to that nagging voice inside them telling them they’re being played for suckers.

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Blumenthal doing good work

Sunday, April 30, 2017

Give Dick Blumenthal a big round of applause:

Although some pessimistic Donald Trump haters are certain he’ll remain in office until the bitter end no matter how tough things get for him, his own track record suggests the opposite. Trump has shown a consistent willingness to quit once he concludes he can’t win, having strategically declared bankruptcy six times over the years and walked away from his various business endeavors. And now the Senate Democrats are hatching a plan that could lead Trump to conclude that he has no real choice but to resign.

The plan, on its surface, is simple enough: sue Donald Trump. But the genius is in the details. This isn’t a plan to merely tie up Trump in court with some willy nilly lawsuit. The effort is being crafted by Senator Richard Blumenthal, a former State Attorney General with detailed knowledge of how these things work. The idea is to sue Trump over his financial conflicts of interest in violation of the Emoluments Clause, forcing him to think twice about how far he’s willing to go to remain in office.

via The Palmer Report

The difficulty will be in crafting the complaint in such a way that the judge can't duck out of deciding it by calling it a political question. If it gets to the discovery phase, it will get very interesting.

I first read about this case on The Palmer Report (to which I've linked), a site I just recently discovered. (I have since seen the story confirmed by other media). I'm still trying to figure out whether Palmer really knows what he's talking about, or is mostly engaged in wild speculation. His take on the above is that it might force Trump to resign rather than disclose his criminality. I disagree somewhat, as I think Trump believes he is invulnerable. After all, this is the guy who said he could shoot someone in Times Square and lose no support. Anyway, I recommend the site, though I'd suggest keeping an open mind on precisely how much to rely on it. As it's new to me, I don't know his track record, but he seems to know what he's talking about, and much of what he has to say is unlikely to hit the mainstream for weeks after he writes about it. Here's a good example of what I'm talking about.

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Compare and contrast

Thursday, April 27, 2017

As I’ve said more than once, we subscribe to three daily newspapers. It’s often instructive to compare and contrast how an event is covered.

Today the main story was Trump’s tax “plan”, if you can call it that.

Let’s see how the three papers covered it. I’m referring here to the print editions. I haven’t checked to see if anything is different on-line.

The New York Times headline reads: Tax Overhaul Would Aid Wealthiest. A sub headline (is that the term?) reads: Radical Revision of Code, on a Single Page.

The Globe has two articles, the main one bearing a headline: Trump plan takes ax to tax rates. The sub headline reads: GOP says it’s a good start; Democrats call it a giveaway to the rich. The second article is headlined: Breaking down potential winners, losers of cuts. There’s a sidebar note (again, I’m not sure that’s the correct nomenclature), in which Gary Cohn, director of the White House National Economic Council, is quoted as saying that Trump “cares about making the economy work better for all American people”.

The Day reports: Trump proposes major tax cuts. The subheadline reads: New plan with few specifics would also mean huge deficits.

I’m not going to get into the weeds of the substance of the articles, for I think we can stipulate that most people might read a paragraph or two rather than the whole thing. My premise here is that the initial presentation matters a lot, because most people will form their impressions based on what I’ve related above.

So, lets rate them, first to last.

The Times wins running away. Given that it’s a one page document, there aren’t many weeds to get into, but what there is, is clear: the “plan” is a massive giveaway to the rich. One thing it is going to allow the rich to do, in addition to paying almost no taxes, is corporatize themselves, avoid personal liability for their sins, and pay the new low corporate tax rate on their personal income. The rest of us will be paying personal tax rates.

Surprisingly enough, the Day comes in second, if only by a hair. The caveat in the subheadline is probably the least of the problems the plan would cause, but at least it’s not covering for the Donald.

The Globe, for once, loses. The blaring headline about Trump taking an “ax” to tax rates sets the table, since who in this benighted land, where we expect infinite government services without paying for them, isn’t for lower taxes. The subheadline is a perfect example of both sideism. The fact is that one of those statements is true in essence, rather than simply from a propaganda standpoint. But the most egregious sin on the Globe’s part is giving prominence to Cohn’s bullshit about Trump caring about the American people. As numerous people have pointed out, if you wanted to design a tax code to maximize Trump’s wealth, this would be that code. The manner in which that quote was presented amounts to an endorsement of Cohn’s quote. The Globe would disagree with me, and I’m sure they’d be making that claim in good faith, but the fact is that the effect on the casual reader is just that. After all, if Cohn was bullshitting (which, of course, he was) why, muses our casual observer, would the Globe promote that quote? Actually, the musing would never take place, except on a subconscious level. That same observer might discover, if he or she read the entire piece, that Cohn was, in fact, bullshitting, but again, we must stipulate that if one in a hundred does so, that would be surprising.

The Times got it right, and it’s refreshing to see it covered honestly, without, at least in the headlines, any attempt to give Trump the undeserved benefit of the doubt. More of this, please.

UPDATE: Just noticed that the Globe added to it’s sins in the caption to the picture accompanying the piece, in which it quotes the Treasury Secretary as saying “We will unlock economic growth”, an implicit endorsement of that statement as well. 

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Corruption of the first order

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

It’s really not hard to see why Ivanka is Trump’s favorite. She’s just like him.

When I read this a few things came to mind. The gist of it:

Ivanka Trump told me yesterday from Berlin that she has begun building a massive fund that will benefit female entrepreneurs around the globe. Both countries and companies will contribute to create a pool of capital to economically empower women.

First, even the commenter at Kos failed to connect the dots from Ivanka’s new foundation to a certain foundation about which Daddy railed during the campaign, and about which he made certain baseless charges that will no doubt be well founded when leveled against Ivanka. After all, Ivanka has a family tradition to uphold, and it’s a near certainty that when all is said and done she’ll be putting the arm on countries and corporation in order to empower one certain woman, rather than women as a whole.

But, what is truly amazing is the sheer openness of the corruption. They really don’t even bother to hide it anymore, and since the commit an impeachable or indictable offense every day, no one even notices any longer. Even if this were well intentioned, and it’s not, it would be a dubious endeavor. The Trumps have hit on a winning formula. If you do something outrageous every day, after a while people will just stop noticing, particularly when you have a substantial portion of the press that is eager to justify your corruption.

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Duly noted

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Impeachable offense #I’ve stopped counting.

Actually, he commits one every morning when he wakes up, but this one is particularly blatant. Emoluments, anyone?

For 12 weekends in a row, Donald Trump has spent time at a Donald Trump-owned or managed property in what has to be a financial boon for the Trump family. Of course, everywhere Donald Trump goes, gaggles of Secret Service agents, staff and pool reporters follow—many or most of them staying at a Trump property, using taxpayer dollars, directly benefiting Donald Trump and his family. Paying members of these clubs regularly take to social media bragging about access to Trump and his offspring. And now, the official website of the U.S. Embassy & Consultants in the United Kingdom is featuring a glowing article on the “winter White House” that is a barely disguised advertisement:

via Daily Kos

The ad avoids pointing out that the Donald owns it, and makes a dishonest gesture toward implying that it’s owned by the federal government (it once was, but that was a long time ago).

The Grant administration was alleged to be corrupt, but no one ever really claimed that Grant was in on it. He was more or less a dupe. Trump is at the center of the most corrupt administration in US history. Once again, imagine if Obama had done just this one thing. This sort of stuff is a daily occurrence with the Donald.

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Goldwater rule going down

Monday, April 24, 2017

Apparently a number of people in the mental health field are convinced that the “Goldwater rule” has got to go. After the 1964 election, the psychological and psychiatric professional organizations adopted a rule discouraging their members from indulging in diagnosing the mental illnesses of politicians. Some of their number had diagnosed Goldwater, and apparently someone got sued and lost. I was 14 in 1964, so I don’t pretend to have had fixed views on the subject then, but over the years I concluded that while Goldwater was extreme by the standards of the day (he would quite likely be uncomfortably to the left of many present day Republicans), if he was clinically ill, he was only, to use Social Security Disability terminology, mildly impaired. He posed a threat to the nation, but that was solely due to his views, and not a mental illness. Quite likely some of the diagnoses were the product of the fact that, for the most part, there was a broad national consensus on most issues, and Goldwater was outside that consensus. That consensus has been destroyed by the intellectual (and in some case, biological) descendants of Goldwater’s base.

Trump, on the other hand, is “markedly” to “extremely” impaired in multiple categories. Most of my mentally ill clients are far more capable of stringing together an articulate sentence than is he. Most of them are far more rational (Read his recent interview for a sample of his mental incoherence) and have far more insight into their own condition. Many of them play a bit fast and loose with the truth, but I’ve never had a client who was convinced that he could create facts simply by asserting them. On the other hand, there is a distinction between what you might call high functioning mentally ill people, such as some sociopaths and psychopaths, and low functioning types, such as people suffering from bi-polar. Trump has always been a narcissist, but he’s turned it to his advantage and he has, by at least some measures, succeeded. It makes him more dangerous than the run of the mill mentally ill person.

Anyway, some psychologists and psychiatrists are advocating abandoning the Goldwater rule in Trump’s case, proferring diagnoses such as the following:

Dr. James F. Gilligan, a senior clinical professor of psychiatry at NYU Medical School, was on next and offered that Trump’s mental unfitness had multiple causes. And before the meeting was over, the following diagnoses had been brought up: narcissism combined with a sociopathic personality, pathological lying, and paranoia, which makes him vulnerable to conspiracy theories. Anyone who doesn’t flatter him extravagantly is meant to be destroyed. He engages in exploitation and violation of the rights of others, and sometimes goes as far as sadism, with no evidence of remorse. “When you add all these elements,” Gilligan observed, “this is a class of people of whom Hitler is a member.”

via Crooks and Liars quoting Gail Sheehy at New York Magazine.

Yep, he went there, re Hitler, but you can’t argue with him on the facts.

If Trump is removed from office, and I’m not as confident about that as are many others, it will likely be through the 25th Amendment. Beyond his obvious mental illness, Trump is showing signs of dementia, and the likelihood is that if he’s removed they will sugar coat his insanity by calling it dementia.

The fact that Trump is mentally ill, and that his diagnosis is what it is, makes dealing with him difficult for his opponents and imposes a special obligation on the media. The Democrats have to oppose him without provoking him. The media has to be careful not only in its criticism, but in its praise. Given the fact that he craves adulation, it is particularly dangerous to give him positive reinforcement when he drops bombs on people. If that’s what it takes to get Fareed and his friends to like him, that’s what he’s likely to do, particularly because it’s not likely to lose him any of the nutjob friends he already has.

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