Skip to content

Ethically challenged John Scott flunks Trump Test

Thursday, August 11, 2016

It’s not every day that a Republican Congressman is both less ethically challenged than my local State Representative and is, nonethless, facing ethics charges in the House, so I really must submit the facts to a candid world:

Texas Rep. Roger Williams is an auto dealer, and he has come under scrutiny by the House Ethics Committee over an amendment he offered to a wide-ranging transportation bill that would have allowed auto dealers to rent out vehicles even if they’re subject to recall. Williams has said the amendment was intended to address recalls aimed at trivial defects, but critics said it would apply more broadly.

via Talking Points Memo

The gravaman (look it up, it’s a word at least to lawyers) of the complaint is that Williams has a direct financial interest in the amendment.

Well, Williams is a piker, and his conflict of interest is remote, compared to that of Groton’s Republican representative, John Scott, about whom I’ve written before. Scott is an insurance agent, who is one of a few agents in the state who writes health insurance policies for UConn students. Here’s a summary of the bills John sponsored and co-sponsored as soon as he got elected:

Proposed H.B. No. 5062: “To require that the sale of a qualified health plan offered through the Connecticut Health Insurance Exchange be transacted by an insurance producer.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5255: “To study the potential benefits of applying Medicaid funds to the cost of health insurance for college students who are eligible for Medicaid.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5354 :“ AN ACT PREVENTING STUDENTS OF INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION FROM OPTING OUT OF A STUDENT HEALTH CARE PLAN FOR PURPOSES OF QUALIFYING FOR MEDICAID.
To prevent an over reliance on Medicaid when an affordable health insurance alternative is available.”

Proposed H.B. No. 5497 : “AN ACT INCREASING THE MINIMUM FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY COVERAGE REQUIRED FOR PRIVATE PASSENGER MOTOR VEHICLES”

Maybe John should run for Congress. The New London Day, by the way, wrote one article about this blatant conflict, and then let the matter drop.

Speaking of John and the Day, faithful readers (if there are any) will recall that Dave Collins, a Republican touting columnist at the Day, recently made the mistake of saying that as far as he was concerned, any Republican running for office should be disqualified if he or she refused to denounce Donald Trump (the “Trump Test”). He hasn’t exactly walked that back; it’s more accurate to say that he has let the matter drop, since as it turns out, the Republicans he tried to contact avoided his calls or avoided the issue, and he let them get away with it. It’s apparently more important to elect Republicans than stop Donald Trump.

But the Groton Democrats haven’t forgotten, and they put up a post on their Facebook page demanding that Scott, and his fellow Republican candidates in the various Groton Districts, out themselves on the Trump test. Bizarrely, John chose to respond. Here’s what he had to say:

The President of the United States has no direct say over the day to day operations of the state of Connecticut. As the State Representative for the 40th district I will support the choice that my constituents make in this election and do my absolute best to serve their individual needs in Hartford. With respect to the Presidency, I see that there are three, perhaps four, choices that could be made. My decision will be made in the privacy of the voting booth as that is my right as a citizen of this country. If you want to know who I am supporting for state representative, state senate, or in future years governor; then that is fair game.

Well, it so happens I was listening to Randy Newman’s Faust, (a vastly under appreciated album, by the way) earlier today, and John’s comment brought to mind these lyrics Randy sings in his role as the Devil, as he calls out God:

In all my life

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard such bullshit

Even from You

A master of bullshit

You know it

I know it

It’s bullshit

Bullshit

In case I haven’t made myself clear, John’s comment was pure bullshit. I doubt that Dave Collins reads this blog, inasmuch as I’m a Democrat. But if he does, or if someone brings it to his attention, I believe it is fair to say that John has not passed the Trump test, and Dave should make that known, and should urge his readers to vote for Chris Conley, Scott’s very able opponent. I can assure Dave that Chris will willingly take and pass the Trump test. I’m not holding by breath on this though, as, like Randy’s God, Dave is a master too.

Filed in Local issues | | Comments (0)

I feel his pain

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Matt Bors, a cartoonist who posts at Daily Kos, has a problem:

I feel his pain. Many of the blogs I visit regularly spend a lot of time explaining why Donald is wrong about this or that, or why we can indeed interpret his most recent (I think it’s his most recent) moronic statement to be a veiled invitation for someone to kill Hillary Clinton. Anyone who can’t see the obvious is past help. To paraphrase Hamlet and his buddy Horatio:

HAMLET

There’s ne’er a villain Trump dwelling in all Denmark the USA,
But he’s an arrant knave.

HORATIO

There needs no ghost , blogger, my lord, come from the grave Internet,
To tell us this.

I miss the good old days, when there some non-obvious points to be made about our benighted opposition. Even the extras in this particular historical-comedy are uninteresting or obvious. Of course Paul Ryan is a fraud. What else is new? Of course Donald Trump is a case of the chickens coming home to roost. We’ve seen him, or someone like him, coming, and I for one, was predicting starting in November 2012 that the next Republican candidate would be a whack job, since the whackos would settle for no less. The fact is that if it hadn’t been Trump, whatever other turd floated to the top of that pool of candidates would have been just as bad. Jeb, the “reasonable” one, never had a chance. I miss loathsome Joe Lieberman. I even miss Dubya. They weren’t much, but they posed way bigger challenges than Trump or the rest of the yahoos that make up the modern Republican Party.

Filed in Rants, Republicans, The Donald | | Comments (0)

A loathsome person

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

The only time I ever voted for a Republican was in 1988, when I voted for Lowell Weicker, who was running against the loathsome Joe Lieberman. The only time I voted for Joe Lieberman was once by mistake, when I forgot to skip his lever on the old voting machines, and once in 2000, when I had no choice, given that he was on the ballot as Al Gore’s biggest mistake ever.

I was proud to do my little bit in 2006 to deprive him of the Democratic nomination for the Senate, when I voted for Ned Lamont at the state convention and in the primary, and regularly vilified Lieberman, to the best of my ability on this blog.

All of this is by way of saying that this in no way surprises me:

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said he’s thinking of supporting Donald Trump for president, Jewish Week reports.

He’s still undecided but added there are “a lot of us, I think, who can’t feel quite comfortable either way yet.”

via Political Wire

In my last post I questioned how the folks in Maine could countenance Susan Collins, but really, we in Connecticut have a lot more to answer for. At least we got rid of him in the end.

UPDATE: Connecticut Bob reminds us that it is 10 years ago today that the Connecticut Democratic Party expelled Lieberman from its ranks. I remember that day vividly. We were vacationing in Vermont, and I spent the evening refreshing my browser every 5 minutes to follow the results. Ned may have lost, but he helped move the party away from Lieberman and the nation away from Iraq, and he deserves our eternal thanks.

Filed in Lieberman | | Comments (0)

Profile in Courage-Not

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

I have a very soft spot in my heart for the state of Maine, as that is where I got my college education, but I’ve never understood how Mainers cannot see through Susan Collins, and before that, her compatriot in “moderation”, Olympia Snowe.

Until we were freed from him in 2006, we denizens of Connecticut’s Second District had a “moderate” Congressman, one Rob Simmons. Here’s a definition of a Republican “moderate”: a Republican who votes with the rational side whenever his or her vote won’t make a difference. I recall that with Simmons and his ilk, the folks who called the shots used the term “catch and release” to describe the process. Simmons and his fellow moderates were allowed to vote against crazy things when the leaders were sure they had enough votes to pass them anyway. If they needed his vote, they got it. In other words, like Collins, he never cast a “moderate” vote where that vote would have made a difference.

So count me unimpressed that Collins has now come out against Trump, who is now trying to incite someone to kill Hillary, probably because he can’t see any other way to beat her. Collins is not up for re-election, and may never run again. I believe there may be one Republican incumbent who is both running for re-election and unambiguously against the Donald, and it ain’t Collins. If she were up for reelection, she’d be walking the same tightrope as Kelly Ayotte, especially if there were still time for a Trumpite to run against her as an independent. Mainers are into that sort of thing; they have time and again shown their independence by choosing governors, like LePage, who could never get elected in a two person race, and should never get elected in any race.

Filed in Republicans | | Comments (0)

Running in place, and other observations

Saturday, August 6, 2016

“Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

This quote came to mind when I stumbled on this post by Wolf Richter, which demonstrates that the “good” news on the job front is nothing more than keeping in the same place:

On average, 205,300 jobs need to be created every month just to keep up with population growth and not allow the unemployment situation to get worse.

Last months good news was that we netted out 255,000 jobs, meaning that while we’re not quite keeping in the same place, we’re not exactly getting somewhere else. Richter points out that most people who don’t live within the Beltway or some other bubble somehow know we’re not moving, and their perception is absolutely correct. It would be ever so nice if the Democrats more vigorously addressed that well founded pervasive anxiety.

Speaking of Lewis Carroll (see the quote above), it occurred to me while thinking about this subject, that another quote that might apply here is “the faster I go, the behinder I get”. So I looked it up to find the source, and what I found was strange. It’s often stated as “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get”, both versions of which are attributed to Carroll. There’s even a website that features 10 quotes from Carroll, one of which is the “hurrier” quote.

I was interested to see which was genuine, so I searched the full text versions of both Alice and Through the Looking Glass, and couldn’t find the quote in either. I searched for the word “hurrier”, assuming it would only appear once. It certainly sounds like a Carroll quote, and in a way, it echoes the quote above, but I must conclude that it’s a misattribution, unless someone’s able to find it. By the way, when I started looking, I thought it likely that it was something Andy Devine might have said on Wild Bill Hickok.

By way of explanation for this pathetic, meandering, post, I just got back from vacation, and am still feeling quite lazy. I’m hoping to get back in the thick of things any day now, though I have to admit that for a guy with a day job, blogging is getting harder. By the time I get in front of my keyboard to point out yet another crazy thing the Donald has said, a million people have beaten me to it, and at least 10% of them have the same take that I do. If this keeps up I’ll have to take to Twitter. Anyway, I’m back, rested and ready to go.

Filed in Economics, Ramblings | | Comments (0)

Trump opens mouth, doesn’t lie

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Strange but true.

It seems Hillary raised $90 million dollars last month, while Trump raised $35.8 million.

Trump didn’t just drop that in to remarks, he bragged about it. 

“It’s gonna be announced tomorrow or the next day: we’ve raised, we think, about $35.8 million. This is unheard of for Republicans, $35.8 million,” Trump said.

In case you’re wondering, Mitt Romney raised $101 million in July, 2012. …

via Daily Kos

Now the diarist at Kos seemed to think that Trump was lying, but he was telling the honest to god truth. When was the last time a Republican presidential candidate raised such a small (adjusted for inflation, of course) amount of money at this point in the campaign. It truly is unheard of for Republicans.

The fact is, every once in a while Trump does say something that happens, by the wildest chance, to be true. Since the media is really doing such a poor job covering his lies, maybe it should change tack and make a big deal every time he says something that is verifiably true.

Filed in The Donald | | Comments (0)

No, Trump did not make the stupid party

Monday, August 1, 2016

Sometimes it amazes me. The New York Times has an op-ed columnist with a Nobel Prize in Economics, but it appears no one at the Times reads his columns. How else to explain that someone let a Republican (Max Boot) write an op-ed piece claiming that the Republican Party has only recently become the actual party of stupid, as opposed to the party that was only pretending to be the party of stupid.

I won’t dissect the whole thing, in which he claims that Ronald Reagan, for instance, was really an intellectual playing the part of a stupid person. Let’s just concentrate fire on this particular paragraph:

There are still some thoughtful Republican leaders exemplified by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party. But the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.

As Krugman has noted time and again, Ryan is not an intellectual paragon, and his “impressive new budget plan” is a total fraud. Just one example, written before Ryan’s descent to the Speaker’s chair:

But Ryan didn’t step into that role by actually being a serious, honest conservative; he just played one on TV. If you knew anything at all about budgeting, you soon realized that his supposedly responsible fiscal proposals were stuffed full of mystery meat. He knew how to game the system, creating the impression that CBO had vetted his plans when it had done no such thing (and in fact hinted broadly that the whole thing was a crock). But there’s never been any indication that he actually knows how to produce a budget — and in any case, giant tax cuts for the rich and fiscal responsibility are fundamentally incompatible.

So Ryan’s current stature is really quite curious, and I’d argue quite fragile. He has been a highly successful con artist, pretending to be the reasonable conservative centrists desperately want to see; he has become a power within his party because of that external achievement. But he’s not a true hero of the crazy right; he’s valued mainly because of his successful con job on the center. So he doesn’t have a reserve of goodwill from the crazies that would let him be, well, not crazy. On the other hand, if he were to be the kind of speaker the crazies want, he would undermine that all-important centrist approbation. Being off to the side, pretending to be dealing thoughtfully with important policy issues, was where he needed to be; moving to the speaker’s chair would be a lose-lose proposition.

Time and again people who can add and subtract (see one of Dean Baker’s takedowns here) have pointed out that Ryan’s budgets don’t add up, but Mr. Boot has apparently bought into the myth that Krugman has tried so hard to expose. He can believe what he wants, but it’s really time for the Times to stop reinforcing the Ryan mythology.

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)

A modest proposal, and an observation.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Apparently Donald Trump is trying to get out of the debates.

Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of intentionally stacking debates against prime time programming to “rig” the election process, despite the fact that the schedule has been set since last September, Politico reports.

Said Trump: “As usual, Hillary and the Dems are trying to rig the debates so two are up against major NFL games. Same as last time w/ Bernie. Unacceptable!”

via Democratic Underground.

Trump claims that the NFL wrote him a letter expressing concerns about the debate schedule, which the NFL has already denied, meaning once again Trump told a blatant lie.

First, the modest proposal. I’d suggest that Hillary allow that Donald has a point, and that it isn’t a good idea if the debates conflict with the football schedule. She should say that she would be willing to debate on any weekday evening of Trump’s choosing. Trump already looks bad, but this would make him look like a total chicken, and to rub it in, I’d suggest unleashing Elizabeth Warren, Jennifer Granholm, Barbara Boxer, and other female Democrats to call him out as a chicken when he ducks and weaves in response. As I’ve said before, his schoolyard bullying techniques don’t work on strong women, as the past several weeks have demonstrated, and he has no idea how to respond when they attack him.

Now, the observation. The lie about the NFL was blatant in the extreme. Remember when Al Gore never said that he invented the Internet? We were not allowed to forget that which did not happen. Maureen Dowd alone must have brought it up a hundred times. What do you want to bet that this actual lie will garner almost zero attention, and that by the time anyone reads this (which, come to think of it, may be a long time from now) it will be totally forgotten. We’ve come to a strange pass when a presidential candidate is allowed to lie simply because he does it so often that it no longer seems unusual, but that’s where we are, and of course it helps him immensely that he’s running as a Republican. Different rules apply to the Republicans, at least in the media. Thankfully, at least in some of the courts, Republican lies have consequences.

Filed in The Donald | | Comments (0)

Back from the shadows again

Friday, July 29, 2016

No posting here for quite some time, due to the fact that I’ve been vacationing in Vermont. The main purpose of this post is to make it clear that I’m still alive.

One of the advantages of having no television is that I am spared watching conventions, so I have followed each second hand, so to speak. This week we’ve been getting feedback from blogs and Twitter. So, based on what we’ve seen I conclude that the Republican convention was a poorly managed travesty, pitched directly and only to the Foxaholics who thrive on fear and hate, while ours was inspiring, until Hillary spoke.

I did think I’d share this. One of our houseguests gave me a gift yesterday.

Unfortunately, I’m in a bit of a quandary. Being a chocolate lover, I am tempted to eat it. But then I won’t have it anymore. I guess you can’t have your chocolate bar and eat it too.

Anyway, as we’ve known for many moons, Bernie will not be our candidate, but we can say this about the candidate we have: We know how bad she will be, but there’s absolutely no way to know how bad their’s will be, except that we know that he will absolutely be worse than her. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can do. And just for the record, my opinion of Hillary is in no way tainted by either the email “scandal” or Benghazi, both of which are typical trumped up (should I use that phrase?) Clinton bashing.

This, by the way, will be the last negative thing I have to say about Hillary until after the election. We’re stuck with her, so we have to make the best of it. My last negative observation is this: looking ahead to 2020, we are in deep trouble.

Filed in Hillary Clinton, Ramblings | | Comments (0)

Our Free Press at Work

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Sorry to return to this subject, but…

If there were a God, I would be thanking him or her right now for the fact that I don’t have a television nor am I forced to watch television news.

Put Fox aside. Are there no televison “journalists” with the guts to call bullshit on Republican spinmeisters?

Check this out. Wolf Blitzer sits meekly and practically concedes RNC Spokesperson Sean Spicer has a point in arguing that there was no plagiarism in Melania Trump’s speech. He just sits there and let’s the guy roll right over him. The best he can do is, at one point, feebly protest that there were some pretty stark similarities. Watch the video at the link. How did this guy get his job? He either has no brains or no spine.

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)