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Nice Work if you can get it

Monday, May 24, 2021






Gordon Sondland is suing Mike Pompeo for 1.8 million dollars:

Gordon Sondland, the former U.S. ambassador to the European Union who was fired by Donald Trump after his explosive impeachment inquiry testimony against the then-president, is reportedly suing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for $1.8 million in unpaid legal costs from that probe. The Washington Post reports the lawsuit claims that Pompeo promised Sondland that the State Department would pick up his fees ahead his November 2019 testimony—but then reneged on that offer after Sondland testified that there was a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine and declared: “We followed the president’s orders.”

Given the identity of the defendant, I wish him well, but as a former practicing lawyer, now blessedly retired but still legally qualified to practice law, I must admit to a certain amount of jealousy. At $1,000.00 an hour, it would take 1800 hours to rack up a bill for $1,800,000.00. To put that in more perspective, 1800 is forty five 40 hour weeks. And that assumes an hourly rate that, I am abashed to say, exceeded my own rate by several 100 percents. The bill for this one client exceeded my total earnings for a significant number of years.

I have to take my hat off to the law firm that represented this guy. It would seem, just based on what I know of course, that the work involved would consist mostly of advising the guy to tell the truth, going over the likely testimony, and assembling whatever documentation you might think is relevant. If Sondland can justify paying $1,800,000.00 for the legal representation he needed, imagine what Rudy would be asking for if he could ever get Trump to spring for his legal fees, as he has demanded. Again, I’m just a country lawyer, but my guess is that the hours his lawyers will spend defending those libel cases, not to mention his criminal cases, will be one or two orders of magnitude greater than the Sondland lawyers racked up.


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To Mask or not to Mask

Thursday, May 13, 2021

Over at Press Run Eric Boehlert documents a new media obsession, yet another right wing whining point. Why, they ask, does Biden, a fully vaccinated person, continue to wear a mask. For that matter, why should any vaccinated person where a mask.

He observes:

It’s slightly jarring that in the wake of the Trump presidency, when Americans were urged to inject bleach as a way to combat Covid-19, that Biden sometimes wearing a cloth facial covering is treated as a pressing news story by the Beltway media. And the recent emphasis isn’t just on Biden. More journalists are setting their judgmental sights on those vaccinated liberals who remain cautious and continue to wear masks, dubbing them “pandemic addicts,” “irrational” and “odd.”

As Digby points out here, this line of attack comes straight from Fox, Tucker Carlson especially.

Perhaps I’m odd, but I don’t continue to wear a mask when I’m with other people, such as in stores or at the Y. I do it because we are not yet out of the woods, and if the vaccinated stop wearing masks now, it would make any policy requiring only the unvaccinated to wear one totally unenforceable. I wear a mask primarily because we are still in a phase of this plague in which it is advisable for certain people to wear masks, and if I and other vaccinated people stop wearing them, so will the unvaccinated. It’s social cooperation. An alternative might be “vaccine passports”, but the very people that are aghast at the vaccinated wearing masks are those opposing, and in some case making it illegal, for places of public accomodation to restrict their facilities to the vaccinated. It is also the case that these are the very people who would be attacking Biden for not wearing a mask, if he chose not to do so in certain contexts. (Update: Well looky here, here it is ) It isn’t surprising when the Foxists and the other right wing media types push these points, but when the “mainstream” press goes along, it’s particularly outrageous.

Afterword: After writing the above, I heard the news that the CDC is saying that as of next week, we vaccinated folks can ditch the masks and social distancing. If we lived in a country chock full of sane people, that would be great news. But I think we’re in store for an uptick in COVID cases, as the unvaccinated Foxistas take advantage of this move and also ditch their masks. I suppose that for the most part it will be the crazies getting sick, since the rest of us are vaccinated, but I’m sure that Tucker will find a way to blame it all on Joe Biden.

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Hard Times at the Times?

Friday, May 7, 2021

I have noticed over the last couple of days that the New York Times has run short of euphemisms. I don’t know if it’s because they used so many during the Trump years that they can’t come up with any more, but lately they’ve been running some euphemistic free articles in which Trump’s lies are referred to as—are you ready for this?— LIES!

Many of us thought that there was a policy against calling lies lies, but either that policy has been abandoned or the writers at the Times have simply abandoned any effort at originality and have come to the sad conclusion that they must fall back on the most accurate term.

I think we have to chalk this up to a lack of writing skills over at the Times, because I’ve checked with my Roget and there are plenty of artifices, indirectnesses, mollifications, obfuscations, overelaborations, pedantries, preciosities, and vague phraseologies that they have failed to use, such as cock-and-bull-story, inveracity (that’s a good one), mendacity, prevarication, song and dance (another good one), and trumped-up story (it’s really there!). The latter phrase has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few years!

Anyway, for whatever reason, so far as Trump is concerned, a lie is now a lie, and that’s apparently the case when Republicans repeat his lies, though euphemisms still prevail when Republicans tell their own homegrown lies. Still, it’s a start, a beginning, a step forward, a dawning, an initiation, a new departure, an onset, a point of departure, and a take off.

Afterword: I just paid $8.00 for a new Roget for my Ipad, as the one I had won’t run on the current IOS. I figured I had to get my money’s worth.

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Running out of demons

Monday, May 3, 2021

The Republican Party has been the party of hate since the late 60’s, when Nixon and his ilk decided they could win by pandering to Southern racists. It has worked for a while. The rules at first were that it was against the rules to be explicitly racist, but the dog whistles were clear enough. Along the way, especially in places where racism didn’t sell so well, the party chose other demons to pursue. But there’s been a problem because in most cases, the demonizing has lost its effectiveness over time. Commies, hippies, and gays are largely passé as demons. Just a few years ago anti-gay measures helped win states like Ohio, but nowadays, targeting gays is completely ineffective. Even the nutcases on the right don’t care about it anymore.

Every time one demon loses its effectiveness, the Republicans start searching for another. Some are largely fictitious, like Antifa, and even here in America, where people are ready to believe almost anything, that hasn’t really worked. Some demons physically exist however. The latest are transgender children and teens. There has rarely been a less threatening demon. Nonetheless, legislatures in at least a score of states are targeting these kids, and the only reason they are doing so is to stir up hate so they can garner votes from the people they must convince to vote against their own interests.

It’s hard not to conclude that this is an act of desperation by a party devoid of ideas, which refuses to embrace policies that might actually help people. The threat is non-existent, as the West Virginia governor implicitly admitted, though he signed a hate bill anyway. We are even looking toward a political campaign in which a Republican transgender candidate has come out against transgender people.

Back when the former guy was first running for president he made gestures toward supporting popular policies, though folks with brains knew he was lying. He was going to protect our social security and get us the greatest medical care ever, remember? Today’s Republicans have thrown away that part of his playbook, and are increasingly playing strictly to the Foxwashed segment of the population. It shouldn’t work. It wouldn’t work, if they weren’t also in a position to steal the upcoming elections. Still, you would think they’d make sure that the folks they are planning on duping into voting for them would have some reason to do so other than fear of transgender kids.

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A look ahead

Friday, April 30, 2021

Back in 2012, when the latest Republican Establishment candidate lost the popular vote and the Electoral College (Republicans don’t ever win the popular vote anymore; they rely on our archaic constitutional provisions to impose their candidates on an unwilling electorate) I predicted that for the next election, the Republican base would demand that the party go full whackjob, which they did. Even Mr. S., who I wrote about here, will back me up on this. Recall, that just about every 2016 candidate in the mix was a whackjob; the “moderate” candidates went nowhere (remember Jeb!), and the biggest whackjob of them all came out on top.

So, what’s in store for 2024?

Yesterday I read this at the Palmer Report. Again, to emphasize, their facts are usually right though you must take the conclusions they draw from those facts with massive piles of salt:

Donald Trump’s favorability rating is down to 32% in new NBC polling. This helps confirm other recent polling showing Trump bottoming out. It means he’s completely non-viable. You can’t win a national election with just your base; they’re always too small. Trump has little left but his base. It’s why lost badly in 2020, and why he isn’t a serious consideration for 2024.

Trump was able to pull it off in 2016 because there were still enough somewhat non-insane Republicans willing to give him their votes despite their reservations, because, after all, Hillary. The numbers above show, I think, that not only have these people left Trump, but they’ve also likely left the Republican Party.

What follows, by the way, assumes that Chuck Schumer will somehow find a way to get through to Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema and get them to help pass HR-1. If we don’t end voter suppression then all bets are off.

Again, assuming that voter suppression is somehow stopped, how exactly can Republicans approach 2024. That 32% is their hard core base, and at that point those people will likely be among the suppressed if the party fails to nominate someone sufficiently whacky. The voter suppression laws are certainly aimed at Democrats, but they are also making it harder for everyone to vote, and if these people are not sufficiently inspired by a Whackjob Supreme, they are quite likely to just stay home. So, initially this brings up an interesting question. What current Republican politician has the necessary blend of conspiracy driven talking points and showmanship to appeal to these folks? There are lots of pretenders to the throne, but folks like Cruz and Hawley just don’t have what it takes. They can dish out the hate with the best of them, but they can’t entertain the way Trump did. In addition, which of them is capable of entertaining the meatheads and, at the same time, giving a sufficient number of semi-rational people a reason to add their votes to the meatheads? They won’t have Hillary to kick around, the Hunter Biden thing never stuck, and, assuming that Biden sticks to his guns and doesn’t run again, they will likely be unable to make anything stick against whoever runs for the Democrats because everyone but the Fox faithful pretty much discounts everything they say. Trump himself, in my opinion, won’t be coming back. Even if he’s not in jail by then, he’s a psychologically beaten man, and I doubt he’d be able to rev them up in 2024 like he could in 2016. He wasn’t even that good at it in 2020.

The reality is that it will be almost impossible for the Republicans to win a fairly run presidential election in 2024. That’s why they have concluded they must steal it. Rather than taking the constitutional route of simply returning the choice of electors to the legislatures, they prefer to maintain the pretense that the electorate actually has a voice. So, consistent with a decades long pattern, they will do precisely what they have baselessly accused the Democrats of doing this year: they will steal the election, or at least try to do so.

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New Libel rules for thee but not for me

Friday, April 23, 2021

There are rumblings on the right that the landmark case of Sullivan vs. New York Times should be overruled. The Sullivan case requires proof of actual malice on a libel defendant’s part when the plaintiff is a public figure. The case does have it’s problems. For instance, it’s not unknown for a plaintiff to become a public figure by virtue of having brought the libel suit in the first place. Still, properly interpreted, on balance, the rule makes sense.

Clarence Thomas has suggested overruling the case, and recently, a right wing court of appeals judge called for completely overturning the case:

Last month, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia joined Justice Thomas’s plea. In a complicated case involving the sale of oil plots, two Liberian officials sued a watchdog group for implying they had received bribes in order to facilitate the sale. The D.C. Circuit panel found that the officials did not make out a plausible case of actual malice on the part of the watchdog. Judge Laurence Silberman, one of the judiciary’s most prominent conservatives, disagreed with much of the majority opinion, including the interpretation of the evidence. What was newsworthy about his dissenting opinion was the virulence of his attack on the actual malice rule. Sullivan has become “a threat to American democracy,” Silberman wrote. “It must go.”

Silberman’s disdain for the actual malice rule was directly tied to its protection of what he dubbed liberal media who, he wrote, “manufacture[] scandals involving political conservatives.” Finding their bias against the Republican Party shocking, he wrote, “The ideological homogeneity in the media—or in the channels of information distribution—risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.” He specifically identified as culprits The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the news sections of The Wall Street Journal. (Silberman approves of the Journal’s editorial stance.) He declared that “a biased press can distort the marketplace. And when the media has proven its [sic] willingness – if not eagerness – to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’ power.”

One can draw one of two conclusions from Silberman’s diatribe and, for that matter, from the push on the right to overrule the case:

Silberman and his ilk actually think that the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post would be more endangered by overturning the Sullivan case than right wing outlets such as Fox, Newsmax and their brethren, all of which are currently potentially on the hook for billions in damages sought by Dominion and Smartmatic, the voting machine manufacturers. If Sullivan free libel law were fairly applied, no reasonable person could agree with such a conclusion.

The other possibility is that Silberman expects that in a Sullivan free environment, he and his brethren and sisthren (I know that’s not a word, but I’m trying not to be chauvinistic here) would find a way to protect right wing media while slamming the mainstream types. Judges can be endlessly creative and can manufacture distinctions out of thin air, and Silberman must believe that he and his ilk could take care of Fox and Friends. We’ve already seen one judge deny a libel claim against Tucker Carlson, so maybe Silberman thinks they can simply go the same route by declaring that no reasonable person could believe anything they hear on Fox or that anything on said network is just “opinion” and therefore sanction free, while reasonable people do expect to get the truth from the New York Times and nothing therein is merely opinion. Of course, they may come up with something a little less obviously absurd, but in a pinch these rationales would do.

My guess is that Silberman would go with door number two and so would the present court. We’ll know a lot more when we see how the voting machine cases go. It makes no sense to find those companies to be “public figures” for purposes of those cases, nor does it make sense to find that there was no actual malice involved in the various allegations of fraud, nor does it make sense to find that those allegations were merely “opinions”, but my money is on the defendants escaping for one or more of those reasons.

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A very stupid idea

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

This may be the stupidest thing the left side of our political spectrum has come up with since some genius coined the slogan “defund the police”.

Home to some of the nation’s strictest gun laws and some of its largest gun manufacturers, Massachusetts has its fair share of firearm contradictions. Democratic state lawmakers are now taking aim at one of them, proposing a bill to ban the manufacture of certain kinds of firearms unless they are intended for sale to the military or law enforcement. That would keep Massachusetts-made assault weapons out of the hands of private citizens.

It would appear to be a crystal clear violation of the commerce clause, and if it’s not, the net effect would be to drive a major employer out of Massachusetts to another state that would be more than happy to let it export its guns to anyone who wants to buy one.

The argument for constitutionality, such as it is, would apparently be that Massachusetts is not interfering in interstate commerce because it is not forbidding the sale of a commodity across interstate lines, it is, rather, forbidding the manufacture of a commodity intended to be sold across state lines.

I really doubt if you could have sold that argument to a judge even before the courts were packed with right wing stooges, but it would go nowhere now.

Charlie Baker will probably veto the bill if it’s passed, and for once he’d be right. Why waste taxpayer money defending a losing cause in court? Then again, he might sign it, so the Republicans could make an issue out of the Democrats trying to drive a major employer out of the state. These sort of gestures make no sense. Like the “defund the police” slogan, they almost seem designed to turn off persuadable voters while doing nothing to advance the cause they claim to want to further. The only concrete thing this would accomplish is putting the employees of Smith and Wesson at risk of losing their jobs.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, April 16, 2021

Just had to pass this along, something I saw on Crooks & Liars. Mick Jagger and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters celebrating the upcoming (we hope) end of the pandemic.

Not bad for a couple of geezers.

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Hearing what I want to hear

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

I have often criticized the New London Day on this blog, but fair’s fair, and when they may have done a good thing it is only right and just that I acknowledge the same.

Today’s letter section contained a letter from a Trumper that began like this:

Lie, lie, lie; lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.

That’s the refrain I like to sing from Simon and Garfunkel’s, “The Boxer” every time I hear a Democrat open their ignorant mouth.

The letter, none of which I will further reproduce here, then goes on to brand a number of true assertions as lies. Okay, I’ll reproduce one more section:

”Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud”. Lie lie lie.”

You get the drift. You can read the rest here if you have nothing better to do.

Someone at the Day had what I consider to be a brilliant idea. The caption for the letter is taken straight from the same Simon and Garfunkel song:

A Man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

This raises the interesting question of whether I am hearing what I want to hear, as the caption is just ambiguous enough that the Trumper, being a Trumper and therefore not very bright or attuned to irony, will never get that the man to whom the caption refers is the letter writer himself. Well, that’s my take, anyway, and I’m disregarding any other interpretation, so I extend a CTBlue thumbs up to whoever wrote that caption, who I choose to believe is someone other than whoever writes the titles for the news articles, which titles always have a right wing bent.

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A little ridicule could go a long way, a modest suggestion

Sunday, April 11, 2021

I’ve been reading Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland, which argues that the United States, for a number of historical reasons which he explores, is particularly vulnerable to irrational behavior including, without limitation, extreme religiosity, susceptibility to grifters, and belief in conspiracy theories. It’s an entertaining read, and though sometimes I think he may be engaging in just a bit of exaggeration to support his arguments, he makes a reasonably compelling case for his thesis. After reading his book one would have to conclude that the QAnon folks and the religious fundamentalists of our era are solidly within an American tradition that has beeen around since the pilgrims landed.

But not everyone in America has embraced irrationality, as Anderson notes in the book. The forces of reason have battled the forces of ignorance for centuries, sometimes winning and sometimes losing. Anderson argues that they were winning in the twenties and the thirties, citing as an example the tendency of the press of that day to mock folks like Billy Sunday and Aimee McPherson, and the derision heaped upon the state of Tennessee, William Jennings Bryant, and other anti-evolutionists during the Scopes trial. H.L. Mencken called them what they were: morons.

Which leads me to my modest proposal for the day. It’s time for the Democrats and their fellow travelers to stop trying to reason with the forces of irrationality, be they Republican politicians, their evangelical enablers, or conspiracists of any other sort. You are not going to persuade them of anything. As Andersen argues, there is a certain strain of American that insists it is their god-given right to believe what they want to believe, evidence, lack of evidence, or rationality be damned. The cult of Trump is not a new thing.

It’s the folks that are not engaged with the irrationality one way or the other that you need to win over, and one way to do that is by adopting a strategy of mocking the irrational. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with some good lines to parrot over and over. After all, we already have our own H.L. Menckens. They are, for the most part, late night comedians, who have had a sort of monopoly of straight on truth telling, while the punditry desperately clings to both siderism.

At this moment in our history, most of the mockery is coming from the folks who are, in truth, most susceptible to mockery. Remember, it was just a few months ago that Matt Gaetz was mocking the rational for wearing face masks. It’s best to be on the attack in this political age, and treating conspiracists, dupes and religious nutcases with the derision they deserve would be a winning political strategy for the Democrats. The fact is, making fun of people works, especially if they are, in fact, ridiculous. I realize that national Democrats have lived in a defensive crouch so long they are having a hard time coming out of it, but there are signs that it’s happening. For instance, who would have thought, a mere year ago, that Joe Biden would essentially be telling the Republicans to shove it when they start whining about his failure to reach out to them for bipartisan solutions. The only bone I have to pick with him on that is that he’s doing it, for the most part, implicitly when we have reached a time when it is to our advantage that he do it explicitly.

C’mon Democrats. We can do this. You can start with Matt Gaetz since he’s so easy, but you can quickly move on to Mitch and the rest of them.

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