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Two years ago today

Saturday, March 10, 2018

I have been keeping a journal on my Ipad, on and off, for the past two years or so. If there is a phrase that connotes the opposite of “deathless prose”, that’s pretty much what the journal contains. Anyway, the app automatically shows entries from the same calendar date from prior years. Two years ago I simply cut and pasted a blog post into the journal, so today I had occasion to read it again. Unfortunately, it holds up rather well, as it gave my reasons for considering Hillary Clinton to be a flawed candidate. I think I got it mostly right, though I was wrong about the email thing; that did hurt her thanks to Comey. It’s an odd thing that by the time election day came, I was convinced that, despite everything, she would win. So was she, I guess, which may be one of the primary reasons she lost.

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If gerrymandering doesn’t work…

Saturday, March 10, 2018

I’ve given my own opinion that the Democrats will find a way to lose in November, but the Republicans are leaving nothing to chance, as they never do. Gerrymandering and traditional forms of voter suppression may not be enough, so…:

President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.

The rider has prompted outrage from more than a dozen top elections officials around the country, including Secretary of State William F. Galvin of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who says he is worried that it could be used to intimidate voters and said there is “no basis” for providing Trump with this new authority.

via the Boston Globe

This bill in which this provision is encased has already passed the House, with “bipartisan” support. If there was any opposition on the part of House Democrats, it was muted. The provision is not in the Senate bill, so it may yet be excised, but it is truly pathetic, looking at this as a Democrat, that it has not been made an issue until some state officials caught on to it. So far as the Republicans are concerned, I’m just wondering why they didn’t go full police state and get ICE involved.

If the “blue wave” materializes, it will be despite everything the national Democrats can do to build a dyke to contain it.

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Really, too funny

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

These are weird times, what with the genius threatening the stability, and perhaps even the existence of the world, but there are things that can still make us laugh. This is one of them:

Adult film star Stormy Daniels sued President Donald Trump on Tuesday, alleging that he never signed a nondisclosure agreement that his lawyer had arranged with her.

The civil suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and obtained by NBC News, alleges that her agreement not to disclose her “intimate” relationship with Trump is invalid because while both Daniels and Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen signed it, Trump never did.

Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, signed both the agreement and a side letter agreement using her professional name on Oct. 28, 2016, just days before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen signed the document the same day. Both agreements are appended to the lawsuit as Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2.

Click here to read the “Hush Agreement” and the side letter agreement

The “hush agreement,” as it’s called in the suit, refers to Trump throughout as David Dennison, and Clifford as Peggy Peterson. In the side letter agreement, the true identity of DD is blacked out, but Clifford’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, says the individual is Trump.

Each document includes a blank where “DD” is supposed to sign, but neither blank is signed.

According to the lawsuit, which Avenatti announced in a tweet, Clifford and Trump had an intimate relationship that lasted from summer 2006 “well into the year 2007.” The relationship allegedly included meetings in Lake Tahoe and at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

via NBC News

I followed a link to NBC from here, where the folks at Crooks and Liars post a tweet from someone named Susan Simpson, who observes:

This lawsuit is a work of legal art. If you are Trump, do you:

A) argue that your agreement to pay hush $$ to the porn star was a valid & legally enforceable contract; or
B) argue that there is no contract, and the porn star is free to talk about your affair?

It’s…beautiful.

I’ve just read skimmed the agreements, but the only defense I can imagine that doesn’t constitute an admission would be a claim that the court in which it was filed lacks jurisdiction, and that won’t fly as it’s quite clear from the agreement that jurisdiction is proper.

I would just like to observe that I pointed out the Catch 22 nature of Trump’s predicament several weeks ago, when I observed the following about any potential lawsuit brought by Trump or Cohen to enforce the agreement:

As a practical matter, in my humble opinion, she’s been free all along, because the genius and/or Cohen would have run up against a bit of a Catch 22 had they brought suit to enforce the agreement, since the act of bringing the suit would have amounted to an acknowledgment of the truth of what she was saying.

I didn’t know at the time about the contract’s requirement of “confidential arbitration”, but Stormy’s lawyer has effectively dealt with that little impediment. This is merely the mirror image of the situation I posited. Bringing the action in this way is really a master stroke. It will be interesting to see how they respond. My guess is that Stormy will find herself free to make some bucks at the genius’s expense. I should mention as well that the agreements seem to make specific references to pictures and text messages, implicitly putting the lie to Cohen’s claim that he was silencing a liar.

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Memo to NY Times: Words have meanings

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Today the New York Times once again goes into the hinterland, to understand the yahoos that are destroying this country. This time it’s the gun loving yahoos, particularly the ones who just can’t live without their assault weapons, particularly the AR-15, the weapon of choice for mass killers. Well, we’ve gone through this before with the Times, but I’ve got a specific linguistic bone to pick. Here’s a paragraph from the article, in which I’ve emphasized a certain word:

For those who love the rifle, it is seen as a testament to freedom — a rite of passage shared between parents and children, a token to welcome soldiers home, a tradition shared with friends at the range. But in its relatively short life span, the AR-15 has also become inextricably linked with tragedy and has been vilified as the weapon of mass murder.

via New York Times

Here’s the definition of vilify from my Merriam Websters:

to utter slanderous and abusive statements against : defame

And this, from the OED:

Depreciate or disparage with abusive or slanderous language; defame, revile, speak evil of.

The word carries with it a connotation: that the abusive statements lack truth. That’s what slander means. No one is vilifying this weapon; they are speaking truth about it. It is the weapon of mass murder, full stop. Words have meaning. The Times used to be aware of that fact. It would be nice if it saw fit to revert to the old ways.

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Sanity in the strangest places

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Every once in a while people behave rationally in places where you would never expect it. As all of America knows, Amazon has been soliciting bribes to locate a new facility somewhere in our benighted land. Cities and towns throughout America have been competing to see who can throw the most money at Amazon in order to get mainly low paying jobs, some of which may actually be filled by locals, that will never return enough to their local economies to offset the bribes they have to pay. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. By that measure, most of our cities are insane. Consider, as one small example, the way they throw money at sports teams. Looking at my home town of Hartford on that one.

Anyway, some cities, or their residents, are not only dropping out of the competition to offer Amazon the highest bribe, they are actively pleading with Amazon to get their bribe elsewhere. Consider this from the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce:

But when we started really thinking about what our future would look like, we realized it would probably never work out between us.

You want 50,000 employees for your new campus. We have a sizable, resourceful workforce, but if we were to concentrate them here, it would be a bummer. Our lack of traffic and ease of getting around would be totally wrecked, and we can’t sacrifice that for you.

You want on-site mass transit at HQ2. Here, there are many transit options that fit our city perfectly, and thanks to our compact urban footprint, many of our residents can easily get to the office on foot, on a bike or just by a quick drive. It would be cool if we could offer that, but we simply can’t do that just to make you happy.

Amazon, you’ve got so much going for you, and you’ll find what you’re looking for. But it’s just not us.

Of course, insanity is still the norm. The District of Columbia is actually offering to pay bribes directly to Amazon employees relocating from elsewhere, thus providing an incentive to minimize the number of jobs created for locals. Those, by the way, would be the good jobs. The locals will be the drones in the warehouses, getting great benefits like ambulances waiting outside to bring them to the hospital when they collapse in overheated warehouses (air conditioning is expensive!) from heat exhaustion. Okay, that particular benefit is no longer needed, after Amazon was shamed into doing something about it, but how about refusing to pay workers for the time they have to spend being screened after they leave work.

It is rarely a good idea to engage in corporate bribery. If this were a sane country, Congress would legislate against it, much to the relief of the states and cities paying the bribes. It is a particularly bad idea when dealing with Amazon, inasmuch as Jeff Bezos is evil. (More evil here.)

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In defense of a much maligned minority

Monday, February 26, 2018

Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money we are informed that Donald Trump is historically unpopular because everyone hates him except Old White Men. This base canard is supposedly finds support in a recent CNN poll, the results of which are summarized, in part, as follows:

You don’t need to be real good at math to figure out that the only large demographic categories in which Trump isn’t massively unpopular are old white men and Republicans, which of course are increasingly the same thing.

On behalf of Old White Men everywhere, I have to object. I hate Donald Trump just as much as anyone, as do all the other Old White Men that I know. I hate Donald Trump just as much as Brian hated the Romans, which was “a lot”. Sure, there are some Old White Men that don’t hate Donald Trump, and maybe it’s true that more Old White Men don’t hate Donald Trump than any other demographic doesn’t hate Donald Trump, except, maybe, for Old White Male Republicans, because they and they alone account for my demographic’s poor performance in this latest poll. And when you look at the poll, it doesn’t actually break out the numbers for Old White Men. The whole idea that Old White Men hate Trump the least is nothing but an assumption for which there’s no explicit support in the poll, merely a massive amount of implicit support.

It’s time for Old White Men everywhere to stand up on behalf of our much maligned demographic and demand that we stop being pigeonholed as ignorant racist easily deluded Fox News watchers who faithfully troop to the polls to vote against our own self interests just because most some of us do.

Here’s Brian, by the way:

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Told you so, redux

Friday, February 23, 2018

I just want to point out that I’m over a year ahead of Mother Jones.

Who is the worst president? The lowest ranked presidents are normally Franklin Pierce (helped cause the Civil War) James Buchanan (helped cause the Civil War), William Henry Harrison (refused to wear a coat during his inauguration, died), and Andrew Johnson (screwed up the outcome of the Civil War, impeached).

Or so it used to be!

Professors Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin S. Vaughn reached out, as they did in 2014 , to hundreds of political scientists to check in on this whole historical ranking of presidents thing and though the upper tier is unchanged the population of the lowest rung is a little bit bigger.

Donald Trump comes in dead last in his debut ranking. Among Democratic scholars, he’s far and away last. Among independent scholars, he’s second to last. Even among Republican scholars, he’s bottom five. (Read Kevin Drum on where he should rank.)

To add insult to injury, President Obama is now ranked the 8th best president ever.

via Mother Jones

I don’t mean to brag (yes I do), but I reported on the consensus opinion of historians before they were ever polled, and I got it dead right. Here’s a bit:

It’s official. The American Historical Society announced today that it had taken a poll of its members, and there was surprising unanimity: Donald Trump is the worst president in American History. Well, actually, Donald Trump will be the worst president in American history, once he’s sworn in.

“There was a bit of debate about whether we should declare him the worst before his inauguration”, an Historical Society spokesperson said, “but in the end, we reached consensus that there was really no reason to wait, since he was such a clear winner….er… loser”.

Trump replaces George W. Bush as the Society’s worst president ever. Bush, unlike Trump, was not a unanimous pick for the highly coveted award. A history professor from Bowdoin College held out for Franklin Pierce, stating that while he saw the merits of the argument for Bush, as a matter of institutional pride, he felt it was important to stick up for a Bowdoin alum. That same professor was recently quoted as saying that “next to Trump, Pierce looks like Lincoln”.

The professors pointed to a variety of reasons for their unanimous decision. “We’ve had mentally ill presidents in the past”, one pointed out, “but you can argue that Lincoln’s occasional depression was part of what made him great, and while Andy Jackson was a bit of a megalomaniac, he simply can’t compare to Trump. ”

via Me

Okay, I’m not lying when I say there was nothing to it. We all knew it, didn’t we, as watched the returns that fateful night.

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Yet another rant

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

So, this happened, either today or yesterday;

Jack “Ass” Kingston, former Republican congressman and current lobbyist, is one of the more disgusting TV yakkers. And on CNN’s New Day this morning, he reminded us why.

Alisyn Camerota introduced this segment on the student gun control effort by asking him about a tweet Kingston made.

…

“I would say to you very plainly that organized groups that are out there like George Soros are always ready to take the charge and it’s kind of like instant rally, instant protest and –”

via Crooks and Liars.

Now, this is total bullshit of course. But I want to direct your attention to the reference to George Soros, the billionaire who, according to Fox and the Republicans, is heading up a conspiracy designed to deliver America into the hands of the left. While it’s true that Soros is on our side on most issues, there is precious little evidence that he is engaged in any kind of concerted campaign to take over the United States government. But that doesn’t matter. He is a convenient whipping boy and he gets the base riled up. It works, so Kingston doesn’t even care if he is called out by his interviewer, because he has given the folks who Republicans count on the red meat they want. You know, the stuff they like to hear that keeps them distracted from the fact that the people they vote for are systematically impoverishing them. Demonizing named people works, even when there is no factual basis for the demonization.

There is something for the Democrats to learn here, though they never will.

There are a number of right wing billionaires who have truly dedicated themselves to destroying what used to be the American way of life. They have real names too. We can start with the Koch Brothers, who own a good chunk of the state legislatures in this country, besides a good deal of Congress, and then give a nod to Pete Peterson, who has dedicated his life to destroying Social Security. Let’s not forget the Mercers, the money behind Steve Bannon. When was the last time you heard a Democrat take aim at any of these people? It has probably happened, sometime and somewhere. To the extent Democrats go on the attack, they may refer to nameless “billionaires”, but they rarely if ever name names. In the case of the Koch Brothers, the Mercers, Peterson, et al, the Democrats would have the facts on their side. They’d be doing the country a favor by throwing a little sunlight on the relentless campaign of these people to turn this country into an oligarchy. But, were they to do that, they’d risk winning the election in November, and that’s a chance they don’t want to take.

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Random thoughts on a Saturday Morning

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Like many on the left, I’ve railed against both siderism, though I defer to Driftglass (highly recommended), as the champ in that field. Read that blog and you have no need to personally read David Brooks to get incensed at his latest atrocity.

This morning I had to gasp, for right in the midst of reading an excerpt from a pundit implicitly attacking both-siderism was a classic case of … you guessed it! Both siderism:

Most pundits in Washington now recoil at any suggestion that the Trump-Russia story is really about treason. They all want to say it’s about something else – what, they aren’t quite sure. They are afraid to use serious words. They are in the business of breaking down the Trump-Russia narrative into a long series of bite-sized, incremental stories in which the gravity of the overall case often gets lost. They seem to think that treason is too much of a conversation-stopper, that it interrupts the flow of cable television and Twitter. God forbid you might upset the right wing! (And the left wing, for that matter.)

via The Intercept

Most pundits in Washington are in thrall to both-siderism. That accounts for their inability to wrap their minds around Trump’s (and the Republican Party as a whole) criminality, because in order to do so they would have to abandon their religious devotion to both-siderism. James Risen, who wrote the above, has a point. But notice how he sticks the finish. Somehow, he sees a world in which the feelings of the left are as tenderly coddled as those of the right. Either that, or he thinks the left would somehow be offended at talk of Trump’s treason. It’s a reflex among the punditocracy, even when one of them is implicitly attacking that very reflex.

Now, on to something completely different, and yet oddly, not so different.

Yesterday Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians and a few Russian based corporations for meddling in the U.S. elections. Anyone with brains can see that there are plenty more shoes to drop. He has the Trump organization in the crosshairs, there can be no doubt, and he no doubt feels he’s got the goods on them. It’s a huge story. A federal prosecutor is getting ever closer to charging a president and his confederates with conspiring with a foreign power. It’s a front page story in today’s New York Times.

But.

It’s tucked away on the left hand side of the page. What story gets the most attention? A story about the fact that the FBI got warnings about the Parkdale school shooter. Sure, it would have been nice if the FBI could have stopped the guy, but a) how many warnings do they get about various people and how many resources do they have to respond, and b) what precisely were they supposed to do since the guy bought the gun legally and had done nothing illegal. Besides, he was a right wing white person, and we don’t bother right wing white people in this country. This story is pure diversion, yet another example of the right wing determining the narrative. In this case it serves two purposes: it supports their campaign to discredit the FBI, thus covering for Trump’s treason, and it diverts from the real issue: why are American citizens able to legally buy weapons whose sole purpose is to enable mass killings of human beings? Today’s front page brings to mind the classic Times’ front page featuring three stories about Hillary’s emails, written about the same time that the Times ran an article headed: Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. sees no clear link to Russia.

It’s often been said (and it’s true) that facts have a well known liberal bias. The fact of the matter is that both siderism has a well known right wing bias.

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What’s the big deal?

Thursday, February 15, 2018

I’m really puzzled about all the attention people are paying to the recent shootings in Florida. I thought we had, sub silentio, agreed that we weren’t even going to talk about mass shootings, unless the shooter broke a record. This guy didn’t even come close. Granted, he holds the record for this year, but even though we’ve seen mass shootings nearly every day this year, the body counts have been relatively low, so this latest shooter still isn’t in the big leagues. All those other shootings got almost no press, which seems unfair to the other shooters, who, I’m sure, we’re trying their best. It also seems so unfair to Republicans, who have to say prayers for the victims again, and decry the Democrats for politicizing the issue instead of bemoaning the fact that there’s really nothing that can be done about it. We really need to set some ground rules on these things. I think Republicans should only have to offer their thoughts and prayers when the body count exceeds a reasonable number; say 30. They should be permitted to ignore the low yield shootings, so they can concentrate on creating a plutocracy. And can’t we all agree that it’s disrespectful to the victims to advocate for gun control right after a mass shooting, and a waste of time any other time, since at such points there’s no demonstrated need to discuss it.

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