Skip to content

A common dodge

Thursday, January 31, 2019

I was struck by a great example of a common right wing/corporate dodge whilst perusing the editorial page of today’s Boston Globe. It is one I think often goes unnoted, so I’m going to note it here.

Massachusett’s governor, Charlie Baker, has proposed a set of laws designed to bring down prescription drug prices for Medicaid patients in Massachusetts. The Globe editorial board (which loves Charlie Baker) lauds his proposal in an editorial here. Baker is the last of the throwback Republicans, he has even proposed raising taxes. Still, he’s a Republican, but that’s not what this post is about, nor is it a defense or attack on his prescription drug proposal. It has good points, which the Globe’s editorial summarizes, and may be the best a state can do given federal inaction.

No, this post is about an op-ed pieceby one Robert K. Coughlin, which, because when corporate interests are concerned, both sides must always be presented, sits below the Globe’s editorial. Coughlin is president and CEO of MassBio, and therefore has an unstated but obvious financial interest in keeping the price of prescription drugs high. 

He begins his op-ed piece by attacking Baker for engaging in “ political gimmickry on drug pricing rather than attempting a more serious approach to improving health care for Massachusetts residents while reining in spending.” Right away the reader assumes that Mr. Coughlin is going to enlighten us as to the “serious approach” he is espousing.

The bulk of the piece though, is a sustained attack on the (Charlie) Baker proposal, based generally, on the universal Big Pharma dodge that if they can’t gouge us on drug prices, they simply won’t be able to innovate. (See Dean Baker’s papers on this, one here.).

Are you still waiting for Mr. Coughlin’s solution to the problem of high drug prices? Well, here it is:

Instead of following the governor’s political gamesmanship, the Legislature should pull together a group of experts from all corners of health care to work on a series of real reforms that can both improve health outcomes for our residents and cut unneeded spending without risking harm to our most vulnerable patients.

In case you missed it, there’s nothing there. Mr. Coughlin has preserved his ability to oppose any and all proposals that might actually reduce the cost of prescription drugs. This is a common right wing/corporate dodge. Sure there’s a problem, they say, so lets study it and think about it and stuff, but let’s not actually doanything about it, especially if doing something about it would cut into corporate profits or take a dollar from the pocket of a billionaire. Coughlin’s piece is a particularly glaring example of this dodge, but it’s very common. For, after all, when they really have to come up with solutions, like they were supposed to do to improve Obamacare, they come up empty. 

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

A conversation starter

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Looks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have started something.

As an aside, she sure has made an impression. My auto-complete worked on her last name. 

Filed in Democrats, Inequality | | Comments (0)

Beware the law of unintended consequences

Monday, January 28, 2019

Nancy Pelosi is talking about legislation to end shutdowns, the thrust of it being that spending levels would automatically continue at present levels during any period when appropriations were not made. This articlesuggests that’s not such a good idea, and the author (Ian Milhiser) makes a good case. His essential argument is that such a mechanism would make it easier for Republicans to refuse to vote on new appropriations, as the immediate political cost would be negligible, while continued intransigence would amount to a slow defunding of vital programs due to inflation.

It’s a helpful reminder that before suggesting any type of corrective legislation, it’s a good idea to put yourself in the shoes of your opponents and try to figure out how they would or could use it to cause havoc.

I’m not sure the courts would allow it, but Milhiser suggests the following:

One possibility is a law providing that, for each week that Congress fails to pass appropriations, marginal tax rates on Americans earning more than a million dollars a year will automatically increase by one percent. That way, a powerful Republican constituency will have a major incentive to end the shutdown, and Republican lawmakers will be pushed into a weaker and weaker bargaining position the longer the shutdown continues.

As he points out, since Republicans are the problem, the solution has to target Republicans where it hurts, so they will have an incentive to act responsibly. On the same subject, I agree somewhat with the writer here, who says the Republicans may have learned their lesson, but the lesson isn’t that they shouldn’t shut down the government, it’s that they should do it in a way that benefits them. The fact that some of them are suggesting we look at an automatic continuing resolution merely means they see the possibility of abusing it in the way Milhiser discusses.

Filed in Republicans | | Comments (0)

We haven’t been conned, we’ve been betrayed

Sunday, January 27, 2019

There’s an oft repeated trope in the left wing blogosphere that, to the right, conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. I’d like to suggest a sort of corollary. 

In the past few days a number of right wing loonies have attacked Trump’s cave on his wall. Ann Coulter is, yet again, one of them, but there are others. Unfortunately, I’m too lazy to search for a blog post I read recently that catalogued a number of them, but take my word, there are lots more.

One of the things seldom mentioned about the right, but which is nonetheless obviously true, is that it is far more comfortable in opposition. This is particularly true of the Limbaughs, Coulters, etc. They can stir up all kinds of grievances without any responsibility on their part or on the part of the politicians they foster to actually do anything about the causes they exploit, because, particularly in economic matters, they usually make things worse for the people upon whom they depend for financial support; that is, the idiots who imbibe their information from right wing radio and Fox. Even when they controlled all three branches of government, they still took every opportunity to bemoan their subjugation by the libs. Sure, it helps them in the short term if the right can control things long enough to give them a tax cut, but after that, right wing book sales and radio audiences, like gun sales, go up when Democrats are in control. So, they are not averse to being in the political wilderness. The money is good when the Democrats are in control.

It is also the case that right wing politicians, once they’ve outlived their usefulness, become non-persons or transmogrify. W, for instance, once the darling of the conservative movement, is now practically a non-person, and certainly not a true conservative.

So, it may very well be that in the coming months we will see the movement move beyond Trump. Most of the country understands that he’s a con-man. But the last people to admit that someone is a con-man are those who have been successfully conned. However, being conspiracy addicts, they are more than willing to admit that they’ve been betrayed, and that, I think, is the line Coulter and her ilk are pushing. It amounts to the same thing, when you think about it, but putting it that way puts the blame on Trump, and absolves the herd of any responsibility for their susceptibility to his snake oil. Once again they can claim that conservatism has not failed, but has been failed.

Update: Something along the same lines here.

Filed in Crazies, The Very Stable Genius | | Comments (0)

Who could have known Roger Stone was actually guilty?

Friday, January 25, 2019

We woke up to the good news (culled from Twitter by my wife) that Roger Stone had been arrested and carted off in the early hours of the morn. I looked for details, as at the time we weren’t sure when, precisely, it had happened. None of my other feeds had any news so I went to the New York Times feed, and there is was. The story is old news by now, but I must comment on my reaction when I read this paragraph from the story in the Times:

He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian election interference. His brash behavior made him less of a subject of news media scrutiny than other current and former aides to President Trump — like the character in a whodunit whom readers immediately dismiss as too obvious to have committed the crime.

Newsflash to the Times: Life isn’t like mysteries. They are fiction, and we read them precisely because they aren’t like the cut and dry details of regular life. In real life, the obvious guy is usually the guilty guy, particularly when a lot of the evidence is out there in the open and, on occasion, he practically confesses.

Almost seems like the Times is justifying the fact that it ignored an obvious story, doesn’t it? Then again, we can’t fault them, because they were right on top of the Hillary Clinton email story, and there was a lot of the obvious about that one, so they don’t miss every obvious story. Of course, in that case, it was obvious all along that it was a ginned up non-scandal, but that didn’t stop the Times from covering its front page with email stories a week before the election that brought us Individual-1.

By the way, one has to wonder why the Times never explored the curious connection between Roger Stone and the allegations against Al Franken. Maybe it was just too obvious. 

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)

Gaming impeachment

Friday, January 18, 2019

It seems like years ago that a new Congresswoman (was it coincidental she was a person of color) was savaged for saying that Individual-1 should be impeached. Given the disclosures of the past few days, and the near certainty that even more will come out in the near future, it has now become respectable for even members of the media to discuss the possibility. It is now clear that he has committed impeachable offenses.

Over at Hullabaloo, tristero makes a good case for the proposition that politically, it would be better for the Democrats not to impeach, though he (or she) still thinks impeachment is the morally right course. The thrust of the argument is that so long as the Republicans continue to enable Trump, they will continue to lose political support and the “entire country can see that the party as a whole is intellectually and morally bankrupt.”

There is another side to this as well. Let’s play pretend, and assume for the moment that the tide of public opinion pushes Republican senators to a guilty verdict. This is unlikely in the extreme, but bear with me.

In that case, McConnell would put himself out front, because a consensus would have been reached among them that conviction would be smart politics.

Even though anyone with a lick of sense would realize that the verdict was the result of political necessity and not principle, that’s not the way it would be played by our unbiased media.

Should there be a guilty verdict, the media would instantly announce that the Republican Party had put country before party. All of its sins, which led directly to a Trump presidency and enabled his criminality once he got in, would immediately be consigned to the memory hole. McConnell and his ilk would be favorably compared to the Democratic Senators who refused to convict Clinton, because, after all, we live in a both sides world, and surely being a Russian agent and getting a blow job are comparable sins. The loathsome Pence, enabler extraordinaire, would immediately become a healer. The Dems would probably still win in 2020, but these memes would nonetheless rehabilitate the party of racists, Nazis, and plutocrats in short order.

I think it’s fair to say that’s how it would play out, should the Republicans defy their base and vote to convict. I doubt it will happen, unless Fox starts laying the groundwork very soon. If you start hearing the folks on Fox saying Trump is really a liberal, then maybe it’s in the cards.

I also very much doubt that tristero’s hoped for “demise of the modern Republican Party” will happen, no matter what the genius’s fate may be. The fact is that the media has come to believe that the Republican Party is the norm, with a sort of vested right to political power. How else explain the preponderance of Republicans and conservatives on the Sunday shows. How, to go a step further, can one explain the ubiquity of Lindsey Graham, a man undistinguished for any actual accomplishments? Whatever the future may hold, Trump’s sins will be Trump’s sins and his alone; his Republican enablers will not suffer at the hands of the media, which will do its best to see that the public forgets the role of the Republican Party in creating the conditions for a Trump presidency and enabling his criminality once he was in office.

Filed in Impeachable, Media, Republicans, The Very Stable Genius | | Comments (0)

A soul mate

Friday, January 18, 2019

The guy who wrote this must have been a Red Sox fan during the character building years. I’ve compared the Democrats to the Red Sox of yore, and like us fans of old who can’t quite believe their team can win (or even should….tradition, you know), this Democrat can’t quite get his head around these newfangled Democrats:

And now? Young upstarts, led by a certain fetching socialist from the Bronx, are destroying everything we’ve worked so mediocrely to build. If you want their vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on Joe Lieberman’s face forever. Actually, don’t picture that; focus group testing has demonstrated that that image really resonates with voters across demographics, something we most certainly do not want.

…

We used to be a party that wasn’t afraid to barely scratch the surface of a problem, and I fear that those days may be behind us. Youth today are too coddled with their unpaid internships and lowered life expectancies to understand the importance of having a mealy-mouthed voice at the table. If today’s Democrats insist upon winning, you can count me out.

Filed in Democrats | | Comments (0)

To impeach or not impeach

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

There’s been a lot more serious talk about impeachment lately, which makes sense, since there’s been a lot more evidence to support it, though some of that evidence, it seems to me, was a matter of public record before, but we’re revisiting the implications. For instance, I believe it was known before that Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes of this meetings with Putin. But, I’m not pounding my keyboard today (I’d like to say I’m taking up my pen, but I’m not) to make the legal case for impeachment. Individual-1 does that almost every time he opens his mouth.

The question is: should he be impeached or should he not be impeached, based on the pure politics of the thing. Michael Tomasky recently made the case for waiting until 2020 and booting him out, and his column has engendered a lot of internet commentary. He makes a decent case for this point of view, but I think he’s wrong. Maybe.

I think he should be impeached, but timing is all, as is a persuasive and well developed case for the prosecution. The point is not to get a conviction. It’s a given that not enough Republicans would jump ship to convict even if there are tapes of him promising Putin that he’d withdraw the U.S. from NATO in return for Putin’s help in the election, besides which many of them are probably “with the Russians too”. The point is to give the American people a comprehensive narrative of his criminality, which should be fresh in their minds as they go to the polls in 2020. I’m sure the people that the Times seeks out in diners will be unimpressed (why, one must ask again, were we never treated to stories about Obama voters?), but they’re not the people we’re aiming at.

The Democrats have to make it clear that they are invoking the constitutional remedy of impeachment because Individual-1 poses a clear and present danger to the continued existence of the American Republic. That means marshaling and presenting the evidence in a coherent fashion, both in committee hearings and in a Senate trial, which should be timed to occur at the optimum time. Just off the top of my head, the summer of 2020 sounds good, but I’m open to conviction on that one. In any event, it should come at a time when Republican senators voting for acquittal will do so with the knowledge that, while they are satisfying their base, they are probably offending everyone else, a category that contains the majority except in the very backward states. The U.S. Senate is up for grabs in 2020, and given the fact that Mitch McConnell may be as big a threat to democracy as the genius, and given the further fact that the American judiciary has already been ruined perhaps beyond redemption by a Republican Senate, winning the Senate is as important as winning the presidency.

If the Democrats make a compelling case for his guilt, and an equally compelling case for the proposition that the acts of which he’s guilty merit impeachment, and if the Republicans nonetheless vote to acquit, we may very well see the last of Republicans like Susan Collins. The Clinton impeachment failed in the court of public opinion, not because he wasn’t guilty of something, but because, while everyone knew he’d lied about having an affair, most people didn’t think that was a good enough reason to throw him out of office. Most people, on the other hand, did think that Nixon’s sins merited his removal, and the genius’s sins make Nixon look like a choir boy. 

One obstacle, other than the Democrat’s inability to speak with a single voice, is the fact that the media has changed since Watergate days. There was no state media then, and the non-state media did not engage in the Republican enabling both-siderism with which it is infected today. Nonetheless, impeachment, if handled right, could be a net winner for the Democrats.

Filed in Impeachable | | Comments (1)

Fuzzy math (at least to me)

Sunday, January 13, 2019

A new poll, unsurprisingly, finds that Republicans overwhelmingly blame Democrats for the shutdown, despite the fact that Individual-1, before the fact, proudly took ownership of any shutdown. Facts don’t mean much on the dark side. But there’s something that doesn’t seem to compute here. Here are the results:

 

 

The percentages given don’t add up to 100 because “no opinion” and “neither” are not counted. The overall numbers are fairly close to the numbers for Independents. If one assumes the number of self professed (I’m assuming that’s the only way the pollster knows party affiliations) Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal, you’d think the overall percentage of people blaming the Republicans would be slightly higher than it is, since Democrats are far more unanimous in correctly assigning blame than Republicans are in buying into Fox propaganda.

Anyway, it seems to me it would be helpful if pollsters supplied the percentage of respondents that identify with the parties. I’m sure if you sat down with these numbers and fiddled with them for awhile, dredging up the algebra we all learned years ago, you could come up with a rough estimate of the relative number of Dems, Independents, and Idiots, but, for my own part, I’m way too lazy. Again, at first blush, it looks like these numbers imply that there are more Independents than adhere to either party, and more self professed Republicans than Democrats. It’s hard to believe that the latter conclusion is true in reality. I suspect that the percentage of self professed Republicans is declining, which explains the near unanimity with which those remaining adhere to Herr Trump. There must be a lot of somewhat rational former Republicans that have jumped ship. Could be wrong, of course.

Filed in Politics | | Comments (0)

Both Siderism to the tenth power

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

The internet, particularly the twittersphere, is agog over this tweet from ABC News:

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another. https://t.co/9IWnqUgl2d

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) January 9, 2019

It arguably raises the both siderism argument to a new extreme, but then again, maybe it’s just par for the course. But it got me thinking.

Back in the days of the Clinton administration, the beltway punditocracy couldn’t wrap it’s collective head around the fact that while most people disapproved of what Clinton had done, they didn’t consider it sufficient reason to remove him from office. In the case of the Clinton impeachment, it seemed that they just couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the electorate as a whole was sophisticated enough not to think in black and white terms about the issue. The prevailing, if unspoken opinion, was that Americans just weren’t sophisticated enough to be a bit nuanced. So far as they were concerned, everyone outside the beltway was a fundamentalist whacko, so the fact that people actually opposed impeachment threw them for a loop.

I think there’s something similar going on here, except this time it’s completely different. (Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself). Anyway, in this case, the pundits operate under the delusion that both siderism is the one true road to truth, and that this should be obvious to anyone. After all, it’s been their religion for years, so they’ve become blinded to the fact that it doesn’t describe the political world in which we live. It turns out, though the media will take a while to figure this out, that regular people are more inclined to blame only one sidewhen something like this happens, particularly when one side pre-announced that it was to blame for the situation and that one side is, in fact, responsible for the situation. The fact is, that given our present political reality, the state of affairs in this country can properly be put at the doorstep of one side, since it’s only one sidethat promotes racism, opposes science, promotes gun violence, attempts to impose their “religious” beliefs on the nation, and covers for a president intent on subverting the constitution and using his office to line his own pockets, and who has, besides the foregoing, also conspired with foreign powers. The list could go on. The only area in which both siderism might make some sense is in the shoving money to the rich arena (to which the pundits don’t object-most of them are rich), where some Democrats are complicit, but in which Republicans still are far and away the major sinners.

ABC doesn’t feel the Democrats are as much at fault as Trump because, whereas he wants to build a racist wall, they do not. The fault, as ABC sees it, lies in the failure of the Democrats to meet Trump in the middle, an area always defined as that which Republicans want. No side can every be wholly wrong. The truth always lies in the middle, a middle that drifts to the right at the speed of light. At least so far as the above tweet goes, they’re learning that real Americans don’t see it that way.

Filed in Media | | Comments (0)