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My bad on Beto

Saturday, December 22, 2018

I know that there’s been a surfeit of crazy the last few days, but events move too fast for a hobbyist blogger, so let me start simply by saying that I was definitely not wrong when I diagnosed Individual-1 as being seriously mentally ill. Everything else that has to be said about recent events has been said elsewhere, so I will turn my attention to the Democrats. After all, this blog is called CT BLUE, dedicated to the proposition that Democrats should win, despite their best efforts.

It is my sad duty to confess error. Sometime in the past few weeks I expressed a tentative preference for Beto O’Rourke as our 2020 candidate. I did not do my homework. He was, of course, vastly preferable to Ted Cruz, but then, who wouldn’t be. He also talked a good game on the campaign trail, but apparently his actual record leaves a lot to be desired:

He’s not that bad. He’d be a better president than Michael Bloomberg or Kirsten Gillibrand or John Delaney. But the Biden people see Beto as a threat and the knives are out. Several Bernie supporters– this one included– feel Beto was getting a record-free free ride towards the nomination and his record– like Gillibrand’s and Biden’s, for example, needed to be examined.

David Sirota’s Guardian piece, Beto O’Rourke frequently voted for Republican legislation, analysis reveals is absolutely devastating. A presidential race is not the same as taking a runner against arch-villain Ted Cruz in a Texas midterm. Beto had nothing to lose and he got better and better as a candidate as the campaign picked up momentum. But his record as an office-holder didn’t change. “[A] new analysis of congressional votes from the non-profit news organisation Capital & Main,” wrote Sirota, “shows that even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities. Capital & Main reviewed the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.”

More details at the link.

I think a lot of potential Democratic candidates, a lot of Democrats, and a lot of the media, believe that almost anyone can beat Individual-1 in 2020. I beg to differ. First of all, there is no question he will be renominated, as he is currently in the process of absorbing the RNC into his own campaign organization.and there’s even talk of ditching primariesto make a challenge all but impossible. That setup will make the DNC tilt in 2016 look hyper-impartial. If he’s in jail, he probably won’t be renominated, but he won’t be, and therefore he will be the candidate.

It is already beginning to look like the Democratic establishment will do in 2020 what it did in 2016: tilt the playing field to support its favored candidate. That candidate is shaping up to be Joe Biden, the one candidate most likely to lose to Trump in 2020. It can’t be said that the risk we’d run in nominating him is worth running because he’s good on policy. That’s because he’s not. He’s horrible.

As one small example of what he’d be up against, consider his reputation as being “gaffe-prone”. If he says something even marginally stupid, the media will amplify it for weeks (see, e.g., Al Gore’s alleged dishonesty in 2000). They do this in order to be fair to both sides. As part of that fairness, they will report, and then forget, each and every colossally stupid thing Trump says, because, after all, that’s just Trump being Trump.

Apart from that, Biden will inspire exactly no one.

We need a young, dynamic, progressive candidate. I thought Beto fit that bill, but it looks like I was wrong. The rest of the pack, for one reason or another, present risks of their own. Most of them (looking at you especially, Kirsten) are self seeking, “moderate” Democrats who would do as Democrats have done for the past 40 years: avoid backing the progressive agenda in order to seek votes from brain dead Fox viewers. Votes they never get, but who’s counting?

We thought we were getting a young, progressive candidate in 2008, or, I should say, we deluded ourselves into believing we were. Obama is a very good person, don’t get me wrong, but he blew an opportunity to pursue a rational agenda in the vain and unrealistic hope that he could somehow bridge the gap between the rational and the crazy. I won’t belabor the point, but we don’t need yet another Democrat who will come in on a wave of hope and then proceed to pursue halfway measures that don’t appreciably or perceptibly improve people’s lives. Had Obama and the Democrats, in 2009, pushed through a recovery plan that did more than stop the bleeding, I firmly believe the red wave of 2010 would never have happened. We don’t need another in 2022.

Bernie would fit the bill, if Bernie were 30 years younger, but he’s not. Anyway, the Democratic establishment would move heaven and earth to prevent his nomination.

We may yet be stuck with Beto. He’s not what we want, but he may at least be what we need to win in 2020. As a candidate, he’d be great. As a president, he’d probably be a huge disappointment, and we’d see a red wave in 2022. But, on the bright side (and we should always look at the bright side of life), if he won, Individual-1 might end up in that jail cell, unless, of course, his successor decides to “heal the country’s wounds” by pardoning the bastard.

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Can’t stop laughing at this

Friday, December 21, 2018

I came across this picture when I followed a twitter link. As I’ve said before, I don’t know how to embed tweets, and I humbly apogize for my inability to give credit to the brilliant mind that put this together. Everytime I look at it I laugh.

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A Goodbye to the Flim-Flam Man

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Paul Ryan will be leaving us soon, and the folks at McSweeney’s are marking the occasion. I got a kick out of it. Here’s the start:

Sing to me, O Fox Muse, of that noodle-spined hero who traveled far and wide, born in Janesville, Wisconsin, the last born son of Dracula and a polo shirt. Many cities of men he saw on Listening Tours: men who were steelworkers, and coal miners, and men who toiled and farmed and hammered and sweat; he met with men with collars of blue and skin of white, and he made a very serious Listening Face at them, which was where he pursed his lips and nodded at three-second intervals, in this way fighting the urge to yell, “Your money should be my money!”

Yes, many cities of men he saw, and learned their minds, but he could not save them from — I’m sorry, is this right, Muse? It says he was trying to save them from being able to afford healthcare? He dedicated basically his entire life to that? That’s correct as written? Okay.

Yes, many cities of men he saw, and learned their minds, but he could not save them from the horrors and tumult of affordable healthcare, hard though he strove. Recall, Muse, how, as a young man, our hero helped care for his grandmother as Medicare provided for her late-stage Alzheimer’s treatment, and how there, he vowed before Gods and Men alike, that he would dedicate his entire life to making healthcare inaccessible not only to grandmothers, but also grandfathers, and grandsons, and granddaughters, and honestly, cancer-curing puppies wearing snow boots and scarves, if that kind of legislation were ever introduced.

It goes on. I don’t know if all the facts set forth about the hero are true. Did his kindergarten teacher really require each student to give a card to everyone else in the class “specifically to protect him”? I suspect not, but where it’s not strictly true, it reeks of truthiness.

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A bit of speculation

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

I don’t pretend to know all that much about British politics, but it strikes me that the Conservative Party is suffering from one of the anti-democratic maladies for which the Republican Party has become notorious.

Apparently, the British people, if given the chance, would vote to reverse the Brexit vote.It was, after all, the result of fraud on the part of its proponents mixed with a healthy dose of Russian interference. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it?) Yet Theresa may will have none of it:

With talk of a second referendum growing, May again reiterated her opposition to another vote last night and said parliament had “a democratic duty to deliver what the British people voted for”. She even described Tony Blair’s recent appearance in Brussels to support a second vote as “an insult to the office he once held and the people he once served.”

At first glance, you’d think that a second referendum would be a no-brainer, since if, as expected, it reversed the first referendum, there would be no need to come up with an exit strategy, which so far has proven to be impossible. Not only that, it might salvage May’s tenuous grip on her office.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that May is terrified of her base, just as our Republican politicians are terrified of theirs. 

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How do these idiots rise to the surface?

Monday, December 17, 2018

Okay, I guess if you run a propaganda network, you’ll give a forum to anyone. Here’s a person who has a columnin the New York Post, who’s invited on to Fox to talk about his suggestion that Trump supporters pay for the wall by starting a GoFundMe campaign:

Trump surrogates in the conservative media are so desperate to get a border war built so Hair Leader doesn’t look like a con artist (he does), that they are stumping Trump voters to chip in $80 apiece so they could fund the wall themselves.

Isn’t Mexico supposed to pay for Donald Trump’s border wall? Didn’t Donald Trump campaign on that proposition to the American people?

Michael Goodwin calls for Trump supporters to start a GoFundMe page in today’s NY Post.

Let the people who support the wall pay for it — directly and voluntarily. That’s what a number of readers suggest.–

“If the 63 million people who voted for Trump each pledge $80, we can build the wall.”

And as usual, a Trump supporter in the media who writes something that might help their petulant lordship, immediately got the call to be a guest on Fox and Friends.

This guy is an idiot, and he has a column in a (relatively) major newspaper and is allowed to bloviate on what is, alas, a major “news” network. I suppose it’s too much to expect such folks to address a rather fundamental issue here. Even ifyou raised all the money you’d need, you’d have no right to build the wall. It has to be authorized by Congress and you would need the capability to exercise the power of eminent domain to seize the land on which you built it. There are, in fact, a lot of property owners on the border who would prefer to keep their land as is, thank you very much.

The eminent domain issue isn’t discussed much in this context. Right wingers don’t like eminent domain. Supposedly. Witness the reaction from the right (all the way to the Supreme Court about the little pink house) when New London used eminent domain to facilitate a project that was supposed to bring jobs to the city. The city made the mistake of believing a major corporation, but that’s another issue. Of course, right wing hypocrisy knows no bounds, so we can rest assured that there would be no squawks from that quarter if the government seized border land to build a useless wall, so long as they could hate them some brown people in the process.

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Trump’s defense: Don’t blame me, I can’t tell right from wrong

Saturday, December 15, 2018

Trump is defending his Stormy Daniels related criminality by claiming that his lawyer should have told him that conspiring to pay her off in order to keep the public from finding out about the affair was wrong. The debate has therefore focused on whether Trump did, indeed, know it was wrong.

I once worked on a case involving a client who really did not appear to know right from wrong. He would make suggestions about possible actions he might take in a given situation. To his credit, when we explained that doing those things “would be wrong”, he accepted that and moved on. He was, despite his moral blindness, nonetheless, a somewhat likable guy. He was not, however, qualified to be president of the United States, precisely because he could not tell right from wrong.

No one seems to be pointing out that Trump’s defense boils down to a claim on his part that all on his own, he can’t tell right from wrong, and that unless someone tells him something is wrong, he can’t be held responsible for doing wrong. Focusing on whether he knew his illegal acts were wrong concedes that argument. Even if it does constitute a legal defense (which, given the facts that we know, seems unlikely), his admission that he can’t tell right from wrong disqualifies him from being considered a fit occupant of the office he has apparently obtained by fraud. I would humbly submit this obvious point should be front and center in the reporting on this issue.

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A few thoughts on the future of the criminal in chief

Saturday, December 15, 2018

Now that Trump has been more or less accused of a crime by his own Justice Department, we must consider where we go from here. There’s been a lot of discussion about indictments, impeachments, etc., and, at times there’s talk as if Trump’s downfall is inevitable. . Things are moving fast, and I may have this all wrong, but I’m going to put myself on record now. I’m sort of hoping I’ll be proven wrong in the long run, but I doubt it. This is a long post, but since no one reads this blog anymore anyway, I can indulge myself.

Back in what now look like the good old days, when we had a criminal named Nixon in the White House, I became certain that he would ultimately be removed from office once the existence of the tapes was made known. It was a given that they would contain a “smocking gun”, and it was also pretty much a given that Congress would do the right thing once Nixon’s guilt became clear.

While I’ve seen a lot of stuff on the net to the effect that Trump is going down, I’ve yet to see any reasonable scenario as to how that’s to be accomplished. That is, I haven’t seen any suggested pathway that leads to the end of the Trump presidency during his first term. I should add that I’m not sure I want him to leave office during this term, not unless he takes Pence with him.

He will not be indicted. I am an agnostic about whether a sitting president can be indicted. I incline toward the opinion that he can be, although perhaps the trial would have to await the end of his term.

I’m going to stray a bit here and point out that I think Laurence Tribe’s rationalefor claiming the constitution assumes a president can be indicted doesn’t hold water. Tribe says:

Just think about it: The president and vice president run as a ticket. No president selects a vice president who wouldn’t strongly consider doing for him exactly what Vice President Gerald Ford did for President Richard Nixon: namely, give the president a full pardon shortly after he becomes the former president — whether that sudden reversal of fortune occurs upon the president’s being turned out by the voters, or upon his being impeached and removed, or upon his resigning under the threat of such ignominious removal.

It’s crazy to assume that the framers of the impeachment power would have created a system in which even the most criminally corrupt president could permanently escape full accountability. Immunized from criminal trial while serving in office (as the ostensible Justice Department policy would require), such a president could count on receiving a get-out-of-jail-free card upon his exit. For he would leave behind him a newly minted (albeit unelected) president wielding the power to pardon any and all “offenses against the United States.”

There’s a glaring problem with the above. The framers did not envision anyone “running as a ticket”. In fact, truth be told, they didn’t contemplate anyone “running”. See, e.g., Thomas Jefferson pretending to be above the fray while James Madison ran his campaigns. But more importantly, they actually expected the electoral college to work in the way it was designed, which meant that there was no popular vote and that the individuals who got electoral votes might have no connection with one another, or might even be political rivals. See, e.g., Thomas Jefferson serving as Vice President while John Adams was president. Jefferson and Adams had been fairly close friends when they were both in France, but by 1796, they were definitely on opposite sides of the political fence. Adams would have had no reason to believe that Jefferson would pardon him if he went on a crime spree.

What the founders didexpect, in my humble opinion, was a Congress highly suspicious of any presidential overreach. A Congress which, regardless of party considerations, would impeach any felonious president, making the issue of prior indictment somewhat moot. Tribe may, ultimately, be right that a president can be indicted, but his history is a little weak.

Let me stray a bit more. The Founders also expected a judicial system in which the judges were at least somewhat removed from politics. Those days are gone. We can hope it’s not a permanent thing, but unless something radical happens, it will be the case during the entire Trump administration. Right now Trump is most obviously (in the sense of the evidence being out in plain sight) guilty of campaign finance violations. Not so long ago, Justice Kennedy declared in Citizens United that, given the fact that there was no evidence at all that money had any influence in politics, certain restrictions on political spending just couldn’t jibe with constitutional principles newly discovered by the Republican justices. It wouldn’t be a stretch for the court to rule that limits on campaign donations, and the obligation to disclose those donations, are also unconstitutional. In other words, it wouldn’t matter that Trump clearly broke the law, because the Supreme Court could rule that, the law being unconstitutional, it’s perfectly okay to break it.

Back to the main theme.

As I said, I haven’t heard any scenarios that are likely to play out.

Whatever the consitutional merits may be, there is a Justice Department rule that forbids indicting a sitting president. Mueller is subject to that rule, and so are the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. There is little if any reason to believe that the rule will be modified by whoever is running the Justice Department for the next two years. It is therefore unlikely that Trump will be indicted while he is in office, or that he will be brought to trial during his term if he is indicted. If he is indicted, my guess is that it would be a prophylactic measure to stay the statute of limitations. 

There are probably multiple state charges that could be brought against Trump, but I think the same general considerations apply to them. It’s unlikely they would or could be resolved before the next election, given the endless pretrial appeals that can be expected. While such charges, one would hope, would add to the likelihood that he’d lose the election (I don’t think a Republican primary challenger is in the cards), consider that two loathsome Republican Congressmen just got reelected despite the fact they’ve been indicted on serious charges.

I’ve seen some speculationthat Trump might cut a deal to avoid prison, something akin to what Spiro Agnew did, trading a resignation for reduced or dismissed charges. I don’t see that happening, primarily because I don’t think formal charges will be pressed against him, and, lacking those, I don’t believe Trump can be brought to believe that he can’t get away with his crimes if he just hangs tough. He’s a lifelong criminal, protected in the legal realm by his wealth and in his psyche by his narcissism. He has been a lifelong beneficiary of the fact that we don’t put rich people on trial in this country unless they do kill someone on Fifth Avenue, in any other even, we look the other way. As an elected official, his actions have now been subjected to scrutiny, scrutiny to which the merely wealthy are rarely subjected. His narcissism makes it hard for him to understand that the rules (may) have changed so far as he is concerned. I don’t think he will ever accept that basic fact, and in his case, for the reasons I’ve given, he may be right, at least until 12:01 PM on January 20, 2021. If, on the other hand, an indictment is handed down in order to avoid the running of the statute of limitations, Trump may in fact try to work a deal. Given his track record on deal making, he’d probably end up in prison for the rest of his life, while claiming he’d beat the rap.

He will not be impeached. He should not be impeached, unless conviction in the Senate were a sure thing, and that is simply not the case. Senate Republicans have demonstrated beyond doubt that they will look the other way regardless of the nature of Trump’s criminal acts. They have nothing to lose by voting to acquit, and everything to lose by voting to convict. Unlike the Democrats, they fear their base, and rightfully so. Several have made it clearover the last few days that they don’t believe Trump did anything wrong, but if he did, well, it’s no big deal. Maybe if he did kill someone on Fifth Avenue they might change their position, but that’s highly doubtful.

Given the odds against a conviction, the House Democrats can and should continue to expose Trump’s criminality, but an impeachment would be a waste of time, and an acquittal would only serve to solidify Trump’s base.

As I said above, I think we’re safer with a lame duck Trump (provided the Democrats don’t do something really stupid and nominate a Biden or someone equally uninspiring) than with a Pence. Speaking of Pence, there has been some talk of Trump dumping Pence from the ticket. Assuming Pence is not indicted (he’s in up to his neck in the Russia stuff) I can’t see that happening. I’ve seen speculation that Trump will resign the presidency the morning of the 20th of January, 2021, so that Pence, as President for a few minutes or hours, can pardon him. Pence wouldn’t have much incentive to do that if Trump had dumped him. For that matter, he wouldn’t have much incentive even if Trump didn’t dump him; he’d be tarnishing his own reputation, such as it is, to no good end.

In sum, we’re stuck with him until the end of his term, unless he is indicted and opts to resign to avoid jail time. Assuming that doesn’t happen, it is not impossible that he will be reduced to a sort of irrelevance if the Democrats play their cards right, if it’s obvious that he’ll be facing charges at the end of his term, andif it’s obvious that he will not get another term. That would require those around him to quash any attempts on his part to salvage his personal situation by starting a war, either of the international variety or of the civil.

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Say it ain’t so, Joe

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Joe Biden sayshe’s the most qualified person in the country to be our next president.

In my humble opinion, there are very few potential candidates that Trump could beat in 2020. Biden tops the list. Also, if there were a god, I’d be asking him (or her) to please preserve us from Hillary, who has been making noisesabout being available. Actually, maybe she tops the list.

We don’t need an old, uninspiring candidate, particularly one with a Wall Street enabling past. I’m even against Bernie, not for ideological reasons, but because we need to pass the torch to a new generation, as a long ago president once said. Beto looks good to me. 

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An observation

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

As is well known by now, a Republican candidate for the House from North Carolina committed voter fraudin connection with the election, by “harvesting” absentee ballots and either tossing those that didn’t go his way, or completing incomplete ballots without the voters consent, never mind input:

The amazing depth and breadth of apparent absentee voter fraud in North Carolina’s 9th district is breathtaking. In a nutshell, it appears that a Republican operative with convictions for fraud in his past harvested absentee ballots, discarding some and having day workers collect others, adding their signatures as witnesses to those they actually turned in.

One thing I’ve seen no comments about: The violations were so blatant that it is hard to believe anyone would engage in them unless they believed the authorities would look the other way. Besides paying people to do the harvesting, something it would be hard to hide, their lackeys witnessed an extraordinary number of ballots, which should have sent anyone’s spider sense tingling:

Woody Hester witnessed 44
James Singletary witnessed 42
Lisa Britt witnessed 42
Ginger Eason witnessed 28
Jessica Dowless witnessed 15
Cheryl Kinlaw witnessed 13
Deborah Edwards witnessed 11
Sandra Dowless witnessed 10

In addition, consider the fact that the percentage of absentee ballots cast for the Republican was about 69% when the percentage of absentee ballots case byRepublicans was less than 20%.

What this tells you, I think, is that the folks organizing this fraud fully expected that the relevant people would see, hear, and speak no evil. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how many other elections have been stolen using similar tactics.

Funny, isn’t it, that the only people insisting we have to suppress the vote to combat voter fraud are the only ones committing voter fraud.

study up on that.

UPDATE: Just saw this tweet. I don’t know how to embed tweets but here’s the gist:

The ’16 GOP primary, ’18 GOP primary; ’18 general elections in #NC09 were all decided by fewer than 1,000 votes. In all three cases, Dowless’s absentee ballot scheme was hidden in plain sight – in the election results. Amazing anyone thought they could get away with it forever.

2016 primary: Dowless works for Todd Johnson (R), who wins Bladen mail-in absentees 221-4-1 (!) over Harris (R) ; Pittenger (R).

2018 primary: Dowless works for Harris (R), who wins Bladen mail-in absentees 437-17 (!) over Pittenger (R).

A blatantly obvious absentee mill. #NC09

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Something to investigate

Monday, December 3, 2018

The Democrats will have a lot on their plates once they take over in the House. There’s plenty to investigate. Here’s hoping they won’t forget to haul the corrupt Ajit Pai of the FCC before one or more committees, and look into the FCC’s handling of the process through which he did away with net neutrality. The comment system was obviously compromised, and the FCC has done everything it can to make sure no one finds out who was responsible. I don’t think there’s much Pai could do to avoid giving Congress the information he has withheld from the press and the New York Attorney General.

It really is astonishing that corruption is now so endemic in Washington that the level of corruption exhibited by Pai barely registers.

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