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The McCain myth

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Things move pretty quickly on the internet, so it’s no surpise that I’ve been beaten to the punch so far as McCain debunking goes. Here’s a pretty definitive account of his life.

It’s not surprising that we’re being treated to waves of adulation by the mainstream press. He self branded himself a “maverick” in 2000, and the press went with that until the day he died. To this day, it’s hard to see anything very mavericky in his career. He sponsored a reasonably good campaign finance bill until it became politically inconvenient for him, at which point he changed his position. He voted to preserve Obamacare, but that wasn’t out of any principle; he did it because he hated Trump. That’s laudable, I suppose, but he helped pave the way for Trump by introducing Sarah Palin to a wider world. Oh, and he never heard of a war that he didn’t want to fight.

The press loved him because they could use him to support their “both sides” narrative, though their own use of him belied that narrative completely. He was on the Sunday shows almost every week, a courtesy extended to exactly no Democrats. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, he was constantly cited as an independent minded Republican motivated by high principles.

It’s nice that he detested Trump, but that’s not so very hard to do, and like exactly all the other Senate Republicans (other than his Obamacare vote) he did exactly nothing to really oppose him. His myth endured to the last. As late as last week (not knowing his death was so imminent) there were those on the left who were spinning scenarios in which McCain would help prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation. When push came to shove, McCain had only slightly more gutsy independence than Susan Collins.

Still, it’s nice that one of his last acts was an insult to Donald Trump. Perhaps we can say of him, what was said of Macbeth’s predecessor Thane, that “ Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

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The Democrats are the Red Sox of politics

Saturday, August 25, 2018

I have been a Red Sox fan all my life, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. When I was a lad of 10 or thereabouts I would listen to Curt Gowdy doing play by play late at night, my transistor radio tucked beneath my pillow. Many was the night that I suffered silently as they lost yet again. Being a Red Sox fan was a character building exercise for it taught one how to deal with disappointment. On the other hand, it also taught one to expect disappointment, which may not be the world’s greatest character trait. A true Red Sox fan expected, and still expects, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune at the end of every season, no matter how good things look at any other point. Our expectations are rarely proven wrong.

Being a Red Sox fan helped prepare me for being a Democrat, for just as the Red Sox always (or almost always) find a way to lose, so too do the Democrats. The Democrats are the Red Sox of politics. They may come into an election with a lead, but they almost always figure out a way to blow it.

The Red Sox are, as I write this, in first place, nine and a half games against the hated Yankees, the Republicans of baseball. There are Red Sox fans who have lost faith, who believe that this year’s Sox are simply incapable of blowing that big a lead. But I have faith. I know they can do it. I cast my memory back to 1967, 1976, 1986, and so many other years. Yes, they won in 2004, but that was, I am sure, due to a disturbance in the Force which will not be repeated. I am just as sure that the blue wave will dash itself against the rocks of Democratic stupidity before it reaches shore.

And yet, hope springs eternal in the human breast. So I submit that, just maybe, the fate of the Red Sox and the Democrats are inextricably entwined. If the Red Sox manage to go all the way, then so too, shall the Democrats. This year, the gods of baseball and the gods of politics have made a pact. As the Red Sox go, so goes the nation. Democrats: prepare for the worst.

UPDATE: I actually wrote this post early yesterday. The Sox now have an eight game lead and are losing as I write this update. I knew they could do it.

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Susan Collins: Stupid, or hypocritical political hack? We report, you decide.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Everything’s been said about Manafort and Cohen, so I’m going a bit in the weeds, since we all should remember that while that stuff is getting the headlines, the destruction of our democracy is ongoing. The lower courts have already been stuffed with racists and corporate whores, and the Supreme Court is about to be handed over to the oligarchs for a generation. Before I go on I should point out that the threat to abortion rights, while real and immediate, is hardly the true focus of the Republican Party. This is all about handing our laws over to the tender mercies of the oligarchs. We will, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, have a court firmly in the pockets of the Koch Brothers and their ilk. Even if we take the Congress and the presidency in 2020, we will be powerless to undo the harm that’s been done in the past few years, because the court will undo any effort to do so.

One of the purported glimmers of hope in this process is the fact that Susan Collins has done her typical imitation of Hamlet as the vote approaches. She has announced that she won’t vote for anyone who is hostile to Roe v. Wade. But, you know, she doesn’t know where Kavanaugh stands on the issue, and now she’s been cheered by the fact that he assured her that so far as he’s concerned, Roe is “settled law”. You can read about it at Think Progress, in a post entitled “Brett Kavanaugh thinks that Sen. Susan Collins is stupid”. 

Which raises the interesting question: Is he right?

We all know that Susan Collins plays the part of a GOP “moderate”, which can be loosely defined as a Republican politician that puts on a show of distaste for right wing policies before voting to enact them. So far, it’s worked for Collins, though it may be wearing a bit thin. Collins’ typical process is to secure promises related to her vote; vote against her alleged principles (she clearly has none) and then pretend not to notice when the promises go unkept.

So, is she stupid, or is she a hypocritical political hack? It would be an act of kindness to go for stupid, because then she might at least be acting in good faith, but I’m going with hypocritical political hack. Though, to be charitable, she might be both.

First, let’s stipulate that even if she is stupid, she’s still a Senator, and she surely knows that the phrase “settled law”, especially when used by a right wing judicial nominee, merely means that a particular decision is currently the last word on a subject from the Supreme Court, and ripe for overturning if the nominee disagrees with it. The use of the phrase does not mean, or even really imply, that the nominee prefers to leave it settled.

Taking it a step further. Kavanaugh knows that Collins needs cover, so he gives it to her by using a meaningless phrase. Collins knows it is meaningless. Kavanaugh knows she knows it is meaningless. Collins knows that Kavanaugh knows that she knows it is meaningless. Both of them know that the press will pretend it is meaningful, even though they both know that the press knows it is meaningless. The press knows that Collins and Kavanaugh know that the press knows the phrase is meaningless, and Collins and Kavanaugh know that press knows that they know that the press knows that the phrase is meaningless.

That’s how these things work. Collins will vote for Kavanaugh on the strength of his assurance to her that Roe is settled law. He will then vote to reverse it. Collins will pretend to be surprised, but mostly she’ll just pretend that nothing has happened, like she did when she voted to gut Obamacare after Mitch McConnell made some promises to her that she knew he wouldn’t keep; he knew she knew he wouldn’t keep, and … Well, you know how it goes.

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She’s not crazy, she’s a Republican

Monday, August 20, 2018

There was a time when this person would, without a doubt, have been the craziest person running for office in the entire country.

A frontrunner in the Republican primaries for a key midterm race says she was abducted by aliens as a child—and it doesn’t seem to have hurt her prospects.

Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, an educator, businesswoman, and former city council member, is running in the Republican primary in Florida’s 27th district, which includes part of Miami. Along with two other frontrunners, Maria Elvira Salazar and Bruno Barreiro, Aguilera is one of the best-known candidates in the primary. She even secured an endorsement from the Miami Herald, the same newspaper that first uncovered old interviews in which Aguilera recounted being abducted by aliens as a child.

via Motherboard

Nowadays, she’s just par for the course. It’s always okay if you’re a Republican.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, August 17, 2018

Aretha. Who else could it be?

I can’t explain why this brought tears to me eyes, but it did.

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We know he’s guilty, Josh

Friday, August 17, 2018

I have a huge amount of respect for Josh Marshall, but I have a bit of trouble with his post this morning entitled We know Trump is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting it. Josh’s argument on guilt is ironclad, a lot of it summed up in this Doonesbury comic from some time back:

 

But I’d submit that like Mark Slackmeyer (for the Doonesbury illiterate, he’s the character in the cartoon), we non-brain dead, non Fox watching silent majority (well, actually, not so silent, thanks be to…ummm…I know! Our excellent educational system.) have known since the evidence came out early in his presidency that he was guilty, for precisely the reasons Mark and Josh explore. Not only have we known, we’ve had no trouble admitting it.

I think I speak for a large slice of that majority when I say I’ve long since put that question aside, and am struggling with far more existential questions related to the fact that we have a criminal in the White House.

The question is whether our system can expel the poison that is Trump (and, by extension, the Republican Party’s present incarnation), and, in the likely event that it does not, whether our representative democracy can survive as even a shadow of its better self.

The majority of the people in this country are more or less alive to the danger. However, the system was rigged from the start, and has become ever more rigged, to enable the minority to control the public policy of this nation. States with a sliver of the nation’s population control the Senate; the House has been gerrymandered to further empower that sliver; and the courts, which have and will even more in the future enabled voter suppression and gerrymandering, enhancing the power of that sliver still more, have been stacked by recent presidents (Bush and Trump) who came to power against the will of the majority, enabled by the votes of Senators that represent the aforementioned sliver.

We know he’s guilty. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! We just can’t quite believe anything will be done about it, and we fear for the future of our children and their children.

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She may have something there

Thursday, August 16, 2018

The recent report on sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy has even this ex-Catholic aghast. The utter cruelty is beyond belief. As a former scholar at Our Lady of Sorrows grammar school, where I lost my religion, I was particularly stunned by the story of the priest who abused a seven year old, then told him to confess the sin he had just committed to his abuser. Truly unbelievable.

Of course, the Church is on it, trying desperately to figure out a way to start recruiting priests that aren’t pedophiles or other types of sexual deviants. Unfortunately, they can’t seem to figure out a solution. It’s such a complicated problem, really. They can’t seem to figure out why their line of work seems to attract the worst type of man. (No women allowed, of course) It’s a mystery they can’t seem to solve.

But wait, this mere woman quoted in this morning’s Timesmay have stumbled on a solution:

A few blocks away from the white cross towering above the pastoral center of the Archdiocese of Miami, Mirta Criswell, 77, was loading dollar-store provisions into the back of a sedan. Of the report, she said, “I believe it 100 percent.”

Ms. Criswell said the sex abuse scandal that began in Boston in 2002 had been painful enough, but the latest reports had left her ever more exasperated. While the scandals would not erode her commitment to the faith, she believed they showed that some of the church rules needed to be revisited.

“The Catholic Church has to change,” Ms. Criswell said. “They have to let their priests marry, to have a family. Humans need sex.”

Gosh, could it really be that simple? That’s what I call thinking outside the box, though I’ve heard that the other box she’s thinking inside of is actually pretty crowded. The more I think about it, the more I think she may have something there. Someone should tell the Pope.

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Fake Everything

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

As the world becomes metaphorically smaller, more and more opportunities open up for grifters of all sorts. And I’m not, at least directly, talking about a certain stable genius.

It turns out that many academics are publishing allegedly “peer reviewed” articles in fake academic journals:

The story begins with Chris Sumner, a co-founder of the nonprofit Online Privacy Foundation, who unwittingly attended a conference organized by the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET) last October. At first glance, WASET seems to be a legitimate organization. Its website lists thousands of conferences around the world in pretty much every conceivable academic discipline, with dates scheduled all the way out to 2031. It has also published over ten thousand papers in an “open science, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly and fully referred [sic] international research journal” that covers everything from aerospace engineering to nutrition. To any scientist familiar with the peer review process, however, WASET’s site has a number of red flags, such as spelling errors and the sheer scope of the disciplines it publishes.

Sumner attended the WASET conference to get feedback on his research, but after attending it became obvious that the conference was a scam. After digging into WASET’s background, Sumner partnered with [German journalist Svea] Eckert and her colleague Till Krause, who adopted fictitious academic personas and began submitting papers to WASET’s journal. The first paper to get accepted was titled “Highly-Available, Collaborative, Trainable Communication-a policy neutral approach,” which claims to be about a type of cryptoanalysis based on “unified scalable theory.” The paper was accepted by the WASET journal with minimal notes and praise for the authors’ contribution to this field of research.

There was just one problem: The paper was pure nonsense that had been written by a joke software program designed by some MIT students to algorithmically generate computer science papers. It was, in a word, total bullshit.

I particularly got a kick out of the undercover names they adopted when they attended a WASET conference:

The two journalists went in disguise as the fictitious academics Dr. Cindy Poppins and Dr. Edgar Munchhausen.

WASET is by no means alone and there is a real world cost to this. The article references First Immune, a drugmaker from England, that marketed an ineffective cancer treatment:

The problem is that these predatory journals gave First Immune an air of legitimacy for desperate patients with cancer. This predicament is illustrated in the autobiography of a famous German media personality Miriam Pielhau, who died of breast cancer in 2016. In Dr. Hope, Pielhau describes her battle with cancer and how she settled on GcMAF as a last resort and cited medical studies published in predatory journals as the basis of her decision.

The ease with which people can be duped into taking false medical advice was driven home by Eckert and co, who submitted a research paper to the WASET Journal of Integrative Oncology that claimed that bees wax was a more effective cancer treatment than chemotherapy. The paper was accepted and published in the journal with minimal revisions.

As detailed by Eckert and her colleagues, similar tactics are used to publish studies and host conferences funded by major corporations as well, including the tobacco company Philip Morris, the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, and the nuclear safety company Framatone. When the predatory journals publish these companies’ research, they can claim it is “peer reviewed” and thereby grant it an air of legitimacy.

Academics from prestigious universities, including a number of Ivy League schools, have published in these journals. The article is not clear whether the academics were in on the con or not.

This type of thing is hardly restricted to academia. Years ago I used to naively wonder why the best lawyers in Connecticut, chosen by a magazine with the word Connecticutin its name, were, to my own personal knowledge, not really all that good. That was before the days of email, so I now know the answer. In the last several years my inbox at work got, on average, a solication a day from someone offering me an award, providing I was ready to pay up. I even had the chance to be named best financial advisor in the world, which I inexplicably passed up. Well, it’s not really that inexplicable; I wouldn’t take my own financial advice and I certainly never gave any. Even Martindale-Hubbell, whose reason for being was destroyed by the internet, offers awards for a price. In the case of the legal profession, the award recipients are clearly in on the con. So, a bit of free advice: don’t go to a lawyer whose face is on a bus or who touts an award in an ad.

There’s a lesson to be learned here by the average Joe. Now, what was I saying about that genius?

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Racist to the core

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, is a black Republican. In my humble opinion, that’s a little like being a Jewish Nazi, a sign either of overweening cynicism or overwhelming stupidity. That being said, it appears Scott, unlike a certain Supreme Court justice whose name shall go unmentioned, retains a shred, as miniscule as it may be, of integrity. He’s proposed to make lynching a federal hate crime, which has put him in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why not a single other Republicanwill co-sponsor the bill. Not even “moderates” like Susan Collins, who comes from Maine, which, so far as I’m aware, has no tradition of lynching, unlike the Southern States, where it’s fairly obvious that making lynching a federal crime would trample on the right of the state governments to look the other way when the right sort of people are lynched.

It says a lot about the modern Republican Party that, so far, not a single Republican, other than Scott, has signed on to support this bill. After all, it’s mostly symbolic, as the Southern states have pretty largely moved on from the lynching phase, and are exploring new, more creative, more modern, and more superficially justifiable ways to keep black people in their place. You would think this would be a perfect opportunity for them to make a meaningless gesture to prove they are not, in fact, the racists they are, (or that they are not totally beholden to their racist base) but they can’t even bring themselves to do that. 

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Chris Mattie for AG

Sunday, August 12, 2018

This columnby old friend Bill Curry is well worth reading, but I especially want to endorse his take on the AG race:

It’s partly our aged, inbred party machines. In the three-way Democratic primary for Attorney General, Chris Mattei, a clear progressive, faces State Senator Paul Doyle and State Rep. William Tong, two rare Democrats so corporate friendly they’ve been endorsed by the powerful business lobby CBIA.

Math favors the progressive. But Mattei, a former prosecutor, brought a corruption case against staff of former House Speaker Chris Donovan that produced seven guilty pleas. It was one of the two biggest corruption cases of the last decade. The other involved John Rowland. Mattei brought and won both.

Donovan, liked by all, loved by labor, was never charged but the case ended his career. The capitol crowd wants pay-back, not from the felons who sold out our democracy but from the prosecutor who brought them to justice. The result: Labor and its close ally, the reputedly populist Working Families Party, are all in for Tong, fresh off his 2016 CBIA endorsement. Shame.

I’m all in for unions. I helped organized our union when I was at legal services, and I represented it before the NLRB when management contested its formation. Still, the sad fact is that while the Democrats still have a habit of bowing to union demands, union members have a habit of voting Republican. Not all of them, but a lot of them. It would be interesting to know the percent of Connecticut union members who voted for the genius.

I first met Mattei about a year and a half ago, when he was exploring a gubernatorial run. He impressed me then, and he continues to impress. The man put Rowland in jail, for goodness sake – – what’s not to like? Moreover, he’s a nice guy, or does a damn good impression of one. I’ve met a lot of politicians, and the sad fact is that a lot of them, even many I am willing to vote for, are total assholes. Joe Courtney is a true exception to that rule, and so is Mattei.

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