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Lies and the Lying Liars that tell them

Thursday, July 12, 2018

It looks like the loathsome former wrestling coach and now Congress critter Jim Jordan’s attempts to deny knowledge of sexual abuse by a team doctor, Dr. Strauss, are falling apart, and even his attempt to use the “locker room talk” defense is probably not going to stand up. 

Jordan was an assistant coach, and the head coach recently defended him, claiming no one knew anything about the doctor’s proclivity to, for example, handle certain body parts during team weigh ins. (And why was a doctor conducting weigh ins anyway, inquiring minds want to know). But it seems the head coach, Russ Hellickson, forgot that he was already on tape admitting that everyone knew about the problem.

On the tape, Hellickson said that many of the wrestlers were “uncomfortable” with Dr. Strauss’s behavior and that he had confronted Strauss about it. There was Strauss’s lingering in the showers with wrestlers and fondling them during weigh-ins.

Jordan tried to draw a distinction between “conversations in a locker room” and formal complaints, but that dog wouldn’t hunt, even on Fox.

But Jordan probably need not worry. So far, I’ve heard not a single Republican call for his resignation. In fact, as Josh Marshal observes, it has become an occupational requirement for House Republicans to insist Jordan is not lying, even though they all know that he is:

…Along with the nine other wrestlers who’ve come forward, Russ Hellickson’s admission makes it certain to anyone who is willing to open their eyes that Rep. Jim Jordan is lying about what he knew and heard more than two decades ago. Yet just yesterday, amidst all this evidence, Paul Ryan was compelled to make what amounts to a public and unbreakable statement of confidence in Jordan’s integrity. This came after numerous other members of the House GOP caucus came forward to express Manchurian Candidate-like testimonies about Jordan’s honesty and integrity. To get a sense of the drumbeat that was created to force Ryan to make this kind of fulsome pledge of confidence in Jordan’s integrity, watch this exchange from Wednesday night with Fox Business News’ Lou Dobbs.

Good example here of the Manchurian Candidate like hold Jordan has on Fox/GOP. Dobbs: “I just cldnt believe that Ryan would persist in refusing to acknowledge the man’s integrity and a service and finally todaySpeaker Ryan steps up on his behalf to acknowledge who Jim Jordan is.” pic.twitter.com/t5hO0JVgEH

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 12, 2018

Dobbs couldn’t “believe that Ryan would persist so long in refusing to acknowledge the man’s integrity” and glad that finally “Speaker Ryan steps up in his behalf and acknowledges who Jim Jordan is.” (emphasis added)

All sorts of crazy things get said on Fox News and its sister station. But this was significant both because of the surreal expressions of disbelief that Ryan would withhold a sort of pledge of loyalty to Jordan and also because it was part of a general climate which is leading virtually every Republican in the House to state categorically that Jim Jordan cannot be lying and is somehow singular in his integrity despite the fact that everyone can see that his denials are increasingly absurd.

Nor is there much chance he’ll lose his reelection bid in his heavily gerrymandered district. Meanwhile, Al Franken languishes in retirement due to what was clearly a joke by which the “victim” was only retroactively offended, done in by another Democrat, almost surely to get him out of the way as a possible presidential contender.

Because, in the end, despite being the party of “family values” and that good old time religion, when it comes right down to it, it’s always okay if you’re a Republican.

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There’s something happening here

Sunday, July 8, 2018

This is bad enough:

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

But this is even worse:

Other countries backed off as well, because they too were threatened. But a funny thing happened. The genius’s puppet master stepped up and did the right thing for the first time in his life:

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.

The article never alludes to our current government’s subservience to the Russian bear. Given the genius’s history, some sort of comment on that score might have been appropriate. It’s all well and good that the Russian dominance of our government resulted in the right thing being done this time, but we all know that’s an outlier. It really may be the case that NATO’s days are numbered.

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The genius is seriously ill

Sunday, July 8, 2018

According to reliable sources, the genius (stable, he says) actually said this as he free associated in front of his fans:

 

In my last years in legal practice I took a number of appeals to federal court on behalf of mentally ill people wrongly denied Social Security disability benefits by the administrative law judges here in Connecticut. When I wrote my brief, I would commonly highlight evidence which demonstrated beyond doubt, at least in my mind, that the person in question had a serious problem This quote would have been manna from heaven.

Lest there actually be any genius fans who read this blog, who might argue that the quote was taken out of context, my reply would be simple: there is no context in which this would make the least amount of sense. I’ll admit that it’s possible to strain and come up with some speculation about the point the genius was trying to make, but, getting back to my old clients, the things they said or did made sense to them too, but they were still ill. All I can say is that it’s a good thing for disability claimants that there’s only one president at a time, because if the job existed in greater numbers, given the genius’s performance, the vocational experts would start testifying that people with extreme forms of mental illness might not be able to do anything else, but they could always be president of the United States.

Once again, the genius has done something that would be weeks to month long fodder with the pundits had any other president, particularly a Democrat, ever said it. Even Bush, had he said something similara would have never heard the end of it. I mean, “Mission Accomplished” looks pretty mild compared to this. This performance is being forgotten as I type these words.

This man is seriously mentally ill. It’s about time that fact entered the national discourse.

Update: The words of the genius, set to some of Sir Elton’s music:

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Friday Night Music

Friday, July 6, 2018

Here’s one from the one hit wonder vault. At least I think they only had this one hit.

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Rant of the Day

Friday, July 6, 2018

Today in my mail (of the snail variety) I got a missive from Elizabeth Warren, asking me to donate money to the DCCC. It went right to the trash, but let me say a word about this.

The DCCC has done its best to squash any local candidate who comes from what might be called the progressive wing of the Democratic Party (defined, roughly, as anyone who holds the same beliefs as a typical 1960s Democrat). See, here, for example. This is the wing of the Party to which Senator Warren belongs, so it is rather mystifying that she would lend her name to the DCCC. Apparently, that organization feels no qualms about raising money from us, while stiffing us at every turn. It’s what the Republicans thought what they could do with their base, so, if there is any justice, we’ll take the same revenge on our party as the racist yahoos took on theirs, the difference being that we’re actually interested in doing things that help people.

Senator Warren may be unaware of the DCCC’s hostility to the Democratic base, but if she is unaware, then shame on her. If she is aware, then even more shame on her.

Perhaps this has something to do with presidential ambitions. For my own part, fondly do I hope, fervently do I pray (not really, I don’t believe in God) that we will not have a Bernie, an Elizabeth, or a Joe to contend with in 2020. We really don’t need a septuagenarian leading the charge against the addle brained, senile septuagenarian we already have, regardless of his or her progressive bona fides (or, in Joe’s case, their almost complete absence). While I’m at it, scratch the loathsome chameleon Kristin off the list too.

After the 2012 election, I predicted (I have witnesses to this) that the Republicans would nominate a base satisfying whackjob in 2016 instead of the “moderate” they always managed to sneak by the racists and yahoos in the past. I wish I could predict that the Democrats would nominate someone in 2020 that would appeal to their base, but that’s a long shot. The thing is, the stuff our progressive candidates stand for are widely popular, and properly run, a campaign by one of them could win. But odds are good that the party elders (and I do mean elders) will circle the wagons and impose someone on us who stands for nothing other than not being Donald Trump.

End of rant.

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A little glimpse into the future

Thursday, June 28, 2018

 

The news from the Supreme Court was bad on two fronts yesterday. The court ruled against unions, holding that a public employee could not be forced to pay union dues as it infringed on their first amendment rights. In addition, the sometimes sane Anthony
Kennedy resigned.

A few predictions.

First, some of the Democrats might try to stop it, but ultimately Trump’s pick will be confirmed before the November elections. He or she (probably he) will be in the Gorsuch mold.

The union decision gives us a foretaste of what we will be seeing in the future. Justice Kagan accused the court of “weaponizing” the first amendment, and that’s exactly right. It’s less intellectually honest than Citizens United, which is quite
a feat. Once again, there is an echo of the goings on in the Gilded Age.

The 14th Amendment was passed in order, primarily, to protect the newly freed slaves. It included a guarantee of due process. Put simply, due process means you can’t be deprived of life, liberty or property without notice and an opportunity to be heard
(i.e., a hearing of some sort, with a neutral decision maker), the amount of that process being dependent on the interest involved. For example, you are entitled to more process if you are on trial for your life than if you are involved in civil litigation
in small claims court.

The courts wasted very little time in abandoning the core reason for the amendment’s passage, and proceeded to weaponize the due process clause by inventing a legal doctrine known as “substantive due process” which, boiled down to essentials, amounted
to the court conferring on itself the right to invalidate any law it felt was unfair. It just so happened that those laws tended to be those that protected workers, children, or normal people, and disadvantaged corporations. The great thing about the
doctrine is that since it was wholly invented, it could be used whenever it suited the court’s purpose, and ignored whenever it did not.

The present court is clearly doing the same with the First Amendment (are other Amendments to follow?), using it as a pretext to invalidate laws it doesn’t like, or confer rights (such as a corporation’s right to buy politicians) that it wants to confer.
But it will see no need to follow the logic of those decisions when that would lead to results it does not like.

There is, for example, an argument with a reasonable basis to it that gerrymandering violates the free speech rights of those, primarily Democrats, who are punished for their views by being placed into voting ghettos where, despite being in the majority
in their state or locale, they are relegated to minority status. This court will, without doubt, lay down its weapon when it hears that case, and decide that the First Amendment rights of that majority are not implicated by partisan gerrymandering. Kennedy
was the only one of the horrible five that showed any sign of being troubled by gerrymandering. His replacement will have no compunctions on that score.

That, of course, is only one of the ways in which the court will frustrate any progressive majority we may be able to elect, despite that gerrymandering. The Gilded Age politicians were pretty much extinct by the turn of the century, but the ossified
court lingered on, well into the thirties, when it neutered a fair amount of New Deal legislation. That is likely to happen again.

The Founders would have been the first to admit that the Constitution was not perfect. That’s why they made it possible to amend it. Unfortunately, the most glaring flaws in that document (the Electoral College, the disproportionate strength in the Senate
of the less populated states, and the undemocratic way in which Amendments must be passed) pretty much guarantee that the worst flaws will never be addressed, and that they will, over the course of time (if, as we can only hope, they have not already
done so) drag us down into a plutocracy or dictatorship from which there will no escape. That’s the lesson of history, and that’s where we are at the moment.

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Typical of Democrats

Thursday, June 28, 2018

 

Read this post from Josh Marshall. Josh’s correspondent is right: There is a danger that the next Supreme Court nominee could legalize Trump’s crimes and he’s also right
that the Democrats have, at least up to now, beaten the wrong drum about this Supreme Court nomination, citing the McConnell rule as justification for holding up the nominee. I’m all for tit for tat if we had the power to enforce it, but we
don’t. It gets you nowhere to demand that a hypocrite be consistent in his hypocrisy. Of course McConnell will now rush the thing through, and he’ll be not the slightest bit uncomfortable about his hypocrisy. In fact, he’ll likely accuse the Democrats
of being the hypocrites.

Better, as Josh’s correspondent suggests, demand it be held up until the investigation into Trump’s criminality is concluded, and during hearings, demand answers from the nominee about where he or she stands on issues like whether a president can pardon
himself or his co-conspirators. The Democrats still won’t be successful in preventing the confirmation of yet another fascist to the court, but at least they would have injected some issues into the public discourse. The McConnell Rule argument
gets them nowhere, because the press has long since accepted that Republicans don’t do consistency. It’s so widely acknowledged, and they’re so used to it that they don’t feel it’s worth noting.

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Yet another in a long line of modest proposals

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Apparently, the very stable genius tweetedthe following about the Red Hen restaurant, which, of course, was a perfectly civil thing for him to do since he is a Republican, even though it is a lie from start to finish:

“The Red Hen Restaurant,” he lied like a spoiled 6-year old, “should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside.” His own restaurants may look good– if faux glitzy– on the outside by are virtually sewers on the inside.

A person commits libel when he or she knowingly or recklessly publishes an untruth about someone who is damaged as a result of the statement. Since Trump’s tweet is, first to last, a fabrication, it is an actionable libel. In fact, many of his tweets are.

Before I go on, and just as an aside, if the place is such a dump, what was Sarah doing there in the first place?

Okay, back to the main point. There is a right wing organization (can’t remember the name, too lazy to look) that made a living out of suing Democrats under various theories. Wouldn’t it be a good idea for some well meaning left leaning legal organization to come forward and start suing Trump for libel or slander every time he unleashes a lying tweet about someone?

The case is a slam dunk as far as liability is concerned:

In contrast to Trump’s pigstyes, Virginia authorities found no violations when they visited the Red Hen in Lexington in February and gave the Red Hen their top possible health-risk rating.

I admit, there is a serious question about damages.

Ordinarily, if a president makes a disparaging statement about a person or entity, you can expect the vast majority of people to believe it, and for the victim to therefore suffer damages. Trump’s lawyers might well argue that since he always lies, and everyone knows he always lies, no one would believe any given lie, and therefore the target of that lie has suffered no damages. They are certainly free to make that argument, but it has some obvious disadvantages.

Of course there is the possibility that the Supreme Court will rule that the Paula Jones ruling only applies to Democrats, but that hasn’t happened yet, and the case will have to work it’s way up through the courts to reach that unhappy denouement. I’m not suggesting that this should be the sole such case against Trump. I’m suggesting he should be sued every timehe lies about someone in a tweet, because his lies are so easily demonstrated. Assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t give him a pass, he would be paying out settlements on a regular basis, which might even distract the cable folks from their jihad against those nasty leftists who hurt Sarah’s fee-fees.

This has been yet another in a long line of Modest Proposals.

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A little added gloss

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

I think Josh Marshall has it pretty much right hereabout the Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing Trump’s Muslim ban to remain in effect:

Here’s what I take as the crux of today’s majority decision and one which I suspect may come up again in subsequent decisions given President Trump’s behavior …

For our purposes today, we assume that we may look behind the face of the Proclamation to the extent of applying rational basis review. That standard of review considers whether the entry policy is plausibly related to the Government’s stated objective to protect the country and improve vetting processes. See Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Fritz, 449 U. S. 166, 179 (1980). As a result, we may consider plaintiffs’ extrinsic evidence, but will uphold the policy so long as it can reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds.5

The point here is that it doesn’t matter if the President says things that suggest he took the action for a bad/unconstitutional reason. What matters is whether the policy can “reasonably be understood” as the product of a legitimate reasoning. The standard doesn’t seem absolute. They say they may consider “extrinsic evidence”, i.e., evidence beyond the narrow facts of the case – what the order says, its direct effects, etc. But the standard they will use is whether the action can be reasonably understood as the product of a legitimate reason – even if there’s evidence in the President’s mouthing off that suggests otherwise.

But there’s a bit more that Josh fails to understand or, alternatively, fully explicate. He points out later that:

I could read these words to mean that the “extrinsic evidence” could be so overwhelming that it made thinking the decision stemmed from anything else than unconstitutional grounds ‘unreasonable’.

I would submit that this decision is one in a line of cases descending from Bush v. Gore. The court is actually saying this:

We reserve the right to strike down the actions of a Democratic President should we wish to do so. In order to preserve a facade of intellectual honesty in our decisions, we inserted the language about “extrinsic evidence”, and although we all know that in reality there will never be such overwhelming extrinsic evidence in the case of a Democratic president as is actually present in this case, if our ideological preferences demand it, we will nevertheless find that evidence.

The Supreme Court is no longer a judicial institution. It is, purely and simply, yet another arm of the Republican Party. 

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Yet more left wing incivility

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Just another example of some white nationalists looking for a little peaceful recreation getting their pleasure ruined by people who are so lacking in civility.

Just disgusting that Americans are getting to be no better than the French. Of course you can’t only blame the French; the restaurant owner is an American, and he’s the one who decided to allow the incivility. Maybe this is where the owner of the Red Hen got the idea.

Caveat: I wish I had thought of this, but I think it’s going around. I couldn’t resist passing it along.

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