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Now more than ever, always look on the bright side

Friday, March 30, 2018


We must honor tradition, and this is a tradition. Each year since I started this blog I have posted this video on Good Friday. In the beginning, I did it, for the most part, to mock religion, a bit, but now it’s mostly to pass on the words, or should I say, lyrics, of wisdom sung by Brian’s nameless co-crucifixee. For verily, in these time, some things are bad, and they really make you mad, and more things (for instance, a certain very stable genius) make you swear and curse. So while you’re chewing on life’s gristle, keep looking on the bright side of life.

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The Democrats should be protecting these kids

Monday, March 26, 2018

I have written many a post bemoaning the inability of the Democrats to speak with one voice, something the Republicans do all the time. There’s another thing the Republicans do all the time: they insist (again with one voice) that the Democrats condemn anyone on the left who says or does anything they can successfully attack. They’re still insisting that Democrats condemn Louis Farakhan, a man of little consequence. The thing is, it works.

Over the last few days, we have seen a number of vicious attacks upon the Parkland High kids. These kids have done what no Democratic politician has been able to do: put the NRA and its enablers on the defensive. It’s only right that we should at least have their backs. The latest in an already long line of slanderous attacks is a faked image of Emma Gonzalez tearing up the constitution. Even elected Republican politicians are getting into the act; the loathsome Steve King issued a lying and nonsensical tweetabout Gonzalez.

Now, ask yourself, what would the Republicans be doing if the situation were reversed. They would be demanding that all Democrats and Democratic affiliated organizations condemn the slanderers and liars. Shouldn’t we be doing the same. Shouldn’t prominent National Democrats be loudly demanding that the NRA and its lackeys condemn the liars spreading this filth? The country already sympathizes with these kids, and a concerted campaign of this sort could only move the country and the national conversation further in the direction we’d like to see it go. Of course the NRA will not condemn these people, it will respond with more of the same sort of bullshit (I don’t have to sanitize the phrase) that it’s been spewing for the past 55 years. But they’ve been called out on that, and they can be called out again. At least at the moment, it’s not working, and the more they’re attacked for it the more they’ll be exposed for what they are.

I don’t expect this to happen, of course. The DCCC is still out there recruiting gun nuts to run for Congress. But it would work if they did it.

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Some more legal musing on Stormy and her pals

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Over at Hullabaloo, digby joins Greg Sargent in speculating that Stormy and Trump’s other accusers may spell real trouble for him. Sargent notes that:

As CNN’s Collinson points out, this means Trump may be facing a period of pretrial discovery and possibly a deposition, which “could put Trump in a perilous position.

I haven’t seen another aspect of this mentioned. Take Summer Zervos’s defamation suit, for example. She isn’t subject to any non disclosure agreement, so Trump’s lawyers have resorted to the silly defense that a presidential candidate can slander anyone they like because it’s protected political speech. That dog won’t hunt, says the judge, so the suit is on.

It would seem that Summer could make her case, in part, by proving that a) Trump has a pattern and practice of doing to others what she says he did unto her, and b) that he has lied about others like he lied about her. That means she may seek to depose Trump’s other victims as well as Trump himself. And while Strormy may not be a victim in the same sense as Summer, it couldn’t hurt to depose her to see if she has anything to add to Summer’s case.

Non-disclosure agreements, including Stormy’s, typically contain clauses that carve out an exception for testimony given in response to a lawful subpoena, and that, presumably, would include a subpoena to a deposition. Testimony given in depositions is not subject to any kind of non-disclosure agreement unless the parties agree to it, or the judge orders it, and why would any party opposing Trump agree to it, and on what basis would a judge order it? In fact, if I were representing Summer, I’d ask for the identities of any woman with whom Trump is a party to a non-disclosure agreement. Why not?

So, these stories may come out, with nothing that Trump can do about it. I suspect that within a fair percentage of the judiciary Trump is loathed, and it’s unlikely that he’ll get much sympathy from most judges hearing these cases.

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About that wave…

Sunday, March 18, 2018

There is a lot of optimism these days about a coming Democratic wave in November. Some are even predicting a tsunami:

You can use whatever cliches you want: The winds have changed, the tide has turned, the handwriting is on the wall. But there’s a definite blue wave at work. The Pennsylvania race might be the first House seat that flipped, but Democrats have flipped 39 seats from red to blue in state races since Trump took office. The Cook Political Report keeps changing its ratings, making House races more and more favorable for Democrats. Currently, the score is that only three districts with a Democrat in office are rated as toss-ups, while 27 GOP seats are toss-ups. There are actually more solid Democratic seats (175) than Republican seats (167). The generic congressional ballot polling on midterm elections keeps favoring Democrats, although the percentage point difference grows and shrinks.

…

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight sees a huge enthusiasm gap between voters in the two parties. He claims that a Democratic wave could become a tsunami, mostly because of high voter turnout in traditionally blue areas.

via Daily Kos

Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, but the blogger quoted above, like many who write about Democratic prospects in November, totally ignores the fervor with which National Democrats, particularly the DCCC, is trying to dampen that enthusiasm.

Let’s put aside the fact that the DCCC, along with Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic establishment, have lined up behind the loathsome RINO Dan Lipinski. You can, if so minded, excuse that because he’s an incumbent Democrat. He only thinks like and votes like a Republican, and the Democratic establishment has never had a problem with that. But how do you explain the fact that in district after district the party establishment has been backing right wing candidates against the type of progressives we need to keep that enthusiasm alive? Here’s one small example, but they abound:

The ultimate establishment polling firm Democrats use for unbiased polling is Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Last week they did a poll of the MI-06 primary to see who the likeliest candidate against Fred Upton will be. So just likely Democratic primary voters. The most progressive in the 6-person race, Paul Clemens led the field– “braced by impressive favorability ratings, a solid regional base and superior name recognition.” Their finding were pretty straight forward:
• Clements is the best known, most popular candidate. At this point in the race, Paul Clements holds at least a 27 point advantage in name recognition compared to every other Democrat running. He also posts an exceptional 4:1 positive-to-negative ratio in favorability.

• Clements holds a lead in the trial heat. Buoyed by a strong regional base in Kalamazoo (26 percent Clements), Paul Clements leads the field with 21 percent of the vote share. Only one other candidate breaks 10 percent: 12 percent Eponine Garrod, 6 percent Matt Longjohn, 5 percent Rich Eichholz, 5 percent George Franklin, 4 percent David Benac. A 48 percent plurality of are undecided.

…

I asked a friend at the DCCC who the DCCC is backing in this primary. After the usual bullshit about how they don’t support anyone in primaries, he admitted they have two horses in the race. Both are right-of-center establishment guys, physician Mark Longjohn, who claims they recruited him, and lobbyist George Franklin. Franklin is the bizarre candidate in the race– he also has a bizarre $100,000 “contribution” in his war-chest that doesn’t seem to have come from anywhere. Franklin is a conservative Democrat, a corrupt lobbyist, who has been helping to finance the career of the Republican incumbent, Fred Upton, who they’re all running against. He doesn’t make a persuasive argument that anyone should back him now. Sure the DC Dems like him, but he comes in dead last in local favorability (typical of candidates the DCCC likes).

via Down with Tyranny!

The folks at that blog document the atrocities on a daily basis. The incompetence of the DCCC is beginning to get a bit of mainstream notice, but there’s no indication it will ever change its ways. Assume for the moment that it is unable to get its favored candidates past the electorate in these various races. History tells us that it will then simply abandon the winners.

The only way that we can hope to stop them is by calling them out. That might not be enough, and it’s entirely possible that we’ll see that wave crash up against a dike built by the DCCC.

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Documenting the atrocities

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

What can I add to what’s already been said about the genius’s latest moves. We are watching a fairly rapid shift from an administration with a Nazi center surrounded by an establishment cover to an all Nazi.

But I digress before even starting. I’m writing to sound yet another warning about the coming blue wavelet. The DCCC is doing all it can to make sure it doesn’t happen, and, if it does, that the Democrats will proceeds to disappoint the very people who made it happen by producing a Congress full of Blue Dogs (I know, the term is unfair to dogs). This time I’m not passing on something from Crooks & Liars, Down with Tyranny, or Driftglass. This time the alarm comes from Newsweek. The title of the piece says it all: WHY ARE DEMOCRATS BACKING A FORMER NRA-SUPPORTER OVER A FIRST-TIME BLACK WOMAN CANDIDATE?, but lets see some of the details:

When Tanzie Youngblood announced her congressional bid for New Jersey’s 2nd District, she thought she’d easily win the support of local, and even national, Democrats. A year with a record number of women running for office, a promising blue wave and the #MeToo movement seemed perfect for her progressive campaign.

Youngblood—a retired school teacher and first-time black female candidate—figured the primary race might get crowded after 12-time Republican incumbent Frank LoBiondo announced his retirement in November. But she never anticipated that the ones attempting to sink her campaign wouldn’t be her primary opponents, but the Democratic establishment itself.

Last month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee threw its weight behind Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey state senator with a 100 percent rating from the National Rifle Association. Van Drew once accepted a $1,000 donation from the group, and has been dubbed one of the “most conservative Democrats” in the New Jersey legislature, a moniker he’s earned for having co-sponsored legislation to bring back the state’s death penalty for certain murder convictions, and require parental notification for minors seeking abortions. He was also one of just two state Senate Democrats to vote against same-sex marriage in 2012.

“They did me dirty,” Youngblood said.

She alleged that some local officials have told her that she’ll never win the primary contest—it’s Van Drew’s turn.

…

It’s not just Youngblood—candidates in House races across the country are running up against the Democratic machine. In Texas, the DCCC launched a full-scale attack against progressive candidate Laura Moser in the weeks leading up to the primaries, publishing an opposition research report on its website against the first-time candidate, who faced off last week against six other Democrats vying to unseat Republican incumbent Representative John Culberson.

In California, where Democrats are desperate to unseat Republican incumbent Jeff Denham in a toss-up House race, there’s a similar divide between national Democrats—who are reportedly encouraging a bid from farmer and beekeeper Michael Eggman, who’s lost to Denham twice before—and grassroots progressives, many of whom would prefer first-timer Dotty Nygard.

Really, the Russians have no need to interfere in our next election. The Democrats will do their dirty work for them.

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Two years ago today

Saturday, March 10, 2018

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

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If gerrymandering doesn’t work…

Saturday, March 10, 2018

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

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

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

via the Boston Globe

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

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

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Really, too funny

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

via NBC News

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

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

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

It’s…beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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Memo to NY Times: Words have meanings

Sunday, March 4, 2018

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

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

via New York Times

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

to utter slanderous and abusive statements against : defame

And this, from the OED:

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

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

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Sanity in the strangest places

Thursday, March 1, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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