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An eternal question

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Why do the cable news networks (and I’m not talking about Fox, where it’s a given) constantly give airtime to the most insane members of Congress? Even when the interviewer pushes back, the mere fact that they put these people on television validates their mendacity. There are sane members of Congress. There are probably even Republicans that are sane, though I admit they’d be hard to find. Joe Courtney is sane. I would estimate he’s been on television one time for every thousand times the idiot at the link, Peter King, has polluted the airwaves. 

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The Democratic Convention-a survivor’s reflections

Sunday, May 20, 2018

I now know why I wasn’t really all that enthusiastic about being a delegate to the state convention this year. It was some instinct, some nagging recollection from conventions past, and some premonition about the long slog this one, with all those contested nominations, was likely to be.

I’m not complaining about the outcome. Not everyone I voted for prevailed, but, then again, I didn’t feel strongly about some of those I supported and I wasn’t strongly opposed to any of their opponents, with the exception of Joe Ganim, whose primary win, were it to happen, would be an unmitigated disaster. But I don’t think we need worry about that.

It’s just that there has to be a better way to run a convention. Lon Seidman’s electronic voting system worked fine, after an initial bug was ironed out, but the efficiencies gained by that process were more than offset by the inefficiencies introduced or retained. After the votes were processed, time was set aside for people to change their votes. I suppose the thinking was that if a given candidate was oh-so-close to the 50% mark, a few changes might put him or her over the edge, and save the need for a second ballot. Well, if you think about it for a few seconds, you will quickly realize that the chance of that happening is fairly microscopic. In the one instance where it might have worked-when Clare Kindall dropped out and signaled her support for William Tong- the vote change period was almost over, and the changes that occurred were few and not all went to Tong. The process would actually have been faster had they simply used the initial results, no changes allowed, and swiftly gone to a second ballot, stopping only to let folks like Clare let their intentions be known. I suppose the opportunity to change votes is in the rules because politicians can’t cope with a system that doesn’t have a built in opportunity for arm twisting.

In brief, the process was interminable, exemplified by the fact that Ned’s victory party, slated to start at 5:00 PM, didn’t get started until around 8:30, at the earliest, by which time I was, blessedly, on my way home, having done my duty and stuck around until the last vote, if not the last speech. I suspect Shawn Wooden spoke to a near empty hall.

I would like to pause to salute William Tong, though I didn’t vote for him. His acceptance speech was refreshingly brief, a happy change from the long platitude filled speeches (and what else could one expect?) of those that had gone before. Perhaps he realized that people were becoming exhausted, so he kept his platitude filled speech short. I wouldn’t be surprised if his brief speech convinced many of his opponent’s supporters that he really was the best choice.

All this being said, I think we will end up, after the primaries, with a pretty good slate. We here in Connecticut have an uphill battle, given Malloy’s unpopularity, but I really think the candidates we have give us a decent shot. The Republicans will be running against Malloy, and we’ll no doubt, be running against Trump, who I sincerely hope will come here to Connecticut to campaign for the Republican slate. Let’s just hope the blue wave (caveat: I’m still confident the national Democrats can erect a dike to prevent it causing any damage to the Republicans) will deposit some Democratic winners on Connecticut’s shores.

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The Times reaches for its Thesaurus

Sunday, May 20, 2018

It’s been noted repeatedly across the internets that whenever a white male engages in a mass shooting (and it’s almost always a white male), the American media almost always gives him a partial excuse because he is a “loner”, implying some form of mental illness. We don’t see that sort of mental illness excuse advanced for killers of other hues.

Anyway, let it be noted that the New York Times has eschewed the “loner” tag. Taking advantage of the nearest Thesaurus, the Times is now using introvert.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, May 18, 2018

This is posted a bit early, it not actually being Friday night at the moment, because I’ll be in Hartford later casting my vote for Chris Murphy at the convention. 

I will freely admit that I am woefully ignorant about current music, though what I’ve heard doesn’t impress, but on occasion I’ve followed up on the giants of the past. Some of them have lost that creative spark, and some haven’t.

I recently got David Byrne’s new album, American Utopia. Putting aside the oxymoronic title, I think it’s really good, on a par with some of the best of the Talking Heads. I think the CD versions of these songs are sonically better, but his performances are fun to watch.

First up, I Dance Like This, which, I guess, makes at least passing reference to the trials and tribulations of geezerdom. He always danced oddly, but if you want to call what he’s doing on this video dancing, then that’s great, because I’ve got a 50th high school reunion coming up, and if this is dancing, we are probably all going to be up for it.

 

Next, Every Day is a Miracle. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OQt_0j3ZT28
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A little trip down memory lane

Thursday, May 17, 2018

I keep a journal, in which I catalog the trivial events of my day and, since January of 2017, on most days I document some of the atrocities emanating from Washington. The app I use automatically displays entries from the same date in past years. It’s actually a good feature, since it’s sort of fun to see what you were doing on this day one, two, or three years ago. It’s not so much fun to see what the genius was doing, but it’s generally interesting to recall what, coming from anyone else, would long be remembered, but coming from the genius, had long since slid into the memory hole.

One year ago today, the genius came to New London to address the graduating cadets at the Coast Guard Academy. I noted:

In typical Trump narcissistic fashion his speech was about himself. He actually said that no politician in the history of the world “and I say this with surety” has been treated as unfairly as he. The man has no self awareness. He also talked about how hard he had to fight to get to where he was. The son of a rich man, who probably paid other people to take his tests or write his papers to get through school.

I submit that if Obama had ever said something of this sort, it would have taken longer than a year for everyone in the world to forget about it. The folks at Fox & Friends would be talking about it still. I don’t know if it is part of some conscious strategy, or just the working out of his mental illness, but Trump has hit upon a perfect way of getting away with behavior so outrageous it would be considered too laughable to put into a work of fiction. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for our media to note the anniversaries of the genius’s outrages, lest we forget. The above is just a minor star in the Trump constellation of iniquity, but it happened just across the river, so it got me thinking. We forget about these things at our peril.

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Quit meets quo

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Yesterday I vowed to do better in cataloging the genius’s criminality, and like manna from heaven, here’s proof of yet another impeachable offense. When the genius tweeted that he was going to help save thousands of Chinesejobs, it set all our spider senses tingling, didn’t it? You just knew there was some sort of corruption involved. The short story is that the Chinese paid for the change in Trump’s policy by lending money to his businesses. The quid is as blatant as the quo. The details are at the link above.

Of course, ultimately impeachment is a political act. While I think it is useful to note each criminal act in which Trump engages, I’m with the Democrats that are arguing that the last thing you want to campaign on in the fall is Trump’s criminality. Let that simmer in the background. It will leave a sour taste in people’s mouths, making them more receptive to campaigns based on progressive ideas, which, whether the DCCC wants to believe it or not, are popular with most voters when packaged well.

Oh, did I forget to say that the odds are increasing that the Democrats will blow it? 

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A new twist on gerrymandering

Monday, May 14, 2018

We’ve all read various news stories about the fact that many of Trump’s policies will adversely and disproportionately affect the idiots who voted for him. Turns out that might not be the case, as Republicans resort to a new twist on one of their favorite ways to insure that the will of the minority prevails.

Let’s step back a bit and recall that it is practically Republican dogma that people who are not working are not working by choice. They are simply lazy. That’s why they argue for getting rid of food stamps, Medicaid, etc., which they claim without end or evidence encourage people to remain in idle poverty. Well, it turns out, much to the surprise of absolutely no one, that white people are not affected by this laziness virus; when they are out of work it is through no fault of their own.

A number of states have asked for permission to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and of course Trump has granted that permission. But they don’t want to impose such requirements on deserving white people, so they have fallen back on gerrymandering. They have proposed exempting people who live in high unemployment areas. Of course, how you define a high unemployment area makes all the difference, doesn’t it:

Those waivers include exemptions for the counties with the highest unemployment, which tend to be majority-white, GOP-leaning, and rural. But many low-income people of color who live in high-unemployment urban centers would not qualify, because the wealthier suburbs surrounding those cities pull the overall county unemployment rate below the threshold.

To no one’s surprise, the end result is that the work requirements will exempt multitudes of white people (who also happen to vote Republican), and almost no black people. If the geographical units used were municipalities rather than counties black people would benefit as well, but of course, in their wisdom, the Republican legislators in the affected states could see that doing it that way would merely encourage shiftless and lazy people to continue to opt not to work.

All of this probably violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, if current precedent were to be followed. However, I’d say it’s even money that this gerrymandering will be upheld by the courts. We have entered a phase of our history when open racism is once again practiced on the political hustings. Those racists are appointing judges, who will license that racism. It will turn out, against all the evidence, that the acts of these legislatures were both race neutral and devoid of disparate impact. Or, the entire notion of disparate impact will be thrown into the trash.

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A mea culpa

Monday, May 14, 2018

I get very few comments, and I just found out that some comments are being blocked, for reasons I can’t fathom, as it is none of my doing. Anyway, in the course of trying to figure out what I could do about this (and I couldn’t figure it out) I came across a months old comment from a friend of mine (the very one who is now mysteriously blocked), who took me to task for failing to deliver on my promise to catalog the impeachable offenses of the individual who was sworn in as president of the United States in 2017. 

He’s right.

In my own defense, I can only plead that the impeachable offenses have been coming so fast and furious that no one can track them all, at least if he has a day job, and I still do. I mean, the man gets up in the morning, tweets a confession to an impeachable offense that we were’nt quite sure about the night before, and then commits a few more offenses in the course of the day. By the time I’ve gotten home from work, the list is a mile long and every blog and newspaper in the land has already moved on waiting for the next shoe to drop. Half the time, I feel like there’s no point writing about the morning’s crime, because it’s old news by the time I have a spare moment and no one is talking about it anymore.

And that, perhaps, is the genius of the very stable genius. He has all but normalized habitual lying, criminality and corruption. Once again, this brings to mind a shocked John Chancellor, reporting on the Saturday Night Massacre, saying over and over again with a stunned look on his face: “Nothing like this has ever happened before”. Perhaps it’s a measure of the decline in quality of television journalists, but if words to that effect ever pass through the lips of television reporters today, they’re likely to have a bored look on their face, since practically every day brings more destruction of our institutional norms. 

Notwithstanding the foregoing excuses, I am going to try to do better in the future. Just to check off a few of the obvious offenses, here’s a few impeachable offenses I don’t think I’ve specifically cited as such previously: conspiring with the Russians to subvert the electoral process; soliciting, through his “attorney”, Michael Cohen, cash for favorable governmental action; and continuing to obstruct justice by attempting to subvert the Mueller investigation. As to the second of those, there’s no direct proof yet, but you know he’s guilty, don’t you?

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Friday Night Music-A dynamic duo

Friday, May 11, 2018

It really is fun wandering around youtube looking for music. I never knew these two guys played together. George Harrison and Paul Simon, one song penned by each.

 

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A curious phenomenon

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

This morning’s Boston Globe recounts the fateof a bill that would have modernized the sex education curriculum in the state of Massachusetts:

At a time when everybody, everywhere, seems to be talking about sexual misconduct, Massachusetts is still having a hard time talking about sex ed.

A bill that would modernize sex education in Massachusetts schools appears ready to die a quiet death for the fourth legislative session in a row — despite its timely attention to healthy relationships and affirmative consent.

Massachusetts is one of 26 states where there is no requirement to teach sex education in public schools — and no way of knowing whether the schools that are teaching it are using unbiased, medically accurate information.

“This seems like a no-brainer,” said Gina Scaramella, executive director of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.

This is yet another example of a curious phenomenon that is observed nationwide in this country. Legislators often panic at the thought of legislating on subjects that have become fairly non-controversial among almost all of their consitutents, except possibly the fringe right. The same Massachusetts legislature has tied itself in knots over marijuana legalization, often attempting to scuttle it, despite the expressed will of its voters, in a referendum.

I would submit that this is yet another example of an asymmetry in American politics. I can’t think of any issue on which there is a widely shared consensus that is opposed solely on the fringe left of which any legislator is afraid. Of course, that may be because there is no fringe left in this country, but the point still stands.

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