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A liar for the ages

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

 

To say that Willard Romney is a liar is to say nothing new to anyone who has been paying attention, but alas, quite a few people aren’t paying attention. And while, in 2000, the press worked vigorously to spread the false meme that Al Gore was a fabricator, we can rest assured that having learned its lesson (I jest, of course, IOKIYAR), it will fail in its duty to spread the truth about Romney. So, it’s up to each of us to arm ourselves with the facts, and spread them far and wide. In that spirit, I recommend this article from Mother Jones, which explores some of Mitt’s lesser known lies. In some cases, of course, one can make the argument that there is a literal truth buried in the artful language, but really that sort of thing is still lying. If your object in speaking is to get the listener to believe something you know is not true, then you are lying.

The Mother Jones article focuses on three stretchers about his personal life, including the one about his burning desire to go to Vietnam, a desire frustrated by those deferments Uncle Sam kept forcing on him. The folks at Mother Jones just can’t seem to understand how hard it was for him:

So his story—he yearned to be fighting for the United States in Vietnam and did nothing to keep himself out of the reach of Uncle Sam—is false. And he has not acknowledged in public a particularly interesting wrinkle. At Stanford, Romney led a protest against demonstrators who mounted an anti-war sit-in at the university. He held a sign that proclaimed, “SPEAK OUT, DON’T SIT IN.” Yet five years later, in 1970, after George Romney had turned against the war, Romney told the Boston Globe, “If it wasn’t a political blunder to move into Vietnam, I don’t know what is.”

Romney wished he could have gone to war, but he didn’t enlist. He took no steps to prevent himself being drafted, but he did. He supported the war, then he didn’t. As a politically-minded son of privilege and politics, Vietnam was a confusing matter for Romney, and he has not addressed that publicly.

(via Mother Jones)

Imagine, if you will, that this was Obama’s story. Would we ever hear the end of it?

 

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A plug

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

 

Ever since I got my Ipad, I have searched for the perfect app on which to write these blog posts. I now think I’ve found it. Actually, a combination of apps, that together do everything I need.

The first is called Writing Kit, which allows you to edit Markdown documents. There are lots of apps that do that, but Writing Kit has built in researching capabilities (a mini-search app and a web browser) and support for pinboard, which means if I find an interesting article on my RSS reader (Mr. Reader, also the best after a long search) I can save it to pinboard, easily access it in Writing Kit, and instantly paste a selected quote into a new post, along with a nicely formatted link. Once I’m done writing, I can export the entire document as HTML and paste it into Blogsy, which, (and I’ve tried them all) is the best blog editor on the platform.

The only problem is that I have to remember to use a special apostrophe character rather than the keyboard apostrophe, because Markdown uses the apostrophe as some sort of marker, and it translates to a string of characters when it’s translated to HTML. (See, I deliberately screwed up back there, and the word “it’s” turned to gibberish).

So, if you happen to be looking for an excellent tool for drafting stuff to post on-line, take a look at the Writing Kit app.

 

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Obama’s gambit

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

 

According to Ed Kilgore at Political Animal, there’s a conservative number cruncher who doesn’t see Obama’s move on immigration as being all that much of a game changer, given that Hispanic voters are only truly significant in two tossup states, Nevada and Arizona:

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics (a conservative numbers-cruncher whom I greatly respect) says he doesn’t quite get Obama’s DREAM Lite gambit last week. After all, only three swing states have “significant” (which he defines as over 10%) Hispanic populations, and one of those is Cuban-heavy Florida, so we’re really just talking Nevada and Colorado, who only have 15 lousy EVs, and Obama’s real problem is with white voters who don’t like liberalized immigration policies.

Trende’s depiction of DREAM Lite as at best a wash for Obama may be more than a little off, per the first national poll measuring reaction, from Bloomberg:

Sixty-four percent of likely voters surveyed after Obama’s June 15 announcement said they agreed with the policy, while 30 percent said they disagreed. Independents backed the decision by better than a two-to-one margin.

Only self-identified Republicans bucked the trend, opposing DREAM Lite by a 36-56 margin.

(via Political Animal – DREAM Lite Reaction)

Kilgore makes some good points in response, but there’s one that I think he missed. Besides motivating Hispanics to vote for him, Obama has potentially undermined Romney’s always shaky support in the Republican base. Romney is behaving exactly like one would have suspected, and I’m sure he was expected, to act. He is ducking, bobbing and weaving, refusing to say he would repeal Obama’s edict, and refusing to say he would not. His dodge is totally unconvincing, particularly to a base that has grown increasingly to expect absolute fealty from its candidates. It’s not just this issue; it reinforces the quite accurate perception that, once elected, Romney will proceed to ignore everything he’s said in the past that proves at all inconvenient to his re-election prospects, and that means he’ll be moving away from the crazies. They feel it in their bones, and this just confirms their suspicions. The more they feel that way, the more of them will decide not to vote, or to vote for a third party. It’s a more subtle, and totally morally defensible form of the voter suppression in which Republicans engage by the use of brute force. It also, secondarily, reinforces Romney’s image among the rest of us as a man who will say – or refuse to say – anything to get elected.

 

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Art mystery

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Yesterday my wife, son, and I went to the MFA in Boston, which has been renovated and expanded recently. I don’t claim to be an art expert, but I do know that in portraiture prior to the twentieth century, the objects around the subject usually were symbolic in some sense. A scholar might hold a weighty tome for example. So this picture got me thinking? Is the artist making a not so subtle jab against the Father of our Country?

 

Now, I know that Washington was a superb horseman and all, but it seems rather strange to feature the horse’s ass so prominently.

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How to solve the “debt crisis”

Sunday, June 17, 2012

 

This morning, Dean Baker responds to yet another know-nothing right wing rant about the deficit, by suggesting we can solve the deficit problem by hiring unemployed college grads to write equally ignorant pieces about the deficit.

But this piece suggests an easy route for dealing with the deficit. Clearly there is a big market for deficit hawks. (I assume that Mr. Ferguson was well-paid for this piece.) It certainly is not difficult to train someone to write this stuff. Suppose that we set up educational programs that will train millions of deficit hawks to write stuff for the Peter Peterson—BBC—Financial Times crew. We split the payments between our former students and the government.

This would be a great win-win-win story. Otherwise unemployed college grads could get good-paying jobs being deficit hawks. Taxpayers would get a cut of their payments, helping to bring down the deficit. And, even Peter Peterson, the BBC, and the Financial Times would gain because they would be able to find deficit hawks who would be every bit as knowledgeable as Niall Ferguson and would work for much less. (We could assure the deficit hawks that our students would not be more knowledgeable because then they probably would not write such dreck.)

There you have it: a plan for compromise and bipartisanship. Do we have a deal?

(via Beat the Press)

Well, this idea will never be adopted, because long term, it actually might make a dent in the deficit. No, there is only one way to make the deficit problem go away, and the Republicans are really, when you listen, being fairly clear about it. We must restore them to power. Then deficits don’t matter, or at least no one talks about them anymore, and really, in this country, isn’t that the same thing? Look at how well we’ve solved the climate change problem.

 

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Friday Night Music

Friday, June 15, 2012

Somewhat topical; Arlo Guthrie, Emmy Lou Harris and others singing Woody Guthrie’s Deportee. Just goes to show some things never change. Obama’s announcement today was no doubt politically motivated, but unlike some politically motivated gestures I could mention, it was the right thing to do.

By the way, it looks like I can pick them. My usual method of picking videos, especially if I’m looking first on my Ipad, is to add the winners to my youtube favorites. I’m not terribly good about removing them from the list, and looking back, it appears that the majority of them have now been removed because of copyright claims. Yet more examples of shortsighted stupidity on the part of the big media companies.

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At least he picked the right victims

Friday, June 15, 2012

It is an interesting fact that the two people who have actually been prosecuted, since the great meltdown, as a result of financial scams, were men who specialized in relieving the already rich of their money, while the folks who simply gambled with everyone’s money have gone not only scot-free, but have been the recipients of government largesse (we cannot call it welfare as it went to the rich). There is a lesson in there somewhere.

The latest con-man sent to the big house is R. Allen Stanford, whose victims joined together in court to condemn the man who relieved them of their millions. Now, I hold no brief for Stanford, but somehow, my heart does not go out to these folks. Consider the nature of the con:

A federal jury in March convicted Mr. Stanford of running an international scheme over more than two decades in which he offered fraudulent high-interest certificates of deposit at the Stanford International Bank, which was based on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

(via New York Times)

Lives there a rich investor that knows not that the entire purpose of setting up shop in Antigua is to evade the law? They feel cheated, I’m sure, because they thought the only point was to cheat the government out of taxes, and not themselves out of their money.

 

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Corporate veto power; the coming thing

Thursday, June 14, 2012

 

There are folks out there who insist that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, so one should either cast a Naderesque protest vote, or not vote at all. I’ve always felt that there is too much truth in that position to totally reject it, but that on the whole, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and that at least the Democrats will keep us from theocracy, albeit not a plutocracy.

But if there’s any truth in this, I really may have to re-think my position.

WASHINGTON — A critical document from President Barack Obama’s free trade negotiations with eight Pacific nations was leaked online early Wednesday morning, revealing that the administration intends to bestow radical new political powers upon multinational corporations, contradicting prior promises.

The leaked document has been posted on the website of Citizens Trade Campaign, a long-time critic of the administration’s trade objectives. The new leak follows substantial controversy surrounding the secrecy of the talks, in which some members of Congress have complained they are not being given the same access to trade documents that corporate officials receive.

…

The newly leaked document is one of the most controversial of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. It addresses a broad sweep of regulations governing international investment and reveals the Obama administration’s advocacy for policies that environmental activists, financial reform advocates and labor unions have long rejected for eroding key protections currently in domestic laws.

Under the agreement currently being advocated by the Obama administration, American corporations would continue to be subject to domestic laws and regulations on the environment, banking and other issues. But foreign corporations operating within the U.S. would be permitted to appeal key American legal or regulatory rulings to an international tribunal. That international tribunal would be granted the power to overrule American law and impose trade sanctions on the United States for failing to abide by its rulings.

(via Huffington Post)

Unfortunately, given the Obama administration’s track record, I can’t dismiss the possibility that this representation of the situation is substantially correct. This type of mechanism would not be unprecedented, but it can’t be denied that it’s a mechanism the corporate wing of the Republican party would embrace, as indeed it has. Under the radar, outside of the public eye, there’s not much difference between the parties when it comes to serving corporate interests.

When I was a young lad, the Supreme Court, an un-elected, unrepresentative body answerable to no one, actually functioned as a bulwark against oppression and a protector of our basic constitutional rights. Since that was the way it was, I imagined that it had always been thus, and I think a lot of my contemporaries felt the same way. We didn’t realize that, in fact, that Court was atypical; that the court had for most of its history been the guardian of the status quo and the “rights” of the uptrodden. The court has of late returned to its historical role with a vengeance. With Citizens United, in one fell swoop, it handed the country over to the billionaires.

If the above is true, then Obama is planning to do the same on an international scale; handing our laws to an unelected body, answerable to no one but the plutocrats, and undoubtedly staffed by plutocrats or their designees (after all, who else understands these very complex issues?). One can make the case for international institutions and one can even make the case for international institutions that can override national laws, but the case collapses when those institutions are part of a closed system, in which the deciders (to borrow a term) are selected through a process so removed from democratic institutions that they are, in effect, the same as the Supreme Court but even more so: an unelected body answerable to no one, with an institutional bias toward the interests of the very entities that will appear before them as plaintiffs. The public interest, be it local, national or international will be ignored. The leaders of sovereign nations, themselves ever more increasingly just the tools of the plutocrats, will simply plead helplessness as their citizens protest the failure of their elected representatives to rein in the corporations.

It calls Europe to mind, where national leaders tell their rightfully disbelieving populaces that there is no alternative to austerity for everyone but the bankers. People will look for alternatives, and they will find them at the extremes. If things run true to form, judging by past history, demagogues of the right will be most likely to arise, partly because the entrenched powers tend to view the right as more tractable and therefore put up less resistance to their rise. See, e.g., Germany in the early 30s.

As a sidebar, the provision barring U.S. corporations from subverting our laws is so obviously subject to manipulation that it means nothing. All a corporation need do is form a foreign corporation and have it do the dirty work. Corporations are wonderful things; they are people “my friends”, but they can be conveniently birthed and buried as convenient.

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Bad Moon Rising

Thursday, June 14, 2012

 

I’ve argued a couple of times (e.g, here) that European austerity may pave the way for a return of authoritarian regimes. Krugman makes the same point here.

 

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Only in America

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

This is a country in which fairly basic human rights are being treated in a rather cavalier fashion, without much outcry from anyone. People are being removed from voting rolls upon mere suspicion, and even that is giving too much credit to the perpetrators. Congress just passed a law allowing the government to imprison without trial anyone deemed a terrorist sympathizer. We are all treated as suspects whenever we board a plane. Our prisons are full of people guilty only of perpetrating crimes upon themselves (e.g., drug use or possession). The list goes on.

But in one respect, we are a shining beacon of a crazy sort of freedom, and here I hark back not only to the modern, but to the original definition of crazy: “full of cracks or flaws, unsound”, for in this country you can do what you like, so long as you do it armed. The Bill of Rights is becoming a dead letter, except the second portion thereof, into which the Supreme Court has breathed life that the far from crazy framers could never have anticipated.

Latest case in point in today’s Times, where we learn that the usual suspect, the NRA and its fellow criminals, have a problem with the fact that some states (far be it from the federal government to ever suggest such a thing) want to require gun manufacturers to manufacturer guns and shells that will enable law enforcement to immediately determine the particular gun from which a shell that say, ended up in some non-gun owners body, might have emerged. Well, naturally, the crime lobby is upset at the possibility that they might actually be held responsible for their crimes, so they, along with the gun manufacturers, are crying foul.

New York is considering such a ban. Now, New York is one of those states that actually still has a fair proportion of sane people in it, so one must wonder about the reaction Remington expected to get when it issued this threat:

The issue has become so heated that in New York, where the State Assembly is expected to debate a microstamping bill as early as Wednesday, one gun maker, the Remington Arms Company, has threatened to pull its business out of the state if the bill becomes law.

“Such a mandate could force Remington to reconsider its commitment to the New York market altogether,” said Teddy Novin, a company spokesman.

Yes, it appears Remington would like us to believe that it sells guns in New York not to make money, but because of its commitment to the New York market.

Now the logical response to this would be: “Make my day!”.

Of course, this blessed event would never take place, as this is, alas, the emptiest of threats. But it does give us a bit of insight into the minds of these gun folks, who have been so pampered and coddled lately that they think such a threat might work.

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