Author: Seth Anderson

Just another Gen-Xer still posting on a blog

This morning’s earworm was Brighton Rock

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This morning’s earworm was Brighton Rock, by Queen the opening track on their Sheer Heart Attack album.

Guitar World celebrates the guitar solo, of course:

“Brighton Rock” (Brian May) – Queen Sheer Heart Attack, 1974

Universally venerated for his lavish guitar orchestrations and tasteful British restraint, Brian May kicked over the traces on this high energy rocker that leads off Queen’s third album, Sheer Heart Attack. One of May’s most blues-based excursions ever, the song’s extended solo section grew out of the guitarist’s experiments with an Echoplex tape delay unit. His original goal was to reproduce his multi-part guitar harmonies live on stage with Queen, back in the days before harmonizers were invented.

“I started messing around with the Echoplex, the delay that was available at the time,” May recalls. “I turned up the regeneration until it was giving me multiple repeats. I discovered you could do a lot with this—you could set up rhythms and play against them, or you could play a line and then play a harmony to it. But I decided that the delay [times] I wanted weren’t available on the Echoplex. So I modified it and made a new rail, which meant I could slide the head along and make the delay any length I wanted, because the physical distance between the two heads is what gave you the delay. Eventually, I had two home-adapted Echoplexes. And I discovered that if you put each echo through its own amp, you wouldn’t have any nasty interference between the two signals. Each amp would be like a full-blown, sustaining, overdriven guitar which didn’t have anything to do with the other one.

“So, ‘Brighton Rock’ was the first time that got onto a record. I’d already been trying it live on stage in the middle of ‘Son and Daughter’ [from Queen’s self-titled ’73 debut album], when Queen first toured with Mott the Hoople. It was rather crude at first. But I certainly had a lot of fun with it.”

(click here to continue reading 50 Greatest Guitar Solos | Guitar World.)

But for me, the loop playing in my head was this, from the bridge:

O Rock of Ages, do not crumble, love is breathing still

O Lady Moon, shine down a little people magic if you will

Listen here if you inexplicably don’t have this LP already in your music library 

(click here to continue reading Queen – Brighton Rock Lyrics | Genius Lyrics.)

And an extended live version from 1975…

This is quite a long (long enough for Freddie’s White-to-Black Costume change) and slightly exotic guitar solo (Three Blind Mice?) sandwiched between ‘Brighton Rock’ and a short burst of ‘Son & Daughter’ that seemed to sit as the centrepiece of the gig; which is of course the ‘legendary’ BBC broadcast from Christmas Eve 1975, filmed at London’s Hammersmith Odeon taken from the recently released Blu-Ray ‘A Night At The Odeon’.

Donald A. Guarisco, Allmusic:

This breathtaking combination of theatrical pomp and grinding power chords is a stellar example of what made Queen such a unique group in the world of hard rock. The lyrics portray the giddy rush of joy that young lovers feel as they present a determined young man pursuing an elusive upper-crust girl: “Oh, rock of ages do not crumble/Love is breathing still/Oh, Lady Moon shine down/A little people magic, if you will.” The music captures the euphoric feel of the lyrics with a fast-paced melody that pairs breathless, staccato verse melodies crammed with notes a la Gilbert & Sullivan with a smoother but no less rousing chorus that has a sing-along feel. On paper, “Brighton Rock” is the stuff of pure pop but Queen transforms into a hard-rocking juggernaut on their recording thanks to an arrangement that places Brian May’s guitar chops front and center: it starts with carnival sound effects that quickly give way to a wave of dazzling, percolating (but very heavy) guitar riffs that fuel an arrangement anchored by a stomping but no less intricate beat from the rhythm section. It also includes a solo break where May trots out a jaw-dropping guitar solo that weaves a series of Hendrix-style riffs into a mini-symphony of power chords. The final piece of the puzzle is the typically complex vocals that were a trademark for Queen: Freddie Mercury contributes a cheeky lead that uses different ‘voices’ for the two characters (a helium falsetto for the girl, a lusty baritone for the boy) and May and Roger Taylor join Mercury to create a symphonically-dense set of backing vocals that pump the chorus up to grandiose heights. It all added up to a multi-layered feast of sound that was balanced pop sweetness and hard rock muscle with skill and a totally personalized sense of style. “Brighton Rock” went on to become a favorite with Queen fans, many of whom consider it May’s definitive guitar performance on record. It also became a mainstay of Queen’s live show, where May utilized tape-delay units to recreate the ornate instrumental section (an epic 12-minute live version of “Brighton Rock” can be found on Live Killers).

 

(click here to continue reading Brighton Rock – Queen | Song Info | AllMusic.)

A Prairie Flower That Flourishes With Fire

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Cultivated Wild Flowers

The New York Times reports:

some small plants can benefit from a fire, because they grow back faster than grasses and trees, giving them an advantage in the battle for resources.

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives another explanation for that success, at least for one prairie plant that has been in decline: reproductive advantage.

Purple coneflowers, also known as echinacea angustifolia, produce more seeds in years following fires, the new study shows, not just because there are fewer competitors for resources, but because a fire “also changes the mating opportunities,” said Stuart Wagenius, a conservation scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Dr. Wagenius, who led the research, tracked a 40-hectare plot, or nearly 100 acres, of prairie land in Minnesota for 21 years as part of the Echinacea Project.

The study found that coneflowers produced more seeds and were more genetically diverse in plots that were burned every few years, compared to those where fires were prevented

(click here to continue reading A Prairie Flower That Flourishes With Fire – The New York Times.)

Fascinating, Jim…

The Echinacea Project study site:

Our study area comprises 6400 ha (25 square miles) of rural western Minnesota, USA near the towns of Kensington and Hoffman (centered near 45º 49′ N, 95º 43′ W). Before European settlement in the 1870s, the entire area, except for lakes and wetlands, was potential Echinacea habitat. Echinacea and other prairie plants now persist in remnant populations on hillsides too steep for agricultural production, in fence corners inaccessible to farm machinery, along road and railroad rights-of-way, and on abandoned pastureland. The remnants that we study range in size from a roadside prairie of only several square meters to a 95 acre TNC preserve.

(click here to continue reading Our Study Site « The Echinacea Project.)

Echinacea Purpurea sign 

Of All Trump’s Defenses, This Is the Lamest

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Shaking Hands

Frank Bruni of The New York Times, writes about a point that has irritated me for for a while, namely that Republicans shirk their duty to their constituents by claiming they can’t work in an election year:

Once the Senate concludes its trial of President Trump, it should go into recess. Until next January. The House, too. Lawmakers shouldn’t pass legislation, consider nominations or make any important decisions whatsoever: This is an election year, and the voters will soon weigh in on the direction of America. The nation’s business should await that judgment, lest members of Congress contradict it.

A ludicrous proposal? Indeed. But it’s in line with — and an extrapolation of — a favorite argument against Trump’s conviction and removal from office. His Republican supporters say that lawmakers shouldn’t speak for voters on such a crucial issue. To pre-empt the verdict at the ballot box, they say, is to subvert the people’s will.

Nice try. Lawmakers are elected specifically to speak for voters on crucial issues. That’s the system. That’s their job. American government doesn’t operate by daily, hourly or issue-by-issue polls (at least not overtly). Congress doesn’t have exponentially more power one week after Election Day than it does one year later (though it may indeed have more political currency).

…

Republicans have decided to sing a different tune. If it sounds familiar, that’s because they turned to the same music when the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace him and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, declared that a presidential election about eight months in the offing prevented the Senate from taking any action. It was a song not of principle but of political convenience. The same holds true now.

…

the framers of the Constitution, who established the impeachment process to do essentially that and declined to add any asterisks about the next election’s imminence? “If the framers thought impeachment in an election year was a bad idea, they could have set things up differently,” noted Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor and the author of the 2018 book “These Truths: A History of the United States.”

“They could have instituted a mechanism for an interim election, for instance,” Lepore told me. “They did not. They could have said, ‘Except not in an election year.’ They did not. You want there to be no impeachments allowed in an election year, ever? You have to get a constitutional amendment ratified.” And that would never happen, because it would be license for a president to do anything he or she wanted, fearlessly, if it synced with the calendar just so.

(click here to continue reading Opinion | Of All Trump’s Defenses, This Is the Lamest – The New York Times.)

Waiting for Somebody to Save Us

The next Democratic president ought to seriously consider packing the courts to make up for McConnell’s scheme to keep the Supreme Court with a conservative majority, and shorten the term of President Obama to 7 years.

Furthermore, as Mr. Bruni recounts, the voters did speak their mind about Trumpism – the 2018 election was a landslide for not-Trump!

What’s happening to Trump isn’t muscling voters out of the process but, rather, taking into account what voters recently did. “You only get an impeachment vote when people have changed their minds,” she [Alison LaCroix, a University of Chicago professor who teaches constitutional law and American history] said, referring to their opinions about a sitting president. “The votes comes from the House, and we know, from things like the midterm elections, that some amount of people have changed their minds. Another party has gained control of the House. That has to be telling us something.”

The Do Nothing Party for sure.

Trump Is Unfit and So Are Republicans

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Whipped Into A Frenzy

What a topsy-turvy world we live in, in recent months, I frequently read and agree with Jennifer Rubin, of The Washington Post, a sentence unthinkable before Trump* became Resident of the White House. 

First, her succinct summary of the Democratic teams presentation:

House impeachment managers have demonstrated through a painstaking presentation of facts and law that: 1) President Trump wanted a foreign government to help him win reelection by announcing an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden; 2) there was no legitimate basis for such an investigation into the Bidens or the Crowdstrike conspiracy, as his own advisers admit, but served only Trump’s egotistical and political interests; 3) Trump ordered military aid held up in violation of law in an effort to pressure Ukraine and to the detriment of United States’ foreign policy; 4) His own officials knew this was wrong and began a coverup (e.g., moving the July transcript to a classified server); and 5) Trump refused to cooperate with the impeachment proceedings in any way, instructing administration officials to refuse to respond to any subpoenas without asserting executive privilege.

(click here to continue reading The honest Trump defense that is too embarrassing for Republicans to advance – The Washington Post.)

Mr Trump I Want Your Tax Returns

And then this:

There is actually an obvious and possibly accurate defense that no Republican senator dare advance. It goes like this: The president has never understood that there is a difference between his political/personal interests and national security. Trump has a narcissistic personality so he cannot intentionally betray the country for his own benefit because he thinks they are one and the same. He is also highly ignorant and malleable, so he will believe any illogical conspiracy theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin advances and/or that serves his interests. No matter how many times he was told that Ukraine did not interfere with our election, or that aid to Ukraine was in the United States’ interest, or that he could not stop aid in violation of law, he could not mentally process such information. He believed that advisers who told him such things were weak or out to get him. In other words, Trump is so mentally and emotionally defective, he cannot understand the import of his actions or concepts such as right vs. wrong, true vs. false and personal vs. national interests. As for obstruction, his lawyer told him to refuse to give up anything, so he simply took that advice.

That might all be true. But, of course, it also posits that Trump is entirely unfit to carry out his job and lacks the capacity to adhere to an oath that requires him to put the nation’s interests above his own. It would mean Republicans are keeping in power and urging the reelection of a dangerous, unfit and deeply damaged personality because they are afraid of him or afraid of his base, which has imbibed the lies perpetrated by right-wing media.

Trump is only part of the current crisis, the other, deeper issue is that the Republican Party is filled with people who basically agree with nearly every action and word that Trump utters. They are not leaders, they cower at the thought of Trump sending a few grammatically challenged tweets in their direction. 

The really depressing thing about the whole impeachment fiasco is that while the Democrats make a logical, detailed case that not impeaching Trump means the end of our Constitutional Democracy, the Republicans shrug, knowing they will vote to acquit anyway. Goodbye America, in other words.

Trump’s Treasury secretary just admitted the tariff rationale is hogwash

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Classic Car Convertible

Meanwhile, in non-impeachment news, Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post reports:

Perhaps distracted by the beauty and billionaires of Davos, Switzerland, this week Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin let slip an embarrassing admission: President Trump’s justification for his trade wars is hogwash.
For two years, the administration has offered increasingly ludicrous explanations for its tariffs. Sometimes tariffs are designed to shield pet U.S. industries from unfair competition. (Those industries are still shuttering plants despite the tariffs, but no matter.)

Sometimes, tariffs are instead intended to raise revenue from abroad. (That additional tax revenue is being paid by Americans, not foreigners, but whatever.)

Perhaps the most farcical rationale, however, has been that massive tariffs are necessary to safeguard America’s “national security.”

…

First, the Trump administration argued that it needed to impose worldwide tariffs on steel and aluminum on these bogus “national security” grounds. After all, Trump explained, “If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” whatever that means.

Loyal allies, such as Canada and Britain, were understandably offended to learn that their metal products somehow threatened U.S. national security and would thus be tariffed. 

…

Last year, at Trump’s request, the Commerce Department produced a report determining that imports of autos and automotive parts somehow also put America at grave risk, and that it thereby needs to do something to increase “American-owned” production. Precisely how your Subaru or Honda, or some foreign-made part buried somewhere in your Ford, compromises U.S. security is unclear; that Commerce Department report has never been released.

To be clear, the auto industry does not want these tariffs. Industry groups — comprising both U.S. and foreign companies — have called them “absurd” and “spurious,” particularly because these imports support millions of American jobs in auto manufacturing, parts and sales.

(click here to continue reading Trump’s Treasury secretary just admitted the tariff rationale is hogwash – The Washington Post.)

Chrysler Imperial

Bullshit from these professional bullshit artists. And yet corporate America still supports the political party that regularly screws them because, you know, tax cuts for millionaires is popular in most corporate boardrooms.

Rust Bucket

And Mnuchin’s “slip of the tongue”:

At a Davos panel Wednesday, Mnuchin finally acknowledged the obvious: that the administration’s official rationale for auto tariffs was made up, a legal fiction designed to let it bully or retaliate against opponents whenever Trump felt like it. In the context of a discussion about digital service taxes proposed by European countries, Mnuchin told the audience: “If people want to just arbitrarily put taxes on our digital companies, we will consider arbitrarily putting taxes on car companies.”

GM

The Director Of National Intelligence Missed The Deadline To Provide Congress With A Report On Jamal Khashoggi’s Killing

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Legality ≠ Morality

Emma Loop, Buzzfeed reports:

The country’s top intelligence official has failed to turn over to Congress a report on the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, sources said, flouting a law passed last month.

In December, lawmakers passed a sweeping defense bill that included a provision ordering the director of national intelligence to send Congress an unclassified report identifying those responsible for Khashoggi’s death at a Saudi Arabian consulate in 2018. The legislation set the deadline for the report at 30 days, which passed earlier this week.

Though the CIA has reportedly concluded that Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s killing at the consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, Saudi officials have denied his involvement — something President Donald Trump seemed willing to believe. The unclassified report, if Congress receives and releases it, could provide the administration’s first public acknowledgment of the crown prince’s role, or that of other Saudi officials, in Khashoggi’s brutal death.

The provision requiring the report was contained in the larger National Defence Authorization Act that Trump signed into law on Dec. 20, 2019. The bill required Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, to provide the report to four congressional committees: the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, and the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees.

The delay has already resulted in an inquiry from the office of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, an Intelligence Committee member who pushed for the provision to be included in the legislation. “Our office has asked ODNI about the status of that information and has not received a response,” Keith Chu, a spokesperson for Wyden, told BuzzFeed News.

(click here to continue reading The Director Of National Intelligence Missed The Deadline To Provide Congress With A Report On Jamal Khashoggi’s Killing.)

It’s so unlike the Trump* administration to ignore laws, and support extra-judicial killing, and kowtow to dictators! Shocked, shocked I tells ya…

Darwin Fish Prototype

Adam Schiff And Narrative Strategy

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Someone mentioned that Representative Adam Schiff has a side gig as a screenwriter.

Back in 2018, Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker wrote a nice profile of Adam Schiff, which includes this:

Schiff mostly sticks to business with his staffers, but they all know that he was a movie buff long before he became the congressman from Hollywood. (Several years ago, his holiday gift to each staffer was a DVD of “The Big Lebowski,” which Schiff often quotes.) It’s less known that, like many lawyers in Los Angeles, Schiff has been writing screenplays on the side for years, which together amount to a kind of autobiography. “The first was a post-Holocaust story called ‘Remnant.’ ” As Schiff recalled, “I had an agent at William Morris tell me it was good but no one would want to see it—too depressing. Then ‘Schindler’s List’ came out, and I was, like, ‘Come on!’ ” His next, written when he was a prosecutor, was a murder mystery called “Minotaur.” “I had a friend who was a producer, and he said there were two answers in Hollywood—‘Yes,’ and ‘Here’s a check.’ I was getting lots of yeses.” But perhaps there is hope for his third. “It’s a spy drama,” he said. “That one is a work in progress.”

(click here to continue reading Adam Schiff’s Plans to Obliterate Trump’s Red Line | The New Yorker.)

So no wonder his closing argument yesterday was so eloquent. He’s molding the Democratic impeachment case as if it was a narrative, using his skills as a screenwriter. It makes perfect sense.

If you didn’t see the whole impeachment saga yesterday, at least watch nine minutes of Adam Schiff’s closing argument

Congressman Adam Schiff: “We believe we will have made the case overwhelmingly of the President’s guilt. He has done what he’s charged with… but I want to address one other thing tonight. Okay he’s guilty, does he really need to be removed?”

Full video here: https://cs.pn/2tA32nD

Google Translate Has A Sense of Humor

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Glad to see that Google hasn’t lost all sense of fun.

Screen Shot 2020 01 23 at 7 44 04 PM
The Funniest Joke In the World 

If one opens Google Translate, plugs in the German version of the deadly joke in Monty Python’s “The Funniest Joke In The World” sketch, Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

Google spits back: “Fatal Error”

Ha!

Rest in peaces, Terry Jones…

Guardian UK:

 

Terry Jones, founder member of Monty Python and director of three of Python’s celebrated feature films, has died aged 77, his family have announced. In a statement they said: “Terry passed away on the evening of 21 January 2020 at the age of 77 with his wife Anna Soderstrom by his side after a long, extremely brave but always good humoured battle with a rare form of dementia, FTD.”

…Born in Colwyn Bay, Wales, in 1942, Jones moved to England as a child, growing up in Surrey. While at Oxford studying English literature, he met fellow student Palin while performing in the Oxford Revue. After university, along with Palin, Jones wrote and performed in a string of TV shows alongside other future stars of British comedy – including Cleese, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie, Eric Idle, Peter Cook and David Jason – on The Frost Report, Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Complete and Utter History of Britain.

 

In 1969, Palin and Jones joined Cambridge graduates Cleese and Graham Chapman – along with Idle and animator Terry Gilliam – on a BBC comedy sketch show. Eventually broadcast under the title Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it ran until 1974, with Jones largely writing with Palin (complementing Cleese’s partnership with Chapman). Seemingly chaotic, frequently surreal and formally daring, Monty Python’s Flying Circus would became one of the most influential shows in BBC history, revolutionising comedy formats, spawning scores of catchphrases, and inspiring an entire generation of comedians. Jones’s fondness for female impersonation was a key feature of the show, as was his erudite writing.

 

 

(click here to continue reading Terry Jones, Life of Brian director and Monty Python founder, dies aged 77 | Culture | The Guardian.)

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes knocks senators for ducking out of impeachment trial: ‘You can resign’

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Sleeping on the El

The Hill reports:

MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes blasted senators who reportedly fell asleep during the opening of President Trump’s impeachment trial or left early, saying lawmakers can listen to arguments or “resign tomorrow.”

Hayes contrasted senators who are in the Senate chamber for the duration of the trial with citizens who regularly serve on juries, noting that many often have to take time off work to complete the responsibility.

“If the trial goes for a long time, often [jurors] don’t collect their paycheck from that and are given a meager amount of money relative to what some of those people might make,” Hayes said on the air Wednesday evening. “This is literally [senators’] job. If you find it too annoying or frustrating or uncomfortable to sit for eight hours and listen, you can resign tomorrow and go get another job.”

 “It’s a terrible look to the public to the extent that the news reports are getting out,” MSNBC legal analyst Maya Wiley said during the segment. “These are people who are supposed to be listening, hearing and then making a decision on what’s being presented all day long. We’ve also heard a lot of people have made up their minds already and are not actually taking their oath seriously.”

Hayes reiterated the point on Twitter, assailing “the sheer entitled whininess on display here.”

The sheer entitled whininess on display here. We ask every citizen to serve on juries! And this is literally your job, to just show up and listen. I’m so sorry this is so hard for you. Go get another gig. https://t.co/JbKnwnbjbv

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 23, 2020

(click here to continue reading MSNBC’s Chris Hayes knocks senators for ducking out of impeachment trial: ‘You can resign’ | TheHill.)

Asleep at the Post

I whole-heartedly agree with this sentiment. I was under the impression that even leaving the chamber was forbidden, but multiple senators ignored this, and went to give interviews while the proceedings were underway. They should be chastised by Chief John Roberts, or even lose their ability to vote.

Laurie Kellman, AP, reports:

 So much for the Senate’s quaint rules and tradition.

Almost immediately after Chief Justice John Roberts gaveled in Wednesday’s session of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, bored and weary senators started openly flouting some basic guidelines in a chamber that prizes decorum.

…

Crow, a military veteran speaking on the impact of Trump’s holdup of military aid to Ukraine, had trouble holding the Senate’s attention. Some senators left their seats and headed to cloakrooms, stood in the back or openly yawned as he spoke. At one point during his address, more than 10 senators’ seats were empty.

 Crow wondered aloud if the Senate wanted to take a recess.

 

(click here to continue reading 24 hours in, senators flout quaint impeachment rules.)

Sleeping cats

That seems wrong, and really, if Senators miss most of the impeachment proceedings, they should lose their vote on the matter. That would wake them up…

Trump Eases Pollution Controls on Streams and Wetlands

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First Night's Camp Site - Buffalo River AR

The New York Times reports:

The Trump administration on Thursday will finalize a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and other water bodies, handing a victory to farmers, fossil fuel producers and real estate developers who said Obama-era rules had shackled them with onerous and unnecessary burdens.

From Day 1 of his administration, President Trump vowed to repeal President Barack Obama’s “Waters of the United States” regulation, which had frustrated rural landowners. His new rule, which will be implemented in the coming weeks, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to repeal or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules and laws, loosening or eliminating rules on climate change, clean air, chemical pollution, coal mining, oil drilling and endangered species protections.

(click here to continue reading Trump Eases Pollution Controls on Streams and Wetlands – The New York Times.)

What an asshole. And I would hazard a guess that the “farmers” discussed here are not small hard-scrabble salt-of-the-earth types, but agribusinesses with hundreds of thousands of acreage, and they want to be free to pollute all of our water without regard to consequence. You’d think some outdoorsman types would object to the destruction of lakes and rivers, I guess they are too swept up in deregulation fever to care.

Profits über alles…

Elin with her Fish Purse and Obama Pin

First Day of Trump Impeachment

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Trump Pinatas in The Mission District

Despite my misgivings, I ended up watching about four hours of yesterday’s impeachment procedurals, on CNN, MSNBC, and eventually CSPAN1

Dan Froomkin of Press Watch reports:

The first real day of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump was an epic exercise in raw political power. The Trump team, effectively led by Mitch McConnell, put forth no plausible arguments to support their position. But they didn’t have to. Because they had the votes.

But the media failed to tell that story.

If you were dependent on the coverage from our biggest and most influential media outlets, what you learned was mostly that there was a spirited debate and that McConnell made a concession.

And that’s just plain wrong. The debate wasn’t spirited, it was wildly unbalanced, with the Democrats making a substantial case for evidence-gathering, bolstered by facts, legal analysis, precedent, and logic – and the Republicans batting around Fox-News-style talking points that were devoid of reasoned thinking.

And McConnell’s concession was, in the greater scheme of things, a minor one. He succeeded – effortlessly – in ramming through a procedure that almost guarantees that the impeachment trial will not be encumbered by fact-finding.

(click here to continue reading Big Journalism completely fails to impart the Big Picture | Press Watch.)

It was striking to watch, and obvious that the Trump team of Republican blowhards had nothing substantial to say. A sad day for our country, putting the GOP’s Party Over Country mantra on display.

Pumpkin Boy He’s Got Seeds For Brains

Susan Glasser, The New Yorker:

It was only a couple hours into the first day of arguments in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald John Trump when Adam Schiff, the lead House manager prosecuting the case, summed up the day’s proceedings. The Senate’s proposed process for the trial, he said, was simply “ass-backwards,” requiring the House to present its case before considering whether to call witnesses and demand White House documents that Trump has been withholding.

Schiff’s edgy remark caused a jolt in the chamber. Senators who had been nodding off or staring down at their legal pads suddenly looked up. But it turns out that you can swear like that on the Senate floor. Schiff wasn’t even the first person to use the phrase, although David Vitter, the former senator from Louisiana, got in trouble back in 2008 when he did, and he had the remark stricken from the official record. Whether or not it was appropriate, in a stodgy institution that does not even allow reporters to wear denim in its hallowed chamber, Schiff’s remark certainly was incisive and to the point.

…

Ever since the Trump impeachment inquiry began, in September, the White House has declined to offer a formal defense, if one excludes all-caps tweets from the accused. But refusing to participate is no longer an option now that the Senate trial is actually happening. Trump’s lawyers not only showed up but very much showed their hands, offering a defense of Trump that was very much like the President himself: loud, intemperate, personally nasty, ad hominem, factually challenged, and often not even bothering to have a tenuous connection to the case at all. When the White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, addressed the Senate, the volume went up in the chamber; the tone changed. As we watched from the press gallery, it was as if we had become the audience in an entirely different play. Why should there be no witnesses or documents produced in the trial? Listening to Cipollone and Sekulow, it was hard to tell.

They barely used the word “Ukraine” or even bothered to talk much about Trump’s “perfect” phone call with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, for that matter. They mentioned the Mueller investigation—repeatedly—though that is not a subject of the impeachment articles. They made false claims, including that Republicans had been excluded from the depositions in the House “basement” that were taken by the House Intelligence Committee. Cipollone attacked Schiff by name, in personal terms, within a minute of beginning his first remarks at the trial, which was striking, if not entirely surprising, given that Cipollone is representing Trump, whose campaign is currently marketing on its Web site thirty-four-dollar T-shirts mocking Schiff as a “Pencil-Neck.”

(click here to continue reading “Ass-Backwards” and (So Far) Witness-Free, Trump’s Senate Impeachment Trial Begins | The New Yorker.)

 Get Out Trump

Doyle McManus, LA Times:

 In the impeachment trial of President Trump, the House Democrats — the prosecution — are mostly pounding the facts. The heart of their brief is a well-told narrative of Trump’s efforts to muscle Ukraine into investigating Democratic rival Joe Biden, and then to cover up the details once the scheme was discovered.

Their central charge is that Trump abused the power of the presidency by asking a foreign government to help him win reelection. There’s plenty of evidence on their side.

The president’s defense lawyers, in contrast, are mostly pounding the law — their own theory of the law, that is.

Their president’s legal brief devotes only 27 pages to contesting the House’s version of the facts. Short version: “The President did nothing wrong.”

Instead, the core of Trump’s argument is a novel interpretation of the law: Whatever the president did, it’s not impeachable.

Asking Ukraine (and later China) to investigate Biden? Not impeachable. Blocking $391 million in military aid to Ukraine despite a law requiring that the aid be released? Not impeachable. Ordering everyone in his administration to refuse to cooperate with congressional investigations? Not impeachable.

…

Under the Trump defense team’s argument, “the president is free to conduct all manner of hypothetical abuses of the office that are not criminal in nature,” Paul Rosenzweig, a former assistant to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Clinton, told me.

“As I read President Trump’s theory, if he promised to pardon anybody who murdered Joe Biden, that would not itself be an impeachable offense,” Rosenzweig said. “The theory would mean that the president could choose to never appoint any Roman Catholics, and be free from fear of removal from office.”

Moreover, the concept of using impeachment to protect against a president’s abuse of power isn’t “newly invented” — far from it. Alexander Hamilton, one of the delegates at the constitutional convention, wrote in 1788 that impeachment would be a response to “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

(click here to continue reading Column: Impeachment primer: If you have the law, pound the law. If you don’t, pound the table – Los Angeles Times.)

Impeach Trump

Footnotes:
  1. which my cable provider still provides in standard definition, not high definition, but since I was mostly listening, the blurry picture didn’t bother me, much [↩]

The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft. Microsoft Got Tougher

Seth Anderson0 comment

Darth Vader

 

ProPublica reports:

Eight years ago, the IRS, tired of seeing the country’s largest corporations fearlessly stash billions in tax havens, decided to take a stand. The agency challenged what it saw as an epic case of tax dodging by one of the largest companies in the world, Microsoft. It was the biggest audit by dollar amount in the history of the agency.

Microsoft had shifted at least $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico, where the company’s tax consultants, KPMG, had persuaded the territory’s government to give Microsoft a tax rate of nearly 0%. Microsoft had justified this transfer with a ludicrous-sounding deal: It had sold its most valuable possession — its intellectual property — to an 85-person factory it owned in a small Puerto Rican city.

…Meanwhile, the numbers Microsoft had used to craft its deal were laughable, the agency concluded. In one instance, Microsoft had told investors its revenues would grow 10% to 12% but told the IRS the figure was 4%. In another, the IRS found Microsoft had understated revenues by $15 billion.

Determined to seize every advantage against a giant foe, the small team at the helm of the audit decided to be aggressive. It used special powers that the agency had shied away from using in the past. It took unprecedented steps like hiring an elite law firm to join the government’s side.

To Microsoft and its corporate allies, the nature of the audit posed a dire threat. This was not the IRS they knew. This was an agency suddenly committed to fighting and winning. If the aggression went unchecked, it would only encourage the IRS to try these tactics on other corporations.

“Most people, the 99%, they’re afraid of the IRS,” said an attorney who works on large corporate audits. “The other 1%, they’re not afraid. They make the IRS afraid of them.”

Microsoft fought back with every tool it could muster. Business organizations, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to tech trade groups, rallied, hiring attorneys to jump into the fray on Microsoft’s side in court and making their case to IRS leadership and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Soon, members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, were decrying the IRS’ tactics and introducing legislation to stop the IRS from ever taking similar steps again.

The outcome of the audit remains to be seen — the Microsoft case grinds on — but the blowback was effective. Last year, the company’s allies succeeded in changing the law, removing or limiting tools the IRS team had used against the company. The IRS, meanwhile, has become notably less bold. Drained of resources by years of punishing budget cuts, the agency has largely retreated from challenging the largest corporations. The IRS declined to comment for this article.

Recent years have been a golden age for corporate tax avoidance, with massive companies awash in profits routinely paying tax rates in the single digits, or even nothing at all. But how corporations manage to do this and keep the IRS at bay is mostly shrouded in secrecy

(click here to continue reading The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft. Microsoft Got Tougher. — ProPublica.)

Truly despicable, on many levels. Microsoft is not teetering on the edge of financial collapse, they can afford to pay their fair share of taxes. Shameful that both political parties enable this abuse, and respond by defunding/defanging the IRS from doing its job. Meanwhile, the US debt grows by leaps and bounds, and corporate profits too.

Donald Trump Is Impeached

Seth Anderson0 comment

I find myself not wanting to watch any of the Senate trial of President Trump*. I’m saddened by the lack of character and courage of the Republican Senators, who even though they know Trump is a terrible president, and that Trump is guilty of many impeachable offenses, refuse to choose country over party, and instead enable Trump to escape justice. 

I had no expectations that 67 Senators would vote to impeach, but had hoped without reason the GOP would still conduct themselves appropriately for the situation. They are not. 

If I believed in prayer, I’d pray fervently that all of the GOP up for re-election in 2020 lost their respective races.

What Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now

Seth Anderson0 comment

Salman Rushdie writes about Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five:

As a prisoner of war, age twenty-two, which is to say three years younger than I was when I read his story, Vonnegut was in the famously beautiful city of Dresden, locked up with other Americans in Schlachthof-Fünf, where pigs had been slaughtered before the war, and was therefore an accidental witness to one of the greatest slaughters of human beings in history, the firebombing of Dresden, in February of 1945, which flattened the whole city and killed almost everyone in it.

So it goes.

I had not remembered, until I reread “Slaughterhouse-Five,” that that famous phrase “So it goes” is used only and always as a comment on death. Sometimes a phrase from a novel or a play or a film can catch the imagination so powerfully—even when misquoted—that it lifts off from the page and acquires an independent life of its own. “Come up and see me sometime” and “Play it again, Sam” are misquotations of this type. Something of this sort has also happened to the phrase “So it goes.” The trouble is that when this kind of liftoff happens to a phrase its original context is lost. I suspect that many people who have not read Vonnegut are familiar with the phrase, but they, and also, I suspect, many people who have read Vonnegut, think of it as a kind of resigned commentary on life. Life rarely turns out in the way the living hope for, and “So it goes” has become one of the ways in which we verbally shrug our shoulders and accept what life gives us. But that is not its purpose in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” “So it goes” is not a way of accepting life but, rather, of facing death. It occurs in the text almost every single time someone dies, and only when death is evoked.

It is also deeply ironic. Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words. This is the manner of the entire novel, and it has led to the novel being, in many cases, misunderstood. I am not suggesting that “Slaughterhouse-Five” has been poorly treated. Its reception was largely positive, it has sold an enormous number of copies, the Modern Library ranked it eighteenth on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and it is also on a similar list issued by Time magazine. However, there are those who have accused it of the sin of “quietism,” of a resigned acceptance, even, according to Anthony Burgess, an “evasion” of the worst things in the world. One of the reasons for this is the phrase “So it goes,” and it is clear to me from these critiques that the British novelist Julian Barnes was right when he wrote in his book “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” that “Irony may be defined as what people miss.”

Kurt Vonnegut is a deeply ironic writer who has sometimes been read as if he were not.

(click here to continue reading What Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now | The New Yorker.)

I read all of Kurt Vonnegut’s books prior to writing an 11th grade honors English term paper. My teacher, the wonderful Mrs. Elaine Hettenhausen, had not read any of Vonnegut’s books so was reluctant to assign him to me. I ended up having to go to the University of Texas library to find some additional biographical information, and I admit that since I knew Mrs. Hett (as we affectionally called her) didn’t know anything about Vonnegut, I fudged some of the details. I remember using Vonnegut’s fictionalized mother-eating Drano to commit suicide story as real (and remember she marked my paper in red, “that’s horrible!”).  She liked my finished paper though, I got an A.

Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut

And so it goes.

After reading Salman Rushdie’s essay, I want to re-read Vonnegut. It has been a long time since high school.

Rudy Giuliani Has Long Been A Jerk

Seth Anderson0 comment

Mr Rubbishman

I disagree with the premise of this article, Giuliani has long been a disgusting human, not beloved by people in my circle, even New Yorkers, even after 9/11.

Jonathan Mahler, of The New York Times, reports:

things seem to have gotten a lot worse for Giuliani. The House has impeached the president largely on the basis of Giuliani’s work, and Giuliani himself has come under investigation for possibly serving as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. And yet he has continued to go on cable television and Twitter, making reckless statements, all the while pressing a bizarre and baseless corruption case against Joe Biden. All of this has left a lot of people puzzled. How did a man who was once — pick your former Rudy: priestly prosecutor, avenging crime-buster, America’s mayor — become this guy, ranting on TV, unapologetically pursuing debunked conspiracy theories, butt-dialing reporters, sharing photos of himself scheming in actual smoke-filled rooms? What happened?

(click here to continue reading The Fog of Rudy – Did He Change or Did America – The New York Times.) 

Steel, Ice and death

Eventually Jonathan Mahler comes to find that the current Rudy is much like the old Rudy, short on ethics, long on grand-standing.

Giuliani’s freewheeling, unconstrained-by-truth style was perhaps a little surprising to some: Was this not the principled prosecutor who made his name taming political corruption and organized crime? But while Giuliani was fighting the Mueller investigation on TV, I was researching his years as a federal prosecutor, and what I was learning about his past seemed perfectly consistent with what I was seeing in the present. As a lawyer, Giuliani had also been willing to do whatever seemed necessary to win: freezing defendants’ assets before they were proved guilty of a crime; issuing subpoenas to defense lawyers; and in one case surreptitiously recording a cooperating witness’s meeting with his opposing counsel, Thomas Puccio (who had a few years earlier served as lead prosecutor in the government’s Abscam case). He prejudiced juries, creating a spectacle in the process, by insisting that jurors be identified by numbers only for their own safety — a novel practice at the time — even when there was no evidence that they were at any risk of retaliation. He overreached, sometimes extravagantly, and then refused to back down: When a lack of evidence forced Giuliani to withdraw his insider-trading indictment of the Goldman Sachs partner Robert Freeman, he insisted that he would file another one soon, with even more counts, and in ‘‘record-breaking time.’’ Nearly two years later, Giuliani left the United States attorney’s office, and there was still no indictment. (Freeman ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count of mail fraud.)

…

The conservative writer William Safire assailed Giuliani in a 1986 column in this newspaper. ‘‘Don’t Ed Meese and Stephen Trott at the Department of Justice care about controlling political prosecutors who will do anything for publicity?’’ he wrote. ‘‘Anything does not go.’’

Did anything go? In the criminal-justice system, Giuliani’s unchecked zeal produced mixed results: He won some big cases, but not all of his victories endured; a number of his white-collar convictions were later overturned.

The first rule for a modern fog machine like Giuliani is that the more you talk, the more confusion you can create

Again, those who paid attention to the truth of Rudy, not the corporate media PR, already knew this about him.