Sunday, March 31, 2024

Easy Sunday. Easter

"What's it all about Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live? . . .
Alfie, I know there's something much more,
Something even non-believers can believe in."
          Bert Bacharach and Hal David, "Alfie" 1966


“My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world.”
               John 18:36, circa 100 CE

 


Guest Post by John Coster


The annual celebration of Easter has been the single most important event for all Christians around the world for nearly 2,000 years. Good Friday marks the death of Jesus, showing him to be 100% human; and Easter marks his resurrection from the dead, showing him to be 100% God. It is the definition of a paradox. The Apostle Paul wrote that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, then Christians’ faith is in vain, and they should be pitied. The whole of Christian faith, the grand hope for humanity, rests in this single sacred truth.

The recent post about Trump hawking the “God Bless the USA Bible” reminded me that hucksters have profaned the sacred for their enrichment for as long as there have been hucksters. The only record we have of Jesus getting seriously angry was when he drove out the merchants and moneychangers from the Temple because they were profiting from selling animals for people to offer as sacrifices as part of Passover. So, you don’t have to wonder what Jesus would think of this kind of profiteering.

That this “Bible” also includes the U.S. f
lag, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Pledge of Allegiance, et al., making it the perfect icon for Christian nationalism, which is the false notion that Christianity was meant to be a political movement. It is the same mistake Jesus’ followers made when they thought that he came to restore the Jewish monarchy and kick out the Romans.

The story of Easter is that Jesus came not just to teach a set of principles for human flourishing. He came to restore the broken relationship between God and us, for now, and eternity. Political systems (and kingdoms) come and go, and graveyards are filled with formerly-powerful leaders who offered false hope of a better life. Many who do not have a better anchor than politics find themselves angry, anxious, and fearful these days.

I am as troubled as anyone about the current political and ecological state of the world -- one that is also filled with enormous human suffering. While I vote, donate, have been a party delegate, and even marched in some causes I believe in, my North Star of hope rests in the eternal Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus offers. It is remarkably liberating and is freely available to anyone who seeks Him.

 



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Saturday, March 30, 2024

TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and my car

"He sees you when you're sleepin'
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake."

   Recorded by  Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby,  the Andrews Sisters, and others, 1934, "
Santa Claus is comin' to Town"


Big Brother is watching me. 

Big Brother wants to sell me stuff.


People whose opinion I respect tell me to be very worried about TikTok. "TikTok is different," they tell me. "TikTok is owned by China. Don't you see? China is spying on Americans."

OK. I hear those voices. But I still don't get it.

Everything one does on line is trackable and tracked. Tuesday morning I visited the Hoka website to get screenshots of shoes for my post on Phil Knight and Nike. By that afternoon I began getting pop-up ads for Hoka shoes when I visited politically-oriented websites. Foreign companies don't need to have spies skulking around in shadows nor do they need spy balloons. They could buy whatever data they need from Google, Microsoft, X, or Meta, just like Hoka did.

Google has its search engine, G-mail, this web hosting company "Blogger," and it owns YouTube. They know everything. The billionaire ex-wife of a Google founder just joined the RFK, Jr., ticket as the candidate for Vice President. She can legally spend as much money as she wants on the campaign. She opposes vaccinations. She opposes in vitro fertilization. I think she is a conspiratorial nutcase, but she is a billionaire conspiratorial American nutcase. She can legally make all the mischief she wants.

Tech firms know what I buy, where I am, who I talk to, and what I write, including what I delete. I own stock in each of them but I don't control them. I find TikTok interesting and fun. It is essentially the same thing as YouTube, except YouTube has more long-form, educational videos on history, geography, and science. My TikTok feed leans toward movie clips, stand-up comedy routines, political commentary, sleight-of-hand card tricks, and sports. It seems pretty harmless to me. Apparently I watch those short videos to the end, so TikTok feeds me more of them. That doesn't strike me as invasive or manipulative. It strikes me as responsive and attentive -- a bit of Dale Carnegie-style salesmanship: Listen to the customer.

I hear the criticism that TikTok is too good. It should be American-headquartered companies, not a Chinese-headquartered one, doing a good job. TikTok is winning friends and could influence people -- how American of them. The most dangerous and heavy-handed manipulator of information I observe is Rupert Murdoch and Fox. If TikTok is manipulating that feed by sending me hidden messages in the choice of magicians and commentary that I see, it is very subtle and I don't care. Fox isn't subtle at all.

I consider TikTok to be exactly as dangerous as YouTube. One has a corporate parent in China. The other is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Both are potential time-wasters, but so are cooking shows, basketball tournaments, and crime fiction novels. People should be free to amuse themselves. But shouldn't young people be doing their homework? Sure, but that won't change. People will find what is fun for themselves. TikTok is more interesting than algebra problem sets.

The most dangerous manipulators of the American mind are the Russian government  and American billionaires. I don't trust government to ban speech and neither did the writers of the Bill of Rights. I prefer more speech even if some of it is dead wrong.

Maybe I am wrong here. But I am independent.

I will be happy to publish guest posts that attempt to persuade readers of this blog that TikTok is worse than Rupert Murdock.



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Friday, March 29, 2024

Good Friday Blues

No boundaries.

No sense of limits. No sense of restraint. No class.

Sometimes the spectacle speaks for itself. It needs no explanation or commentary. It is the purest expression of the "body language" of political communication. 

In time for Easter week, Donald Trump endorses and promotes the Bible, and you can buy it right now, directly from him.

Only 59.99, plus shipping and handling:

https://godblesstheusabible.com

     "I'm proud to be partnering with my very good friend Lee Greenwood, who has the lovely song "God bless the USA" in connection with promoting the "God bless the USA" Bible. This Bible is the King James' version and also includes our founding father documents, yes, the Constitution, which I am fighting for every single day, very hard, to keep Americans protected. Also the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance are all part of this "God bless the USA" Bible. . . . "

I write a political blog, so I am accustomed to disagreement with my observations and opinions. Maybe some readers don't "get it." They may not have any sense of crass tastelessness in this new bit of "merch" he is adding to the hats, logo-wear, flags, water bottles and other items promoted by Trump. After all, he has created and sold heroic images of action figures of himself -- Superman Trump; Gunslinger Trump -- so what new boundary is this? Maybe people want to buy the King James version of the Bible from him and think it is perfectly appropriate for him to sell Bibles at this splendid mark-up. Maybe there is a market among patriotic, Trump-supporting Christians for a copy of the Bible, bound in leather.

I see it differently. I see it as showing that Trump has no limits. He will commercialize anything. He will mix the sacred and profane without apology, and indeed proudly. Trump will do anything. There is no bottom. And that is dangerous in a political leader.




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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Readers said I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Yesterday I wrote that NBC was smart to hire Ronna McDaniel. 

     "Peter, we love you but this is crazy. She can be a guest. But her hiring as a commentator suggests she has more authority, intelligence, credibility and honesty than she has."

     "I think you have misplaced your priorities here, Peter. If I hire someone, it's rightly assumed I am vouching for their integrity."

I got lots of comments like these. 

Let me explain.

An ongoing theme of this blog is that the message cannot be disentangled from the messenger. Who is saying things and how it is said are huge parts of the received communication. Indeed, when I am being bold, I claim that nearly all received communication in political speech is from the who and how, and that denoted, literal words are nearly irrelevant.

I use the exaggerated example of Joe Biden or Clint Eastwood. No matter how superbly either of them acted the part of Juliet in Shakespeare's play, they could not do it persuasively. They don't look the part. I cite the response to Biden's recent State of the Union speech. All of the attention was on Biden's tone of confidence, his strength of voice, and his apparent clarity of thought -- not what he said. 

Ronna McDaniel would not be hired to be a source of truth. She would be a paid contributor to play a specific role -- the role of Republican quisling and collaborator with Trump, a person who corruptly enabled Trump to spread falsehoods. She would be the semi-reformed villain.

Regular viewers of NBC know that Eugene Robinson is on multiple news panels. Every time the panel is introduced we hear that Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter with The Washington Post. For all I know, he won it 30 years ago for a heartwarming human-interest story about a lost puppy, but that doesn't matter. He won a Pulitzer Prize, so he is presented as a highly-qualified serious reporter for a major newspaper. 

Ronna McDaniel would be introduced as a former Trump enabler who participated in the gaslighting of America, who participated in the fake elector plot in Michigan, and who, even with that effort to undermine democracy, was insufficiently loyal to Trump to keep her job. I can imagine her on the panel next to Eugene Robinson. He gets his intro. Then:

" . . . and Ronna McDaniel, former head of the Republican National Committee, who in that role echoed Trump's false claims of a stolen election and who participated with him in the Michigan fake-elector plot -- actions she now recognizes were lies, but done 'for the team' during her role as RNC head. She was fired by Trump and joins us to give a Republican perspective."

She would be positioned as an unreliable narrator. Because she is a woman and a professed Christian, NBC would need to exercise some care. If she looked like a punching bag, particularly for male news hosts, it would send an unseemly, counter-productive look of misogyny -- a man humiliating a woman when he asks her tough questions. She claims the identity of Christian mother. This could look like a concerted NBC effort to pick on and humiliate "deplorable" Christians, if hosts aren't careful. Avoid that, too. 

Her place on a panel, positioned as a thrust-from-the-Trump-cult Republican, would be to articulate that some of what Trump did and does is criminal. Anti-democratic. Lawless. Shockingly crude as regards women. Dishonest. And that McDaniel, a professional Republican partisan, rejects some parts of Trump-ism, although she also minimizes that because she is a Trump apologist at heart. MAGA Trump-cultists are a lost cause. But there are Republican and Republican-leaning voters up for grabs. They are offended by Trump. Those are the people NBC would be trying to reach with McDaniel trying to unpack Trump, picking between the legal and illegal. 

McDaniel might not last long at NBC if she were forced to confront Trump's most lawless behavior and lies. She would probably quit. She would not like being introduced as a dishonest enabler of an authoritarian criminal. She would be, as Trump celebrated in a Truth Social post, politically homeless -- in Never-never land:

She would not be homeless for long. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and McDaniel's uncle, Mitt Romney, all drew lines in the sand and would not tolerate Trump at his worst. Ronna McDaniel didn't. Trump fired her. 

The easy thing for her to do would have been to work for a few weeks at NBC, realize she looked terrible being described as having a history of partisan lies while trying to defend Trump, and negotiate her way out of the contract. 

Then she would go to Fox, where she can delight audiences by complaining about her treatment by the liberal media. 





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Wednesday, March 27, 2024

NBC should hire back Ronna McDaniel

NBC has this all backwards.

They were right to hire Ronna McDaniel 

They were wrong to cave to the complaints of their liberal on-air anchors. 

Now they are wrong to fire her.

NBC's own story.
Ronna McDaniel was the head of the Republican National Committee from 2017 until early this month. In that role she vouched for Trump. She defended him. She helped promote the Big Lie. She participated in pressuring election officials to decertify the Michigan election. She says she plans to vote for Trump again. 

That makes her a perfect on-air contributor. Liberal commentators at NBC were furious. They should have been thrilled. She wasn't a threat to NBC's credibility. She was a threat to Trump's. 

Ronna McDaniel is no hero now that she is starting to come clean on Trump's fake-elector plot and the Big Lie. She is very late to the game. Most of her damage was done. She represented the official public face of Republicans, and she normalized Trump. She did not leave the RNC voluntarily. She was fired. She was not loyal enough. She made her way to NBC because she needed a new perch.

The usual suspects of liberal media people rose up in righteous indignation at her hiring. You hired a liar, they said, and we won't stand for that. Monday night Rachel Maddow said:

You wouldn’t hire a wise guy -- a made man, like a mobster, to work in a DA’s office. You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TCA screener. And so, I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable, and I hope they will reverse their decision.

Those news hosts have it backwards. NBC should have her on air often. 

Here is a link to the transcript of the interview between McDaniel and Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. Welker was ready for this interview. It established that the RNC was in on Trump's plot to pressure Michigan to discard the election Biden won. Welker got McDaniel to admit she had been lying about it, and that Biden won, "fairly and squarely." It shows McDaniel scrambling to preserve some sense of legitimate "face."  

NBC should make McDaniel a centerpiece of Republicans trying to justify Trump. She reportedly was set to earn $300,000/year. NBC should have made her earn it. Ask her tough, embarrassing questions. When Joy Reid is through with her, pass her along to Chris Hayes. When he is done, pass her to Rachel Maddow. From her to Lawrence O'Donnell. Then to Stephanie Ruhle. Repeat as needed. 

McDaniel calls herself a "Michigan mom" and a Christian. The E. Jean Carroll defamation case and the Stormy Daniels case are current news. Ask McDaniel what Christian mothers should say to their daughters about men like Trump grabbing and penetrating women with their fingers. Is it OK for Trump to do that? Ask McDaniel how she explains the E. Jean Carroll case to her children. How does she explain why she still supports him for president? 

How should good Republican mothers explain Stormy Daniels to their daughters?

Ask McDaniel what she thinks about the audiotape of Trump bragging to Mar-a-Lago guests about having the classified documents he was waving around at the table. Do Republicans think it is OK to talk about government secrets like this? Trump says it was wrong for the FBI to have used a search warrant to retrieve them. As a good Republican, do you agree with Trump? 

Mike Pence said Trump demanded that he violate the Constitution. Is violating the Constitution OK? If it is wrong to violate the Constitution, why does she trust Trump not to do it again?

Alabama says fertilized eggs are human souls. As a Christian mother and Republican, what exactly do you say to couples who want to have babies and need to use IVF? 

A prudent Republican politician knows better than to put him or her self in a position to be humiliated on national news. But Ronna McDaniel signed up for that, and for only $300,000/year. It is a bargain for NBC. It would create popular segments of news shows. It would expose the way that Trump and extremists within the GOP have distorted their party. 

For seven years at the RNC McDaniel helped normalize Trump's grift and lawlessness. She clearly wants to look normal and reasonable, but Trump is not normal and reasonable. She cannot scramble fast enough to avoid the simple reality that Trump and MAGA behavior are indefensible. She exposes that. The longer she sticks it out before she resigns, the better for NBC and the country. 

Hire her back.




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Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Oregon's Uncle Phil

I've been a Nike fan.

Now it's more complicated.

Nike is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. I have considered it the "home team" of athletic wear. I have been a fan of Phil Knight, too.

Phil Knight, Nike's founder, has made huge gifts to the University of Oregon, my home-state flagship university. 

Phil Knight ran track when he was a student at the "U of O" in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene advertises itself as Track Town USA. Oregonians were early adopters of jogging and running for casual exercise. Nike money helps maintain that Oregon tradition. 

Knight could move his personal domicile to Texas and probably save on taxes, but he hasn't done it. Not yet, anyway. Oregon needs a rich guy. California has its Silicon Valley billionaires, but Phil Knight is Oregon's, with an estimated net worth of $40 billion. He's been loyal to Oregon so I've been loyal right back. I buy Nike stuff. I have worn Nike running shoes for decades for running and casual wear. The Pegasus model is my favorite.

Pegasus: Lightweight, cushiony, slipper-like.

They are crazy-expensive -- about $125 -- and they are manufactured in Asia, so there's got to be a lot of margin in them for Nike, but that's OK. Some of that margin comes back to Oregon. 

Three months ago my sister surprised me by telling me that I should sell the Nike stock I own. "Nike is going downhill," she said. "Nike shoes are good, but they aren't as good as Hoka shoes."

I told her I had never heard of Hoka. 

"They are so comfortable," she said.  She was wearing a pair. Hers looked garish and clunky, like this.

Or maybe the orange ones.  All I remember was that they were brightly colored and had thick, rounded heels. 



My sister said the rounded heel makes her feel like she is walking downhill, or gliding effortlessly, the way we feel walking on those moving walkways at airports. "They are the most amazing shoes I have ever worn," she said.

I looked on-line for Hoka shoes. They were $150/pair! I felt guilty going to REI, the Pacific Northwest-headquartered recreational equipment store to try on some. I felt like I was cheating Nike. My sister was right. The shoes were incredibly comfortable. Something about the rounded heel, I think, rolls my feet forward when I walk. 

These are three months old and have about 300 miles of walking on them:


I felt disloyal to Oregon. 

And then this:  

I have always gotten along well with Republicans. Probably half of my clients were Republicans back when I was a financial advisor. Before Trump transformed the GOP, Republicans had the normal spectrum of political thought, with a lean against taxes on rich people and opposition to abortion, but still supportive of law and good order.

Trump forces Republican officeholders to toe his line on issues central to democratic government. Otherwise you are a RINO. Non-Trump Republicans are so uncomfortable in the new GOP that they are resigning their seats in congress. That is almost unheard of, but it is happening. Being in the caucus demands too much of them.

Ronna McDaniel just burned her bridges with the GOP when she said in public that, really, now that she is free to speak, Biden did win the 2020 election and it was wrong for Trump to try to overthrow it with violence. McDaniel is the perfect case to show the problem with electing Republicans to state offices. As part of the team, she had to stick to the program of overthrowing and denying elections. She knew better. She knew it was a lie, but to be a Republican she had to tell it.

A Republican state senator in good standing, Kim Thatcher, a former candidate for secretary of state, the chief election officer of the state, is the kind of officeholder who will be funded by Knight's donation. She led Oregon's effort to join the Texas lawsuit that would have thrown out Biden electoral votes in six states. Randy Sparacino, the non-partisan mayor of Medford -- a pretty normal-sounding guy usually -- had to abandon that moderation and sound like the election-denying crew that leads the local Republican party and the state senate's GOP caucus and its PAC. He had a long career in law enforcement, yet to be a Republican in good standing he was stuck tolerating a flagrant scofflaw who condemns the people who investigate and prosecute crimes. He paid a high price for party loyalty. It sabotaged his campaign, as I wrote in detail two years ago. 

It is Trump's party. You can mumble. You can tell people in private that you don't agree 100% with Trump. But in a public vote, you stick with the team. The team tolerates -- and in many cases actively promotes -- the Big Lie and the mechanisms for overthrowing elections. It is dangerous to have Republicans in that position.

So I am not surprised that Phil Knight likes Republicans. Democrats want to tax him more heavily than do Republicans. But I am disappointed that he wants to support them now, when Republicans must be Trump compliant, on issues that involve respect for our democracy.

I hope Nike quickly copies Hoka's rounded heel design. I also hope Phil Knight stops trying to elect people who will toe Trump's line.



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Monday, March 25, 2024

Misplaced loyalty: Just a few little white lies for a good cause

     “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team. Now I get to be a little bit more myself.”
                     Ronna McDaniel, on Meet the Press

Trump asks too much of loyal Republicans.  

It will haunt them.

At some point Republican Party officials and officeholders will take off the logo-wear of being loyal Trump-supporting, MAGA-compliant Republicans. Ronna McDaniel is giving us an early look at what I expect will take place. Forgetting. Denial. And disassociation. 

She wasn't really being herself, she said.

Now she says it: "The violence that happened on January 6th is unacceptable. It doesn't represent our country. It certainly doesn't represent my party."

On November 17, 2020 Trump and McDaniel were together on a conference call urging the two Republicans on the four-person certification board for Wayne County (i.e., Detroit), Michigan, not to certify the election for the county. Biden had carried Michigan by 154,000 votes. "Do not sign it. . . We will get you attorneys," McDaniel urged.

McDaniel, a Michigan voter, claimed fraud. Michigan's Department of State said they had investigated and audited the election and said her claim was false. The Trump/McDaniel telephone call was part of the plan for Michigan GOP partisans to meet secretly and sign documents claiming that Trump's electors were "duly elected." Throughout the past three-plus years McDaniel has backed Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the January 6 Capitol riot was "legitimate political discourse." 

There is a problem once a person attempts to move on from Trump. Trump's actions are out in public. He is a scofflaw. He insists on things that are observably untrue. He proudly and openly sought to overthrow the election. He proudly and openly took classified documents, shared them casually, hid them and lied about it to the courts, but asserts today that doing this is OK. He sat quietly and watched his supporters ransack he Capitol, and now he calls them patriots and heroes. To be a Republican in good standing one needs to be on board with Trump. As RNC chair, McDaniel was loyal to Trump, but not loyal enough. She was replaced by Trump's daughter-in-law. 

Now McDaniel wants a new life, back again as an American in good standing. Now she says that people convicted of crimes on January 6 deserve to be in prison. 

In the aftermath of the German surrender in 1945, most Nazis and Nazi sympathizers said they weren't really Nazis. We were just caught up in the tragic madness of the era, they said. Their forgetting, denial, and disassociation mostly worked, and the world moved on. The victors focused attention on top leaders and the participants in death camps, not the rank and file people who made the Nazi war effort possible. 

As time passes, Republicans will try to move on, as McDaniel is doing now. It will be difficult for them. There are videotapes, phone records, memories, and motivated accusers. Liz Cheney called out McDaniel in a tweet:

Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot & his effort to pressure MI officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies & called 1/6 “legitimate political discourse.” That’s not “taking one for the team.” It’s enabling criminality & depravity.

Chuck Todd condemned NBC for "normalizing" McDaniel by paying her $300,000/year to be a network contributor. We saw her lie to the American public on matters of great consequence, Todd said. 

Officeholders in current good standing as Republicans have a record. Nearly all are going along with Trump. They must. He demands loyalty. Candidates are stuck with Trump and his claims. Democratic strategists are elated that the most Trump-compliant of Republican nominees are winning key primary elections. They carry Trump baggage.

In the fullness of time, I suspect Republicans will try to shed that baggage. Do Republicans really support overthrowing elections? Do they really think prosecution of crimes done openly constitutes a witch hunt? Are they really OK with Trump's grift and lawbreaking? Some are indeed OK with it. Others, I suspect, are uneasy and are just going along with the team. They are caught up in the tragic madness of the era.

In the bright light of a general election in 2024, Trump and his claims will be a handicap for Republicans. He sounds wildly dishonest. Not to everyone, but to a majority of Americans. As time passes, in the post-Trump world perhaps 10 years from now, I suspect support for Trump will look indefensible.

What were we thinking?



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Sunday, March 24, 2024

Easy Sunday: Local sports in Washington, D.C.

Sports betting is reshaping sports.


I'm not a big sports fan. Back when I worked, I filled out a March Madness "bracket" when people in the office passed it around in mid-March. I didn't care who won. I did it to be sociable and part of the enthusiasm I saw around me. Because I am indifferent about sports, I can see the effect of putting a wager on a game. There is finally a reason to watch the whole game.

Jack Mullen, however, follows sports with genuine interest. He is the designated hitter for this blog when it comes to matters of sports. He was a star athlete at Medford High School almost 60 years ago. We had summer jobs thinning and picking pears together in local orchards. We worked together for U.S. Representative Jim Weaver. Jack Mullen loves sports. He married a woman who loves sports. They lived in Oakland A's territory in the Bay Area. Now they live in Washington, D.C.



Guest Post by Jack Mullen


Local Politics. Local Sports.

I find living in Washington,D.C., no different than living in Medford, Oregon, or any other part of the country. Local politics raises citizen ire as much as the upcoming national election.

Washington is a provincial town. There may be well-heeled lobbyists who live here, or politicos, or ex-politicos, but most people lead normal lives centered around family, schools, going to the grocery store, and taking part in the myriad of options in entertainment and sports. It is the last that has burrowed itself under the skin of Washingtonians.

Despite a century-long history of mediocre teams, a bond over local teams still unites the Washington community. It's probably the only thing that does so. Yes, twice, Washington baseball teams have moved away to the far regions of Minnesota and Texas. The football team once referred to as the Redskins -- now the Commanders (no one likes that name either) -- has forsaken the city for a far-flung Maryland suburb. Presently, the Commanders are in search of a new venue and are playing the three local entities in the DMV (the District, Maryland and Virginia) against each other while searching for the best deal.


Jack wears "A's" logo-wear when he travels.

Still, the City of Washington fights back. Major League Baseball owners gifted Washington a third chance by awarding the city a team, the old Montreal Expos, which became the Washington Nationals in 2005. When they won the World Series in 2019, the entire Washington area celebrated together. The Nationals play in a scenic, new ballpark near the U.S. Capitol.

Washington nailed it, when, in 1997, the new Capital Center opened in downtown D.C. Planners worked out a perfect location where the Metro subway line connects all parts of the region. Fans seeking entertainment need not pay exorbitant parking fees to see the Wizards or Capitals play opponents in the National Basketball Association or the National Hockey League. The area adjacent to the Capital Center is dotted with free museums, restaurants, theaters, and after-hours clubs. Only Madison Square Garden’s setting in New York offers such a comparable multitude of entertainment options.

Last month, the D.C. area received a major jolt when, out of the blue, the two teams’ owner Ted Leonsis, along with Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin, called a news conference to announce Leonsis’ NBA and NHL teams would abandon D.C. and build a new hockey-basketball arena, not in Washington, but across the river in an abandoned Virginia railroad yard, “Potomac Yards.” The cost? Two billion dollars -- a sum to be appropriated by the Virginia state legislature. Governor Youngkin assured Leonsis that he would work with his legislature to carry their plan through. After all, look at all the new jobs that would be created for Virginians. What politician doesn’t like to crow about new jobs they have created?

Governor Youngkin’s strong interest in jobs contrasts with his previous job as head of the private equity company, the Carlyle Group. Youngkin became rich from buying companies, slashing jobs in them, and then bringing them public, reaping huge profits.
 
Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas, chairwoman of the Virginia House Finance and Appropriations Committee, raised concerns over Leonsis and Youngkin’s pet project, and her committee effectively killed the arena plan, at least for the present.

Inspired by Major League Baseball and Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s “Nevada Plan.” Youngkin and Leonsis will badger the Virginia Legislature until they cave. Oakland A’s owner John Fisher hired lobbyists and made large campaign contributions to reluctant legislators until the Nevada state legislature unanimously decided to help Fisher by committing $380 million of taxpayer money to build a new $1.5 billion air-conditioned baseball stadium in Las Vegas. Why Las Vegas? Maybe because California is one of 18 states that outlaw sports gambling; Nevada does not. Who cares if a baseball game is played in an indoor stadium on Astro-Turf when a compliant state legislature gives you $380 million and fans can gamble from their seats while watching a game in air-conditioned comfort?

The current relocation frenzy in sports began in 2018 when the Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law that banned commercial sports betting in most states. As much as the repeal of Prohibition became a new source of fortune in the 1930s, gaming, especially sports gaming, is creating opportunities for investors, especially for professional sports owners.

Leonsis admits his Washington arena is too small for modern gaming. He publicly stated that he believes sportsbooks are “what sports’ future should look and feel like: lots of data, lots of comfortable settings, lots of televisions, lots of ways to learn about gaming.”

In an effort to entice Leonsis to stay in Washington, a new bill was introduced by a D.C. lawmaker Kenyan McDuffie to boost the city’s lackluster sports gambling operation to allow local sports teams and venues to offer citywide mobile sports betting. Judges, politicians, owners, gamblers, the media, all try to create new avenues to gamble. Money seems to be growing on trees. Struggling newspapers, like the Portland Oregonian, are given a life-line of new advertisers who are flooding us with ads on gambling. Same goes for television networks, especially ESPN.

And now, the latest bombshell!

Baseball’s superstar, the L.A. Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani, widely considered the game’s best player since Babe Ruth, admitted assisting his Japanese interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, cover a $4.5 million gambling debt.

The media is indignant. Billionaire team owners from coast-to-coast seem perplexed and confused. Didn’t the 1919 Black Sox scandal teach Americans something about the gambling world? After all, the national pastime’s biggest star, Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with seven of his Chicago White Sox teammates, were all fingered for throwing the World Series.

Will hucksters like Governor Youngkin and team owner Ted Leonsis ease off their efforts to garner two billion dollars from Virginia taxpayers for a new sports and gaming arena in an abandoned Virginia rail yard?

How about the Major League Baseball commissioner's frantic push to beat the NBA and pro basketball’s efforts to land a team in Las Vegas?
 
Will Commissioner Rob Manfred and A’s Owner John Fisher ease up slandering new Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s efforts to keep the Oakland A’s in the state of California, a state which, after all, outlaws sports gambling?

America, take note! 2024 is proving to be a year of reckoning.




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Saturday, March 23, 2024

RISE Law Group hit with attorney fee award.

Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke orders RISE Law Group to pay $142,560 in attorney fees.

The decision came in his Findings and Recommendation in a case against RISE Law Group, Jamie Hazlett, and Maryanne Pitcher. It was an employment case. 

The award to the plaintiff was $10,000. RISE was also ordered to pay the prevailing party's reasonable attorney fees. Those were calculated at $142,560. 

Magistrate Judge Mark Clarke signed the order on the next-to-last day of the eight-day trial I attended last month. I wrote about it on March 8. Attorney fees charged by RISE Law Group were a major subject of that trial. That plaintiff in that case claimed the RISE fees were excessive and unreasonable. 

What happens in local courts is part of the bigger national controversy about the legitimacy of our entire court system. If people have a bad experience with local courts, while also hearing accusations of biased and unfair courts in the national news, Americans' overall trust in the rule of law is diminished. I learned that a local law firm, RISE Law Group, was causing problems for local courts. Jackson County Court Trial Administrator Tina Qualls wrote me saying:

". . .the RISE Law Group has negatively impacted the court’s ability to schedule family law cases. RISE Law Group has filed frequent motions to “affidavit” judges – i.e. objections to specific judges presiding over their cases. This complicates the judges’ dockets, slows scheduling, and results in processing delays - not only RISE Law Group cases but also for other litigants."

I attended that trial to see for myself. Witnesses called by both the defendant and plaintiff said that RISE was unusual in the aggressiveness of their litigation. The plaintiff's lawyers argued that RISE drove up costs unreasonably. RISE argued that their litigation practice was reasonable and productive. A RISE partner herself said in her closing argument that "we have a reputation for aggressive advocacy for our clients and that we expect to be paid." She said they get their clients better than down-the-middle results. An attorney practicing opposite them testified that when RISE was the opposing counsel, he presumed a more contentious divorce case, and therefore sought a higher retainer fee from his own client.

Longer, more contentious resolutions to cases are a second, confounding problem crowding the domestic relations docket in Jackson County.

My post of March 8 posited that the remedy, if any, for local courts would be stronger cases than the one I witnessed. I thought it at least arguable that the RISE fee of $50,000-plus in that divorce case was necessary, even if on first glance it seemed startlingly high, given the financial circumstances of their client.  

There is a second mechanism for dissuading a law firm from crowding court dockets. Aggressive litigation might cause RISE or their clients to pay both their own and the other side's attorney fees. That was the basis for Judge Clarke's findings.

Judge Clarke wrote "Prevailing party attorney fees and costs are mandatory. . . .Congress intended that the wronged employee should receive his full wages plus the penalty without incurring any expense for legal fees or costs." He noted the Ninth Circuit's "lodestar" criteria for determining what is reasonable. These include the time involved for opposing counsel, the standard attorney fees in the area, the novelty of the case, plus any special circumstances.

On pages 11 and 12 of Clarke's order he described special circumstances:

Finally, the Court notes the ferocity with which the Defendants have litigated this case. The Defendants removed this case to federal court on September 15, 2022, and filed an Answer on October 5, 2022. Defendants then proceeded to notice a deposition to Plaintiff immediately, despite opposing counsel alerting them that no depositions could take place prior to completing a Rule 26(f) conference. Defendants, being the party who removed the case, should have been aware of this rule in federal court, yet they persisted in sending notices of deposition for even earlier dates, until Plaintiff was forced to file a motion for a protective order on October 19 2022 (ECF #8). Similarly, later in the case, Defendants noticed depositions for ten different witnesses in this matter, and they objected to streamlining of discovery, (see ECF Order #30). Plaintiff asserts that several of the depositions noticed by the Defendants were cancelled at the last minute, requiring Plaintiff's attorneys to expend a significant amount of effort to prepare for nothing.

Magistrate Judge Clarke concluded with:

While the Defendants were well within their rights to litigate this case as zealously as they deemed appropriate, they cannot now complain about the hours billed in response to this tactic.

I was struck by the word "ferocity."

In the case of Mrs. O against RISE, the partners said they get good results and have happy clients. That zealousness comes with a risk. Possibly the opposing party will ultimately pay the cost for that zealousness through a better award. Maybe not. Testimony by Mrs. O in her case was that RISE told her that her soon-to-be-former husband would end up paying the cost of litigation. It turned out to be more complicated than that. 

After my March 8 post, I received criticism saying I was too easy on RISE. Critics said that, in effect, I did an advertisement for RISE. I had quoted a RISE partner saying they were called a "bulldog" and a "man-eater" by competing lawyers, but that their aggressiveness gave good value. Sometimes it probably does. I thought they presented a strong argument in the case I observed. But sometimes apparently not. Multiple former clients have filed complaints about their fees.

Driving up the costs of settling disputes has a risk. That is something for litigants to consider, including ones who considered my March 8 post an advertisement for RISE. You need to pay your attorney. The fee may surprise you. Sometimes you may need to pay your opponent's attorney. In this case RISE was both the client and the attorney, and they were ordered to pay $142,560. They were ferocious.

                                           ---                    ---



NOTE: The courts are the public's business. If divorce cases are slow to be resolved in a community, for whatever reasons, it is public business. I'm writing here as an opinion journalist, one with a small audience, something over 2,000 a day, 365 days a year. 

These are my opinions; no one else’s. I am writing based on the judge's document and observations I made watching and reviewing audio recordings of testimony and closing arguments made in open court. My wife is an attorney. She is the executive director of the Center for Nonprofit Legal Services. Neither she nor CNPLS has anything to do with my blog. She rarely reads it.

I welcome comments from parties to any of the disputes I am describing, or from people with professional knowledge of the local courts. I would expect to publish them verbatim. 



[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]



Friday, March 22, 2024

Bill Clinton/Donald Trump

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
          William Faulkner

Democrats had a problem dealing with the Clinton/Lewinsky mess.

Republicans have a problem dealing with Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election.

The problems are different.

I mention Clinton/Lewinsky to remind Democrats not to fool themselves. Bill Clinton dallied with a star-struck young woman and then lied about it. "Move on," most Democrats said. Republicans impeached him, saying this was a high crime. Democrats said it wasn't OK, but it wasn't a high crime. Politically engaged people have an instinct to stand behind their party leader. The leader represents a set of policy ideas and a coalition of people. If the leader falters, so does everything else.  

Most Republican voters support Trump. They deny or minimize some of what Trump did openly and in public. Most officeholders and partisans want to "move on," saying they want to "look forward," not backward. Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and the other rivals to Trump take that approach. This is a kind of "safe harbor" of thought and talk for Republicans. Don't look back. 

Clinton, 1998

I make a distinction between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Lying about improper sex play with an employee does not endanger the republic, whereas a multi-faceted effort to overturn an election most certainly does endanger it. But that is not the distinction I am making. More important is that Bill Clinton was deeply ashamed. He recognized what he did to be morally and legally wrong. Democrats -- and Americans -- could "move on" because Clinton was not trying to define his behavior as good or legitimate. Quite the opposite.

Donald Trump is repeating the Big Lie, still claiming he won by a landslide. He validates political violence to stay in power. He praises people who were videotaped and convicted of crimes on January 6. He defends taking classified documents, then sharing them with country club guests, hiding them, and lying to the courts about hiding them. He condemns Mike Pence.

Saluting January 6 rioters

The announcer at the rally in Ohio this week introduced Trump saying "Please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages." They played a recording made by the prisoners. Trump began with these words:
Well, thank you very much and you see the spirit from the hostages, and that’s what they are is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly and you know that and everybody knows that, and we’re going to be working on that sooner. The first day we get into office, we’re going to save our country and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots, and they were unbelievable patriots and are. You see the spirit just cheering? They’re cheering while they’re doing that and they did that in prison and it’s a disgrace in my opinion.

Unlike Bill Clinton, Trump is not ashamed. He calls January 6 rioters "unbelievable patriots."

This week Mike Pence announced he would not support Donald Trump's re-election. It may seem obvious that Pence would oppose someone who inspired a mob chanting "hang Mike Pence" to break into the Capitol to find him, then sat passively watching them do it on TV. In fact, Pence did an act of political courage. A majority of Republican voters prefer Trump and condemn Pence for "betraying" him. Pence obeyed the rules. He obeyed the Constitution. That was his betrayal. 

October, 2023. Pence presented himself as an alternative to Trump.

The split between Trump and Pence lays down a clear marker. Trump endorses political violence to retain office. This isn't merely "implied" in a speech that became famous for his prediction of a "bloodbath" if he isn't elected. The bloodbath imagery was in fact part of the overall validation of extra-judicial, extra-constitutional behavior, but his opening words are overt and denoted. He says the people who invaded the Capitol are the good guys. The people who stopped them, arrested them, prosecuted them, the juries that found them guilty, and the prisons that now hold them -- those people, the people representing law, justice system, and the peaceful transfer of power -- they are the villains.

Republicans who support and endorse Trump are not saying the past is past and Trump is different now, so we can move on. This is Trump and this is now.

There it is. That is the choice for Republicans. They are saying today's Trump OK.




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