Roger O Green

Emoluments clause: public office for private gain

The wholesale looting of America is apparently not an impeachable offense.

My good friend Anne, who I’ve known at least since Gerald Ford was President, asks: Why hasn’t the current regime been charged with using public office for private gain? (Sorry, kinda rhetorical).

It’s a reasonable question, given a recent ruling in which a judge dismissed suits claiming Trump violated the emoluments clause.

“The plaintiffs argued that because Trump properties rent out hotel rooms and meeting spaces to other governments, the president was violating a constitutional provision that bans the acceptance of foreign emoluments, or gifts from foreign powers.

“But Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York ruled that the plaintiffs, led by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), lacked standing to bring such a case, saying it was up to Congress to prevent the president from accepting emoluments.”

To the first point, it wasn’t merely that the Trump organization was renting out space, it was with the (wink, wink) impression that those countries would receive favored status in dealing with the United States.

Precisely how much benefit IS the regime leader receiving from these deals? Who knows since he doesn’t release his tax returns. That, of course, is why most of us believe the dreadful tax bill that was recently passed and signed will favor him economically. We don’t even need to read the tea leaves.

To the second point, about standing, Judge Daniels wants THIS Congress to hold him accountable? I’m hoping that lawsuits still out there by “a group of congressional Democrats and another filed by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District” will have more success.

Unfortunately, engaging in class warfare and participating in the wholesale looting of America is apparently not an impeachable offense as long as two branches of government agree to it.

Yes, I think it’s obvious that the emoluments clause has been violated, and repeatedly. But I’m not king.

Musical throwback: No More by Elvis Presley

It is, “together with Yesterday by The Beatles,… one of the most recorded songs in the history of music.”

One of my work colleagues had this Elvis Presley video which I couldn’t identify, though it looked as though it was from one of his movies, none of which I’ve ever seen. Yet the tune was irritatingly familiar. Dustbury identified the video as No More from the soundtrack to Blue Hawaii.

That made sense, he noted, because it came out right after Elvis had an enormous hit with It’s Now or Never, an English rewrite of O Sole Mio, the “globally known Neapolitan song written in 1898.” Its lyrics were written by Giovanni Capurro and the music was composed by Eduardo di Capua. Aaron Schroeder, Wally Gold, and di Capua are credited on It’s Now or Never.

Here are a few examples of when Elvis borrowed from classical music; compare and contrast.

Don Robertson, credited as the co-composer of No More with Hal Blair, said he based it on the Italian tune La Paloma. But in fact Sebastián Yradier was a Spanish Basque composer who wrote this habanera around 1860 after a visit to Cuba. It is, “together with Yesterday by The Beatles,… one of the most recorded songs in the history of music.”

From this list of Elvis songs, I checked who was cited for writing Love Me Tender, since it was based on what I thought was an old folk tune, Aura Lee. It’s credited to Elvis Presley; Vera Matson (pseudonym of Ken Darby, uncredited – what’s THAT all about?); and George R. Poulton (1828–1867), who was “a musician and composer, best known for composing the tune to Aura Lea.” (I’ve seen it spelled both ways.)

Of course, Aura Lee has often been rewritten. When we were kids, the lyrics were:
If you must take medicine
Take it orally
That’s because the other way
Is more painfully

Listen to
No More – Elvis Presley here (the video I saw, unlabeled) or here
La Paloma – Plácido Domingo here
La Paloma – Julio Iglesias here

Love Me Tender – Elvis Presley here
Aura Lee – A Cappella Trudbol here
Aura Lee- Jim Reeves here
Aura Lee – 97th Regimental String Band here

Baseball Hall of Fame 2018

One could make a good case for Omar Vizquel

Somehow, I missed the fact that the ballots for the 2018 Hall of Fame were distributed in November to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA). They voted by mail to select from a ballot of recently retired players and were returned by December 31. The results will be announced on January 24.

The candidates can be found here – inductees will need 75% of the vote.

The ones I would have picked:

1 Barry Bonds (6th year of eligibility, out of 10; 53.8% of the votes last ballot)
2 Roger Clemens (6th year, 54.1%)

Still, by far, the best players on the ballot. One of the greatest position players (Bonds) and pitchers (Clemens) of all time. Performance-enhancing drugs were not really regulated until 2004, and their achievements before any allegations were stellar. They each received over 50% of the vote last time, with 75% needed, which is on the upswing.

3 Vladimir Guerrero (pictured, 2nd year, 71.8%) – the outfielder had career batting average of .318, with 449 home runs. If the ballot wasn’t so stuffed last time, he would have made it then

4 Chipper Jones (1st year) – the third baseman/outfielder spent his 19-year career with the Atlanta Braves and hit over .300, with 468 homers

5 Trevor Hoffman (3rd year, 74.0%) – painfully close for the guy with 601 saves

6 Jim Thome (1st year) – with 612 home runs, he is 8th on the all-time list

7 Larry Walker (8th year, 21.9%) – though having a .313 batting average, his 9.5 years playing his home games in Colorado, advantageous to a hitter, has made him a less attractive choice

8 Edgar Martinez (9th year, 58.6%) – voters have been resistant for voters to select a full-time designated hitter to the Hall, though they’ve picked Frank Thomas, who was a DH about 58% of the time

9 Jeff Kent (5th year, 16.7%) – solid infielder at three positions, solid hitter, and has the same birthday as mine

10 Mike Mussina (5th year, 51.8%) – solid pitcher for many years, not always the ace of the staff – he won 270 games at a point that winning 300, once the gold standard, is almost impossible to achieve with a five-man rotation

One could make a good case for Omar Vizquel, the slick-fielding infielder with over 2800 hits
***
The National Football League playoffs start this weekend. My rooting interests this postseason, in order:
1. Buffalo Bills – only team that plays its home games in New York State
2. Pittsburgh Steelers – the favorite team of Chuck Miller
3. Philadelphia Eagles – my favorite bus driver’s favorite team
4. Carolina Panthers – where my parents moved to in 1974
5. Jacksonville Jaguars – they’ve been terrible for a decade, went from 3-13 in 2016 to 11-5 in 2017, and the city took a beating from Hurricane Irma in September 2017
6-11. whoever
12. New England Patriots

Why it’s so cold (spoiler alert: it’s global warming)

“We are getting the Arctic temps that should remain in the Arctic to stop the ice sheet melting.”

Back on the evening of December 28, 2017, someone wrote on his infamous Twitter feed: “In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”

According to Ed Landing, NY State Paleontologist emeritus, i.e., an actual scientist, who has been writing on the global hyperwarming:

“Here is why it’s so cold – the jet stream has a lobe of Arctic air that’s come down over a good portion of the eastern US, which is unusual. Why unusual? Because that lobe is caused by an overly heated Pacific. Warm air travels north. The excessive heat of the Pacific has gone northeast, as warm air does, and is encountering and pushing the Arctic air aside and down toward the US, thus the lobe.

“In addition, a great lobe of warm air over the Atlantic is pushing northeast and locks in the cold jet stream air over the US—and is warming western Europe. Last year western Europe had the lobe, with killer cold.

“The lobe is stationary because there’s a lot of “hot air” being pushed north. How long will the cold continue? Until a storm or front from the southwest interferes with the jet stream and begins to push it back north, so some of that warm air can come into place over us.

“Is this related to global warming? Yes. If the Pacific, at the equator and tropics, wasn’t so warm from the climate warming (remember the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has been nearly destroyed by the warmer ocean temps), the excess heat wouldn’t be pushing north and thus forming the jet stream into the lobe over us. Thus we are getting the Arctic temps that should remain in the Arctic to stop the ice sheet melting. Everything is haywire.

“It’s good that it’s windy here (sort of), even though the wind chill makes it far colder because that means there’s a front from the southwest trying to get through to push the jet stream back north.”

At least the Tweeter-in-chief didn’t throw a snowball.

Random 2017 posts, a New Year’s tradition

Someone had suggested I put some pro-vaping info on my blog recently, as a result of my previous annual Great American Smokeout posts.

In the beginning of each year, I select a post for each month of the previous year, using a random number generator, which may not actually be random, or not, but is adequate for this exercise. I like to see how well it reflected that year just passed, or did not.

I figure if I do ABC Wednesday once a week, it should show up once or twice. Those link summaries are 2 or 3 times a month, so a couple of those too, I imagine.

And Allah help me, but I have no idea how many times I mentioned, or at least alluded to, the current American regime. It was painful enough to live through, and I might have to regurgitate it? Them’s the rules.

I’m fairly sure I got this from Gordon, who lives in Chicago and still remains the only non-local blogger I’ve ever met.

But I love it because it’s quasi-mathematical, like doing the first level of these Brilliant quizzes that I get in my email and occasionally get right. “You have a one-day streak going.”

The pic is me putting in a random search in Google limiting to .gov site. The pic’s from NIST, but I don’t know the context.

January: Mary Tyler Moore: “girl with the three names”
1974: AITF, Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers#, MTM#, Bob Newhart#, Burnett (hr)

When one of my favorite actresses died, I noted the CBS lineup during the run of the show named after her. AITF is All in the Family. MTM is of course the Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show is the one based in Chicago, and Burnett is The Carol Burnett Show. The # indicated shows produced by her and then-husband Grant Tinker’s production company.

February: Smoothing over rough edges with friends
The message the sender thinks she’s giving is “I’m a good friend/relative, just trying to be helpful.”

Answering Chris’ Ask Roger Anything question, citing Deborah Tannen’s 2001 book “I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You’re All Adults”

March: March rambling #2: Vitiligo As Body Art
This is what happens to your body when you stop having sex

Landing on a provocative link.

April: Systematically listening to the music
LOTS of Paul Simon gets played in October, so the S&G is played in November, for Art’s birthday.

Explaining the pathology of my CD playing.

May: Q is for Quisp and Quake cereal
It [Quisp] was brought back in the mid-1980s, then again in the 1990s and in 2001, where it was relaunched as the “first Internet cereal”.

ABC Wednesday post about my fascination with breakfast cereals.

June: June rambling #2: Sheila E. and Lynn Mabry
Anita Pallenberg Passes Away at Age 73

The second death I’ve hit on.

July: Music Throwback Canada Day: The Guess Who
“Quality Records credited the [1965] single [Shakin’ All Over] only to ‘Guess Who?’ in an attempt to build a mystique around the record…”

I’ve been doing Music Throwback almost weekly as well.

August: August rambling #2: Mamihlapinatapai
He has a fake Civil War monument at his golf course and Lies About His Reaction To Charlottesville

Ah, the first tRump references

September: Enroll in the Equifax free ID theft protection ASAP
You may have heard about the Equifax cybersecurity incident potentially impacting approximately 143 million U.S. consumers.

One of the relatively few times I posted twice in one day.

October: Q is for a Famous Quotation
That apparent need to always say SOMETHING is often to the detriment of the speaker, and, quite often, of us all.

For ABC Wednesday. The quote was: “It is better to remain silent and be thought of as a a fool than to speak up and remove any doubt.”

November: E-cigarettes: a solution to smoking?
“In addition to the unknown health effects, early evidence suggests that e-cigarette use may serve as an introductory product for preteens and teens who then go on to use other tobacco products, including cigarettes…”

Someone had suggested I put some pro-vaping info on my blog recently, as a result of my previous annual Great American Smokeout posts. But, in doing the research, I became less than enthralled with this alternative, though I suppose it’s better for people already smoking.

December 18: Xmas: St. Nicolas Day to Russian Christmas
What is Santa’s favorite sweater?
His Fleece Navidad

ABCW: I HAD to give you the following line, or you’d be lacking the payoff
***
And now the Kickstarter I’m supporting (deadline: Wed, January 10 2018 11:59 AM EST). LOLISTRAW is the world’s first edible, hypercompostable straw aimed at replacing the 500M plastic straws used every day in the US.