Category Archives: Random Blogging

A Warning About Reservations.Com

It’s summer, and lots of us take trips during the summer. We also avail ourselves of the convenience of the Internet to make reservations. I love doing these tasks online–but an experience my husband and I had recently is an example of convenience’s downside.

We have driven to our timeshare in South Carolina for years, and we have a favorite stopping place along the way: Newberry, South Carolina. It’s a charming little town with a historic Opera House and a couple of good restaurants. For the past several years, we’ve stayed at a Hampton Inn that’s in the walkable middle of the town.

This year, my husband went online to make reservations for two rooms–one for us, one for my older son, who will be with us. The emailed confirmation showed just one room, so he called to correct it. Evidently, Hampton no longer has its own reservation system; he was connected to (misnamed) customer service at Reservations. Com. After a lengthy discussion with someone for whom English was clearly not the native language, he was assured that the reservation had been corrected.

We then received an email confirmation (still for one room, but showing 3 adults instead of two)–and a second confirmation for a Holiday Inn in Ardmore, Oklahoma. 

Neither of us has ever heard of Ardmore, Oklahoma, let alone had any desire to visit there. The confirmation said our credit card had already been charged and the amount was unrefundable.

If that wasn’t sufficiently surreal, the telephone conversation between my husband and the individual at Reservations.com who answered his call was even more so. The man kept saying the reservation couldn’t be cancelled, and my husband kept saying (eventually, shouting) that we’d never made it. The closest we got to a resolution was the agent saying that he would “look into it” and if it turned out the charge was their mistake, it would be refunded.

Our next call was to our credit card company, to determine the process for disputing a charge.

Thanks to Trump, I’m mad all the time anyway, and I decided that I would write an “extra” blog post to alert readers to what was probably simple incompetence, but in the alternative, might also be a scam. Perhaps most people examine their credit card statements more closely than we do, but I wonder how many people have paid for a room they never reserved without catching the problem.

It turns out to be impossible to contact the Hampton Inn directly. Their phone goes directly to Reservations.com, and their website has no email contact listed. Anyone needing to speak to one particular hotel in the chain to resolve an issue is out of luck.

I don’t know what Reservations.com considers “customer service,” but I would warn against using them whenever possible. We had two phone calls with them: the first handled by someone with great difficulty communicating (and communicating, presumably, was the job description); and the second with a defensive asshole. (Excuse the terminology, but nothing else seems accurate.)

If anyone from Hampton Inn (or Hilton, the parent company) is reading this–you have a BIG PROBLEM. Sometimes, outsourcing is definitely NOT a good idea.

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The Non-Abstract Effects Of Gerrymandering

It’s hard not to be bitter in the wake of the Supreme Court’s intellectually dishonest refusal to protect the legitimacy of democratic governance.

For one thing, over the past couple of years, as I have delved more deeply into the research, I’ve discovered that gerrymandering–aka partisan redistricting–does more than skew election results. A lot more.

I’ve previously pointed out that here in Indiana, where partisan redistricting has carved up metropolitan areas and subordinated urban populations to rural ones, gerrymandering has given us distribution formulas favoring rural areas over cities when divvying up dollars for roads and schools, among other inequities.

And a recent article in The Guardian has connected gerrymandering to the recent spate of radical abortion laws.

Fifty-four thousand votes out of nearly 4 million. That’s what separated Stacey Abrams from Brian Kemp in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election, a sign of how closely contested this once reliably red, southern state has become.

Earlier this month, however, Georgia’s legislature responded to the state’s closely divided political climate not with thoughtful compromise but by passing one of the most restrictive abortion bansin the United States.

An April poll by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 70% of Georgians support the landmark Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion. The new state ban is opposedby 48% of Georgians and supported by only 43%. So why would the legislature enact such an extreme measure?

For that matter, why would Ohio, Alabama, Missouri and other states establish similar “fetal heartbeat” laws that are far more restrictive than their constituents support?

One important answer is gerrymandering: redistricting voting districts to give the party in power an edge – making it almost impossible for the other side to win a majority of seats, even with a majority of votes. Sophisticated geo-mapping software and voluminous voter data turned this ancient art into a hi-tech science when the US redistricted after the 2010 census.

Give credit where it’s due: the GOP has been far more adept at using these new tools than the Democrats (probably because Republicans recognize that they are increasingly a minority party and must cheat if they are going to win).

As the Guardian reports, gerrymandering has allowed the GOP to control state legislatures with supermajorities even when voters prefer Democratic candidates by hundreds of thousands of votes. Gerrymandering thus nullifies elections and insulates lawmakers from democratic accountability.

Despite lacking any mandate for an extreme agenda in a closely divided nation, Republican lawmakers have pushed through new voting restrictions, anti-labor laws, the emergency manager bill that led to poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, and now, these strict abortion bans. Electorally, there’s little that Democrats can do to stop it.

The article outlined evidence of extreme gerrymandering in several states where legislatures have passed laws not supported by voters.

In Ohio, the article pointed to “zero evidence” that voters hold extreme opinions on abortion, and noted that polls show more voters opposed to that state’s new “heartbeat” bill than supportive of it. A University of Chicago study showed that barely half the total vote in Ohio gave Republicans more than 63% of the seats– simply because the maps were “surgically designed” to ensure that few seats would be competitive.

There’s a lot more data, and I encourage you to click through and read the entire article. But (as I have repeated endlessly) the bottom line is simple: the only way to overcome the unfair advantage Republicans have built for themselves is massive turnout. As I posted yesterday, unusually high turnout in the 2018 elections was enough in many districts to overcome built-in advantages as high as 5-8 points.

We need to remind discouraged voters that gerrymandering is based upon prior voting behavior. If people who rarely or never vote show up at the polls, a significant number of supposedly safe seats can change hands.

It has never been more important to get out the vote. America’s future–and that of our children and grandchildren–depends upon it.

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Trump Voters Thought He Was A Good Businessman?

When Donald Trump chose Orlando, Florida for the kickoff of his 2020 campaign, the city demanded up-front payment of the costs it would incur.

They were smart.

Because this President doesn’t pay his bills–never has. According to multiple media reports, 10 cities are still waiting for Trump’s campaign to pay $841,000 in bills from previous rallies. Some of those bills go back to 2016.

Ironically, Trump often gushes at rallies about police officers and other brave first responders, but his campaign is apparently stiffing police and firefighters across the nation.

“Do we love law enforcement or what?” he asked at a rally in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, in October. Apparently, his campaign didn’t love them enough to even bother to respond to a $16,191 bill for city police and other safety costs, according to the report by the nonprofit CPI in conjunction with NBC and CNBC.

According to the Washington Post, 

President Trump’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the Fourth of July is expected to drive up security costs for an annual event that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the nation’s capital.

But the president has still not fully paid the bill for the last time he addressed a massive crowd on the Mall: his 2017 inauguration.

The Trump administration and Congress owe D.C. more than $7 million in expenses from Trump’s inauguration, according to federal and city financial records. The total cost of the four-day celebration, which culminated with a parade and gathering of roughly 600,000 people on the Mall, was $27.3 million.

As a result, the District has been forced to dip into a special fund that covers annual security costs for protecting the city from terrorist threats and hosting other events such as demonstrations, state funerals and the visits of foreign dignitaries. That fund, which for years was adequately replenished by federal dollars, is now on track to enter the red by this fall, records show.

As the article noted (in what may have been a subtle dig), the expenses of the inauguration were “formidable despite the fact that attendance was far more sparse than at Obama’s Inauguration.”

It’s no secret that Trump has been a deadbeat throughout his career. I remember television interviews during the 2016 campaign with vendors he’d stiffed over the years, and reports of the numerous times he’d been sued. (As I recall, the number of lawsuits was in the thousands.)

Evidently, the D.C. liquor board understands that business history. According to The Washington Examiner, a group of Washington, D.C., residents are being permitted to challenge the Trump Hotel’s liquor license on the basis of President Trump’s character. The group is asking to have the hotel’s liquor license revoked, citing a D.C. law that requires license applicants to be of “good character and generally fit for the responsibilities of licensure.”

“Donald Trump, the true and actual owner of the Trump International Hotel, is not a person of good character,” the residents wrote in their complaint, because of “certain lies he has told, his involvement in relevant fraudulent and other activity demonstrating his lack of integrity, and his refusal to abide by the law or to stop associating with known criminals.”

Instead of denying the complaint, the board issued a ruling allowing for the complaint to move to mediation or a hearing before the board.

There’s so much more the group can point to. The multiple bankruptcies. The fraud that was Trump University  (he settled those claims for 25 million). The unwillingness of American banks to do business with him and his subsequent coziness with–and dependence on– Russian oligarchs. His use of the office of President to line his and his children’s pockets, arguably in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Etc.

Some “businessman.” No wonder he doesn’t want to disclose his tax records; according to knowledgable observers, they will show (among other things) that he has grossly inflated his net worth.

It all begs the question: how did this crude and classless deadbeat come to occupy the Oval Office? And is there anything–other than White Nationalism, fragile masculinity and misogyny–that can explain why anyone would still support him?

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How The Internet Facilitates Dishonesty

Sometimes, just skimming the news is enough to trigger heartburn.

In addition to the hourly reminders that our country is being “governed” (note quotation marks) by a dangerously ignorant lunatic and the daily disclosures of corruption and cronyism, we are routinely reminded of the difficulty of separating all manner of informational wheat from both inadvertent and purposeful chaff.

The other day, the Guardian carried a story about dishonesty in–of all things– a women’s fertility app.

I didn’t even know such things existed. It would never have occurred to me that fertility could be managed on line–but evidently, in the age of the Internet, pretty much everything is subject to online interventions.

The problem is, it turns out that this particular app comes with an agenda.

A popular women’s health and fertility app sows doubt about birth control, features claims from medical advisers who are not licensed to practice in the US, and is funded and led by anti-abortion, anti-gay Catholic campaigners, a Guardian investigation has found.

The Femm app, which collects personal information about sex and menstruation from users, has been downloaded more than 400,000 times since its launch in 2015, according to developers. It has users in the US, the EU, Africa and Latin America, its operating company claims.

Although it markets itself as a way to “avoid or achieve pregnancy,” what the app really does is create doubts about the safety of birth control.

Femm receives much of its income from private donors including the Chiaroscuro Foundation, a charity backed almost exclusively by Sean Fieler, a wealthy Catholic hedge-funder based in New York.

Fieler’s foundation has long supported organizations– and politicians such as the vice-president, Mike Pence – that oppose birth control and abortion. Fieler has criticized Republicans for failing to outlaw abortion, calling their reticence “the tyranny of moderation” in a recent editorial.

The Chiaroscuro Foundation, with Fieler as its chairman and main backer, provided $1.79m to the developers of the Femm app over the last three years, according to IRS statements. Fieler also sits on the board of directors for the Femm Foundation, a not-for-profit which operates the app.

The Femm app asserts that “hormonal” birth control–i.e., the pill– may be “deleterious to a woman’s health” and promotes learning one’s “cycles” as  a safer, “natural” way to avoid pregnancy. This is medically inaccurate information.

“The birth control pill is one of the greatest health achievements of the 20th century,” said Dr Nathaniel DeNicola, an OB-GYN with the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, which has studied fertility apps extensively. “This is part of standard women’s healthcare.”

“Natural” family planning methods using fertility awareness are known to have a failure rate of about 25 unintended pregnancies for every 100 women a year in the US.

I wonder how many women have downloaded this app in good faith, relying on the professional advice of “doctors” who are unlicensed in the U.S. and who are peddling information inconsistent with sound science and best practices.

For that matter, I wonder how many other apps, websites and blogs are providing information they know or should know is both untrue and potentially damaging, whether for ideological reasons or financial ones. We already know about the so-called “dark web,” where alt-right white nationalist propaganda radicalizes the vulnerable, and conspiracy theories ensnare the gullible. Add to that the new “deep fake” technologies, and the potential for mischief (and worse) is enormous.

I have no idea how we combat the avalanche of misinformation that is facilitated by the Internet’s low entry barriers. It seems clear that the “big guys”–the social media mavens–don’t know how either.

Ultimately, better education (and better mental healthcare), plus development of some sort of “Good housekeeping seal of approval” denoting credibility might act as warning devices, but for right now, it’s a Wild West–and the bad guys aren’t wearing black hats so that we can recognize them.

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