Category: Banana Republicanism

Cartoons Of The Week – April 14, 2024

The Daily Escape:

Salt Run, St. Augustine FL – April 2024 iPhone photo by Wrongo. This is a tidal inlet fed by the Atlantic Ocean. The far shore is a protected state park and the ocean is just over the dunes in the distance.

Wrongo has been enjoying the spring weather here in Florida, the second stop on our caravan of sibling visits in the south. This view is from my sister’s home.

Many cartoons this week about OJ’s death, along with lots about Arizona’s new anti-abortion bill. Here’s the best that I found. First, a leftover about the eclipse from earlier in the week:

OJ left the building, but isn’t home yet:

OJ’s running just like back in the day:

Ukraine Will Lose If Republicans Have Their Way:

School voucher money is shrinking public school funding:

With a few exceptions, those private schools that far outpace the public ones have the advantage of being able to pick and choose their students. Also, the public gets the schools it demands.

The Arizona fallout won’t be limited to abortion:

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Why Ukraine?

The Daily Escape:

St. Ann’s Church and Shrine, Polonia, Buffalo NY, abandoned in 2012  – March 2024 photo by Abandoned and beyond Buffalo. It was recently purchased by a group of Muslims aiming to transform it into a refuge.

From Timothy Snyder:

“…It has been 459 days since the US Congress passed legislation to support Ukraine. Russia, supported by arms from Iran and North Korea, is now slowly advancing…and sending scores of missiles and drones at cities throughout Ukraine.  Russia has…destroyed one major Ukrainian hydroelectrical facility, and…is targeting two others.  The aim is to bring down the Ukrainian electricity grid.

The US Congress is once again in recess.  Although sizable majorities of Americans and their elected representatives want to support Ukraine, legislation has been blocked by the Putinist wing of the House of Representatives.”

This means that the House won’t address funding for Kyiv until mid-April at the earliest. It would be difficult to state the problem more succinctly or better than Snyder does. Where have the Biden administration and the US House been for the past 460+ days?

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) was on “Meet the Press” yesterday. Bacon favors some support for Ukraine and highlighted his partnership with Reps. Jared Golden, (D-ME), Brian Fitzpatrick, (R-PA), and Ed Case, (D-HI) on a Ukraine aid bill:

“We put a bill together that focuses on military aid — a $66 billion bill that provides military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan….If we do this bill, and I think we will, there’s enough support in the House to get this done. And — and I want to make sure that we have support in the Senate…”

It’s possible that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) could face a vote to oust him if he moves to pass Ukraine aid in the House. Before the House left for its two-week vacation Marjorie Taylor-Greene, (R-GA), submitted a motion to vacate, which could lead to a House vote to oust Johnson. Since Greene did not file the motion as privileged, the vote can happen at an indefinite point in the future. Shortly after Greene filed the motion, she said: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“He (Johnson) should not bring funding for Ukraine to the floor…”

The US has been in a stalemate on resupplying weapons to Ukraine for six months. Zelenskyy told CBS News that Ukraine’s forces had managed to hold off Russian advances through the worst of the winter months:

“We have stabilized the situation. It is better than it used to be two or three months ago when we had a big deficit of artillery ammunition, different kinds of weapons….We totally didn’t see the big, huge counteroffensive from Russia… They didn’t have success.”

CBS said that Zelenskyy acknowledged that the invading Russian troops and their seemingly endless supply of missiles and shells is having a negative effect, that they’re not going to be able to defend against another major Russian offensive expected in the coming months. That, he said, was expected around the end of May or in June.

More: (parenthesis and emphasis by Wrongo)

“He (Zelenskyy) said what’s needed most are American Patriot missile defense systems, and more artillery…he said the nature of the funding dedicated by the American government to help Ukraine must be put into perspective.”

He then made the point that the vast majority of the funds committed to Ukraine go to defense contractors in the US:

“Let’s be honest, the money, which is allocated by the Congress, by the administration, in the majority of cases….at least more than 75% — stays in the US. This ammunition is coming to us, but the production is taking place there, and the money stays in the US…”

What’s happened to Americans? Two years ago every town in the US was sponsoring Ukrainian families. Zelenskyy spoke to the US Congress and received standing ovations. Their war of necessity with Russia dominated the evening news.

Now, we get crickets instead of news about Ukraine. It seems that we’ve become a culture where we admire, support and follow “winners only” like Beyoncé and Taylor. We like winners. Their stories are simple to follow, and their detractors are easy to get angry about.

Ukraine looked like a winner in the fall of 2023, so America was all in, but that died in the standoff in the spring of 2024. America no longer has the willingness or ability to think through complex problems like Ukraine vs. Russia, a problem that may take several more years to solve. So we kick Ukraine to the side of the road and instead talk about Princess Kate and her cancer diagnosis or about Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani, his awesome huge contract and his possible connection to gambling.

You know, the easy stuff that doesn’t make your hair hurt.

We need to keep Ukraine in the forefront of our thinking. We need to realize that Russia sees the eastern NATO countries on their border like potato chips. And you can’t expect Russia to eat just one.

America has two “far enemies” (as opposed to “near enemies”). Our far enemies are Russia and China. Rather than allow them time to become near enemies, we need to deal with them where they are today. This means arming Ukraine with the best air defense systems we have and with longer range missiles that can strike at Russia’s oil, shipping and manufacturing facilities.

Its long past time for the US Congress’ wakeup call! Your dithering may cost Europe and America far more than you think.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to the late Kirsty MacColl perform her hit “Walking Down Madison”, from her 1991 album Electric Landlady. The backup group includes Johnny Marr (The Smiths) on guitar and rapping by Aniff Akinola. Wrongo has loved this song since he first heard it 33 years ago. The idea that you’re never far from having reality whack you in the face has always appealed

Sample Lyrics:

From an uptown apartment
To a knife on the A train
It’s not that far
From the sharks in the penthouse
To the rats in the basement
It’s not that far
To the bag lady frozen asleep on the church steps
It’s not that far

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Democrats Are Better For The Economy

The Daily Escape:

Sunset at Fonts Point, Anza-Borrego Desert SP, CA – March 2024 photo by Paulette Donnellon

“If you want to live like a Republican, vote for a Democrat.” – Harry S. Truman

Republicans always claim that they are the Party of prosperity. They pretend that their policies lift everyday workers and their families, what with tax cuts and all, and the public seems to buy it. In polls, the Republicans usually get better marks on the economy than Democrats, often by hefty margins.

But as John E. Schwarz notes in the Washington Monthly:

“What is truly startling is the astonishing degree to which American workers have fared better under Democratic than Republican presidents….Today, the economic data are unambiguous: Whether it’s real wage gains or job creation, average Americans have fared far better under Democratic than Republican presidents.”

From the economist Jeffery Frankel, Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers:

“Since World War II, Democrats have seen job creation average 1.7 % per year when in office, versus 1.0 % under the GOP.  US GDP has averaged a rate of growth of 4.23% during Democratic administrations, versus 2.36% under Republicans, a remarkable difference of 1.87 percentage points. This is postwar data, covering 19 presidential terms—from Truman through Biden. If one goes back further, to the Great Depression, to include Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the difference in growth rates is even larger.”

Frankel says that the results are similar whether one assigns responsibility for the first quarter of a president’s term to him or to his predecessor. He also makes the point that the average Democratic presidential term has been in recession for 1 of its 16 quarters, whereas the average for the Republican terms has been 5 quarters, a startlingly big difference.

Frankel asks whether these stark differences in outcomes are simply the result of random chance?  But he concludes they aren’t:

“The last five recessions all started while a Republican was in the White House (Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, G.W. Bush twice, and Trump)….The odds of getting that outcome by chance, if the true probability of a recession starting during a Democrat’s presidency were equal to that during a Republican’s presidency, would be (1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2), i.e., one out of 32 = 3.1%.  Very unlikely.”

I know, nobody said there’d be math in the column. Frankel says that the result is the same as the odds of getting “heads” on five out of five consecutive coin-flips. And it gets worse if we look back further in time:

“A remarkable 9 of the last 10 recessions have started when a Republican was president.  The odds that this outcome would have occurred just by chance are even more remote: one out of 100.  [That is, 10/210 = 0.0098.]”

More math, but you get the idea. If you look at job growth, the results are similar. More from John Schwarz:

“The significant contrast between each party’s record on wage and job growth has held true from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 through to the onset of the pandemic, just after 2019 ended, and after that, starting once again under Joe Biden.”

Here’s a chart from The Economist:

The Republican and Democratic Parties were in the White House for roughly equal amounts of time, 24 years each. During the Republican presidencies they created about 17 million jobs, whereas Democrats presided over the creation of about 60 million. That’s such a big gap that Americans can safely reject claims of stronger economic performance under Republicans.

Schwarz closes with this:

“Democrats have an amazing story to tell in 2024. They should tell it loud and clear.”

Absolutely!

Enough of the hard math. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we try to disconnect from Trump’s Bible sales and from the plan by Senate Republicans to introduce articles of impeachment of the Secretary of Homeland Security when there’s so much truly pressing business for them to consider.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, we’re attending to some spring yardwork in the precious time between passing rain and snow showers. We will also find the time this weekend to watch college basketball’s March Madness.

To help you focus on anything but politics on this Easter weekend, grab a seat by a south-facing window and listen to Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere mei, Deus” (Have mercy on me, O God), performed here in 2018 by the Tenebrae Choir conducted by Nigel Short at St. Bartholomew the Great Church, in London.

Allegri composed this in the 1630s, during the papacy of Pope Urban VIII. The piece was written for use in the Tenebrae service on Holy Wednesday and Good Friday of Holy Week. Pope Urban loved the piece so much, that he forbid it to be performed elsewhere outside of the Sistine Chapel.

We all could use a little mercy now, and this is beautiful:

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Crime: Perception vs. Reality

The Daily Escape:

Saguaros and poppies, Catalina SP, Tucson, AZ – March 2024 photo by Paul J Van Helden

From Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans:

“Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023, likely at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded. What’s more, every type of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime with the exception of auto theft is likely down a considerable amount this year relative to last year according to newly reported data through September from the FBI.”

We all knew that crime rates skyrocketed between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s. Then they went into a slow 35-year decline. Now, homicide, violent crime, and property crime rates have returned to what they were prior to the latest 20-year increase. This means that if you’re under 55, crime rates have been falling for most of your adult life.

But America perceives that crime rates are high. A Gallup poll released last November found 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in America than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a “very” or “extremely” serious crime problem — the highest in the poll’s history going back to 2000.

Wrongo doesn’t truly believe the polls since Pew revealed that 12% of people under 30 and 24% of Hispanic people who opt into online polls claim they have a license to operate a nuclear submarine, but here’s a chart:

(This is based on Gallup’s annual Crime survey, conducted Oct. 2023)

The question is, why the disconnect? NPR quoted Jeff Asher:

“There’s never been a news story that said, ‘There were no robberies yesterday, nobody really shoplifted at Walgreens….Especially with murder, there’s no doubt that it is falling at [a] really fast pace right now.’”

One theory you might have is that since the Covid pandemic caused social disorder, dysfunction in our government, and all sorts of problems, including that spike in crime, you might expect crime to remain high even after the country went back to work and school.

Another theory is that when people say “crime“, they don’t exclusively mean “people breaking the law“. Instead maybe they mean “behavior which upsets me“. For example, when the Philadelphia DA tries to focus on eliminating bail for simple drug arrests, while opposing police corruption, he’s said to be soft on crime. Then Republicans (and Trump) tried to impeach him, saying that they’re being “tough on crime” and crime remains a politicized news story.

Another theory is that the narrative around homeless people drives perception of crime. The idea that “homeless people have been violent“, or simply that “homeless people live near me and I don’t want any shelters built nearby,” strengthens the perception that crime is everywhere. For people who feel that way, the statement “Crime is a big problem” is equivalent to the statement “I always see homeless people when I go into town”.

This may explain why crime rates “near me” are perceived to be substantially lower than how national crime is perceived. Few of the homeless are encamped in their suburbs.

If you look back on the 1980s, there were a large number of visible homeless people in Washington DC, and Reagan dismissed them as “homeless by choice“. Today, there are plenty of homeless people on the streets in every city. It’s important to remember that when St. Reagan was governor of California, he released mental patients onto the streets.

This was part of “deinstitutionalization”: The emptying of state psychiatric hospitals that began in the 1950s. As hospitals were shut down, patients were discharged with no place to get psychiatric care. They ended up on the streets, some eventually committing crimes that got them arrested.

In 1963, JFK signed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Health Centers Construction Act. (It turned out to be the last bill Kennedy would sign.) The law was designed to replace “custodial mental institutions” with community mental health centers, thus allowing patients to live—and get psychiatric care—in their communities.

However, a sufficient number of community mental health centers were never built.

In 1965, Medicaid accelerated the shift from inpatient to outpatient care: One key part of the Medicaid legislation stipulated that the federal government would not pay for inpatient care in psychiatric hospitals. This further pushed states to move patients out of their state facilities.

That’s when homeless people began to be visible to most of us.

Later, in the 1970s, Nixon declared a war on drugs, setting the stage for tough-on-crime policies. Laws, like mandatory minimum sentences for possession and other drug-related crimes, disproportionately affected people of color and pushed incarceration rates to record levels. Between 1972 and 2009, America’s prison population grew by 700%.

The homeless get blamed for the bad behavior of a small minority of their group. But since an awful lot of the dysfunctional are homeless because their families or friends couldn’t cope with their behavior, it’s logical that the general public would also find their behavior a problem.

And it’s more than just the homeless. In Wrongo’s small Connecticut town, long-time residents resent people who have moved in recently. They are appalled by the occasional drug arrest or stolen car that was left unlocked in a driveway.

This scales up to people in our town bellowing about CHICAGO!!!! Or LA or Portland, OR. They see the far enemy as young Black/Hispanic men in certain zip codes destroying each other. And just possibly turning their attention to our tight, white community here in the Litchfield Hills.

It’s a good thing that overall crime and especially violent crime rates are much lower than they were 30 years ago. But we’re still faced with the overriding perception that people see their families at greater risk now.

This has spilled over into how parents treat their children. NO parent today would allow their kids to get on a bike and roam miles from home. Everything is monitored. If you ask why, the near-universal response is: “It just isn’t safe out there. Not like it used to be.”

Used to be? Most kids were tooling around on their bikes Goonies-style during the 1980s, when crime nationwide was at its peak.

People just seem hell bent on seeing the world as a massively scary place, one filled with predators.

There are major political implications, when data aren’t facts, when truths are lies.

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Trump’s Constant Financial Lying May Be His Undoing

The Daily Escape:

Saucer magnolia trees, Smithsonian, Washington DC – March 2024 photo via Smithsonian Gardens

Trump has five days to come up with more than a half billion dollars in liquid assets or New York State could begin to freeze some of his bank accounts and seize some of his marquee properties. From the NYT:

“It’s crunchtime for Donald J. Trump….the former president must secure an appeal bond for roughly half a billion dollars in his civil fraud case in New York, a possibility that was called into question on Monday.

In a court filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers revealed that he had been unable to secure an appeal bond despite “diligent efforts” that included approaching about 30 bond companies.”

This would amount to about 20% of Trump’s total net worth, but as Timothy Noah notes, much of the rest is already spoken for. There’s the $91 million bond he just secured from Chubb for his E  Jean Carroll defamation appeal. And a lot more:

“There’s $392,000 that Trump paid The New York Times…for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s $938,000 that a judge last year ordered Trump and his attorney to pay Hillary Clinton for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s $382,000 that a London judge earlier this month ordered Trump to pay Orbis Business Intelligence, founded by Christopher Steele (of the ‘Steele dossier’), for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s the aforementioned $5 million that Trump paid earlier in the Carroll case. There’s $110,000 in contempt fees that Trump accrued for bad-mouthing New York Attorney General Letitia James during the civil fraud prosecution.”

On top of all that, Deutsche Bank’s loans to Trump require him to maintain $50 million in “unencumbered liquidity” and a minimum net worth of $2.5 billion. He’s likely already in default of those provisions. From Rick Wilson:

“For decades, Donald Trump’s public image as the dealmaker, builder, salesman, and showman was his brand, his most significant asset, and the key to his multifarious con games. He discovered the secret sauce of modern financial alchemy was making it up, relying on the greed and desire of investors and banks to get some of the….Trump glamour. The swagger, the gold leaf, the…biggest, best, tallest, sexiest adjective…of every Trump project attracted bankers and vendors, no matter how rickety…the property or project may have been.”

His serial bankruptcies weren’t some fiendishly clever business practice; he was simply bad at making money on a legitimate basis. For all that, Trump is peerless at convincing people that he is a business genius with no need for their capital…[just] as he asks them for money.”

Did that take a lot of creative accounting? Of course. More from Wilson:

“Was there a yawning delta between what Trump claimed his properties were worth and market reality? Always. Did he tell the banks one thing about valuations when refinancing…and then turn around to tell local and state tax authorities that the same property…was practically…worthless…for their purposes? Naturally.”

Trump’s most successful business has been his email money-raising business that was targeted at lower-and-middle class angry white voters. He asks them to send part of their payroll, social security, and disability checks to him. Now, that big con is falling apart, with the donor list getting exhausted. The Trump base has realized that he’s not financing his campaign, he’s spending the vast majority of their donations on his legal expenses and now, on his fines.

His financial house of cards is falling apart. His always highly-leveraged properties peaked in value pre-Covid, and none could be sold quickly enough or for enough cash to give him the lifeline he needs to pay his mounting judgements and court fees.

He managed to get the Chubb Group to underwrite his bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case(s), but 30 lenders turned him down in the business fraud case, and this week, the “billionaire” had to tell the courts he can’t come up with the roughly $500 million he needs to stave off liquidation of some of his assets by NY AG Letitia James.

The truth is that there’s no reason why large financial/bond companies won’t take real estate as collateral for a bond or loan to Trump. The problem is that they WON’T take real estate collateral without a true, accurate, and independent appraisal for the value of the real estate collateral.

But that’s precisely what the NY fraud case found Trump was guilty of doing. Trump can’t offer up those properties to the bonding companies, because it would prove again the state’s case that he fraudulently overstated the values of his NY properties on loan applications and financial statements. It wouldn’t be difficult to sell one or more of the properties in a true arm’s length sale, but Trump would have to face the reality that he inflated their value.

NY AG James and all Democrats should remember that Trump’s properties are physical manifestations of his ego. Trump Tower was the model of that ego for decades. That’s why when Rick Wilson tweeted “Take Trump Tower first” the MAGATs reaction was rage. Apparently this is how the authoritarian addiction plays on their minds; they see his long pattern of fraud as smart business and see Trump’s facing the reality of losing in court as an attack on themselves.

No matter, Trump always portrays himself as a martyr, claiming the deep state is out to get him. But none of it will change that the facts are damning, that the pattern of fraud is explicit and vast, and that Trump is veering towards being cash-strapped. Just when he needs hundreds of millions to run his 2024 presidential campaign.

Depending on how the judgments pan out, Trump might become the first ex-president since Ulysses S. Grant to declare bankruptcy. But bankruptcy isn’t going to save him from having to pay his pre-existing judgements.

The irony here is that even while Trump is being taken down to the studs, he’s still at least even money to win the election in November. What does that say about the American voter in 2024?

Finally, with Trump in financial extremis, anyone who swoops in now to save him by posting half billion dollars is going to do it expecting to be compensated in some way beyond simply the repayment of the loan, if/when he loses his appeal of the fraud conviction.

What would Trump be willing to promise to keep his considerable fat out of the fire? Would Russia do it? What would Putin want? What would Saudi Arabia want? Who else might see an angle in this?

After all, despite how large we think $500 million is, it would be a cheap price to pay for many around the world who would wish trouble on the US.

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Demographics Is Destiny

The Daily Escape:

Avila Beach, CA – March 2024 photo by Slocoastpix

Wrongo’s back! What did he miss? Nothing? Let’s take a look at global demographics. You’re saying, what, no discussion of Trump’s latest falsehood, or about Biden’s age? Nope, not today.

The facts are that the nation (and the world) need on average, a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman to maintain its population at any given level. This is called the replacement rate. The additional .1 accounts for children who die before they reach reproductive age, or who never reproduce.

Live Science reports:

“Population growth could grind to a halt by 2050, before decreasing to as little as 6 billion humans on Earth in 2100, a new analysis of birth trends has revealed. The study…predicts that if current trends continue, the world’s population, which is currently 7.96 billion, will peak at 8.6 billion in the middle of the century before declining by nearly 2 billion before the century’s end. “

In 1970 the world’s total fertility rate was well above 5 live births per woman; now, it’s about 2.3 and is continuing to fall. Africa’s total fertility rate is 4.1, down nearly half that in the mid-20th century, while Asia and Latin America both have fertility rates of 2.0. North America (including Mexico) is at 1.8, and Europe is down to 1.6 live births per woman.

India, the world’s most populous nation, is at 2.0; China, second most populous, is at a stunningly low 1.1 despite efforts by its government to encourage births. Last year, China reported that its population was 2 million people lower than the year before. The US, third most populous, is at 1.7, and Indonesia, fourth, is at 2.1.

Only when you get to the fifth most populous, Pakistan, does the fertility rate sustain population growth (3.3). The sixth, Nigeria, has a fertility rate similar to what the entire world had half a century ago, 5.1. Only six countries on the planet have higher fertility rates than Nigeria does, while 187 have a lower rate.  At the very bottom is South Korea, with a 0.8 fertility rate; if that stays unchanged, it will leave each Korean generation at a little more than a third the size of the generation before it.

Demographers say that sometime in the next two decades, the world will reach its all-time peak human population and begin to see sustained year-over-year contractions.

This will raise serious political issues. First, it means that economic growth will slow in any country experiencing a population decline. Lower growth means incomes will fall. Second, we’re already seeing the effects of illegal mass migration from high-growth/low income countries to the lower growth/high income countries in the developed world. Third, falling populations and better healthcare will make humanity older as a whole and lower the proportion of working-age people, placing an even greater burden on the young to finance health care and pensions.

But this isn’t all bad. Many authors have written about how continued population growth would strain, and if unchecked, ultimately damage the environment and reduce resources required to sustain human life as we know it today. Whenever the dwindling resources discussion takes place, (e.g. America is using up its ground water) or similar, someone says not to worry. They insist that technological progress would soon eliminate our reliance on oil, water (or oxygen). That an even cheaper and more abundant resource will be found to replace the ones we’re wasting. But there isn’t much evidence for that viewpoint.

Think about the equation: In most years the economy grows. Why does the economy grow?  Ultimately, because population increases. With every passing year, there are more people joining the workforce, buying assets, making investments, and purchasing goods and services. Population growth is the engine behind economic growth. The smaller the population, the smaller the economy.

To see this more clearly, imagine that a population contraction was happening in the US. There are fewer people who need to buy or rent a home this year than last year; there are fewer people shopping at the neighborhood stores, or working at the shops and factories, and so on. From Nature Magazine:

“Using population projections, we found that, by 2100, close to half of the nearly 30,000 cities in the United States will face some sort of population decline, representing 12–23% of the population of these 30,000 cities…”

What happens to housing prices, rents, business profits, local tax revenues, in that scenario? They go down. And if it weren’t for immigration, western Europe, the US, and other countries would fall into population contraction. And the entire structure of business, power and wealth that depends on economic growth would slowly come apart.

The most potent issue is that birth rates are falling in some countries that until now have produced most of the immigrants. Mexico’s fertility rate right now is around 2.0 per woman, below replacement level. As a result, these days, Mexico sends fewer migrants to the US. Most are migrants that are passing through Mexico from countries that still have a population surplus.

These consequences are already being felt in some countries. And when the world transitions from an economy based on growth to a new economy based on contraction, expect to see rapid political change.

From Scientific American:

“We’re at a crossroads—and we decide what happens next. We can maintain the economic status quo and continue to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet. Or we can heed the warning signs of a planet pushed to its limits, put the brakes on environmental catastrophe, and choose a different way to define prosperity that’s grounded in equity and a thriving natural world.”

The Right-wing nativist movement in the US rallies around an anti-immigration platform. At the same time, they attack women’s reproductive rights. But we’re not going to reproduce our way out of the coming depopulation trend.

The canary in the coal mine is birth rates.

We’re entering an unfamiliar world, one that Wrongo certainly won’t be around long enough to see. But since demographics is destiny, we can be pretty sure depopulation is in our future.

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Cartoons Of The Week

Welcome to a week that included TikTok, March Madness and St. Patrick’s Day!

The House overwhelmingly passed legislation to ban TikTok:

But will it ever become law?

Trump said the quiet part out loud:

Insulin remains under threat:

Yes, Big pharma is suing the Biden administration for making insulin affordable. They say his actions are “unconstitutional“. It’s important to remember that they didn’t invent insulin and it is cheap to make.

The GOP’s double standard on documents:

The mystery surrounding Princess Kate isn’t going away:

Boeing is so badly broken it’s hard to see how it recovers:

March madness has many meanings:

Wrongo’s favorite St. Paddie’s Day cartoon:

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State Of The Union Speech Mop-Up

The Daily Escape:

Morrow Bay, CA – March 2024 photo by Slocoastpix

(This is most likely the only column this week, as Wrongo is working on an outside project.)

Today let’s cover a few disparate topics that are about clean-up from the Biden State of the Union address. The Hollywood Reporter reports on Biden’s viewership ratings with this headline:

“The 2024 State of the Union address drew a larger TV audience than the 2023 address.”

Biden’s speech averaged 32.23 million viewers across 14 broadcast and cable outlets, almost 5 million more viewers than the 2023 State of the Union. Viewership rose on all of the largest outlets by about 18%.  More:

“The vast majority of viewers — 28.47 million — watched the State of the Union on the big four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and the three largest cable news outlets (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC). All seven outlets drew a bigger audience than they did for last year’s address.”

So much for viewer apathy. One big surprise to Wrongo is that Fox News led with 5.84 million viewers, beating out the 5.24 million for ABC, which had the largest viewership among the broadcast networks. NBC’s 4.47 million viewers finished third, followed by MSNBC at 4.43 million, (its largest audience ever for a State of the Union).

Why would Fox have more viewers when their network demographics skew far more to the Right than the others? Did they tune in hoping to see a Biden senior moment?

Second, Sen. Katie Britt (R-Jesus) lied in her rebuttal for the GOP.

Third, Umir Haque’s newsletter, the issue has some good insights that Wrongo hasn’t seen elsewhere. About leadership: (emphasis, parenthesis and brackets by Wrongo)

“We recently discussed the difference between occupying a leadership position—and being accepted as a leader. This Biden’s been hid[den] away by the Democratic machine….Those roaring, electrified [people attending the speech)? Those surging positivity ratings? That’s…going from merely occupying the position, to being accepted as a leader.”

More:

“Biden quietly proposed something very much like a new America. A new American social contract. The ideas came so fast and furious that they were almost easy to miss, sandwiched between philosophy and persuasion.”

More:

“…most State of the Unions aren’t like that. They’re pretty boring because Presidents tout their accomplishments. They’re backwards looking…sort of performance reviews….This one really was…profoundly different.”

Haque who lives in the UK, says that the ideas Biden put forth, are very popular in Europe:

  • Taxing billionaires, which is part of a new movement, arising mostly in Europe, to reduce inequality, by having a global tax on the ultra-rich.
  • Taxing executive compensation on salaries over $1 million by making them no longer tax deductible. This is also linked to recent moves by European nations to make economies more equal again.
  • Giving home buyers tax credits. This is a first step towards fixing America’s badly broken housing market…..many European nations are trying to fix that through incentives like this.
  • Lowering drug prices. One of Biden’s most revolutionary policy ideas was to let the government negotiate prices for many more drugs—this is a big deal, because of course Americans are ripped off incredibly badly by their version of “healthcare.” This would bring the US in line with other Western nations.

More: (brackets by Wrongo)

“if you read between the lines….Biden [is] recognizing how badly broken many aspects of the American social contract [are] —healthcare, housing, inequality, salaries, taxes—and how all that adds up to an incredibly precarious life even [if you are] at or above the median [income].”

More:

“Taxing billionaires, limiting salaries, intervening in broken markets, giving people actual support—none of these are ideas we associate in the slightest with…American politics. They’re the stuff of social democracy, and Biden’s setting out a sort of lightweight…social democratic vision. It’s not quite one fully, but what it does…is begin to put America on the path to becoming one, like the rest of the Western world.”

This sets a clear distinction between the Parties in 2024. Democrats since Bill Clinton have not had a clear definition of what they stand for: What do they stand for? What’s their overarching idea? Are they after a just society, and a good life for all Americans?

This theory of the good life, the just society, and how they’re linked now has Biden championing a politics that isn’t simply another version of “life’s about winners and losers”. Haque thinks this is an incredibly important evolution in US politics.

Will Biden’s move leftward bring enough votes to win in November? We have to hope it will. Conservative Republican Peter Wehner in the NYT reminds us that there’s just 34 weeks to the election:

“The next 34 weeks are among the more consequential in the life of this nation. Mr. Trump was a clear danger in 2016; he’s much more of a danger now. The former president is more vengeful, more bitter and more unstable than he was, which is saying something…..He’s already shown he’ll overturn an election, support a violent insurrection and even allow his vice president to be hanged. There’s nothing he won’t do. It’s up to the rest of us to keep him from doing it.”

It’s time on this Monday morning, to wake up America! IF he gets to run the country, Trump will act like a juvenile delinquent, flipping over as many of the cafeteria lunch tables as he can. In a nutshell, that’s his MAGA platform. And like the Zombie Apocalypse come to life, sooner or later all Republicans who hold public office will endorse him.

The rest of us have to put aside our ideological differences and support Biden. To help you wake up watch and listen to The Clash perform “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” from their 1979 album “The Clash”. This is far from their best, but it’s on point for today’s column:

This song is from a time when the youth began to realize that sticking together was actually a better idea than allowing themselves to be divided. That has to come back.

Sample Lyric:

White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution

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Cartoons Of The Week

There were many quality cartoons about how Biden exceeded expectations during his State of the Union speech. Despite all of her notoriety, there were surprisingly few about Sen. Katie Britt’s rebuttal performance. On to cartoons.

Our true choice:

Different messages:

Biden drinks a new concoction:

Katie’s being seen, but not quite as the GOP expected:

Women’s History Month had a big kick off by the elephant:

Supremes move deliberately:

California won’t elect this guy:

Wrongo’s evergreen Oscars joke:

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Jokers To The Right

The Daily Escape:

Stormy night, Portland, OR – March 2024 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

“Democrats want to do something for you. Republicans want to do something to you.” – Tom Sullivan

Super Tuesday is in the rearview, and Nikki Haley announced her exit Wednesday. Haley was a useful person for the Democrats for as long as she was campaigning against Trump. Think about the picadors in bull fighting: Their primary role is to weaken the bull by piercing its neck muscles and tissues, making it easier for the matador to ultimately kill the bull.

That was Nikki, weakening Trump for the past few months. Wrongo reported that Haley overperformed in the GOP primaries:

“We’re seeing Trump consistently underperform the polls by 7-8 points. Worse for Trump, Fox News’ John Roberts talked about an alarming exit poll finding that 59% of Haley voters in South Carolina last night (equal to 40% of the electorate) would not vote for Trump in the general election.”

Depending on the state, between 25%-40% of Republican and conservative independents voted for her.

But now she’s left the ring, ceding the Republican nomination to Trump. You know, the guy who drove the American economy into a ditch, mismanaged a pandemic resulting in hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths, was found guilty of both sexual assault and fraud in two American courts, and is currently facing charges for mishandling national secrets and fomenting a coup.

Haley earned the votes of millions of Republican voters in her brief time in the spotlight. But she’s made a business decision to try and remain relevant to the MAGA world in case Trump cannot go forward with his campaign. JVL reports Haley said this:

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party who did not support him, and I hope he does. This is now his time for choosing.”

Sounds good, right? But JVL calls Haley out about the above:

“If there’s been a more cowardly statement over the last year, I can’t think of it. Haley refuses to acknowledge that she was supported by a broad coalition of voters—Republicans, independents, and Democrats. She claims that she is rooting for Trump to win over only the Republican voters who supported her. And instead of leading and standing for the Constitution, she fobs off all questions of agency to Trump. It’s not time for Nikki Haley to choose.

She believes that she’s preserving her political viability by seeming to put Trump in a box, making winning her supporters Trump’s job to succeed or fail to do. It won’t be long before Haley endorses Trump, becoming just another useful tool for MAGA world.

Biden on the other hand immediately invited Haley supporters to join his campaign. From The Hill:

“It takes a lot of courage to run for President — that’s especially true in today’s Republican Party, where so few dare to speak the truth about Donald Trump….Nikki Haley was willing to speak the truth about Trump: about the chaos that always follows him, about his inability to see right from wrong, about his cowering before Vladimir Putin.”

“Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign…”

Then there’s the hot steaming pile of Mitch McConnell. From the WaPo:

“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States…It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”

From Norm Orenstein:

“…McConnell, once again, demonstrates a level of moral cowardice that is destructive and pathetic. He was responsible for letting Trump off the hook and having him as the Republican nominee when he deep sixed impeachment trial. Now he endorses the vicious autocrat. Shame.”

Why do these Republican hacks support a guy who has attacked their wives? Mitch does it, Cruz did it. Trump attacked Haley’s husband. She’ll most likely endorse him as well.

Finally, there’s Elon Musk who jetted to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. From Judd Legum:

“On Tuesday…Musk told his 175 million followers on X that President Biden had committed “treason” by “secretly” flying “320,000 illegal immigrants” from Latin America to US airports:

Nearly everything said above by Musk is a lie. Then Trump said that Biden “flew in 325,000 immigrants” into the country.

Musk was retweeting Collin Rugg who references a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) about a program expanding humanitarian parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. CIS is a notorious anti-immigrant think tank.

Nothing about the expanded humanitarian parole program is “secret.” Biden announced it in a White House speech on January 5, 2023.

“…Today I’m announcing that my administration is going to expand the parole program for people not only from Venezuela but from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti.”

The program was then detailed in a White House press release. The release specifies that the program allows:

“…up to 30,000 individuals per month from these four countries.” To qualify, individuals must have an  “eligible sponsor and pass vetting and background checks.”

Musk was amazed that the Biden administration was able to keep the program secret when it involved chartering thousands of planes, flying to dozens of airports. Wrong again. The reason why no one noticed all the planes chartered by the Biden administration is that they didn’t charter planes.  The parole program requires the individuals to purchase their own flights to the US.

Musk says that this program constitutes “treason”. But it is fully within Biden’s legal authority. Every president has used parole authority since it was established in 1952, except Trump. Somebody in Washington ought to look into what the consequences should be when a major defense contractor like Musk says the Commander-In Chief is committing treason.

The silly season is upon us.

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