Category: Banana Republicanism

Trump’s Role In The Insurrection May Go Unpunished

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Camden Harbor, Camden ME – January 2024 photo by Daniel F Dishner Photography

It’s been three years since the Insurrection on Jan. 6. One of the determining factors of the outcome of 2024 presidential election will be whether the cases against Trump for his role in the Insurrection are decided before the election on November 5th of this year. It’s just 303 days away. That isn’t a lot of time, and there remains only a small possibility that Trump will be convicted and sentenced to prison for his role in fomenting either the violence at the Capitol or in the stolen documents case before November.

Wrongo no longer expects that either of the political cases against Trump will be decided by then.

Hopefully you realize that if those cases are still pending on Nov. 5 and Trump wins the election, the US government will withdraw from them, eliminating the possibility of Trump ever being convicted.

The failure of the DOJ to see the past four years as an asset that had to used quickly and decisively before it was used up by the Trump team’s procedural appeals, is unforgivable. This also applies to the DOJ efforts to try the downstream Jan. 6 insurrectionists. From the NYT:

“As of December, about 1,240 people had been arrested in connection with the attack, accused of crimes ranging from trespassing, a misdemeanor, to seditious conspiracy, a felony.”

Another 350 cases are still pending. That’s out of a total of nearly 3, 000 people who have been identified as Jan. 6 insurrectionists. So far, around 170 people have been convicted at trial, two people have been fully acquitted, and about 710 people have pleaded guilty. More than 450 of them were sentenced to jail time, ranging from a handful of days to more than 20 years.

Yet the instigator of all that happened that day remains free. And his public still support him. Here is a chart from the WaPo that shows how the view of Trump’s responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection have changed over time:

The survey also found that over a third of Americans now believe Biden’s election was illegitimate compared to a December 2021 WaPo survey. Republicans are also less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were “mostly violent”. Only 18% of them believe the people who entered the Capitol on 1/6 were in that category. They are less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack.

This prove that Mark Twain was right: you can indeed fool some of the people all of the time.

A few months ago, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released its annual American Values Survey. Buried inside their extensive report was a very alarming finding:

“One-third of Republicans and 46% of people who think the 2020 election was stolen believe that ‘true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.’”

This is a dangerous powder keg: An increasingly unhinged former President, and a Republican base that believes violence may be the only way to preserve America as they know want it.

When Wrongo speaks about “dread” in the political sense, his biggest fear in 2024 is the powder keg we’re sitting on. If Trump loses again, we are certain to see more political violence from the Right. And if he wins? No one should think there is a zero chance of violence against Trump’s political enemies.

This brings to mind a quote from Churchill, who when speaking about countries appeasement of Hitler said:

“Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”

That is clearly true for many Republicans and most of the media.

A lot of Democrats are down in the dumps these days. They are frustrated with the lack of progress on some issues (immigration) and by the never-ending cycle of bad polling on Biden’s popularity. Some were hoping to vote for a younger or more progressive Democrat this time around.

Those feelings are legitimate, and it is incumbent on Biden and his campaign to persuade people why they must exercise their voting power against the dark forces on the Right. Democracy can’t function when people intend to use force as a means to bring about their idea of justice. It’s even worse when they are excused after their behavior.

This is the reason to unify and mobilize the disparate Democrats, Independents and anti-Trump Republicans. The use of force on Jan. 6 and the possibility of using more force this year to get an unconvicted Trump back in the White House and keep him there, isn’t democracy. This is the time and place to stop Trump’s rolling Insurrection.

Biden recognizes this and kicked off his 2024 political campaign in Valley Forge, PA on Friday. Biden sees Valley Forge as a symbolic connection between his efforts to “heal the soul of the nation” and George Washington’s undaunted spirit during the American Revolution hundreds of years ago.

His second speech will be at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, where white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners as they welcomed him to pray with them in June 2015.

From Joan Walsh:

“Something that stays with me, that few commentators ever mention: Trump came down his gilded escalator to declare his presidential candidacy just one day before the Charleston massacre. It would probably be too daring for Biden to make that connection, but I always do.”

Biden’s campaign theme of “preserving democracy” isn’t compelling, or “made for TV.” But it is precisely what the nation needs as it stares into the abyss of a potential second Trump term as president. Like Biden, Trump has made promises. He’s promised his followers that, if re-elected, “I will be your retribution.”

As with Biden, we should take Trump at his word: He will exact retribution and act as a dictator on day one of his second term. These competing promises of Trump and Biden tell us all we need to know about the choice we face in the 2024 election.

On to our first Saturday Soother of 2024. Here at the mansion of Wrong, we’re ready for tonight’s snow. We’re also looking forward to next weekend when we will have all of our 12 grandchildren here for a belated Christmas party. Since they span the ages of 15-32 and are spread all over the country, this is the first time ever that they will be in the same space.

It’s something that Wrongo and Ms. Right are looking forward to with great anticipation.

Today, let’s try to forget the dread and the likelihood that Trump will never be convicted for his crimes of Insurrection. Instead, grab a comfy chair by a window where, if you are in the Northeast, you can watch the falling snow.

Now watch and listen to the London Gay Symphony Orchestra play “La Calinda” from Delius’ third opera “Koanga”, written between 1896 and 1897. Koanga is reputed to be the first opera in the European tradition to base much of its melodic material on African-American music. Delius spent time as a young man working in Florida. Here is “La Calinda” conducted by Christopher Braime at St. Giles Cripplegate in February 2017:

 

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Americans Dread The Future

The Daily Escape:

Manhattan Beach Pier, CA – December 31, 2023 photo by Michael Franich

Welcome to Wrongo’s first column of 2024. Let’s dispense with the reviews of last year and the forecasts of this year. Let’s try to describe what we’re all feeling as we say so long to the presidential campaign of 2023, and welcome in the presidential campaign of 2024.

What’s the overwhelming feeling that comes to mind for Americans when thinking about the upcoming presidential election? Dread, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll:

“The survey of 1,636 US adults…offered respondents seven emotions — three positive, three negative, one neutral — and asked them to select any and all that reflect their attitude toward the 2024 campaign.

Dread, the most negative option, topped the list (41%), followed by exhaustion (34%), optimism (25%), depression (21%), indifference (17%), excitement (15%) and delight (5%).”

Here’s the relevant chart:

More:

“In total, a majority of Americans (56%) chose at least one of the three negative feelings (dread, exhaustion or depression), while less than a third (32%) picked at least one of the three positive feelings (optimism, excitement or delight).”

Wrongo test marketed the idea that “dread” was the watchword for 2024 at a New Year’s breakfast with people who span the political spectrum. They universally hated it, but after a short discussion felt it was arguably, the dominant feeling that they had about what will/might happen in 2024.

From the issue:

“We are feeling an acute sense of loss….But what do you call the feeling of watching your society being taken over by fanatics, monsters, and lunatics? How about the feeling of watching democracy crash and burn—remember, it’s declining by the stunning rate of about 10% a decade, putting its extinction within our lifetimes.”

Psychology Today gives us a frame to think about dread in their 2023 article, “How to Overcome the Sinking Feeling of Dread”: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“A sense of dread may be due to an abstractly internalized experience of external volatility called “disembedding”….This phenomenon refers to our ability to interact with one another without having to make face-to-face contact. The result is an overabundance of information that comes our way. It becomes abstracted and metaphorically slips through the fingers of our minds in trying to grasp what it is. With a few clicks through an Instagram feed, scrolling through Twitter, or even just opening your web browser to search for something, your brain becomes a dartboard for world news.”

More:

“When one experiences this, there are often repeated attempts to secure a firm base. People will reassert their values as moral absolutes, declare other groups as lacking in value, draw distinct lines of virtue and vice, be rigid rather than flexible in their judgements, and punitive and excluding rather than permeable and assimilative….Another consequence of disembedding is the possibility of scapegoating: the underclass, racial minorities, new-age travelers, addicts, people with unusual behaviors, and other vulnerable social groups risk being singled out and demonized as the source of society’s problems.”

Dread makes us less tolerant of differences, and as a result, we punish them. This is the emotional backdrop for 2024, and the road ahead looks murky as hell. And facts increasingly don’t matter, since whichever side posits a fact, the other has a prepared rebuttal that says the source (even if its official statistics) are misleading if not outright lies.

The NYT’s Krugman notes that overall, the country’s in pretty good shape. The challenge is that people so far continue to blame Biden for the chaos and ugliness that Trump and his cult are creating: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The big question…was whether America would ever fully recover from that shock. In 2023 we got the answer: yes. Our economy and society have, in fact, healed remarkably well. The big remaining question is when, if ever, the public will be ready to accept the good news….America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, [but] so has the pessimism of the public.”

The big question going forward is whether the grim narratives will prevail over our relatively sunny reality when we get to the 2024 election. Unfortunately, we are bathing in the hideous cultural nastiness caused by the Republican Right and it’s spread despair throughout the country.

Overcoming that mood (and the dread people feel) isn’t going to be easy, but disaster is certain if you give up. Individually, we each can do more than we think we can to keep America in good hands.

Start by no longer buying into the bullshit spewed by the mainstream media, in particular, the NYT. Their both sides coverage of Trump’s crooked behavior demonstrates their inability to let us know how real his threat is to the public.

The rest of the corporate media’s coverage is the same, with a few exceptions. Don’t overlook outlets abroad which had good reputations for thorough and unbiased reporting. In the age of the internet with translation capability at your fingertips, it’s not absurd to look outside of the US news rut for different perspectives.

As long as the GOP can paint the Democrats as the bigger enemy, Independent and anti-Trump Republican voters have an out; they can justify staying on the sidelines. The mainstream media’s complicit role in broadcasting the GOP strategy can’t be overstated. And the Democratic Party leadership’s long-term paralysis in the face of this simple equation is one reason why we’re in the situation we are in now.

Stop ascribing superpowers to the GOP. The Republican Party is a hot mess.

No matter what you read, act! Make a plan and act. It can be surprisingly easy to become a thought leader on the local level. Inside both Parties, the leaders are the people who show up and do the work. That’s it, that’s all it takes to begin making change happen. Show up, do the work.

We’re heading into what will be the toughest part of an existential fight for this democracy. It’s going to be an ugly, messy show, one that is certain to add to those feelings of dread. Plan on it and then show up to do the work it will take to beat back the fascists.

Think about the toll Americans will endure in 2024. How many women will die of complications from a pregnancy they couldn’t end? How many trans persons will give up because they can’t live as human beings with autonomy over their bodies? How many persons will die from Covid this coming year because of right-wing propaganda supported by elected GOP officials? How many futures will be shortened because children may not get the food, health care, or education they need?

How many families will be split up because they couldn’t find shelter?

Our message when we’re doing the work has to be about unity. It’s clear right now that Democrats are splintering in all directions. Some don’t want Biden because he’s pro-Israel. Young people find Biden to be too old. Some feel he’s too middle-of-the-road. We all need to remember American novelist Rebecca Solnit’s mantra:

“Voting is a chess move, not a valentine.”

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Happy New Year!

The Daily Escape:

Dory with lights, Ogunquit, ME – December 2023 photo by Eric Storm Photo

This is the last Wrongologist column of the year because tomorrow is the first day of 2024. Cartoon lovers shouldn’t worry, there are a few cartoons at the end of this post. We will spend tomorrow attending a New Year’s Day concert of Baroque music at the auditorium of a local prep school.

You will see plenty of year-end reviews of what happened in 2023, most of which will concern what went wrong. So no need to recapitulate the bad news here. Despite all that, 2023 also was a year with significant positive developments:

  1. We engineered a soft landing for the economy, meaning that we didn’t have a recession and the widespread unemployment that would have come with it.
  2. The US will end 2023 with one of the largest annual drops in homicides on record (-12.8%), according to AH Datalytics
  3. In 2022, the insured share of the US population reached 92% (a historic high). Private health insurance enrollment increased by 9 million individuals and Medicaid enrollment increased by 6.1 million individuals.
  4. US healthcare spending as a percentage of the GDP was lower last year than it was 6 years earlier. Health care spending grew by 4.1%, and the share of GDP devoted to health care fell to 17.3%, lower than the 18.2% share in 2021.
  5. The WHO approved a new and affordable malaria vaccine. More than 600,000 people died of malaria in 2021, with children under 5 years representing 80% of malaria deaths in Africa. The US still reports about 2,000 malaria cases each year. The majority of them are contracted abroad.
  6. Two sickle cell disease treatments gained FDA approval. Sickle cell is a debilitating condition that affects around 100,000 Americans, most of them Black. One is the first medical treatment to be based on the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
  7. Sweden and Finland joined NATO. Germany is no longer dependent on Russian oil and natural gas.
  8. The Webb Telescope made huge advancements in human understanding of the Cosmos.
  9. And finally, as Wrongo has written elsewhere, today, despite his best efforts, he turns 80!

The Christmas season brought our family one piece of arguably bad news. On both sides, we are a blended family. That means the holiday season can bring quality time with extended family members who do not share your political and/or cultural sensibilities. But no worries, it’s just one day, except when it isn’t.

One of our kids while participating in a “Yankee Swap” of gifts, wound up with an autographed copy of Ted Cruz’s book, “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America”. Imagine having to act excited with this as your New Year’s read. As expected, there are many 5-star reviews on Amazon, but Wrongo wants to quote this one:

“A most difficult book to read. Almost never do I feel inclined to post a book review on a public site, yet I am compelled to do so here. Practically everything Cruz expresses outrage over are previously debunked, decades old tropes.”

Your mileage may vary. Wrongo OTOH, participated in a different Yankee Swap, receiving a grandson’s “75 songs that changed my life” along with a written description of each. A fantastic gift!

Here are the cartoons of the week. Gov. Haley can’t figure out the word puzzle:

The Elephant resolves to begin this year like last year:

The new baby doesn’t look so cuddly:

Enjoy the peace and quiet of this New Year’s holiday. There’s plenty of time to be nervous about the other 364 days.

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A New Year Brings New Work

The Daily Escape:

Merced River, Yosemite NP, CA – December 2023 photo by Graham Holmes Photography

We’ve enjoyed a few days away from the news, seeing kids and grandkids while eating non-stop and playing games in the living room. But it’s nearing the time when we will need to refocus on the state of our country. These are overstimulated times, as the abuse of all caps and exclamation-points around the internet shows us.

It’s doubtful, as the song goes, that “Next year, all our troubles will be out of sight“. It seems that next year will be very much like 2023 where the “bad vibes” were everywhere, despite all of the good news about the economy.

Here’s one finding from a poll by YouGov  that was performed between December 11th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 adult citizens, with a 4± point margin of error:

The bad vibes were overwhelmingly felt by Republicans, 66% of whom felt that 2023 was “One of the worst years in American history” even though it clearly was not.  From the NYT:

“The “vibe” is bad, voters can’t see that the economy is good.”

The economy is really good. Unemployment is near its historic low. Inflation is nearly controlled. While the Fed raised interest rates rapidly to slow economic growth, we are now likely to experience a soft landing of the economy. Back in December 2022, the Financial Times (paywalled) published a survey that showed 85% of economists were projecting a recession in 2023. But it didn’t happen, largely due to US fiscal policy (adding money to people’s pockets) overriding the impact of the Fed’s desire for a restrictive monetary policy.

Maybe people believing that the economy was bad shouldn’t be surprising. FOX, along with other media have been telling people non-stop that the economy is a problem (and using inflation as the proof). With few exceptions the Democrats haven’t responded clearly. Biden tried to brand the economy as Bidenomics, but neither he nor the Democrats mention every day how great the economy is.

Without hearing from the Dems, most Americans hear that the economy is bad and nobody contradicts that. So one side uses proper messaging techniques and the other side wonders why they’re unpopular. This is true for the Dems on issue after issue.

Heading into 2024, Wrongo is putting on his armor, because next year’s not going to be easy. In fact it’s going to be a shitshow. We know that we’re having an absolutely make or break election for president. Control of Congress is on the line as well. It’s now becoming clear that unless there’s a legal miracle, Trump will not be judged guilty in any of his pending criminal cases prior to the election.

That means it’s up to us voters to get the 2024 election right: Overwhelming turnout, hammering the message locally and not simply relying on the national Democratic apparatus to get things done for us at the local level. If we fail, it’s hard to see how America recovers fast enough to keep the entire world from turning to chaos with a Trump win.

From Rick Wilson: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“If I could weigh one magic wand and accomplish one simple change in the minds of anti-Trump voters, Republican or Democrat, it would be this: stop believing in miracles. Miracles are in short supply….It’s taken me a while to overcome the hope that something derails Trump….But nothing does. He is a protean force in American culture now, seemingly beyond all sanction. He is not going to jail….He won’t be disqualified from the ballot in any states when the Supreme Court is done. Trump is going to be the nominee; he is going to lure the media into his narrative frame once again.”

More:

“The miracles in politics are the ones we make. They come from work planning, preparation, organization, and focus. Nothing will set the Democratic Party back further and faster than the fantasy that somehow the law or fate will take Trump out of their way. This one will take a lot of work at every return, and there are no shortcuts.”

The DNC sends us their mealy-mouthed-please-send-money-now emails every week. They must up their game if they hope to win. Also, Wrongo can’t understand why so many Americans can’t see the handwriting on the wall. This isn’t a time for third parties, it isn’t a time to “send a message” to Biden.

The best defense for our democracy is to speak out and encourage everyone we know to vote.

We close this year with our final seasonal Christmas musical presentation, selections from the 2023 Christmas Carols Concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. This is snippets of the whole carols, which may disappoint some:

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Saturday Soother – December 23, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Santa Christmas gondola regatta in Venice – December 2023 photo by Manuel Silvestri

Happy Saturday! Wrongo loves it when the days begin to get longer, if only by a fraction. It’s a hopeful sign of the return to more daylight and eventually, spring and summer. This may (or may not) be the last column until the New Year. If it is, Wrongo wants to end with some positive notes.

First, The Economist is out with its annual “Country of the Year” award. This year, it highlights the move back to moderation from conservative governments in three countries.

First, Brazil which swore in a center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after four years of mendacious populism under Jair Bolsonaro:

“…who spread divisive conspiracy theories, coddled trigger-happy cops, supported rainforest-torching farmers, refused to accept electoral defeat and encouraged his devotees to attempt an insurrection.”

The new administration quickly restored normality—and reduced the pace of deforestation in the Amazon by nearly 50%. But since Lula likes Putin, Brazil didn’t get the award.

Second, Poland had a remarkable 2023: its economy withstood the shock of the war next door; it continued to host nearly 1 million Ukrainian refugees. It raised its defense spending to above 3% of GDP. The country’s biggest problem has been the dominance of the populist-nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has run the government for the past eight years, eroding the independence of the courts, stuffing state media with lackeys and nurturing crony capitalism:

“In October voters dumped PiS in favor of an array of opposition parties. It is early days for a new coalition government, led by Donald Tusk, a veteran centrist, but if it does a good job of mending the damage PiS did to democratic institutions, Poland will be a strong candidate for our prize next year.”

Tusk is a former president of the European Council.

But Greece won the prize. We all remember a few years ago when Greece was the economic basket case of Europe. Incomes had plunged, the social contract was fraying and extremist parties on the left and right were popular. The government turned to China and sold its main port, Piraeus, to a Chinese firm:

“But after years of painful restructuring, Greece topped our annual ranking of rich-world economies in 2023. Its center-right government was re-elected in June. Its foreign policy is pro-America, pro-EU and wary of Russia. Greece shows that from the verge of collapse it is possible to enact tough, sensible economic reforms, rebuild the social contract, exhibit restrained patriotism—and still win elections.”

The Economist closes with the thought that nearly half the world is due to vote in new governments in 2024, so democracy isn’t just on the line in America. It’s on the line everywhere.

Second, a piece of good domestic news. Charles Gaba at ACA Signups reports that, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

“In 2022, the insured share of the population reached 92% (a historic high). Private health insurance enrollment increased by 2.9 million individuals and Medicaid enrollment increased by 6.1 million individuals.”

Another stunner from CMS: US healthcare spending as a percentage of the GDP was lower last year than it was 6 years earlier. More detail:

“With a lower rate of health care spending growth of 4.1% in 2022, the share of GDP devoted to health care fell to 17.3% in 2022, lower than both the 18.2% share in 2021 and the highest share in the history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts of 19.5% in 2020. During 2016-19 the average share was 17.5%.”

That’s all good news. Around the global headquarters of the Wrongologist, we’re starting to look toward next year. And even if it seems the news can’t get worse, it probably will. Think about Trump on trial, epic Supreme Court decisions, ongoing foreign policy crises and the most important election of at least Wrongo’s life.

2024 will be a long year that’s going to require emotional and intellectual strength to avoid despair when the media continues covering this election as they have been. It will be a lot to handle.

Here’s Wrongo’s wish that you find some comfort and joy over the next week. And please keep showing up around here in the New Year. Wrongo promises to keep trying to give you perspectives that hopefully make some sense of the world.

On to another out of the ordinary Christmas tune. Watch and listen to the Canadian singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt perform the “Huron Carol”, written in 1642 by a Jesuit missionary, Jean de Brébeuf who lived among the Huron people. It is Canada’s oldest Christmas song. Brébeuf wrote the lyrics in the native language of the Huron/Wendat people. In December 2021, McKennitt sang it together with an ensemble. It’s superb and haunting:

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The Colorado Case

The Daily Escape:

Squam Lake, NH – December 2023 photo by Robert John Kozlow

”If you aren’t paying attention to the courts, you aren’t paying attention to democracy”. – Mark E. Elias

The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump is disqualified from appearing on the state’s presidential primary ballot because he engaged in insurrection was a bombshell. The plaintiffs included four Republican voters and officials, and two Independents. The organization bringing and managing the lawsuit was CREW and its chief attorney, Marc Elias, quoted above.

Some people are saying that it doesn’t seem right to toss him off of the ballot without a conviction. At issue is whether Trump is such a danger to the country that he’s ineligible to be a candidate at all, and the Colorado Court’s reasoning for this seems very tight. It’s not an interpretation about his rhetoric or an evaluation of his political extremism. It’s solely a determination of whether he took an oath to protect the Constitution, and then fomented an insurrection against the government. And although the verdict was 4-3, all seven judges agreed that Trump had fomented insurrection.

The Court found that he’s ineligible. Regarding the “he must be convicted to be ineligible” argument: The criminal cases against Trump that are wending their way through the courts are varied in their accusations. None of them were brought solely or even primarily to prevent Trump from being elected president, although the Colorado case was. The others charge real crimes. The importance of those cases transcends the individual who committed them. A failure to bring them would set a precedent that we as a country think these behaviors permissible by a future president.

As for letting the people decide about Trump, we did that already. Biden got seven million more votes than Trump. Yet Trump’s still spouting the Big Lie that the election was stolen. Even after 60 court cases, Trump couldn’t prove there was any election fraud. Conservative Judge Luttig says that the 14th Amendment isn’t about removing someone from qualifying for office. Rather it’s about meeting a baseline qualification in order to be considered a QUALIFIED candidate.

There’s also an argument on the Right that Trump shouldn’t be in court at all. But we have a Justice system and in the Colorado case, the legal process was followed. The Court didn’t take any shortcuts; no extraordinary maneuvers were made.

Jon V Last asks why Republicans were on one side of the law in 2020 and on a different side today: (brackets by Wrongo)

“So ask yourself this: All throughout December 2020, everyone insisted that, no matter how foolish or baseless President Trump’s claims might seem, he was entitled to pursue the legal process vigorously to its end.

Why is that not true in this case? Why is it that Trump…[in 2020 was] entitled to have his day in court, but the forces [today] looking to apply different laws to a different end are not?”

Last reminds us that many of the same people who insisted that Trump could pursue all available legal remedies in 2020 wanted a result that would keep him in power. Now, they’re outraged that the people in state of Colorado also pursued legal remedies and won a result that might keep him from returning to power. There’s more from Jon Last. Those who are complaining about the result in Colorado are complaining not about the legal process, but the legal result:

“Have you ever noticed how, whenever Trump does something terrible, there is always an argument that holding him accountable can only help him?

You can’t impeach him in 2020, because it’ll just make him stronger.

You can’t impeach him in 2021, because you’ll turn him into a martyr.

You can’t raid Mar-a-Lago to take back classified documents because you’ll rile up his base.

/snip/

There is a…..helplessness to that thinking: A wicked man does immoral and illegal things—and society’s reaction is to say that we must indulge his depredations, because if we tried to hold him accountable then he would become even worse.

Is there any other aspect of life in which Americans take that view?

That’s not how parents deal with children.

It’s not how regulatory agencies deal with corporations.

And it’s not how the justice system deals with criminals.”

From Robert Hubbell: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Every hesitation, reservation, and exhortation to ‘make an exception’ because of potential violence or political chaos is an invitation to abandon the Constitution. We do so at our grave peril and possibly for the first, last, and only time—because if we set our great charter aside once, there is no logical stopping point for setting it aside again when it serves the pleasure of a president who views the Constitution as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.”

The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot for engaging in insurrection is probably on its way to the US Supreme Court. Wrongo isn’t a lawyer, so you should look elsewhere for a discussion of the finer points of the law in this case, and he has no confidence that the Supremes will decide against Trump.

But Wrongo wants to address one item, the question of whether a candidate should be tried while running for office. Just the Mar-a-Lago charges of mishandling highly classified information and then obstructing their return makes it clear that he should be tried regardless of his candidacy. The government needed to secure the secret documents Trump had stashed all over his club. Trump thwarted those efforts. And the case was developed before Trump declared himself as a candidate for 2024.

A thought experiment: Let’s imagine that Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis had run for US president in 1868. Either of them could probably win a solid South and be competitive in several border states. Making sure that they didn’t win at the ballot box what they couldn’t on the battlefield is why Clause 3 was included in the 14th Amendment in July, 1868.

Would supporters of Lee or Davis have complained that they were ineligible for public office? Certainly! But, too bad. Insurrection and rebellion (still) have consequences. And nobody said that they had to be convicted before being ineligible.

When a president of the US loses an election and attempts to stay in power through violence, there really is no way to deal with it that doesn’t have a political component. But that means nothing to the merits of the case. Should we prosecute it only to the point that the ex-president decides to run again, and then drop it?

The whole Republican “let the voters decide” talking point was trotted out after the Colorado decision. It’s hilarious. We did that. We did let the voters decide. Biden won. And Trump refused to accept the results and sent a violent mob to overturn it. That’s the whole point of this case. We must apply the Constitution and the rule of law to Trump in the same way it would be applied to any other citizen.

Whatever lies ahead, let’s not underestimate the significance of the Colorado Court findings. They will figure prominently in the outcome in 2024. Our job is to fight for the soul of democracy and for a free and responsible government by popular consent.

Let’s close with a Christmas tune that is new to Wrongo: The Tractors perform their 2009 hit “The Santa Claus Boogie”, from their second album, “Have Yourself a Tractors Christmas”. The band no longer exists, as several of the members have died:

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The Number Of Guns Seized in US Schools Is Soaring.

The Daily Escape:

Geminids Meteor shower, Grand Tetons, WY – December 2023 timed exposure photo by Jeff Bernhard

We’ve just passed the 11th Anniversary of the school massacre in Newtown, CT. Wrongo and Ms. Right live about 20 minutes from the scene. While that grisly event is never too far from our consciousness when December rolls around, we never thought there would come a time when America would have an easier time banning books than guns. From the WaPo:

“Last school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That’s more than six guns each day, on average. Nationwide…1.1 million students…attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year.”

It’s hard to imagine that while some children are trying to learn, others are packing.

Even that exhaustive review of local news sources doesn’t account for guns that are carried into schools undetected. In addition, many gun seizures are never disclosed by districts. Some guns are found on campuses located in communities that are underserved by news organizations.

The Post asked the country’s 100 largest school districts to share data on guns seized over the last five school years. Many said they do not track that data. But disclosures from 51 of them illuminated the gap between what’s reported in the news and what happens in schools.

In those districts, representing 6.3 million students, 515 guns were found during the 2022-2023 school year. That means 58% of seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations. The Post’s survey recorded guns recovered at schools in rural, suburban and urban areas, in all 50 states and Washington, DC. Here’s a chart from the WaPo survey:

Note the sharp increase after the Covid shutdown. A giant problem is that the true number of guns on school campuses is almost certainly far higher.

The Post found that the number of campus gun seizures spiked significantly between the 2018-2019 school year and the 2022-2023 school year — a five-year period that, following the pandemic shutdowns, has also seen significantly more behavioral problems in school. The 47 districts for which The Post was able to obtain five full school years of data saw a 79% increase in guns found on campuses over that time frame. In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings.

A huge question is what’s causing so many more kids to bring loaded guns to school? The WaPo quotes Megan Ranny a leading firearm-injury researcher and dean of the Yale School of Public Health:

“Kids are more likely to carry firearms, and even to bring firearms into school, if they have been victims of violence themselves, if they aren’t connected to a community, if they have post-traumatic stress….We’ve got a lot of kids who are scared…maybe have lost parents from Covid, maybe have lost community connections because of shutdowns of community groups during Covid. And then add on to it increased access to firearms. A lot of guns bought over the last couple of years. It becomes a perfect storm.”

Such frightening thoughts. One of the positive outcomes from Sandy Hook is that Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit launched after the 2012 killings, debuted the “Say Something Anonymous Reporting System” that allows users to anonymously alert school officials of safety concerns at any time of day, online or by phone. More from WaPo:

“More than 5,000 schools use the program….The system is free to schools….In the districts they’ve trained, about 3% of students and staff, on average…submit tips…although some school systems see higher participation rates, up to 5%. Most tips concern suicidal behavior and drug use. But the system has averted at least 143 acts of violence with a weapon, including at least 15 planned school shootings, since 2018…”

And what about parents? What’s their responsibility for one of their kids bringing a gun to school? Parents have largely skated on accountability for the misdeeds of their children, except in Virginia, where last week, CNN reports that:

“The mother of the Virginia 6-year-old who shot his first grade teacher in January was sentenced Friday to two years in prison, according to the court in Newport News.”

What happens to her son (she’s a single parent) will be collateral damage in this story. Parents need to be held accountable for these acts, particularly when the kid took the parent’s gun to school.

When we talk about what‘s wrong today, we have to admit that there’s nothing more important in America than the supremacy of the Second Amendment. Your life, the lives of your spouse and children, or your friends are worth nothing compared to that “right” to own guns.

Time to wake up America! The nation is sinking under this sick and warped interpretation of the Amendment. To help you wake up, It’s the perfect time for Tchaikovshy’s 1892 “Waltz of the Flowers” from his ballet “The Nutcracker”. Here it is performed by the Concertgebow in the Netherlands, conducted by Semyon Bychkov.

The waltz is the last number in the Nutcracker Suite, which is set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child’s imagination:

 

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More Immigration Disinformation

The Daily Escape:

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, ME – December 2023 drone photo by Rick Berk Photography

There are plenty of newsworthy items as we end another week. You can read about them all over the internet. Wrongo wants to highlight just one: The Dow Jones index is up 29% since bottoming on Sept. 30, 2022, climbing to a new all-time high.

This is mostly due to the announcement by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday that in all likelihood, there will be no more increases in interest rates, and that there may be as many as three interest rate reductions in 2024.

Professional investors aren’t following the Dow, but it remains a mental benchmark that many Americans use to gauge the health of the stock market and the economy. So accept good news when it shows up.

Today we return to the topic of illegal immigration. As Wrongo writes this, there is still no deal on immigration, which is thought to be the hold-up on funding for Ukraine and Israel. From Semaphore:

“GOP negotiators said they believed they were making progress in securing a border policy package that’s tilted toward conservative priorities….They also welcomed the…Democratic attacks on the negotiations…..’There are several Democrats that have spoken against it,’ GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, (R-NC) told Semafor. ‘That means we’re hitting the right sort of tone.’”

Wrongo mentioned that it is very difficult to find facts from either side in the immigration debate. One constant refrain from the Right is that terrorists are slipping over the southern border, posing an existential threat to America, and it’s all Biden’s fault. From CBS:

“Republican lawmakers, GOP White House hopefuls and conservative media figures have argued that the Biden administration’s border policies have given terrorists an easier way to enter the US and harm Americans. On Monday…Trump claimed that the “same people” who killed or abducted more than 1,000 civilians in Israel are coming across the southern border separating the US and Mexico…”

And Media Matters added:

“Since the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza, Fox News has seized on the chaos in the Middle East to revive its relentless fearmongering campaign suggesting that migrants crossing into the US at the southern border are terrorists, this time from the Middle East. Fox’s toxic rhetoric follows “a spike in hate incidents” against Muslims in the US.”

There has been an increase in Border Patrol apprehensions of individuals who are on the US terror watchlist over the past two years. But they represent a tiny fraction of all migrants processed along the southern border. From the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“From October last year to this September, officials at the southern border arrested 169 people whose names matched those on the watch list, compared with 98 during the previous fiscal year and 15 in 2021, according to government data. But that is a minuscule fraction of the total number of migrants who were apprehended at the border over the past year, more than two million.”

That fraction is less than 0.01% for those of us without calculators. Finding illegals who are on the terror watch list is far more common along the US-Canada border, despite much lower levels of unauthorized migration there. Here’s a US Customs and Border Protection chart:

Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 430 watchlist hits along the northern border in fiscal year 2023, the vast majority of them at official ports of entry.

Still, there are concerns. In its homeland threat assessment for 2024, the intelligence branch of DHS said:

“…record encounters of migrants arriving from a growing number of countries have complicated border and immigration security…”

The assessment also said a recent increase in apprehensions of migrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, while still significantly lower than those from the Western Hemisphere, has “exacerbated border security challenges” because those individuals require more vetting and processing and because it’s more difficult to deport them.

There’s also the question of migrants who aren’t apprehended. The Border Patrol estimates more than 1 million individuals have entered the country surreptitiously over the past two years.

Republicans in Congress now talk about the southern border primarily as a national security issue rather than largely as a collective fear of the “great replacement”. If hundreds of thousands of migrants are evading apprehension, these national security fears have merit. But since terror watch list apprehensions are tiny and a lot higher along our northern border, that border most likely poses an equal threat to national security, if not more, since the security along the northern border is lax. We don’t really have any idea how many evade apprehension by crossing it.

Despite the constant hammering by Fox and the Right, since 1975 no one has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the US that involved someone who came across the border illegally. Whenever Congress gets around to dealing with illegal immigration, the solution will require more manpower both for the border patrol and immigration services.

Immigrants will keep on coming. Migration is a part of human nature. Europeans came to North America before America was a country. The peoples of the UK are not the peoples that were there 5,000 years ago. The vast majority of UK citizens have little DNA from the original peoples of those islands. That is also true in the US.

History shows that trying to stop immigration all together is a fool’s errand.

Regardless of how successful we are at controlling immigration, the US demographics of the past 250 years will look VERY different from the US demographics of 100 years from now. That doesn’t mean we should give up on controlling the process as much as possible. Part of that is to increase the costs of crossing the border, which we are doing today with instant expulsion and denial of asylum claims.

And once people are here, we must do all we can to get them integrated into US society.

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The Mess That Is Congress

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Henry Driggers Park, Brunswick, GA – December 2023 photo by Kyle Morgan

“Dress me up for battle when all I want is peace
Those of us who pay the price come home with the least”

(from 1976’s “Harvest for the World”, by the Isley Brothers)

There are only 11 days left until Christmas, and there are only three more days this year when the Senate is in session, and just two days left for the House. That schedule could be amended and lengthened if both Houses can reach agreement on anything before they break this Friday.

Prime among the legislation that should/must pass is aid for Ukraine. And Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy’s in Washington to try to help turn a few politicians to help. From the WaPo:

“The visit — less than three months after Zelenskyy’s last trip to Washington — comes at a critical time for the supplemental appropriations bill….Republicans have demanded that the package include border policy changes, and some Democrats criticized the White House on Monday for being willing to give up too much in those negotiations after Biden said he was willing to agree to “significantly more” to strike a deal.”

Biden says he’s willing to deal, but Congress seems very likely to leave for the holidays without passing any new Ukraine package. From David Frum in The Atlantic:

“The ostensible reason is that they want more radical action on the border than the Biden administration has offered. The whole aid package is now stalled, with potentially catastrophic consequences for Ukraine. Ukrainian units are literally running out of ammunition.”

More:

“How is any of this happening? On past evidence, a clear majority of Senate Republicans sincerely want to help Ukraine. Probably about half of House Republicans do too. In a pair of procedural test votes in September, measures to cut or block aid to Ukraine drew, respectively, 104 and 117 Republican votes of the 221 (Republicans then) in the caucus.”

Biden’s offer to negotiate with Republicans about the border is meaningful. The fundamental reason for today’s border crisis is that would-be immigrants game the asylum system. The system is overwhelmed by the numbers claiming asylum. Most of those claims will ultimately be rejected, but the processing of each takes years. In the meantime, most asylum seekers will be released into the US.

Biden’s proposal is $14 billion of additional funding that would pay for 1,600 new staff in the asylum system. New hires can speed up the process, reducing the incentive for asylum claimants who get de facto US residency while their claim is pending.

But are Republicans willing to negotiate? It doesn’t seem like they are. The Republicans in the Senate’s  position is stated by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) who said:

“There’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator Schumer….This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.”

This is 2023: For some Republicans, what matters isn’t what they get, but how they get it.

That’s also true in the House where Speaker Johnson (R-Bible) told Zelenskyy that the US southern border should come first in negotiations with Democrats over aid for Ukraine.

Clearly the Republican House members are in it to strike poses and television hits. They do not want to make deals. They each want to position themselves as the one true conservative too pure for dealmaking. The only things they’re willing to admit they want are the things they know to be impossible.

It’s a complicated situation, because House Republicans have one set of immigration demands while Republicans in the Senate refuse to say what their demands are.

This means Biden has to make a deal that Senate Democrats won’t want. Otherwise we’re headed to a “no” that will doom Ukraine and disgrace the US in the eyes of the world while doing nothing to remedy the crisis at the border.

If Congressional leadership was ever needed, it’s needed today.

Jon V. Last in the Bulwark lists the two real-world reasons for Biden to give in. First, that Ukraine is more important than our domestic immigration policy:

“The war is a finite event, the results of which will influence global economics and security for years and decades to come. Depending on the outcome, NATO will either congeal or fracture. Peace and security in Europe will either stabilize or destabilize. China will either be deterred or encouraged in its quest to subjugate Taiwan.”

Second, immigration is a perennial challenge for America. Even if we “solved” current immigration problems today, next year, we’d have more immigration problems to re-solve:

“Immigration does need reform. Huge sections of the system are broken, the humanitarian crisis at the border is real, and there are some areas where Democrats and Republicans have similar views of which reforms are needed.”

Jon Last also points out that there are good political reasons for Biden to make a deal. First, a deal makes Republicans co-owners of the border problem. For Republicans, immigration is like abortion: It’s not an issue they want to solve; it’s a political club they want to wield.

Second, Biden can paint Republicans as anti-Ukraine even after making an immigration deal. He can say that Republicans didn’t want to fund Ukraine (which polls well with voters) so he had to take action to make sure they didn’t hand Putin a victory.

Third, an immigration deal shores up Biden’s position with Hispanic and swing voters. Immigration is a very important issue to voters and large majorities of them disapprove of Biden’s immigration policies.

Fourth, Biden can then reinforce his 2024 narrative that the election is a choice between governing, or chaos. He’s going to try to disqualify Trump and make 2024 a contest between a workhorse who gets bipartisan compromises done and a chaos agent who burns everything down.

JV Last says:

“Cutting a deal on immigration in order to get aid to Ukraine lets Biden say (a) “I’m the guy who gets business done by doing bipartisan compromise,” but also (b) “If you don’t like this deal, Democratic voters, then we have to win back the House.”

Good thinking from Last.

Wrongo has generally steered clear of debates over immigration and the Wall because they have a high noise to signal ratio, and neither side is always great on the facts.

It’s curious: You would assume that all Republicans should be pounding on their Congressional representatives to increase the number of immigration judges immediately! But they aren’t since that would conflict with their idea of shrinking the administrative state. They shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.

One way to cut illegal immigration down would be to crack down on foreign remittances. Most immigrants are sending money back home to help the rest of their families survive. If remittances required an ID card that only citizens or those with a valid visa could obtain, remittances would fall.

All we can do now is hope for cooler heads to make a deal before year end.

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