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:
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.
The US will end 2023 with one of the largest annual drops in homicides on record (-12.8%), according to AH Datalytics
In 2022, the insured share of the US population reached 92% (a historic high).Private health insurance enrollment increased by9 million individualsandMedicaid enrollment increased by 6.1 millionindividuals.
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.
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.
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.
Sweden and Finland joined NATO. Germany is no longer dependent on Russian oil and natural gas.
The Webb Telescope made huge advancements in human understanding of the Cosmos.
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.
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.
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.
“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:
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 Economistis 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.”
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 millionindividuals.”
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:
”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.”
“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:
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:
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…”
“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.
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.
Garden of The Gods, CO – December 2023 photo by James H. Egbert
It’s another Monday, and the world is still a mess. There is so much division here at home that we forget that the rest of the world is boiling over with wars. Not a world war, but there are wars everywhere around the world. Americans are focused on the Ukraine War and the Israel/Hamas war, but there are local and regional wars we barely hear about.
“Among the deadliest wars so far in this still young century are the Second Congo War, the Syrian Civil War, the Darfur War in western Sudan, the war in Afghanistan following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the war against Boko Harem in Nigeria, the Yemeni Civil War, Russia’s current war against Ukraine, and, of course, the current blood-letting between Israel and Hamas.”
More:
“According to the Geneva Academy….more than 110 armed conflicts are raging worldwide.”
Gershowitz says that in 2022, 237,000 men, women, and children died from organized violence, double the number of armed conflict deaths of the year before. While the bloody toll for 2023 hasn’t been compiled yet, we should expect the numbers to exceed those of 2022.
The Middle East, including North Africa, is the most blood-soaked region of the world, hosting more than 45 shooting wars. We know about the Israel/Hamas fight, but we hear much less about ongoing armed conflicts in Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and Western Sahara.
There are scores of other active hot conflicts, most of which don’t ever make headlines: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan are among the most dangerous places on the planet for civilians.
War dead in this region alone adds up to between hundreds and thousands every day. Some countries, such as the Central African Republic, have had multiple wars. Last year, the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region accounted for over 100,000 battle-related deaths, according to Oslo’s Peace Research Institute.
Currently, there are 21 separate armed conflicts raging in Asia, two of which are considered international wars (India-Pakistan and skirmishes between India and China). In some countries, such as Pakistan and the Philippines, there are multiple armed conflicts taking place simultaneously. Both countries are host to six separate regional in-country conflicts.
While everyone is familiar with Putin’s war in Ukraine, there are five other European nations (or territories) that Russian armies have occupied, including Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, Moldova’s Transdniestria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia (Georgia).
The deaths in Ukraine are adding up. The US estimated in August that there were approximately 300,000 Russian casualties, including as many as 120,000 deaths and 180,000 wounded. Ukrainian losses were estimated at 70,000 deaths and 120,000 wounded. Since those estimates were released, the toll of dead and wounded on both sides has climbed even higher.
In our hemisphere, there are six armed conflicts in Latin America—three in Mexico and three in Columbia.
The 21st Century is still young, but it’s horribly violent. China is eyeing Taiwan, North Korea is elbowing its way into the nuclear club, and Iran, which follows the Shia form of Islam, is eying all of Arabia, which embraces Sunni Islam.
Back to Israel/Hamas for a few random thoughts: First, at the start of any new armed conflict, the UN, occasionally the US and other nations, call for an immediate cease fire. There hasn’t been a durable cease fire in this century. Yet, Steve Coll in the New Yorker had this to say:
“Even a temporary ceasefire displays the moral power of peacemaking. Last week, as a shaky truce to allow prisoner and hostage swaps and aid deliveries quieted the ruinous war between Israel and Hamas, Israeli families welcomed back more than a hundred children and older adults whom Hamas and its allies had kidnapped on October 7th…..In the West Bank, jubilant crowds waved the flags of Fatah and Hamas as Palestinian parents hugged their teen-age children released from Israeli jails.”
More:
“Ceasefires usually don’t end wars because they don’t address the issues that underlie them. (A study of sixty-seven civil wars published in the Journal of Peace Studies in 2021 found no evidence that ceasefires and prisoner releases led to sustainable peace agreements.)”
Specifically with respect to Israel/Hamas, we can’t see what the end state looks like. Netanyahu visited Gaza during the ceasefire and cited three aims: “eliminating Hamas, returning all of our hostages, and insuring that Gaza does not become a threat to the State of Israel again.”
As Wrongo said two months ago, it is difficult to see how the second objective can be achieved in tandem with the first. Regardless of what Netanyahu thinks, the third will not be controlled by Israel, even though it may be the most important of Israel’s three objectives.
Another problem is that this war is causing a terrible divide in America. Think about how quickly U of Penn’s president Liz Magill was forced to resign after giving a truthful and legally correct answer to an utterly bad faith question. The question she was asked was, “Is calling for the genocide of Jews always a violation of Penn’s code of conduct in regard to bullying and harassment?”
Now, no rational person is in favor of genocide, but Rep. Stefanik’s question implies that simply speaking out in support of Palestinians is the equivalent of calling for Jewish genocide. Plenty of today’s college students support Palestine, and very few of them think that Jews should be exterminated.
Stefanik’s question asks us to ignore people’s free speech rights when they are awful and noxious. It lands very close to the witch hunting of McCarthyism in the 1950s.
Also, it’s clear in Wrongo’s circle that people are afraid to express opinions on the Israel/Hamas war, because whatever is said is sure to offend someone. It could possibly be enough to cause a threatening retaliation. What’s worse is that not a single person will live or die in the Middle East because of anything anyone says or doesn’t say at the University of Pennsylvania or in Wrongo’s hometown.
There is nothing at stake in the performative rage about what’s said at college demonstrations. It’s all empty theater.
Time to wake up America! If Republicans and other hardliners are able to make criticism of Israel a forbidden topic in mainstream society, that means our democracy will die right along with the many more deaths we will see in the Middle-East.
To help you wake up, watch and listen to a globally produced cover of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” by the people behind Playing For Change. This song came out in 1971 when the Vietnam war was still going on. Here it features Sara Bareilles among many other talented people:
Sample lyric:
Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some loving here today…
It’s the start of a brand new week with shopping opportunities! And you can watch our Senate and House members leave for their undeserved vacation without doing much. Try that at your house. On to cartoons.
Trump told us what he plans to do:
Trump thinks he has an “It’s Easy” button:
Voters then and now:
The Republican Party sleeps through a real crisis:
The MAGAts are all in:
The economy sucks and the checkout lines are too long:
Tuberville feels he’s entitled to more obstruction:
