Banana Republicanism – Page 14

Saturday Soother – July 8, 2023

The Daily Escape:

There are currently 13 turkey chicks roaming the Fields of Wrong. One mom has nine and the other, four. While each year we hope for the best, we live amongst always hungry Coopers and Red Tailed hawks. Oh, and watch out for the foxes, coyotes and bobcats – July 2023 iPhone photo by Wrongo.

In Wrongo’s last column, he talked about the need to fight and win the long battle to reclaim rights that were lost in recent Supreme Court decisions:

“It won’t be easy to win these rights back, but it isn’t impossible.”

And new data from NBC offers a ray of hope:

“Republican primary voters are older, whiter and much more conservative than the electorate at large…. 39% of Republican primary voters are age 65 and older, compared with 25% of the overall electorate and 25% of Democratic primary voters, according to the poll…..89% of GOP primary voters are white, versus 72% of all voters.”

Here’s a chart from the poll:

Only 24% of GOP voters are under age 50, compared to 57.9% of the US population. More:

“…67% of Republican primary voters say they are conservative, including 41% who are “very” conservative…..That compares with 36% of all voters who are conservative, including 18% who are “very” conservative.”

There’s more bad news for the GOP in recent census data:

One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election is that census data show that the number of white people without college degrees (a core of Trump’s support) has fallen by 2.1 million since 2016.
Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college (an increasingly Democratic constituency) has grown by 13.3 million.

Worse for the GOP and Trump, the reliance of the GOP on the electorate without college degrees has grown. In 2012, 48% of Republicans didn’t have college degrees. By 2016, that percentage had increased to 58%, but according to the NBC News poll, it’s now 63%.

They’ve also lost many of the college educated over the past eight years. And the population of the non-college educated is shrinking. It’s not a good formula for victory. It all points to having a decent chance to win the town by town, state by state fight to blunt the Supreme Court’s extremism. Forget what the media are saying, 2024 doesn’t have to be a close election.

And let’s also forget about the news, or where in the world Prigozhin is hiding. Rumors say he’s in St. Petersburg, Russia. Soon we’ll want proof of life.

And if you want to know just how far to the right the House Freedom Caucus has moved, they just ousted Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for being too liberal.

But it’s time to leave all of this behind and concentrate on our Saturday Soother.

We’re in the middle of a heat wave here in northwest Connecticut, and that makes all of the necessary yard work much more difficult to do. This year, we’ve had rabbits in our vegetable garden along with the usual horde of chipmunks, so Wrongo put up some of the deer fencing we use in the winter around the garden. We’ll see if it is successful.

This morning grab a cold brew coffee and take a seat in the shade outdoors. Now put on your Bluetooth headset and watch and listen to Sissel Kyrkjebø, a Norwegian soprano, perform “Going Home”. This song is about Antonin Dvorak, who wrote his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World” soon after arriving in America in 1893.

The song is based on the larghetto movement from Dvorak’s 9th. One of Dvorak’s students, William Arms Fisher, put words to the melody from the second movement. He called the new song, “Goin’ Home“. It was published in 1922.

Dvorak outlived his entire family, and returned home to Bohemia from the US. He died in 1904, at the age of 63. Sissel, who Wrongo knew nothing about before today, sings beautifully. Consider that English may not even be her primary language:

You Say You Want A Revolution

The Daily Escape:

17 Palms Oasis, Anza-Borrego SP, CA – June 2023 photo by Paulette Donnellon. When Wrongo and Ms. Right lived in LA, we hiked to this spot twice with grandkids.

This year, the Fourth of July just won’t let go of Wrongo. Political historian Eli Merritt has an op-ed in the LA Times: The Fourth of July is all about America’s first principle — the right of revolution:

“This right of resistance against inequality and tyranny is the American way. It is the essence of the American experiment, beginning in the 1760s and 1770s with the colonists’ defiance of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Tea Act and the Intolerable Acts; and in the 19th and 20th centuries with the abolitionist movement, women’s suffrage movement, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments, and the civil rights movement; and today with nonviolent fights for racial justice, equal voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive rights.”

We’re a country born of revolution. But after the Jan 6 insurrection, people are probably put off by the very idea of it. It’s what Trump’s seditionists did when they stormed the Capitol. Their goal was to prevent, or at least to obstruct, the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

And they did so by summoning the spirit of 1776. But in contrast to the J6 “protesters”, the people who approved the Declaration signed their names to a document. They didn’t wear hoods, masks, or camo gear and beat up people. The country’s “revolution” began with paper, pen and ink, with “revolutionaries” plainly identifying themselves. As Merritt points out:

“…the Declaration of Independence is a nonviolent manifesto. It makes no mention of swords, guns or war. Separately, the Continental Congress called upon American patriots to arm themselves, yet only in self-defense of God-given natural rights.”

Yet here we are in 2023, facing once again a fight for rights that we had already won, says The Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The first thing to remember about the damage done by the US supreme court this June and the June before is that each majority decision overturns a right that we had won…. What this means is that the right wing of the US supreme court is part of a gang of reactionaries engaging in backlash.”

In the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, the Supreme Court made a decision based on nothing, in which a woman refuses to perform a service she didn’t provide, to a gay couple that didn’t exist, in the name of religious “liberty.” That six Supremes jumped on this case is a travesty. We either back down and accept the direction these extreme Justices are pushing the country toward, or we fight.

Wrongo wants to fight, just like he did in the 1960s. It won’t be easy to win these rights back, but it isn’t impossible. And this from WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin:

“On…Independence Day, which celebrates rebellion against a monarch lacking consent of the governed, it behooves us to dedicate ourselves to robust and authentic democracy: government of the people, by the people, for the people — not by arrogant right-wing justices.”

The Supreme Court is the point of the American Conservative movement’s spear, and it must be our goal to blunt their extremisim. The ballot box is our only way out of this mess, so it will take an immense amount of organizing and effort to overcome the gerrymandering, active voter suppression and massive disinformation campaigns conducted by the media.

The current SCOTUS cannot change our beliefs and values. These rights are ours, regardless of what six Supremes say. From Solnit:

“If you didn’t believe that equal access and rights were wrong yesterday…you don’t have to believe it now. Not just because those rights were denied by six justices….”

The country is on our side. Gallup has a new poll of approve/disapprove of the Supreme Court:

This shows that the people agree with blunting the power of today’s Supreme Court. The final words go to Solnit:

“…history shows us that when we come together with ferocious commitment to a shared goal we can be more powerful than institutions and governments. The right would like us to feel defeated and powerless. We can feel devastated and still feel powerful or find our power. This is not a time to quit. It’s a time to fight.”

We must take every available measure in our democracy to revoke consent and remedy these unconstitutional decisions. It will require active engagement in all levels of the democratic political process, from local school boards to the presidency. We can’t take any political office for granted.

Help new voters obtain ID and register to vote. Educate yourself about the candidates, vote in the primaries. Get your friends and families to vote. Make sure no seat goes uncontested wherever a GOP politician holds office or runs without opposition.

Above all, do not let them assume that you consent to the loss of our rights.

July 4, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Kilauea Caldera showing a blackened lava lake, Hawaii Volcanoes NP – June 2023 photo by J. Wei for the NPS

Kilauea stopped erupting on June 19, but the threat of another eruption is always present. That could be a metaphor for America in 2023: We could erupt at any moment.

The 1960s were an optimistic time. There were demonstrations for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. There was police violence against the demonstrators, and assassinations of JFK and MLK. But a throughline of those times was a belief that righteous change was possible.

Wrongo graduated from Georgetown in 1966. His specialty was American colonial history. Those also were times of optimism, and there also were factions and different priorities and beliefs throughout the land.

Back in the 18^th century, we overcame our differences, declared our independence, and formed a nation.

Now, 247 years after our revolution, it seems that staying united is difficult, if not impossible. Today, facts are fungible, and so is the truth. As Wrongo stated in his last column, about one third of Americans fail to vote. They are apathetic because they can’t see what would change if they did vote.

Having one third of Americans regularly fail to vote has surrendered control over our politics and our courts to a minority, mostly a few at the top, supported by some people in the middle, and enabled by the apathy of most of the rest of us.

Worse, most of those in today’s controlling minority are extremists. They have exploited the imperfections in our system to impose a return to the social mores and politics of an earlier time.

The best example of this is the string of far-Right decisions handed down in 2022 by the Supreme (Extreme) Court. From Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern:

“Consider the issues that SCOTUS has resolved….The constitutional right to abortion: gone. States’ ability to limit guns in public: gone….Effective constraints around separation of church and state: gone. The bar on prayer in public schools: gone. Effective enforcement of Miranda warnings: gone. The ability to sue violent border agents: gone. The Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases at power plants: gone.”

Vast areas of law that took decades to establish were overturned in a year.

And in 2023, the Court’s reactionary majority has continued to overturn more of the American social order. Those rulings: ending affirmative action, preventing the forgiveness of student loans and an egregious decision on gay rights, show that the Court has lost any sense of judicial restraint.

The Court is no longer “calling balls and strikes” as Chief Justice John Roberts famously said. In fact, there could be a highlight reel of umpire John Roberts’ blown calls. It’s clear that the Extreme Court wants to go further, and given today’s politics, there’s zero risk of the other two branches of government agreeing to override their decisions.

So, on this Fourth of July weekend, let’s hit pause. Let’s take time to reflect on how our founders were able to weave a message that united many factions against a common enemy. It should be very clear that at this point that the common enemy to unite against is the partisan power of a partisan minority.

Real power no longer lies with the People or with their politicians, it resides in the Supreme Court. The antiquated and undemocratic elements of our government: the Electoral College, lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices and the malapportionment of the Senate, would require Constitutional amendments to fix. But we’re too divided to amend the Constitution.

Imagine attempting to fix the Senate’s malapportionment by getting a Constitutional amendment through that same malapportioned Senate.

But there may be reason for optimism in the fact that the two of this term’s negative rulings related to college students (admissions and debt relief). Those issues will motivate young voters in 2024.

Here are some numbers that give some cause for optimism about younger voters helping to change our politics:

Voters 47 and younger will be in the majority beginning in 2028.
Younger voters have historically voted in significantly higher numbers for Democrats.
Young women, especially young Hispanics and young African Americans are substantially higher voters for Democrats.
Fifty-five percent of white male voters under 45 voted Democratic in 2022, as did 52% of younger white females.

Here are a few other facts that should make us optimistic going forward:

Abortion was youth’s #1 issue in 2022.
Mid-term voter turnout for people under 29 was 23%, lower than 2018 (28%), but much higher than in 2014 (13%).
Michigan had the highest youth turnout in the country (37%).
Two swing states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, were among the four states to have the highest youth turnout in 2022.

To help you reflect on how we might take back control, let’s listen to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” performed at the Greek Theater in Los Angles in 2012.

There are many versions of this tune on YouTube, but this one makes the point that virtually all of us are descended from immigrants, in this case, Diamond’s grandmother, who immigrated from Kyiv:

Off To Alaska

The Daily Escape:

***Sitka Harbor – Alaska stock photo via Bing***

(Today we’re leaving for Alaska and will have limited access to WiFi, so columns will be light and variable. Regular columns will resume on 7/1. In the meantime, if turbulence occurs, keep your tray tables in their upright and locked position and if you’re Trump, keep your tiny hands inside the blog.)

Wrongo isn’t sure who is the most famous Alaskan, but he really likes this comment by Sarah Palin, when asked if Trump’s followers were a cult:

Sarah! That’s the EXACT definition of Trump’s followers. And isn’t a cult just a religion that doesn’t have tax-free status? Maybe the difference is that in a cult, there’s a guy at the top who knows it’s a scam. In a religion, that guy is dead.

In other battlefields in the culture war, the Southern Baptists voted to uphold the expulsion of one of its most prominent mega-churches, Saddlebrook, because Saddlebrook had decided that women could be pastors. In the Southern Baptist Convention, preaching is a man’s job. From the Economist:

“The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America’s largest Protestant denomination with 13.2m adherents, which begins its annual meeting on June 13th in New Orleans, has long treated women as subordinate to men. “Complementarianism”—the idea that men and women occupy distinct but equal roles, with men exercising spiritual authority—is the preferred term.”

On Wednesday the Convention voted by a two-thirds majority to amend their constitution to state that the Southern Baptist Convention “Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder.” Their concern was the old slippery slope:

“….that female pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.”

If you think that sounds out of touch with modern America and more like the Taliban, this chart from the Economist shows that you’re not alone:

This means that the Southern Baptists are back where they were in the 1980s in terms of membership. More from the Economist:

“By the mid-1980s, 200 women had been ordained as pastors….But a year later conservatives commandeered the leadership of the SBC, and began to purge women from seminaries. In 1998 the SBC amended its statement of faith to affirm that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband. In 2000 it said that only men can be pastors. Churches that disagreed were hounded out.”

Kind of explains the decline in membership. Also it isn’t the SBC’s biggest problem: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In recent years hundreds of sexual-abuse allegations have surfaced, implicating pastors directly and in the cover-up. And ever more people are leaving the faith. In 2012 there were three baptisms for every congregant who quit. Last year the SBC lost two-and-a-half members for every baptism.”

Could it be that the SBC has some kind of a marketing problem?

This is a problem across the evangelical community: Women are meant to be meek, accommodating baby making machines. They have no sexual education. Home schooling leaves them unable to compete in a globalized work environment. It’s not about the scriptures, it’s about power and control.

That’s what cults are about. It doesn’t matter if it’s MAGAs or the SBC. Considering that evangelicals compose a significant portion of the voting GOP, this shouldn’t be a surprise. These people are fearful of what the future may hold. Like the MAGAverse, they long for a time that may never have existed. The Economist quotes the conservative leaders of the constitutional amendment:

“Once a denomination has female pastors, it’s usually just a matter of time until they ordain homosexual pastors….”

That’s probably true, but these people really have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Where Is The GOP’s War Of Words Taking Them?

The Daily Escape:

Rain, White Sands NP – June 2023 photo by Dawood Afzal

(Wrongo and Ms. Right want to give healing thoughts and condolences to John & Janis S., who have just experienced a terrible loss.)

The NYT reported on Trump’s speech in Columbus, GA, where he was pretty chatty about the US government and the DOJ indictment:

“Either the Communists win and destroy America, or we destroy the Communists…”

He was referring to Democrats. He railed against “globalists,” “warmongers” in government and “the sick political class that hates our country.” Trump also described the DOJ as:

“…a sick nest of people that needs to be cleaned out immediately,”

He called the special counsel, Jack Smith, “deranged” and “openly a Trump hater.” He then went on to say, “This is the final battle”. And by that, he doesn’t mean the final court case against him. All of this was said in a speech to several thousand people and delegates of the Georgia Republican Party who met in a brick building that was once a Civil War ironworks that manufactured mortars, guns and cannons for the Confederate Army.

Trump calling his Democratic opponents “Communists and “Marxists” isn’t connected to today’s politics. the number of either in the US is vanishingly small. It barely makes sense, but in today’s GOP, it really doesn’t have to make sense. Trump and the GOP would never actually articulate what it is they’re opposing. That would make explicit that they’re really against America becoming more of what it is: An increasingly pluralistic and multi-ethnic country.

But many on the Right are deliberately going much further. The NYT reported that in Georgia, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, said:

“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden….If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA”

Well, that’s a threat. The same NYT article says:

“In social media posts and public remarks, close allies of…Trump…including a member of Congress…have portrayed the indictment as an act of war, called for retribution and highlighted the fact that much of his base carries weapons.”

And all of these threats against Democrats, LGBTQ+ people, the FBI and the DOJ are more than rhetoric. They’re step one in a process known as stochastic terrorism. The idea is that a person or group are demonized, and violent actions against them are suggested by a leader with a large following:

The leader doesn’t ask or arrange for a specific person to carry out the violence, but they know in advance that somewhere among their followers are people who will.
And it only takes one.
The leader accomplishes their goal of violence without formally arranging for it.
There isn’t any paper trail, or phone records, or texts, or secret payments that could eventually show up in a court of law.

But the intent is clear even if, by design, there’s no direct accountability.

Wrongo saw a quote attributed to Anand Giridharadas:

“…Donald Trump…has clearly decided that his movement, and the Republican Party that he leads, is going to be the movement of resentment against the future. It is going to be a movement of people who don’t want to live in the future.”

Trump represents people who are in a state of constant rage at the thought that the world is changing in ways they hate and can’t actually stop. The horrible part of their dilemma is that no time that actually existed is a time that they want to live in.

Trump will try to “blanket the zone” with constant misinformation that may make it difficult to empanel a south Florida jury. It will be very difficult to find prospective jurors who say truthfully that they haven’t heard about the indictments and/or formulated an idea about it.

The best way to beat back the misinformation being spread by Republicans and MAGA sympathizers is to televise the trial. Take the trial away from social media pundits and let the MAGAverse see their hero squirm, bluster, and lie with their own eyes. They’ll see his complete lack of a legitimate defense unfolding in real time. Of course, that would take a judge other than Aileen Cannon to preside.

Let’s close with a tune that’s not among the normal music flavor here at the Wrongologist. It makes the point that some Americans don’t want to live in America if it’s going to change. It shows that you don’t have to wear MAGA to be MAGA. It doesn’t mention anything overtly political, but it could be a theme song for Trump’s campaign:

Monday Wake Up Call – June 12, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Dawn, Outer Banks, NC – June 2023 photo by Stephen P. Szymanski

Wrongo promised himself that he wouldn’t write about the Trump indictments, but that was yesterday, so here we go. Mother Jones had a great take Wrongo hasn’t seen elsewhere. It’s from Reality Winner who was the first person to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act by the Trump administration:

“In 2018…Winner pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years and three months in prison after leaking a top-secret report on Russian hacking to the media….The former intelligence contractor and Air Force linguist made the comments in a new interview with NBC… ‘It wasn’t hard to believe’, Winner told NBC on Friday. ‘This is a man that really likes trophies.’”

“This is a man that really likes trophies.” There are people who get paid seven figures to cover national politics who didn’t know that. What’s ironic is that the most serious charge against Trump is for violating the Espionage Act that he signed into law. More from Winner’s NBC interview:

“This is probably one of the most transparent and straightforward indictments that defines national defense information and gives the public a sense of the itemized description of every document, which is not how this particular law has been used against ordinary citizens…”

Ordinary citizens like Winner. She has said that the application of the Espionage Act is inconsistent and vague. But she went on to say that the indictment against Trump is remarkably specific on what he allegedly took and that there wasn’t any indication that he was acting for the greater good of the public: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“So this might set the new legal standard on how it will be used in the future. Perhaps it could give people like myself who were acting out of moral conscience more leverage under the law.”

Dems say, “we’re treating Trump like an ordinary citizen”, but that isn’t been true. He was given a ton of latitude and deference. An ordinary citizen (like Winner) went to jail after being charged. No ordinary citizen would have remained free and had their case moved to a special prosecutor at DOJ.

But most importantly he would have been given a “get out of jail free card” if he had simply returned the documents. There would have been no charges, just like there were no charges for Biden or Pence, who both happened to have stray secret documents lying around.

Yet, no ordinary citizen gets a do over from the feds.

But his ardent defenders on the right ignore that Trump got special handling. They really aren’t attempting to defend him on the merits because what he did was indefensible. You can’t be an ex-president who holds on to some classified documents and then shows them to random people in his orbit all while refusing to return them to the government.

Trump can’t then argue he should be given a “get out of jail free card”. Too late, times up.

The Republican Party has every right to demand that the nation consider Trump innocent until proven otherwise. We all know that the burden of proof resides with the government. But Republicans need to get real about the Trump documents case.

They can squint as hard as the can, but they won’t see government abuse here.

Wrongo knows that pointing out that Republicans are hypocrites no longer flies as an argument, but he remembers their 2016 presidential campaign attack against Hillary was that she failed to comply with information security best practices, even though no secret documents were found on her server.

But that was still considered a federal offense by Republicans: “Lock her up”, etc.

And now, with Trump actually criminally misappropriating classified documents and his subsequent obstruction of justice, it isn’t enough to get Republicans to say: “hey, let’s see if he gets convicted.”

From Hal Gershowitz:

“Few events in American history have riveted the people’s attention, as have the legal travails…of… Trump. The Republican Party has been steadfast in its support of the former President, notwithstanding those civil and criminal charges that have been brought against him…”.

Time to wake up America! About half the country believes that the FBI and the DOJ operate on a double standard. They no longer trust the media. These are existential problems that threaten the entire nation. Republicans: Take Trump’s name off of the indictment and replace it with anyone else’s name. Then decide if that person should be prosecuted.

To help you wake up watch and listen to this Jimmy Fallon Trump parody to the tune of the Pointer Sisters’ song “I’m so excited”. Here’s “I’m So Indicted“:

Saturday Soother – June 10, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Peony, Fields of Wrong, CT – June 2023 photo by Wrongo

(There will not be a Sunday Cartoons column this weekend. Wrongo and Ms. Right are attending a memorial service for family member Bob W.’s mom.)

The week ended with a ton of political news. First, as Mark Joseph Stern reported in Slate:

“The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Allen v. Milligan on Thursday, which found that Alabama’s congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial vote dilution, sends two clear messages. First, a bare majority of the court—Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the three liberals—believes that the VRA still plays a meaningful role in maintaining a multiracial democracy (or is willing to defer to Congress’ judgment on the matter). Second, that same majority of the court does not look kindly upon red states’ race to shred decades of precedent in an effort to wipe out the voting power of Black Americans.”

The good news is that the decision means that Alabama must create a second Congressional district in which the voting power of Black voters is not diluted by gerrymandering. It is likely that Alabama will add a second Democratic representative to its Congressional delegation.

Even better, Democracy Docket says that the holding in Allen v. Milligan will likely result in a net gain of six Democratic seats (five in other states) in the House in 2024.

Second, Trump is being indicted in Florida. He, along with a staff member at Mar-a-Lago, are facing 37 felony charges related to the mishandling of classified documents. This good news is offset by learning that judge Aileen Cannon is again assigned to hear the DOJ’s case that Trump wrongly held classified documents, failed to return all of them, and then obstructed the efforts of the National Archives and the FBI to recover them. Here’s a link to the indictment.

Mega millions of words will be written about this before there’s a trial or a guilty plea. Hold off on a victory lap until Trump is convicted. About a quarter of the classified/national security documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were found in Trump’s office. It will be difficult for Trump to persuade a jury that he didn’t know about the documents and chose not to return them.

Also, the Trump lawyers who were the front men for this indictment have quit the case. The attorneys, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, did not explain in detail why they had resigned.

Does MAGA now stand for: Make Attorneys Go Away? Or possibly, Make Attorneys Get Attorneys? Although it appears the parting was amicable, it would be irresponsible not to speculate! And it’s difficult to believe that the lead attorney’s last name is Trusty.

But Trump wasn’t the only MAGA mishandling secrets this week. The HuffPo reported that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made an eyebrow raising claim during a TV interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox:

“Greene said she read a document inside a SCIF ― a sensitive compartmented information facility ― related to bribery allegations Republicans have made against Biden…Then, she described that document while speaking to Laura Ingraham on Fox News”

Wrongo has experience with reading documents in SCIFs. NOBODY takes notes on what they’ve read. It’s a violation of national security regulations. When you enter a SCIF, you check all electronic devices before entering, and can’t take notes while inside. And usually, information revealed in the SCIF can’t be repeated outside of it. But Greene held up her notes to the camera.

Mark Zaid, an attorney who specializes in national security, tweeted:

“Hey @FBI, if this information was classified sounds to me like the Congresswoman is admitting to a crime. And if it was not, @SpeakerMcCarthy should remove her privileges for violating the trust she was afforded as a Member of Congress to review sensitive information.”

— Mark S. Zaid (@MarkSZaidEsq) June 9, 2023

But McCarthy won’t do anything. The GOP is building a wall around Trump, and minimizing the mishandling of documents by Greene will just be part of the play. To be a Republican in 2023 is to love Trump. They no longer love him for a particular reason: He’s what the Party has become.

There was plenty of orange air outside of the Mansion of Wrong this week. So, let’s pray for brighter skies while we settle into our Saturday Soother, where we try to forget the political news and the impending climate disaster. Let’s try to relax for a few moments. This week, George Winston died. He was a composer who became the signature style of New Age music in the 1980s. Wrongo was mildly interested in him at the time but came to admire and respect his work in the past few years.

Here’s Winston in 2020 playing Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”:

Monday Wake Up Call – June 5, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Blue Ridge mountains, NC – June 2023 photo by Michele Schwartz

It’s getting to be long enough into our economic recovery that we’ve started to ignore the monthly jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Luckily, Simon Rosenberg doesn’t let us forget: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The…BLS jobs report is out and it’s another good one – 339,000 net new jobs, [plus] 432,000…upward revisions from previous months. With this new data my monthly jobs tracker clocks in at:

-33.8m jobs – 16 years of Clinton, Obama

-13.1m jobs – 28 months of Biden

-1.9m jobs – 16 years of Bush, Bush and Trump

Biden’s 13.1m jobs is almost 7 times as many jobs as were created in the 16 years of the last 3 Republican Presidencies, combined.”

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has seen 49 million new jobs created. Remarkably, 47 million of those 49 million jobs were created under Democratic Presidents.

On the Democratic Party’s watch we’ve seen strong economic growth. OTOH, during the same time, Republican presidents have overseen three consecutive recessions. It’s not a stretch to say that the GOP’s economic track record over the past 30 years has been among the worst in US history.

Consider Biden’s record of economic growth:

GDP growth under Biden is 3+%, or 3 times what it was under Trump.
Almost 7 times as many Biden jobs as last 3 GOP Presidents combined.
Best post Covid economic recovery among the G7 countries.
Lowest unemployment rate in a peacetime economy since WWII.
Lowest poverty/uninsured rates ever.
Real corporate earnings up in 2022.

Despite what the GOP is saying to the press about their being deficit hawks, the federal deficit went up every year under Trump, and has come down every year under Biden. Rosenberg adds this helpful chart of GDP growth by president:

So why is it that Americans aren’t convinced that the economy has improved since the pandemic? In a new poll from the AP-NORC, asking if the nation’s economic conditions are in good shape, the percentage who agree is down from 30% last month to 24%. Only a third of Americans in the new survey approve of how Biden’s handling the economy, while two-thirds disapprove.

In the survey, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to view economic conditions favorably, but just 41% of them say the economy’s good and only 7% of Republicans agree. And both numbers are down from the previous month for both Parties.

Now this may be at least partially due to the Republicans scare tactics about the Debt Ceiling. The Hill reports that this AP-NORC poll is in line with other recent surveys that suggest most Americans think the country’s economy is in poor shape, Other polls also indicate low confidence in the economic leadership team.

Axios suggests a different way to view the economic issue. They looked at Federal Reserve survey data from 2017-2022, which shows that people think they’re personal economy is doing just fine, while they think the national economy is in terrible shape:

This is most likely because of the media’s awfulizing about our economy. Obviously, consumer prices are high, but inflation is coming down. But even if inflation went to zero, today’s prices will still be much higher than Americans were accustomed to pre-pandemic, so people will be complaining.

And we can’t discount the negative impact of Congressional dysfunction about the Debt Ceiling, or all the news bunnies crying about our unsustainable national debt.

Still, our economy continues to do better than even the economists think. The May employment report marked the 14th straight month that more jobs were created than economists expected. Our GDP continues to grow (it’s up more than 5% from its pre-pandemic peak), even after accounting for inflation.

The average US employee now makes $33.44 per hour, 17.5% more than before the pandemic. The stock market is up 10% so far this year, but still, Americans aren’t buying it. Axios’ Felix Salmon reports that while Americans say that they’re broadly happy with their personal finances (above chart), in other polls, a majority consistently think (erroneously) that we’re currently in a recession.

Time to wake up America! Things are rolling along reasonably well, even if they’re not fantastic. We have the best job market in 50 years, and there’s no recession on the horizon. As the Rolling Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want…”. Maybe it’s time to look at the glass as half full.

To help you wake up, watch and listen to Alan Jackson cover Eddie Cochran’s 1958 “Summertime Blues” in 1994. The Blue Cheer had the radio hit with it in 1968. Wrongo loves three versions of this song: Blue Cheer, the Who, and this Allen Jackson cover:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – June 4, 2023

Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or DEI, are intended to address inequities against historically marginalized groups and individuals who are working within an organization. DEI are three closely linked values that work together to be supportive of different groups of individuals, including people of different races, ethnicities, religions, abilities, genders, and sexual orientations.

DEI has recently come under fire. It’s at the center of some political battles being waged by Republican governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis. Several Red states are considering or have passed legislation targeting DEI in public institutions. Texas passed a bill with a rider banning the use of state funds for DEI programs in universities and colleges. A similar bill to ban spending on DEI in public universities has been advanced in Iowa.

But Chick-fil-A? The same Chick-fil-A that’s given millions of dollars to anti-LGBTQ hate groups? The Chick-fil-A that conservatives circled the wagons around a few years ago after liberals criticized the owners for being haters?

They’re taking MAGA fire for creating a DEI policy and hiring someone to oversee the program. MAGA suddenly realized that Chick-fil-A had gone woke! But their program has been around since 2020. On to cartoons.

Nobody is safe:

Signs are everywhere:

MAGA says ya can’t help trans kids:

Our PolyCrisis government:

It’s a very old game, but Trump’s surrounded:

The Sacklers win:

Victory lap for Biden:

Thoughts On The Debt Deal

The Daily Escape:

Rosa rugosa, Cape Cod, MA – May 2023 photo by Don Wilding

The holiday is over, and it brought an apparent deal between Biden and McCarthy. But was negotiating with the axe of a default on the national debt hanging over the country worth it? Sure, since it pulled the country back from the fiscal cliff.

But mostly, having to do it at all was stupid, and dangerous. And now, neither Party is completely happy, because both sides had to compromise. Wrongo recommends Noah Smith’s take:

“The recent fight over the debt ceiling, however, seems…like a return to the pointless obstructionism and grandstanding that characterized politics in the 2010s. There was absolutely zero reason for the House GOP leadership to use the debt ceiling — they could have just forced a deal through the normal appropriations process. Few people actually believed that the country’s leaders would let the US default on its sovereign debt due to a random minor budget fight…”

He’s correct, the House is controlled by Republicans. And the Senate also has enough Republicans to control the country’s fiscal budgeting process. They can ensure that what’s included and what’s cut would almost certainly be what Republicans wanted in the final package.

The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein tweeted:

“It’s really something House GOP was willing to risk tanking global economy for such a tangential set of policy goals. Their plan threatened spending on young & low-income but by excluding revenue & entitlements had small impact on overall deficits. Means wildly excessive for ends.”

Despite all of the grandstanding by both Biden and the Republicans, the compromise deal looks like this:

A freeze on non-defense discretionary spending in 2024 and a 1% increase in 2025.
A 3% increase in defense spending.
Expanding work requirements by four years for SNAP (food stamps) and some smaller welfare programs.
Resumption of student debt payments (this isn’t a change to Biden’s student debt plan).
Reducing IRS funding by $20 billion.
Clawing back some unused Covid relief money.
Minor changes on permitting to streamline the process of environmental review.

House Republicans had initially demanded huge cuts in spending, which would have been pretty destabilizing to essential programs. These demands may have been simply an initial negotiating tactic. But not getting them in the final agreement might also speak to Biden’s negotiating ability.

Remember that the GOP’s threat to trigger sovereign default was because they think that the level of our national debt is an existential threat. But they wanted to include tax cuts in their original proposal. That would have been nuts since the purpose of their bill was to limit the growth in federal debt.

Remember too that only about 27% of our federal spending is classified as “discretionary”. About 65% is “mandatory” spending, which means that it doesn’t go through the appropriations process. (The remainder is interest on the debt.)

The spending restraint in this deal will affect only the “discretionary” portion, leaving the “mandatory” majority untouched. The “mandatory” portion includes Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, EITC and SNAP.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Banana Republicanism

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Where Is The GOP’s War Of Words Taking Them?

Monday Wake Up Call – June 12, 2023

Saturday Soother – June 10, 2023

Monday Wake Up Call – June 5, 2023

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – June 4, 2023

Thoughts On The Debt Deal