The majority of Americans under 18 live in households that receive “means-tested assistance” from the US government. In 2016, according to the most recent data from the Census Bureau, there were approximately 73,586,000 people under 18 in the United States, and 38,365,000 of them, 52.1%, resided in households in which one or more persons received benefits from a means-tested government program.
Those programs include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), Medicaid, public housing, Supplemental Security Income, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the National School Lunch Program.
And when the Census Bureau excluded school lunch programs from its calculations, the percentage of those under 18 who lived in a household receiving means-tested assistance (44.8%), still exceeded the percentage in any other age bracket.
We have now had four straight years: 2013 – 2016, during which a majority of those under 18 lived in a household taking means-tested benefits.
The primary reason for this is that most in this category are single parent households headed by a woman. Many canât find employment paying a decent wage with some benefits. Many have to choose between full-time work and childcare. Some are working 2-3 part time jobs but still can’t cover their expenses.
But, the economy is good, the stock market is great, so why worry about these banana republic statistics, America? On to cartoons.
Trump sings the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, âWhatâs That Smell?â
Speak to a Trumpist, and youâll find a reasonable, fact-driven human being:
Trump tweets about âwidespreadâ killings of white farmers in South Africa. Hereâs the truth:
Immigration unmasks the hate:
DeVos shows that sheâs a helper:
Mitch reserves his looks of disgust only for Democrats:
And the much-publicized search for yet another white co-ed comes to a tragic end.
But for Donald Trump, it was a beginning. Trump and other conservatives quickly cited Rivera, who worked on a farm owned by a prominent Republican family, as proof of the flawed immigration system and lax border security the president has long warned about. Hereâs Trump on CNN:
You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in very sadly from Mexico. And you saw what happened to that incredible beautiful young woman. Should have never happened. Illegally in our country…We’ve had a huge impact but the laws are so bad, the immigration laws are such a disgrace. We’re getting it changed but we have to get more Republicans.
Iowaâs Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, released a statement saying she was:
Angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community.
Fox News led with the story. After all, why would they voluntarily be talking about Manafort and Cohen?
A side note, Riveraâs employer, Yarrabee Farms, a company that operates dairy farms in Iowa, said that Rivera had been an employee in good standing for four years. They said initially that they had checked his immigrant status with the Fedâs eVerify system. Use of the eVerify system is not mandatory. In fact, the White House dropped its call for mandatory E-Verify in February when trying to reach a DACA deal.
Later, Yarrabee admitted that they hadnât used eVerify, but had used another verification system. The company is owned by the family of Craig Lang, a prominent Republican who previously served as president of the Iowa Farm Bureau.
We should note that many undocumented workers are hired â often knowingly â by employers, particularly in agriculture. And typically the employers suffer few consequences when ICE raids, and takes their illegal employees away.
Trump and the GOP will try to turn this into a “Willie Horton” moment in the mid-term elections. Willie Horton was serving a life sentence for murder, but was released by Massachusetts for weekend furlough. He never returned, and committed rape, assault and armed robbery before being recaptured. This happened on the watch of Democratic governor, Michael Dukakis. The GOP then used the Horton case very successfully against Dukakis, who lost the presidential election in 1988.
And the Mollie Tibbetts murder is another example of Republicans using fear to scare the electorate. Facts never seem to matter, here are a few: (emphasis by Wrongo)
The CDC analyzed the murders of women in 18 states from 2003 to 2014, finding a total of 10,018 deaths. Of those, 55% were intimate partner violence-related, meaning they occurred at the hands of a former or current partner or the partnerâs family or friends. In 93% of those cases, the culprit was a current or former romantic partner. The report also bucks the strangers-in-dark-alleys narrative common to televised crime dramas: Strangers perpetrated just 16% of all female homicides, fewer than acquaintances and just slightly more than parents.
If you say none of that matters to Mollie Tibbetts, or her family, you would be wrong. Sam Lucas, a cousin of Mollie’s, tweeted a response to Candace Owens, a representative of a right-wing student organization:
Hey Iâm a member of Mollieâs family and we are not so fucking small-minded that we generalize a whole population based on some bad individuals….stop using my cousinâs death as political propaganda…. https://t.co/xxZNBF0Uv9
Our hearts should break for Mollie and her family. But why then, is the GOP dragging out the old Horton playbook to whip up racism? Trump wouldnât have made any mention about her murder if it had involved one of the many white men who rape and murder women (of any race) in our country, every day.
This is an entire political party dedicated to promulgating fear of the âotherâ, and a huge swath of the media are dedicated to blasting it out to their audience of (apparently) timid white people.
Where the killer comes from shouldnât have anything to do with the publicity any crime receives. Except in Trumpworld, where it has everything to do with why they pay attention.
Their strategy is: Find one bad apple and then say no one should eat applesauce.
On Facebook, this photo is said to be a view from 30,000 ft. of the California fires. But, itâs fake news. In reality, itâs a sunset over Albuquerque. The pic has been on the internet for months. Why would someone lie to their Facebook âfriendsâ, about a picture of the fires?
What has happened to our society that lying about something like the CA fires seems worth the trouble?
Fake news has always been with us, but weâre reaching the point where we no longer can tell truth from fiction without considerable effort. The Atlantic had a story in March about an ambitious and first-of-its-kind MIT study published in Science: (emphasis by Wrongo)
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitterâs existenceâsome 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 yearsâand finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
The leader of the MIT study, Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT data scientist who has studied fake news since 2013, offered this:
It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information…And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.
And the data are truly scary. According to the study, false stories reach 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subjectâincluding business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment, it probably isnât news that fake news about politics regularly does the best at outperforming real news:
Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods. Even when the researchers controlled for every difference between the accounts originating rumorsâlike whether that person had more followers or was verifiedâfalsehoods were still 70% more likely to get retweeted than accurate news.
One of the more disturbing findings was that fake news consistently reaches a larger audience, and it tunnels much more deeply into social networks than real news does. Why do fake news tweets do so well? The MIT team settled on two hypotheses:
First, fake news seems to be more ânovelâ than real news. The study found that falsehoods are often notably different from all the tweets that have appeared in a userâs timeline 60 days prior to their re-tweeting them
Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers found that fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets used words associated with sadness and trust.
The key takeaway is really that content that arouses strong emotions spread further, faster, more deeply, and more broadly, than real news on Twitter.
Most depressing is that users who share accurate information have more followers, and send more tweets than fake-news sharers. They are more likely to be verified Twitter users. In short, the most trustworthy users have every obvious structural advantage that Twitter can give its best users.
And they still fail to connect as efficiently.
We have to wake up. Social media is amplifying falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one knows how to reverse the trend. Â We are living in a dangerous moment for a political system that relies on truth as a knowable reality shared by all Americans.
To help you wake up, we have a tune dedicated to Paul Manafort, Bob Dylanâs âLeopard Pill-Box Hatâ. Manafort’s trial is revealing his penchant for purchasing, and wearing wild articles of clothing. Many Trump supporters are saying that Manafort had nothing to do with the Russian hacking, and no matter, heâll be acquitted.
Both of those ideas are fake news.
There are very few good videos of Dylan performing his work. This is from the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert in October, 1992. Here, John Mellencamp performs his best impression of Dylan:
We will have to wait and see if Manafort, or any others in the Trump administration go to jail. Wrongo hopes thatâs the case. If it happens, it will be a novel event: We didn’t send Nixon to prison for his crimes, we didn’t send Reagan to prison for his crimes, and we didn’t send Bush or Cheney to prison for their crimes â so we ended up with Mr. Fake News himself, Donald Trump.
When there is no punishment for the crimes, the criminals see no reason to stop their behavior.
Sample Lyric:
Well I, see you got your
Brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes I, see you got your
Brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby how your
Head feels under somethinâ like that.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
If you had your fill of Trey Gowdy during the Benghazi hearings, you can be excused for vomiting if you watched the FBIâs Peter Strzokâs hearing last week.
In the hearing, the Republicans wanted to make America believe there was an FBI conspiracy to prevent Trump from being elected president. How did the FBI go about it? First, by mounting an investigation of what nearly everyone now acknowledges was a comprehensive effort by Russia to help Trump get elected. But then, the FBI kept that investigation completely secret from the public, to prevent news of it from affecting the outcome of the election.
You also have to set aside the fact that the Director of the FBI may have thrown the election to Trump when he violated FBI protocols, and announced 11 days before the election, that the Bureau was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clintonâs emails.
There doesnât seem to be any evidence that the FBI engaged in a conspiracy, and the GOPâs claim is contradicted by everything the FBI actually did.
And so far, Republicans have not produced any evidence that Strzok, or anyone else, took any official action that was biased or inappropriate with respect to the Trump campaign.
Fake news, folks. But Gowdyâs committee managed to set a new low during their show trial of Strzok:
This is where we are: The American right have become Trumpers. The head Trumper is free to say and do whatever he likes, and so are his lackeys in Congress.
Today, there is no institutional check on Republicans, except another Republican, Bob Mueller. Ultimately all he can do is provide a report to Congress, which the Trumpers will ignore, regardless of the validity of any accusations it contains. The fate of the nation now hangs on the midterms. And since the electorate failed the country in 2016, we shouldnât be too hopeful about the odds.
On to cartoons. Strzok tells it like it is:
Trumpâs move to remake Supreme Court goes a little too far:
Trumpâs new guardian is Judge Kavanaugh:
Trump was poorly received in UK:
Trump took on Germany at the NATO meeting. It wasnât hard to know why:
Trumpâs moving on to his Monday meeting with Putin:
Stormbrewing near Vilano Bridge, St. Augustine FL – June 2018
At Vox, Dylan Matthews has a detailed review of Supreme Court Justice Nominee Brett Kavanaughâs history of being in the middle of Republican wars since the 1990âs. He represented the 6-year-old EliĂĄn GonzĂĄlez pro bono in an attempt to keep him from being deported to back to his father in Cuba in 2000.
Kavanaugh also worked on GW Bushâs legal team during the 2000 Florida recount, which resulted in Bush winning a party-line Supreme Court vote to install him as president. Then:
Kavanaugh worked in the solicitor generalâs office under George H.W. Bush….The SG under George W. Bush was Kenneth Starr, who took a shine to Kavanaugh and hired him to join the independent counselâs office in 1994.
Kavanaugh became a Republican glamor boy with the investigation into Bill Clintonâs affair with Monica Lewinsky: (link, italics and emphasis by Wrongo)
Eventually, Kavanaugh, and the rest of Starrâs team, moved on from the substance of the Whitewater real estate deal to the matter of Clintonâs affair with Monica Lewinsky. In his history of the investigation, âThe Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starrâ, Duquesne Universityâs Ken Gormley notes that Kavanaugh, âconsidered one of Starrâs intellectual heavy-lifters, pushed hardest to confront Clinton with some of the dirtiest facts linked to his sexual indiscretions with Lewinsky.â
In a memo to âJudge Starrâ (with a copy to âAll Attorneysâ), Kavanaugh wrote:
After reflecting this evening, I am strongly opposed to giving the President any âbreakâ ⊠unless before his questioning on Monday, he either i) resigns or ii) confesses perjury and issues a public apology to you. I have tried hard to bend over backwards and to be fair to him. ⊠In the end, I am convinced that there really are [no reasonable defenses]. The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to meâŠ.
The President has disgraced his Office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles â callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle. He has committed perjury (at least) in the [Paula] Jones case. ⊠He has tried to disgrace [Ken Starr] and this Office with a sustained propaganda campaign that would make Nixon blush
It should be unimaginable for a nice young Catholic lawyer, but Kavanaugh then listed a series of ten questions that he wanted Starr to ask Bill Clinton. All of them were explicit and unsavory. Wrongo will offer one, and it is the least unsavory:
If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretaryâs office, would she [be] lying?
Starr didnât ask any of Kavanaughâs questions, but did ask others that were similar. Weâll never get past what Bill Clinton did to the Democrats. Hillary too.
This is the real Kavanaugh: Heâs not just the guy we are told is a good father, CYO basketball coach, and feeder of the poor. He clearly had a prurient interest in Clintonâs affair with Lewinsky.
We know that he will most likely be on the Court if it is tasked with judging the constitutional validity of whatever Special Counsel Robert Mueller produces regarding the man who appointed Kavanaugh. This has nothing to do with impeachment, it is largely about Trump being compelled to testify to a grand jury, as Bill Clinton did in 1998, compelled by Ken Starr and Brett Kavanaugh.
Having seen first-hand how complex and difficult that job is, I believe it vital that the President be able to focus on his never-ending tasks with as few distractions as possible. The country wants the President to be âone of usâ who bears the same responsibilities of citizenship that all share. But I believe that the President should be excused from some of the burdens of ordinary citizenship while serving in office….
This is not something I necessarily thought in the 1980s or 1990s. Like many Americans at that time, I believed that the President should be required to shoulder the same obligations that we all carry. But in retrospect, that seems a mistake.
Now heâs for insulating the president. The Senate shouldnât allow him to use what he wrote in 2009 as an alibi for what he would do if a Mueller-related case came before him.
Unless Kavanaugh agrees to recuse himself from any such case, no Senator should vote for him.
Given Kavanaugh’s desire to ask difficult questions of Bill Clinton, Democrats shouldnât let these hearings pass without some very pointed grilling. Otherwise they will have failed.
Turkeys on the Fields of Wrong â June 2018 photo by Wrongo
We wake up this Monday in an America that seems unlike what it should be, or what it was a few years ago. Two quick stories. First, this action by the Trumpistas encapsulates everything horrible about the Trump administration’s approach to the world: (emphasis by Wrongo)
A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly…. Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to âprotect, promote and support breast-feedingâ and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
More from the NYT:
When that failed, they turned to threats…Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.
The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
They scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation.
The Russians ultimately introduced the measure â and, no surprise, the American delegation did not threaten them. From Booman:
The Trump administration demonstrated almost every flaw they have here. They put the interests of corporate lobbyists ahead of the health of babies. They showed a complete contempt for science and the consensus of the international community. They abused their power and threatened well-meaning and innocent nations simply because they could.
The message is clear: If a country needs to stand up to America, they should go running to the Godfather, Russia, who will do the right thing. And for America? Another horrible outcome brought to you by Donald Trump.
The obstacle is not the usual red tape that delays US infrastructure….the environmental review for the new Hudson tunnel was fast-tracked and forwarded to the Transportation Department for approval in an unusually speedy two years. The obstacle is the Trump administration, which vowed in its infrastructure plan to accelerate the permits process, but has been sitting on this one without explanation. âI wouldnât say weâre slow-walking it,â one administration official told me, before laughing. âOK, maybe a little.â
Ha-ha. The truth is that Trump is trying to force Chuck Schumer to vote for Trumpâs Wall in order to get money for the Tunnel. Hereâs the NYT: (brackets and edits by Wrongo)
President Donald Trump was in an unusually bipartisan mood on September 7, when he convened a White House meeting about a massive project to build a rail tunnel under the Hudson River.
The politicians in attendance thought [they had a deal]…. âAsk anyone on either side of the aisle. It was very upbeat, total agreement this needs to get done,â Christie told me. King describes the meeting as a love-in: âNot a single negative word, great body language, everybody on the same page.â
After the meeting, though, Trump asked Schumer to stay behind. He bluntly offered another deal, an offer suggesting he had a rather different conception of Gatewayâs larger importance: Schumer could have his tunnel if Trump got his border wall with Mexico.
Schumer said he couldnât make that trade. And ever since, the Trump administration has been doing just about everything in its power to derail the Gateway project. In March, the president threatened to veto an entire $1.2 trillion government spending bill if it included anything at all for Gateway.
It always comes back to his F*king Wall. Heâs promised something he can’t deliver, so the only thing he knows how to do is try to take hostages.
This will simply get worse if we fail to turn out in massive numbers in November, and try to re-take the Senate, and absolutely take back the House of Representatives. To help you wake up today, here is John Prineâs âLong Mondayâ from his 2005 âFair and Squareâ album, which won the Grammy for best Contemporary Folk Album:
There are a host of great musicians on the album, including Jerry Douglas, Allison Krauss and Dan Tyminski. Mindy Smith sings harmony on Long Monday.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Piebald fawn at rescue center, Sherman CT â June, 2018 photo by JH Cleary
It was a week in which Wrongo rode the Cape Cod bike trails every day, got up at 4:15 am one day to get to Coast Guard Beach at high tide to surf cast for Striped Bass, and catch none. We ate very well, mostly seafood. We watched fireworks on the Cape Cod Bay side, which gave a great view of fireworks displays by at least 10 towns, from Boston around to Provincetown on the Cape.
We experienced all of this with kids and grandkids, it was a relaxing time.
One benefit was that we didnât see a newspaper or a newscast the entire week. But everyoneâs phones lit up with news about Scott Pruittâs walk off the stage in DC, the soccer kids in Thailand, and who would be Trumpâs pick for the Supreme Court.
But as we downshift into the weekend, Wrongo wants to talk about a big, bad idea that Democrats canât seem to stop talking about. It is âAbolish ICEâ, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, thatâs a part of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE has been a part of our lives since 2003, when it was created in the governmentâs reorganization after Sept. 11, 2001. But calls to abolish ICE take focus away from a winning issue for Democrats: Republicans separating asylum-seeking families at the border.
ICE doesnât do that; itâs being done by Customs and Border Protection, who run the Border Patrol. As the WaPo points out, yelling about abolishing ICE is a gift to Republicans in November. Karen Tumulty says even serious Democratic contenders for president in 2020 are saying it:
ICE has become a deportation force, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) told CNN. Get rid of it. Start over. Reimagine it.
Well, Wrongo thinks sheâs a serious candidate.
Itâs clear that ICE and the Border Patrol are staffed mostly with goons who would just as soon trample your Constitutional rights as they would separate a kid from an immigrant. But, we shouldnât be thinking of replacing them, so much as adopting our own âzero toleranceâ policy for their bad behavior and constant dickitude.
Since Democrats donât have a clear solution for reforming ICE, they should drop the issue and focus on the child separation question, where the law and public opinion is on their side. Otherwise, calls to eliminate ICE will be spun by Republicans as undermining the security of the nationâs borders.
Also, Democratsâ calls to abolish ICE distracts from the real villain in the immigration crisis and the separation of immigrant families â Donald Trump. ICE just executes orders received from the Trump administration. ICE can certainly be improved, but the function ICE performs is necessary to the security of this country. Besides, every nation has organizations that manage immigration and customs.
Trump is the person who initiated the program to separate immigrant families. Dems shouldn’t water down his culpability with a misplaced focus on ICE.
Ok, time to see if we can get soothed a little while we wait to see who the Trump Supreme Court nominee will be. Letâs start by brewing a big cup of Tanzanian Peaberry coffee ($15.75/lb.) from Coffee Bean Direct. They say that its flavor is punctuated by an intoxicating, chocolaty aroma with a rich, winey body that is surprisingly versatile and perfect for any time of day.
Sounds like marketing lingo to Wrongo, but, go for it!
Now, find a quiet air-conditioned spot with a comfortable chair and listen to âConcierto de Aranjuezâ written in 1939 by JoaquĂn Rodrigo. Here we see it from the 1996 movie âBrassed Offâ, which is set 10 Â years after a strike in 1984â85 by the National Union of Mineworkers in Britain. At the time of the movie, coal mines (called pits in Britain) are being closed. One of the mines scheduled to close has a brass band. The movie shows the circumstances of the coal miners who are losing their jobs through their bandâs performances.
This might possibly foreshadow what will happen to unions in America with last weekâs Supreme Court decision saying that government workers who choose not to join unions, do not have to pay for collective bargaining. This makes them free riders and dramatically cuts the money that these unions have to operate with.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
(Today, Wrongo and Ms. Right are on our way to Cape Cod for a few days of bonfires, bicycling, surfcasting, and hanging with kids and grandkids. Blogging will be infrequent, but you can expect a Saturday Soother on, well, Saturday.)
This morning, Wrongo feels the need to bore you with a concept from historian Peter Turchin, taken from his book Ages of Discord, which provides some insight into where America is today. Turchin posits that historical eras are either integrative periods when people find reasons to cooperate, and join forces, or disintegrative periods, when reasons to split apart become dominant.
Turchin identifies three key factors that can create the disintegrative periods:
Competition and conflict among an expanding population of elites
Declining real wage for an expanding population of workers
State financial collapse (unpayable debt)
Does any of that sound familiar? Turchinâs theory is that history experiences cycles which, in non-industrialized economies, tend to last between 200-300 years. In America, the cycles from start to finish are much shorter, about 150 years, due to a faster pace of change.
His demonstrates his theory about a positive phase (the integrative phase) and a negative phase (the disintegrative phase) in the first of two American cycles, from 1780 to 1920. The positive phase lasted from about 1780 to about 1840, while the negative phase lasted from about 1840 to about 1920. Turchin contends that the second American cycle began in 1920, and is not yet complete. The positive phase lasted from 1920 to around 1970, and the negative stage has lasted from 1970 to the present.
He contends that the best parts of positive eras typically last only a generation or two, such as 1810 â 1840, and 1940 â 1970 in the US, before elite individuals and groups abandon consensus politics to pursue ever harsher exploitation and competition to enrich themselves.
A cycle begins with an undersupply of labor, such as happened after the American Revolution. This shortage of labor caused a rise in real wages and general economic progress. This positive phase peaked around 1820. It was a time that reflected a sense of national purpose and a desire for unity among Americans in the aftermath of the War of 1812.
But the division between the industrial North and the slaveholding, agrarian South continued, creating rivalry among the elites, along with political polarization, culminating in the Civil War. The negative phase of the cycle continued afterward, with massive strikes, many of them violent, in the late 19th Century. Meanwhile, income inequality peaked during the Gilded Age as elites profited from low workerâs wages and poor working conditions.
In modern America, we are largely governed by religious, geographic (local, state and federal), and economic institutions. And many compete with each other for resources, and the separation of powers among them is becoming hazy. Today, our âeconomicâ government is the corporation.
If you think about it, our current political struggles are between geographic governments and both the religious and economic ones. Republicans, and many Democrats, support the efforts of both to increase their influence over the lives of the people, often through the geographic governments.
And this isnât simply a minor change in who is doing the governing, they threaten our democracy.
Weâre blowing up our institutions, but itâs not in reaction to any looming danger. Itâs because weâve been conned into thinking that September 11 was the same as Pearl Harbor. And the threat of immigrants today is the same as the threat of a Japanese invasion was in 1941. And that modern social policies threaten the religions of some people.
Time to wake up America! We cannot surrender to fear, to corporatism, or to forever war. We have entered a disintegrative phase, but there is time to pull out of it.
If you care.
To help you wake up, here is Pink Floyd with âOrdinary Menâ from their classic album, âDark Side of the Moonâ:
 Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Welcome to Sunday. Itâs beastly hot in the Northeast of the US. Three things to help you cool off: Did you realize that the Trump/Putin Summit in Helsinki on July 16, takes place one day after soccerâs World Cup final? We know that Trump doesnât care about soccer, but since the World Cup is taking place in Russia, Putin wouldnât meet until after the World Cup was over. They settled on having the meeting the very next day.
Median household income in May 2018 climbed to $61,858, according to Sentier Research. This is a higher median than in any month since January 2000, after adjusting for inflation. The May 2018 median was 1.8% higher than the May 2017 median.
Median household income in May was 3.7% higher than the median of December 2007, when the Great Recession began. It is 13.3% higher than the post-Great Recession low of June 2011. The trend line has been positive for nearly seven years. This should be looked at very carefully by people who think Democrats have an easy path to winning the House of Representatives this fall.
Third, itâs doubtful you knew that the University of Tulsa has an Institute of Bob Dylan Studies. The George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa acquired the Bob Dylan Archives, and now is the national hotbed of all things Dylan. Unsurprisingly, Dylan hasnât visited.
On to cartoons (and we’re sure there are much ruder cartoons and animations made my people to depict leaders in compromising situations, for example www.cartoonporno.xxx go right here if you want to look for yourself). Mitch is large and in charge:
Republicans treat the Constitution like they do the Bible, picking and choosing parts they like for personal benefit:
Trump picks a surprising nominee:
(And the GOP would probably confirm him.)
Kids need to get their priorities straight:
Trump has new idea for the Wall:
Supreme Court hands public unions a big loss:
Bonus: 2012 Tom Toles cartoon on the Court. Bottom line ? we all lost:
Raul Ilargi of The Automatic Earth gets us thinking about truth in journalism:
The two most viral photographs of the âTrump Separation Scandalâ have now been debunked, or at the very least been proven to have been used âout of contextâ. This is a dangerous development, as are the reasons to use them the way they have been. Both pictures are of children who had not been separated from their mothers at all. But both were used to depict just that: a child being taken away from its mother.
Here are the two pictures. The first shows a Honduran toddler sobbing. The photo was taken on June 14th. It was used widely by the media, with the accompanying message that the child was about to be separated from its mother:
But the NYT reports the child was not separated from her mother. That was reported on June 23rd. Pro-Trump news outlets have had a fine time calling the photo fake news. And the same photo was photoshopped by Time Magazine for a cover that used the little girl juxtaposed with Donald Trump looming over her, with the caption, âWelcome to Americaâ:
Now, Time may not have known the true status of the child at the time when they made the choice to place her on the cover with Trump, but theyâre absolutely ok with using it. The NYT quotes them:
Our cover and our reporting capture the stakes of this moment.
But, there is a major difference between illustrating a moment, and reporting. A Facebook funds-raising page using the original photo above inspired hundreds of thousands of people to donate $19 million for a nonprofit legal defense fund for immigrants and refugees.
Is that a good outcome from bad reporting? If people are interested in donating, why trick them into doing it? Back to Ilargi:
Thatâs what is dangerous: seeing a photo of a child in distress makes people halt their critical thinking. Thatâs also why such photos are used. They help build a narrative that doesnât have to be factual to shock people. But at that point TIME becomes a fiction magazine; itâs where it leaves journalism behind.
There also was a picture of a caged little boy crying, âDetained by ICE at a border facilityâ said the caption:
But the image of the crying, caged young boy, which went viral, was actually taken at a demonstration. RT reports that this photo was shared by activist journalist Jose Antonio Vargas as a comment on the Trump administrationâs immigration crackdown on families. More from RT:
It has since emerged that the picture was in fact not from a detention facility at all, and instead was taken at a protest against Trumpâs immigration policies held on June 10 outside Dallas City Hall.
Some activists argue that the origin of the photo is irrelevant, that it portrays a true problem, even if this particular image is not a true representation of the facts on the ground.
But weâre on a slippery slope with that reasoning. We shouldnât be using any available means to message against even a wrong policy.
Whatâs dangerous about this approach is that if journalists are allowed to spread a narrative that isnât confirmed as true, they may be âreportingâ unsourced stories simply to make a point. Then, no one will ever know fact from fiction.
This is the downside of instant, global communications. The narrative can outrun the truth, the myth can become fact. Since social media compensation is often tied to âclicksâ on an article, publishers and editors have a conflict of interest: sell the truth, or sell the narrative?
Children are being taken from parents at US borders, and Trumpâs policy needs a healthy debate. But playing loose with the facts cannot be permitted by the media.
Time for the media to wake up! It helps no one if the charge âFake Newsâ is true. To help them wake up, here is Billy Bragg doing âIt Says Hereâ from his 1984 album âBrewing Up with Billy Braggâ:
Sample Lyrics:
It says here that the Unions will never learn
It says here that the economy is on the upturn
And it says here we should be proud
That we are free
And our free press reflects our democracy
If this does not reflect your view you should understand
That those who own the papers also own this land
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
