False Memes – Page 2 – The Wrongologist

Cartoons of the Week – May 5, 2024

We’re at the start of a new week, and the cartoonists remain deeply into the student protests and Gov. Kristi Noem shooting her dog. But let’s start with a chart from the polling organization Civic Science. This is from the weekly newsletter by their CEO, John Dick:

“Last month, America’s attention to politics reached a new low. For the first time in the 9+ years we’ve tracked it, more US adults follow politics “not at all closely” than those who follow it “very closely.” The stat is especially mind-boggling when it’s what many believe to be an existential-level election year.”

The percentage of Americans who say they follow politics very closely has fallen from 50+% in Q4 2020 to 26% today:

Note that the result was based on 1.1 million responses. OTOH, the survey found that “very closely” plus “somewhat closely” totaled 71%. On to cartoons, which this week, aren’t funny.

People were shocked by Trump’s answers in Time Magazine:

Gov. Noem can’t live down shooting her puppy:

Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. University administrators should take note:

The press thinks Biden should have ended the Hamas/Israel war by now:

The Dems still own the best issue for this November:

More On The Campus Protests

The Daily Escape:

Japanese Garden, Portland, OR – April 2024 photo via The Oregonian

On Tuesday night, hundreds of NYPD officers entered Columbia University in riot gear, one night after students occupied the University’s Hamilton Hall.

And in a “you can’t make this s__t up” moment, Tuesday was exactly 56 years to the day when police cleared Hamilton Hall of Vietnam War protestors in 1968. The new clear out happened 13 days after students built their encampment and lit the match that started a student movement against the war in Gaza on college campuses nationwide.

The police crackdown at Columbia isn’t an isolated event. There was a round of arrests at City College in Harlem (NY). And police responded to clashes between pro-Palestinian and counter-protesters at UCLA. On Monday, demonstrators at The New School took over Parsons School of Design. Meanwhile, police cleared an encampment at Yale. Nationwide, more than 1,000 students have been taken into police custody since the original encampment began at Columbia on April 18.

From John Dean:

“More than four dozen colleges now have active protests against . . . against what? Signs demand an end to genocide in Gaza, disinvestment from Israel, and an end of US support for Israel. But Jewish students are also being attacked. For some protestors, Palestinians are the people fighting for freedom, and the Jews are the oppressors.”

As the protests continue, the story grows ever more complicated. House Republicans plan a series of hearings into what they are characterizing as antisemitism on college campuses. House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the hearings and also threatened the loss of federal funding:

“Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen absolute lawlessness and chaos on college and university campuses across America. It’s not right, and everybody in this country knows it. If they don’t correct this quickly, you will see Congress respond in time, you’re gonna see funding sources begin to dry up. You’re gonna see every level of accountability that we can muster.”

Columbia’s leadership took the Republicans at their word. They invited the NYPD to campus to remove students from Hamilton Hall with force.

Before the Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall and got ejected, and before the UCLA demonstrating groups decided to fight each other, these protests seemed familiar in that they were an echo of the Occupy Movement in 2012. Back then, the vast majority of the violence was caused by police, much like it is today, But it isn’t clear that today’s encampments have sufficient size or strength to achieve their goals. They are certainly not of the scale of 2012’s Occupy, let alone the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

If the past tells us anything, we should be skeptical that these protests will actually lead anywhere. The 1968 Vietnam protests eventually fizzled out, particularly when it became clear that students would be shot and killed by police and the National Guard. Occupy ended with a 17-city crackdown by police that happened just two months after Occupy began. The George Floyd protests fizzled out, but not before significant property damage and police crackdowns.

One thing is very clear: The speed with which campus protestors have embraced Palestine is remarkable. These students have never shown interest in the slaughter of Muslim children in Syria, or women and teenage girls in Iran. To Wrongo’s knowledge, none have protested against genocide in Darfur. Is now what we’re seeing the power of TikTok to feed highly curated information to them?

Some might say that the students are expressing normal human empathy, possibly with a touch of ignorance regarding the history of the Palestinians and the Israelis. And certainly with a definite lack of understanding of the limits of free speech in America. Free speech does not permit extended protests on private property.

The purpose of free speech is the absolute freedom to speak your mind. The First Amendment does not grant the right for a person or group to occupy property that doesn’t belong to them. Freedom of speech does not include resisting arrest. Would any of us say that freedom of speech allows protesters to occupy their home? Free speech doesn’t allow making threats to kill a person or members of a group.

In addition to the desire to draw attention to the Gaza carnage, the campus protests seem to be about the role of the US government and American companies supporting Israel. Doesn’t that make their protests difficult to understand? Israel has been a US ally for more than 70 years. In that time, it hasn’t been able to defend itself without substantial US aid. Most Israeli aircraft bombing Gaza targets today are American-made.

Does our support for Israel make the US complicit in the Israeli military action in Gaza? Of course, but should the US now end that support? If colleges divest from Israel, would that help Palestinians? Hard to say, but it’s unlikely to cause any meaningful change.

Wrongo doesn’t think the students’ problems are with Israel the country or necessarily, with the Israeli people. Most of the heat is reserved for actions by Bibi, his cronies and the IDF. From The Economist:

“Two areas where the IDF has fallen short are its responsibilities as an occupying power and its duty to minimize civilian deaths. Some 1.7m people have been displaced; many lack adequate food, water or medicine.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…many armies would find Israel’s rules of engagement disproportionate and hence illegal. The IDF is reported to have set the threshold of civilian deaths in justifying decisions to strike a junior Hamas fighter at 20:1 and a senior leader at 100:1. For Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator, America set a threshold of 30:1.”

The IDF appears to be failing in its goal of destroying Hamas. After six months, Hama’s most senior leaders are still alive, and over 100 hostages remain in captivity. Most important, Israel appears to have no strategy to prevent Hamas from rising from the rubble. Without meeting their goal of destroying Hamas, Israel will remain subject to insurgency.

Israel is paying a high price both economically and diplomatically for its Hamas war. There has been a very real shift in support for Israel’s methods of conducting its war with Hamas. If the student protests were to energize America voters to reject supporting an unending conflict, a significant number of American politicians would eventually follow.

Today, Israel is in a doom loop where the operations designed to reduce the number of terrorists will likely attract recruits to replace them. Without a plan for peace, Israel will end up as an occupier or as in the past, repeatedly striking Gaza to tamp down the insurrectionists.

The story of the 2024 campus protests is still being written. The outcome remains difficult to predict. With the end of the academic year approaching, could the calendar be the deciding factor?

Thoughts On The Student Protests

The Daily Escape:

Orca #T99C Barakat breaching very near shore, Point No Point Beach, WA – April 2024 photo by Hongming Zheng. Yes, the Orca was really that close. The photographer says it was about 10’ from shore.

The US media is giving front-page treatment to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses across America. From the NYT:

“University administrators from Texas to California moved to clear protesters and prevent encampments from taking hold on their own campuses as they have at Columbia University, deploying police in tense new confrontations that already have led to dozens of arrests.”

“At the same time, new protests continued erupting in places like Pittsburgh and San Antonio. Students expressed solidarity with their fellow students at Columbia, and with a pro-Palestinian movement that appeared to be galvanized by the pushback on other campuses and the looming end of the academic year.”

Protesters are saying that their demands include divestment by their universities from companies connected to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, disclosure of those and other investments and a recognition of the continuing right to protest without punishment.

There are many questions raised by these protests. Does protesting by students against what Israel is doing in Gaza equate to antisemitism? Are the protesting students’ free speech rights being violated by the several universities when they are arrested for peaceably protesting?

Wrongo hates writing about Israel and Gaza. It’s very emotional on both sides, maybe more than for any other topic. It’s possible to be accused of being complicit in a genocide and/or accused of being insensitive to the killing of Jews or of being antisemitic.

From Margret Sullivan:

“Can we be clear about a few things? Protesting this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus — taking a stand against a perceived wrong, at least provoking discussion and debate.”

Wrongo thinks students have a right to protest. As Robert Reich says:

“The most important thing I teach my students is to seek out people who disagree with them. That’s because the essence of learning is testing one’s ideas, assumptions, and values. And what better place to test ideas, assumptions, and values than at a university?”

Non-violent student activism is a great way to learn and to participate in our democracy. While activism shouldn’t violate school rules, if you are a student and your school makes rules about student protests like: “you can’t protest on this lawn or at this time,” and you break that rule, you should be prepared to get suspended or arrested.

The schools are responsible for not making rules that effectively restrict or end student activism. And students are responsible for following all reasonable rules.

But there’s another big question: Why are the media and politicians treating these protests as very important problems? It’s true that the Israel/Gaza war is very important. It could plausibly lead to a regional war or even to a wider war. But what’s happening on college campuses in the US is relatively minor, particularly if they’re compared to the student protests during the Civil Rights era or during the Vietnam era.

Yet, the Israel/Hamas war and the campus protests about it are receiving nearly the same amount of media coverage. We never see headlines that read “Another Peaceful Day On 99% Of US College Campuses” even though that headline could run on any day of the year. This is the shape of the media today, and it’s difficult to understand why so many reporters and politicians are so deeply concerned with a relatively minor story. More from Robert Reich:

“Education is all about provocation. Without being provoked — stirred, unsettled, goaded — even young minds can remain stuck in old tracks.”

Protests that call for boycott, divestment and sanctions are perfectly rational ways to protest Israel’s war against Hamas. However, getting Columbia (or other universities) to sell an investment in a US defense contractor, or in an Israeli company isn’t going to change anything.

Also, it’s a stretch for protesters to say that any university, its professors or anyone on its faculty are “complicit” in anything Israel decides to do in Gaza. But, non-violent forms of protest offer important objections to policy. And when the university criminalizes or stifles non-violent protests, that often leads to violent protests instead.

In the Columbia University case, its president called in the police (against the vote of the University council) telling the NYPD that the students had been suspended and thus were trespassing. But at that point, the students had not yet actually been suspended, although they WERE arrested. Then Columbia suspended them because they had been arrested:

“The suspension notices that the students received now cite the arrests themselves as part of the cause for suspension. In other words, the logic was circular. They called in the New York Police Department on the premise that the students were trespassing, when they hadn’t yet been suspended…”

Perfectly circular logic. If campus authorities need to act to protect the safety of any of their students, then they should. But when a university is facing pressure from pro-Israel donors and elected officials to shut down the protests, because the powerful find the protesters and their demands offensive, the university goes too far.

If that isn’t bad enough, consider Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR): (emphasis by Wrongo)

“On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.”

Nascent Pogroms? What is Cotton seeing at Columbia that the rest of us aren’t seeing? Apparently every Republican Senator knows that the military must be called in to end left-wing insurrections, but never for right-wing ones! We should understand that there’s a possibility that any military response might lead to Kent State 2.0.

A final thought. We need to differentiate between protestors who show up and do terrible things and the idea that the current rules of discourse focus mainly on the complainant’s subjective state of mind (“I felt unsafe!”). Without turning this into a rant, once a member of any so-called victim class makes that accusation, the burden of proof falls on the accused to prove they didn’t do something wrong. They have to prove a negative. That’s a game that the accused can rarely win.

That isn’t to say that some students aren’t doing objectively awful things during protests.

The vast majority of student protesters probably are good kids who are horrified by the things they see happening in Gaza. They log onto social media and see heartbreaking videos and feel compelled to do something, even though as individuals they are powerless. That’s a normal human, empathetic reaction to war. War is horrific.

Having that reaction doesn’t automatically make them Jew-hating terrorist-lovers.

What’s past is prologue. Remember how protests morphed into killings at Kent State and elsewhere in 1970? Today’s demonstrators aren’t trying to avoid getting drafted for the Vietnam War; they’re protesting what they see as a genocide in the Middle East.

Democrats Are Better For The Economy

The Daily Escape:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a chart from The Economist:

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

Schwarz closes with this:

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

Absolutely!

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

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

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

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

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

State Of The Union Speech Mop-Up

The Daily Escape:

Morrow Bay, CA – March 2024 photo by Slocoastpix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More: (brackets by Wrongo)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sample Lyric:

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

Cartoons Of The Week

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

Our true choice:

Different messages:

Biden drinks a new concoction:

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

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

Supremes move deliberately:

California won’t elect this guy:

Wrongo’s evergreen Oscars joke:

Jokers To The Right

The Daily Escape:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Norm Orenstein:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The silly season is upon us.

Russia. China And Iran, And Other Thoughts

The Daily Escape:

Snow at sunrise, Grand Canyon NP, AZ – February 2024 photo by John Fecteau

Welcome to another Monday Wake Up. Wrongo wants to touch on a few different ideas today. First, a non-trivial topic that Wrongo plans to return to this year. When we look at the geo-political landscape today, the US is confronting a growing alliance between three countries, each of which holds ill-will towards us and towards our western allies. Those three are China, Russia and Iran.

We’re confronting them separately and also in the case of the Ukraine War, jointly. This is an excellent time to harken back to something that Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1997. He had formerly (through 1981) been Carter’s National Security Adviser:

“Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition, united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. . . . Averting this contingency . . . will require a display of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously.”

Today’s geopolitical landscape reflects exactly what Brzezinski feared more than two decades ago. Is the world heading toward what the late Brzezinski referred to as “the most dangerous scenario”? What should America be doing now to head off what we’re seeing from our three rivals? Or is it already too late?

Which presidential candidate will do the better job of blunting this potential power conflict ?

Second, what did the weekend’s South Carolina Republican primary tell us? Trump won by a wide margin. As of this writing, the tally has Trump at 59.8% and Nikki Haley at 39.5%. The media is treating this as a significant triumph. When you win by 20 points, that’s true.

The real story, however, is that Trump underperformed expectations and failed to expand his coalition beyond his base. If you doubt that, take a look at the polling group 538’s polling vs. actual results for Trump across the three Republican primaries:

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

From Simon Rosenberg:

“It’s my view that something broke inside the GOP when Dobbs happened. That even for many Republicans, it was just too much, the party had gone too far, had become too ugly and dangerous.”

Trump and the GOP are showing signs of deep institutional weakness. They had disappointing elections in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023. They’re replacing the entire leadership team at the RNC due to their ongoing fundraising struggles. Today’s RNC is broke:

In addition, the GOP’s state parties have atrophied in some key battleground states. Trump is burning through cash at unprecedented rates to fund his many lawsuits. Even Nikki Haley out raised him last month.

Wrongo thinks that we’re finally seeing “Trump Fatigue”. Everybody has seen his act and has zero need to ever see it again. The assertion that Trump is strong beyond his die-hard MAGA base seems to at last, be untrue. But what does Wrongo know? When he retired from the F500, he thought he would go into private equity. But he was seduced into online journalism by the promise of very small paychecks and zero job security.

Our third story is for the birds. The Guardian reports that:

“The Eurasian eagle owl named Flaco, which escaped New York City’s Central Park Zoo last year, has died after crashing into a building in Manhattan, officials said late on Friday.”

Here’s Flaco in happier times:

“Flaco was rescued by the zoo in 2010, when he was less than a year old. He was reputed to be the only owl of his kind in the wild in North America, and there were widespread fears he ultimately wouldn’t survive for long outside captivity.”

The Eurasian eagle-owl is one of the larger owl species. Flaco’s wingspan was reported to be about 6 ft. Ornithologist Stephen Ambrose wrote on LinkedIn that there was evidence light glare from city buildings’ windows could blind owls momentarily and increase their risk of crashing into the structures, especially at night.

This raises the evergreen question of how to keep birds safe in US urban areas. Federal officials estimate that one billion birds in the US die annually after accidentally flying into building windows. Wrongo and Ms. Right had this happen to us years ago when a hawk crashed through our lakefront cottage living room’s wall of glass. He was dead when he hit the floor. It doesn’t only happen in high-rise buildings.

Time to wake up, America! There’s glare everywhere, including in the media’s silly discussion about how overwhelming Trump’s electoral chances are vs. Biden. Trump has a very small chance of being elected in 2024. To help you wake up, watch this great video of England’s Prince William singing “Livin’ on a Prayer” with Jon Bon Jovi and Taylor Swift at the Winter Whites Gala charity ball at Kensington Palace. This is fun and worth your time:

The future King of England singing with the current Queen of Americana.

Florida Lets Measles Run Free

The Daily Escape:

Highland Lighthouse, North Truro, Cape Cod, MA – February 2024 photo by Barbra A. Bentley

Let’s take a break this Saturday from a) Russia’s infiltration of the Republican Party and b) the growing realization that unless House Speaker Mike Johnson Johnsonless whips his members into shape before March 1^st, we’ll have a government shutdown. Instead let’s focus today on Measles.

You are a witness the continued collapse in US public health standards since Florida’s Surgeon General has said its ok for unvaccinated kids to attend public school even though there are measles outbreaks. From KFF News:

“With a brief memo, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has subverted a public health standard that’s long kept measles outbreaks under control. On Feb. 20, as measles spread through Manatee Bay Elementary in South Florida, Ladapo sent parents a letter granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school amid the outbreak.”

“The Department of Health ‘is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance,’ wrote Ladapo, who was appointed to head the agency by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose name is listed above Ladapo’s in the letterhead.”

With his brief memo, Ladapo has subverted a public health standard that’s long kept measles outbreaks under control. This is where you wind up after decades of indoctrination of libertarianism and neoliberalism, where “freedom” becomes anarchy, a rejection of the ability of the state to impose restrictions, even in the name of public safety.

Everyone in America knows that measles is highly contagious, that it kills, and can do lasting damage. More from KFF:

“Most people who aren’t protected by a vaccine will get measles if they’re exposed to the virus. This vulnerable group includes children whose parents don’t get them vaccinated, infants too young for the vaccine, those who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons…”

The CDC advises that unvaccinated students stay home from school for three weeks after exposure. About 1 in 5 people with measles end up hospitalized, 1 in 10 develop ear infections that can lead to permanent hearing loss, and about 1 in 1,000 die from respiratory and neurological complications. They reported that in 2023, childhood immunization rates had hit a 10-year low.

Worse, only about a quarter of Florida’s counties had reached the 95% threshold at which communities are considered protected against measles outbreaks, according to data posted by the Florida Department of Health in 2022.

Rebekah Jones, a data scientist who was removed from her post at Florida’s health department in 2020, over a rift regarding Coronavirus data, said:

“I think this is the predictable outcome of turning fringe, anti-vaccine rhetoric into a defining trait of the Florida government,”

A strategy of letting measles spread (which can wipe out your body’s immunity memory) while Covid is still pin-balling its way around the country? Sounds legit.

The way that things are going with public health in the US, it’s only a matter of time until the health departments of other western countries start issuing travel health notices for their citizens wanting to visit the US, advising them of the diseases that are being left to run free, particularly in Florida.

From The Nation:

“In 2022, Georgetown University political scientist Donald Moynihan wrote a piece on how to undermine the administrative state….No country becomes a world power without a capable public service.”

Perhaps the corollary, as stated by The Nation’s Gregg Gonsalves is this:

“No country becomes healthy without a capable public health system.”

That describes America today. More from The Nation:

“We did terribly on Covid…part of the reason was that our fundamentals were weak, but our politics are also set up to undermine public health….This has implications well beyond…the pandemic. It’s about how we expect to survive and thrive in America….This is a disaster in slow motion, and we’re watching it unfold as bystanders.”

There you have it: another thing to lose sleep over, and the election is still 7+ months away. Will there be enough infant deaths to generate sufficient outrage to roll this decision back?

Highly doubtful.

Wrongo is leaving you with that thought and is segueing into our Saturday Soother, where we take a break from doom scrolling and spend a few stolen moments alone with our thoughts. Here on the Fields of Wrong, there is still snow on the ground. So while we hope that spring is just around the corner, there’s little evidence to support it.

To help you relax, grab a seat by a south-facing window and watch and listen to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”, played here by the Vienna Philharmonic, and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Dudamel is scheduled to become music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. This performance was a part of the annual free Vienna Summer Night Concert in 2019.

This is the fourth time Wrongo has featured this composition, although you are seeing this particular version for the first time.

Barber finished the Adagio in 1936. In January 1938, Barber sent an orchestrated version of the Adagio for Strings to Arturo Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, which annoyed Barber. Toscanini later sent word that he was planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had already memorized it!

It was performed for the first time by Toscanini in November, 1938. Here, it is conducted by Gustavo Dudamel in 2019, like Toscanini did, without a score:

Update On Book Banning

The Daily Escape:

Ashokan Reservoir, Ulster County, NY – February 2024 photo by Dan Mish

The GOP effort at book banning isn’t going well. DeSantis acts SHOCKED that his punitive censorship laws have resulted in chaos and excessive book banning in Florida public schools. DeSantis knows he went too far. Mr. Never Back Down, is in fact, backing down:

“With objecting – if you go to a school board meeting objecting. If you have a kid in school, okay. But if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a kid in school and you’re gonna object to 100 books? No, I don’t think that’s appropriate. So I think the legislature is interested in limiting what the number of challenges you can do, and maybe making it be contingent on whether you actually have kids in school or not. We just want to make sure we’re not trying to incentivize frivolous objections or any type of games being played.”

But don’t get your hopes up. The Propaganda Professor (PP) takes a look at book banning, riffing on a National Review article “Book Curation is Not Censorship”:

“Curation is the process whereby a venue (library, museum, theater, etc.) decides what products to offer its patrons….But curation means making such decisions…on the basis of such factors as quality, relevance, timeliness, and constraints of space and budget. Those factors for the most part do not figure into with what is happening in Florida, Texas and elsewhere. Books are being pulled just because someone chooses to find them offensive….And those choices aren’t being made autonomously. They’re being made under intense pressure from government bodies and their proxy agitators.”

While denying that they’re really banning books, Right-wingers offer attempts to justify the bans they say that they’re not really doing. They often brand the offending book as “pornographic”. They slap the “pornography” label on anything that makes any vague reference to sex. Another common claim is that the books being attacked are guilty of somehow “indoctrinating” kids into…something. Usually some combination of “liberalism”, “leftism”, “communism” or “anti-Americanism”.

“There are two types of books in particular to which they are eager to award the Indoctrination Trophy. One is anything with a gay or trans character, or that even makes reference to a gay or trans character….Such books, they…warn, are indoctrinating kids into the gay ‘lifestyle’…”

A huge problem is banning books that have too much truth about racism. If you write about the horrors of our shameful past, you can expect to be branded as someone who “hates white people”. One of the books removed for “review” was a biography of baseball legend Roberto Clemente because it mentioned the racism he encountered in baseball. Above all is the complaint that so much literacy will indoctrinate our kids into wokeism or leftism — or whatever FOX says is the equivalent du jour.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: False Memes

Democrats Are Better For The Economy

Cartoons Of The Week

Russia. China And Iran, And Other Thoughts

Update On Book Banning