It’s 21 years since the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As Michael de Adder says:
Twenty one years on, America is more at war with itself than with any foreign terrorists, despite having troops deployed in 80 countries. Our society and our democracy are threatened from within in a way that Osama bin Laden could never have managed. And where are we today? Cartoonist Mike Luckovich has a thought:
If ever so briefly after that fateful day. Today we face threats that might end our democracy:
We’ve nearly lost our social cohesion
We aren’t dealing with income inequality
We’re seeing racism grow
We see clear threats to the right to vote, or whether our votes will even count if we cast them
In these 21 years, Republicans have moved from being the Party of national security to the Party of grievance and anger. As Elliot Ackerman wrote last year in Foreign Affairs:
“From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The US today meets both conditions.”
MAGA asks the wrong question:
When you have no policies, this is what you get:
Let’s close today with a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter that she wrote back on the first anniversary of 9/11. Carpenter was inspired by an interview with Jim Horch, an ironworker who was among the early responders at the WTC site. Here’s part of what Horch said:
“My responsibility at the site was to try to remove big pieces of steel. The building fell so hard there wasn’t even concrete. It was dust….I started to feel the presence of spirits…not very long after I was there. The energy that was there was absolutely incredible and…it was more than just the people that I was working with…it was energy left behind….One day when I was working, I felt this energy and it felt lost and it wanted to go home but it didn’t know how to go home and it came to me to go to Grand Central Station. When I got off the subway, I walked into the Great Room. Into where the constellation is in the ceiling. And I walked around the perimeter and…out of the building. I didn’t feel the energy anymore. I could feel it leave.”
Moulton’s Barn with Tetons and clouds in background, Jackson WY – July 2022 photo by Peter Mangolds
Lots of bees buzzing around AG Merrick Garland because they’re concerned that he won’t indict Trump before Trump announces a re-run for president. From Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel:
“Yesterday, Rachel Maddow reported the exciting news that Merrick Garland released the same memo that Attorneys General always do during election years….the memo requires Garland to do what everyone has long assumed: that Garland would have to approve any investigation into Trump”
The pundits concluded immediately that by releasing the memo, Garland had nixed any further indictments before the election, including of Trump and his coup henchmen. But that’s not true, Wheeler says: (brackets by Wrongo)
“….that’s not true is because after Garland released this memo, DOJ arrested…[Republican] candidate for Governor of Michigan, Ryan Kelley [for Jan. 6 activities]….in addition to charging him with entering restricted grounds (that is, entering inside the barricades set up around the Capitol), DOJ also charged him with vandalizing the scaffolding set up in advance of the Inauguration. The charging documents also cited some of his other efforts to undermine democracy in the lead-up and aftermath of the 2020 election.”
All of this concern about Garland occurred after a Rolling Stone report that Trump sees an early announcement of his candidacy for 2024 as a shield against possible investigation/prosecution. That prompted Harvard’s Laurence Tribe to tweet words of caution to his former pupil, Merrick Garland, warning against letting Trump play him in any decision about investigating Trump:
Whether the DOJ has already opened an investigation into Trump’s activities or not, Marcy Wheeler says: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“….I’m also confident that if the investigation isn’t open now or soon, Trump’s campaign roll-out would do nothing to thwart opening an investigation. It would require the same Garland approval that would be obtained in any case. Trump wouldn’t even be affected by the DOJ policy on pre-election actions, because he’s not on the ballot this year.”
But criminal prosecution by Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is a more proximate threat to Trump. The recordings of Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,000 votes seems clear-cut enough to justify a criminal indictment.
Willis has already warned several high-profile Georgia Republicans they could face charges over Trump’s fake electors scheme in her state. She subpoenaed Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is fighting a Georgia subpoena to answer questions about his calls to Georgia officials about 2020 election results.
Trump’s pondering of an early announcement may have more serious objectives than avoiding prosecution. He’s seeing polls that show him trailing badly in his home state of Florida. Allahpundit gathers Florida polling data:
”For the second time in five days, a pollster from Florida with whom I’m unfamiliar sees DeSantis leading the former guy comfortably in their mutual home state. Last week Blueprint Polling had the race 51/39 there. Today Victory Insights has it 61/39 if “leaners” are included and 51/33 if they aren’t.”
Maybe Trump is trying to clear the field of primary rivals. But Dems think an early (before the mid-terms) announcement by Trump would be a gift. The GOP wants to keep voters focused on Biden, rather than transforming the contest into a referendum on Trump.
Many pundits underestimate what Garland is doing. They’re after a quick legal fix. He’s moving deliberately, gathering evidence. There’s an abundance of low hanging fruit (the fake electors, Eastman, Giuliani, Powell) and many others. The strategy of the DOJ following behind the J6 hearings will create a groundswell of public support.
We now know the story about the build up to the attempted coup, and we’re seeing who was involved at all levels. When Garland indicts, the majority of the voting public will say “it’s about time.”
German Lopez in the NYT writes about how urban gun crime is very concentrated, saying that a small number of city blocks often account for most of the gun violence in US cities. He says that just 4% of city blocks account for the majority of shootings in Chicago:
“The violence is so intensive that a few neighborhoods, blocks or people often drive most of the shootings and murders in a city or county. And this is true in both urban and rural areas, said Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton.”
Let’s pick up on the comment that this is true in both urban and rural areas. The WSJ has an article that says there’s been a big spike in murders in rural America:
“Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the largest rural increase since the agency began tracking such data in 1999. The CDC considers counties rural if they are located outside metropolitan areas defined by the federal government.”
That’s pretty close to the 30% increase in urban areas. But the WSJ points not to a lack of tough-on-crime policies causing the spike in rural homicides, or a lack of social services, safety net, or investment in anti-poverty measures. Instead, it says that the primary culprits are Covid lockdowns and a lack of “pastoral care” from churches.
“Progressive prosecutors take the approach of not prosecuting some low-level offenses like drug possession. In Philadelphia, for example, cases brought by the district attorney’s office from 2018 through 2021 dropped by nearly 30% compared with the prior four years. This week, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner defended progressive prosecutors while promising to tackle gun violence at the swearing-in ceremony for his second term.”
The Conservative formula is simple: When crime increases in liberal cities, the cause is: reformist prosecutors, bail reform, and defunding the police movements.
But when murder spikes in counties coded as white or rural, and controlled largely by Republicans, the causes are societal and therefore blameless —namely the fraying of the social fabric brought about by the pandemic. They fail to mention the persistence of drugs in rural America, or how corporations have hollowed out the economies of rural America by moving abroad.
Johnson says that we’re caught in a “Narrative” by leaders in both Parties, that the Covid-era surge in crime was the result of lax DAs, bail reform, and other far-left measures. And the only way to combat it, was to remove the reforms, fund more police, and to effectively sunset the Black Lives Matter movement.
And Johnson says:
“…data very clearly indicates that crime—namely, murder rate—increases appear to be entirely divorced from the policies of the prosecutors and police budgets of the affected areas. Despite the widespread, casual lie that radical, far-left reform prosecutors or defunded police budgets have caused a spike in crime…”
Despite everyone knowing that socio-economic problems are also at the heart of the homicide rates in urban areas.
“In Democratic strongholds like Maryland, a rise in violent crime has pushed the party’s candidates to address the issue of public safety in newly urgent terms….Long seen as a political wedge for Republicans to use against Democrats, crime is increasingly a subject of concern within the Democratic Party and the big cities that make up much of its political base.”
The homicide spike is transforming the Democrat’s playbook on law and order. It’s forcing the Party to seek ways of balancing its determination to overhaul the criminal justice system with the imperative to protect some of its most loyal voters from a rising tide of violence.
The challenge is to walk a fine line: How can urban Democrats make the police more responsive but not militarized or heavy-handed; how to move police departments away from the often discriminatory tactics favored by the law-and-order mayors.
Still, when crime goes up in urban areas, it’s the reform efforts that are to blame. When crime goes up (by roughly the same percentage) in rural places where no such reforms exist, the “Tough on Crime” approach and the lack of robust social services can’t be blamed.
Both Democrats and Republicans want police budgets to grow. But neither have any answers as to how incremental dollars will reduce homicide rates, or make the police more effective at their jobs.
“Cops nationwide can’t stop crimes from happening or solve them once they’ve occurred.”
According to data published by the FBI, the rates at which police forces are solving crimes are at historic lows. In the case of murders and violent crime, clearance rates have dipped to just 50%, a startling decline from the 1980s, when police cleared 70% of all homicides.
We know that murders have increased since 2019, and violent crime (broadly defined), has also inched up over the same period. OTOH, property crimes are down, contrary to what Republicans and their Party’s news outlets would have you believe when they obsessively show videos of LA, San Francisco, and Portland.
And all crime, including the murder rate, remain well below 1990 levels. Sammon points out that crime today is much more distributed geographically than before. It used to be that Los Angeles and New York accounted for 13.5% of all murders nationally; now it’s only 4%.
While crime clearance rates have dropped to all-time lows, police budgets have reached all-time highs. In the business world, we would say that the marginal dollar of investment is producing a negative return compared to the forecast. In the business world, that gets you fired. Sammon quotes University of Utah law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman:
“Increases in police officers or police budgets have not been shown to reduce crime or make us safer.”
And clearance rates can be easily manipulated. They are not a proxy for crimes that have been solved since they equate to arrests. More from Baughman:
“All they tell us is whether there has been an arrest made in a case…not whether that person is actually ….eventually convicted of the crime…”
He says that convictions are a better measure of whether a crime was actually cleared, and those numbers are substantially lower than the already abysmal national clearance rates.
The Guardian points out that proponents of increasing police budgets argue that more law enforcement is the solution to more violence. But Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard, notes that:
Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations call for police budgets to be defunded, not a single major American city has slashed its police funding. In fact almost all of them have increased spending on their police forces. Biden released a budget proposal for an additional $30 billion in law enforcement and crime prevention efforts, including funding to put “more police officers on the beat”.
America needs to answer the question of why police departments haven’t been able to convert increasing budgets into more effective crime-solving.
Meanwhile, the Uvalde murders underscore police forces’ inability to prevent crime from happening and/or stop them in progress. We’ve been slow to get the real story from the local police, but it’s clear that the police response to the shooting in progress was shameful.
The problem is that police reform is really hard. There are what appear to be intractable cultural issues within departments. The police unions need to be brought to heel. More accountability is a necessity. And their relationships with the community are terrible. If you suggest that your town or city shift some law enforcement resources to support the social work aspects of the job (thereby freeing cops to focus on actual law enforcement), you will be accused of wanting to “defund the police”, and the idea will die.
Time to wake up America! Both Democrats and Republicans want police budgets to grow. But neither have any answers as to how incremental dollars will help make the police more effective at their jobs! Progressives have been scapegoated by Republicans for their anti-police funding attitudes, but they’re the only political group saying we shouldn’t continue throwing more good money at a failed solution.
It’s a fact that our police departments aren’t solving crimes, despite devoting larger and larger sums to them. And heavily policed communities have good reason to continue to mistrust police involvement, thereby also depressing case closure rates. Failing to solve crimes only adds to that; why would marginalized communities respect a police force that doesn’t do its job particularly well?
To help you wake up, watch and listen to Rob Hustle’s 2021 rap, “Call the Cops”. It’s a lyric video:
Easter morning at Lake Tapps, with Mt. Rainer in background, Pierce County, WA – April 2022 photo by Motojw Photography. This picture was cropped by Wrongo to fit the blog’s page. View the original photo here.
“In early November, an email dropped into the inbox of Judge Ron Cunningham, the silver-haired head chair of the governing body of Llano County in Texas’s picturesque Hill Country. The subject line read ‘Pornographic Filth at the Llano Public Libraries.’”
The author was Bonnie Wallace, a local church volunteer who had attached an Excel spreadsheet with 60 books she found objectionable, including those about transgender teens, sex education and race, including “Between the World and Me,” by author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Not long after, the county’s chief librarian sent the list to Suzette Baker, head of one of the library’s three branches:
“She told me to look at pulling the books off the shelf and possibly putting them behind the counter. I told them that was censorship,”
In January, commissioners voted to dissolve the existing library board and created a reconstituted board of mostly political appointees, including many of the citizens who had complained about books. They named Ms. Wallace the vice chair of a new library board stacked with conservative appointees some of whom didn’t even have library cards.
Later, Baker was fired, and Llano joined a growing number of communities across America where conservatives have mounted challenges to books and other content they deem to be inappropriate.
A movement that started by influencing school boards has now expanded to public libraries. They accounted for 37% of book challenges last year, according to the American Library Association. Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures.
No one is forced to go to a public library. If someone goes to a public library, nobody is forcing that person to read a book while there, or to take a book out of the public library. It’s called a “public” library for a reason. The library serves all of the public, not just a small interest group (or individual) who feels they have the right to decide what all citizens should or shouldn’t read.
The issue is denial of public access.
Second, the NYT reports that a Texas state legislator warned Citigroup that he would introduce a bill to prevent the bank from underwriting municipal bonds in the state unless it rescinded its policy covering travel expenses for employees who go outside their state to seek an abortion. This Texas politician is attempting to dictate a national anti-abortion policy:
“Citigroup stated in a filing on Tuesday that it would provide travel benefits to employees seeking abortions outside their state, “in response to changes in reproductive health care laws in certain states.” Last year, Texas enacted a law that bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. The law took effect in September.”
It’s important to remember Enron, a now-defunct Texas corporation known for its massive accounting fraud, used to threaten banks with withdrawing all of their business if the bank’s analysts gave accurate opinions about Enron’s stock. It appears that remains a model for Republican governance.
Lots of high tech companies have diversity programs and progressive employee policies. Many have extensive operations in Texas. It’s going to take some time but Texas will suffer disinvestment as companies move elsewhere.
Because Texas is becoming Taliban country.
Here’s a long quote from Oliver Cromwell, speaking to the Rump Parliament on April 20, 1653, the day he dissolved it. He could easily be speaking to today’s Republican Party:
“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.
Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?
Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there and lock up the doors.
Dawn, Zabriskie Point with Panamint Range in background, Death Valley CA – January 2022 photo by Rick Berk Photography
Various thoughts on a snowy Saturday in Connecticut.
First, in a turnaround from recent polls, a Marquette Law School nationwide survey of adults finds that Biden leads both Florida Gov. DeSantis and former President Trump in hypothetical 2024 matchups:
“In a head-to-head matchup, DeSantis is supported by 33%, while Biden is supported by 41%. A substantial 18% say they would support someone else, and 8% say they would not vote.
In a Trump versus Biden rematch, Trump receives 33% to Biden’s 43%, with 16% preferring someone else and 6% saying they would not vote.”
The survey was conducted between Jan. 10-21, 2022. It surveyed 1000 adults nationwide and has a margin of error of +/-4 percentage points. There are always a few outlier polls. Could this be accurate?
Second, even before Justice Breyer announced his retirement, Republicans already had their usual hissy fit over Biden’s decision to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court, implying that she would be an “affirmative action” hire. Republicans on Twitter are prejudging any Black woman nominee as inherently inferior and underqualified.
Ilya Shapiro, a conservative lawyer who will soon teach at Georgetown Law, made it clear that he thinks being Black and a woman means the person is innately unqualified for the Supreme Court. In a since-deleted tweet, he lamented that since his preferred candidate for the job “doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get a lesser black woman.”
Shapiro is the same guy who wrote in 2009 that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination “confirmed that identity politics matter… more than merit,” showing that this is who he’s always been. Wrongo is appalled that my alma mater just gave this guy a job.
George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley tweeted that Biden’s pick will cause uncomfortable moments on the Court because:
“…when the justices will hear arguments on the use of race in [college] admissions, one member will have been selected initially through an exclusionary criteria of race and sex.”
He thinks it will cause uncomfortable moments for the White majority on the Court. This is from the same crowd that was fine with the White Catholic Amy Coney Barrett, who had never before been on the bench or even argued an appeal, being on the court.
Third, more about yesterday’s discussion on education, in which we said that the Right-wing is using the slogan of “parental control” to rationalize imposing changes in school curricula and libraries. A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from being taught in its classrooms because board members said the book contains material that was inappropriate for eighth grade students. Members also objected to a cartoon that featured a drawing of a “naked” mouse.
Wrongo has read “Maus” and recommends it to readers of all ages.
And there’s this gem from Indiana: HB 1362 mandates that teachers adopt a posture of impartiality in any conversation about controversial historical events. It goes on to state that in the run-up to a general election, students must be taught that: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded. In addition, students must be instructed that if any of these political systems were to replace the current form of government, the government of the United States would be overthrown and existing freedoms under the Constitution of the United States would no longer exist. As such, socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are detrimental to the people of the United States.”
We’re now seeing a deadly combination against public education: parents plus legislators following the marching orders of a Right-wing media complex that spews disinformation.
Time for us to kick back and enjoy our Saturday Soother.
If you live in the Northeast, you’re not going to be driving or working outside today, what with the 50+ mph winds and the 1-2+ ft of snow. So start by brewing up a cup of Pearl District Blend ($17.00/12 oz.) from Portland, Oregon’s Cycletown Coffee Roasters.
Now grab a seat by a window and listen to Giuseppe Verdi’s “Va, pensiero“, also known as the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves“, from his 1842 opera “Nabucco”. It recollects the period of Babylonian captivity in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Here it’s performed outdoors in front of a large audience in Naples, Italy by the orchestras of the Theater of San Carlo, and the National Academy of Sainta Cecilia, in July 2009. It’s not totally on point for Thursday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but it’s beautiful:
These headlines could say: “Biden Fails to Fix All of the World’s Problems in a year.”
What’s driving much of this “presidency in peril” coverage is Biden’s approval ratings. Some results are truly discouraging, while CNN’s poll of polls, released Thursday, found that 41% of Americans approve of the way Joe Biden is handling his job while 54% disapprove.
Still, Biden and the Dems need a mid-course correction. On to cartoons.
Can diplomacy solve the crisis in Ukraine?
The Senate failed to pass voting rights. Republicans wouldn’t help:
Republicans don’t want to look back one year, but they certainly don’t mind looking back at the 1950s:
The administration is sending rapid tests via the post office. Have they heard about Amazon?
Plenty of news this week about Trump and January 6. The dogs are gathering:
Oregon City Bridge, OR with Willamette Falls in background – January 2022 photo by Sanman Photography
Gallup says that the Dems are losing the battle for hearts and minds. Their most recent poll shows a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter. Here’s a chart showing the bad news:
More from Gallup:
“Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the [2021] first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.”
Gallup points out that the GOP has held a five-point advantage in a total of only four quarters since 1991. The fourth quarter of 2021 was the first time Republicans held a five-point advantage since 1995, when they took control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s.
Republicans have only held a larger advantage one time, in the first quarter of 1991, after the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War led by then President George H.W. Bush.
We’ve known that the Democrats aren’t at the top of their political game for months. The current issue of The Economist reports that while Biden looked great in 2020 as an alternative to Trump, in 2021, with Trump virtually invisible, Biden managed to look less compelling:
“Americans find themselves being led through tumultuous times by their least charismatic and politically able president since George H.W. Bush.”
The Economist listened in on a focus group of 2020 Biden voters conducted by Conservative pollster, Sarah Longwell. There were eight panelists, all under 30, from Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania:
“Asked to grade the president, the group…gave him four Cs, three D’s and an F. And it was not a hostile crowd. All the group’s members were Biden voters, and none regretted their vote. Indeed, if asked to support the president again in 2024, all said…they probably would…”
While a few things have been accomplished, much of the progressive agenda hasn’t. So half of the Democrats are mad at Biden for not accomplishing more. The focus group was young, and just one of them watched cable news; the rest got their facts from social media, where the president’s two recent good speeches barely register.
Ezra Klein points out that Biden learned from the weak Obama effort at stimulus after the Great Recession. He met the pandemic crisis with an overwhelming fiscal stimulus, supporting the passing of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act (passed during the Trump administration) and then adding the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Biden made it clear that he preferred the risks of a hot economy to mass joblessness.
From Klein: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“That they have largely succeeded feels like the best-kept secret in Washington. A year ago, forecasters expected unemployment to be nearly 6% in the fourth quarter of 2020. Instead, it fell to 3.9% in December….Wages are high, new businesses are forming at record rates, and poverty has fallen below its prepandemic levels.”
Since March 2020, Americans have saved at least $2 trillion more than expected. A JPMorgan Chase analysis found the median household’s checking account balance was 50% higher in July 2021 than before the pandemic.
But we now have inflation, supply chain issues and most importantly, we still have Covid. This may not be the presidency Biden wanted, but it’s the one he’s got. Biden has problems with the media. Crises sell, after all. But the reason Biden’s approval numbers are so underwater is that neither side thinks he is fighting for them.
Biden’s a career politician who survived by steering toward the middle of his own Party. That’s fine when you’re an incumbent Senator in the liberal Northeast, but not when you’re fighting a war of attrition against a Republican opposition that wants to destroy you and your Party.
Remember Biden’s talking point in his 2020 campaign was that this was a fight for the soul of America. He was right, but both Biden and the Party have drifted away from that and from designing programs that would rescue America’s soul.
If the Dems are to win in the 2022 mid-terms and the 2024 presidential election, they must start acting like they’re fighting for us. There’s no grey area in American politics. The entire Party must unite behind fighting the Republicans and Trump.
Democrats need to be on the offense – all day, every day.
How about taking a few minutes for a musical palate cleanser? Since we need Biden to find his way home to the Democratic Party, Let’s watch Rachael Price, lately of Lake Street Dive, along with the Live from Here Band with Chris Thile, performing in 2018 a cover of Blind Faith’s 1969 “Can’t Find My Way Home“:
Blind Faith was a Supergroup comprised of Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech. They released just one album. Winwood wrote this and sang lead, despite Clapton’s reputation.
Sunrise, Jensen Beach, FL – November 2021 photo by Patrice Ostradick
More about the Dem’s messaging problem. The latest jobs report showed that we added more than 530,000 new jobs in October. And the DOL also revised its estimates for September and August, confirming an additional 235,000 positions were created.
That’s 766,000 jobs we didn’t know about until last Friday.
The news sent the Dow Jones upward (again). It ended at another all-time high, 36,327. Since Biden was elected last year, the market is up 40%. That’s $14 trillion in new wealth that has landed in quite a few pockets. But the media still covered a Biden administration in disarray. From Eric Boehlert:
“…on Friday, news consumers visiting WashingtonPost.com had to scroll down past 75 different stories and links before they found the first mention of the blockbuster jobs report…..at the top of the Post site Friday afternoon was a column about how the White House is having trouble spreading good news about the economy.”
Again, the media going all “gotcha” on Biden. And it’s having an impact on his poll numbers, which took another dive in a USA Today poll over the weekend that shows Republicans holding a lead on the 2022 Congressional ballot. It found that Biden lost support among the Independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over Trump one year ago:
46% said Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he’s done worse, not better, than they expected.
64% said they didn’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2024. That includes 28% of Democrats.
Democrats need to understand their peril. The NYT’s front-page story, “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful” shows their dilemma. The economy is by all accounts on fire, but consumers and voters think it’s floundering. You might question just who is flush with cash, but the negative views of the economy seem to be tied to the effects that rising prices and shortages have on families. Regardless of the exact causes, after decades where the lack of jobs drove economic sentiment, inflation now appears to be a force driving opinion about the economy.
Prices for many consumer goods are rising, and as we said yesterday, it’s impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. From Bloomberg (paywalled):
“It’s not all negativity: A record-high 74% of respondents told Gallup in October that this is a good time to find a quality job, and 65% told AP-NORC pollsters that their personal financial situation was good. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index rose in October and, while lower than before the pandemic, is higher than at any time between 2001 and 2017.”
The reality is that consumer prices have risen faster over the past six months than at any time since the early 1980s. And there’s increasing evidence of a partisan bias in consumer sentiment, with most people judging the economy more favorably when the person they voted for is president.
Remember that the USA Today poll says 64% think Biden shouldn’t run in 2024. Maybe some of today’s economic pessimism has to do with people downgrading their view of Biden’s competence after the surge in the Delta variant that killed so many, while our messy withdrawal from Afghanistan was seen by many as humiliating.
The Democrats’ conundrum is how to respond both to the economic concerns and the cultural attacks. They can’t win by simply pointing to their actual policies on specific issues. They must respond to the attacks on “wrong way for the country” by honing a message that works for the persuadable Independents. We live in a 40-40-20 country in which 40% percent are hard-wired for either Party, and 20% are swing voters, who are primarily located in the suburbs. They largely control the outcome of elections.
Democrats need to study the art of persuasion. The Right is driven by nostalgia: they want to go back to a “simpler time”. The Left is motivated by change, to ensure rights for all, whether that’s healthcare or fair wages. if Democrats want to win against the highly organized right-wing media ecosystem, they must find a series of messages to persuade Independents.
We need a tune for Tuesday. Here’s Willy Nile with something brand new, “The Justice Bell” a tribute to John Lewis, from his August 2021 album, “The Day The Earth Stood Still”:
A few start-of-the-week thoughts. First, compare and contrast: The result of New Jersey’s election for governor must be “legal and fair” no matter the outcome, Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli said in his first comments after the AP declared incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy the election’s winner. BTW, Ciattarelli hasn’t conceded the election. Republicans say NJ’s Murphy won in a squeaker, an almost illegitimate (and certainly embarrassing) margin of 77,000 votes.
OTOH in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin won a landslide victory by 79,000 votes. Terry McAuliffe the Democrat in the Virginia race, conceded. And Youngkin’s 17 year-old son was reported to have tried to vote twice for his dad. That’s a problem since he’s underage. And attempting to break the law twice, well, that’s just youthful exuberance.
Republicans are all about election integrity. It must be nice to not care about hypocrisy or inconsistency. Maybe that’s what Republicans mean when they say they are defending freedom — it’s the freedom to have no principles.
Second, the economy: The Dow is over 36,000, unemployment has dropped from 6.3% in Jan. to 4.8% today. Over 5.6 million jobs have been added, that’s more jobs added under Biden in 9 months than in the 16 years of the last three GOP administrations combined. We’ve managed to give 220 million shots of Covid vaccine in 10 months. But only 30% of Americans think the US is on the right track. Democrats have a huge messaging problem. On to cartoons.
NOW they don’t see a problem:
Will Dems get the message?
The message didn’t work for those nice Aryan people:
Kids ask questions. Answers are simple:
The GOP hits keep coming…
2006: Gay people will force you to gay marry
2010: Muslims will make you conform to Sharia law
2016: Bad brown people are coming in caravans to kill you
2020: Socialism is coming. It will give everyone healthcare, not just the elderly
2021: Teachers will teach white kids to hate themselves if they learn about Emmitt Till
Oregon City Bridge, OR with Willamette Falls in background – January 2022 photo by 
