(There won’t be a Monday Wake Up column this week. Wrongo will return on Wednesday, May 31.)
Memorial Day, Arlington National Cemetery – 2013 photo by William Coyle
Monday will be Memorial Day, when we honor the sacrifice of those who died fighting in America’s wars. We mourn those we knew, and we pause briefly to remember those we never knew. The American public’s job is to say, “thank you for your service”. Saying it has become a reflex, like “bless you” when someone sneezes. Our default position is to thank, but not to think. For most of us, America’s foreign wars are a kind of elevator music. Always present, but we barely notice it.
Maybe we watch our town’s parade, or shop at the mall. There’s likely to be a cookout. It isn’t about love of country. It’s about sad Facebook emojis, Memorial Day mattress sales, and burgers on Monday. On to cartoons.
The old man remembers the soldier:
RIP Tina Turner:
More:
Requiring a clean Debt Ceiling dies as Biden negotiates with Freedom Caucus:
Top negotiators for Biden and Speaker McCarthy resumed talks Friday evening after the Republicans said the negotiations had to go on a “pause”. Roll Call reports that:
“After a nearly daylong setback, White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti, White House budget director Shalanda Young, Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., and House Financial Services Chairman Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., resumed talks at the Capitol shortly after 6 p.m.”
Time is running out for Congress to raise the debt ceiling. If not, the consequences are stark. Keeping the lines of communication open and giving away the store are two different things entirely. On to cartoons.
McCarthy’s toll booth:
The North Carolina legislature overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill imposing a ten-week abortion ban. Will this ensure Democratic victory in North Carolina in 2024?
Texas has sued the Biden administration 29 times in a Texas Federal District Court. Now after banning mifepristone, Texas judges have new careers:
Durham’s report:
Disney’s Bob Iger asks DeSantis: “Does Florida want our jobs and taxes or not?” This is a severe kick in the balls:
Wrongo’s old enough to have seen Jim Brown play in Yankee Stadium against the NY Giants:
Today, Wrongo is going to be a grumpy old mossback. It rarely suits his politics or his outlook on life, but the WaPo is reporting that automakers are removing AM radio from their new models:
“Automakers, such as BMW, Volkswagen, Mazda and Tesla, are removing AM radios from new electric vehicles because electric engines can interfere with the sound of AM stations. And Ford, one of the nation’s top-three auto sellers, is taking a bigger step, eliminating AM from all of its vehicles, electric or gas-operated.”
More:
“Now, although 82 million Americans still listen to AM stations each month, according to the National Association of Broadcasters, the AM audience has been aging for decades. Ford says its data, pulled from internet-connected vehicles, shows that less than 5% of in-car listening is to AM stations.”
Wrongo remembers car radios before FM, and long before SiriusXM, listening to Wolfman Jack at night, beaming his show from the US–Mexico border. Or hearing Alan Freed talk about the “submarine races” in NYC. Later, living in London, he would listen to pirate radio instead of the BBC.
At night, rotating the AM dial to bring in stations like KDKA in Pittsburgh or WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia was an art. It required that you avoid the interference of other stations or the snap and crackle of lightning. While driving in the car, the AM signal could also be corrupted by the hum of overhead power lines.
Now that less-than-ideal experience will soon be only a memory. But as always in America, there’s a political argument to be made about AM radio leaving a few high priced cars. More from WaPo:
“The removal of AM radio from cars — where about half of AM listening takes place — has sparked bipartisan protests. Some Democrats are fighting to save stations that often are the only live source of local information during extreme weather, as well as outlets that target immigrant audiences. Some Republicans…claim the elimination of AM radio is aimed at diminishing the reach of conservative talk radio, an AM mainstay….Eight of the country’s 10 most popular radio talk shows are conservative.”
But the auto makers aren’t abolishing AM radio; they’re just not offering it in their new cars. AM will persist on the dial in most of America.
As usual, the issue in America is profits. Eliminating AM is all about the numbers. From WaPo:
“Of the $11 billion in advertising revenue that radio pulled in last year, about $2 billion came into AM stations, according to BIA Advisory Services, which conducts research for broadcasters. And some of the country’s most lucrative radio stations are still on AM, mostly all-news or news and talk stations in big cities such as New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles.”
BIA Advisory says that about 40% of AM stations have news, talk or sports formats; 11% are oriented to specific ethnic groups; and another 11% have a religious format. About a third of AM outlets play music, including Mexican and Spanish music. But they also report that the AM audience is getting smaller and older. The in-car streaming technology has grown exponentially, as has the trend away from music and toward podcasts and other spoken-word formats.
WaPo also quotes Pierre Bouvard from Cumulus Media, which owns more than 400 (mostly AM) stations:
“Radio is still the soundtrack of the American worker….It’s what people listen to on the way to work. And Ford owners are massive users of AM radio — 1 out of 5 AM listeners are Ford owners, so Ford is missing something here.”
But people can stream AM broadcasts into their cars if they must have AM programming.
The demographics of in-car listening aren’t fully understood. A new study by Edison Research found that young people often prefer AM and FM broadcast radio because it’s free. Edison says that overall, AM and FM radio still account for 60% of all in-car listening. SiriusXM satellite radio makes up 16%, followed by drivers’ own music from their phones at 7%, with podcasts and music videos at 4% each.
If this makes a difference to you, several manufacturers including Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Kia and Jaguar Land Rover, said they have no plans to eliminate AM.
Time to wake up America! Nobody is shutting down AM radio stations! If you need AM in your new car, you’ll just have to shop for a car that offers it. Wrongo has nostalgia for the old days of AM radio, but the one AM station he listens to in the car can easily be streamed through Apple Air Play.
Let’s not create another faux cultural war issue over whether your new Tesla must have an AM dial. To help you wake up listen to Meatloaf performing “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” with Ellen Foley. It’s from his 1977 album “Bat out of Hell”:
Props to Mike and Marie S. who did the absolutely best karaoke version of this tune!
(The Monday Wake Up Call will be published on Tuesday this week.)
America has been waiting for more than a year for the Federal Reserve to get control over inflation. In that time, they’ve jacked up interest rates to over 5%. A year ago, raising rates that high seemed unthinkable, but here we are. Wages have also risen.
There was some damage: A few horribly managed banks collapsed. A couple of auto dealer-lender chains that specialized in selling overpriced used cars to subprime customers collapsed. And there were some fiascos in commercial real estate.
All of that has led the Fed to indicate that there could be a “soft landing” for our economy. But with the latest jobs growth numbers, maybe the Fed will have to keep circling the airport. In April, 253,000 jobs were created. There are now a record 155.7 million payroll jobs. Over the past 3 months on average, 222,000 jobs were created per month. So is a soft landing ahead?
Please raise your seat tables to the upright position and pass your trash to the attendant. On to cartoons.
Coronations aren’t just for the Brits:
(Wrongo watched the coronation of King Charles III yesterday. Seventy years ago, he also watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on a 9″ black & white Philco television. Yesterday’s was on a 55” Samsung.)
The reality about the GOP:
What to expect after the GOP talks with Biden about the Debt Ceiling:
Proud Boys found guilty, but who pulled the strings?
Kremlin complains:
Justice Thomas needs to be taller to take the ride:
This month, Texas Senate Republicans passed three bills allowing religion into public schools. From Vox:
“The first, SB 1515, would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in classrooms. The other bill, SB 1396, would permit public schools to set aside time for students and staff members to pray or read the Bible and other religious texts. The third, SB 1556, would give employees the right to pray or “engage in religious speech” while on the job.”
Some of this sounds unconstitutional. You can be certain that plenty of Texans will be happy to comply as maliciously as possible next fall.
The three bills now go to the Texas House for approval. They follow Texas’s SB 797, which took effect in 2021 and requires schools to display “In God We Trust” signs.
When the Texas Right say they want to bring religion back into public schools, they mean they want to make public schools more Christian. This flies in the face of America becoming noticeably less religious over the past 20 years: Weekly service attendance and religious self-identification are both down 20% overall, which translates to about 50 million fewer Americans than two decades ago.
This is ironic: If religious identification is to increase, it will have to come from “importing” traditional believers from the global south. But few of them are white. So that’s a problem for Trumpism and the reactionary Right. On to cartoons.
State-sponsored religion is hard to swallow:
Biden announces he’s running:
How do young voters fit in the race between these geriatrics?
Another busy week filled with news we didn’t want to hear. Fox’s huge $787.5 million payout in the Dominion lawsuit seems appropriate, but Lever News reports that Fox can take a tax deduction from the settlement. Ironically the financial consequences of lying are just a cost of doing business for Murdoch and Co.
Fox Corporation reported $1.2 billion in net income in 2022, so the $787 million Dominion settlement is equivalent to about two-thirds of the company’s profits last year. The Lever quotes Daniel Shaviro a tax professor at NYU:
“If your business model is to tell lies so that you’ll get viewers and have lots of advertising revenues, then, odious though this business model may be, the tax system’s job is to tax you on the profits that you actually make from it…”
Fox reported paying an effective income tax rate of 27% in 2022 (the combination of federal and New York taxes). If Fox can write off the full settlement payment to Dominion, it could amount to an estimated $213 million in tax savings. On to cartoons.
Fox didn’t even have to do this:
Losing the lawsuit didn’t cost Fox any viewers:
Justice Sam Alito was in an especially grumpy mood after the other Justices on the Supreme Court ruled that access to Mifepristone will remain unchanged while the case continues to wind through the courts. Alito and Thomas dissented even though the underlying suit is frivolous:
Note that Thomas is drinking a coke.
That the SpaceX rocket crashed and burned was totally on brand for Elon:
America is in a literal death spiral. The more mass shootings take place, the more innocent people die. And then more of America’s Republican politicians tell us that only more guns will solve the problem.
We need to see mass shooting as a form of domestic terrorism. We’ve moved from having ten Constitutional Amendments that most of us cared deeply about to a place where the Right only really cares about the Second Amendment. Maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised that there are so many Americans who care more about guns than they care about people.
For a certain group, that seems to be what America is all about. If they cared about freedom, nothing would be more of a priority than defending every person’s right to go about their daily lives without the threat of violence. If we really cared about the sanctity of human life, we would prioritize people over guns. On to cartoons.
The unholy trio who prioritize guns over people:
The GOP’s platform is turning into a cliff:
When your anti-human policy list is this long, you must be a Republican:
It isn’t a game:
Clarence is tracking mud into the Court:
Rep. Jim Jordan plans to investigate AG Bragg in NYC:
TikTok’s CEO testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week. He wasn’t well received. The main focus of your Congress critters was how TikTok could be weaponized against Americans through data surveillance and/or algorithm manipulation.
TikTok is used by about 150 million Americans. It may (or may not) be owned or controlled by the Chinese government. Given what we know about how American Big Tech abuses your data, and how China embraces surveillance as a tool of social control, it’s common sense to ask questions about how best to guard against TikTok’s misuse.
TikTok could be used to collect information on American citizens. But if TikTok was banned, that wouldn’t protect the privacy of American citizens. Many other companies are already collecting that information and are willing to sell it to any buyer.
The only thing that could protect the privacy of American citizens is a law preventing anyone from collecting that information: A law that would restrict all companies’ capacity to collect data on Americans, not simply TikTok’s.
A final argument made in Congress is that TikTok could be used to promote Chinese propaganda. It could; but is our government in the business of protecting us from a free flow of ideas? If America is still a democracy, people should be free to promote or listen to any kind of speech. That is the very essence of free speech. On to cartoons.
Why hammer only the Chinese?
The hypocrisy by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs after the bank failure was breathtaking:
Let’s talk about Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The tech industry’s go-to lender just became the second-largest bank failure in US history. The bank’s customers withdrew $42 billion from their accounts on Thursday. That’s $4.2 billion an hour, or more than $1 million per second for ten hours straight.
We ancient, moss-covered former bankers call this a bank run. That occurs when a large number of customers of a bank withdraw their deposits simultaneously over concerns about the bank’s solvency.
Nearly half of all venture-backed US companies were SVB customers. We’re unsure why the run started, but on Thursday, several Venture Capital firms started telling their client companies that pulling cash from SVB was prudent, and the run began.
While bank deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) up to $250,000, few of SVB’s deposits, by value, were FDIC insured, since its customers were overwhelmingly corporations with much more than $250,000 in the bank. By Friday, there was no cash left in SVB’s coffers. In fact, the cash on hand was negative, to the tune of $958 million.
“Some banking experts on Friday pointed out that a bank as large as Silicon Valley Bank might have managed its interest rate risks better had parts of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulatory package, put in place after the 2008 crisis, not been rolled back under President Trump.”
Trump signed the bill despite a report from Democrats on Congress’s joint economic committee warning that under the new law, SVB and other banks of its size:
“…would no longer be subject to nearly any enhanced regulations”.
This also affects ordinary people. Wrongo has a California friend who banks with SVB. Here’s a quote from her:
“While I’ve been waiting to sign the purchase contract on a condo, I woke to the news that my lender Silicon Valley Bank has been closed and taken over by regulators. That concludes literally 8 months of working on this….and the end of my effort to buy a home.”
So don’t listen to the pleas for another bank bailout. Wrongo would be okay with bailouts if they were accompanied by personal accountability by management. Like, we’ll rescue your institution, but none of the bank senior management can ever work in finance again. On to cartoons.
Tucker’s mendacity:
It takes two teams to play:
Walmart’s OK with pills for boners, but not for pregnancy:
GOP wants to regulate Trans not Trains:
GOP loves doormats:
Most appropriately named movie of this or any year:
“The nation’s second-largest pharmacy chain confirmed Thursday that it will not dispense abortion pills in several states where they remain legal — acting out of an abundance of caution amid a shifting policy landscape, threats from state officials and pressure from anti-abortion activists.”
It seems that Republican state attorneys general in about 24 states wrote to Walgreens in February, threatening legal action if the company continued distributing the drugs in their states.
These abortion pills are the nation’s most frequently used method for ending a pregnancy.
The company subsequently told the states that it will not dispense abortion pills either by mail or at their brick-and-mortar locations in those states.
This is where America is at: Large corporations are doing more to obstruct access to abortion than the law requires. On to cartoons.
Women’s history month at the Supreme Court:
Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the Oscar-nominated movie “Women Talking” last night. It’s message is that women should no longer accept things they cannot change; that it’s time to change the things they can’t accept. Like the Dobbs decision.
Tennessee outlaws drag. And they’re so pro-life that they want to execute any woman who gets an abortion.:
