Right Wing Ideologues – Page 7

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – June 12, 2022

The WaPo reports that Facebook is allowing marketplace buyers and sellers to violate its ban on gun purchases 10 times before being kicked off the platform. They rep orted that Facebook’s guidelines also include a five-strikes system for gun sellers and buyers who call for violence or voice support for a “known dangerous organization” before they lose Facebook access.

Five years ago, Facebook banned the private sale of guns on its website but it hasn’t previously explained how the company enforces the ban. Apparently, they really don’t. On to cartoons.

The GOP’s #1 strategy:

GOP strategy #2:

Kids understand:

Liz Cheney, another guided missile:

Wrong argument in the wrong court:

Twisted logic by Republicans who defied the J6 committee:

FOX knows its audience:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – June 5, 2022

Since 2019, more than 4,500 children have been shot to death in the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That’s about the same number as US military members killed during the 17 years of the Iraq War.

The supporters of permissive gun laws say that an armed society is self-regulating. That we should be able to keep weapons out of the hands of the wrong people. And when we can’t, a law-abiding gun owner will be nearby with their gun to stop the bad guy, wherever they appear.

But life isn’t such a simple binary. And because America has allowed the unlimited proliferation of weapons, we know with certainty that when the switch flips, people will die.

If that is the cost of freedom — if our liberty demands the occasional massacre, including of innocent children — then Republican politicians need to make that case to the rest of us. On to cartoons.

Mental health is only the tip of the iceberg:

Causes of kid trauma are in the eye of beholder:

The “well-regulated militia” isn’t regulated at all:

GOP wants teachers to defend themselves but not think for themselves:

So much misunderstanding:

Anatomy of a hunting gun:

Saturday Soother – April 23, 2022

The Daily Escape:

North Landing River, near Virginia Beach, VA – April 2022 photo by Erik Moore

Our media ecosystem is overwhelming us. Some of the information is accurate, some is bogus, and much is intentionally misleading. And that’s a deliberate strategy. While it didn’t originate with Steve Bannon, he perfected it with his thought that:

“…the Democrats don’t matter….The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

This is why the ongoing cultural war works so well for Republicans. There’s always some petty war going on between the Parties that’s stoked by the media. And it’s almost always about cultural issues since Republicans really don’t have a policy platform, and don’t want to go against large corporate America. When you go against corporations, you lose the money needed to get elected.

But we should see the big corporations as our common enemy. Time Magazine has an article about how overtime pay has disappeared:

“If it feels like you’re working longer hours for less money than your parents or grandparents did, it’s because you probably are. Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages have actually fallen since the early 1970s, while average hours worked have steadily climbed. American workers are increasingly underpaid, overworked, and overwhelmed.”

One reason is the loss of overtime pay:

“If you’re under the age of 45, you may have no idea that overtime pay is even a thing. But…middle-class workers used to get a lot of it….That means that [for] every hour you work over 40 hours a week you work for free, contributing…a giant pool of free labor that modern employers have come to expect and exploit. Profits are up, real wages are down, and income inequality has soared to its highest level since the Gilded Age.”

Overtime pay was one of the great New Deal reforms. It was a core provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA set the minimum wage at one-half the median wage and the overtime threshold at three times the minimum—an amount equal to 1.5 times the median wage.

But both the minimum wage and the overtime rules began to change in 1975, and rising income inequality since 1975 is responsible for a $50 trillion upward redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom 90% households to those in the top 1%. Here’s a chart showing the impact of losing overtime. Productivity goes up, but is completely decoupled from income:

Source: chartr

The Economic Policy Institute has a tool called “Company Wage Tracker” that allows you to select any big corporation and see what percentage of their employees make below a certain wage. For example, it shows that 51% of Walmart employees earn below $15/hr.

The NYT wrote about Mary Gundel, a manager at a Dollar General store in Tampa, FL who was fired for speaking out about the chain’s policies regarding overtime and short-staffing:

“The store used to have about 198 hours a week to allocate to a staff of about seven people….But by the end of last month, she had only about 130 hours to allocate….With not as many hours to give to her staff, Ms. Gundel often had to operate the store on her own for long stretches, typically working six days and up to 60 hours a week with no overtime pay.”

Ms. Gundel was working 60 hours a week and making $51,000 a year. That means she’s making only a little more than the minimum wage. Dollar General is one of the most profitable retail chains in the country.

Prices are going up everywhere across America, and corporations are making proportionately more income. This is what the Democrats should be focusing on, standing up for workers, doing what is right as opposed to groping for answers to the Republican’s culture war issues.

There’s plenty that’s wrong in America. But what’s wrong doesn’t see the light of day alongside all of the pissing contests about Critical Race Theory, or predator grooming or LGBTQ issues. These are ginned-up to make sure you won’t pay attention to what’s really going on.

Something seems to be brewing. We’re seeing halting attempts at unionization at Starbucks and Amazon. Those employees want a better life; they want to have a seat at the table about the future of the company.

We need to remember that without the “essential workers” the country grinds to a halt. We need to support those who try to organize. We need to wrest some economic power away from politicians and big businesses. And finally, some faceless people who are sick of being wronged are trying to do just that.

Enough for another week. It’s time to let go of the news. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. On the Fields of Wrong we’re preparing our vegetable garden, although it will be a few weeks before it’s warm enough for the plants to survive. We had an overnight temperature of 32° earlier this week.

Now, grab a seat by a large window and listen to violin soloist Soojin Han play Chopin’s “Nocturne No.20 in C# minor” in August 2019. She’s playing on a 1666 Stradivarius:

It sounds beautiful.

Chopin composed the piece in 1830, but it was published in 1875, 26 years after his death. It was featured in the movie “The Pianist” in 2002.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 27, 2022

The public personas of three women: the late Madeline Albright, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Ginni Thomas were on display last week. Two of them seem destined for important places in history.

You know Albright’s story: A refugee from Hitler and Stalin. A naturalized American, the first woman US Secretary of State (fourth in the line of presidential succession), and a huge influence on US foreign policy in the 1990s. The New Yorker says that she was the first “most powerful woman” in US history.

They report a great story about Albright attending a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1998. She and the then-Russian Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, performed a skit for the assembled diplomats, despite growing tensions between Washington and Moscow over NATO expansion. They did a bit from “West Side Story”, with Albright playing Maria and Primakov playing Tony. To the tune of “America,” the two sang back and forth:

Albright: “America’s nobody’s enemy.”
Primakov: “So why do you practice hegemony?”
Albright: “I want to know what you think of me.”
Primakov: “Look in your file at the K.G.B.!”

Today it’s a different world. It’s hard to imagine Anthony Blinken and Sergei Lavrov doing a skit.

It’s also a different Washington. We’ve now had several female Secretaries of State. We have a female Vice President, and a woman as Treasury Secretary. Not all that Albright advocated or was a part of were with hindsight, the best actions for the US, but she left an indelible mark on the world.

Ginni Thomas won’t ever be able to wear Albright’s shoes (or her pins). From the WaPo we learned that Thomas exchanged at least 29 text messages with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, as both of them strategized about overturning the 2020 election result.

Shortly afterward, her husband became the only justice to dissent when the Court granted access to Donald Trump’s White House records. Ginni Thomas has also since confirmed that she attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection. That means Justice Thomas voted against disclosing information about an attempted coup that Ginni Thomas supported.

It’s ridiculous that Ginni Thomas, who tried to directly influence Meadows and Trump, thinks that we will believe that she would not try to influence her husband. Together they are a stain on public life.

The same day the Thomas scandal broke, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she would recuse herself from a major case involving Harvard University, where she serves on the governing board. That’s what true public servants do. They respect the norms of civility. On to cartoons.

Ginni’s world:

A fair and sober hearing:

Good question:

A clown show broke out in DC:

The difference:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 13, 2022

Have you given any thought to the inconsistency between how Whoopi Goldberg was treated for her comment about the holocaust, and how Joe Rogan has been treated for his um, body of work? Whoopi was condemned by the left and right. She was appropriately suspended from her position as a host of ABC’s The View. She later apologized for the hurtful inference in her remarks.

With Rogan, after the flap over his COVID misinformation, it came to light that dozens of his episodes were quietly removed from Spotify because they featured Rogan using the N-word. To date, Spotify has yanked more than 100 of his episodes. But Rogan wasn’t suspended or “cancelled” by Spotify. Still, he’s held up on the Right as another victim of leftist cancel culture.

The artists who left Spotify weren’t trying to “cancel” Rogan. They just wouldn’t continue being associated with a platform that promoted him. Both the artists and Spotify are making free-market business decisions that they have every right to make.

That’s an idea that you’d think would be vigorously supported by Conservatives.

The outcry on the Right about “cancel culture” comes at a time when they are working to outlaw Critical Race Theory, overturn elections, enact legislation to deny the vote to millions of Americans, and ban books. It’s clear who’s doing the cancelling in America.

Those who defend Rogan say he’s simply providing a forum. Sure, he interviews kooks and sleazes, but he also interviews some reasonable folks. So he’s presenting “both sides“. The other side of a fact is a lie. And if you put a lie on an equal footing with the truth, you give the lie credibility. This is a cardinal sin that the media have been committing for decades. On to cartoons.

The massive self-deception the Right Wing practices while copying Nazi tactics:

Trump’s monument on the Mall:

RNC censures two of its own, says many of its own are totally fine:

Mitch the turtle takes RNC to task for its censure, also says Trump is wrong:

Russia’s about to bite off more than it can chew:

The end of mask mandates is political signaling. We’ll soon know if this calculated risk works:

Republicans Double Down on The Coup

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Camden Harbor, ME – February 2022 photo by Daniel F. Dishner

(For email subscribers: Below in this email is a link to Monday’s Wake Up Call. It wasn’t sent on Monday morning)

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking,” ̶ Gen. George S. Patton

Last Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) passed a resolution that claimed that the House Select Committee was seeking to punish ordinary people for engaging in “legitimate political discourse.” This came days after Trump suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack. He also said that his goal on Jan. 6 was to “overturn” the election results.

From MSNBC:

“The Republican National Committee on Friday approved an astounding resolution that…condoned the attack on the US Capitol last year. In doing so, it’s given up any pretense that the party stands in opposition to the violence that then-President Donald Trump inspired.”

As Robert Hubbell says in his newsletter:

“The RNC resolution illustrates the death grip Trump has on the GOP….Trump’s repeated insistence that Mike Pence could have awarded the election to Trump finally provoked Pence to declare that “Trump is wrong”….Pence’s statement provoked a vigorous defense of Trump from Matt Gaetz, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone—a rogues gallery of felons, targets of grand jury investigations, and recipients of presidential pardons.”

The RNC resolution included this:

“WHEREAS, Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes…”

So, Republicans think that what the insurrectionists did by bashing in cops’ brains with flag poles is legitimate political discourse? Smearing feces on the walls of Congress was legitimate political discourse?

CNN quoted a Republican who said the resolution was “watered down” because it didn’t demand that Kinzinger and Cheney be expelled from the GOP. That says what passed is the GOP version of a more moderate resolution supporting the coup.

That phrase “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” goes beyond just defending Trump or faulting Cheney and Kinzinger for defying the Party. It sanctions the actions of insurrectionists who wanted to overturn a legitimate election.

The resolution shows that the RNC (and therefore most Republicans) have effectively joined the insurrectionists. The important thing is that it wouldn’t matter what their intent was. The Republican Party is whitewashing the riot:

We know that the Right-wing media continues to spread misinformation about Jan 6.
We know that those arrested for participating in the Jan. 6 violence are getting sympathetic responses from many Republicans.
We know that for the overwhelming majority of elected Republicans, the only thing they truly regret about 1/6 is that it failed.

This means that Republican candidates will have to campaign in the 2022 mid-terms by supporting violent insurrection and a failed coup. That will appeal to most Republicans, but on its face, it will repel the strong majority of Democrats and Independent voters.

Speaking of the mid-terms, let’s spend a few words on Liz Cheney. Had you said a few years ago that the straight daughter of Dick Cheney would become a pariah in the Republican Party in 2022, you would have been laughed off your bar stool.

What kind of a world do we live in when Liz Cheney isn’t evil enough for the Republican Party?

Cheney’s Congressional seat is important: If the next presidential election were to be decided by the House of Representatives, each state would get a single vote. If Cheney was Wyoming’s sole Representative, she would have the same clout as California or New York.

That’s a relatively unlikely future scenario, but Wyoming is an open primary state, meaning that Democrats could cross the aisle and vote for her, possibly making a difference in whether she wins the primary. She couldn’t win the mid-term because Dems would go back to their candidate, and the anti-Cheney Republicans would stay home. In that scenario, the seat might flip to the Democrats.

Cheney is what the GOP used to be, or pretended it was: stalwart, principled, with deeply-held convictions, and unwavering loyalty to the country and the rule of law.

She’s also a reminder of how far the GOP has fallen.

Know your enemy. Dems think they’re in a battle of tweets armed with binders of position papers and outrage. That won’t be enough in November.

The Republicans are doubling down on the coup. Democrats need to double down on registration, turnout, voter protection, and sure, some outrage at Republicans.

Whose Side Are You On?

The Daily Escape:

Capitol Reef NP -December 2021 photo by Jonathan Vandervoorde

Shouldn’t we be on the side of democracy? Georgia’s Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock says yes. He spoke in the Senate on Tuesday, and what he said is consistent with Wrongo’s thinking.

Warnock asked why the Senate could suspend its rules in order to pass an increase in the debt ceiling by a simple majority but couldn’t do the same thing for something as critical to our democracy as voting rights. From Warnock:

“Before we left Washington last week, we in this chamber made a change in the Senate’s rules in order to push forward something that all of us think is important. We set the stage to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, and yet as we cast that vote to begin addressing the debt ceiling, this same chamber is allowing the ceiling of our democracy to crash in around us….Be very clear, last week we changed the rules of the Senate. To address another important issue, the economy. This is a step, a change in the Senate rules we haven’t been willing to take to save our broken democracy, but one that a bipartisan majority of this chamber thought was necessary in order to keep our economy strong.”

The Jan. 6 attempted coup and the many state anti-voting laws passed by Republicans subsequent to that, come from the same poisonous well: A growing anti-democratic movement of fellow travelers including American conservatives, Right-wing extremists, and political entrepreneurs on the Right who have made the Republican Party their political vehicle.

They’re close to winning in the 2022 mid-terms. If the Senate adjourns without acting on voter suppression, it will help them get there. Buzzfeed reports that in some states, Republicans are going door-to-door in order to “check” to make sure there aren’t any illegal voters in your home:

“Individual election deniers and grassroots groups are canvassing for election fraud in states…including New Hampshire, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, and Nebraska.”

They’re targeting registered Democrat voters. It’s part of a broader effort by Trump supporters and Republican Party leaders to cast doubt on our elections going forward. In Colorado, a member of the Three Percenter militant group is helping lead the canvassing effort. According to the Colorado Times Recorder, that member suggested volunteers carry firearms to provide security for the group as they went door-to-door.

Let’s call this what it is: Voter intimidation on a multi-state scale. It’s a message that if you are a registered Democrat, the Trump cultists know who you are, and where you live. This intimidation should be illegal, but it’s not.

And it’s another part of the problem that the Senate needs to address right now.

The Democrats have what amounts to less-than-a-majority in the Senate in favor of suspending the filibuster rules for voting rights. In June, Majority Leader Schumer outsourced an effort to garner a filibuster-proof majority on voting rights to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVA), but Manchin’s effort failed.

Despite that, Schumer was able to finesse the filibuster to act without Republican votes to increase the debt ceiling. He was also able to corral all Democratic Senators, including Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, who are on the record as being against any change in the filibuster rules.

But voting rights, the most fundamental of all Democratic principles, are being sacrificed to the crusty parliamentary rule that these same two Democrats have so far refused to consider. This week, Schumer appointed a group of Democratic senators, who lead the talks on voting rights legislation, to spearhead discussions with Joe Manchin about how to change the Senate rules. They met with Manchin on Tuesday.

It’s time for Sen. Schumer to wrestle Manchin and Sinema to the ground, and make them vote to suspend the filibuster rules a second time.

Barton Gellman, who wrote a recent Atlantic magazine article that Wrongo quoted last week, recently told Terry Gross of NPR:

“This is, I believe, a democratic emergency, and that without very strong and systematic pushback from protectors of democracy, we’re going to lose something that we can’t afford to lose about the way we run elections.”

We’re facing a crisis. Biden and all Democrats have to make this a “whose side are you on?” issue for Washington politicians and for voters everywhere.

Warnock has a powerful message. He’s the one Democrat willing to speak about the elephant in the room. Watch his speech:

Saturday Soother – December 4, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Mexican Hat Rock, Mexican Hat UT – 2021 photo by Jacky and Rick

The media keeps talking about inflation, saying that it’s bound to hurt the economy any time now. They mean that inflation will make workers ask for higher wages. That will force companies to pay workers more, and thus, lower corporate profits.

Sounds like a problem, but as Bloomberg reports, the fattest corporate profits since 1950 are debunking inflation stories spun by CEOs. US corporations enjoyed the widest profit margins in more than 70 years during the second and third quarters of 2021. US corporate profits before adjustments rose to a record high of $3.14 trillion in the third quarter of 2021. From Bloomberg:

“On earnings calls, plenty of executives complained about the squeeze from rising costs of labor as well as materials. But overall, profits were up 37% from a year earlier, according to data out last week from the Commerce Department.”

Nearly two thirds of publicly traded US corporations have reported higher profit margins this year compared to 2020. One hundred of the largest have booked profit margins at least 50% higher than last year’s levels.

Bloomberg reports that businesses have been paying more to their employees too, with total compensation up 12% in the last quarter vs. a year earlier. It’s not that every worker got a raise. A significant part of the increase was due to millions of Americans simply returning to work. But many got raises too. To date, hourly earnings broadly kept up with the fast-rising cost of living. And in some low-pay industries like leisure and hospitality they’ve outpaced it, although not by enough for those firms to get fully staffed.

The new data on corporate earnings suggest businesses are comfortably passing on their higher costs. In recent months, a number of US companies including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Chipotle, and Dollar Tree have announced price hikes, claiming that the increases were necessary because of higher wages and material costs.

But the Bloomberg data say that these corporate kings are using price hikes to pass their sky-high CEO pay and marginal increases in material and labor costs to consumers, in order to keep padding their already historically strong profit margins.

Still, politicians are calling for Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s head. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) wrote in the WSJ that Powell doesn’t deserve another term because he caused inflation. Powell’s policies have contributed to US inflation, but there’s zero evidence that US inflation is a problem today.

For months, corporate executives and right-wing politicians have been parroting the claim that inflation in the US is due to Biden’s social spending policies. But the new data show that inflation is going up largely because corporations are driving it.

Remember, corporate profits are up by 37% while inflation amounted to about 6.2% in the same period. In other words, as the economy reopened and prices for goods went up, and corporations used the situation to raise prices a lot.

In fact, the FTC just announced it voted 4-0 to investigate the relationship between competition and supply chain problems. The FTC sent letters to nine dominant firms in supply, retail, and wholesale, mandating they respond within 45 days to a host of questions, as well as give internal documents on various topics.

This matters. Inflation and shortages aren’t neutral forces. The twin problems seem to be *helping* big business improve their profit margins. It’s important to ask why they are happening and who has an incentive to keep them going.

Even Morgan Stanley is now asking corporations to hit the brakes on accumulating profits. Their research division released a report highlighting the gap between corporate profits and worker wages. From the report:

“Real wages…still have to grow by 7.3% in excess of productivity growth to make up the gap….If this catch-up takes place over the next 5 years, unit profits will fall 33% from current levels…This would move the corporate profit share back to its 1990s average on a pre-tax basis and leave it just marginally above on a post-tax basis.”

Imagine. An investment bank telling corporations that they really should be making less profit. Things must be really going to get much worse than we think.

Let’s launch into our weekend, starting with a Saturday Soother. Try to forget about whether a government shutdown will hurt you or Biden, or whether the Supreme Court is now filled with ideological hacks.

Instead, grab a seat by a window and listen to “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” by Claude Debussy. The Art Nouveau period was obsessed with women’s hair. Debussy was immersed in that world. It’s played here by the LA-based, Sakura cello quintet. Wrongo is a sucker for cello, and there are five of them! This was originally written for piano, and is transposed here for cello:

The Continuing, Slow-Rolling Coup

The Daily Escape:

Stormwatchers II by Jamie Perry

There is a storm brewing. You can see it’s coming. It’s the danger our democracy faces from the Americans who would overturn our elections. After the Arizona recount found statistically zero difference with the officially certified 2020 vote, you would think that we could move past the Big Lie, and settle into no drama, mid-term elections in 2022, but that won’t be happening.

Several Republican-led states are conducting or threatening to conduct recounts in Democrat-leaning counties. They are still pushing both to undermine the 2020 presidential election results and change the way our future elections are run.

That effort to undermine elections has been fully embraced by the GOP and is gathering momentum at the state and county levels. Robert Kagan wrote in the WaPo on the dangers we face heading into the next few election cycles:

“Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.”

Read his whole article.

So, the failed Arizona recount hasn’t even been a speed bump for Republicans. MSNBC reported that Virginia Republican congressional candidate Jarome Bell went even further, tweeting:

“Audit all 50 states. Arrest all involved. Try all involved. Convict all involved. Execute all involved. #MaricopaCountyFraud.”

Really? Sounds harsh, but hey, that’s today’s Republican Party. Their only move is to threaten everyone with violence until we all shut up. Wrongo reminds us:

“…Reuters interviewed nine of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states ̶ Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada….Only two of the nine candidates said that Biden won the election.”

Trump-lovers love conspiracies. They don’t trust the government. They don’t trust our election process. They don’t trust vaccine science. They believe Democrats are teaming up with Antifa to destroy all that Republicans hold dear. Their conspiracies always involve people who intend to harm them. That’s one big reason why they are continually arming themselves.

Kagan started his article with this sobering viewpoint:

“The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”

The Big Lie is morphing into an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Kagan says the stage is set for chaos: Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to seize power.

Imagine if they’re armed.

The Eastman Memo, written by a conservative law professor, advised the Trump campaign in 2020 that Mike Pence could unilaterally overturn the election. Plan in hand, Trump urged Pence to reject the votes of the Electoral College, with the mob outside as the stick to compel Pence’s obedience. Pence tried to find a way to do Trump’s bidding, but in the end, he blinked.

Still, on Jan. 6, Trump had both a plan and a large violent crowd. That was a coup attempt, and he came very close to pulling it off. All that prevented it was a handful of state officials who showed courage and integrity, and the reluctance of a vice president to obey orders he believed were wrong.

It has always been theoretically possible to manipulate the voting rules to seize power. 2020 taught us that it’s now a real option, that with the right pieces in place, a coup can succeed. Trump is the first sitting president in American history to attempt to overturn a certified presidential election. Now, his Party has adopted his lies and are attempting to install on state and local levels, lackeys who support rigging election results.

The coup didn’t die, it rolls on, and the people who plotted it are still welcome inside “Beltway” society. Aside from the 600+ insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol, no one involved in planning and carrying out the coup has faced any legal consequences. They are still collecting their government pensions, their speaking fees, and their corporate consultancies. Some still appear on the Sunday pundit shows.

They launched what is tantamount to a civil war on our democracy, and that’s why Democrats should be focused on passing the Manchin-approved version of the voting rights bill as soon as possible. And by any means necessary.

After losing the White House and the Senate, Republicans are willing to rig voting in their favor. Protecting the integrity of America’s electoral system and the voting rights of its citizens should be priority #1, not because it helps Democrats, but because it will preserve our democracy.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 12, 2021

When Wrongo was a kid living in CT, he got a 3-speed English bike, a Humber. One day while riding on the road in front of our house, a truck forced me onto the road’s sandy shoulder. The sand immediately grabbed the bike’s front wheel, stopping it dead in its tracks. Wrongo went headfirst over the handlebars and got up with a displaced fracture of his left wrist.

While Wrongo saw the accident coming, he couldn’t do anything to avoid the sand.

On the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, is America being pushed onto the sandy shoulder of our road? We can still avoid a crash, but we’re facing quite a few threats that might push us off the road and into the gutter:

Losing our social cohesion
Continuing income inequality
Continuing racism
Increasing threats to the right to vote

Twenty years on, America is more at war with itself than with foreign terrorists. Our society and our democracy are threatened from within in a way that Osama bin Laden could never have managed.

Think about the Delta variant. One Party thinks that people should be free to acquire and transmit to others a deadly and extremely communicable virus. They also think it’s morally wrong for the government to engage in even the mildest coercion to push people to get vaccinated, because that coercion interferes with an individual’s liberty.

They think personal liberty is the highest social value in all circumstances except abortion. On to cartoons.

Our continuing learning disability: