Social Cohesion – Page 19 – The Wrongologist

Saturday Soother – Super Bowl Edition, February 12, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Owens River, east of Big Pine, CA – 2022 photo by Brian Joliffe

Tomorrow brings the Super Bowl, an American cultural icon that transcends football. Even people who don’t watch football watch the Super Bowl. Advertising executives know that it is the one time each year when most Americans are tuned into one show at the same time, across most forms of media.

It’s watched by roughly 100 million viewers. Given the fragmentation of our media, it’s a huge number of eyeballs to find in one place. That’s why Super Bowl commercials cost so much. NBC, broadcaster of this year’s game, sold out all of its Super Bowl ad space for $7 million per 30 second spot.

And though it may only last for a short time, this is the first time in 22 years that the Super Bowl will be played when the country is not officially at war.

On Sunday, the Super Bowl halftime show will be a celebration of hip hop, featuring Los Angeles rap heroes Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Kendrick Lamar. That places hip hop firmly at the center of the Super Bowl for the first time. The show will also star Eminem and Mary J. Blige.

Depending on who you ask, that’s either one of the greatest classic hip-hop lineups ever assembled, or way too much lineup for a show that only lasts for about 13 minutes, less than 3 minutes per artist.

This isn’t the first time the Super Bowl has included rap music. But it’s had a rocky path to headliner status. Headlining this year’s event comes at a time when the NFL is again confronting issues regarding its tin ear about race.

Since 2016, when the quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police killings of Black people, the league has faced questions about its commitment to diversity and social justice. Brian Flores, a Black NFL head coach who was fired last month, sued the league, claiming he and others had been discriminated against during various teams’ hiring processes.

This year, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are taking the NFL in a different direction, and that may be the idea. The NYT quotes Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who headlined the show in 2011:

“At one point, Dre was in a group that was banned by popular culture,”

Will.i.am is referring to Dr. Dre’s gangster rap group NWA, widely considered in the late 1980s to be one of the greatest and most influential groups in the history of hip hop music. Their music had explicit lyrics, and many viewed NWA as misogynistic. They also glorified drugs and crime.

Their work was banned from many mainstream American radio stations. In spite of this, the group has sold over 10 million albums in the US. Wrongo’s favorite NWA cut is “Fuck Tha Police” from their 1988 album “Straight Outta Compton”. You should take a listen, but don’t hate on Wrongo if you despise it.

That the NFL has now turned to these formerly controversial figures, makes it seem as if we’ve moved far from White America’s pearl-clutching days of Janet Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction. Or from M.I.A.’s middle finger in 2012, or Beyoncé’s nod to the Black Panthers in 2016.

Or maybe we haven’t moved on. But right now, the league needs to embrace Black music and culture to help shore up its badly damaged community bona fides.

And there’s the open secret: The NFL, a fabulously wealthy sports league whose least valuable team is worth more than $2 billion, doesn’t pay its Super Bowl performers. They consider their halftime show to be music’s ultimate for-exposure gig. But how much is that exposure worth when multiple performers are competing for just 13 minutes of attention?

On to our Saturday Soother. Weather is positively spring-like in Connecticut, so Wrongo will venture outside for some way-too-early spring cleanup. After that we have a family party followed by making turkey chili and queso con chorizo for Sunday’s extravaganza.

It’s time for you to forget about Trump’s missing call logs from Jan. 6, and grab a seat by a window. Now, plug in your Bluetooth headphones and listen to John Williams, who turned 90 this week. Here’s his “Cowboys Overture” from the 1972 film, “The Cowboys” starring John Wayne.

It’s played live in 2020 by the Film Symphony Orchestra, Spain’s first orchestra specializing in cinematic music:

While you listen, to this mythical view of the west, do you hear echoes of Aaron Copeland?

Are Freedom and Democracy Still Compatible in America?

The Daily Escape:

Henniker Covered Bridge, Henniker, NH – February 2022 photo by Jurgen Roth Photography. It is a footbridge across the Contoocook River.

Trucker anger is coming to America. From Politico:

“Canada’s truckers have paralyzed Ottawa and unsettled the country’s politics over vaccine and mask mandates. Now Americans want in on the action. A nationwide convoy — starting in California before heading toward Washington, D.C. — is expected to get underway on March 4 amid a growing clamor from those who believe their freedoms are under threat from government Covid-19 restrictions.”

The trucker protests in Canada seem to have become a rallying point for those who are irate about what they view as Covid-inspired overreach by their governments. Momentum seems to be building for a similar convoy in the US. The NYT reports that:

“…several right-wing figures, including Dan Bongino, Michael Flynn and Ben Shapiro, have promoted the protest and shared links to fund-raising sites that have collected millions of dollars. American anti-vaccine groups have also begun forming local wings of the movement and have urged truckers in the United States to adopt the tactics in Canada.”

The US organizers are now calling it “the People’s Convoy“. They have formed Telegram encrypted channels to use for building support in multiple states. The group says it’s working with two other groups: Freedom Fighter Nation and Restore Liberty, whose founders are closely tied to right wing politics. They include Leigh Dundas, founder of the Freedom Fighter Nation. She gave a speech in DC on the eve of the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill insurrection, claiming it would be “within our rights” to murder “alleged American turncoats” who interfered with the 2020 election.

She seems nice.

Trucker protest convoys have become a rallying cry for far-right and anti-vaccine groups around the world. They seem to be gathering strength from growing Covid fatigue, something that is nearly universal in the developed world.

Their message is that “government has been overreaching for too long, and we’re not going to take it anymore”. They’re expressing an old, bad idea: That individual freedom cannot be limited by government.

Let’s spend a minute on whether freedom and democracy are compatible. “Freedom” normally means freedom of the individual while democracy is a communitarian concept. Democracy is a system of government while freedom is about either not being governed or being governed as lightly as possible.

But a society without democracy would be autocracy or worse. With no government, it would be anarchy. And a society without freedom couldn’t possibly be a democracy. So maybe the question isn’t whether they are compatible, but whether each is a co-requisite for the other to exist.

Elizabeth Anker in the NYT opined on the changing nature of the language of freedom, saying that many political actors are using the concept of freedom to justify anti-democratic politics. She calls them the “ugly freedoms”. In American politics they increasingly justify minority rule, prejudice, and anti-democratic governance. And their popularity is growing.

This is highly relevant to the impending trucker convoys and how we think about “free speech” and the rights of non-experts to try and force their opinions on the majority. Perhaps the alternative to the ugly freedoms should be our beautiful freedoms, like the Bill of Rights, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

A third of Americans make up their own facts, so we’re bound to hear a few lies expresed as truth. These same people believe they don’t have to consider what’s happening in their communities. They think opinions are equal to facts. They get angry enough to threaten violence or to commit violence.

Many of them, despite outward tough guy appearances, are simply too soft mentally and emotionally. Life can often be harder than we want it to be. Sometimes, you’ve got to do what’s good for society, not just what’s good for you.

OTOH, these trucker rallies could conceivably draw support from others who are angry at governments at all levels. Think about restaurant workers, first responders and all of the “essential’ employees who have been unevenly impacted by Covid.

Think of it as the laptop workers vs. those who have to leave the house to earn a living. They each have experienced Covid and the jobs crash in far different ways. If the trucker protest casts a wide net, it will rope in small business owners and parents who are angry that their children have lost so much when schools were closed.

There’s plenty of anger fermenting out there.

Going back to Wrongo’s US Army days, you weren’t required to like everyone in your platoon, but duty demanded you bear the responsibility of fighting beside and for them. That was considered patriotic. Once we had the ability to pull together and sacrifice in the midst of national crisis. Now it’s everyone for themselves.

On Jan. 6, the right of free speech produced lies that led people to commit federal crimes. That’s the downside of the Bill of Rights: An individual has a protected right to lie to the public. We see many career politicians and social media entrepreneurs lie every day.

Assuming that there are protests in the US in coming weeks, Biden will face the same dilemma as Canada’s Prime Minster Trudeau faces now. Will Biden demonize the truckers? Will he listen to their grievances?

The shift of emphasis in America from an expanding democracy with protected individual rights/freedoms to an ad hoc (and sometimes illogical) version of freedom is what may create a failed American state.

It’s a movement that’s long on energy, and short on facts and judgment.

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.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 6, 2022

According to Worldometer data, the US Covid death toll is now at 924,000. Last year, on June 1, 2021 the US death toll was 615,000. That’s the minimum number of deaths we could have suffered prior to the widespread availability of Covid vaccines in the US.

That 600,000± pre-vaccine death toll is comparable to the deaths that occurred in the Civil War. We’ve studied the Civil War for generations, although it’s doubtful that the Republican Right wants America to study all that much about Covid. On to cartoons.

As someone (?) once said, it takes a village, and we don’t have one:

The Olympics are on TV. Should we watch? Views differ:

Supreme Court nominations of women through time:

Biden’s alternate nominating strategy:

Trump doesn’t care who knows:

Putin and Biden ridin’ around the Ukraine speedway:

The NYT said on Saturday that portions of the Russian army near Ukraine have reached full combat strength. No one knows what will happen next, but there seem to be two likely outcomes. First, that any conflict is limited to Ukraine territory or second, that it moves beyond Ukraine to other parts of Europe.

If it goes beyond Ukraine’s borders, we could quickly find ourselves again on the threshold of nuclear war, since that’s a red line for NATO. But Russia also has other cards to play. They could launch massive cyber-attacks on the US, attacking and disabling our power grids, communications systems, and/or our financial system.

We would try to do the same inside Russia.

Wrongo isn’t trying to spread fear. He’s expressing the hope that we can get past all of the hollow political posturing and take a cold, hard look at what we’re truly trying to achieve if we decide on military intervention on behalf of Ukraine.

In a sense, the world changed on Friday when China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin met in Beijing. Their joint statement is unequivocal. China & Russia are now explicitly willing to at least challenge or possibly replace, Pax Americana, in Eurasia.

Borrowing from ancient history, in 560 BC, King Croesus was considering war on Persia. He consulted the Oracle at Delphi. Famously, the Oracle’s forecast was “If you make war on the Persians, you will destroy a great empire”. Let’s hope that Biden is receiving less ambiguous advice.

Saturday Soother – February 5, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Paradise Springs, South Kettle Moraine, Eagle, WI – January 2022 photo by Nick Schroeter. The spring water is warm enough that it doesn’t freeze in winter

This week two years ago, Covid began to enter America’s consciousness. It was February 3, 2020 when Trump declared a public health emergency because of the virus. Now, Republicans are again saying “let ‘er rip”. Mother Jones reported that Iowa is taking “done with Covid” to a whole new level. On Thursday, Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced a plan to end the state’s Covid disaster declaration and to shut down its case count and vaccination websites later this month.

From the Des Moines Register:

“We cannot continue to suspend duly enacted laws and treat COVID-19 as a public health emergency indefinitely,” Reynolds said in a statement. “After two years, it’s no longer feasible or necessary. The flu and other infectious illnesses are part of our everyday lives, and coronavirus can be managed similarly.”

In a state with less than two-thirds of the population over 5 years old fully vaccinated, Wrongo asks what kind of governor and legislature shuts down a website aimed at making it easier for people to get their shots? If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that it is in the people’s best interest to make it as easy as possible to vaccinate as many people as possible.

The Register adds:

“Her move comes as Iowa’s spike in cases and hospitalizations from the omicron variant has begun to ease. Still, 794 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Iowa as of Wednesday, while 109 patients required intensive care and 51 required ventilators.”

BTW, 70.6% of the patients in Iowa ICUs were not vaccinated. Having contemporaneous data allows us to see that Iowa recorded more than 150 additional COVID-19 deaths in its weekly update last Friday. In the same report, Iowa’s health department recorded just three additional flu deaths in its weekly flu report Jan. 28, bringing the total since last fall to just 13.

The data do not seem to make a case to treat Covid and the flu the same way.

The governor’s decision to end the emergency declaration may be more sensible. Many states have already discontinued theirs. And as Omicron case counts plummet, maybe there’s a chance to reallocate resources to other state priorities.

Today you can check Iowa’s status on its readable and useful Covid dashboard. That dashboard will now be going away.

Soon, the state health department’s website will not include regular reports on Covid hospitalizations or nursing home outbreaks. Kelly Garcia, interim director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, said Iowa will no longer require hospitals and nursing homes to report the data to the state, since they already report it to the federal government. Iowans wanting updates on those numbers will be referred to federal websites.

Lina Tucker Reinders, executive director of the Iowa Public Health Association, said in an interview that the move was premature, and could give Iowans the false impression the pandemic is over.

Iowa’s own statistics show that isn’t the case.

It’s become an article of faith inside the Republican cult that Covid is No Big Deal, and that vaccinations are either unnecessary or some sort of plot. And that masks are also unnecessary, because Covid is just like the flu.

Across the country, these same Republicans are seeing the elderly in their families, neighborhoods and churches die of Covid while a free and effective vaccine is available. But they don’t care enough to make getting themselves vaccinated a priority.

If they don’t care about their elders, why would they care about nurses, or teachers? That would require disrupting their entire worldview.

No scientist says that the virus is finished mutating. So will treating it like the flu be good enough? If it isn’t, Gov. Reynolds certainly won’t give a shit.

Time to let go for a few minutes and relocate to a chair by a window for our Saturday Soother.

It will be another winter weekend of indoor sports in New England, with binge streaming of favorite shows on tap, along with chiseling ice on the walkways around the Mansion of Wrong.

Let’s start into the weekend by brewing up a large mug of Chutzpah Coffee ($13.99/ 12oz.) brought to us by Hebrew Coffee. Their tag line is “A strong coffee to get you off your tuches”. Now settle into your chair and watch “Pow Surf 101”, a long snowboard ride through deep powder, while listening to Claude Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”, written in 1890 when Debussy was 28. The snowboarding takes place in Steamboat Springs, CO. Consider this Wrongo’s nod to the Winter Olympics:

Reform the Supreme Court

The Daily Escape:

Valley of Fire SP, NV – January 2022 photo by Robert E. Ford

Glad to see January go, with it being the anniversary of the Jan. 6 coup attempt and all that came after it. What isn’t going away is the slow and continuing fracture of America’s social cohesion. We also remember that it was FIVE years ago that Trump was inaugurated. That was a sorry time, since it made it clear that he would get to appoint several Supreme Court justices.

The partisan rancor brought to Supreme Court appointments has become another fault line in our social cohesion. That’s due in part to changes in Supreme Court.

One recent trend in these appointments is how much younger appointees are: The typical tenure for Supreme Court justices in the 19th and early 20th centuries was around 15 years. But as the lifespan of American adults has lengthened over the past century, so has tenure on the Court. Since 1975, the average justice has retired from the court after serving 27 years. Breyer, who was sworn in on Aug. 3, 1994, matches the average perfectly. Soon it will be longer than 30 years.

Another issue is the hubris of elderly Justices. Justices Brennan and Marshall, both about 70 years old at the time, decided not to retire when Jimmy Carter was president, thinking he wasn’t liberal enough to appoint their replacements. They decided to wait for a more left-leaning Democratic president that they presumed would come next.

Liberals got lucky when Brennan retired in 1990,and David Souter replaced him. They weren’t as lucky when Marshall was replaced by Clarence Thomas in 1992. Thomas, the first GOP Justice was selected explicitly for his race and youth (he was 43) and still sits on the Court today, 30 years later.

The same scenario played out less than two years ago with Justice Ginsburg. She refused to retire during Obama’s presidency (after a direct appeal from Obama in 2013) when he correctly feared losing the Senate in 2014. She died in 2020 and was immediately replaced by the 48-year-old Conservative Justice Barrett.

Another trend is Judicial Supremacy. Once Justices realized that their power was almost completely unchecked under the Constitution, it wasn’t a big leap to find them ruling according to personal preference.

The Framers never foresaw how formidable the judiciary would become. Once the Supreme Court successfully claimed the right of judicial review — the power to strike down laws it deemed unconstitutional — it went from being the weakest branch to the strongest. Today, virtually every important political controversy eventually comes before the Court.

The public’s opinion about the Court has never been lower. A Gallup poll last September (just before the Texas abortion cases) found that just 40% of Americans say they approved of the Court’s job. This represents a new low in Gallup’s polling, which dates back to 2000.

The chart below shows the results of a new ABC News / Ipsos Poll asking if the Supreme Court’s rulings are partisan:

(Hat tip: Jobsanger) The poll was conducted January 28-29, 2022 and has a ± 4.9% point margin of error.

It’s clear that a plurality of Americans no longer trust the Court with their lives, or with the direction of the country. That’s what makes selecting a Supreme Court nominee such a high-stakes game.

If Supreme Court vacancies were more frequent and regular, confirmation battles would be much less likely to turn into political Armageddon every time. We should be asking whether life tenure for Supreme Court justices still is legitimate, regardless of which Party controls Congress or the White House.

The Framers of the Constitution feared that the judiciary would be the weakest of the federal government’s branches and the most susceptible to political pressure. They therefore sought to bolster the Court’s independence by ensuring justices could stay on the bench for as long as they wished.

But the only alternative to a bad Court decision today is for 2/3rds of both Houses of Congress followed by 3/4ths of all States to change it by Constitutional Amendment. A nearly impossible and time-consuming process.

Instead, we should enact term limits for the Supremes. With nine Justices, one Justice’s position should expire every two years (essentially giving each an 18 year term). After serving on the Court they could fulfill their lifetime appointment by continuing to serve as “Justices Emeritus” on one of the regional Courts of Appeal.

This isn’t a partisan idea. Many Republicans endorse term limits. Among those who have endorsed it is Justice Stephen Breyer. Numerous polls in recent years show widespread support across Party lines for limiting Supreme Court justices’ terms. Everyone can tell that life tenure on the Supreme Court isn’t working. It’s time we replaced it with something better. America’s social cohesion depends on it.

Speaking of social cohesion, spend a few minutes watching this affecting commercial for Heineken. It celebrates communication, listening, and getting to know others who have different viewpoints:

Saturday Soother – Biden’s First Year, January 22, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Winter sunrise, Monument Valley, Four Corners – January 2022 photo by Lothar Gold

Wrongo is rooting for Biden and for the Democrats to grab victory from the jaws of defeat in the November 2022 mid-terms. He also has a few thoughts about Biden’s first year as president. Dickens said it best in The Tale of Two Cities in 1859:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…”

This seems to apply today. The best is how the economy is performing. GDP is up while unemployment is down dramatically. Six million new jobs have been created. Wrongo repeats what he said earlier this week:

“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…the median household’s checking account balance was 50% higher in July 2021 than before the pandemic.”

On Biden’s watch, we’ve given 532 million doses of Covid vaccine to Americans.

The worst of times includes too little progress in four areas: First, our inability to put the Coronavirus pandemic behind us. Second, our inability to do anything about the looming threats to our elections that partisan vote-counting in many Republican-controlled states implies. Third, the continuing fracturing of our social cohesion, and fourth, our inability to face up to the climate crisis.

These are not solely Biden’s failures. These failures are shared by Republicans, along with the rest of the Democratic Party leadership who seem to have forgotten what the job of being a politician is. If you doubt that, consider what Paul Begala said on MSNBC:

“…the problem for the Democrats…is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers”,

Begala is Dem royalty from an earlier time, even if he’s no longer powerful today. Doesn’t this show that the rot is throughout their leadership? Matt Taibbi wrote: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Democrats are now in their second straight year of losing significant ground with all minority groups. There are major defections among Asian and Hispanic voters, and even Trump’s six-point gain among black men last year is beginning to look like a thing (Biden’s approval rating with black voters has dropped from 78% to 57%).”

So, does all that add up to the age of foolishness or the season of darkness? Opinions differ. More from Taibbi, who says given America’s demographics, Dems had a glidepath to a permanent majority:

“If Democrats had just figured a way to deliver a few things for ordinary people over the years, they would never have lost again….if that were its real goal, the formula was obvious. Single-payer health care, bulk negotiation of drug prices, antitrust action against Too Big To Fail banks or Silicon Valley’s surveillance monopolists — really anything that demonstrates a willingness to prioritize voters over the takeover artists and CEOs who fund the party would have given them enduring credibility.”

With nine months until the 2022 mid-terms, what can ol’ Joe and the even older Democratic Party leadership do to turn things around? The truth is that they’re most likely incapable of turning the tanker that is the Democratic Party onto a new, true course that will return them to majorities in the House and Senate.

Wrongo has covered what they should do. He has little optimism that they are up to the task.

Time to pivot to our Saturday Soother, where we let go of questions like “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” or “Will Ivanka testify?” and focus on a weekend of professional football playoffs or the Australian Tennis Open. Here, we’re gonna watch the TV return of “Billions”. We’re also taking down the last of our Christmas decorations and hoping for the return to normalcy that Biden promised us a year ago.

Time to grab a seat by the window and listen to Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere mei, Deus” (Have mercy on me, O God), performed in 2018 by the Tenebrae Choir conducted by Nigel Short at St. Bartholomew the Great Church, London. We all need a little mercy now, and this is beautiful:

This was composed in the 1630s for use on Holy Wednesday and Good Friday of Holy Week. Pope Urban VIII loved the piece and forbade its performance anywhere outside of the Sistine Chapel.

For over 100 years, ‘Miserere mei, Deus” was performed exclusively there. In 1770, Mozart who was 14, heard it, and transcribed it from memory. The following year, Mozart gave the sheet music to historian and biographer, Dr. Charles Burney. Burney published it in London, which resulted in the papacy lifting the ban.

Democrats Must Go on Offense

The Daily Escape:

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:

Monday Wake Up Call – Remembering MLK, Jr.

The Daily Escape:

After an ice storm, Taos NM – January 2022 photo by Bob Benson

“Freedom without consequences is a myth. Our actions always have consequences. The question is: who will bear them?” – Seth Godin

The year 1968 was pivotal. In addition to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., it brought the Tet Offensive, student protests across the country, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the student and police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, Black Power salutes at the Olympics, and the triumph of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy.

MLK, along with others in our churches and a few courageous politicians, came together to support the Big Idea that Separate was not Equal. MLK gave a voice to that Big Idea. His presence, power and persuasiveness drove our political process to an outcome in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that was completely unthinkable in 1954 when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court.

Wrongo participated in the Civil Rights movement from 1958 to 1962. He left active participation in the movement believing good ideas and a morally sound position would change our politics. He was wrong.

Legislation has recently passed in eight states that will restrict what students can be taught about our past. This is an effort to segregate certain subjects from our common history. These Republican states want to diminish or exclude the stories that speak to slavery, to Jim Crow, and to other moments in which America’s deepest shortcomings around the subject of race in America are told.

Wrongo wishes that this represented a minority of the Republican Party. But when Biden spoke in Atlanta, he said:

“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Dr. King had said that stripping the right to vote from Black southerners laid the groundwork for laws that further disadvantaged poor people, even across racial lines. Then as now, Southern legislatures justified limiting the franchise to vote with specious claims about electoral shenanigans.

Biden’s words set Republican teeth on edge. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that Biden:

“…called millions of Americans his domestic enemies…and that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace….If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well you’re Jefferson Davis.”

Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer tweeted:

“Now he says disagreeing w/him on voting laws means you’re a segregationist, like George Wallace or Bull Connor. How low can he go?”

The linkage between trying not to teach America’s true history with the censorious outrage shown by Republicans over Biden’s comments is clear. Biden said America needed to be on the side of voting rights.

That was Dr. King’s great struggle, and his great success.

But Republicans want to whitewash that history. They also condemn Biden’s efforts to tie today back to our undemocratic past. As Jelani Cobb says this week in the New Yorker:

“This holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., sees a nation embroiled in conflicts that would have looked numbingly familiar to him. As school curricula and online discourse threaten to narrow our understanding of both past and future, it’s more important than ever to take stock of our history and its consequences….

Time to wake up America! We are docile sheep heading back to the barn, the place where we will be shorn of our democracy, just as surely as wool is shorn from the sheep. The smoking guns are all around us, and yet, we seem hopelessly divided about what we should do to change course.

To help you wake up, let’s listen to Wrongo’s favorite MLK song, “Southern” by OMD from their 1986 album “The Pacific Age“. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his last speech, which we remember as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. OMD samples some of the content of that speech in “Southern”:

Although everyone knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” part of the speech, Wrongo thinks our focus should be on the following:

I want young men and young women, who are not alive today
But who will come into this world, with new privileges
And new opportunities
I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities
Did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing
For freedom is never given to anybody

Why focus on that part of the speech? One day down the road, and it will not be long, young people will have forgotten what MLK meant to America, or how whatever remains of their civil rights, came to be.

Or, how the 13th Amendment ending slavery came about, and why, 100 years later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, or how 48 years later, in June, 2013, the Roberts Court eviscerated it.

So, take the time to teach a child about why MLK is so important.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 16, 2022

A new Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted between January 7 – 10 of a nationwide sample of 1,313 adults shows that Americans are confused about which Party is protecting voting rights:

(hat tip: Jobsanger)

This is another example of poor messaging by Democrats. Republicans have been trying to suppress voting in many states, and the Republicans in Congress have prevented Democrats from passing legislation to protect the right to vote for all citizens. But only 45% say Democrats are protecting the right to vote and 43% say it’s the Republicans. That’s within the poll’s margin of error of 2.7%, meaning it’s a virtual tie.

There are only three cohorts with more than 50% saying that one Party is better. Women (52%) and Blacks (86%) say it’s the Democrats, while Whites (51%) say it’s the Republicans. It’s also interesting that 12% apparently have no opinion about which Party is better for voting rights. Whatever the reason why this poll is so close, it isn’t good for the country. On to cartoons.

Let’s vote our way out:

More GOP inflation:

Sen. Sinema is just not that into him

Are Sen. Manchin’s priorities misplaced?

Supremes reject federal government’s right to set rules for public safety:

(The mandate would have covered about 84.2 million Americans. OSHA estimated (before Omicron) that the rule would save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations over a six-month period.)

Supremes can’t rule on Djokovic:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Social Cohesion