Voter Turnout – Page 27 – The Wrongologist

Monday Wake Up Call, Abortion Editon – July 18, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Barn with cotton candy clouds, Allegre, KY – July 2022 photo by Fuller Perspective Photography

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe has opened a Pandora’s Box of ethical and legal issues. The infamous story about the pregnant 10 year-old Ohio rape victim who was forced to travel to Indiana to receive an abortion is the best example. It was reported in the Indianapolis Star on July 1.

After the Dobbs decision, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) had issued an executive order putting in force a 2019 law that had banned nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The 10-year-old was reportedly six weeks and three days pregnant.

Then we saw a Right-wing smear campaign:

A WSJ editorial called the Indianapolis Star’s report a “fanciful tale“, and claimed that there is “no evidence the girl exists.”
Tucker Carlson said that the story of the 10-year-old girl who had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion was “not true.”
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in an interview with USA Today, that the story was likely a “fabrication.”
The New York Post, which, like Fox News and the WSJ, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an opinion piece by law professor Jonathan Turley under the headline “Activist tale of 10-year-old rape victim’s abortion looks like a lie.”

All of those shouts and murmurs soon disappeared when a 27-year-old man from Columbus, Ohio, Gershon Fuentes, was arrested and charged with impregnating the 10-year-old Ohio girl. Apparently, Fuentes “confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions.”

Subsequently, the WSJ recanted and published a different editorial correcting the record. Why would they accuse the Star of fabricating a story? From Judd Legum: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“There is a reason why so many people, particularly on the right, were eager to push the idea that Bernard’s story was a lie. If they acknowledged the story was true they would have to answer this question: Do you believe that a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to give birth?”

By the way, Covid appears to have increased early-onset puberty around the world. Getting your period “early” now means when you’re younger than 8. People who think a pregnant 10-year-old strains credulity should bear this in mind.

The Nieman Lab, a Harvard-based group focused on journalism on the Internet, took the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler, author of their “Fact Checker” column to task for not checking his facts about the Star’s reporting. One of Kessler’s so-called “facts” was: (brackets by Wrongo)

“An abortion by a 10-year-old is pretty rare,” Kessler notes…..[but] The Columbus Dispatch reported that in 2020, 52 people under the age of 15 received an abortion in Ohio.”

Your mileage may vary, but if one under-15-year-old gets an abortion every week in Ohio, it can’t be thought of as “pretty rare”. The press needs to wise up and get the data before diving headfirst to a conclusion.

There are other ways the Dobbs decision will impact lives. Unsure doctors in Texas are already turning away ectopic pregnancies, fearing legal liability. According to The Lily (a WaPo newsletter):

“…a South Texas woman diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy was refused an abortion by her doctor…..she was advised to seek help out of state.”

Under the unclear Texas law, a doctor who removes an ectopic pregnancy that is not actively causing the patient to bleed to death may face legal consequences.

It doesn’t end there. The laws surrounding in vitro fertilization (IVF) could also be facing threats of lawsuits even though these women aren’t seeking abortions. Slate reports:

“Fertilizing eggs in a Petri dish often results in extra embryos, which are usually frozen….Leftover embryos are frequently discarded or donated to research….In some abortion-restrictive states, this may no longer be possible. Louisiana defines “a viable in vitro fertilized human ovum” as a “juridical person which shall not be intentionally destroyed,” and at least five states have introduced bills establishing fetal personhood.”

States probably won’t ban IVF outright, but as some countries have done, they may limit the number of embryos that can be created in an effort to prevent embryo destruction. All of this would make IVF far more difficult and expensive than it is, and it could possibly reduce the number of IVF clinics in those states.

This is the tip of the iceberg of the issues women will have post-Dobbs. Technology will always be ahead of our laws and ethics. Just as will some men’s (and religions’) need to control women.

Time to wake up America! Elect a filibuster-proof Senate this fall. To help you wake up listen to Willie Nile, perform his ode to Covid, “The Day the Earth Stood Still”:

Sample lyric (that could be about the end of Roe instead of Covid)

So if you feel some heartache
And if you feel some pain
And if you see some lonely soul
Standing in the pouring rain
Offer up some kindness
Compassion if you will
And remember well the way it was
The day the earth stood still

Monday Wake Up Call – July 11, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Penstemon and Paintbrush, with Mt. St. Helens in background – June 2022 photo by Edwin Buske Photography

There are two big economic issues that the media and pundits say will influence the 2022 mid-terms: inflation, and the possibility of a recession.

Let’s start with the scare of a looming recession. Most Americans have been told that a recession occurs when real GDP contracts for two consecutive quarters. Sounds easy to figure out, but this definition wasn’t met in two out of the last three recessions. Some facts: The 2020 downturn lasted just two months, not two quarters. And during the 2001 recession, real GDP didn’t contract for two quarters in a row either.

The difference is that recessions are determined not by pundits but by a group of economists at the National Bureau of Economics (NBER), and they use several measures beyond GDP to make it official. Here’s how they explain it:

“A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, normally visible in production, employment, and other indicators…”

They go on to say that:

“There is no fixed rule about what measures contribute information to the process or how they are weighted in our decisions.”

In recent decades, the two measures that have had the most weight are real personal income and non-farm payroll employment. So, despite what you’re hearing from pundits about GDP, it basically boils down to income and employment. If income and employment turn south, there’s a good chance economic output will be lower.

But after two quarters of 2022, while output is slowing, income and the labor market are both still solid. The WSJ quotes Robert Gordon a Northwestern University economics professor and member of the NBER’s committee that decides on recessions:

“We are going to have a very unusual conflict between the employment numbers and the output numbers for a while…”

The US economy added 1.6 million jobs in the first quarter, and another 1.1 million jobs in the second quarter. Those numbers certainly don’t look recessionary, despite what the media is trying to tell us. U6, which is a measure of underemployment declined -0.4% to 6.7%. This is a new all-time low for U6, which has been tracked since 1994.

It may seem like splitting hairs to talk about the definition of a recession. But we need to be prepared for the coming political scenario where some argue we’re in a recession while others will refute that idea vigorously.

In this mid-term season, things are going to get weird.

Let’s turn to the scourge of inflation. It is among the first stories on the local news every night, but you might not know that as Paul Krugman says:

“The wholesale price of gasoline has fallen about 80 cents a gallon since its peak a month ago. Only a little of this plunge has been passed on to consumers so far, but over the weeks ahead we’re likely to see a broad decline in prices at the pump….what are the odds that falling gas prices will get even a small fraction of the media coverage devoted to rising prices?”

That seems to point to profit taking by the petroleum corporate interests. Have you noticed how much profit they have made lately? ExxonMobil plans to buy back $30 billion of stock this year with the extra money that we all paid at the pump.

Last Friday, PBS talked about a looming wage-price spiral, a neoliberal concept that says rising wages drive prices. But the annualized rate of wage growth, comparing the last three months (April, May, June) with the prior three months (January, February, March), was 4.3%,down from a previous annualized rate of 6.1%.

This is big since the Fed’s plans for aggressive interest rate hikes is based on its concern about a 1970s-type wage-price spiral. It is impossible to have a wage-price spiral when wage growth is slowing. The current 4.3% wage growth is less than one percent higher than the 3.4% rate in 2019 when inflation was comfortably below the Fed’s 2.0% target.

Retailers are now stuffed to the gills with merchandise. What happened was that all of the product that was stranded at sea has finally reached store shelves. They will hold massive sales this fall to get rid of it, and that will lower prices.

The lockdowns in China are mostly over, last year’s fiscal stimulus has worked its way through the economy, and the Fed has begun sharply raising interest rates.

Krugman feels that as the economy weakens, the prospect for sustained inflation is receding.

Time to wake up America, don’t get demagogued by the scary economic terms that the politicians will throw at you. To help you wake up, let’s listen to Barenaked Ladies – “If I Had a Million Dollars” Live in Michigan in 2007:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 10, 2022

Continue reading Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 10, 2022

Saturday Soother – July 9, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Abandoned homestead, Sanpete County, UT – photo by Jon Hafen Photography

Wrongo hates writing about dysfunction among Democrats, but lately, they seem to be all too willing to assemble the circular firing squad. And they’re doing it at a time, as we said yesterday, that the Dems seem to be getting back in the mid-terms race.

Wrongo heard an NPR reporter asking if Democrats were angry with Biden because he wasn’t doing more after the Dobbs decision. The point was that many Dems seem to think there’s a magical way of reinstating the Constitutional right to abortion when Democrats have at best, barely nominal control of Congress. Here are some media comments:

The WaPo reported that “some Democrats” think Biden “risks a dangerous failure to meet the moment” and quoted a Democratic consultant lamenting Biden’s “leadership vacuum.”
Politico reported that “Democrats have grown increasingly frustrated at what they perceive has been the White House’s lack of urgency” and “Biden’s seeming lack of fire.”
CNN reported: “Top Democrats complain the president isn’t acting with … the urgency the moment demands.” Anonymous Democratic lawmakers called the White House “rudderless,” with “no fight.”

Is it time to remind Democrats that the radical change in the Supreme Court was a self-inflicted wound? It was Democrats who failed to turnout in Obama-strength numbers in 2016 for an admittedly weaker candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Also, by not electing a few more Dems to the Senate in 2020, Democrats gave their majority over to Manchin and Sinema, and by extension, gave Republicans more control than they had earned.

As Dana Milbank said in the WaPo:

“The fratricide is…stoked by the press, which likes a “Dems-in-disarray” story and would love a presidential primary. Democrats are habitually more self-critical than their Republican counterparts…. And there’s genuine frustration that more can’t get done.

But that’s the fault of Joe Manchin, not Joe Biden — and of a broken political system that protects minority rule. What’s depressing Biden’s (and therefore Democrats’) poll numbers isn’t alleged timidity…but inflation and gas prices.”

One issue that is particularly galling to Wrongo is that many Dems want Biden to do more about Britney Griner, a WNBA basketball player who was arrested in Russia on a drug possession charge. She took vape vials containing cannabis to Russia, and was arrested when she tried to leave the country with them. She has now pleaded guilty to the charges.

While Wrongo and all Americans can feel sorry for her plight, her decision-making was terrible. As a Black lesbian American celebrity athlete, she became a perfect target for the Kremlin. Now she’s placed the US government in a difficult position, and many Democrats are pushing on Biden to do something. But his calculation has to be based on geopolitics. Her decisions aren’t Biden’s fault.

Once again, we’re seeing that Democrats are a herd of cats and Republicans are a herd of cattle. Republicans are satisfied to follow the bell cow, while Dems want to change the world to reflect their individual needs on the first day we get in power.

Republicans worked 50 years to achieve what they have today. They never gave up. Democrats always look for a shortcut to power, and then are angry when that door isn’t opened immediately. All we do is complain.

It’s fair for Democrats to ask whether they should re-nominate an 82-year-old man for the 2024 presidential election. But right now, we need to bear down and add to our Senate majority in November.

Holding on to the House isn’t a bad idea either.

Enough politics, it’s time for our Saturday Soother, those few moments stolen from our overly-scheduled lives when we can prepare ourselves for the trouble to come. If you are feeling exhausted by the news and the lack of action on the part of politicians, it’s understandable. But right now, we must recharge our batteries and throw ourselves back into the fray on Monday.

We’re back on the Fields of Wrong from 10 days in the south, including a stop on July 4 at Monticello. The fourth is also the date of Jefferson’s death, in 1826, 50 years after the Declaration of Independence. Here’s a photo of Jefferson’s gardens and his view to the east in Virginia. The white building is the textile workshop:

July 2022 iPhone photo by Wrongo

To help you prepare for what’s coming, listen to Rossini’s Overture to “La Gazza Ladra” (“The Thieving Magpie”). Rossini hadn’t finished the overture to the piece on time, so the day before the premiere, the conductor locked him in a room at the top of La Scala with orders to complete it. He was guarded by four stagehands whose job was to toss each completed page out the window to a copyist below. The opera was first performed in May, 1817. Here, it’s performed in 2012 by the Mannheim Philharmonic, a youth orchestra conducted by Boian Videnoff. You should watch just to see Videnoff’s conducting style:

Wednesday Wake Up Call – June 29, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Asheville morning, June 28, 2022 – iPhone photo by Wrongo. The log house we’re renting this week is at 4,000’ above sea level.

Wake up calls by the Wrongologist rarely happen on Wednesdays, but since the Roberts Court dismantled the line between church and state in public education with Justice Gorsuch’s decision in Kennedy v Bremerton School District, on Monday, it seems right.

Voting 6-3, the Court declared that an Oregon public high school football coach’s post-game prayer sessions with students were Constitutional, whether the students wanted them or not. That made Monday part of a pretty good run for American theocracy:

“The decision came less than a week after the court ruled, by the same vote, that Maine could not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program.”

The line between church and state is being erased before our eyes. Gorsuch, cherry-picking the facts of the case, wrote that football coach Kennedy had sought only to offer a brief, silent and solitary prayer:

“Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse republic — whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head…”

Justice Sotomayor responded that the public nature of his prayers and his stature as a leader and role model meant that students felt forced to participate, whatever their religion and whether they wanted to or not. She gave a different account of the facts, taking account of a longer time period:

“Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student-athletes in prayer…”

In an unusual move, Sotomayor’s dissent included photographs showing Mr. Kennedy kneeling with players, which debunked Gorsuch’s selective use of facts.

Do you really think that this decision would have been the same if those prayers had been offered by a Muslim?

In the process of ruling for Mr. Kennedy, the majority overturned a major precedent on the First Amendment’s establishment clause, Lemon v. Kurtzman. That ruling was decided by an 8-0 vote under Republican Chief Justice Warren Burger. As an aside, John Dean (of Watergate fame) has said that during the Nixon administration, Burger threatened to resign from the Court if Nixon nominated a woman to it.

It came to be known as the Lemon test, which required courts to consider whether the challenged government practice had a secular purpose, whether its primary effect is to advance or inhibit religion, and whether it fosters excessive government entanglement with religion.

Sotomayor acknowledged that while the Lemon test had been frequently criticized by various members of the court:

“The court now goes much further…overruling Lemon entirely and in all contexts.”

So, by tossing out Lemon and saying that Coach Kennedy was not speaking for the school because it was an extra-curricular activity, the barrier between prayer and secular school has been permanently breached.

In today’s America, outside money will fund your culture wars grievance in the courts. The longer you can keep your case moving up through the courts, the better chance you have of running into a conservative Christian judge who will find a precedent for the White people’s Jesus in the Bill of Rights.

Teachers will now feel empowered to “invite” a group to pray with them. A few kids will jump in right away, while others will look around uncomfortably and gradually agree to join in, because the social opprobrium that comes with refusing is huge for kids. And since the person inviting you to pray is an authority figure: a teacher, coach, or principal, you really risk a lot by having them decide you aren’t: A.Good.Christian.

When given the choice between upholding traditional case law or creating de novo judicial principles, the Roberts Court is almost always going to favor the latter.

Wrongo isn’t a lawyer, but many lawyers are now pointing to the extraordinarily shoddy nature of the Court’s majority opinions, including all three of the precedent-shattering ones the Court has issued over the last week.

It’s time to wake up America! Why is it so hard for Christians in the United States to just practice their religion without involving the rest of us?

We’re getting very close to the establishment of a default Christian American religion. We know that there are many public school teachers who have been silent despite their sincere religious beliefs while at school. Now they will be actively pressured by their pastors to begin proselytizing while on the clock.

To help you wake up, let’s travel to the 2022 Glastonbury music festival, which always creates great live music. On June 25, Olivia Rodrigo and Lily Allen dedicated the latter’s song “Fuck You” repurposed to express anger at five of the six Conservative members of the court.

Rodrigo named the Justices one by one, while Allen raised alternating middle fingers to them:

These artists aren’t afraid of controversy. Millions of us now feel exactly the same.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – June 26, 2022

(New columns will be light and variable for the next week, since Wrongo and Ms. Right are attending grandson Conor’s wedding in NC. Regular programming will resume on July 6.)

We’re not talking about the Supreme Court or the J6 news this morning. We’ll leave that for the cartoons below. Instead, let’s focus on an enlightening article from Curbed: “Hoboken Hasn’t Had a Traffic Death in Four Years. What’s It Doing Right?”:

“Hoboken feels downright roomy. Wander down the wide, busy sidewalks of Washington Street, the city’s main strip…and one thing becomes clear….A pedestrian doesn’t have to play the…perilous game of New York City crosswalk chicken, where you squint through the windows of a massive metal box to catch a glimpse of another speeding metal box whose driver doesn’t see you.”

“Few drivers park next to crosswalks in Hoboken because they can’t. Those spots are blocked off with bike racks or planters or storm drains or extra sidewalk space for pedestrians or vertical plastic pylons that deter all but the boldest delivery-truck drivers. Stand at a corner, and you can see what is coming toward you, and drivers can see you too, and you don’t have to step out into the road and risk your life to do it.”

This concept is called Vision Zero, a strategy that municipalities across the US and abroad have adopted that seeks to alter traffic and engage pedestrians to lessen the severity of accidents. In total, Hoboken has had three traffic fatalities since 2015.

As Hoboken’s streets get safer, the rest of America is getting less safe. Traffic fatalities in NYC were up 44% percent in the first quarter of 2022. Hoboken has empowered it’s pedestrians and every corner makes it clear they have the right of way. Hoboken’s streak of zero fatalities could end at any time, and eventually will, but that’s no reason for other cities and towns not to enable similar change. On to cartoons.

Somebody should remind the Conservative ideologue Justices that America is a multi-belief country:

It’s on the ballot in November:

Clarence rewrites the 2^nd Amendment:

Now concealed carry has multiple meanings:

The scales of justice get a Conservative makeover:

The J6 hearings have inspired criticism from Texas. The late Molly Ivins referred to Texas as the “national laboratory for bad government”:

Uvalde ,TX failures give new meaning to an old idea:

Saturday (Un) Soother, Supreme Court Edition – June 25, 2022

The Daily Escape:

North River, Marshfield, MA – June 2022 photo by Laurie France

Roe overturned. Gun laws on the books since the Taft administration overturned. Miranda weakened. The separation of church and state required by the First Amendment, no longer Constitutional.

Remember when Republicans railed against “unelected, activist judges”? They always meant judges appointed by Democrats. Here’s a quote from the National Review:

“The Left views the judicial branch as no different from the executive or legislative branches. To them, judges are supposed to ‘take sides,’ making sure that some political interests win and others lose.”

Or, this from a Baptist minister in 2014:

“Unelected liberal activist judge delivers Michigan to Big Faggotry.”

As always, Conservatives were projecting their actual views as the views of their opposition.

Today, we do have unelected activist judges running America, and they are Conservatives. We’re living in an ahistorical time: There are six justices who are practicing Catholics. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh.

Five routinely vote as a bloc. There have only been 15 Catholic justices (out of 115 justices total) in the history of the Supreme Court. Forty percent of all Catholic justices are now sitting on the Court.

The Conservative majority on the Court has walked away from Stare Decisis, the doctrine that courts will adhere to precedent when making their decisions. Stare decisis means “to stand by things decided” in Latin.

Here’s how stare decisis has evaporated: On Thursday, the Court said that the individual right to bear arms is an inviolable fundamental right, meaning states cannot infringe the right to carry a gun. Clarence Thomas held that a NY statute enacted during the Taft administration was not part of the American tradition of regulating firearms.

The right to an abortion, in place for 50 years, was overturned and sent back to the states because it’s just not as fundamental as the God-given right to have a gun which you can use to shoot up elementary schools.

The NY gun law dates from 1913. The right to abortion was decided in 1973. But the radical judges tout the notion that the former violated a fundamental right, while the latter isn’t even a thing.

Also on Thursday, the Conservative justices voted 6-3 to block lawsuits against police who neglect to read the Miranda warning, (“You have the right to remain silent”). It also includes language about Constitutional protections against self-incrimination. From Alito’s opinion:

“A violation of Miranda does not necessarily constitute a violation of the Constitution, and therefore such a violation does not constitute ‘the deprivation of [a] right…secured by the Constitution,'”

Miranda was decided in 1966, but Alito now says it’s a “prophylactic rule”, meaning that Miranda warnings aren’t required by the Constitution, but are instead judicially-crafted rules designed to protect people’s core Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. His signal to prosecutors is clear: Miranda is suspect, and we’re willing to entertain arguments that we should do away with it for good.

So the Conservative wing has knocked off three “settled law” items in one week, despite each – John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh – all saying under oath some version of what Roberts said during his confirmation hearing:

“…[Roe] is settled as a precedent of the Court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis. It is settled.”

You should know that Alito and Barrett didn’t lie quite so egregiously about Roe during their hearings, although with hindsight, both were disingenuous. Obviously, a judge who lies under oath should be removed from office, but that won’t happen since “everyone” knew they were lying.

These Conservative unelected activist judges are placing ideology above precedent.

That elections have consequences was the key takeaway from the 2016 presidential election won by Trump. Democrats didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton as much as they had turned out for Obama or that would turn out for Biden. Trump won because he got 78,000 more votes than Clinton in just three counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and thus got to appoint three reactionary justices.

Reactionary justices will issue reactionary rulings. And there are many more to come.

But it’s time to forget (if you can) about the Supreme Court gutting legal precedent for ideology. It’s time for your Saturday Soother.

Our long-term lawn guy has decided to close his business. It’s a combination of higher costs that couldn’t be passed along to customers and getting too old for outdoor physical labor. So we’re scrambling at the height of the season.

It will be a warm weekend in the Northeast, so grab a seat outdoors in a shady spot, put on your wireless headphones and listen to “As steals the morn” composed by Handel in 1740. “As Steals the Morn” is adapted from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. Amanda Forsythe and Thomas Cooley are the soloists, and their voices are beautiful:

Lyric:

As steals the morn upon the night,
And melts the shades away:
So Truth does Fancy’s charm dissolve,
And rising Reason puts to flight
The fumes that did the mind involve,
Restoring intellectual day.

Intellectual day is gone, my friends.

Normalizing Violence Will End Democracy

The Daily Escape:

Bodie Island Lighthouse, Nags Head, NC – June 2022 photo by Jordan Hill Photography

America’s in a dark period, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see how we can come out of it.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way say:

“The Republican Party…has radicalized into an extremist, antidemocratic force that imperils the US constitutional order. The United States isn’t headed toward Russian – or Hungarian-style autocracy…but something else: a period of protracted regime instability, marked by repeated constitutional crises, heightened political violence, and possibly, periods of authoritarian rule.”

They say we’re heading into a period of protracted instability. They aren’t saying we face a civil war. It’s more subtle: a future of intermittent armed conflict, something like “The Troubles” in Ireland.

You’ve probably seen the campaign ad by Missouri Republican Senate candidate Eric Greitens, where he struts into a home after some camo-clad associates have broken in, saying their purpose is “RINO hunting”. After the team busts into the house, Greitens walks in through a cloud of smoke and says:

“Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Hunting down one’s political enemies with guns hasn’t been the American way, but it sure is becoming so now. It’s only a matter of time before racial, sexuality and politically-based violence occurs at scale in America. The Brennan Center found that 17% of America’s local election officials have been threatened during the 2020 election cycle. There’s a growing domestic terror threat to civil servants.

But it was only two weeks ago that Republicans found it easy to have moral clarity when authorities arrested a man and charged him with the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The suspect turned himself in before anything happened. However, Republicans were outraged and questioned why Biden and other Democrats did not condemn what happened.

Candidates say outrageous things all the time in the heat of the moment and lately, hitting below the belt is often rewarded. But that is a far cry from a call to hunt down your political enemies in order to “save the country.”

The GOP is normalizing violence, and it became clear after the Republican response to J6. From Robert Hubbell:

“The Republican National Committee described the events of January 6th as ‘legitimate political discourse.’ Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde said that video of the attack on the Capitol looked like ‘a normal tourist visit.’ Mike Pence, whom rioters wanted to hang, said on Monday that Democrats were using the January 6th hearings ‘to distract attention.’”

Republicans try pretending that they have no idea what’s happening (“I haven’t seen the ad, so I cannot comment”). But the right thing is to take the risk that someone will yell at them on Facebook and Twitter and condemn it by saying loud and clear, “This isn’t the way for a candidate to conduct himself.”

Unless Republicans change their act, the normalization of violence will move toward its logical conclusion — election officials and politicians will be wounded or killed by someone who believes that violence is a legitimate political tool.

GOP candidates are posting ads about killing us in our homes. The Texas state GOP party wrote a campaign platform calling for the repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and seceding from the US, while saying that gay people should get back in the closet. They passed a resolution declaring that Biden’s election was illegitimate.

This is the platform of the governing party of the nation’s second largest state, and no non-Texas Republican has complained.

Pundits keep saying that Democrats have no chance in the 2022 mid-terms because of Biden’s low approval ratings. Wrongo has repeatedly said that there are “persuadable” voters who can be reached before the Fall. Proof of that is in the 6-point increase in public support for indicting Trump since the start of the J6 hearings.

If pundits argue that Biden’s unpopularity will affect the 2022 races despite Biden’s absence from the ballot, they must also agree that other issues not on the ballot— the J6 conspiracy, the Supreme Court abortion decision, Texas secession, and yes inflation, will also affect the 2022 races.

The 2022 election (not the 2024) will determine our future. Will people vote this Fall based on the price of gas? Or the threat of a recession? Or, will they understand that there’s a real possibility that democracy as we know it in the US could vanish?

Democracy is what’s on the ballot in 2022. Inflation comes and goes. Recessions come and go. If we lose our democracy, it won’t be returning any time soon.

Americans understand democracy. They’ve fought and died for it. Dems can make voters see that democracy is on the ballot this year, while inflation and other issues sadly need to take a back seat.

Let’s not make the mistake of selling Americans short. Democracy is more important than our pocketbooks. People will vote for democracy.

The slogan should be “Vote Democratic And Save Democracy”.

Some Factors Affecting The Mid-Terms

The Daily Escape:

Before dawn, Kennebunkport, ME – June 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo.

Even though the first public hearing about the Jan. 6 attempted coup happened last night, Wrongo doesn’t intend to write about them for a few days. The hot takes are all over the media, and it’s doubtful that we will know much about how the public is reacting for a few weeks. Once again Wrongo cautions that the media will cover this like a political contest when it isn’t. It really is about the health of our democracy.

And did you realize that only 21% of Americans over 18 read a newspaper every day? Cheryl Russell of Demo Memo has statistics from the General Social Survey showing how precipitously newspaper readership has fallen. She says that in 1972, 69% of the American public read a newspaper every day:

“Now, the share of adults who never read a newspaper (40%) is far greater than the share who read a newspaper daily. Fully 57% of the public reads a newspaper less than once a week…”

This also has implications for how broadly the findings of the Jan. 6 committee will be shared. As does the fact that FOX won’t be airing the hearings and plans to counter-program with GOP members of the House and Senate presenting real-time disinformation as the facts are aired.

Speaking of not knowing the facts, YouGov reports on an economic survey showing that seven out of 10 Republicans think we’re currently in a recession. More than half of all independents and 43% of Democrats also think the same. They sampled about 1,500 US adults online between May 28 – 31, 2022, with a margin of error of ± 3%. Here are the results:

How can we be in a recession when our unemployment rate is at 3.6%? When wages are up 5.6% over the past year, and consumers still are spending money like crazy?

People may believe we’re in a recession, but the US economy added 1.2 million jobs in the past three months. Yes, inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years, but higher gas and food prices don’t mean we’re in the midst of an economic slowdown. Maybe the survey was poorly worded, or maybe, since people really never read in depth about what’s really going on in America, they never learn what’s really happening. This will be very damaging to the Democrats’ mid-term chances.

Next, you may have heard that there was a “political earthquake” in the California primaries, that Dems did poorly because of the “crime” issue, and that will hurt Democrats all across the nation.

A recalled San Francisco District Attorney didn’t cause an earthquake, and neither did a Republican-turned-Democrat’s advancing in the LA Mayor race. Former Republican and billionaire Rick Caruso spent $40 million on his mayoral primary! His opponent, Karen Bass, spent $3 million on her campaign. He won the primary by 3 points, although she is the likely winner in November.

What WAS an earthquake was the anemic voter turnout. Only about 19% of California’s registered voters actually voted.

There was no sign of an anti-Democratic wave in CA. Candidates from both parties that were expected to make the general election did so. Probably the weakest performances by incumbents were posted by Republicans David Valadao and Young Kim, who struggled to defeat challengers running to their right. In particular, Valadao, who voted to impeach Trump, appears to have advanced to the general election.

And in CA-41, moderate Democrat Will Rollins advanced to the November election against Republican incumbent Ken Calvert, who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. Rollins has a decent chance to win in November in what is a 50-50 district.

Finally, Larry Sabato reports on the redistricting landscape now that most state redistricting is complete:

The total number of competitive districts has declined from 84 to 75.
The number of super-safe Republican districts (those where Biden won 40% or less) increased from 112 to 131.
The number of super-safe Democratic seats, 127, while similar to the Republican total, is down slightly.
There are 211 seats where Biden received 49% of the vote or less, and 202 seats where he won 53% or more.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates Republicans having 214 seats as safe, likely, or leaning Republican. That means that if they hold those seats, they are just four additional seats from controlling the House. They rate the Democrats as having 193 seats as safe, likely, or leaning Democratic.

That means if both Parties hold serve, there are just 28 seats in play in the 2022 mid-terms. For the Democrats to retain control of the House would require them to win 25 of those 28 seats.

If the Dems want to retain control of the House, what message should they be telling voters who: a) Don’t read newspapers; b) Think the economy is crashing; and c) Fail to turn out in Democratic and Independent-leaning Congressional Districts?

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 8, 2022

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell thinks the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe is a “toxic spectacle”. Chief Justice John Roberts calls it a “betrayal.” And Justice Thomas of Ginni said:

“We can’t be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want…We are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like…”

So suck it up American women! They’re sure that the leak is worse for America than their outrageous decision, and nothing you say will change any Republican minds. It is likely to be a long time before this (anticipated) decision is reversed. We will be a nation divided between states where reproductive freedom is guaranteed and states without it.

Major judicial errors in American history have been reversed before. The Constitutional amendment prohibiting alcohol was repealed in 14 years. The Supreme Court opinion upholding laws that criminalized gay sex was overturned after 17 years.

Women have many reasons for choosing abortion that have nothing to do with not wanting to be a parent. They may have medical needs; a fetus may carry genetic defects; the woman may be an underage child or a survivor of rape or incest. Adoption does not erase either the medical effects or the psychic scars that forcing a mother to term might inflict, and that may persist long after pregnancy is over.

And on this Mother’s Day, it is particularly ironic that they call themselves pro-life. Except, of course, for mothers. On to cartoons.

Who should be feeling violated?