Those Koch-funded ads to convince young people to opt out of Obamacare were so weird, I have trouble believing they’d be terribly effective. Nonetheless, it pains me to watch billionaire fossils long-detached from the realities of America give bad advice to an economically-hosed generation.
Ugh, what more can I say. This whole thing reminds me more and more of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine every day. Manufacture a crisis, use the ensuing sense of panic to impose draconian cuts to programs people desperately need, and voila! Utopia at last. Never mind that Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times, and Dubya 7, or that Clinton balanced the budget, or that the vast bulk of our current deficit was formed under Bush. The hypocrisy is simply astounding.
The m&m’s in the first panel are, of course, a reference to Van Halen’s infamous contract rider stipulating that the brown ones be removed. David Lee Roth has explained that the point was not to be a prima donna, but to test to see if stage crews had read the contract carefully. I love this quote:
I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean ‘What is this before me?”… you know, with the skull in one hand… and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”
I decided to make the m&m’s that Republicans object to the green ones, since, you know, they hate anything green.
When it comes to fuel efficiency and climate change, automakers have been brazenly talking out of both sides of their mouths. To quote from the NY Times:
At auto shows and on dealership floors, automakers are quick to talk about the latest green technology â electric vehicles, hybrids, even hydrogen cars.
But in Washington, the industry is sending a different message. Last month, one of the largest lobbying groups argued in a regulatory filing that the basic science behind climate change is not to be trusted.
In the same filing, the lobbying group, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, also cast doubt on the negative effects of tailpipe pollution on human health.
As the article goes on to explain, they’re actually using the same doubt-sowing tactics that were infamously used by the cigarette industry. A 2013 MIT study found 200,000 premature deaths in the US every year due to air pollution, with “emissions from road transportation” being the most significant contributor. If anything, I lowballed the estimate in the third panel of this cartoon.
EPA chief and beady-eyed corruption sponge Scott Pruitt rightly gets much of the blame for cutting Obama’s CAFE standards, but let’s not forget that the automakers began lobbying for this immediately after Trump took office. As much as they might not want to be publicly linked to Pruitt, they are more than complicit. (And yes, we’ll see what happens with California’s challenge to all of this.)
Other recommended reading: this Greenbiz column on the automakers’ hypocrisy, and one of my perennial faves, Mr. Money Mustache on the folly of gargantuan luxury pickups.
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A backlash against the #MeToo movement rages, with conservatives spluttering about the awful feminists posing an existential threat to liberal democratic order, or some such thing. Look, I am not a fan of Twitter’s mob mentality even when I agree with the mob. But that’s the nature of the medium, a problem not isolated to just anti-sexual harassment activists.
This backlash is a massively disproportionate response, indicative of a highly distorted media universe where pundits are rewarded for saying that the nation’s biggest problems originate with liberals — remember the obsession with “PC on campus” during the election? As I have noted elsewhere, the speech concept has been utterly perverted to suit right wing efforts to chill speech.
A few relevant links:
The linguist and progressive activist George Lakoff, author of “Don’t Think of an Elephant”, is being sued for defamation by a wealthy Georgian-American businessman who was present at the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. Lakoff cited the businessman’s alleged involvement in money-laundering in a TV interview. The businessman’s legal team includes a lawyer who represented Trump in a previous lawsuit. I find this incredibly chilling, and deserving of much, much wider coverage than it’s getting. Lakoff has a GoFundMe set up for his legal expenses.
Also deserving major headlines is the plight of the “J20” inauguration protesters still facing felony rioting charges. Many had their charges dropped, but 59 people still face the possibility of years in prison for merely being present when a few people engaged in vandalism. This is huge news with major implications for the right to protest.
Then there’s the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.” In this day and age of neo-Nazis, it sounds fine, right? But in practice, it conflates legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with bigotry. Many liberal Jewish groups are opposed to it for this reason. Of course, the Trump administration is appointing a fervent supporter of the act to be Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.
My cartoonist colleague Susie Cagle was arrested while reporting on #OccupyOakland last week. I can assure you, she’s not the sort of person to give cops a hard time. She was standing in a doorway with a bunch of observers from the National Lawyers Guild, trying to avoid a skirmish, when the police came up and arrested all of them. So I got to thinking… if protesters aren’t allowed to peacefully assemble on private property, and they risk arrest or physical injury from overzealous police on public property, where are they supposed to go, exactly? An entirely separate plane of existence is all they seem to be left with.
The 1% have lobbyists, superPACs, and Fox News, of course, so they don’t have to bother with the messiness of occupying meatspace to make their case.
Hmm… so according to this 2-1 appeals court ruling, speech added to cigarette packaging limits speech. I guess the “individual liberties” of li’l old corporate persons like RJ Reynolds outweigh a democratically-elected government’s right to add a message on behalf of the public interest. Never mind that we’re talking about the packaging of a deadly commercial product with a history of being marketed to kids. Actually showing a kid being harmed on the package would interfere with whatever those Marlboros are trying to express.
Via Raw Story:
In a dissent, Judge Judith Rogers said that the regulation ordering the label âdoes not restrict the information conveyed to consumers, but requires additional information to be conveyed with the aid of graphic images.â
Rogers, who was appointed by former president Bill Clinton, said that tobacco companies had engaged in âdecades of deceptionâ over health risks and had no legal basis to complain about âemotional reactionsâ to graphic warnings.
You may recall that Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the author of the majority opinion, was one of the radical George W. Bush appointees whom the Dems tried to filibuster, until the Gang of 14 came along and opened the floodgates of nutballery. She’s an extreme libertarian who invokes Ayn Rand in speeches to the Federalist Society, and calls government a “leviathan” prone to “crushing everything in its path.” You know the type. She and Paul Ryan would make great drinking buddies.
I’ve been surprised by the number of commenters on Daily Kos who say “Oh, the labeling won’t work anyway.” To which I responded:
I think some of the labels would work, such as the one shown in the cartoon, saying “Tobacco smoke can harm your children.” Some people have no regard for their own bodies, but they care about their kids, and could use the reminder to smoke away from them.
If the warnings have no effect, then why are companies fighting them so vigorously? Why does Judge Brown say the labels are against the business interest of the companies if, as she also says, there’s “not one shred of evidence” that they work?
As if Texasâs over-the-top regulation of abortion clinics in the name of âprotecting womenâs healthâ wasnât ridiculous enough, enter the spectacularly misplaced skepticism of Justice Alito during oral arguments at the Supreme Court last week. While questioning the clinicsâ counsel Stephanie Toti, Alito asserted, âThere is very little specific evidence in the record in this case with respect to why any particular clinic closed.â This prompted an awesome rebuttal from Justice Kagan. From the great Dahlia Lithwick:
So frustrated is Justice Elena Kagan by the conservativesâ repeated insistence that perhaps the clinics just coincidentally all closed within days of HB 2âs passage that she finally has to intervene. âIs it right,â she asks Toti, âthat in the twoÂ-week period that the ASC requirement was in effect, that over a dozen facilities shut their doors, and then when that was stayed, when that was lifted, they reopened again immediately?â Toti agrees. âIt’s almost like the perfect controlled experiment,â continues Kagan, âas to the effect of the law, isnât it? Itâs like you put the law into effect, 12 clinics closed. You take the law out of effect, they reopen?â
Hereâs an argument I havenât heard yet: given that the stateâs requirements are medically unnecessary â there was no problem in the first place â it seems to me that women will face statistically greater risk of death or injury driving on Texas highways to get to a clinic 200 miles away than if their local clinic remained open. If Texas Republicans are so incredibly serious about protecting the safety of ladies, should that not factor into the equation? Not to mention the botched back-alley abortions, of course. Those never factor into the equation.
That tweet from former Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is here.
This week’s comic depends a little on familiarity with Game of Thrones (I recently finished watching season one of House of the Dragon), so some people might not understand all the references. Hopefully it’s clear enough that I’m talking about seemingly unconditional U.S. military aid to Netanyahu and giving him carte blanche to lay siege on Gaza, which he’s most certainly doing. The attack by Hamas was truly horrifying, but conducing massive airstrikes that kill thousands of children (in addition to thousands of adult civilians) is a grossly immoral and unstrategic response.
The White House and State Department have been discouraging language supporting restraint: “In messages circulated on Friday, State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to include three specific phrases: ‘de-escalation/ceasefire,’ ‘end to violence/bloodshed’ and ‘restoring calm.'”
From a Guardian article about diplomatic inaction preceding the current conflict:
Bernie Sanders, for instance, in February had argued that Biden had to recognise this was a qualitatively different Israeli government to anything that preceded it.
He said: âIf a government is acting in a racist way and they want billions of dollars from [US taxpayers], I think you say: âSorry but itâs not acceptable. You want our money? Fine. This is what you got to do to get it.ââ
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The billionaire in question is one Paul Singer, who wrote an epic screed to his investors about the “fake” economic numbers coming out of Washington. Singer issued the following caveat:
check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading edge of hyperinflation could look like
Now, it seems to me that other factors may be coming into play here. For example, when 1% of the world’s population holds as much wealth as the bottom half, you’re going to see some pressure on those Picasso price points. It’s a clash of the titans — titans with near-infinite resources to spend impressing each other to death!
When you see the price of luxury homes as a more reliable indicator of inflation than the price of milk or gas — or government data showing that inflation is under control — it says more about your limited, paranoid perspective than anything else.
Seeing the People’s Climate March reminded me of the global protests against the Iraq War in 2003. People protested on every continent, including Antarctica, in an effort to stop the invasion. It was a rare feat of organization and international unity — and it was largely ignored. I drew a cartoon at the time pointing out that heavy snowstorms received more prominent coverage on the front page of the Washington Post than the protests.
When I see ISIS rampaging through Iraq and Syria, butchering people and displacing families, I think about how intelligent people around the world did everything they could to prevent the colossal humanitarian disaster of the past eleven years that is still unfolding. I think protesting is our ethical obligation, but the sense of coming up against an immutable force is familiar.
Alternate strip titles included: “History Re-heats Itself”; “Between Iraq and a Hot Place”; and “Worst Learning Curve Ever.”
