CSotD: Closing down that Golden Gate
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David Horsey on Dear Leader's crusade against California, and, as co-conspirators, Oregon and Washington.
I've said the fault is not with Trump so much as with gutless GOP legislators, particularly those who insult our intelligence by making statements about the policies and appointments they then vote for in lockstep.
Apparently, the governors on the West Coast have a little more intestinal fortitude, Horsey reports.
He also indulges in a bit of fantasy thinking to go with that cartoon:
Californians pay more federal taxes to the federal government than any other state and, per capita, get far less back in federal support than many other states. Trump has threatened to “defund” California if the state gets too ornery. One wonders if California could defund the federal government in return.
It's an interesting idea. This article from the Atlantic shows which states recoup their investment in the federal government and which lose money on the deal, though the author chides us not to make too much of the apparent fact that the people who bitch the most about freeloaders are in the states most on the federal teat.
But the conservatives didn't seem to flinch when Texas threatened to secede from Obama's America, so let's see if the shoe fits on the other foot.
Taken to its illogical extreme, it does make you wonder how Trump, having cut off the uncooperative states in a snit, would deal with a military the western side of which was entirely based out of Hawaii and Alaska.
Sure would create jobs, upgrading Elmendorf and then building a much longer wall. I don't think he'd get California to pay for it, and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't get much from the artists' colony in Portland either.
Boeing might have chipped in to help out, except they've already had their dust-up with the King of Trumpotania, and, in case you were wondering, Seattle is also the headquarters of Nordstrom's.
(I'm just kidding about extending that wall. It's only until San Andreas dumps them all into the ocean anyway.)
Speaking of Nordstrom, everyone seems to be, and, in particular, drawing cartoons of Dear Leader furiously calling in air strikes on them. Jack Ohman not only departs from that shared gag, but takes on that stupid power tie.
I leave it to you and Dr. Freud to speculate about what an extra-long tie compensates for.
David Rowe manages to work Kellyanne's plugola issue into a cartoon about an issue of more substance, which is that Trump thinks everything is for sale and I have a feeling we're going to find out if he's right.
I'm less concerned about the immigration order itself than I am about his fundamental misunderstanding of checks-and-balances and how the federal government operates.
Aside from his dyspeptic railing against the so-called judges on the so-called court, he's also not too happy with his own selection for the Supremes, who doesn't seem as easy to direct as perhaps Dear Leader had expected.
As long as his strength is among people who object not only to Roe v Wade but to Brown v Board of Education, his railing against our system of government probably won't hurt him politically, and, after all, Gorsuch is simply the replacement for Scalia, so his confirmation, which is all but a done deal, is simply status quo ante and could even be a slight improvement.
It's replacing Ginsburg that would tilt the court, and, if you're looking for the pony in this massive pile of horseshit, the confirmation of Colonel Beauregard Sessions as attorney general prompts a special election for his Senate seat in 2018, raising the number of current Republican seats that will be contested then to nine, in a chamber that is current 46 Democratic, 52 Republican plus Bernie Sanders and Angus King.
Perhaps someone might want to stop whining about the last election and begin pounding the pavement for the next one.
And the pavement may not be so hard to pound this time around, if Trump doesn't STFU and start to govern as if he liked the place.
If it's all beginning to be a bit overwhelming, check out this David Sipress commentary on his most shared cartoon and his own experience with the phenomenon, which was pointed out by Tom Spurgeon.
I will say that my recent week out-of-pocket was refreshing, because I had no time to keep up with the news, though there's a certain "pouring boiling water into the chilled glass" phenomenon when you step back into the fray.
And you do have to stay involved in this mess.
Lennon's "War Is Over If You Want It" schtick was a lovely bit of philosophical fluff and we need to have the idea floated that bad things happen because we tolerate them, but I prefer Phil Ochs' declaration that the war was over because it was an active statement of refusal to collaborate, which is quite different than withdrawing into the clouds.
Phil didn't just sing about resistance. He showed up in person.
On the lightest possible note:
Yesterday I ended a fun, fluffy posting with a cartoon of genuine substance. We'll reverse that entirely today with another hat tip to Tom Spurgeon for pointing out this collection of filler comics from 1950ish comic books.
I was a little young to have seen any of these, but I remember the genre from slightly later years and, while the fillers weren't particularly funny, I don't think the actual comics in whose books they appeared were a whole lot more hilarious.
Certainly not as hilarious as the idea that the demographic for them was hoping to look like Bert Parks.
The only time I remember caring about my hair at that age was when I asked for a crewcut so Sister Theophilus wouldn't be able to pick me up by my hair.
Now here's your moment of Phil:
This blog is seven years old this week. I might
have done something special except that
I just did a bunch of old favorites.
But thanks for being around!
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