CSotD: Fun with the Franchises

So this happened yesterday. You might have seen something about it on TV.

They don’t really ask that question, but Christopher Weyant has the situation pretty well in hand, because voting in primaries is more tactical than voting in regular elections.

That’s particularly true in states with open primaries, like New Hampshire, and it goes back a long time: I voted in a primary in Colorado back in 1974 against a particularly toxic candidate in hopes of keeping him off the general ballot in November.

And it can happen in the general: My vote for George McGovern in ’72 was a vote against Richard Nixon. I’d been a Muskie supporter and so by then I didn’t have a candidate to vote for. But it was clear who was going to win and I just hoped to trim the mandate a little. 

Though imagine how different our world would be if McGovern had won.

 

Steve Kelley (Creators) indicates that this was his first New Hampshire Primary. Someone should have taken him aside and assured him that, first of all, the NH Primary has always been deeply tactical and has always involved both independent and crossover voters.

And they might also have told him Will Rogers famous line, “I am not a member of any organized political party — I am a Democrat,” though one would think it would be obvious anyway. And moreso in this case, since the national party was punishing us for following our state law by having our primary first.

The Democratic Party couldn’t conspire to order a pizza.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

Kal Kallaugher

Jeff Danziger — Counterpoint

Kallaugher posted his cartoon a few days before the primary; Danziger’s appeared this morning, though likely drawn in advance, and both are predicated on a Trump victory. 

The difference is that, despite Haley’s defeat, Kallaugher may be closer to the significance of the outcome, because she didn’t lose by that much, all things considered, and could remain in the race as a gadfly. I think Danziger is dismissing her too early, and, though she’s not likely to defeat Trump for the nomination, she may do an effective job of outlining his shortcomings.

Robert Reich is overly optimistic about the meaning of yesterday’s primary, but I agree with him that Trump is a long way from sewing up the general election in November. 

While we wait to see, let’s talk about something more pleasant.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

Adam Zyglis

Jeff Stahler

I don’t think the NFL is profiting at the moment from the fact that one of their biggest stars is dating one of music’s biggest stars. TV revenues for football are already going through the roof at such a rate that the NFL is adding broadcast and streaming games, and, specifically, the Chiefs/Bills game set an audience record.

It wasn’t because of people tuning in for a two-second shot of Trevor Kelsey’s girlfriend in the stands.

And they sure weren’t tuning in to see his big brother Jason rip off his shirt and bellow.

However, after he finished blocking the snoopy cameras from spying on little brother’s GF, Jason went down into the stands below their skybox and lifted an eight-year-old Swifty up to the window so she could show Taylor her sign and get a smiling wave she will never forget.

It was a sweet gesture that went viral and the little girl ended up on the Today Show telling of her adventure.

It’s a heart-melter anyway, and the sort of thing football fans would expect of the Kelce brothers, who are a class act, if a bit hirsute.

But Zyglis and Stahler could be right that, as irrelevant as the relationship may be to the game itself, it has an appeal to little girls who, not all that long ago, wouldn’t have sports in their collection of interests. But times are changing and, for the past half century, girls have been putting their ponytails through the back of a baseball cap and tossing gym bags over their shoulders on the way to practice.

They didn’t have commercials like this when I was a young impressionable kid. I wish they had. I wish our world had been more like that on a couple of levels.

As for football itself, I don’t know that a lot girls will be attracted to playing the game, though there are already girls playing in high schools and women working as NFL referees, plus the NFL is actively promoting flag football, which will be an event at this year’s Pro Bowl. They even had a brief exhibition flag game between two girls’ champion teams at halftime of the Chiefs/Bills game. But it would be nice if they were like the girl in Stahler’s cartoon and could spend an afternoon watching with dad.

The world contains a lot of things that simply never occurred to us.

 

By some sort of contrast, this is the world I grew up in. Vintage Buz Sawyer (KFS) is at the start of a new adventure, with Buz investigating suspected Russian spies checking out the new Polaris submarines.

Roy Crane was a good artist and terrific storyteller, but he was also very much a Cold War warrior who alternated light adventure stories with more political material like this. He wasn’t alone; at roughly the same time, Efrem Zimbalist Jr was chummy with J. Edgar Hoover and his TV show, the FBI, was very positive about the work of J. Edgar and his people, who checked each episode before broadcast.

Not sure how effective it was, given the number of Republican leaders who grew up when I did, presumably read the same comics and watched the same shows, but are now on the side of the Russians in the Great Game.

 

For that matter, we all grew up watching The Untouchables, and Dave Whamond doesn’t need to exaggerate to make his point: Donald Trump really did compare himself favorably to “the great Al Capone” and honestly was pleased to cite Sammy the Bull as a character witness.

Well, it’s hard to predict how kids are going to turn out, which was the topic of the latest Sufi Comics, a source of wisdom I look forward to:
That last panel is a good example of Sufi wisdom: It sounds good but, like a lot of simple solutions, can be very hard to put into practice.

Still, we do what we can.