CSotD: Friday Wrap
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Okay, it wasn’t a wrap. It was a sub or, as it’s called in some places, a hoagie or grinder. But Huck gets the prize for using another alternative term — “hero” — and not only doing so, but posting this after the trial began but before the jury declined to convict.
The latest defeat for the Trump Administration being proof that while it’s said you can indict a ham sandwich, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro not only failed to indict a sandwich on a felony but then failed to even get a misdemeanor conviction.
Pearls did a gag about (recovering attorney) Stephan Pastis being chosen for jury duty. Having sat on a jury myself, I don’t understand the reluctance, which seems almost universal. I expected to be rejected as a journalist, but I’m glad I wasn’t; it was fascinating to watch up close, and, just as I found when I worked the election polls, it reinforced my faith in the system.
I understand the hero case jury was out for seven hours over two days, but our jury was only out about an hour and a half, and we’d have been back sooner but they brought us a tray of subs. Apparently, the jury in DC also got sandwiches, which, I hope, were made on Wonder Bread so they wouldn’t start chucking them at each other as part of their deliberations.
Dear Leader had a tough week, having also had to eat crow instead of turkey with this bogus boast, in which the White House watermarked and posted a story about WalMart, bragging “Good news for American families: the cost of Thanksgiving dinner is DOWN this year.”
Then Trump posted on his Truth page:
“2025 Thanksgiving dinner under Trump is 25% lower than 2024 Thanksgiving dinner under Biden, according to Walmart. My cost are lower than the Democrats on everything, especially oil and gas! So the Democrats ‘affordability’ issue is DEAD! STOP LYING!!!”
Turns out Banx could have labeled this guy as working for WalMart. Their Thanksgiving package was 29 items last year and is only 15 items this year, so while it’s only three-quarters the price of last year’s offer, it’s barely half the food.
“Price” and “cost,” FWIW, being two different things.
I should probably update this, given that it’s a dozen years old. But I’m willing to bet that the numbers may have changed but the trend remains the same, and Dear Leader also got spanked by a federal judge who ordered him to get those SNAP payments out, in full, by today.
Here’s a GAO Report from 2020 indicating that most welfare recipients are working full time, and we should remember that someone disabled who cannot work, or someone who must stay home full-time with a disabled family member or small children, may also be getting — and deserving — assistance.
Still, predictably, the lies continue, and NewsGuard named this cascade of hate its “False Claim of the Week.” They traced the claim to a Newsmax opinion program that was uncritically spread by other broadcasters and then on social media.
It’s fascinating to see how they trace it to a misinterpretation of a real, but largely irrelevant, statistic. As the saying goes, haters gonna hate.
However, while Ronald Reagan had to spread his falsehood about “welfare queens” the old-fashioned way, artificial intelligence allows bigots and liars to generate false videos, generally of Black women cheating the system.
I suppose the flood of stupid videos of impossible animal interactions is harmless by comparison.
Certainly, the animal slop is less harmful than the ChatGPT program that encouraged a young man to kill himself, and it’s important to point out that AI is a repeat offender in such matters.
Nor am I convinced that it’s okay for AI to cost people’s jobs because they promise we’re all gonna live on the fat of the land or somesuch.
Tom and Daisy weren’t much in touch with the people their mobster friends exploited, and Brodner marks Dear Leader’s Great Gatsby party by not only quoting a relevant passage from the novel, but citing the slogan Melania wore on her back when she went to visit a detention center for migrant children.
“It was for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticising me. I want to show them I don’t care. You could criticize whatever you want to say. But it will not stop me to do what I feel is right.”
That night what she felt was right was to party like it was 1925 just as poor people were about to lose their SNAP benefits.
Jay Gatsby hung with mobsters and had not served in the trenches of France. He really didn’t care, either, and it’s important to note that, while the crash in 1929 did damage beyond captains of industry and bourgeois stock plungers, there was already plenty of poverty across the land.
The Gatsby crowd got a taste of instant karma, and their financial misfortunes radiated out into the general public, certainly, but it was the not-caring part that cost Republicans the White House in 1932.
I guess not caring can also get you there, but we’ll see how well that goes in the next year or three. And, no, this wasn’t a one-time reaction.
We could sure use another mensch in that office.
I like Aussie cartoonists. They don’t both-sides the issues and they’re not afraid to call out hypocrisy. I finished my election commentary yesterday, but Wilcox goes beyond the numbers and into the argumentation.
We’re going to be hearing about Mamdani the Commie for awhile, and mostly, as she accuses, from the folks who’ve soft-pedaled criticism of the deliberate, autocratic cruelty that withheld food to force political obedience and that refused to okay FEMA relief for Maryland because it’s a Blue state, despite the fact that the flood damage was in two deeply scarlet counties. (75.66% of Garrett county and 68.9% of Allegany county voted for Trump.)
Anyway, if Mamdani is a commie, he hides it well. Must be one of them there Commie Chameleons.
(Nice setting: Like Gatsby, Rhett Butler was a profit-driven criminal who didn’t, frankly, give a damn.)
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