CSotD: Alas, It’s Monday
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Poor Volodya had to cut back the annual Victory Day Parade in Moscow this coming Saturday, reportedly because all the impressive arms and armor normally seen at that time are in Ukraine and can’t be spared, or, in some cases, made operative.
But what are friends for? After a 90-minute phone call, his pal Donald announced that he was pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany. That doesn’t mean he’s sending them to Red Square for the parade, and it’s only about 14% of the 36,000 US troops stationed there, but as a sign of his willingness to abandon his NATO allies and strengthen US ties to Russia, it amounts to a nice Victory Day present.
Trump could stand in the middle of Red Square and throw somebody out a window, and he wouldn’t lose any voters, at least not there.
Granted, he could be doing better here. McKee suggests he apply some of that ciphering he studied at Wharton, but his staff appears, rather, to be digging up polls that reflect better on his popularity, since the main policy of the second Trump administration is to keep the boss happy.
Speaking of his business acumen and Wharton, I’m a little surprised — given somebody’s ability to have leaked private emails from SCOTUS about their creation of the shadow docket — that nobody has managed to reveal Dear Leader’s transcripts from Wharton.
Inquiring minds want to know, not so much how well he did but how he managed to graduate at all. Given his grasp of tariffs, trade imbalances and how percentages work, we should hope somebody also leaks Wharton’s 1968 parental donation records.
And I think it would be nice to get that information before we do any more building and renaming of vanity projects to honor Dear Leader. I like Artley’s compromise.
I also like the question raised by the kids in Deering’s piece. The drawing of parallels between the panic over a nearly somewhat almost shooting at the WHCA dinner and the far more successful shootings in schools has been made often in the past week, but Deering does a better-than-average job of tying in Trump’s paranoid vision with the way such things have become normal for our kids.
In particular, Deering doesn’t compare the WHCD event with actual school shootings, but, rather, compares the two fears: The glitterati at the dinner got a very small sample of what kids get, not from actual shootings, but from the ever-present terror created by the drills that are normal for students.
I know people who were frightened by the duck-and-cover drills we did in school a few generations ago, but note that atomic warfare was, for us, an abstraction. Yes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had happened, but not in our memories and not in our country.
By comparison, our grandkids are going through drills for something they know has happened and is real and could happen again.
It’s not the same thing. Not at all.
Sheneman raises the issue of priorities, and we all should understand that our government has made a choice and has refused to spend money on feeding children, or giving them health care, or providing them with decent housing.
And here’s something else: When you cut funds for SNAP and for school food programs, you’re not just screwing the kids.
For some of them, that school breakfast program, and that lunch, are their only real sources of food for the day.
A lot of legislators, and certainly our president, have never been hungry. A fair number of them have likely never shopped for groceries or even bought gasoline, but I’m sure that very few of them have gone hungry, or gone without a meal so their kids could eat.
Still, the blind, deaf fools ought to at least understand that, when they cut SNAP and cut school food programs, they’re also screwing the farmers for whom these are significant markets for their products.
And the farmers won’t make up their losses by selling soybeans to China, thanks to Dear Leader and his cronies.
Speaking of people who don’t get it, there seems to be a lot of angry chatter about how importers are supposed to get their illegal tariff payments refunded, but individual consumers won’t be getting a taste.
It’s lovely to think they should, but it’s not in the least bit practical.
When Dear Leader first imposed his tariffs, Amazon indicated that they were going to show the resulting price increases, but then someone said not to, and Bezos said “Yazzuh, bozz” and it didn’t happen. And it couldn’t have, given that different companies made different decisions about how to spread the additional costs in price increases, profit adjustments and so forth.
I suppose, theoretically, that, if you had kept all your receipts, there could be some clearinghouse with records of how every importer along the supply route — manufacturers, their raw-material suppliers and the retailers — had applied the cost increases, and the impact upon each retailed item.
But after all the resulting costs of this process had been figured in and all the fees taken out, it would be like one of those class-action settlements where you’d get a check for 37 cents.
Well, we elected the guy. Think of those tariffs as a Fool Tax.
I’m not suggesting a complete surrender, and in the case of the SCOTUS redistricting decision, I’m advocating that we follow the Who’s lead and not be fooled again.
Ramirez suggests that the ruling means a return to blind justice and the end of race-based redistricting, but that raises a critical question: If we’re no longer using race as a basis for drawing up districts, how do you explain the wandering, drawn-out districts now being proposed?
De Adder explains “how,” but we’re left wondering “why,” and we shouldn’t accept the rationales we’re getting.
It’s valuable to explain gerrymandering, and it would be a public service for newspapers and TV stations to create explainers for their local communities, but even if you sugar-coat it by claiming the distinction is between the major parties rather than the major races, it’s still a refutation of Ramirez’s premise that redistricting is a blind process.
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