CSotD: Driving Off The Voters
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Dunno how Chatfield fastened on Talarico for this gag, but his is one of a flock of Democratic campaigns I have blocked on my phone, or “stopped” at any rate. Not sure of the distinction.
It’s not that I wouldn’t vote for him, if he were here or I were in Texas, any more than I would decline to vote for any of the people who have been texting me. But their constant dunning is making me crazy, particularly the ones that come in after my admittedly early bedtime. I hesitate to turn off my phone at night, but I hate getting roused out of sleep by political spam.
And, yes, I was awakened by a Talarico plea which was probably sent from Texas at a reasonable hour two hours away.
I laughed at this, in part because I picture Dear Leader flipping a coin, heads for Biden, tails for Obama. But I also appreciate the fact that it’s a push poll, in that he is fishing for a response preloaded in the question.
I used to participate in polls, in part because I believe in the democratic process and in part because I feel sorry for the people conducting them. Now I’m disinclined, largely because so many of them have been push polls, and I don’t like going through five minutes of reasonable-sounding questions before coming to the one asking how I feel about Candidate X still beating his wife and selling fentanyl to schoolchildren.
We need to get money out of politics, though it’s not as easy as legislation, unless we get the Supreme Court to a point at which they’d be willing to do for Citizens United what they did for Roe v Wade. And I’ll admit it would be fun, if the Democrats attained a majority in the Senate, to watch Republican senators asking prospective justices if they consider Citizens United to be settled law.
German brings up the issue of people being taxed on income when the uberwealthy get their walkin’ around money primarily from interest on holdings, such that they can have Scrooge McDuck piles of wealth but only pay taxes on the smaller amount of interest it earns, minus, of course, what their accountants can manage to shelter.
But it’s not like they’re eating cold oatmeal like Ebenezer Scrooge. They’re living large, and not only that but, as German says, Elon Musk can whip out a check for over a quarter billion without blinking an eye.
I’d like to believe that he is calling his broker and asking for a half a billion to be taken out of his IRA, and then paying the taxes on this realized income and donating the rest to the candidates of his choice. And I’d like to have a horse, but it was hard enough finding an apartment where I could have a dog.
In lieu of a horse, I’d just like a look at the mechanism by which the 1% are able to pass money around without paying taxes on it. You can leverage a yacht in some way that it doesn’t come out of your pocket, but then you’ve got a yacht that becomes part of your holdings.
When you write a multimillion dollar check to a campaign, a congressman may become part of your holdings, too, but there has to be some kind of paper trail and I know that political contributions are not deductible.
I’d also like to know if Lindsey Graham left his little sister any congressmen and whatnot, though I’m mostly wondering what happened to her last name between the time Dear Leader had her proclaimed a Senator and a candidate for the full-time seat and the time her name appeared on the ballot for that seat.
Good thing she’s running for the Senate from South Carolina. It’s cheating to play around with names on ballots in Alaska.
And Dear Leader doesn’t put up with cheating, like recruiting bogus candidates or setting up polling places in convenient locations or letting people vote by mail or letting them vote for whoever they want to. It’s not fair!
There are a fair number of conservative voters turning against Trump, as Smith’s cartoon implies, not because of the number of people in his administration who have been forced to resign, or the sleazy ways in which his family has enriched itself, but because of the rising cost of gasoline.
Some of them will vote Republican anyway, because that’s the team with which they identify, but a fair number, while not voting for Democrats, just won’t vote at all. Even more would stay home Tuesday if they didn’t live in a silo where the news is carefully screened to make it administration-friendly.
For instance, on Fox the other night, Lara Trump recruited five typical Michigan voters to talk about why they aren’t voting for Abdul al-Sayed, and they all offered interesting reasons they were voting for Mike Rogers, though none of these typical voters on what Fox labeled a “bipartisan voter panel” thought to mention that all five were active Rogers partisans and one of them had even raised $5.7 million for his campaign.
Still, you’d think this news about company profits would have pierced the bubble:
Juxtaposition of the Day
While Joe Six-Pak was rooting under the sofa cushions for gas money to get to work, the oil companies were making record profits as the cost of crude skyrocketed because of the war with Iran.
The decision to attack Iran was bad news for Joe, and for military dependents on American bases in the Gulf, and for the young Americans killed in the war, and for US bases in the region, but it was very good news indeed for the oil companies and those who profit when they profit.
Which should raise the question of how those record profits would spread if they were applied to prices at the pump instead of prices of shares on Wall Street.
We’ll know more Tuesday night, or maybe Wednesday morning. Whatever happens, Trump will still be president, and he’ll still have veto power, but perhaps his protective bubble will have been popped.
Keep the faith.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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