→2024→08→21→Comic Strip of the Day→Editorial cartooning→CSotD: Conventional Commentary
Comic Strip of the Day Editorial cartooning

CSotD: Conventional Commentary

1 minute 13 comments

Can’t deny Scott Stantis’s observation that the Democratic Convention isn’t sticking to a tight schedule, though all reports are that people not only stuck around for Biden’s speech but delayed his speech for four or five minutes more with an ovation.

In fact, it may be that part of the scheduling issue is that they didn’t allow for applause and suchlike. First time I played at a coffeehouse, I timed out my 20 minute set without introductions or crowd reaction and went way overtime. Mostly with introductions, but my playing improved.

In any case, Stantis is right that they went long, but he’s clearly making up the part where nobody stuck around to hear Biden because there’s been plenty of reaction to his speech on social media, so not only did the convention hall stay humming but plenty of folks at home stayed tuned in, too.

I’m a non-combatant in all this, since I have to get up at 2 a.m. to write this thing each morning, so even the start of the convention is well after my bedtime. Like Will Rogers, all I know is what I read in the papers, and unlike Will Rogers, I read a lot online as well.

So far, the DNC has me feeling more like Oblio talking to the Rock Man, because as far as I can tell everybody sees what they want to see and hears what they want to hear and has a point to make.

That goes for the inside and the outside of the convention hall. For weeks, I’ve seen and heard talk about 1968, and so Bob Englehart’s cartoon isn’t much of a surprise.

I was at Chicago in 1968, but in May, not in August. There was what was supposed to be a peaceful march from Grant Park to the Picasso, but Hizzoner pulled the parade permit and then the police beat the crap out of anyone who tried to get to the plaza. It was very bloody and ugly and those who returned that summer knew what to expect.

I’ve always credited the convention with making demonstrations popular. When the Freedom Riders’ bus was firebombed and they were attacked by mobs, it wasn’t live on national TV, but the Convention was right in our livingrooms and all of a sudden demonstrations became a Thing.

What else happened about then was that the original Civil Rights protesters graduated and moved on, taking a lot of institutional memory and knowledge with them, so that the younger folks who decided demonstrations were a Thing didn’t have the base their elders had gained by having gone south to register voters and learn from the John Lewis generation.

There may be some people demonstrating in Chicago whose grandparents did the same, but only a handful. On the other hand, that may be a case of me seeing what I want to see and hearing what I want to hear.

And Englehart doing the same.

And Mike Lester (AMS) offers another subjective interpretation, which is one that even had a short shelf life on the progressive side.

The scandal over there was that the Democratic Platform repeatedly refers to Joe Biden as the nominee, which caused a ripple until cooler heads pointed out that writing, and approving, a 90-page platform is not something you do overnight. The name of their nominee changed exactly a month ago, and it would have been all but impossible to grind the wheels to a stop and reopen the bureaucratic process in time for the convention.

And foolish, since Harris was expected to continue as part of the administration. She has some of her own priorities, but she’s not an outsider who will differ in major ways from the president.

Her half-formed platform is logical, unless you are looking for conspiracies, given the unusual circumstances. Though there are those who see conspiracies in those unusual circumstances.

And in chem trails and vaccines, if they want to.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Clay Jones

Gary Varvel — Counterpoint

One of Harris’s proposals is to bring the middleclass back to a level of prosperity, which includes a program to assist them in making down payments on homes as well as an attack on profiteering by companies that raise prices beyond the needs of inflation and supply chain issues.

Jones see opposition to this as part of the MAGAt mentality that inexplicably puts them on the side of, as he puts it, Scrooge McDuck, Montgomery Burns and Uncle Pennybags. It’s an accusation with which several progressive economists, including Robert Reich, would agree.

However, Varvel has a point about price controls, because government control of businesses is part of both socialist and communist economic theory.

First of all, this strict view of the matter makes Richard Nixon a communist, since he imposed price controls during his administration, however reluctantly. And he caught hell from his own right wing over it, so it’s not totally out of bounds, though the name-calling is in dubious taste.

Second, I’ve had the advantage of sitting in on economic discussions of laissez-faire capitalism with Soviet industry heads and I promise you their system was far more all-encompassing than telling a cereal company to justify raising the price of Cheerios while shrinking the boxes.

Still, if you’re looking for communists under your bed, price controls are a clue, if not actual evidence.

Though given the way subsidies and tax breaks are gobbled down on Wall Street, Pat Bagley has plenty of justification for his “he who smelt it, dealt it” philosophy. And, yes, it’s odd to have a Red Scare coming from the same folks who admire Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban.

At least Varvel has an intelligent, if strained, point to make. Steve Kelley (Creators) resorts to schoolyard insults. It’s true that Harris — who has a doctorate in law — failed the California bar exam on her first try, but so did more than half the applicants. She uses the experience to encourage young people to have faith in themselves.

As for intelligence, the GOP’s nominee made, as Drew Sheneman points out, the inexplicable decision to infuriate a very large number of young voters by claiming that Taylor Swift had endorsed him.

Perhaps the Wharton honor graduate honestly believed this AI mockup was genuine.

Or wanted to.

Previous Post
Rhea Ripley of the WWE and of Gil Thorp
Next Post
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Comments 13

  1. There are few individuals on the planet who guard their IP and their brand more aggressively than Taylor Swift.

    I doubt she’ll sue him, because it’s not time effective, but I have every expectation that he and his campaign will suffer for this.

    1. Rule #1 of modern politics: Don’t pick a fight with pop musicians. You’ll have no chance.

      And this isn’t even Trump’s first tussle with them. Back in 2020, he got trolled by some K-Pop fans who bought all the tickets for one of his rallies. That of course proved quite humiliating for Agent Orange.

  2. There is a difference between “price controls” and regulating against price gouging. You should learn it. We already have laws against price gouging. Kamala just proposes to widen and strengthen them.

    1. It would also be good if the cartoonist understood that the last president to implement price controls was Richard Nixon, hardly a communist. In fact, Nixon cut his teeth falsely claiming there were Communists controlling the US government as part of Joe McCarthy’s House Unamerican Activities Committee.

  3. As I happens, I do know the difference between price controls and laws against price gouging, having spent several years covering business news and consumer affairs. To some extent, it’s a distinction without a difference, since any time the government tells businesses what they can charge it is controlling prices, but the price-gouging protections tend to be more precise and more situational.

    As an example, during the 1998 Ice Storm, we had some stores suddenly raise prices on generators — that’s gouging and they were prosecuted for it. I don’t recall that the law specified generators, but likely had a prohibition on boosting prices of necessary items or commodities during an emergency.

    My suspicion is that to enforce price-gouging against a whole class like “groceries” other than during, say, a hurricane would require legislation and, with that kind of broad target might cause significant pushback. There would also be an issue — with either a gouging law or price controls — over the issue of ex post facto demands for reductions.

    In my time covering such things, I saw more enforcement against fraud — deceptive advertising or bait-and-switch, etc. It’s not hard to do on a local basis but can become very complex on a national basis. Still, it’s a strong possibility, if you can prove intent.

    There’s also the issue of publicity. After the ice storm, I contacted major airlines that had a perfect right to enforce “non-refundable” ticket policies against people who no longer had spring break. What got them to change their mind was not fear of prosecution but realization of the horrible publicity which would ensue if they didn’t give in on the matter.

    This latter might be Harris’s best weapon. Sometimes you don’t need to get rough to get results.

  4. I’ll leave the comments regarding price control to others.

    Starting point :
    Take the Biden policy document in whatever Word Processor it exists, (I’m guessing Microsoft Word) and write a simple rule to replace every instance of “Joe Biden” with “Kamala Harris”. Review with the team for accuracy, then run it by editors for correctness, then ensure the candidates are on board with what it says. Delete/reword/reprioritize paragraphs as Political Advisors deem necessary — they have given it the first going over with Joe and democrat leadership. Now was that so hard ? There’s no need to redraft the whole thing starting from step one, is there ?

    1. Pretty sure the Committee of Whatever would have to approve it and they’d have to go back to their people for that. I’m equally sure that everyone on the CoW has some clause they think also ought to be changed. The “while we’re at it” factor would come into play.

    2. I’m pretty sure that no matter how many eyes proofread the auto-replaced version of the platform would have at least one reference to the Harris-Harris administration somewhere.

      A story told to us at a church secretaries’ convention years ago concerned the secretary at St. Dattashame Episcoterian Church who routinely used Replace All when updating an earlier funeral bulletin for the next one. And so it came to pass that a month after Mary Christensen’s funeral, the congregation mourning Waldo Weresford recited their credo that Jesus Christ had been “born of the blessed virgin Waldo.”

      1. Easily solved–first replace any occurrence of “Harris” with “Walz”, then replace “Biden” with “Harris”.

        Word 101.

  5. I just figure that if the rich folks’ pet economists are raising such a stink then they’ve really struck a price gouging nerve.

    1. No argument there.

  6. Here I thought that we’d all agreed that platform documents considered outdated, and unnecessary, the example being the 2020 Republican Platform, which was merely the 2016 platform document left completely as-is. This included references to the various problems of “the current administration” and “The President” while completely ignoring that they were the current administration and the President. All they did was tack on a page at the beginning saying they didn’t think it was even worth their time to bother updating it.

  7. Perhaps Harris should just take a page from the Republican’s SCOTUS Hearing Handbook.™ When she finally has a free minute from pwning Trump and goes before the press, and is asked elaborate and detailed questions about how she would react to this particular granular economic issue or her strategy for confronting that potential foreign conflict — she should shake her head and say, “sorry I couldn’t *possibly* answer a hypothetical without knowing the particulars of the case before the court.”

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.

^ Top