CSotD: Potpourri
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I usually begin my day by checking Google News to make sure I haven’t missed any important changes in the world, because I don’t want to feature a political cartoon that’s been overtaken by developments.
For instance, Delta and Coke breaking their silence on Georgia’s repressive election laws made a couple of cartoons obsolete, though I got a few Suez cartoons in hours before they freed the ship.
No such problem with John Auchter‘s cartoon, which I’d been holding since he published it a week ago. Here’s this morning’s version of the continuing story:
A week is the most I’ll hold a cartoon for use, but this one could run anytime or you could simply repeat it continuously, the political equivalent of The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day.
Except it’s a finale for real people.
As I write this, we don’t know if the latest is a random shooting or a disgruntled employee shooting, and, after all, one must keep track.
And it isn’t etiquette to shoot any one you’ve been introduced to, even if you are disgruntled, and so, as Alice says, it’s better not to be introduced to people or we shall have no mass murders at all.
Though I suppose some sort of limitations on weaponry might also … never mind, I was joking: This is America and it’s perfectly fine to shoot people you’ve been introduced to. We do it every day!
I had been planning to lead with this Ed Hall cartoon before I read the news today oh boy, because part of the sticker shock for these repairs is caused by how long we went without proper maintenance.
On a non-metaphorical level, I’m hoping one of my granddaughters will pour a substantial amount of her $1400 stimulus into her car, because she may not be able to deal financially with the here-and-there costs of an aging vehicle in the near future, even though she’s got a skilled job.
Meanwhile, on a less metaphorical level, they’re repairing several bridges in the area, which I realize is not the money Biden is dangling but that of a previous administration. Still, it’s pretty scary as they’re tearing out parts, to see what we’ve been trusting in recent years.
One of the bridges they’re working on is actually a replacement, lane by lane, that goes over the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, and it’s one of those tall ones where you either enjoy the panorama or close your eyes and cower, if you are acrophobic (and, ideally, not the driver).
I suppose there will be a lot of people who want to be first to cross the new bridge, but I think I’d rather be maybe the 2000th person to test it out, thankyouverymuch.
In any case, my granddaughter has an excuse for letting her car perhaps limp into bad condition, but there’s no excuse for anti-Biden folks to puke and mewl over the cost of maintaining our nation and its economy, given the fact that they cheerfully handed our wealthiest a major tax break that did equal damage to the deficit.
Steve Brodner is correct to salute Bernie for trying to plug the leak, and he’s right that we needn’t let Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have more money than they could spend in 100 lifetimes while others are homeless and hungry.
And I’d note that 35% is nothing: We ran it at 92% for the wealthiest Americans under Eisenhower, and I feel compelled to once again remind people that it wasn’t 92% of everything, only 92% of the tippy top portion of their income.
The point was to tax the part they probably should have been pouring back into their businesses instead of scraping off for themselves, and to thereby induce them to avoid the tax by investing in their own infrastructure and their employees.
And it worked.
It bothers me in particular to see blue-collar workers supporting the plutocrats, the poster children being the coal miners who believed those lies about restarting their industry. But all sorts of people were willing to vote for the oligarchs while they themselves were being laid off.
Maybe they don’t realize how much the jes’ plain folks on Fox and talk radio are making, but they also support fabulously wealthy TV preachers, so who knows?
So here’s another reference to classic literature, and Aesop wouldn’t have lasted 2600 years if his fables didn’t continue to reflect our world.
Jen Sorensen presents a nice takedown of the anti-trans hatemongers, in which her female character demands an explanation, and finally gets it in the last panel.
She’s right: This sudden concern for women’s sports seems a bit erratic, given all the inequities that go unaddressed.
It’s true that certain things are related to revenues, so that men who play NBA basketball should out-earn women in the WNBA by virtue of sharing the wealth they generate.
But I watched the US men’s soccer team flail against Honduras the other night, and even before they’d played themselves out of the Olympics again, I was bored and wishing I were watching the women’s team.
The women are not only better players but attract larger audiences and sell more jerseys and yet still get second-class treatment.
And on a more wiseass but penetrating level, I like what Keith Knight suggests in this K Chronicles. I kinda hope his proposals to reassign the NBA, NFL and legalized cannabis trade as reparations are sarcasm, but he’s dead right on the black sidekick issue.
I’d note that the relationship between Jack Benny and Rochester on Benny’s show, and between Rick and Sam in Casablanca, is employer/employee, with both being respectful and neither Benny nor Blaine seeming to feel any hipper for having a Black sidekick.
I go to bed early enough to have only caught snatches of the shows he scorches, but I have to turn off Ari Melber because his obsession with hiphop on a political show reminds me of the Festrunk Brothers, high-fiving their Black neighbor and then checking their hands in hopes that some if it has rubbed off.
Which was an act.
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