CSotD: Mundane Monday Matters

There have been a lot of cartoons about Joe Manchin and coal this holiday season, including this piece from Jeff Danziger (WPWG), which dropped on Friday, before he made his stunning announcement that he would not support the Build Back Better proposal.

The “lump of coal” motif is so common this time of year that it tends to float by, despite the way it actually fits in this particular case. Danziger is direct in tying Manchin’s coal holdings to his voting record, which makes this cartoon stand out.

BTW, making blockbuster announcements over the weekend is a good way to duck the cartoonists. Few of them work weekends, and even if they do, the people in their distribution streams don’t. It’s likely that tomorrow will bring a flood of cartoons about Manchin’s defection, but the shock will have dissipated significantly.

Add in the holiday break, and he’s built in a pretty good buffer.

The Washington Post has a good breakdown of what happened and how the White House has responded, and I don’t think you’ll run into their paywall if you click here.

 

For a more amusing take, here’s a Don Winslow video, which he made before Manchin dropped his opposition to the infrastructure bill. It’s still interesting as a backgrounder on a Democratic Senator in a deep Red State who drives a Maserati and lives on a yacht, while the people he ostensibly represents live far less privileged lives.

The Squad is furious that the Administration unbundled the two bills, trusting Manchin to deal fairly with each, but we don’t live in a binary world, and the fact that one approach proved wrong does not mean theirs was right.

Still, it’s reminiscent of the early days of the Obama administration, in which he tried to be bipartisan and wound up mired in politics, accomplishing little and losing his Congressional majority in the midterms.

Which is not intended as a prophecy, only a warning.

One that brings us to this

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Non Sequitur – AMS)

 

(Bill Bramhall)

 

(Paul Szep – AMS)

Given that Wiley Miller works on a comic stripper’s lead time, Non Sequitur qualifies as a bit of a prophecy. The Jan 6 Committee and others are, no doubt, already hearing the impact of memory loss, while, if they extend immunity to those inclined to take the Fifth, they’ll certainly encounter even more.

Bramhall tests the sincerity of those who, confronted with clear evidence, fail to see it. It may be that we have an entire political party that — with the exception of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — shares a mental condition with OJ Simpson, in which they have convinced themselves of their innocence, even if the evidence clearly shows their guilt.

In OJ’s case, it was not necessary to override the evidence, but only to play upon the jury’s intense desire to believe in his innocence. Ditto here.

Szep fills in the rest, but’s hard to reason with MAGAts, in part because an entire network exists to lie in their faces and tell them comforting stories they want to hear, but also because we’ve become so fragmented that people only see and hear what they want to see and hear.

We have clear, irrefutable evidence that Fox personalities knew who was guiding the insurrection and appealed to Mark Meadows and other administration officials to restore calm, but then went on the air and accused BLM and antifa of storming the Capitol waving Trump banners.

But it’s pointless to argue something on Fox that will convince MSNBC followers because they won’t see it, and it’s equally difficult for Rachel Maddow to sway people who never watch her show.

Which makes me wonder how many Germans were suspicious of that alleged attack on the radio station, how many sincerely accepted the report, and how many just wanted an excuse to invade Poland.

 

As John Cole puts it, Fox lied. It’s clear they lied. That’s not an opinion; it’s a demonstrable fact.

But who will even see that evidence?

And, of those who see it, how many will lay aside their established belief?

 

Jen Sorensen is more optimistic than I am at the moment.

It gives me hope.

 

Meanwhile, Dana Summers (Tribune) puts spin on a pair of developments: People are getting pay increases, particularly at the lower levels, but we are experiencing inflation.

Summers is right that inflation will eat away some of those gains, but this seems less like detailed financial analysis and more like an attempt to downplay a bit of good news in favor of maintaining resentment.

BTW, if you have a fixed-rate mortgage or car loan, inflation is good news, because that payment is proportionally less today than it was a year ago.

 

I did get a laff out of this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereals roasting of financial reporters who link particular events to particular market swings.

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: Financial reporters declare that recall of a nail fungus drug has sent the markets into free-fall and nervous investors begin to bail out and, when a stock price hits a particular point, it triggers automatic “sell” orders and down we go further.

Then someone reports that parliamentary elections in Ruritania have made investors giddy, and up we go to where we were before that whole nail-fungus debacle.

I’ve heard that Real Journalists object to having to give market standings at the end of each radio wrap-up, but they still do it and the Dow and NASDAQ still like having their bellies scratched.

The NFL Network has begun countering major sponsorships by sports betting companies with a PSA that reminds people not to bet more than they can afford to lose. This is related to beer commercials that end by telling you to drink responsibly.

Maybe they should end the stock market report with a reminder not to put more than 10 percent of the baby’s college fund into nail-fungus treatments or Ruritanian bonds.

I heard one of those stories on the radio about a guy who started with a hairpin and swapped it around until he ended up with a house.

Geez. One honest transaction and he’d have been out of business.