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Bidenomics: Inflation is at a 40-year high, and wages are growing far more slowly than prices

I am old enough to remember the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States was stuck in what some called ‘stagflation,’ with stagnant economic growth coupled with high inflation. Former Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA) used what he called the ‘misery index,’ the total of the inflation and unemployment rates to hammer President Jimmy Carter right out of office in the 1980 election.

Christopher Rugaber of the Associated Press wrote an article entitled,[1]Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title. in The Philadelphia Inquirer, U.S. inflation might have hit a 40-year high in January: Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, saying:

    Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, according to data provider FactSet. That would be up from a 7.1% year-over-year pace in December and would mark the biggest such increase since February 1982.

Well, the unnamed economists got it wrong: it was 7.5%!

    Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation’s fastest pace in 40 years

    High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House

    By Rachel Siegel and Andrew Van Dam | Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 8:32 AM EST

    Photo at closest gas station to my house, taken on February 2, 2022.

    Prices continued their upward march in January, rising by 7.5 percent compared with the same period a year ago, the fastest pace in 40 years.

    Inflation was expected to climb relative to last January, when the economy reeled from a winter coronavirus surge with no widespread vaccines. Today’s new high inflation rate reflects all the accumulated price gains, in gasoline and other categories, built up in a tumultuous 2021.

    In the shorter term, data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed prices rose 0.6 percent in January compared with December, same as the November to December inflation rate, which officials revised upward slightly.

    As with previous months, higher prices reached into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else.

There’s more at the original.

That photo, taken by me on Groundhog Day? On Tuesday, February 8th, 87 Octane regular gasoline was up to $3.259 per gallon locally.

President Reagan, who defeated President Carter by a large margin, saw the Republican Party lose a significant number of seats in the 1982 elections as inflation remained high and recession struck.

    Sharp inflation has undermined an otherwise robust recovery. The economy has rebounded remarkably since plunging into recession almost two years ago. Over the past 12 months, the U.S. economy has added nearly 7 million jobs and average hourly earnings have climbed 5.7 percent. The overall economy has shown relative resilience to new waves of the coronavirus, and stocks have bounced back from their volatile start to 2022.

If wages have risen 5.7%, but inflation is at 7.5%, it’s pretty simple: American workers are falling behind, are becoming poorer in relative terms.

    High inflation has left an indelible mark on the economy, including the highest price increases for housing, food and energy that many workers have ever seen. And questions loom about how or whether policymakers will be able to rein prices back in without slowing the recovery or even causing another recession. The answers will have enormous implications for policymakers at the Federal Reserve and in the Biden administration.

That has always been the problem, and was a large part of the problem that faced Presidents Carter and Reagan; the halting of inflation meant a recession.

The timing is different this year: we are not in a recession, but if there is one, after the elections, and it persists into 2023 and 2024, it could encourage the voters to throw the Democrats out of the White House. The Republicans will point out that the economy was strong, with very low inflation, during President Trump’s term, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and the government’s draconian response to it, much of it ordered by state governors rather than the President.

The President doesn’t really control the economy — no one does — but he normally gets either the credit for a good economy or the blame for a bad one. Come election day, I will be very happy to see Joe Biden get the blame for a bad economy!

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↑1 Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title.
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“This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

We have written previously about the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender’ women’s swimmer, Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia.”[1]In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading Now the New York Post has printed a story from an unnamed teammate of Mr Thomas’:

That part is incorrect: Mr Thomas, was according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” During the 2019-20 season, he “won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” That is competitive, if not exactly dominant.

    The anonymous female swimmer gave an interview to the Washington Examiner on Sunday — a day after Thomas, 22, racked up two more wins at a meet against Ivy League rival Harvard University.

    She railed against the NCAA for not acknowledging Thomas had a distinct advantage and accused the board of governors of “not protecting women’s rights.”

    “Women are now third-class citizens,” the swimmer told the outlet.

    “Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100 [freestyle events]. But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and the 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn’t good at as a man.”

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

Mr Thomas’ times have been gradually slowing, so much so that there have been suspicions that he has slowed down deliberately, still winning, but by much smaller margins.

But there’s an obvious question here: who is this unidentified female teammate? There are a couple dozen real women on the UPenn team, and it could have been any of them, but I’ve noticed a pattern here: the stories are all broken by the same two outlets, the Washington Examiner, a conservative website, and OutKick. OutKick said:

    While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out.

Those are reasonable concerns for the teammate, but I have to wonder: has it always been the same teammate who has been the source for these stories? This has sort of jumped out at me as I have read these stories.

But one part of the New York Post story cited above really jumped out at me, a quote from this anonymous woman, who said, “This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

That’s absolutely right: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? I have asked that second question before, and no one has been able to give me an answer.

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↑1 In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex, not their imagined “gender.” When using Twitter to publicize my stories, I have sometimes had to refer to him as ‘Lia’ to avoid getting banned for ‘deadnaming’ or ‘misgendering’.
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The sweetness and light Joe Biden has brought to Philadelphia

January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th President of the United States, was certainly a busy one on the streets of Philadelphia: five people were murdered in the City of Brotherly Love that day, making a total of 32 for the first twenty days of 2021.

Of course, as we’ve previously noted, 2021 was a banner year, a gold medal winning year, for Philly, as it not only beat the previous homicide record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, but smashed it, destroyed it, completely obliterated it, with 562 souls being sent early to their eternal rewards last year.

Joe Biden was supposed to ring in a new era of good feelings for everyone, after four years of the evil, reich-wing Donald Trump. But somehow, some way, that’s not what the numbers say. From January 20, 2020, to January 20, 2021, President Trump’s last year in office, there were 497 homicides in Philadelphia; from January 20, 2021 to January 20, 2022, there have been 564 killings in the city.

What else has changed? The Mayor, the District Attorney, and the Police Commissioner are all the same people.[1]Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had … Continue reading The Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, is the same. The state legislature has been controlled by the same party throughout. The gun control laws, always a bugaboo for city officials, were all the same.

But hey, President Biden showed up on Sunday, January 16th, the day before Martin Luther King Day, to help pack 27-pound boxes of food at Philabundance food bank!

The only difference was the amount of blood flowing in the city’s mean streets.

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References
↑1 Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had resigned on August 20, 2019, following allegations of sexual harassment and racial and gender discrimination within the department.
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There’s no threat quite like an empty threat!

President Joe Biden didn’t do too well in his recent news conference, leading the White House to issue a clarification on his statements about possible Russian ‘incursions’ into Ukraine. From The Washington Post:

    Biden insists U.S. won’t accept a ‘minor incursion’ by Russia into Ukraine after remarks drew criticism

    by Amy B Wang | Thursday, January 20, 2022 | 8:42 AM EST | Updated: 12:19 PM EST

    President Biden insisted Thursday that the United States would not accept even a “minor incursion” of Ukraine by Russia, as the White House continued efforts to clarify Biden’s remarks Wednesday suggesting that it might.

    “I’ve been absolutely clear with President [Vladimir] Putin. He has no misunderstanding: Any, any assembled Russian units move across the Ukrainian border, that is an invasion,” Biden told reporters Thursday at the start of a White House event on infrastructure.

    Such an invasion would be met with a “severe and coordinated economic response,” Biden added, noting that those consequences have been “laid out very clearly for President Putin.”

    “Let there be no doubt at all: If Putin makes this choice, Russia will pay a heavy price,” Biden said.

    In the second news conference of his presidency Wednesday, Biden said he expected Russia to take some sort of action to “move in” and invade Ukraine and that the U.S. response “depends on what it does.”

There’s much more at the original.

I’d like to think that I am not the only one who remembers how President Barack Obama, and the rest of the NATO leaders, breathed a collective sigh of relief in 2014 that Ukraine had declined an offer of NATO membership when President Viktor Yanukovych came to power following 2010 elections. Mr Yanukovych was more closely aligned with Russia, and was deposed in 2014 Maiden revolution, but Ukraine was still not a NATO member when President Putin sent the tanks rolling into eastern Ukraine, and annexed Crimea.

The North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an attack on any member nation is an attack on them all, and the last thing any of the NATO leaders wanted was to go to war against nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine.

And let’s tell the truth here: the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, along with Poland, had to have taken notice: if the NATO leaders were so relieved that they didn’t have to fight Russia over the 2014 invasion, they wouldn’t want to fight Russia if Vladimir Vladimirovich sent the tanks rolling into their countries, either.

    “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera,” Biden said. “But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force they’ve massed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine.”

    Biden was swiftly criticized for appearing to give a green light to Russia to attack Ukraine as long as it didn’t amount to a full-scale invasion. Soon after, the White House issued a statement seeking to clarify Biden’s comments, saying that if Russia sends its forces across the border, it will be met with “a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our allies.”

Yeah, uh huh, right?

    Putin’s gas weaponization hits a hot spot in Berlin

    Germany is pumping Russian gas back into Poland as Gazprom cuts supply to the EU. As Russia plays its hybrid war games with an increasingly divided EU, the new front appears to be the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline.

    by Jo Harper | December 28, 2021

    Yamal-Europe, Europe’s longest gas pipeline, usually transports Russian natural gas overland to — rather than from — Germany. Now it has spent the last week sending mainly Russian gas from Germany back to Poland. The purpose? To meet a shortfall as temperatures drop to -10 degrees Celsius (14 F) and Russia cuts gas supplies.

    Observers have warned that Russian President Vladmir Putin could use energy as a weapon should the troubled gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 (NS2) go ahead. He is, in fact, already doing so.

    On December 21, Russia halted the supply of gas via Yamal-Europe, immediately spooking markets. The wholesale price in the benchmark Dutch TTF contract for January deliveries rocketed to €160 ($185) from €100 on December 9. High gas demand in Asia is also fed the spike in prices. Consumers in Europe will feel some of the increases in 2022, adding to rapidly rising inflation there.

    According to the Germany Network Agency, two-thirds of the gas imported into Germany comes from Russia and former Soviet countries via the Yamal pipeline, which runs across Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany. Its capacity is 32.9 billion cubic meters of gas per year. In 2020, 23% of Russian gas reached Germany via Belarus and Poland along its 4,107-km (2,552-mi) length.

    Worryingly, the gas price on futures markets is also rising. January 2023 prices are up to €90 per megawatt hour, a clear signal that the market expects European gas supplies to be low by the end of this winter and that little gas will come from Russia over the summer to replenish supplies before winter next year.

There’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: it’s the middle of January, the coldest part of the winter, and if Mr Putin decides to shut off the flow of gas to Europe, the Europeans will knuckle under; none of the NATO leaders want to see their people freeze this winter. And Russia loses leverage every day that passes toward warmer weather.

It doesn’t matter what threats President Biden makes to somehow hold President Putin accountable; it’s the Russian who holds the hammer here. No one wants to go to war over Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin knows that just as well as anyone else.

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Why Are Capitol Police Arresting Protesters?

OK, they’re Very Stupid people, but,  regardless of my opinion of their politics, they are engaged in their 1st Amendment Right to protest peaceably and petition for redress of grievance. On the steps of the U.S. Capitol, pretty much the main point of those provisions. Protesting government. Especially Congress.

There’s a quote at the top of my blog saying “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all,” which is, interestingly, from super-leftist Noam Chomsky (who doesn’t really practice what he says). Perhaps it should be “If we don’t believe in the 1st Amendment for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” Who are they bothering? Are they really doing anything but sitting there and singing and calling out? And freezing, but, that’s their problem. Let them protest. If I was in D.C. I’d be tempted to go sit with them just to get arrested and say “I don’t agree with them, but, they have the Right to do this.”

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The Philadelphia Inquirer props up transgender swimmer Will Thomas

I was surprised to see that The Philadelphia Inquirer allowed reader comments on this article. Since it is, supposedly, a sports article, and the Inquirer didn’t close sports articles to comments when they did so on everything else, maybe an editor hasn’t figured it out yet. As I start this article, at 9:10 AM, there are ten comments up, including two of mine; I wonder how long that will last.

    Lia Thomas swims on for Penn amid controversy

    Lia Thomas competed at home for last time in her Penn swimming career.

    by Scott Lauber | Saturday, January 8, 2022

    Penn swimmer Lia Thomas waits before competing in the 500m free race during a meet at UPenn’s Sheerr Pool in Philadelphia on Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022. Thomas is a transgender athlete who is among the nation’s top swimmers in her events. Photo by Heather Khalifa, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer. Click to enlarge.

    In the final home meet of her college career Saturday, Penn swimmer Lia Thomas won two freestyle races and continued along a path to the NCAA championships in March.

    And that would have been the end of the story except for this: Thomas is a transgender woman who is defeating most of her competition.

    So, as Thomas swung her right arm and touched the wall 1.47 seconds before Penn teammate Anna Kalandadze to win the 500-yard freestyle in a tri-meet against Yale and Dartmouth (Yale won the team competition), two female protesters held a “Stand Up 4 Women” sign on the sidewalk on Walnut Street and shouted about an unfair competitive advantage and a tilted playing field – or in this case, Sheerr Pool.

I do not normally like to include photos from the Inquirer, over plagiarism and copyright points, but this one falls under obvious Fair Use guidelines, in that it illustrates the point: does this swimmer look like a woman to you?

There are three other photos of the swimmer in the Inquirer article. The first is mostly unrevealing, but the second and the third show Will Thomas — The First Street Journal always refers to the transgendered by their real names and biologically appropriate pronouns — next to the women in the UPenn swim team, and the differences are obvious; Stevie Wonder could see that he isn’t a woman.

I did have to craft my two comments to not refer to Mr Thomas by his real first name or use the real gender pronoun to escape probable deletion. I asked:

    Did Thomas purposely drag out times to win, but not by so much? In the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio, the one which attracted the greatest attention due to the staggering difference in times, Thomas won the 500- yard freestyle event in 4:34.06 to 4:48.99 for second-place finisher Anna Kalandaze, a 14.93 second margin. Thomas’ time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500-yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Kalandaze’s second-place time.

For someone used to writing in a more formal style, that paragraph is painful, as is my second comment:

    Several articles have noted that Thomas’ wins have been met with crowd silence, while the second-place touches of cis-women swimmers have been greeted with loud cheers. It may be politically correct to assert that the transgendered are the sex they claim to be, but, at least in the natatorium, the crowds appear to see it differently.

    I note that Scott Lauber, the article author, was very consistent in using the name “Lia” and the feminine pronouns to refer to Thomas. I know, I know: that’s the Associated Press’, and the Inquirer’s, stylebook, but it’s a subtle attempt to slant the debate in the politically correct direction.

Doing such is the telling of a deliberate lie — and Mr Lauber knows full well that Mr Thomas isn’t a real woman, but in a newsroom full of the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading he can’t say anything unless he has another job lined up — to push the politically correct notion of gender transition. Every bird, every mammal, and every reptile, can distinguish between males and females of their own species, but somehow, today’s left have educated that ability right out of themselves.

I am shocked that the Inquirer is even allowing such a discussion; none of the readers comments that exist as of the time of this writing accept the notion that Mr Thomas is a woman, and everyone sees the basic unfairness of allowing someone who went completely through puberty, and was fully developed as a male, to just decide he’s female and compete against female athletes in sex-segregated sports.

That’s just basic common sense, but common sense is in very short supply when it comes to the left and their acceptance that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

References

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↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Well, wahhh! Outgoing Governor Ralph Northam is upset because people are blaming him!

As soon as the Virginia highway shutdown became news, the left were out blaming Glenn Youngkin, who won the election last November.

But, oops! Mr Youngkin won’t take office until January 15th. That’s amusing enough in itself, but now Governor Northam is upset that people are criticizing him!

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam says he’s ‘sick and tired’ of his government being criticized for the I-95 traffic pileup that left hundreds stranded for hours

by John L Dorman | Saturday, January 8, 2022

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said Wednesday he was “sick and tired” of hearing criticism of “what went wrong” during the recent snowstorm that left hundreds of people stranded for hours on Interstate 95, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

During an interview on WRVA, a Richmond-area radio station, reporter Matt Demlein asked Northam about any updates in assessing how the huge transportation backlog transpired, especially as many were stuck in their vehicles with limited heat, minimal food options, and frigid outdoor temperatures.

The Democratic governor — who is term-limited and will leave office on January 15 — forcefully rejected the line of questioning about the incident, which made nationwide headlines.

“I don’t know why you’re sitting there saying, ‘what went wrong?'” Northam said. “This was a storm that we haven’t seen for a long time. It started with rain, and then turned into a slushy snow of eight to ten inches … more than what was predicted. And then after midnight, turned into essentially an ice rink.” . . . .
“We knew that the storm was coming. We put warnings out. Why don’t you start asking some of these individuals that were out on the highway for hours, one, did you know about the storm? Two, why did you feel it was so important to drive through such a snowstorm?” Northam said. “And three, in hindsight, do you think maybe you should have stayed home or wherever you were, rather than getting out on Interstate 95?

All of those tractor-trailers? They didn’t have a choice: it’s their job to deliver their loads, on time. The other people? Some of them doubtlessly had little choice. But Mr Northam is going to blame them.

You know, in some ways, he’s right: the Commonwealth was not prepared for the type of storm which hits the Old Dominion once in a blue moon, and it’s not really reasonable for the state to spend the money to prepare for something that rare.

But the reality is that he’s Governor of Virginia now because he asked for the job, told people he could do the job, and said that he was the man they should make responsible for running the Commonwealth. Someone who once held higher office once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” The chief executives love to take credit for things when they go right, even if they weren’t actually the ones making things go right. They also get the blame when things go wrong, and things have gone wrong enough in Virginia that not only did Mr Youngkin defeat Democrat Terry McAuliffe, but Virginia voters flipped the state House of Delegates from Democrat to Republican control.

Time for him to get out of the kitchen.

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Charlotte ex-patriot aghast to find “Let’s go, Brandon” bumper sticker in North Carolina

My good friend William Teach alerted me to this article via a tweet:

From The Charlotte Observer, yet another McClatchy newspaper:

    There’s a real danger behind the juvenile ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ meme

    by Peter Horn | Friday, January 7, 2022 | 4:30 AM EST

    Back in Charlotte for the holidays, I was out on a walk when I noticed my parents’ neighbor’s truck. It’s a big truck. White, newish, plastered with bumper stickers in dense but ordered rows — mostly political, some football-related. Among many others was “Mean Tweets 2024” and “Let’s Go Brandon.”

    This, from a purportedly serious man. A grown-up by most senses of the word, likely born in the 1950s. A man with grown children of his own, a respectable career, two bowls of water by his mailbox for passing dogs and a nativity set in the front yard.

    I stopped and stared for a moment, wondering, how did we get here?

Much of the author’s dismay can be found in his bio at the bottom of the article:

    Peter Horn is a Charlotte native and a southern ex-pat for the greater part of the last decade. He currently lives in San Francisco and works as an investor and freelance writer.

Oh, he’s a native of Charlotte, but lives in ‘Frisco!

Also see: William Teach in The Pirate’s Cove: There’s A Real Danger In #LetsGoBrandon Or Something

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden carried the Pyrite State by a huge margin, 11,110,250 (63.48%) to President trump’s 6,006,429 (34.32%), but it was even worse in San Francisco, where Mr Biden won 378,156 (85.26%) to 56,417 (12.72%). Mr Horn was apparently never so triggered[1]In this, I am using the Urban Dictionary’s definition: “1.) *popular and well known definition* triggered is when someone gets offended or gets their feelings hurt, often used in memes to … Continue reading as he was when visiting his parents, because there probably aren’t a lot of “Let’s go, Brandon!” stickers seen around the feces-covered sidewalks and streets of the City by the Bay. While Mr Biden carried Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, by a wide margin, 378,107 (66.68%) to 179,221 (31.60%), Mr Trump carried the Tarheel State as a whole, 2,758,775 (49.93%) to 2,684,292 (48.59%). Hey, you go to Carolina, and you’re likely to see Trump stickers and signs!

    I don’t mean the polarization. How did we reach this level of absurdity, where ”serious people” are comfortable putting thinly veiled ”F— Joe Biden bumper stickers on their trucks, like a group of 12-year-old boys snickering over walkie-talkies because surely Mom and Dad don’t know that word really means penis.

Well, it’s certainly one way to express one’s feelings about the current President without resorting to actual profanity. But if Mr Horn has been triggered, maybe it’s because he left his safe space on the left coast.

    For those unfamiliar with “Let’s Go Brandon,” it’s a viral slogan that’s coded criticism of President Joe Biden. It started when an NBC Sports reporter suggested fans at an Oct. 2 Talladega race were chanting “Let’s Go Brandon” during an interview with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown. They weren’t. They were actually chanting “F— Joe Biden.”

    It’s all just so juvenile. So pathetic.

One wonders: was Mr Horn similarly appalled at this, from his adopted home state?

    Hundreds of Artists Have Come Together to Say ‘Fuck Trump’
    Los Angeles gallery iam8bit launched the ongoing virtual exhibit on the President’s birthday

    By Liz Ohanesian -June 17, 2020

    On Sunday, June 14, the Echo Park-based creative production studio and art gallery iam8bit launched fucktrump.art, a hybrid virtual exhibition and protest where all of the works read “Fuck Trump” and are available to download for free as web and print resolution files so that anyone can share the message online or IRL.

    The date of the launch was significant—it was Donald Trump’s birthday and Flag Day, as well as a day often used to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride—and the message was strong. Jon M. Gibson and Amanda White, co-founders of iam8bit, describe it as a “primal scream.”

    “It’s like punctuation for us at this point,” says White of the phrase “Fuck Trump,” adding that their hope is for “everyone who disagrees with the administration to be comfortable screaming it at the top of their lungs.”

Google search for “Fuck Trump signs” and you’ll get hundreds of images. But, perhaps for Mr Horn, that’s different somehow.

    But as I found myself thinking more about it, trying to find an historical parallel for this intersection of creeping illiberalism and giant oversized red shoes, it struck me how dangerous this moment in time really is.

    Because every minute spent shaking one’s head at the latest display of self-debasement by the GOP is a minute not spent on the insidious machinations behind the veil. Save for a few notable exceptions — who are currently being driven out of the party with pitchforks and tiki torches — in 2022 Republicanism is Trumpism.

You can follow the embedded link to read the rest, but it boils down to one thing: Mr Horn was using his sight of a “Let’s go, Brandon” bumper sticker primarily as the supposedly snappy beginning for his complaint that evil reich wing Republicans are trying to prevent legal voters from voting. No, we want legal voters to vote, but we want to restrict the ability of the left for cast fraudulent votes. I may have mocked him for his supposed triggering, but I doubt he actually was triggered; he just needed a starting hook for what he wanted to write.

Mr Horn suffers from a kind of denialism: he really can’t believe that other people would think differently from him, that other people might take different choices than he would. That’s not an uncommon problem for much of the American left.

References

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↑1 In this, I am using the Urban Dictionary’s definition: “1.) *popular and well known definition* triggered is when someone gets offended or gets their feelings hurt, often used in memes to describe feminist, or people with strong victimization.”
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High water!

SSG Pico bought tickets for her and me to see the Oakland — never Las Vegas! — Raiders play the Baltimore Indianapolis Colts today, but the one road in or out from our farm is underwater. Our place isn’t in any danger; even the record flood of a guesstimated 41.00-foot crest didn’t get in the house, though it did get in the garage and crawlspace.

But we have sparktricity, propane, food, water and internet, so life is still good.

There has been some flooding damage in Madison County, but we don’t live in Madison.