Cagle World

We all know that MAGA 2.0 Ayatollah Ron DeSantis takes a strong interest in what gets taught in Florida schools. But now that Hurricane Ian has wreaked virtually unprecedented havoc on the west side of his state, it’s time for him to sit in a class and get schooled on the basics of science.

Lesson One: Human folly is driving climate change, and climate change is making hurricanes more severe. That’s because warm tropical waters – the primary source of fuel for hurricanes – are warmer than ever. And that’s because those waters are absorbing most of the extra heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, ambient air temperatures are also rising, which means the air can hold more water vapor.

Translation: Humans are warming the seas, the warmer seas make the air warmer, the warmer air triggers more precipitation… it’s basic science, not rocket science.

But DeSantis is deaf to reality and on record denouncing climate change as “left-wing stuff.” When asked last December whether his state should take steps to fight climate change – by, say, encouraging green technology and cutting carbon emissions – his answer was: “We’re not doing any left-wing stuff.”

Actually, it’s been clear for nearly a decade that even the Pentagon believes in “left-wing stuff.” A 2014 Pentagon report warned: “As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating.” That report was preceded by a 2013 U.S. Energy Department report that linked human-based climate change to the increasing frequency of “more intense storm events,” and that report was preceded by a 2012 insurance industry report that linked human-based climate change to a growing pattern of “intense precipitation events.” Indeed, the insurance industry said, “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.”

The reports are too numerous to mention. Last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, after studying satellite images dating back to 1979, concluded that human-driven climate change has made hurricanes far more destructive. In the words of NOAA lead author James Kossin, “The trend is there and it is real. There’s this remarkable body of evidence that we’re making these storms more deleterious.”

But alas, Florida is a red state condemned to consequences. And its flat-earth Republicans have long been determined to keep it that way.

When Senator Marco Rubio was asked eight years ago whether he agreed with the scientific consensus that human-driven climate change was real, he told ABC News: “I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists…What they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and solely attributable to man-made activity…I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”

Rubio’s Senate colleague is Rick Scott. When Scott was the governor of Florida, his favorite tactic, when asked about climate change, was to simply say, “I’m not a scientist.” Which meant that he had no intention of listening to scientists. He applauded Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. He also reportedly banned the phrases “global warming” and “climate change” from state documents and websites. He also signed a law that allows any Florida resident to file a legal complaint if a school in that resident’s county teaches climate change.

Scott was rewarded by the voters, who made him a senator. DeSantis is up for re-election in November, and is expected to win. Rubio is up for re-election in November is expected to win. Floridians – including those currently swimming inside their homes – have gotten the governance they wanted.

But fear not, Floridians. Your governor is now an instant socialist, pleading for disaster relief dollars from the federal government he routinely derides. And he’ll get whatever help he needs, because the current president doesn’t malign states that didn’t vote for him, or throw paper towels, or try to redraw the path of hurricanes with a Sharpie.

Oh, one other thing: Did I forget to mention that when DeSantis was a member of the U.S. House, he voted against sending federal relief aid to New Jersey and New York in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy?

Sorry for that oversight. We’re done here.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

We’ve long been exposed to Don the Con’s superpowers, his ability to scam millions of presumably sane Americans and make them think his bullcrap doesn’t stink. But this week in an “exclusive” appearance on Faux News, he announced that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Turns out, he’s telepathic! He’s telepathic like you wouldn’t believe. Very stable telepathy. Everybody is coming up to him with tears in their eyes and saying, “Sir? Nobody else has ever been more very stable telepathic.”

Who knows, maybe his untapped superpowers are so potent that at some point he’ll simply launch himself airborne and land in a country with no extradition treaty. It may come to that.

Wednesday night, our desperate thief-in-chief was gutted like a fish on a slab by three federal appeals court judges (two of them, his own appointees), who ruled unanimously that the temporarily-halted FBI probe into his theft of national security documents can now resume with all deliberate speed. I need not bother explain what that halt was all about – it was just Trump trying to gum up the legal machinery, as usual.

Here’s the relevant gist: Trump claimed he’d declassified everything he stole, but the three appeals judges shrugged that off, the same way you’d flick a fly off your forearm.

The judges wrote: “[Trump] suggests that he may have declassified those documents when he was president. But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified. And before the special master, [Trump] resisted providing any evidence that he had declassified any of these documents.” And it doesn’t matter if he declassified anything or not; the judges called that issue “a red herring.” They pointed out that all the documents he stole are “owned by, produced by, or…under the control of the United States government.”

But Trump still doesn’t grasp that bottom-line fact. He’s all hung up on the red herring. And that’s where his superpowers come into play. He explained it to lapdog Sean Hannity:

“It doesn’t have to be a process [to declassify], as I understand it. Different people say different things, but as I understand it there doesn’t have to be. If you’re president of the United States you can declassify just by saying ‘It’s declassified,’ even by thinking about it. Because you’re sending it, to Mar-a-Lago or wherever you’re sending it, and it doesn’t have to be a process.”

Even by thinking about it…Did Obi-Don Kenobi learn that Jedi mind trick from Yoda?

Or is he channeling Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent?

I have so many questions. If a lame duck president can declassify documents in his mind merely by thinking it, would it not also be true that Joe Biden, the current president, can reclassify those documents merely by using his mind to think it, which would mean that the ex-prexy got caught with classified documents?

If a president can merely tap his noggin to classify or declassify anything he fancies, without anyone knowing what’s going on his head, how do people with high security clearances know whether the documents to which they have access are classified or declassified?

Wait, I think I get it: He uses his mind to declassify the documents (thus lowering their value, because he thinks it might stave off an indictment), but when he’s ready to sell the documents to Saudi Arabia or Russia or God knows who, he uses his mind to reclassify them (thus raising their value to fetch a higher price). Which is basically what the New York attorney general’s office, in Wednesday’s historic lawsuit, says he’s been doing for years – inflating his assets, with illegal fakery, for ill-gotten financial gain.

OK, enough tongue in cheek. This is a very sick puppy who’s terrified that the walls are closing in, which is why his latest con is so telepathic. Maybe he was auditioning an insanity defense.

But if he did train with Yoda, it’s clear that he ignored one of the little dude’s sternest warnings: “Once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny.”

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Those of us who have long tuned to CNN can’t say we weren’t warned.

Incoming CEO Chris Licht decreed on Aug. 19 that “this is a time for significant change” at the news network, “and you might not understand it or like it.”

Thus began his reign as a Trump Lichtspittle.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what’s going on at CNN; nor do its freaked out employees, one of whom told The Washington Post that the new brooms “seem to be sending a message, ‘Watch what you say, watch what you do.’” But some facts are indisputable. Licht has been signaling that he wants CNN to be more “objective” and more “respectful of differing viewpoints.” His overlords at the parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery – especially bigwig Trump donor John Malone – say that they want CNN to be more “neutral,” or, in Malone’s words, “more centrist.”

It doesn’t take a genius to decode that corporate gobbledygook.

So I’ve got to ask: With the future of American democracy in serious peril, how is the free press supposed to be “neutral”? Is there really some magic “centrist” midpoint between defending democracy and destroying it? At an historic moment when free elections are literally under assault, should the free press twist itself in knots to be “respectful” of those who are plotting the assault?

Licht dropped his first bomb in mid-August when he fired Brian Stelter, the host of Sunday morning’s “Reliable Sources.” Stelter, who still had time left on his contract, was well known for refusing to indulge “both sides” nonsense. In his final on-air appearance he stated: “It’s not ‘partisan’ to stand up for decency and democracy…It’s not ‘partisan’ to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.”

And one of his guests, Carl Bernstein, weighed in thusly: “The truth is not neutral…Donald Trump is a serial liar…The bottom line has to be the best attainable version of the truth, and the truth is not neutral. As yourself a question, is a lynching ‘neutral’? It’s not neutral.”

But the piece de resistance was articulated last week by veteran White House correspondent John Harwood. It was Harwood’s last day at CNN, because he was abruptly fired with time still left on his contract. He had apparently unnerved the new CNN higher-ups with his straightforward reports that the sky is blue and the earth is round and that there aren’t two sides to those truths. And for his final “stand up” outside the White House, assessing President Biden’s speech about the dangers of MAGA Republicans, the veteran journalist (previously at The Wall Street Journal and CNBC) unloaded both barrels:

“The core point (Biden) made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true. Now, that’s something that’s not easy for us, as journalists to say. We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with two different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest agreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not honest disagreements. The Republican party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue. Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election and other things as well. And a significant portion – or a sufficient portion – of the constituency that they’re leading attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. Violently. By offering pardons or suggesting pardons for those people who violently attacked the Capitol…Donald Trump made Joe Biden’s point for him.”

The Republican party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue. Is that mere opinion that warrants rebuttal the “other side”? Or is that a statement of objective reality?

The new bosses at CNN apparently believe there’s more money to be made, via higher ratings, if they re-brand themselves as something akin to Fox News lite. To put it charitably, that is a foolish decision – especially now, when most Americans now agree that MAGA is a threat to democracy. It’s stupid to buck mainstream public opinion.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: When one political party openly declares that it no longer believes in democracy, when indeed it is working non-stop to destroy it, honest journalists cannot take refuge in “neutrality.” Because in a national civic emergency, journalists need to be pro-democracy and pro-truth.

That is not bias. That is patriotism.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This one is worth a stint in jail.

Trump’s sweat-soaked defenders are freaking out about a FBI photo of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago and fumbling for fresh rationalizations – they say it’s “staged” and “dishonest.”

Meanwhile, the thief-in-chief is veritably chewing his grandiose carpet about the way “his” top-secret documents were treated during the Aug. 8 search: “They (FBI agents) took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them. They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving.”

Why are they all so upset? Because they respect – and, in this case, they fear – the power of the visual image. Because now the average American who has no time to read abstruse court filings can measure the depth of Trump’s crimes with merely a glance.

Psychologists have long concluded that humans are far more likely to remember something they see, as opposed to what they read or hear. Historians have long noted that even Cicero, the legendary Roman orator, brought visual props to enhance his eloquent speeches. But we need not reference ancient history. Richard Nixon “lost” the 1960 presidential debates in part because his TV makeup made him look more haggard than JFK. Mike Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic candidate, was forever branded as a dork because he looked diminutive while riding in a military tank.

The late French philosopher Jacques Ellul said that the visual image “locks us up…and obliges us to look. The visual image is always rigorous, imperative, and irreversible…You cannot dispute with an image.” And that’s why Team MAGA’s attempts to dispute the FBI’s image have been so desperately hilarious.

Start with the complaint that the photo was “staged.” Of course it was! It’s standard law enforcement practice for federal agents to lay out the evidence seized in a legal search – and to catalogue those seized materials by snapping evidentiary photos. Imagine how stupid it would sound if drug dealers, after being raided by police, tried to complain that their guns and cash were being unfairly depicted in “staged” photos.

But what’s most delicious are some of the last-ditch defenses that have only made Trump look more guilty.

When Trump fumed on his social media site that the FBI agents took the classified documents “out of cartons and spread them around” in his office, he basically confessed that he’d been hoarding the stolen goods in those cartons in his office. And his fourth-tier lawyers are just as dumb as he is. Alina Habba told Fox News that her client would never have strewn those documents on the floor: “That is not the way his office looks. He has guests frequently there.” Thank you, Habba, for confirming that national security materials stolen from Washington were stashed in an office where “guests” came and went.

(Hanna also said that the FBI is trying to persecute Trump with “three mundane statutes: espionage and the two others – obstruction.” It’s news to me that espionage is a “mundane” offense; during the Cold War, it was serious enough to fry the Rosenbergs in the electric chair.)

And the Trump camp has only itself to blame for the release of that evidentiary photo. The Justice Department shared it with the public only because Trump keeps going to court seeking to impugn the legal search. As the government’s rebuttal, that photo is a smoking gun. One marketing expert has pointed out: “We respond to and process visual data better than any other type of data. In fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.”

So when a visual image speaks for itself, there’s only so much one can do to spin it away. Karl Rove, the ex-Bush Republican swami, didn’t even bother to try. He told Fox News on Wednesday: “Let’s be clear on this. None of these government documents are his to have taken. A lot of the former president’s problems are of his own creation. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, you cannot take original documents out of the White House when you leave, whether it’s the president of the United States or any of his aides. It’s verboten under the law.”

In fact, let’s contrast that evidentiary photo with something Trump said at a campaign rally on Aug. 18, 2016: “In my administration, I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

Yes indeed, some spoken words are memorable after all.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

As a special House election loomed in an upstate New York swing district, conventional wisdom decreed that Democrat Pat Ryan would surely lose. Ryan’s Republican opponent led in every poll, voters in the district had favored Trump by seven points in 2016, and, as a general rule, the “out” party typically picks up lots of House seats in a midterm year – especially at a time when everyone is supposedly fixated on inflation.

But earlier this week, Ryan defied the odds and shocked his own advisers by notching an upset victory. Blue turnout was far higher than anticipated. In post-election remarks, he nailed the big reason why: “Choice was on the ballot. Freedom was on the ballot, and tonight choice and freedom won. We voted like our democracy was on the line because it is…We centered the concept of freedom…Patriotism to me means, when your fellow Americans’ rights are being taken away, you stand up and fight, not just for yourself, but for them as well.”

As you probably know, Republicans have long monopolized the flag and branded themselves as the champs of “freedom.” But this year Democrats are endeavoring to reframe “freedom” to their own advantage – to wit, freedom from MAGA proto-fascism, freedom from the Supreme Court theocrats, freedom from Second Amendment gun fetishists, freedom from Republican vote-suppression, freedom from right-wing homophobes who want to end gay marriage, freedom from climate change deniers, and, arguably most timely of all, freedom for women to make their own most intimate health decisions despite the forced-birth diktat that killed Roe v. Wade.

In other words, as Pat Ryan just demonstrated in upstate New York, linking abortion rights to the broader theme of freedom can be a potent midterm message. This was also evident earlier this month when voters in Kansas, of all places, delivered a landslide referendum win for abortion, triggered in part by the belief that government shouldn’t meddle to restrict women’s freedom.

Nervous Republicans have now taken notice – scaling back their earlier expectations of a “red wave,” especially in the House. As GOP pollster Whit Ayres noted, “It appears that the U.S. Supreme Court did Democrats a significant political favor with the Dobbs (Roe-killing) decision. There has clearly been an increase in Democratic enthusiasm since that decision, and that has translated into higher Democratic turnout.” Indeed, nonpartisan election analyst David Wasserman said this week that continued Democratic control of the House chamber is “not out of the question.”

Well, let’s not get too giddy here. Republicans need only net a five-seat pickup to recapture the House, and they’re targeting 16 Democratic districts that Trump won in the 2020 presidential tally. On the other hand, love for Trump in many of those districts may well be on the wane, given the fact that he stole highly classified documents and risks criminal indictments for multiple reasons in multiple venues.

Plus, the Democrats’ freedom message, which includes freedom from MAGA coups, has the potential to further galvanize blue-leaning turnout now that gas prices have dropped by more than a buck a gallon – freeing up more voters to think more broadly about where America is heading. In New York state, Ryan’s opponent in the House race ignored abortion and focused on inflation – and it doomed him.

By talking up freedom, Ryan took his cues from a burgeoning Democratic consensus. A former Obama aide, Dan Pfeiffer, hit on the freedom message earlier this summer. He wasn’t the only one – various progressive groups spent the summer honing that theme – but his arguments may well prove prescient. He wrote in his Substack newsletter:

“I would humbly suggest something like the ‘American Freedom Agenda.’ There are two advantages to framing (it) around freedom. First, there is a lot of polling circulating in the party that shows that, in the wake of the Dobbs decision and 1/6 hearings, focusing on freedom is a powerfully persuasive message. Second, ‘freedom’ can serve as a bridge between various Democratic issues…The goal is to simplify the Democratic agenda into an easily understandable digital palm card of sorts.”

Pfeiffer wrote that before President Biden and the Democratic Congress scored their recent string of legislative victories. At this point, seizing the “freedom” brand doesn’t seem like a big risk at all. I also remember when the Republican concept featured freedom from Russian tyranny. The Putin-palling party has forfeited that one for the foreseeable future.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

I’ve had some good yuks lately – starting with quack doc Mehlmet Oz screwing up his Man of the People Act in the “Wegner’s” supermarket, and lightweight Jared Kushner getting reviewed for his new book: “Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one…Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.”

But for sheer legs-in-the-air hilarity, I nominate this new Washington Post report:

“Donald Trump and close aides have spent the eight days since the FBI searched his Florida home rushing to assemble a team of respected defense lawyers. But the answer they keep hearing is ‘no.’… The former president’s current legal team includes a Florida insurance lawyer who’s never had a federal case, a past general counsel for a parking-garage company and a former host at far-right One America News.”

It’s the August dog days, we’re all on vacation or wish we were, so I promise not to tax your sun-splashed cognitive faculties: Care to guess why Trump on the cusp of indictment is having trouble hiring crackerjack criminal lawyers, only duh best lawyers?

To answer that, it helps to remember that in the last five years, Trump has cycled through lawyers as if they were Kleenex. In fairness, it’s hard to represent a client who sues without a scintilla of evidence (his “stolen election” won-lost record was 1-61);

Five of Trump’s lawyers resigned in tandem on the eve of the second impeachment trial, and one of his former lawyers (Michael Cohen) went to prison. Two others (Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis) have been sucked into the Georgia grand jury’s probe of Trump’s coup bid, and another ex-Trump lawyer (Emmet Flood) is now defending a key member of the Mike Pence team.

Ty Cobb, another ex-Trump lawyer, recently had this to say: “(Trump) is a disaster for the Republican party…The Big Lie, and the related violence, election interference and other perceived misconduct, was and is an affront to this nation and its first principles. It has permanently soiled the history pages and deepened the abyss that divides our country.”

In short, as veteran Philadelphia criminal defense lawyer David Rudovsky told me back in 2018, “We’re talking about the client from hell.”

That jibes with John Dowd’s assessment. He was the top Trump lawyer during the Robert Mueller probe, but quit in March of 2018 because (according to Bob Woodward) he had concluded that Trump was “a f–king liar.” That also jibes with Mark Corallo’s assessment. He was the spokesman for Trump’s legal team, but quit in 2017 because, in the reported words of a close friend, he could no longer tolerate his job “on a moral and professional level.”

Three key characteristics of this client from hell: He doesn’t listen to professional advice (one former lawyer advised Trump to stay off Twitter, whereupon Trump tweeted anew before the lawyer was back in his car), he wants his lawyers to amplify his whopping lies (Rule 3.1 of the American Bar Association’s Rules of Professional Conduct stipulates that lawyers shall not bring an action that has no grounding in law or fact); and (last but surely not least), and he often doesn’t pay them.

Trump himself has reportedly whined about his representation. According to Bob Woodward’s 2018 book “Fear,” he ranted in the White House: “I’ve got a bunch of lawyers who are not aggressive, who are weak, who don’t have my best interests in mind, who aren’t loyal. It’s just a disaster. I can’t find a good lawyer.”

“Who aren’t loyal” is the key phrase. He demanded then, and still demands, lawyers who swear personal fealty, even at the expense of the profession’s code of conduct and their own reputations. Consider, for instance, the unnamed Trump lawyer in Mar-a-Lago who, in a signed letter two months ago, falsely told the Justice Department that all stolen classified materials had been returned.

At this stage in our endless psychodrama, what top quality criminal lawyers are eager to sign up for Trump, at great risk of burning themselves down? Four long years ago, Rudovsky told me that “for any lawyer, this relationship is so fraught with difficulty, a nightmare. You just know it’s going to end in a bad way.” It already has, uncountable times.

To tweak John Kerry’s famous Vietnam-era quote: How do you ask a lawyer to be the last to die for a mistake?

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

I fail to understand why so many people have long made such a big deal about Joe Biden’s lousy poll numbers.

Don’t they know their history? Haven’t they bothered to research recent presidents’ first-term performance ratings? It just so happens, for instance, that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama took deep plunges during their first terms, that Ronald Reagan’s favorability share plummeted to 35 percent during his first term, and that even though Abe Lincoln didn’t have to worry about Gallup, it’s an historical fact that the “baboon” (as he was so relentlessly labeled) was widely perceived as a first-term screwup until the Union army won some key battles late in 1864.

So, a little perspective on Biden seems wise – especially now that he’s racking up enough wins to demonstrate, against some heavy odds, that he indeed does deliver in the realm of policy, that democracy can actually still function for the betterment of the nation. As Democrats prepare for the autumn midterm elections, with their thin House and Senate majorities hanging by a thread, Biden’s late-summer success surge certainly won’t hurt their prospects. They may even help.

If the blue party can get its act together with some effective repetitive messaging (no guarantees on that), it can hike the odds of beating the red cult in November. Believe it or not – and all the carping has obscured the truth – Biden is poised to post one of the most productive legislative records in roughly half a century, and he’s doing it with congressional majorities thinner than dental floss.

For instance:

– The Inflation Reduction Act, which will land on Biden’s desk after the House passes it soon, boasts by far the biggest investment ever to fight climate change. Policy analyst Michael Tomasky points out that the imminent law “establishes the principle that the government has a role to play in setting industrial policy and creating growth, and in determining what kind of growth we want.” The bill also extends Obamacare subsidies for three years, authorizes Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for seniors, imposes billions in taxes on big corporations, and much more.

– The new CHIPS and Science Act will boost the domestic manufacture of semiconductor chips, creating jobs and helping us compete with China.

– The new PACT Act, which finally passed last week after Senate Republicans finished their obstructive hissy fit, will make it far easier for our servicemen and women to get health coverage for illnesses suffered after being exposed to the military’s toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.

– The jobless rate is 3.5 percent, a 50-year low. Plus, there’s a hiring surge.

– Gasoline prices have fallen steadily for the last 50 days in a row.

– Biden’s intelligence operatives located and killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the co-mastermind of 9/11.

– Biden recently signed the most extensive gun reform law in three decades.

– Pushing back on Putin’s war in Ukraine, Biden has led the expansion and strengthening of NATO.

– Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which earmarks billions for roads and bridges over the next 10 to 12 years.

– Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, which put money into the pockets of tens of millions of workers who were financially hurt by the Covid pandemic. Among its many other provisions, it also earmarked money to save union pension plans that were on the verge of going under.

All told, John Harris of Politico has a good line: “Biden is looking a little like the student who is failing his class for most of the semester, then pulls an all-nighter and slips the paper under the professor’s door at 6 a.m. It turns out the paper is actually pretty good… A solid B is within reach.”

The problem with the 24/7 media, especially its twittery component, is that we always risk being trapped in the exigencies of the instant moment. Alas, a democracy doesn’t move nearly fast enough to satisfy those who pine for quick gratification. It takes time to craft the big picture.

Biden and his blue legislative allies – despite predictable missteps, despite settling for less than their ambitions visioned – still believe in something important. It’s called governing. It’s the wild and crazy notion that, if you’re elected to public office, you should try to do something substantive for the people you represent. Whereas the opposition cult is bent on doing nothing – aside from thumbing demagogic tweets to the nutcase base, and cheering on a Hitler-lite lunatic who’s on the cusp of indictment.

That contrast should be enough for Democrats to campaign on.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

When high court theocrat Samuel Alito wrote his screed abolishing the constitutional right to an abortion, he insisted – quoting the late rightwing justice Antonin Scalia – that the issue of abortion should be “resolved like most questions in our democracy, by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”

Be careful what you wish for, pal.

In a stunning landslide that should prompt all Republican midterm strategists to soil their undies, the voters of Kansas – a red state that endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election by 15 percentage points and hasn’t gone blue in a presidential race since 1964 – surged to the polls in a statewide referendum and protected a women’s right to choose. The margin of victory: Roughly 17 percentage points.

Forced-birth reactionaries, bankrolled by big bucks from the Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City (which said that abortion “encourages women to attack an essential part of their femininity”), mounted a seemingly formidable campaign to erase language in the state constitution that guarantees the right of personal autonomy. But, as Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!”

Turns out, they were decimated. Anyone who still doubts that abortion could be a powerful issue for Democrats in the midterm elections, an issue that propels angry women en masse to the polls, need only examine the voting stats in Kansas.

For instance:

– After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there was a huge spike in new voter registrants. Among those newbies, Democrats outpaced Republicans by eight percentage points – in a state where Republicans crush their opponents in the statewide voting rolls by 19 points. And 70 percent of the newly registered voters were female. Take a wild guess why they suddenly signed up.

– The Republican state legislature cleverly scheduled this referendum for Aug. 2 in order to maximize right-wing turnout and dampen pro-choice turnout. After all, college campuses are empty on Aug. 2 (i.e., fewer young women would be voting), and most of the primaries on the same day’s ballot were Republican-only contests (i.e., fewer Democrats would be voting). Yes, rigging the referendum for early August seemed clever indeed, but the GOP screwed itself. Kansas turnout on this midterm primary day topped 900,000 – twice as many voters as the last midterm primary in 2018.

– Early voting, a practice long favored by Democratic leaners, was 246 percent higher than in the 2018 Kansas primaries.

– The blue surge aside, it was clear that a sizable share of Trump voters switched sides and endorsed female body autonomy. One random example: Heavily rural Franklin County, southeast of Topeka, went for Trump in 2020 by nearly 40 percentage points. But its voters protected abortion rights by 12 points. Like many other normally Republican voters (as well as the voting independents), they were swayed by the pro-choice campaign’s message that banning abortion was an infringement on personal freedom, a governmental threat “to interfere with private medical decisions.” In the end, 14 counties that backed Trump in 2020 switched sides and voted for abortion rights.

– Most significant was populous highly-educated suburban Johnson County, east of Kansas City, which has a sizable center-right citizenry. In that county, the pro-choice campaign rolled up a whopping 68 percent of the votes. That stat alone should freak out any Republican midterm strategists who still think that Roe‘s demise will fail to galvanize blue-leaning voters in, say, the suburbs of Philadelphia and other swing states’ suburban counties.

Granted, other issues will also be in play this November – especially inflation, if it’s still bad. But Kansas has sent an important message: People get really ticked off when their rights get taken away.

The GOP’s theocrats have been put on notice.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

The grinding sound you’re hearing is the Rupert Murdoch propaganda machine chewing up Donald Trump and spitting him out.

That’s the good news. We’ll get to the bad news shortly.

What a miraculous coincidence it was last Friday when Murdoch’s New York Post editorial page and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page eviscerated Trump for abetting deadly violence on Jan. 6. The right-wing outlets didn’t denounce Trump’s behavior as criminal in nature – that would’ve been too much to expect – but they signaled nonetheless that they’re done with the demagogue once and for all.

Granted, Murdoch’s outlets have sent up signal flares before. Six weeks ago, his Post penned an editorial lamenting Trump’s fixation on the 2020 election and urging Republican voters top consider alternative candidates “who embrace conservative policies without the preoccupations of the Don.” And lest we forget, Murdoch in the past has reportedly referred to Trump as a “f—ng idiot.”

Nevertheless, the latest salvos are startling. From the Wall Street Journal:

“Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call Mr. Pence to check on the safety of his loyal VP. Instead he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out.”

The New York Post editorial was even more withering:

“Trump didn’t lift a finger… He was the only person who could stop what was happening. He was the only one the crowd was listening to. It was incitement by silence… His only focus was to find any means – damn the consequences – to block the peaceful transfer of power.”

Meanwhile, Murdoch’s Fox News appears to be filing for divorce.

This week, Trump’s usually reliable doormats on “Fox & Friends” posted new poll numbers showing Trump’s grip on the GOP loosening in the early matchups for 2024 – prompting Trump to whine on his social media account. And last week, the Fox News website posted a montage of Trump voters who are pining for a less “polarizing” hero. And last Friday, when Trump was in Arizona staging his latest hate/self-pity rally, Fox News counter-programmed by airing an interview with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Ah, here’s where we spotlight the bad news.

Murdoch is ditching Trump not because of any sudden moral epiphany that Trump is a clear and present danger to American democracy. As a rank opportunist, he has merely calculated that Trump is fatally damaged goods; that the ever-mounting evidence from the Jan. 6 committee, the Georgia grand jury investigation, and the Justice Department’s expanding criminal probe are rendering Trump increasingly unelectable,  and that Trump’s clout even within the GOP is likely to wane further. Therefore, Murdoch has decided that Trump is expendable.

A source in the Murdoch orbit recently told Vanity Fair magazine: “Rupert’s a pragmatic guy. He knows better than anybody how to read political tea leaves. It’s fairly self-evident that quite a few people in the firmament have begun to challenge the previously supported collective viewpoint about Trump. It’s understood now that the gloves are off.”

Hence, the bad news: Murdoch is rebooting his empire to promote Trumpism without Trump.

At this point, his vehicle of choice is Ron DeSantis, who is smarter than Trump and is full MAGA without Trump’s serial imbecilities. Murdoch’s strategy was previewed last month, again in the New York Post, when Piers Morgan, one of his multi-platform mouthpieces, wrote a rapturous huzzah about DeSantis: “He’s just younger, fresher, and more exciting than the aging, raging gorilla who’s become a whiny, democracy-defying bore.”

Unlike Trump, DeSantis also has the discipline to market the MAGA movement’s rage – as evidenced by his “don’t say gay” law, his law restricting classroom discussion of race, and his creation of a so-called “election security” agency to police (non-existent) voter fraud.

As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert of authoritarianism, recently remarked: “DeSantis has already absorbed all the lessons of Trump…And he’s a very dangerous individual. He’s dangerous because he is equally repressive, but doesn’t have the baggage of Trump.”

So before any of us cheers Murdoch’s takedown of Trump, let’s all be careful what we wish for.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Do I detect a faint glimmer of good news?

Trump’s cult party still seems on track to capture the House, thanks to inflation (which is worldwide) and high gas prices (which are steadily declining). But Democrats’ best hope is to retain control of the Senate – and perhaps pick up a seat, or even two.

That’s important, because the Senate is the chamber that confirms judicial and presidential nominees. And if the Dems can somehow pick up two seats (giving the party 52), they’d be positioned to blow past their twin obstructionists – Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – and abolish the ridiculous filibuster that’s making it impossible to pass good stuff. Like, for instance, a bill codifying abortion rights.

Fifty two blue seats may well be a foolish dream. But retention of the Senate is not. And that’s because the Republicans, infected by their MAGA pandemic, have come up with some Senate candidates who can most charitably be described as incoherent, ill-credentialed, extremist, or all three.

Consider, for instance, the farcical doings in Georgia. The GOP have prioritized picking up the seat now held by the Rev. Raphael Warnock, but Trump successfully gave his seal of approval to Herschel Walker, the ex-pigskin jock who’s vividly demonstrating that just because someone toted a ball and ran over people decades ago, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this person would have the remotest clue about life in the public realm.

Aside from all his non-stop lying about his non-existent credentials and the revelations about kids he sired but never disclosed, what’s perhaps most noteworthy – and perhaps the reason why he’s trailing Warnock in the polls – is that he sounds dumber than a box of rocks. As Erick Erickson, a conservative Georgia-based radio host, remarked earlier this month, Walker “doesn’t have a deep grasp of the issues nor really the desire to learn those issues.”

Republicans also want to pick up the Arizona Senate seat currently held by ex-astronaut (and Gabby Giffords spouse) Mark Kelly. Problem is, the featured GOP front-runner is a Trump-endorsed loon named Blake Masters, a first-time candidate who still insists that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. He’s also on record saying that America was wrong to enter World World II and said recently that gun violence in America should be blamed on “black people, frankly.” No wonder Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, is raising huge sums of money, far more than Masters, in a state that went blue in 2020.

So the Dems have a decent chance of holding the Georgia and Arizona seats – and potentially snatching at least one seat now held by the GOP. Like, for instance, Pennsylvania.

With conservative Pat Toomey departing, the GOP is stuck with Trump fave Mehmet Oz, the carpetbagging quack doc from New Jersey. He’s far behind Democrat John Fetterman in the polls, mainly because his celebrity cachet is trumped by the fact that his ties to Pennsylvania are thinner than dental floss.

Oz put out an anodyne statement the other day declaring that “Pennsylvanians demand leaders who will solve their problems in a meaningful and effective way,” but it’s hard to take seriously a guy who was federally investigated for a fake weight-loss cure, and who was outed as a fraud by the British Medical Journal and assailed by 1300 physicians who signed a letter calling him “a quack and a fake and a charlatan.” Fetterman, who unlike Oz has actual governing experienced, also benefits from having deep working-class roots in the state’s normally Republican southwest region.

Another potential Democratic pickup – though it seems far chancier – is in Wisconsin, home of notorious nutcase Ron Johnson, who has dispensed a lot of Oz-like quackery about COVID vaccines (he says they’re killing people: “All these athletes are dropping dead on the field”) and COVID cures (actual quote: “Standard gargle mouthwash has been proven to kill the coronavirus”). Democrats haven’t even picked a challenger yet. But with Johnson’s statewide favorability rating in the danger zone – 37 percent – perhaps sanity can prevail.

Simon Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic strategist and numbers-cruncher who’s virtually alone these days contending that the much-predicted red wave is more more mirage than real – that Senate races are indeed leaning blue in 2022 and that Democrats even have a shot at making the House midterms competitive.

Rosenberg thinks the declining price of gas will allow Democrats to talk about their success on the economy and “create more room for Democratic candidates to make the indictment of their opponents as too extreme.”

“As we’ve been saying, opposition to MAGA has been the driving force of the last two elections, and with mass shootings, the end of Roe and fanatical abortion restrictions, a radicalized Supreme Court, extremist/terrible candidates, an unfolding criminal conspiracy involving dozens of top Republican officials to overturn an election, it is now likely to be the most powerful force in this election as well,” Rosenberg sald. “It is a new, bluer election.”

His remarks may prove prescient. Or maybe in four months, I’ll look back at this column and wince.

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Copyright 2022 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]