U.S. employers shed jobs last month for the first time since April, cutting 140,000 positions, clear evidence that the economy is faltering as the viral pandemic tightens its grip on consumers and businesses.
At the same time, the unemployment rate stayed at 6.7%, the first time it hasn’t fallen since April.
Friday’s figures from the Labor Department depict a sharply uneven job market, with losses concentrated among restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues, many of them affecting low-income employees, while most other sectors are still adding workers. Still, the nation has nearly 10 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic sent it into a deep recession nearly a year ago, having recovered just 56% of the jobs lost in the spring.
Very bad , bunumbers overall, but note the "unevenness", which is even more apparent as you dig into the full jobs report.
On the good side, the loss of jobs in December was almost entirely offset by upward revisions in previous months.
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for October was revised up by 44,000, from +610,000 to +654,000, and the change for November was revised up by 91,000, from +245,000 to +336,000. With these revisions, employment in October and November combined was 135,000 more than previously reported.
So while job growth was slowing in recent months, it was better than we thought, which is a good thing. However, we are still far below the amount of jobs that we had before the COVID World set in, at 9.8 million below February's job peak, and 8.5 million lost in the private sector.
Definitely a leveling off, and worth keeping an eye on for 2021. However, not all sectors leveled off in the last month of 2020. The goods side of the jobs market continued to climb back, with construction adding another 51,000 (seasonally-adjusted) jobs in December, and manufacturing adding 38,000.
Another remarkable part of the jobs report was a large increase in retail hiring for December. And much of that hiring was well above the typical amount of hiring for the biggest month of Holiday shopping season.
Jobs change, seasonal vs non-seasonal Retail
Seasonally-adjusted +120,500
Non-seasonal total +229,700
Big Box Stores/Supercenters
Seasonally-adjusted +58,700
Non-seasonal total +54,900
Health and Personal Care stores
Seasonally-adjusted +9,800
Non-seasonal total +17,000
Food and Beverage Stores
Seasonally-adjusted +7,900
Non-seasonal total +15,900
Clothing and Clothing Accessories
Seasonally-adjusted +7,700
Non-seasonal total +45,500
The question is whether these added retail jobs stick around after the Holidays, and if it reflected a big jump in business that'll show up in the retail sales numbers that emerge next week.
But other services continued to lag, with some areas suffering significant losses to end the year as COVID got to its worsty levels yet. And no sector was hit harder than already-beleaguered bars and restaurants, which lost 372,000 jobs in December.
This sure tells me that one priority of the new Dem Congress and Biden Administration is to go beyond the limits of PPP 2.0, and pass the $120 billion RESTAURANTS Act, which targets aid specifically for that service industry.
Two other beaten up consumer spending areas lost jobs in December - the lodging industry, and the arts/entertainment/spectactor sports sector. This leaves both areas with 1/3 fewer jobs than they had before the COVID World came in.
The second straight month of a 6.7% unemployment rate and a third straight month of a 57.4% Employment-Population Ratio also indicates that any "recovery" from the depths of this spring had plateaued, with our economy in danger of falling back down. And with COVID infections and deaths reaching new highs in January, it doesn't seem likely that the next jobs report will be much better.
Which makes it all the more important that the new Biden Administration and Dem Congress get things quickly moving on two fronts.
1. Get people vaccinated against COVID and the virus under control, so people can be confident in going out to more types of places.
2. More stimulus, both in the form of larger checks to more people, and in targeted help to boost the beaten-up service sectors that cratered in 2020. Then for the Summer, do a major infrastructure package to keep construction and manufacturing going, and to ease the pressures in a public sector that has already lost 1.34 million jobs in the last 10 months.
And as an ending tag, there's this inequity in the jobs market that needs to be discussed as well.
I could have plenty to say about the attempted coup in DC this week, along with the criminal President that gave the order, and the fake surprise of so many who can't believe that unstable trailer trash would take a cue from Trump/GOP and try to overturn the will of the voters.
It's the last part that might be as vile as anything that has happened in this week. You can see the smarmy smiles on so many GOPs - "It's just a game, that we shouldn't take seriously, right guys? Biden will be president, what's the problem?"
"It's not a F***ING GAME! F*** what you heard, it's what you hearing!"
And it's ablout what the MAGAts are hearing, which is why GOPs andn their AM radio spokespeople continued to float out lies about how the election was handled. It's inteneed to keep these low-info, weak-minded fools stirred up and voting Republican.
Especially egregious in this two-step is Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil, who is now parroting the GOP line of the day, which is an epic in false equivalency. "Yeah, that attempted coup and dead people thing was bad, but hey it's over. Oh, you still want to hold Trump responsible for the riot he caused,? SCREW YOU!"
Oh no, Bryan. We wouldn't want to lay the blame on an executive for violent mayhem. You'd NEVER do anything like that if some Trumper decided to play Army in your district and killed people, would you?
Go back to fetching Paul Ryan's coffee and GTFO out the House, you pathetic, partisan slug.
GOPs won't try to get better until they lose their power, their money, and their status. And they will never operate in decency or good faith until then, so don't waste your time trying to work with these scumbags.
After 9 months of nearly no legislative activity, The Wisconsin State Assembly got inagurated yesterday, and promptly sprung into action. Assembly Republicans decided that it was finally time to do something about the COVID-19 pandemic that has hit hard in the state.
A group of Assembly Republicans not wearing masks on the floor. This was during a moment of silence to remember the 4,884 Wisconsinites who have died because of COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/Ic4JMfqdPx
I kid, I kid. The GOPs in the Assembly did come up with a COVID bill that they had a public hearing on today. But if you paid attention to the power-grabbing piece of crap that they floated out there last month, you'll see that it's basically the same thing.
Here's a sampling of how Wisconsin Public Radio described it.
The new GOP-backed proposal, which mirrors some elements of an Assembly plan released in early December, would give businesses, schools and governmental entities legal immunity if someone contracts COVID-19 on their premises, even if the entity isn’t following local, state or federal requirements to curb the spread of the virus.
The bill would also:
Bar schools from providing virtual instruction, unless its school board votes to approve virtual instruction by a two-thirds vote of its members. Each approval would last only 14 days.
Require the state unemployment insurance call center to expand its hours until a backlog of unemployment claims is at pre-pandemic levels.
Extend the suspension of a one-week waiting period for unemployment benefits until March 14.
Prohibit the state Department of Health Services (DHS), local health officials, and employers from requiring people to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Limit local health officers’ ability to restrict capacity of businesses during the pandemic to 14-day periods, unless the local government approves an extension of such an order. Each extension could only last 14 days.
Bar DHS and local health officers from closing or forbidding gatherings in places of worship.
Typical poser BS that's based more on relaying the whines from RW Talk Radio than it is in dealing with the realities of the COVID World. The liability protections for employers that put their workers at risk is an especially nice touch, and the vocal approval of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce about that measure tells you who came up with that scheme.
In what's also an obnoxious WisGOP pattern, there are unfunded mandates thrown into the bill. This includes giving zero to pay for staff and other costs connected to having more hours at the call center for unemployment, the overriding of local health restrictions, and allowing for mass gatherings in churches. There are also several items to mess with public schools, including this idiocy.
Specify that beginning on January 11, 2021, and ending June 30, 2022, a school board may not provide virtual instruction to pupils in lieu of in-person instruction unless approved by a two-thirds vote of the members of the school board. Specify that the approval would be valid for 14 days, after which the school board could extend virtual instruction for an additional 14 days only by another two-thirds vote of the members of the school board.
The "party of local control", you know.
The only extra funding that is in the Assembly GOP bill is basically an ability to allow the Joint Finance Committee to move $100 million away from funds that aren't going to be used up, and transferred for "expenditures related to the public health emergency." But while it slaps on a lot of rules and requirements of coverage (some of which are good), there isn't a lot of money that the Assembly GOP bill sets aside to handle treatment or the extra costs that will go ionto treatment and vaccination.
But this casual and PR-related approach to dealing with COVID World isn't going to be enough, particularly as levels of cases and the rate of people testing positive started to go back up in the final week of 2020.
And this update from today was an especially bad sign.
So if the gerrymandered GOP Legislature wanted to smack down COVID-19 and resume the decline in new cases that we had in December, now would be the time to get serious about this, and to formally sign off on measures that were in the stimulus bill that passed Congress at the end of the year.
But WisGOP is NOT serious about dealing with COVID. All they want to do is insert power-grabs and poison pills designed to have Governor Evers veto the bill, which allows WisGOP to complain even more about Evers not doing enough and not "compromising". Which is complete bunk as Evers has already compromised plenty in the bill, and even included the few good items in last month's Assembly GOP plan as part of his own revised proposal for the new session.
If GOPs really wanted Wisconsin to get through this COVID Winter with fewer difficulties, they'd put out one "clean" bill that would include the items they and Evers agree on. They could even pull the talk radio poser stuff in a separate bill that they could promote and rile up their base with. But that's NOT what the Assembly GOP is doing, and are instead larding up this COVID bill with a pule of junk that is intended to be vetoed, to muck things up even more, and then dump the blame on Evers as the pandemic drags on and the state continues to stagnate.
It's all a game to these jackwagons, and with an election for Governor looming in 2022, you can bet they'll be even less interested in being responsible leaders and trying to make things better for the typical Wisconsinite.
“All I want to do is this,” [Trump] said. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.” He later added: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
Of course it's something that criminal, and in a functional country, would be grounds for immediate removal from office. But more than it being further proof of how horribly flawed American democracy is in 2020-21, it also made me wonder if perhaps the pre-election polling (that had Biden winning by 5-7% more than he did) wasn't as inaccurate as we were led to believe.
I made this comment when I was reviewing the election results in November.
The first item I'll go into turnout, which is something I was wrong about. I said on Monday that if Biden got 1.6 million votes in Wisconsin, Trump had no chance and Biden would win easily. That wasn't the case, as Trump ended up getting more votes than any Republican has ever gotten in Wisconsin.
Add in the third-party tallies, and turnout was nearly at 3.3 million votes, shattering the state record by more than 200,000, and going up by more than 10% compared to 2016. These increases were widespread throughout the state with one exception - the City of Milwaukee, which didn't see any additional turnout at all.
Well, what if Trump DIDN'T get 1.6 million votes after all? Let's go back to a couple of items I looked into at the time, starting with the places that Trump did better or worse in.
Wisconsin UNOFFFICIAL votes.
The map of the vote margin by county, and of the shift in margin from 2016 to 2020.
A familiar map of red and blue counties. Only Sauk and Door flipped, R->D
Margin change notable that WOW and BOW (Fox Valley) both getting smaller Rep margins
And then overlay it with a stat I created that took into account how much turnout increased in a given county, and then subtracted the population growth (or added for decline) in that county from 2016-2019. As this stat shows, the biggest growth in turnout in Wisconsin was generally in smaller, rural places, many of whom trended towards Trump. By comparison, Dane and Milwaukee Counties had much smaller increases in turnout.
In fact, Milwaukee County had one of the smallest increases in turnout in the state, and the City of Milwaukee was basically flat vs 2016. This meant that Milwaukee's share of the electorate in 2020 was smaller than it was in 2016, and significantly smaller than it was during Barack Obama's elections. At the same time, outstate Wisconsin had its largest share in at least 12 years, as their votes went up bigtime.
That's quite an impressive turnout operation in areas whose populations are stagnant or even declining, and it's a reason that this election was as close as it was in Wisconsin. If you look at that bar graph of 2012's turnout shares and compare it to 2020, you can see that the City of Milwaukee's share dropped from 9.39% in 2012 to 7.49% in 2020. If turnout was the same 3.3 million total in 2020, but with 2012's electorate, you'd have seen this result.
Biden 50.0%
Trump 48.3%
And Biden's winning margin of less than 21,000 votes in Wisconsin >ends up being more than 57,000 - a close but relatively comfortable victory. Instead, there were 65,000 fewer votes in the City of Milwaukee (where Biden won just under 79% of the vote), and 34,000 more votes outstate (where Biden barely got over 42% of the vote).
Given the news that emerged yesterday, I have a hard time believing that Donald Trump didn't make similar calls to states like Wisconsin, asking officials how he could "find votes" and "recalculate" totals. And perhaps he found a few of those extra votes in key GOP-leaning areas.
And perhaps Ron Johnson knows it too, which is why he's claiming there are questionable results that should be looked into. If you look at the numbers, they are indeed questionable - in favor of Trump/GOP. And GOPs always project onto others the bad actions they would pull
Not that this really surprises me, but it's still sickening and infuriating.
"Johnson is the ONLY senator joining the effort whose state's voters backed President-elect Joe Biden" U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson from Wisconsin to join 10 others from GOP in refusing to certify Electoral College results https://t.co/7sevE4KOM1 via @journalsentinel
So Ron Johnson is saying that the votes of more than 1.6 million Wisconsinites are irrelevant, and that because "some (whiny, weak-minded) people have questions", and because those real numbers and legitimate votes from his own constituents gave him a result he didn't like, that we ignore reality?
By that same token, shouldn't we be having hearings determining whether the world is the flat, or discuss "Who is Q", or whether some races are superior to others? After all, some are asking!
.@chucktodd: "Plenty of people ... thought [9/11] was an inside job. How about the moon landing? Are you gonna hold hearings on that?"@SenRonJohnson: "... There's all kinds of things I'd like to hold hearings on. You have to kind of pick and choose based on priorities."
But you know what Ron Johnson thinks is not worthy of hearings? Whether or not our President worked with other countries to try to spread misinformation and hack our election systems. Because why would the Chair of the Homeland Security Committee actually care about that, right? And why would RoJo want to know more about why it's taking weeks for the USPS to deliver packages in Wisconsin? That's nowhere near as important as getting to the bottom of whether quacks have ideas on "alternative treatments" that can lessen your chances of getting COVID-19!
It's bad enough that garbage like Ron Johnson abuse power, but it's worse that their hairbrained thoughts and obvious coverups are portrayed as legitimate, and allowed to be amplified by "objective" media. This statement by Vox's Matt Yglesias sums up the problem.
I think this thing where TV hosts invite liars onto their show and then dunk on them for applause is weird and harmful.
Why not book people worth listening to and have respectful interactions? https://t.co/rtsjotuslA
This has become one of the worst aspects of this awful last decade. The media gives more access (and therefore legitimacy) to shameless scum than in people who do things honestly and correctly. This has given a significant advantage to right-wingers, as any airtime given to their BS means that "it's out there", and allows them to frame the discussions and smear their opponents accordingly.
DeWine: "We have a lot of people in this country who are very concerned–"@JakeTapper: "Because they have been lied to, Governor." pic.twitter.com/lxLuhvIkWF
I have been seething and more aggravated than normal with this GOP kabuki/soft coup that is trying to overturn an election that Joe Biden won convincingly. Much of this is because there is no punishment for lying to the public, and no benefit to telling the truth. The GOPs that "challenge" this election won't be booted for office, or sued for lying about events. Instead, the seamiest and most outrageous GOPs are getting airtime and campaign donations, and grifting lowlifes like Kraken Lady and Lin Wood don't get disbarred for their absurd claims and wasteful lawsuits.
If you drill down to what Republicans are saying, it is that they don't think that the thoughts and votes of other people are as important as the thoughts and votes of their group of people. And their claim of "fraud" is really wishful thinking, because they don't want to admit that the clear majority of the country doesn't buy into what they beLIEve, and they don't want to have to adjust and work to get public opinion on their side.
So instead, these weaklings rely on media and "reports" that make them feel better, and feel like they're right. Well, here's my thought about those feelings.
On the flip side, where's the benefit to telling the truth and being proper? Dems don't seem to get rewarded at the ballot box for being right on policy, nor do they get votes by being "the adult in the room" that allows government to continue to run smoothly.
I have a job and bills to pay, so it's not really worth it for me to harrass and humiliate GOP scumbags about their bad behavior. Kind of like how trailer trash have lobbed threats and camped out on the lawns of Dem politicians for....speaking honestly and doing their jobs?
When I see GOPs get rewarded for being lowlifes, while Dems have to act 5 times better just to be heard, it makes my mind go to dark places. Because it seems like shamelessness is what gets you ahead, and putting your head down, giving honest solutions, and doing a good job is ignored. It seems like the only way to break through is to be as bad as the other guys, and the only way that Republicans will stop being scum is to make them feel pain in some fashion - whether through loss of status, money, or health.
In 2021, Dems have to play hardball, and have to ignore past custom of propriety. The smugness of DC Dems, which uses a West Wing-Obama mentality of "going high" as a central method of operations, allows Republicans to get worse and worse. And this country continues to slide away from what used to be a functional democracy that worked to solve real problems.
Hardball may not bring us closer together, or be a long-term governing solution. But dammit, Dems and state/federal prosecutors have been given the power to take the hammer of the law and the Constitution to these whiny, dishonest jerks, along with unleashing a public barrage that summarizes what so many of us are feeling. SO DO IT.
DC Dems should understand how cathartic it would be to refuse to seat the seditious GOP Congress members who refuse to accept the results of the elections, or to publicly dress down these GOP thugs for lying and for calling Dem voters second-class citizens. And how much we would cheer if prosecutors would file charges against lawbreakers and seditionists, even if the GOPs whp are charged (and their paymasters) drag out proceedings in court.
Because if the power that is available is not used, and these fascist, racist liars are not stamped down on, as well as the AM Radio and Faux News outlets that give those liars a megaphone, things will get even worse. And no one will be immune from the rage that so many of us in the Silenced, Decent Majority feel toward the elites that continue to allow things to get worse, without feeling the consequences for letting it happen.
Not that you should have believed it anyway, but over the last few years, Republicans have shown that their adherence to "free market, small government solutions" is a standard that shifts a lot, depending on the individuals you are talking about. GOPs also believe in bailouts and using government resources and laws to redistribute wealth - they just choose different groups to help vs hurt.
All of a sudden Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are worried that someone in America might get a $2,000 check "who doesn't need it."
Funny. They had no problem giving a $1.4 billion tax break to Charles Koch and his family with a net worth of $113 billion. What hypocrisy!
"In America, the big get bigger and the small go out," Perdue said after an appearance at the World Dairy Expo in Madison. "I don't think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service estimated in their latest farm financial forecast that net farm income will hit $119.6 billion in 2020, a 41 percent increase from 2019 and the highest income level since 2013.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the forecast is slightly higher than last quarter’s estimate, partly because of a price rally for corn and soybeans seen around harvest time....
Earlier forecasts also did not include the $13.3 billion expected to be paid to farmers through the second round of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP).
That means farmers are now expected to receive $46.5 billion in direct government payments. That’s $24 billion more, or 107.1 percent higher, than in 2019. By comparison, farmers received just under $13 billion in direct government payments in 2016.
---------- Oink, oink! --------
This reliance on business owners needing government support is apparent in other ways. I originally noticed this part of November's income and spending report, which dropped in late December.
Personal income decreased $221.8 billion (1.1 percent) in November according to estimates released today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (tables 3 and 5). Disposable personal income(DPI) decreased $218.0 billion (1.2 percent) and personal consumption expenditures(PCE) decreased $63.3 billion (0.4 percent).
Then you dig down a bit deeper, and you see that the loss in business income in November is because of 2 reasons.
Look at the declines for both PPP assistance, and the CARES aid to farmers (and the convenient jump in farm aid 1 month before the election). You can especially see how the 6-month timeframe for the first round of PPP funding sunk in, and is now fading. It helps explain why the latest stimulus bill included $284 billion in new PPP loans, to keep businesses afloat through the COVID Winter - it's really the only federal help that restaurants and some other hard-hit service businesses are getting for 2021.
But at the same time, it took a lot of grinding just to get $600 (or less) sent out per person to get through the same COVID Winter. And while unemployment benefits were extended, and given a $300 add-on for the next 11 10 weeks, the time between now and March is traditionally the time when the largest number of seasonal layoffs happen.
Once we get to March, and 12 months of the COVID World, all of these temporary measures that propped up incomes through 2020 go away. And if there haven't been enough people vaccinated to allow for crowds to return to inside venues and other industries, are we going to continue to prop up a still-depressed economy? Especially now that GOPs will see no reason to care about the typical American, and will be more than willing to blame the bad situation on the Democratic President and the Dem Governors that are up for re-election in 2022 in a lot of states that have voted GOP in the past (including Wisconsin)?
I remember going into the 2020s by thinking "the 2010s were so awful, now we can come out the other side and recover to a better place!" Didn't quite work out that way. The only positive was Biden beating Trump, but even that is having its own share of issues, as I'll share below.
The last 12 months have accelerated the worst aspects of the previous decade, where politics trumped (pun intended) any type of honest analysis and decision-making, and cronyism and spin was chosen over keeping people safe and healthy. It's the biggest reason why this pandemic is still slogging on with more deaths than ever, and with Trump now passing off the distribution of the vaccine to drug companies and the states, that's not running well either.
Which is why Biden needs to hit the ground running as soon as he takes the oath of office. His first executive order should be to institute the Defense Production Act and centralize who gets the vaccines and where they go. It will send the clear message that containing and crushing COVID is the Number 1 priority in the nation, which has the added benefit of being true as people will not return to traveling and going out in large scale until the virus is under control.
Of course, we gotta get to January 20 first, which is its own set of problems, as you can bet some GOPs in Congress will put up an obnoxious charade on Wednesday when the electoral votes get counted. These fascist jags never say that their own elections and vote totals that are suspect (even though most of the places with suspiciously higher vote totals in Wisconsin were red-voting areas with stagnant populations that Trump did even better in for 2020). No, it's always the votes of THOSE PEOPLE who have questions.
If DC Democrats really wanted to put these lowlifes on the spot, they would refuse to seat any House Republican that has publicly said they would challenge the election's results, especially if they challenge the results of their own states (I'm looking at you, Tom Tiffany). Only allow them to take office on this condition - They must publicly admit that Joe Biden won the election, and that they apologize for calling those results into question on unfounded BS. Even then, give them a time-out until January 7, just to make sure.
Too many Dems have been content to sit back and run out the clock until January 20 without forcefully pushing back on the destructive garbage that GOPs and their megaphones in media have been spewing. They've also done the same conflict-averse strategy on Trump's moves to fire competent people in charge of various federal agencies and put in hacks to shred documents and keep others quiet run those places for the last 2 months of his presidency, and hamstring Biden's effectiveness.
TRUMP PENTAGON putting US national security in great peril. Transition meetings turned off since 18 Dec. Political appointees are deliberately hiding issues. Russian hack? Mil Ops against Iran? Contract corruption? Jan 6 DC security? https://t.co/Q0a3FLo6kc
Biden has started to publicly call it out more recently, but it's not been enough. Donald Trump was defeated nearly 2 months ago. How has this lame duck been allowed to grab more power and screw things up even further? Instead, DC Dems cared more about funding the government and wasted weeks trying to get a half-assed stimulus in place instead of dealing with the 5-alarm fire that's going on inside the White House.
Far too many DC Dems are so personally tied to their belief in "our system" and in "the proper way to act" that they refuse to admit that things are as broken as they are, and that they need to hit the Republicans hard for what they have done are continue to try to do. In 2020, too many still believe that being the adult in the room is something that is rewarded by voters, and I see zero evidence that has been true for the last decade.
So many DC Dems still think "The West Wing" was a way to emulate being a politicians. But it's the rambunctious, "troublesome" outsider that understood the best way to treat these bastards.
I'd add the words "racist, anti-democratic, whiny snowflakes" to what Ron Silver said, but you get the point.
Allowing yourself to be hit while not hitting back, and not using the power the voters have given you just makes you look weak and ineffectual. That is not what voters are looking for in a time of major problems. They want action and results.
This is what so many Dems miss in 2020 - they act as the party of stability and the status quo, but the status quo is failing. Look at the inequities in our economy, in who COVID has and has not hit, and how some groups of Americans are presumed guilty until proven innocent by law enforcement while others constantly break the rules, and not only don't get arrested, they benefit from it. In added money and in added power.
This quote summed up the 2010s, but it applies in 2021 more than ever.
Someone, I can't recall who, asked recently in this space for single words that defined this past decade. I've thought about it for a bit and now offer my candidate: IMPUNITY.
Because of a self-serving memo written 47 years ago, prosecutors refuse to hold this criminal president and his associates accountable because...they get a safe space in the White House for the next 19 days to laugh at us from? DROP THE BOMB ON THESE BUMS, make TrumpWorld claim they are immune after the charges are in place, and make SCOTUS actually answer the question. That's what Republicans would do if the shoe were on the other foot, but too many Dems shrug, say "Them's the rules", and let things continue to get worse.
As the 2010s taught us in Wisconsin and the Trump era taught us in DC, rules only matter if there are consequences for breaking them. And customs and laws exist until they don't. Republicans have spent the 2000s pushing the rules and changing the referees to make things more in their favor. Why shouldn't Dems be aggressive and do the same tactics FOR REASONS OF GOOD?
Why shouldn't Dems go after misinformation outlets and make lying media accountable for the degrading outcomes of the posisonous, disprovable garbage that they push out into the world? Why shouldn't Dems demand that the rich and coporate give back some of the obscene gains they have made in the last 12 months while the rest of the nation has suffered unprecedented death and the loss of millions of jobs?
Why do we let garbage GOPs walk away unscathed for propelling lies about our elections, and actually benefit from that outrageousness in the form of increased donations and media attention, instead of refusing to seat these pieces of trash, and publicly berating them on a daily basis for what they tried to pass off?
Why isn't the Democratic Party of Wisconsin launching a full-scale assault of ads and billboards on Ron Johnson for being a traitorous tool, and sticking it in people's faces on a daily basis so it sinks in well before the 2022 election cycle that this guy is crooked and unfit?
I have real fears that Biden in DC and Gov Evers in Madison still refuse to understand how depraved and awful the members of the other party have become, and that GOPs will not operate in good faith. Evil like that cannot be reasoned with, but must be CRUSHED, at least long enough so that the opposition learns that trying such shenanigans are even worse than accepting defeat.
This guy knew how to deal with Confederates.
“I would not coax them, or meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”
If we don't take that attitude in 2021, and if we try to remain conflict-averse and believe in "stability over everything else". then I worry that our economy and our political system will remain stagnant, and that low-info voters will demand "something different." Which won't be the group that has Joe Biden, Tony Evers, Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer in power. And can you imagine how bad the GOP would be in the 2024 election if they actually ran swing states like Wisconsin?
We are too far down in the hole to do nothing. 2021 has to be a year of action, or else things will become even worse. So it may be a New Year, but I'm far from Happy at this time.
