The Government Will Not Shut Down... This Week

Both chambers of Congress have passed a bill that will fund the government for another week, while negotiations on a longer-term package continue. It doesn't have Joe Biden's signature yet, but that will undoubtedly be applied today.

The vote in each chamber is instructive. In the House, the measure passed 224-201. Put another way, the Democrats were joined by nine Republicans—Adam Kinzinger (IL), Liz Cheney (WY), Chris Jacobs (NY), Anthony Gonzalez (OH), John Katko (NY), Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA.), Fred Upton (MI), Steve Womack (AR) and Brian Fitzpatrick (PA). In news that is highly related, seven of those nine will be leaving the House at the end of this term. Only Womack and Fitzpatrick will remain as of Jan. 3 of next year.

Meanwhile, over the Senate, the vote was considerably more lopsided. The 50 Democrats and independents were joined by 21 Republicans, for a final vote of 71-19. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was one of the 71, and he clearly whipped his conference in support of the bill.

What this pretty strongly suggests is that a full-year spending deal is going to be adopted next week. As long as the Democrats can attract 10 (or 21) Republican votes in the Senate, then they don't need any Republican votes in the House at all. Reportedly, as per usual, most of the haggling is on non-defense spending. However, leaders on both sides of the Senate expressed optimism that they'll work something out.

Meanwhile, the willingness of McConnell & Co. to support a long-term bill (well, one that will be in effect for most of next year), as opposed to pushing this to January, could be a preview of the dynamics of the 118th Congress. It sure looks like Senate Republicans are scared to death about what might happen if a Republican-controlled House (and, by extension, the MAGA crew) gets power over the federal budget. They know that if the government gets shut down or, even worse, if the government defaults on its debt, voters are likely to blame the GOP.

And so, maybe that will be the dynamic in 2023-25: Democrats, a small number of moderate House Republicans, and Senate Republicans finding middle ground so as to stop the MAGA Militia from wrecking the country. If that does happen, it would mean that the Joes, Biden and Manchin, were right and bipartisanship isn't dead. It just took Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to scare everyone straight. (Z)

Inflation Deflation

You can never know what the economy will do, but it certainly looks like the wild inflation of the last year is in the rear-view mirror. The year-to-year figure for October was 7.7% and for November it was 7.1%. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) was up 0.4% in October and just 0.1% in November. Core CPI (which excludes food and energy costs) was up 0.3% in October and 0.2% in November. The national average price of a gallon of gas, which is apparently the index that regular people pay attention to, is down to $3.18. That compares to $3.74 a month ago and $3.31 a year ago. We wonder if people are still putting those Joe Biden "I Did That" stickers on gas station pumps, now that fuel is cheaper than it was this time last year.

And speaking of Biden, probably the best sign that the economy has turned a corner is not these numbers, but the behavior of the politicians. The President did a little bragging about the state of the economy this week. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and predicted confidently that inflation would cool in 2013. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank met this week and raised rates by half a point, which was a smaller hike than the past several, and is a clear sign that the Governors think inflation is slowing down.

So, you can probably bid farewell to all those "inflation is out of control" stories in 2023, while bracing yourself for a million "Will there be a recession?" stories. For our part, we don't have the faintest idea what will happen. In fairness, (Z) has been watching a fair bit of CNBC lately because the dogsitter tends to leave the TV set to that channel, and is not convinced that anyone else has the faintest idea, either.

In any event, what we are interested in is the political implications of all of this. More specifically, are the Republicans better off in 2024 if there is a recession and/or if the inflation returns, or are they better off with a more stable economy? The obvious answer is that Republicans would like to run against a bad economy. However, they are going to control the House for the next two years. Further, it's not like running on a bad economy worked out great for them in 2022.

If the GOP was a normally functioning political party, the leadership might conclude that its "Biden ruined the economy" pitch did not land very well, and would re-tool either their verbiage, or the issues they focused upon, or both. Maybe they might even offer some actual policy ideas (even though Mitch McConnell does not like to do that). For example, exactly why the Republican Party, which is the party of rural America, has not become the party of rural broadband for everyone right now, we do not know. But that would be an actual policy idea that might get some positive attention.

Under current circumstances, however, the removal of the economy as a viable issue (not to mention the likelihood of Donald Trump or Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-FL at the top of the ticket) would probably cause the Party to lean even more fully into the culture wars stuff. And that definitely hasn't been working for them, outside of red states and districts. So, it's probably best for the Republicans if the economy is bad in 2024, not because they will have success using that against Biden, but because it might save them from focusing more on things that are even less likely to be successful. (Z)

Charlie Baker to Lead the NCAA

Gov. Charlie Baker (R-MA) has landed his next gig. After he leaves office on Jan. 5 of next year, and then has a few weeks of vacation, he will take over the presidency of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The NCAA is kind of a mess, and has been for years, so Baker isn't exactly opting for an easy retirement.

We pass this news along for one reason. There are some folks out there—Republicans, Democrats and independents—who would like to see a non-whackadoodle Republican gain control of the Party and serve as its standard-bearer in 2024. Clearly, that won't be Baker; running the NCAA is not going to leave time for mounting a presidential bid. Maybe in 2028, but by then he'll be 72, which is kind of old by the standards of any president besides the last two. So it would certainly seem that one of the favorite non-whackadoodle Republican options is off the table. There's still Phil Scott (R-VT), Chris Sununu (R-NH) and Asa Hutchinson (R-AR), though. (Z)

The Word Cup, Part VIII: Presidential Campaigns, 21st Century

This is the last of the preliminary rounds. If you care to review any of the other opening groups, here they are:

• The Word Cup, Part I: The Martial Spirit
• The Word Cup, Part II: Presidential Campaigns, Pre-Civil War
• The Word Cup, Part III: Reform
• The Word Cup, Part IV: Presidential Campaigns, from the Civil War to World War II
• The Word Cup, Part V: Reactionary Slogans
• The Word Cup, Part VI: Presidential Campaigns, from World War II to the End of the 20th Century
• The Word Cup, Part VII: The Fight for Equality

And now, the last set of presidential slogans:

Hope (2008): In 2008, Barack Obama ran the most effective presidential campaign of the 21st century (at least, so far). He's the only presidential candidate since Bill Clinton to win the popular vote by more than 5% (he won by 7.3%) and also the first since Clinton to win more than two-thirds of the electoral votes (he won 365 of 538, or 67.8%). There was a time when that was a garden-variety solid victory, but under current, hyper-polarized circumstances, it's a rout. And Obama did it by first dispatching the ultimate Democratic insider in Hillary Clinton, and then defeating a fairly popular Republican with crossover appeal in John McCain.

The "Hope" slogan, and the ubiquitous (and often parodied) poster by Shepard Fairey, were a huge part of establishing Obama's "brand." If your campaign is going to have a four-letter theme that starts with "h," it is much easier to peddle "hate." But that has significant limits in terms of how much support it can attract, and how long it will be effective. Meanwhile, if a politician can actually persuade people that he or she represents "hope," that is powerful stuff indeed, as Franklin D. Roosevelt could attest. Of course, that did not stop Obama's enemies from weaponizing hate. Indeed, with the 44th president laying claim to the yin, it's not surprising that his opponents decided the yang was all they had.

Feel the Bern (2016): "Feel the Bern" was also about hope, of course, given that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was running on a better and more egalitarian version of America's future. Of course, Obama went 2-0 and Sanders went 0-2, so it may be hard to imagine that "Feel the Bern!" was more impactful than "Hope."

Still, before you reach your conclusions, hear us out. Sanders' campaign got a lot of young people engaged in the political process who might not otherwise have been. In the elections since, the participation of younger voters has trended upward. So, it could be that Sanders' campaign will have a long-term impact that stretches over multiple decades. On top of that, Sanders and his movement forced the Democrats to pay attention to the progressive wing of the Party; that hadn't been happening since sometime before the Clinton years.

Jeb! (2016): There were a number of contenders for this slot. In particular, we would really have liked to include a Hillary Clinton slogan, but we just were not persuaded that "Love Trumps Hate" or "I'm With Her" had all that much impact. Ditto Joe Biden's "Build Back Better." These all come off as kind of clumsy to us.

And so, if we're going to go with clumsy, then let's go with one of the two clumsiest slogans in American political history (the other one is AuH₂O). Jeb Bush was supposed to be the chosen one, but he struggled to gain traction, and he took a fair bit of damage due to the attacks made by Donald Trump, particularly the mockery of Bush as "low energy." Consequently, the Bush campaign launched the worst rebranding in American political history, trying to counter the "energy" bit by putting an exclamation point after Jeb's first name. This did not counter Trump, it just made Jeb! into an object of ridicule (that continues to this day, 6+ years later). He was toast within the month.

It is not often the case that a political campaign makes an unforced error this damaging, particularly with a slogan. It is true that Jeb! already had his back against the wall when his marketing team attempted its reboot. However, was he really in that much worse a position than Joe Biden was heading into South Carolina in 2020? And after Bush's demise, the Republican establishment's last, best hope of derailing Donald Trump was gone.

Make America Great Again (2016): Most readers will not be fans of this slogan, but there is no questioning the enormous impact of "Make America Great Again," which was an absolutely brilliant bit of politicking. It recalls St. Ronnie of Reagan, allowing Donald Trump to lay claim to his legacy. It can be reduced to an instantly recognizable acronym—and Twitter hashtag. It fits well on a baseball cap.

Perhaps most importantly, the slogan seemed to commit Trump to a bold policy agenda, while actually committing him to no policy agenda at all. His campaign never made it entirely clear when America was last "great," or how we would know when it had become "great again." And that lack of substance carried over into the Trump presidency; tax cuts for rich people, xenophobia, a coarsened political discourse, and a few dozen miles of border wall are hardly the stuff of a return to greatness. And yet, the base still loves their champion.

The latest ballot is here. If you have comments on this group of slogans, please pass them along. (Z)

It's a Conspiracy!, Part II: The "Twitter Files"

On Wednesday, we had an item discussing Hunter Biden's laptop, and our assessment of the story (executive summary: We are inclined to believe the laptop, and the data on it, belong to Hunter Biden, but we don't believe that there is anything that demonstrates corrupt behavior by Joe Biden). We promised to follow up with a piece on the so-called "Twitter Files" on Thursday, since there is a definitely connection between the two stories. However, we actually meant "Friday." Sometimes it's easy to mix up "the day on which the material is written" and "the day on which the material is published."

Anyhow, Friday has arrived, and so now it's time to take a look at this alleged scandal. And where you have to start, in our view, is with three giant red flags:

1. Elon Musk: Given Musk's skill at, and demonstrated history of, bending the narrative to suit his purposes, you have to treat anything he's involved in with kid gloves. That is especially true here. The story that the Twitter Files purport to tell is that under the site's past regime, Twitter was hopelessly biased against conservatives. There is also an implication that Twitter is representative of other social media platforms, which are therefore also hopelessly biased against conservatives.
   
   The problem here, in terms of red flags, is that Musk has at least two motivations to sell this particular narrative. The first of those is that, for whatever reason, he has recently reinvented himself as a right-wing culture warrior, doing battle with the forces of wokeness. The second is that he's trying to attract right-wing users, most obviously Donald Trump, back to his money-hemorrhaging social media platform. If The Daily Beast were to start publishing stories about how left-wing websites are our single-best tool for combating global warming, it would be wise to treat those stories with some skepticism. The same holds here.
   
   
2. Selective Release: Musk, and several members of his management team, are choosing what is released to the general public (mostly internal e-mails and online Slack conversations involving Twitter employees). For serious journalistic outlets, this curation alone is enough to be a dealbreaker. It means two important things: (1) that there's no way to be certain of the context surrounding the communications, and (2) that there's no way to know how often similar situations arose involving left-wing and/or politically neutral content. It is one thing if 95% of the moderation discussions and decisions involved right-leaning content. It's another thing if it was only 50%, or 40% or 30%.
   
   
3. Selective Recipients: Musk is only releasing the Twitter Files to select people in the media. In fact, there are only three folks who are on the Twitter CEO's recipient list: Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger. This is a very, very carefully chosen list. All three of these individuals have cultivated a reputation for being "independent" but willing to ask "tough questions" about wokeness and about people on the left. Shellenberger, for example, has argued that progressivism encourages homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. Weiss is fond of comparing left wingers and fascists. Taibbi is an enthusiastic practitioner of bothsidesism; his main shtick is that the excesses of the left and of the right are equally wrongheaded and are entirely comparable to each other. For example, he's compared people who look through the past statements of public figures with an eye towards racist rhetoric to "Christians [who] periodically discover the face of Jesus in tree stumps or wall mold."
   
   In short, Musk did not handpick Fox or The New York Post to share his material with. No, to create a veneer of legitimacy, he picked people who are not necessarily in the bag for the Republican Party the way Fox is, but who agree with the right on a lot of things, and who just so happen to agree with Musk on the key issues in play here. So, he knew exactly what would be written even before he shared a single screen shot with Taibbi, Weiss and Shellenberger. And even then, Musk demanded additional concessions from the trio. One of those was that they had to publish everything they wrote to Twitter first, before publishing it elsewhere. It's not known what the other concessions were; Taibbi has publicly acknowledged that "in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions," but has refused to expand on what those conditions were.

In short, one cannot take this seriously as an attempt to inform the public and to stimulate thought and discussion. This is much closer to a propaganda campaign than it is to serious journalism.

With that said, here are the three major "stories" that these writers have told so far (again, in service of the larger storyline that Twitter is biased against conservatives):

1. The Biden Laptop: Hunter Biden's laptop was the subject of the first wave of revelations, and most of the Twitter Files coverage has been about this issue. What the releases show is that the Twitter staff initially suppressed coverage of the laptop story in general, and of The New York Post's reporting in particular. Their reasoning for doing so was that the story was based on hacked data, and Twitter's policies forbade the propagation of such stories (as the platform does not wish to encourage hacking, for obvious reasons).
   
   With the benefit of hindsight, it's fairly clear that Twitter made two mistakes here. The first was the general policy; there is a fair bit of legitimate news based on hacked or otherwise pilfered information, and a blanket ban on such reporting is problematic. The second is that the laptop data wasn't hacked. As we noted in the previous item, linked above, the data was copied from a laptop that computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac appears to have acquired legitimately.
   
   It is entirely plausible that, if the laptop had belonged to right-wing figure, the generally left-leaning Twitter staff might have handled things differently. That can never be known, but it does raise the possibility of at least a little bit of left-wing bias, at least in this particular case. That said, there are two things to be said in the Twitter staff's defense. The first was that when they were grappling with this particular issue, all of the prominent data leaks in recent memory (e.g. the DNC e-mails) actually were the result of hacking. So, their premature conclusion here was understandable, even if it was incorrect. The second is that the decision to suppress the story was in place for... 1 day. So, there is no basis for saying that Twitter (which is not the only social media platform, and which is used by only 5% of Americans on any given day) somehow changed the landscape of the 2020 election with its heavy-handed, pro-left-wing content moderation. Because it didn't.
   
   
2. The Trump Suspension: This was the subject of the second wave of releases. Everyone knows the decision that the Twitter staff reached (and that Musk ultimately reversed). And the debate that the staff had is exactly the same sort of debate that might have taken place in this site's Sunday mailbag. On one hand, politicians and world leaders are given much broader latitude on social media and other platforms than are private citizens, and Twitter had never before banned a sitting world leader from its platform. On the other hand, Trump tweeted things that most certainly fanned the flames, and that might well be said to have helped cause much violence and multiple deaths. Ultimately, every other social media platform reached the same conclusion that Twitter did and banned Trump. So, it's hard to find much fault here. In fact, it's hard to find any.
   
   
3. COVID-19: The current wave of releases has to do with efforts to curb COVID misinformation, often with direct input from the Biden administration. To take one example, Stanford School of Medicine professor Jay Bhattacharya was "blacklisted" on the day he joined the platform. That meant that he was still able to log in, to tweet, to add followers and to engage with users but that his tweets would not show up in "trending topics" searches. In other words, if you asked Twitter to show you the latest tweets about COVID, his stuff wouldn't appear. The reason he was blacklisted is that he and two of his colleagues released what they call the "Great Barrington Declaration," a letter that argued that only very vulnerable people should be locked down and that everyone else should resume their normal lives with an eye toward contracting COVID and developing herd immunity. This is not insane in the way that "inject bleach to cure COVID" is, but it did and does run contrary to generally accepted wisdom on COVID. And indeed, what we know now that was not fully clear when Bhattacharya and his fellows issued that declaration is that having COVID does not convey full immunity against the disease, and it's most certainly possible to contract it again (and again and again).
   
   Maybe Bhattacharya should not have been blacklisted. Maybe he should have. However, this is another case where context matters a lot. When Bhattacharya joined the platform back in 2020, much about COVID was unknown and Americans were dying at the rate of thousands a day. Further, the people moderating content at Twitter are not physicians and are certainly not immunologists or microbiologists. Under the circumstances, it is understandable that they erred on the side of being heavy-handed.

In the end, the Twitter Files raise some questions about which reasonable people can disagree. Should a sitting presidential administration be asking a social media platform to moderate content in the name of public health? Should Donald Trump have been banned in response to the events of 1/6? Should non-scientists be making decisions about science-based content? Should anyone from Stanford be allowed to tweet, ever?

Also, the Twitter Files might support, very weakly, the notion that the folks who ran Twitter had a left-wing bias, and that the left-wing bias sometimes affected the choices they made. That said, it's hard to know how pernicious this problem really was, given the selectivity of what Elon Musk is releasing. It's also worth noting that while moderation decisions might favor left-wingers, Twitter's automated algorithms, the ones that decide which content to promote, actually favor conservatives. The reason is simple: Conservative tweets are much more likely to contain misinformation, misinformation is much more likely to get engagement from users, and high-engagement tweets get promoted over low-engagement tweets.

The lesson the Twitter Files really support, however, is that content moderation is really difficult. And the folks who used to run Twitter, who were trying to figure out how to handle the situation on the fly, while being attacked from partisans on both the left and the right, clearly spent much time where they were in over their heads. And don't forget that the staff was not only trying to do what was right, as they saw it, they were also keeping in mind their business partners and the possibility that the government might swoop in and start regulating them. Not an easy situation.

Finally, we will conclude with this: In the end, the Twitter Files didn't reveal anything that we didn't already know. Oh, the stuff shared by Musk might have filled in the picture a little bit, but there is nothing we've written here about how Twitter operates that couldn't have been written six months ago. As with the Biden laptop story, folks on the right are carping about how this story is being buried by the "lamestream media." But it's gotten some coverage, and the fact that it hasn't gotten more is due to the red flags we outline above, as well as the fact that there just isn't much "news" here. Further, as with the Biden situation, we assume the political actors here (i.e., Musk) would have made sure to release the most damning stuff first. So, it is likely that the Twitter Files will continue to fade from public view, excepting those for whom the coverage serves as a form of confirmation bias.

Incidentally, it's been suggested by several readers that we should write items like this on a regular basis, perhaps weekly. If we did that, we'd envision putting conspiracy theories, right- and left-wing talking points, historical claims and other such material under the microscope. Does this sound like a good idea? If so, what would be a good recurring title that covers all those possibilities? And also, if so, are there any subjects in particular you would like us to look at? If you have thoughts, let us know. (Z)

This Week in Schadenfreude: NFT, WTF?

Although we've been doing this feature for the better part of a year, Donald Trump has rarely been featured. In part, that's because he does so much stuff that might be targeted, and we don't want to focus too much on any one person. And in part it's because we try not to write about him except when it is actually newsworthy.

This week, though, he's going to get the treatment because there's just too much... juice in this story. Roughly 10 days ago, the former president began to tease a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT that he said was coming on Thursday. Now, whenever he says something like that, particularly in ALL CAPS, one should be very cautious. He is Donald Trump, after all. That said, since announcing his candidacy for president, he's done literally nothing that a candidate for office usually does. No speeches. No rallies. No policy statements. He hasn't even hired a campaign manager, much less other staffers. So, the Trump faithful thought that he might be planning to unveil something of substance.

He wasn't, as you've probably guessed. No, the MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT was that Trump is unveiling his own line of NFT trading cards. They feature a blend of "action" and "fantasy" poses. Here are some examples:

Hold on. Didn't we see those the last time we visited the Louvre? No, wait, that was the Venus de Milo. Sorry, small hands, no hands... we get confused.

The images are absolutely ridiculous, of course. And to sell them as NFTs, when you already have a reputation as a grifter? At a time when the NFT market, and the very much related crypto market, are in freefall? Wow. Trump was skewered on social media and on late-night talk shows in a way we haven't seen in at least a year or two. Jimmy Kimmel, for example, observed that "It's literally Cards Against Humanity," making reference to the popular game. "You know your campaign isn't going well when your re-election strategy is, 'Maybe people will like me as a Pokemon,'" joked Jimmy Fallon. Stephen Colbert went in a similar direction, but used "Grope-e-mon." Seth Meyers said: "Also, got to love the timing of a former president launching his NFT line the same week a crypto scammer gets arrested. 'They got S.B.F.? Looks like there's an opening available, then!'

Quite a few Democrats also jumped in, among them the leader of the Party:

I had some MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS the last couple of weeks, too…

️️ Inflation’s easing
️️ I just signed the Respect for Marriage Act
️️ We brought Brittney Griner home
️️ Gas prices are lower than a year ago
️️ 10,000 new high-paying jobs in Arizona

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 15, 2022

Joe Biden doesn't usually indulge in this sort of thing. Maybe he relaxed his usual rules as an early Christmas present to himself.

More significantly for Trump, a lot of people on Team Donald reacted with dismay and/or anger. Steve Bannon, for example, said:

I can't do this anymore. He's one of the greatest presidents in history, but I gotta tell you: whoever—what business partner and anybody on the comms team and anybody at Mar-a-Lago—and I love the folks down there—but we're at war. They oughta be fired today.

The Blaze host Chad Prather wrote: "We have a nation going down the toilet, and Donald Trump is selling Pokémon cards. No thanks." The on-air staffers at Newsmax, which interrupted its daily programming to cover the announcement, were... nonplussed, to say the least. You can watch the 80 seconds they ultimately gave to the story here:

One Trump supporter tweeted "I Can't Believe I'm Going to Jail for an NFT Salesman." Another added: "Which $99 Donald Trump Limited Edition Digital Trading Card NFT are you? I'm Overly Photoshopped Dinner Guest." We could easily continue this with another 100 tweets.

As you can see, the price for the cards was $99 a pop. And all 45,000 of them have reportedly sold out, meaning that Trump collected about $4.5 million in one day (which goes into his pocket; this was not a campaign fundraiser). So maybe it was worth it for him. Or, maybe not. Trump insiders are concerned that stunts like this will reduce donations to his campaign. Further, the next time he has a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT, it will get considerably less attention, probably even from Newsmax. As to the schadenfreude angle, CNN and CBS contributor Ron Filipkowski put it this way:

All I can say is that those of us who have lost friends, fought with relatives, resigned positions, been called traitor, left our party, all because we saw very clearly what a con-man, huckster and fraud this man is, have never felt more vindicated.

Undoubtedly, many of the readers who sent this item in will feel the same. (Z)

This Week in Freudenfreude: The South Will Fall Again

Black people are the largest ethnic group in Richmond, VA, comprising 45% of the population. And for more than 100 years, any Black folks who needed to travel down Monument Avenue, which is just a little north and west of downtown, were subjected to the sight of hagiographic monuments paying tribute to the heroes of the Confederacy. You know, the folks who fought to preserve slavery and white supremacy?

No more, though. Last year, most of the government-owned Confederate monuments in Richmond (the ones honoring Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson) were removed. The last one left standing was the one that honored A.P. Hill. Why? Well, in part because Hill's statue was not on Monument Avenue; it was a few blocks to the northeast. And in part because Hill's mortal remains were interred in the pedestal, making it not only a monument but also a gravesite.

This week, the Hill statue finally came down. Hill's descendants are still fighting the decision in court, but they're out of luck. First, the statue belongs to the city and the city can do as it sees fit. Second, the deed is already done. Good luck finding a judge willing to order that the statue be returned to the spot from which it was removed.

The statue was not destroyed, though its disposition is still in question. The city wants to give it to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, which also took possession of the other monuments that were removed. A museum, of course, can put something like that in historical context, and can transform something that was celebratory into something that is illuminating and educational. Hill's family, by contrast, wants the statue moved to their ancestor's new gravesite, to act as a headstone. They are not likely to win that one, either.

In any event, wherever the statue goes, it will no longer occupy a place of honor in a plurality-Black city. Mayor Levar Stoney's remark, as the monument was lifted off its base, was "This is, I would say, the last day of the Lost Cause." It is about damn time. (Z)

A December to Rhymember, Part X: The Man of Steal

Let us now present the evidence that the Trump NFT story simply could not be allowed to pass without comment, courtesy of M.C. in Newton, MA:

On Truth Social where no one who counts went,
Thursday Trump made a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT:
Now he sells NFTs!
(to grift rubes with great ease)
MAGA fans? Soon their checkbooks will bounce rent.

And from B.H. in Westborough, MA:

On legal matters Trump does skate
With hookers and sleazeballs he does mate
He appeals and appeals
And slows justice's wheels
So for Schadenfreude we impatiently wait

And finally, from S.S. in West Hollywood, CA:

My poems about our home Führer
Are ignored by E-V's tome keeper.
Perhaps I'm too mean,
I'll be less extreme.
Hey, I like TFG's combover.

We think S.S. might not be telling the truth about the combover. Anyhow, here's the address for submissions. Have a good weekend, everyone! (Z)

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