Tangle - The Sunday — January 14

This is the Tangle Sunday Edition, a brief roundup of our independent politics coverage plus some extra features for your Sunday morning reading.

What the left is doodling.

John Deering | Creators Syndicate

What the right is doodling.

Steve Kelley | Creators Syndicate

Reader essay.

Photograph by Anne Fowler.

This week we have a unique piece — half touching testimonial, half educational lecture — about a colony of feral and semi-feral cats in the Midwest. The story was pitched to us by a reader who adopted the pseudonym ‘Anne Fowler’ to protect the anonymity of the cat colony, and she brings us her story from what could be Anywhere, USA. You can read and review Anne’s story here!

Have a local story you want to write about? Pitch us! Fill out this form or reply to this email, and we’ll get back to you if we’re hooked.

Reader review.

This week, we had a flurry of commentary about reader questions, which was unusual. Many readers wrote in about our answer to the declining birth rate question, which we’ll respond to next week. Others wrote in to talk about our bias, and media bias in general, which is an evergreen topic that our longtime readers have heard us discuss on end. For those reasons, despite the interest in our responses to reader questions, we wanted to highlight a comment on our spending deal piece that focused on fiscal policy. John’s comment received a lot of support, and it captures a lot of the frustration people have with Congress:

I really hate these spending deal fights. For everyone who says spending is out of control, the question is what are you going to cut? If you're going to reform Medicare, Social Security, or military spending you will need a bipartisan commission to work out a deal with enough buy-in across the aisle. Not just for votes, but for psychological reasons that people cannot just reject or accept the budget merely based on whether it’s coming from team red or team blue. Until that kind of deal is struck I don't want to hear the complaints particularly from the fiscal hawks on the right. There is simply not enough popular support for their versions of entitlement reform. That said, Democrats never have to face the difficulty of requiring their favorite welfare programs to be fully paid for.

No one is being forced to make a necessary choice between high spending on social services with high taxes or lower spending with lower taxes. Instead, we get to skate along with ridiculous spending and not enough tax revenue to pay for it. Nobody is going to get everything they want and the yearly routine of either omnibus spending blowouts on one hand or government shutdowns on the other is getting very tiresome.

Our main stories this week were Joe Biden’s campaign speech, Ohio’s trans healthcare legislation, Congress’s spending deal, and Lloyd Austin’s disappearance. For full versions, you can find all of our past coverage in our archive.

Monday, January 8.

This was an extended edition in which we gave a rundown of all the big stories we missed while we were away, but our main focus was breaking down Joe Biden’s January 6 speech.

On January 5, President Joe Biden delivered his first campaign speech of 2024 just outside Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, telling Americans that democracy itself hung in the balance heading into the 2024 election. The speech focused heavily on former President Donald Trump, whose name Biden invoked 44 times in the roughly 30 minute address.

• From the right. The right is critical of how Biden and Democrats have sought to use the events of January 6 for political gain. In American Greatness, Matthew Boose wrote “Biden’s Valley Forge stunt shows the real threat to democracy.”
• From the left. The left is troubled by a growing sense that Republicans no longer see January 6 as a stain on Trump’s presidency. The Washington Post editorial board criticized “dangerous revisionism of Jan. 6” from the right. 
• Our take. “Biden focusing on Trump’s biggest weakness is just smart campaigning. To be clear, I think the non-peaceful transfer of power is the biggest stain on Trump’s record. As the Biden-Trump rematch becomes increasingly inevitable, be prepared for more and more talk about January 6.”

Tuesday, January 9.

Gov. Mike DeWine and trans legislation. Just one week after vetoing a ban on gender-reassignment surgery, puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine issued an executive order that prohibits gender-transition surgeries for anyone under 18 at state hospitals or ambulatory clinics. Gov. DeWine also directed Ohio health agencies to propose rules that require a multidisciplinary team of medical professionals to be involved in prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy for minors.

• From the left. The left was highly critical of DeWine, calling his position incoherent and saying he folded to the far right. In Cleveland.com, Thomas Suddes bashed the “legislators poised to undercut DeWine.” 
• From the right. The right was equally critical of DeWine for his veto and partial backtracking. In National Review, Madeleine Kearns wrote “do better, DeWine.”
• Our take. “Any time issues like this are divided so strongly on partisan lines, we should take a step back and think. I thought DeWine’s reasoning for his veto was strong, and overall I think the executive order he issued was a pretty good olive branch. There’s good reason to be concerned about this issue for minors, but I don’t think we need more government intervention here.”

Wednesday, January 10.

The new spending deal. On January 7, top Democrats and Republicans in Congress said they had come to an agreement on a $1.65 trillion spending deal. Now, lawmakers will attempt to pass appropriations within the limits specified by the deal. Otherwise, Congress will need to once again push through a short-term spending bill, also known as a continuing resolution, to keep the government from shutting down. The new agreement includes $773 billion for non-defense discretionary spending and $886 billion for defense spending. As part of the deal, Congress will move $10 billion in IRS funding cuts scheduled for fiscal year 2025 into fiscal year 2024 and rescind $6.1 billion in Covid-relief funds. 

• From the right. The right was mixed on the deal, but mostly criticized the deal as ineffective and no different from McCarthy’s budget agreement. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the deal gives Republicans “a chance to show they can actually govern.”
• From the left. The left had few objections to the budget agreement itself, focusing instead on how similar the deal was to McCarthy’s. In The American Prospect, David Dayen said Johnson is the “same as the old boss.”
• Our take. “The Johnson-Schumer deal is basically the McCarthy-Biden deal. I fully support Republicans’ effort and strategies to limit spending and earnestly pursue fiscal responsibility, but the outcomes have been flat. Johnson now has to break his promise to his caucus or allow a government shutdown.”

Thursday, January 11.

Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization. 70-year-old Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin disappeared from public view on New Year's Day, later disclosing that for three days he had been hospitalized in intensive care without the public or the White House being informed. On Tuesday, it was revealed that Austin ended up in intensive care after suffering complications from a surgery required to treat his prostate cancer, a diagnosis he kept from the public and from President Biden.

• From the left. The left was critical of Austin’s decision making and suggested he needs to be actively transparent about his health going forward. In Bloomberg, Nia-Malika Henderson argued “Austin must come clean about his health.”
• From the right. The right was outraged at Austin’s absence and Biden’s muted response, especially during a time of heightened tensions abroad. In The New York Times, Bret Stephens wrote “the Secretary of Defense can’t go AWOL. Neither can America.”
• Our take. “Austin was wrong to conceal his issues, he’s wrong not to resign, and Biden is wrong not to ask him to. This could have been a catastrophe if something serious happened abroad — and that’s how it would have been framed under Trump. Biden should swiftly appoint a new Defense Secretary, and if Republicans won’t confirm them then that’s their political problem.”

Recommended reading.

Something light. Ginger Adams Otis chronicles professor Tom Marion’s attempts to get rodents to stop breaking into his car and gnawing its wires — an increasingly common problem in cold-weather environments. The story was published by the Wall Street Journal (paywall).

Recommended watching.

Something heavy (and non-paywalled). Andrew Callaghan and Channel 5 news are absolutely blowing the competition out of the water when it comes to covering the drug crisis in American cities. This week, Channel 5 published a one-hour video on the crisis in Philadelphia, telling a story that implicates the city government, drug cartels, the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, and two brothers that have cornered the market of a popular new drug (and even managing to interview them).

Most-answered survey.

1,126 people have responded to our survey on Lloyd Austin (so far), making it the ninth-most answered survey in Tangle’s history. And the responses were very clear: 81% of respondents think Austin should be fired. 10% said he should be publicly reprimanded, 6% said he should be privately reprimanded, 1% said he should face no formal consequences, and 2% were unsure. “As a teacher I am required to leave highly detailed lessons and instructions covering every potential emergency scenario for a substitute taking my place for even a portion of a day. If I did not, I would be severely reprimanded or fired for failing in my duties much less for going AWOL without notifying everyone in my chain of command. Mr. Austin has put lives all over the world at risk and should immediately resign,” one respondent said.

On the channels.

YouTube: Over break, we published a video on all the misinformation swirling around the conflict in Gaza. 13,000 people have already watched it, making it our second-most watched video in the brief history of our YouTube channel.

Instagram: We’re getting our engagements throttled again! Magdalena noticed a huge drop in engagement, and our posts temporarily not showing up on timelines, after Will posted a reel in which he said the magic words: January 6. We’re looking more into it, but in the meantime, your engagement on our social channels is more appreciated now than ever. You can see the “offending” reel here.

Tweet of the week.

They just don’t make them like they used to. This video of a hydraulic press struggling to conquer an old Nokia phone is great, but the real gold is in the comments.

Tangle’s favorites.

Ask the readers.

In our New Year’s Eve Sunday special, we asked you what your New Year’s resolutions were for 2024. We got a lot of great answers about focusing on health, mental wellbeing, nurturing creativity, and reading more — and one resolution to learn Welsh (shoutout to Jennifer from Phoenix). Ultimately, though, we decided to highlight the following very specific resolution.

We’ve gotten a few suggestions from our readers, and we wanted to see if readers liked any option better than just keeping the name as is. Our friends at Ranked Vote gave us a license to create ranked choice polls, and we’d love to see how the choices stack up.

VOTE HERE!

Add your thoughts to our poll and our choices by replying to this email or through this form.

Starting with the first letter, add one letter in any position to the preceding line to answer the clue to each line. 

EXAMPLE:

Click here for the answer.

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