May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. – Actress and Director Joey Adams
To quote the great Aerosmith, “I’m back in the saddle again.”
And I want to thank the WRMN listener who called in to ask if I was going to do a First Ward 2023 retrospective primarily because he wanted to hear me admit that I got the whole Bud Light saga wrong because I might not have otherwise done this.
Bud Light
Yes! I did get the whole Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney transgender influencer outcome dead wrong because any reasonable prediction has to rely on a certain logic or they’re nothing more than a stab in the dark.
The truth is Bud Light’s numbers were slipping long before Ms. Mulvaney entered the scene, American beer drinking is at generational low, and with their aging demographic slowly dying off, I thought the Anheuser Busch advertising team would damn the torpedoes and take full speed advantage of the Barnum-esque notion that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Think about it for a second. Most gay men aren’t burdened with progeny which means they have more disposable income and more time to party.
But instead of making hay while the sun shines, unnerved by the conservative backlash, those lackluster lunkheads at AB folded like a cheap backtracking suit when anyone with a quarter-of-a-brain knew they couldn’t unring that Mulvaney bell.
So, after their asinine knee-jerk attempt to distance themselves from the influencer, gay bars joined their redneck brethren in banning Bud Light which sent sales plummeting and cost those fine ad folks their jobs. Though the evidence clearly indicates I should capitulate in this regard, I refuse to base predictions on some potential rank stupidity, particularly on the part of a Fortune 500 company.
Politicians are another story entirely.
While we’re talking, I still don’t understand the absurd reaction to Ms. Mulvaney’s face being plastered on a can of really bad beer. I’ll be the first one to take on today’s LGBTQ bullies, but she simply lives her life as best she can while attracting a scad of followers in the process. Anyone who has an issue with that is just as big a fucking asshole as the latently gay and no-talent Kid Rock – who continued serving Bud Light at his Nashville bar, despite his proclamations to the contrary.
COVID 
Though it really doesn’t take a rocket scientist at this late pandemic point, The First Ward continues to predict the plague’s progression with unerring accuracy. In fact, it’s become so easy that it wouldn’t be worth mentioning were it not for all the medical “experts,” many of whom have called for a return to masking, still getting it wrong.
The lure of all that pandemic publicity and policy power is far too addicting for them to let go of it, so when they’re not issuing calls for a return to the mitigations that didn’t work the first time, they’re writing op-ed articles “justifying” their terrible decisions.
And they do this despite their “cure” being so much worse than the disease. Doubt me? Just talk to any teacher. I know quite a few of ‘em and they’re all counting the days until they can leave the profession because the kids are failing at a record rate and they’ve become utterly unmanageable. Great job progressives!
Cashless bail
Once the Illinois courts put the SAFE-T act on hold, I thought that would be the end of it, but you never know what evil lurks in the hearts of a Democratic State Supreme Court. It’s difficult to tell if this “reform” is “working” at this early point in the game for two reasons.
The first is, though Chicago crime is generally down, violent crimes, like armed robbery and carjackings, have exploded and the media has yet to determine if a statistically significant number of these offenders were out on “bail” at the time.
The second and far more important measure is the jury is still out on any effect on the Illinois jail population. If more people are incarcerated awaiting trial than before the new law was implemented, then it’s clearly not working. I’m sure we’ll start seeing some numbers next summer after the Act has been around for a year.
“Inflation” is, indeed, easing
And the reason it’s so nicely retreating is, per The First Ward’s repeated pronouncements, IT’S NOT FUCKIN’ INFLATION – it’s global supply chain issues that were greatly exacerbated by disastrous COVID mitigations.
Were it a case of actual inflation, the current minor (but utterly unnecessary) series of Fed interest rate hikes wouldn’t have put a flippin’ dent in it. How do I and my contemporaries know this? Because we’ve lived long enough to remember Gerald Ford’s “WIN” buttons (look it up youngsters) and we watched the Carter administration tighten interest rates to the tune of 20 percent to finally tame the decade long inflationary beast.
But just as the global supply chain has finally returned to some semblance of “normal,” the Houthi rebels are threatening to disrupt it once more by attacking Red Sea shipping.
That said, some of those price increases, particularly in the grocery aisles, were the result of profiteering on the part of some of our “best” corporate citizens. But now those robber barons are shaking in their shoes because, instead of obediently handing over their wallets, Americans have changed their shopping habits in the form of forgoing or avoiding the biggest brand names in favor of cheaper in-house store brand alternatives.
The Web is replete with articles on the subject if you want to learn more.
Here are a couple of perfect examples. When my former favorite steak sauce, Kraft’s A1, nearly doubled in price, I summarily moved on to Country Bob’s, which, at half-ish the price, actually tastes better. The irony is I would never have given Bob’s a shot had they continued to sell A1 at a reasonable price.
Now, I’m never going back, despite those Meijer “New Low Price” tags on the A1 shelf.
When those ubiquitous large boxes of Milk Bone dog biscuits skyrocketed from $10 to $17, I started making my own for about a quarter of the price. C’mon! We’re talking just flour, margarine, and water here. I’ll still buy ‘em if Amazon sellers offer some sort of coupon, but otherwise it’s me, the rolling pin, and the dog bone shaped cookie cutter.
Though I really think the canines would be content if I simply cut them into basic rectangles.
Oh! And speaking of those Amazon Milk Bone sellers, they’re all currently offering 25 percent off coupons because they can’t sell those 10 lb. boxes at 15 bucks a pop. Unlike Gordon Gekko claimed, greed is NOT good, and most of those once high-flying brand names will never fully recover from their own avarice and stupidity.
Since we’re on the subject, I cannot begin to fathom how the Biden administration and the Dems consistently fail to frame any reasonable message based on how their policies sidestepped the “inevitable” post-pandemic recession that every last Republican nitwit predicted.
On Thursday we’ll persist with part two covering the more local 2023 issues.
