Cartoonists With Attitude

Sheldon Art Rage

Originally uploaded by Kevin Moore

Just purchased ArtRage 2.5, a painting program frequently used by one of my favorite webcomics artists, Anthony Clark of Nedroid Comics.

Newly-elected chairman of the RNC, Michael Steele:

Let me start by saying, the goose egg that you laid on the president’s desk was just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Now, folks, I know we’re in the era of bipartisanship, but it’s easy to be bipartisan when you outnumber the minority two to one. Anyone can be bipartisan then. But I thought it was very, very important that you sent a signal, and you sent it loudly and very clearly, that this party, that the leadership of this caucus, will stand first and foremost with the American people. You made it very clear that in order to grow through this recession, that you would not redistribute the wealth of the people of this nation. That you would empower them to earn it, invest it, save it, and spend it on their terms.

Republican state governors: hey, how much of that wealth can you redistribute to me? Can we get it by Tuesday?

Most Republican governors have broken with their GOP colleagues in Congress and are pushing for passage of President Barack Obama’s economic aid plan that would send billions to states for education, public works and health care.

Their state treasuries drained by the financial crisis, governors would welcome the money from Capitol Hill, where GOP lawmakers are more skeptical of Obama’s spending priorities.

The 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, planned to meet in Washington this weekend with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other senators to press for her state’s share of the package.

This isn’t really surprising to anyone who knows how to use Google or Wikipedia, and therefore in five minutes would know that red states are the most constant recipients of wealth redistribution, the third largest being the state of Alaska.

Mavericks!

I’m not going to snark about the collapse of Pajamas Media being “inevitable,” since I’ll give them credit and confess four years was a hell of a lot longer a run that most people would have given them, myself included, at a Vegas betting counter.

However, I am going to re-link to this little reminder from 2006 about the makeup of this extraordinary venture. As if the post doesn’t explain that in itself, this was probably one of the most surreal moments of my four years in DC.

My god. Can you believe it was less than three years ago that these people thought they ran the country?

The first line from a NYTimes article today caught my eye:

Getting between a broker and his bonus is like getting between a schnauzer and his lunch bowl. He may not bite you, but you are going to smell his breath.

Huh? I quickly looked for the line at the bottom “Thomas Friedman contributed to this report” but it wasn’t there. I don’t know if they are biting Friedman’s style, but I definably smell it on their breath. Or something.

There are spoilers ahead.

Last night we went to the Bagdad to watch the new episode of BSG in a room with several hundred other BSG fans. Major mistake. Every time a character picked up a gun or said anything macho, the room cheered, and the MC was obsessed with talking about Starbuck’s “balls” (as in, “she got them back” — he went on and on and on about it). It just made me feel that maybe my favorite current TV show is enjoyed by stupid people.

Also, am I the only one who thinks that on the whole, Zarek and Gaeta are in the right? It’s only this episode — after the fleet is in rebellion — that we see anyone actually attempt to persuade the public that an alliance with their former genocidists is a good idea. The leaders of the fleet are so used to thinking of themselves as dictators who don’t have to give a shit about what the nonentities they’re ruling think, that using persuasion to get the population on their side simply never occurred to them.

More importantly, the moment a military leader gives the order to have the elected government arrested, he loses all moral legitimacy. It’s likely that if the rebellion succeeds (which it won’t), Zarek’s government would be more effectively democratic than the Adama/Roslin government. (And as Elkins pointed out, it’s appropriate symbolism that the president and the admiral are literally in bed together.)

That isn’t to say that Zarek or Gaeta are perfect, or that their motives are pure and good. There’s clearly a lot of anti-cylon racism going on, which is understandable given the genocide and all, but still not fair to innocent cylons. And of course, Gaeta in particular is motivated by all the ways he believes he’s been betrayed. (I have a lot of sympathy, in particular, for his feeling that there was something terribly wrong about a circle of self-appointed vigilante executioners, led mainly by secret cylons, throwing people out of airlocks for collaboration with cylons.)

Despite all that — at least in the midst of that audience cheering every time one of the protagonists posed with a big gun — it seemed that this is being turned into a simple matter of good guys (the current military dictatorship) versus the bad mutineers. In particular, I thought the threat of Sharon getting raped was gratuitous — it was used by the episode not to show that rape is used as a weapon of war (which would have been a point worth making), but to establish that apart from Felix Gaeta himself, the mutineers are Bad People. Similarly, Starbuck — usually an excellent shot — manages to fail to execute the prisoner, because if she had executed an unarmed prisoner, that would have made it seem like atrocities were being committed on both sides — it would have created a parallel to the young soldier killed on the CIC, and that wasn’t an equivalence the writers wanted made.

I hope that in part two, things get a little more complicated — although Elkins tells me the writer of part 2 is one of the worse writers on BSG, so I may be disappointed.

On a shallow side, I got a lot of fun out of seeing Gaeta effectively and intelligently exploit his position to postpone Adama finding out that there had been a mutiny as long as possible. And Gaeta’s “why won’t my ex stop calling me” expression (as Jacob described it) when he was told Baltar was on the phone was priceless.

Thoughts?

Images found here and here.

The Democratic-led Congress has passed bills to provide health insurance for 4 million uninsured children. In the Senate, nine Republicans joined all Democrats in the bill. That leaves 32 Republicans who opposed it. And here’s why:

But Mr. McCain said, "Some of us who look at this bill may view it as another effort to eliminate, over time, private insurance in America, and I am concerned about that."

And Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, asked, "Is the real intent of this legislation to replace the private health care system with a government-run health care system?"

And from The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel, who fears that Democrats in Congress are using "stealth" tactics to nationalize health care:

The bill even takes a whack at the private market. Under the guise of money for "health technology," the legislation makes the government the national coordinator for electronic health records, able to certify what platforms are acceptable. This is an attempt to squelch a growing private market that is competing to improve transparency and let consumers compare providers and costs. In liberal-world, only government should be publishing (and setting) health-care prices.

Dude, if only! I would love to see the day when health insurance rips off only stupid rich people and the rest of the country enjoys a single payer health care system, freeing both businesses and workers alike from the burdens of rising health insurance costs and providing quality health care to everyone, regardless of class.

Oh, but that would be "socialism," so screw that. If we look at how the Democratic candidates debated health care only a year ago, I think we’ll recall that the consensus favored a hodgepodge of various programs that hopefully achieved near-universal health care insurance coverage. The main bone of contention among the candidates was whether or not the government should impose an "individual mandate" that would somehow force everyone to seek some form of insurance from an employer, from a government program, or from a private company. (I tended to agree with Obama that such a mandate could penalize poor people yet seemed rather unenforceable anyway.) There is also the Massachusetts program:

Yet Massachusetts has taken a very different route than Senators Clinton and Obama envision. Massachusetts basically adopted an individual-market model: People without coverage from their employer need to actively seek it out. The cornerstone of both candidates plans, by contrast, is the play-or-pay requirement: employers cover their workers, or their workers are automatically enrolled in a single insurance pool to which employers are required to make contributions. (Both candidates have said they would exempt small businesses from this requirement, which could pose a big hurdle to universal coverage, since most of the uninsured work for small firms.)

Done correctly with businesses reporting whether they cover their workers to the federal government, which then enrolls uninsured employees and their dependents a play-or-pay requirement makes covering people much less complicated. The more than 90 percent of non-elderly Americans (and more than 80 percent of the uninsured) who live in a family in which someone works would be enrolled automatically through the workforce. Many of those missed are already covered through public programs, and aggressive outreach could reach those who still remain without coverage. Thus, Mr. Obamas plan could well cover almost everyone even without the individual mandate.

That leaves about 10-15 million people without health care coverage. For its part, the Democratic Party agenda advocates "quality, affordable health care for every single American" and it’s the "affordable" part that sticks in my eye. Republicans lie that Democratic-led government will destroy the health insurance industry. I wish it were true, but I have more faith in corporate influence on congressional Democrats than that of well-placed single payer advocates. However, in the spirit of the times, I’ll hold out some hope that Rep. John Conyers succeeds in bringing "Medicare for all."

Curtsy: Feministe (and Mom’s Tinfoil Hat for the post title).

UPDATE: By request, here it is without the captions:

Original version after the cut.

Curtsy: Feministe (and Mom’s Tinfoil Hat for the post title).

click for comic

The Prius nipples should’ve gone on the headlights, but that would violate safety regulations.

For your viewing pleasure, I put together some ERUDITE FERRET MACROS. (They are not to be confused with LOL Ferrets, who have a limited grasp of English and the world around them.)

If anyone wants to create the STD Tracker App, go right ahead. Then you can give Big Fat Whale the clap.

Next Week: Obama’s Mad Science

Remember, you can own a paper copy of “Hereville” of your very own!

For folks that pay extra, I do a sketch on the title page. Each sketch is different. Here are three sketches I haven’t posted before; you can see a bunch more here.