Cartoonists With Attitude

Two suicide bombings in Dagestan kill twelve people. As BBCNews reports, the bombings are likely linked to the same group responsible for the Lubyanka bombings two days ago — that is, militants from the North Caucasus region that includes Ingushetia and Chechnya, where Russia, as the Soviet Union and in its post-Soviet mode has waged war, ethnic cleansing, and state terror of various kinds for decades.

But whatever. On Dylan Ratigan’s show on MSNBC, Lanny Davis and some Republican hack are in agreement that this is all part of the GWOT. The hack scolds China and Russia for not doing enough to pressure Iran on nuclear weapons. And that’s it! Thanks for the insight, fellahs!

When available I will update with video.

Over at Salon, Alfred McCoy gets to the heart of Afghanistan’s success:

To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: In poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to establish the state’s authority. When the economy is illicit and by definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental. If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan’s poppy crop is still grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain of production. Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium economy in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?

The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three Afghan wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 years — the CIA covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s (fueled at its start by $900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001, the U.S. invasion, occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns. In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by its Afghan allies as the price of military success — a policy of benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world’s No. 1 narco-state.

But do we Americans get a thank you? Nooooooo.

(Title reference.)

Speaking of Afghanistan, Ted Rall wants to go back there and risk his neck in the service of truth, justice and contrarianism. You can help him at Kickstarter. He’s pretty close to his fundraising goal, but every little bit helps in assuring that he can get there — and come back.

Page 11, that is.

Click the thumbnail to see the whole finger! I mean…page.

Beware random Pink Floyd reference.

There has to be a long lost Apostle who was really into abusing children. The Catholic Church was willing to slack on the whole fish on Friday thing as modern lifestyles changed, but they remain sticklers for the whole protecting-rapists thing.

Matt Bors has more on the subject.

If pope hat is not already a euphemism for a sex act, we should put our filthy thinking caps on.

I know the Pope’s a German Nazi, but it’s too much fun to say that line from the Alka Seltzer commercial.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lce1tZrybt8

There are typos. And then there are intelligence failures in more ways that one.

A Defense Intelligence Agency publication available as recently as yesterday on its Web site noted “an Israeli F-16 raid to destroy an Iranian nuclear reactor” in 1981.

Just one problem: publicly-known history includes no Israeli raid on an Iranian nuclear reactor in 1981. Israel did attack an Iraqi facility at Osirak that year, however.

Remember when George Bush didn’t know the difference between Shia and Sunnis or that it would matter before invading Iraq? Or WMD? Let’s hope the CIA’s recent defector will help us avoid similar mistakes in the future.

“So…yer Iraqi, right?”

“No. Iranian. We’re a totally different culture, history, ethnic group. Persian.”

“So…that’s from Iraq?”

“I-RAY-NEE-AN!”

“???”

“!!!!”

Remember the “Dean Scream,” the celebratory whoop that ended Howard Dean’s presidential ambitions? Does that not seem like nothing compared to the vein-popping whackadoodlery coming out of Republican congressmen? And yet somehow, their careers do not end.

So far, the most popular aspect of this strip is the hue of John Boehner. A couple readers have suggested that he needs to be more orange. My response is that Photoshop unfortunately doesn’t come with fluorescent colors. I think we should just start calling him John the Orange, or simply His Orangeness.

This is an open thread. Use it to post whatever the heck you want. Linking to your own awesome posts would be, well, awesome.

Happy Passover, folks!

1. Last week, I posted about Steve Perry, former “Thundercats” and “Timespirits” writer, who is in pretty dire need of help. This week, cartoonist Walt Simonson (whose 1980s Thor run is widely considered the best that character has ever been done) is ebaying the above drawing to help Steve Perry out. At this moment, the high bid is $2000 (!), and there’s still six days to go. Sometimes it must be really, really cool to be Walt Simonson. Plus, no one draws big-ass capes the way Walt Simonson draws big-ass capes.
2. A long-delayed missive on “childhood obesity”, from a onetime obese child. If only Michelle Obama would read this…
3. Predator Theory. “…of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). [...] Lisak & Miller also found that the repeat rapists in their survey were responsible for a broad array of violent acts, including intimate partner violence and child abuse.”
4. Fugitivis comments on the above-linked Predator Theory post.
5. The Kaiser Foundation has a two-page, pdf summary of the Affordable Care Act that’s pretty good.
6. This is great. “When Salinger was 7 she became plagued with nightmares about the film ‘Monster House’. Strangely, through a friend, I knew the screenwriter Dan Harmon (@danharmon, Creator of ‘Community’ on NBC). So one day, in early 2008, I wrote to him….”
7. Nothing whatsoever of any importance happened to Social Security this week. And at Dollars and Sense, learn how to fix the entire Social Security “shortfall” in one simple step.
8. If someone would pay you the same money (and the same benefits) as your current job to be chased by a bear for 10 minutes a day (workdays only), would you do it?
9. How Might We Measure Race Without Reifying It?
10. We Hate the Government But Want More Government Jobs
11. In West Bank Palestinian Childhood Is Cut Short – It’s the Law
12. Outrageous Treaty Nonsense, or The Copyright Tail Wagging the Internet Dog
13. White Backlash: Yes, It’s Real
14. I Died in a Law & Order: SVU Bus Wreck and Lived to Tell the Tale [Law And Order: Svu]
15. Abra-Cadabra: NBC’s Community Makes Burqa Jokes
16. Revisiting the Paradox of the Chess Queen
17. Broken down by race, the trends for education achievement scores in the US look pretty good.
18. Recruitment and the Underrepresentation of Women in Political Offices
19. 11 predictions for the health-care reform bill
20. Citizens United doesn’t treat corporations like people. It treats them better than people.
21. I haven’t yet listened to this Douglas Adams lecture, but I want to.
22. J.D. Shapiro, screenwriter of Battlefield Earth (which just won a Razzie Award for the worst movie of the decade), discusses his participation. “No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.”

One thing Jesus wouldn’t do is try to kill a cop. Among other things. Like, sure, he brought a sword and meant to set father against son, etc., but, see, those were metaphors from a guy who spoke often in parables. Tends to complicate the whole taking things literally thing.

FireDogLake rounds up the driveling sniveling doublespeak dribble drool from the right wing bloggermensch. They seem congenitally incapable of recognizing a terrorist when one threatens to commit acts of violence against the state. Now if one of the suspected terrorists were named William Ayers, they might see past his white skin and call him out on it (and rightly so.) I wonder what they make of actual Caucasians committing serious acts of terrorist murder?

But let’s let one of the suspects speak for himself.

“I’m just a simple militant and I just want to protect my family. What’s wrong with that?”

And he adds: “You people need to read between the lines. You’re being lied to by the corporate media.”

You know, the “simple militant” has a point: the mendacity of the corporate media requires vigilant critical thinking and media literacy. Not sure how deploying Improvised Explosive Devices against a funeral procession facilitates the decoding emotive jargon and manipulative imagery. Perhaps these folks need to brush up on their Roland Barthes.

Anyhoo, do militants/terrorists/whatever come any more “simple” than this guy?

Look away from his eyes! Don’t make eye contact!

Mike in the UK sent in this funny correction to panel three from last Friday’s The Metric Resistance cartoon:

I generally don’t believe in English authority over our shared language, but I’m conceding this point to him. Why? Every goddamn theater in Boston spells it theatre. And it’s not like the American spelling of liter was getting much use anyway.

But this isn’t over. I’ll be visiting London in May, and I’m going to hunt and gut all of their colours and humours until the Thames is choked with the carcasses of superfluous Us.