Cartoonists With Attitude

Roger Ebert on Glenn Beck’s latest, um, crusade?

What are the words “social justice” code for? Why, Nazism and Communism, says Beck: “Social justice was the rallying cry–economic justice and social justice–the rallying cry on both the communist front and the fascist front.” Beck even went so far as to cite Jesus Christ, saying, and I quote: “Nowhere does Jesus say, Hey, if somebody asks for your shirt, give your coat to the government and have the government give them a pair of slacks.” Well, Beck has me there. It is quite true that nowhere does Jesus say that. Nor, for that matter, does he ever say, A wop bop a lu bop, a wop bam boom!

There are so many reasons to criticize the Catholic Church — just ask my Catholic friends — but the “social justice thing” tends to work in its favor. As Ebert points out, religions in general have social justice at the heart of their creeds; including The Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints (i.e., Mormonism), as demonstrated by their monumental relief efforts in New Orleans after the hurricane.

Indeed, you would think Beck would point out what a superior job religious charitable organizations did compared to the “heckuva” fuck-up performed by U.S. and Louisiana state governments. That would certainly play into his anti-government rant. But for Beck and the rest of his far right crowd, the whole point of opposing any government effort to help out the poor, the suffering and the unfortunate goes beyond anti-government libertarianism. At heart it is a lack of heart. It’s reflexive white supremacy, resentment against the imagined threats posed by “those people” to the dominant culture of passive suburban consumerism (ironically, given how easily immigrant cultures from all over the world assimilate to America’s shopping malls and ex-urban housing developments.) You hear it every time some yahoo says, “I don’t want my tax dollars going to those people.” The credo of Beck’s ilk can be summed up in two words, “Fuck them.”

I’ve been busy and missed this update to my Texas Textbooks cartoon and commentary. The conservative district that Ding Dong McElroy represented on the Texas Board of Education voted him out in favor of the more reasonable Republican, Thomas Ratliff by the slimmest of margins.

But the best thing in the article is McElroy’s stance against teaching Chinese Literature in schools:

“[Y]ou really don’t want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them. Why should you take a child’s time trying to learn a word that they’ll never ever use again?” He conceded some terms, such as “chow mein,” might be useful, the San Antonio Express-News reported.

I’d love to see a comprehensive list of “foreign” words McElroy deems acceptable. It probably includes chop suey, nacho, lasagna, and bukkake.

Because Bart Stupak wants to screw over poor and middle class women and risk the fate of health care reform in Congress, I have decided to fight back the only way I know how — by drawing mean pictures of him.

[Cartoonist Note: It was announced that Jim Bunning ended his filibuster threat while I was typing this up. That doesn't change the fact that he remains a senile turd.]

Bunning is the Grandpa Abe Simpson of the Senate. I don’t have anything to say about how he partially froze the government beyond what Kevin Moore and David Rees have already said. BUT, I have been driven insane by all the baseball puns and clichés used by news outlets covering this story.

I’m sure there have been countless others, all as groan-inducing as a Jay Leno monologue. In the interest of improving the quality of topical Bunning-baseball humor, I whipped up a few jokes:

Government spending caused Jim Bunning to balk, allowing Harry Reid to advance to second base. Olympia Snowe’s breasts were not pleased.

Jim Bunning and Curt Schilling walk into a bar. They wouldn’t shut the fuck up and everyone left before they got to the punchline.

Jim Bunning treated the unemployed to some chin music this week, if you consider the sound of his wrinkly old balls slapping against poor people’s faces to be musical.

Pitchers and catchers reported a couple weeks ago, except for former pitcher Jim Bunning. He was busy eating out a Kentucky Tea Partier’s asshole.

It’s a shame I’m not on anyone’s fax list.

Shorter Harold Ford: “Dude, I coulda totally pwned that bitch if you pussies hadn’ta hold me back.”

Glad that sideshow’s over. I have not lived in New York in 15 years, but I still take its politics very seriously. I didn’t want no Teabagging Palinites and I don’t want no Carpetbagging Blue Dogs.

FWIW, I was born in Tennessee, but I’d be totally happy to send Ford back home. I doubt he wants to go back. Can you blame him?

Kentucky GOP senator Jim Bunning screwed over 1.2 million jobless Americans with one filibuster. And that ain’t all:

“This means that construction workers will be sent home from job sites because federal inspectors must be furloughed.”Federal projects shut down include more than $38 million in project funding for Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest and Fernan Lakes Idaho Panhandle National Forest and $86 million for bridge replacements in the Washington, D.C., area. Bunning’s home state of Kentucky has no projects affected by his action.

However, nearly 1.2 million unemployed workers, including 14,000 in Kentucky, would lose federal jobless benefits this month if Congress doesn’t extend them, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal-leaning research group. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that about a third will lose benefits in the first two weeks of the month.

I’m glad the press has found the ovaries/cajones to confront this dill-hole. “Excuse me! This is a senators-only elevator!” should be the new “get off my lawn.”

David Rees already has an excellent Halloween costume in Bunning’s honor. (Link via Brian McFadden tweet.)

UPDATE: Jon Kyl of Arizona says people on unemployment are lazy shits anyway. Kick ‘em off the rolls, make ‘em desperate for a job. Oh, sorry; that wasn’t fair. Let his own words hang him:

“I’m sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue that it’s a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it’s a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here,” said Kyl.

See? He was being nice. As he takes away their food and rent and health care money, he makes sure to say polite things about their hard-workiness.

Anyone remember Lynn Forester de Rothschild? Think reeeeeaaaaalllllly hard back to the closing days of the 2008 election; and you may recall an upper class white woman with strong ties to the investment class making a big regretful noise that, contrary to decades of loyalty to her Democratic Party, she could not in good conscience vote for that radical lefty Obama and so must endorse the proven centrist John McCain.

Right. You forgot. So for some reason The Daily Beast has given her bandwidth to remind us, this time in the form of an I Told You So. Yes, that is literally the headline. “I Told You So.” Um, okay, I’ll bite — you told us what?

Suddenly now everyone is worried he is trying to transform America. He had said so all along. His is an effort to make a bigger, more intrusive and more costly government. His hope is, and has always been, to turn the country into a nation that looks more like a European social democracy. He ignores that the roots of our strength have always been small government and a dynamic private sector, fostered by both Democrats and Republicans. His cynical use of centrist language as a tool to get elected does not change the fact of his true objectives for America. It is telling that under Obamas presidency, according to Sundays CNN Poll, 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans see the federal government as a threat to the rights of Americans.

The stuff I emphasized above is the “what planet are you on?” stuff. If Obama’s true objectives are to turn the U.S. into a stable social democracy based on successful European models, I would be the first in line to blow him.

But before I get out my knee pads, I have to say, he’s really going about it all wrong. Cuz first thing out the gate he bails out Lady de Rothschild’s investor cronies with no strings attached, ensuring uncannily enormous profits, until public outrage prompts him to try to get the moolah back; and even so, nothing significant has changed, no significant regulatory regime has been implemented, leaving plenty of opportunity for another Ginormous Financial Meltdown.

And as for health care reform…. Wouldn’t a dedicated social democrat push a lot harder for single payer or a robust public option? Cuz I seem to recall he caved pretty quickly on that issue almost a year ago. Does someone seeking to transform America into a Lefty Paradise sell out his green technology agenda to the “Clean Coal” (sic) and nuclear energy industries? And, hey, how about those wars?

But whatever. Best to stick with a Radical Extremist straw man conjured out of the paranoid stereotypes of Black Power that haunt the white ruling class imagination. Surely the craven little weasel currently animating McCain’s corpse would have been a better bipartisan player had he won the Presidency, reaching across the aisle to throttle the Pelosi-Reid Hydra with all the force of his vindictive, angry, tortured soul.

Here’s the thing: It is really important for certain sectors of the ruling class to believe, or to have the rest of us believe that Obama is not the corporate centrist that he actually is. Because then any move he makes that is both practical AND progressive — that is, that holds the investment and financial class accountable for the horrible mess they’ve made and that might make them more socially responsible (ha, ha, ha) — infringes on their entitled sense of unchecked social and economic power. De Rothschild is not a very effective voice in this chorus, but their overall aim is to intimidate the altogether Wall Street friendly president from spoiling their party. They need to keep painting him as a Loony Leftoid. If only he were such.

…but Congresscritters do not see inherent conflicts of interest or bribery in the close connections between campaign contributions and contract awards to their donors.

“Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member’s actions are being influenced by campaign contributions,” the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct said in a unanimous statement.

Jon Lovitz could not be more disingenuous.

From your “liberal” New York Times:

But havent I read economists saying that a bill that small will make almost no dent in unemployment? Is that sort of thing the only hope for bipartisanship?

It depends on what you mean by bipartisanship. Nothing is stopping Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats from adding more Republican ideas to their health plan and not just fig leaves. If the Democrats did that, they would have a bill worthy of the name bipartisan.

Emfuzzies mine. If only Democrats would just reach out to the other side and invite their input and listen to their ideas and stroke them under the chin and greet them at the door in nothing but a big ribbon and a bottle of champagne, then they would truly earn that most honored most esteemed most thigh tingling mantle, “bipartisan.”

But if they don’t, then they will have earned naught but spite and enmity from the great hive mind of the people, who shall shew them utterly the door. It’ll be Obama’s fault for going all Red up in here.

That thar is yur Konsensus Thinkin thar.

Meanwhile in Utah the governor is poised to sign a bill that would criminalize miscarriage. How is that related? Well, I live in a land of crazy theocrats and patriarchal opportunists who warp the health care needs of people to either reap profit or punishment points in the name of their false gods. There. That’s how.

Hey, look! The U.S. Supreme Court decided to let corporations spend more money on elections. Says Ken Rudin:

The decision overturns a 20-year ruling — Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce — that prohibited corporations or labor unions to pay for campaign ads. Today’s decision removes spending limits for independent expenditure groups. It threatens to remove spending limits already established in 24 states. And it struck down part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that bars issue ads paid for by corporations or unions in the closing days of a campaign.

NPR’s Peter Overby adds that one limit remains intact: corporations still cannot give money directly to federal candidates or national party committees. That limit dates back to 1907.

Oh, I’m sure that little barrier can be quickly overcome. As ever there’s lotsa doom & gloom predicted, but it is hard for me to see how the floodgates can be more open than they already are. The last election cost the current President nearly $750 million. Total spending in 2008 by presidential candidates was $1.3+ billion — almost double the amount spent in 2004, which itself was a doubling of 2000 expenditures. Congressional races are getting more expensive, too, and it has been no secret that Congress critters serving on important oversight committees are well financed by corporations with a vested interest in the legislation those committees produce. Sometimes a Dodd gets punished, but he’s an exception to the rule — and hardly the worst offender.

Yes, the ruling is outrageous, but no more so than the entirely corrupt two party system of corporate toadies who have been running pseudo-democratic puppet shows all along. Let’s reach back in the time machine to dredge up a classic and still relevant George Carlin routine: