NoKo On the Mogogo A-Go-Go!

Quick--Send for Commando Cody!

I’m still having eyestrain and headaches and waiting for new eyeglasses that will hopefully stop some of them, so this will have to be short. I was considering doing an Obama/chained CPI cartoon that was evil, offensive and right on target. I decided not to do it, but I will if I have to.

So let’s turn instead to North Korea and Kim Jong-un. Rhetoric and saber rattling have been indulged in along the 49th parallel for some time and it has recently been ratcheted up several notches. Kim Jong-un, boy wonder leader of NoKo and Cartman cosplayer, has been shouting that a state of WAR exists between NoKo and SoKo, having pictures taken of him seriously watching serious operations through serious binoculars, photoshopping landing operations, shooting off his mouth…errr missiles that seem to go nowhere near their targets, and … was that seismic bloop an atomic bomb test? South Korea has shown how serious they think this is by telling us how serious it is, and serious President Obama has taken it seriously enough to send two serious stealth bombers to fly over NoKo and back just to let them know that they could be seriously obliterated without the US breaking a serious sweat.

First of all, Little Kim isn’t doing this for anyone’s benefit except his own people’s. He needs to be taken seriously by them as a dangerous warlord like his father and grandfather before him. Is Kim Jung-Un really as Ill as Kim Jung-Il? He’s hoping to wring out some concessions by convincing the South and the US that he’s as crazy as his late nutbag of a father. But…

Look at the pictures of the Korean “computing power?” Have we seen anything that antiquated since the 1950s? Look at those missile tests–if Kimmy lobbed a missile at Japan, he’d be lucky if it hit Mongolia! And those “atomic bomb tests”–all underground and only the first showed any low level radiation escaping the test area–are in such a low kiloton range that they could have easily been caused by (drumroll please) 4-5 kilotons of TNT being exploded. Right–lots and lots of those red sticks you see in the movies! Enough raw power to wipe out a neighborhood! Call Commando Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen! We need a hero worthy of a Republic serial–or defunct rock band.

Of course, our “pacifist” President Obama–a Democrat who actually makes Richard Nixon look like a liberal–has to show we mean business. So we’re again stuck in a serious military situation with a pissant dictator of a pisspot country. What wouldn’t have needed to be sequestered if we didn’t have to act like the megapower of the universe?

BTW–why hasn’t the CIA sent a drone over to Pyongyang? Or do we only do that to Muslims?

Oh well, my ranting has never affected anything. In other news, the person who with Ronald Reagan, that’s right, the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, was responsible for turning the world from the high point of Western Civilization to the crapfest we’re in today, has died. The 1980s are finally over.

Long live the Gatsby era.

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…And a Happy New Year!

MOUSE OVER SANTA FOR PAGE TWO!

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Couldn’t Have Happened To A Nicer Guy

The GOP is sure all this slut business will blow over by November

Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk...

Much as I normally hate to do a subject two weeks in a row, the swift financial retribution against Rush Limbaugh is worthy of an exception. Seems Rush has lost about 90% of his sponsors over the controversy caused by his deliberate slander of an innocent bystander, at least temporarily. As you will remember, Rush called Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute for the horrendous crime of wanting to testify to the all-male committee fulminating over contraception about her friend who was denied contraceptives when she needed them for hormone therapy. Rush leapt to judgment on the girl, in an ass-brained show of ignorance of how contraceptives work, saying she was having so much sex she needed government assistance to pay for her pills. The rightwing ditto heads have repeated these charges ad nauseam and no amount of facts can ever dissuade them from the opinions given them by the Pope of Clear Channel.

This is the way free speech works in the free market. Rush Limbaugh was, is and will be free to make any ass-brained statement he wants to make. The question is whether or not anyone has to pay to allow those statements to be broadcast to the nation and world at large. With sponsors, he can shout it loud and clear to the entire radio audience. Without sponsors, he’s still free to shout them–but unless he or Clear Channel pay for it themselves, his soapbox might be … a soapbox. Seems Clear Channel has had to run Public Service Announcements on many of the commercial spots during Rush’s show this week. Dum da dum dum!

Bill Maher has weighed in on the proceedings and has tried to argue that Rush ought not be censored by the free market. Piffle. Bill is still smarting because HIS former TV show Politically Incorrect got dumped when he expressed an unforgivable truth: that the perpetrators of the cowardly attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were not themselves cowards. This was in the middle of US war-drum fever. Come on Bill, Americans won’t be ready for that kind of nuance before 2102, the year AFTER the 9/11 centennial. We still have people who said the Japanese deserved the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown tragedy because of PEARL HARBOR! And besides, what you said was true, just unpopular. That’s a fair distance from maliciously maligning someone by misrepresenting what they’d said or done.

Free speech doesn’t mean we have to subsidize hate speech. As long as someone’s willing to pay for the plug in the socket, Rush will have a platform. But, if no one wants to pay to have a person with that much bile representing their company, screw it. Let him try to get a gig on NPR 🙂

And speaking of Japan, this weekend marked the anniversary of that horrible series of misfortunes. Compounding the tragedy was that although Japan is one of the most prepared nations against earthquakes, the government had let down its guard on tsunami preparedness and had dropped the ball on nuclear safety measures AND spent more time CYAing and following procedures instead of reacting swiftly enough to contain the nuclear danger. But the Japanese people have shown incredible resilience and courage in their recovery. Last year, I did a short video to Yoko Kanno’s song for the survivors and I’d like to post its URL here againhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na60p1P22rg. Links are there for several organizations that were involved in the recovery effort at the time. I’m sure they will accept more donations.

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It was all Boehner could do to stop Mike Pence from holding his breath til he turned blue…

No, that's not a basketball team uniform...

Our country is in a world of hurt. Seriously. In one party, we have a bunch of two-year-olds who demand everything and won’t be satisfied without sugar on top. And on the other hand, we have a chief executive who has the backbone of a sponge. SpongeBarack. He sucks in all this abuse, giggles annoyingly, and then declares it a great accomplishment for the American people. OK, Barry doesn’t giggle annoyingly, but it would be better if he did.

Now I understand narcissism. I was an actor once. And that’s possibly the one profession which is more narcissistic than politics, but it’s a close race between actors, politicians and strippers. Politicians see every deal as an accomplishment–even turds that have been spray-painted gold. And this budget deal is a turd so moist the paint can’t even stick. Yet President Obama goes and describes it as some kind of rosey-hued vision of democracy because “Americans of different beliefs came together,” to avoid a government shutdown–when the tyrannical threat of a shutdown should never have existed in the first place! Then he went to the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate the fact that it was still open, but don’t worry, your tax dollars will help pay for those tax cuts for the upper 1% we caved on back in 2010. My, how long ago was THAT? Oh, by the way, we’ll have to cut out some government jobs–like 100,000! (But the stock market is doing great, isn’t recovery grand?)

And immediately after the deal was struck–we get assholes like Mike Pence intoning that the deal was probably not good enough. Not good enough? According to one Republican, they got 79% of what they wanted. What does Mike Pence want? 100% capitulation, an apology for not surrendering sooner, war reparations and Obama, Reid and Pelosi committing seppuku on the steps of the Capital?

As a wise ‘possum once said, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” God save the United States of America–’cause nobody else is trying.
__________

The awful tragedy in Japan is continuing–hundreds of thousands of people have been homeless for a month now and agriculture in the area–particularly rice farming–is non-existent. Many people kept their money at home rather than the banks, and now are penniless. So a reminder, please give generously for Japan relief in this time of need

Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 from your phone
Text MED to 80888 from any mobile phone to give $10.
Text ‘JAPAN’ or ‘QUAKE’ to 80888 to make a $10 donation or visit SalvationArmyUSA.org.
Also Save the Children
Japan-earthquake-tsunami-relief @ Global Giving
Doctors Without Borders
Americares
Shelter Box
Peace Winds
Operation USA
World Vision

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Too Soon? Not for our nuclear expert, Ann Coulter!

Ann Coulter takes a dip in Japan's latest hot spring, while a Fukushima engineer rails at her from the sidelines.

Dear Ann: Why don't you go over and show us how beneficial a little radiation can be?

Well, the big news about someone finally helping the Libyan rebels after they had been driven back to Benghazi has pushed the Japanese situation off the headlines. While I’m generally not very much in favor of militarily sticking our noses into other countries’ affairs, I’m even more against pussyfooting around when it’s something that we’ve wanted to do for a long time, and (drumroll) WE WERE ACTUALLY ASKED TO DO IT. I mean, instead of being suckered into it by someone who’d tell any lie to get us to attack his country to a bunch of people who’d tell any lie to to convince us we needed to start a war against it. The Libyan rebels were actually in danger of overthrowing Gaddafi a few weeks back, but I suppose, it was better to wait until they’d been hammered to near defeat so there could be a much more protracted and expensive war. Gotta keep those arms factories busy–they’re our only dependable export!

Besides, we couldn’t do anything about Libya while Japan’s travails were at the top of the headlines! We can only keep our collective national attention on ONE thing at a time! Sure enough, now that we’ve started bombing raids in Libya, Japan gets swept off the headlines–last week’s news–it’s been seven days, aren’t they out of the woods YET? Well, the situation has improved–if you can count finding a few thousand bodies and getting 2 out of 6 reactors stable improved–but there are many more bodies to be found, 4 reactors that still are in danger and Japan is in massive need of rebuilding. But don’t worry! We’ve tied up the world supply of potassium iodide so the people of the west coast and their pets won’t get radiation sickness! Never mind the people who live on the same island! Our chihuahuas must not get sick (except maybe from an overdose of potassium iodide).

Americans are known for over-reacting to everything. So it comes as a shock that Ann Coulter would seem to be a voice of reason. But no, when she said, a little bit of radiation was GOOD for you, she wasn’t thinking about the nervous nellies of California, she meant the people of Tokyo! “… the only good news is that anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer,” she wrote in her Human Events column. Well, Ann, if a little bit of radiation is so good for you, why don’t you hop on over to Fukushima and lend a hand? Oh, I forgot, that would be altruistic and Ayn Rand would never have approved. On the other hand, it’d be great publicity for your next book and remember, your place as the reigning bitch queen of the right wing has been usurped by the Alaskan twitterer! So go on over for the photo opportunity–and do us a favor–take a few photos at the gate of the reactor complex. But don’t get in the way–you might keep some of those engineers who are desperately trying to save their country from getting their proper dose of Vitamin Gamma Ray.

In the meantime, everyone, please keep sending in donations for Japanese relief–I listed a few worthy causes in last week’s column and there are many others as well. With a tragedy of these proportions–over 400,000 people are homeless and in need of food, clothing, shelter and medical attention–even a wealthy country like Japan needs help in the short run and if you can even just afford a few bucks, it will help.

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