Help is On the WAY–in a few days…

Well, we’re finally doing something over in Haiti, but, sad to say, we got beat to the punch. Rescue teams from … Iceland … were despatched almost immediately after the earthquake struck. Sniffer dogs arrived from … China … within 48 hours. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the President of the Lumbering Giant of America said that we could get the first 2000 Marines to Haiti–a mere 700 miles from Florida and a hop, skip and jump from Puerto Rico–in a few days. A few days means a lot to a victim still buried under rubble. Or someone sitting on the roof of their submerged house as we found out from Katrina. But Haiti is not New Orleans. It’s simply the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Greg Palast has a remarkable precis of the screwy US response. I don’t want to copy what he’s said, but what it boils down to is that instead of treating the Haitian tragedy as an EMERGENCY, our response has been to treat it as a military operation. Secretary Gates said he would not send in food and water immediately because there was no security apparatus in place. OF COURSE NOT, an entire country has been devastated. The proper response in an EMERGENCY is to send in rescuers first, followed up by relief and security. But America is so hamstrung by both its muscle-bound state and its security paranoia that instead of doing the right thing first, we started out with the back end of the horse.
Our first operation appears to have been to secure the Port-au-Prince airport and try to take over rescue efforts in a way that had French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet complain that we seemed to be more concerned with occupying Haiti rather than helping it. Indeed, we secured the airport so well that we refused landing to an aircraft from “Doctors without Borders” carrying supplies and an inflatable surgical hospital, forcing them to land in the Dominican Republic and truck in the supplies over the mountains, delaying their arrival for 24 hours. Danny Schecter on Media Channel suggests that our overweaning focus on security may be driven more by a desire to keep US-deposed President Aristide out of Haiti than on anything to do with the safety of the country.
We’ve heard a lot about things being “too big to fail” in recent months–the banks are too big to be allowed to go under after they’ve screwed up the economy, the health insurance industry is too big to be allowed to be given competition from a single payer health plan. And even when the leading political party is in agreement on something in general, it can’t agree with itself about what it wants. Could it be that the US has become too big to act effectively? Man, if so, we better get some streamlining in pronto before we choke to death on our immensity.

Happy New Year … it should be better than the Old one?

Happy New Year–Happy New Decade! Good Riddance to the Old one(s)! What a pile of manure the new century has turned out to be so far (as Bess Truman said to the people who complained about Harry saying “you need some ‘manure’ on these roses”, “What? It took me 25 years to get him to say THAT!”) Let’s start things off right with a really funny but hard-hitting cartoon. What’s been happening?
Hmmm, we’re still talking about the airliner bomb FAIL, the security FAIL and the “no intention of invading–I mean, sending troops to Yemen” (I hope) not-yet FAIL. That’s two weeks old and I posted an oldie-but-goodie over Christmas to cover it. Timmy Geithner and his magic “shhhh-let’s keep this a secret” emails? Not funny enough, that can wait for Thursday. Health Care? SOOoooo last year! Besides they’re hashing it out behind closed doors, contra Obama’s promise that it will be televised on C-SPAN. Transparency is becoming more opaque every day. What else?
All righty then, let’s check and see if Lindsay Lohan is having a meltdown. Oh wow, Lindsay had to fly–COMMERCIAL! How sad. Casey Johnson died–who was she again? Some rich heiress who was Tila Tequila’s ‘wifey’? Whose biggest claim to fame previously was turning down Paris Hilton’s offer to start a TV program called “The Simple Life”? And who’s Tila Tequila again? Let’s call this one too sad for SO MANY reasons and decide not to start off the new decade with such a bummer!
AH-HAH! I have it–someone’s exhibiting a sexbot at the Vegas Adult Entertainment Expo! Now there’s something you could get your teeth into! errrrrrr… Oh, she’s not REALLY a sexbot. Inventor Douglas Hines says “The sex robot thing is marketing – it’s really about making a companion.” Um-hum…sure. Well, not in its present state, she can’t even walk yet–has to be carted around in a wheel chair so far. And she kind of has the expression of the girl in the bar who’s had one too many when you passed that marker two hours ago. Actually from her rather limited set of capabilities, she looks like a “stripped-down” version of Aiko, the “not a sex bot” gynoid that Le Trung is making up in Canada. Although designed to eventually service as a maid, (Everybody ought to have a maid…) Aiko’s name is actually a Japanese word meaning “love child,” and she looks a heckuva lot more sophisticated than Roxxxy, the new robot, tho not as realistic as the computer generated photos from RealDolls (bet the real dolls don’t look half as good), life-sized dolls that are actually SUPPOSED to be sexbots. Oh, brave new world…
Anyway, since Roxxxy is actually supposed to have conversations like a real woman, I thought I’d give my take on one of the many discussions that might come up. Happy New Year

Great, now I can solar power my refrigerator box…

I am still recovering from my bout of whatever crud I have, though now it’s more had than have. I should really not be working at all, but it’s so near the end of the year and my Christmas break that I can’t see not keeping to schedule. In any case, my last cartoon of the year will be next Thursday’s, and I will begin again on the 11th of January.
President Obama did present his Main Street recovery plan, and I can only hope that this is just a warm-up to use up the moneys that were left over from the bank bailout. Seriously, falling to 10 percent unemployment from 10.2 is not a necessarily a sign that things have turned around, especially with so many underemployed. As Robert Reich said in HuffPo, the real October story wasn’t the dip in unemployment but the number of people who dropped out of the labor force. And Obama’s proposals are such a hodge-podge–a few initiatives to make it easier for small businesses to get loans–not that the banks have started making them yet since after they shored up their bottom lines, they paid themselves bonuses. Some green-incentive thingies–which, of course, mean you can AFFORD to go green before you can get any benefit from the incentives. And finally, $50 billion in infrastructure building–something that actually may produce some jobs.
The Republicans, on the other hand, have suddenly waxed wroth on the deficit–something that hardly mattered to them when George Bush was President. Paring down that deficit is more important than creating jobs. After all, the banks were saved, we’re already in recovery, right? Obama’s anemic jobs initiative can be seen as another one of his compromises, trying to spend just enough to stimulate employment while trying to please the Republicans by not spending too much and thus running the risk of not spending enough. Whether he spends enough or not, it won’t help matters before the end of ‘09, a year that will be ended without engendering much nostalgia by its passing.

We Send Troops, We Send Troops Not, We Send Troops, We Send Troops Not

Yesterday was Veterans’ Day and as all Presidents do, Barack Obama went to Arlington to pay respect to our nation’s heroic dead. He seem to have surprised everyone by actually walking among the Iraq and Afghanistan war graves–although why that should have surprised anyone can only be ascribed to just how unexpected a noble gesture is after the Bush years. George Bush made the typical patriotic noises on each of his Veterans’ Days, but he always took care not to greet bodies at Andrews Air Force Base or visit the gravesites lest lightning come suddenly out of the sky. Instead he asked us to support our troops by going out and spending money like it was 1997. Very few of us could actually do that after the FIRST Bush recession–unless we were employed by Goldman Sachs and doing God’s work to make ourselves rich. God helps them that help themselves and gosh darnit, those superproductive workers at Goldman Sachs have done nothing but help themselves!
But I digress–I do that a lot since the Bush years, which seem to have kicked up my ADHD several notches. I think it’s because ADHD characterized our leadership in those days. Bush managed to send out troops into Afghanistan–where they were charged to find Osama bin Laden and were called away to go fight in Iraq when they were on the verge of actually finding him. In Iraq, our troops were charged to take away Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction–which have been forgotten ever since we got tired of looking for something that wasn’t there. We DID manage to find Saddam Hussein–or at least, we found him when somebody handed him over to us in a drugged stupor. If that hadn’t happened, I’m sure we’d have forgotten about that also–like we did about several billion dollars for rebuilding Iraq which managed to disappear unaccounted for. Donald Rumsfeld managed to mislay 2.3 TRILLION dollars somewhere in the Pentagon–which is quite an accomplishment. And of course, we forgot that the levies in New Orleans weren’t up to standard, and at last, we gave away 350 billion dollars to bail out financial companies without asking anyone what they did with the money.
But to return to the veterans. Back in those heady days of fantasizing that we would conquer the entire Middle East so that another 9/11 would never happen again, it was practically a mark of treason to suggest that our military adventures in Sand-flea-istan were ill-advised. But finally, most of the country has come to believe that sending troops on missions with no good reason is not exactly the best use of the armed forces. While most of the country still believes however that the “troops should be supported no matter what,” some of us are still trying to make the argument that the best support you can give the troops is to get them the hell out of someplace they aren’t supposed to be. We’ve declared victory in Iraq so we can skedaddle at the most auspicious time–has anyone heard much news out of there in a while–must be our national ADHD again! And now we turn our attention back to Afghanistan, where the Pentagon, bless their pointy little heads, is telling us we can win if we only nearly double our troops there by sending in 40,000 more. The question is, what are we supposed to win? Al-Qaeda did a little mountain climbing and now lives in Pakistan. The Taliban are trying to wrest power from the corrupt Karzai government–which WE put in place. What the hell are we doing there anyway?
So–now it’s on Barry’s plate. President Obama has at least 4 options of what to do about our military presence in Afghanistan. The option that makes sense–getting us the hell out of there–has been taken off the table–like the single payer health care option had been–leaving us with four different ways we can lose American lives and waste its money in order to achieve some nebulous victory. If we don’t do it, we are told, then all the American lives already lost will be meaningless. That kind of reasoning is like the horseplayer on a losing streak who has to keep betting or else he won’t make back the money he’s lost. DUHHHH! If you can see how stupid the one is–why can’t you see how totally dumbass stupid the other is?
Anyway, Obama has these four options and as always, he’s acting as coy as Miss Scarlett when she’s deciding which beau she’s going to let bring her some barbeque. He’s acting as coy as Steve Jobs when he’s about to introduce the iVibe. You’d think the White House had turned into a backyard fish pond filled with big carp! Which BAD move will Obama decide to take? Just this week, our ambassador to Afghanistan came back and said–DON’T DO IT! But, we can’t let out boys down or the wingnuts will come out and say Obama has no guts for a fight because he’s a socialist fascist and a secret Muslim to boot. Which trying to make sense of makes my head hurt! Obama says he will announce his decision after Thanksgiving. How much you wanna bet he’s trying to find some middle ground solution that neither withdraws troops not sends enough in to do anything? We’re taking bets. Stay tuned for more information!

keep looking »

ABOUT MEH

Cartoons and text by Greg Uchrin (aka Gregorius alexandrinus), with the able assistance of Fred and Bert Squirrel, with special appearances by George Dymme. Published Mondays and Thursdays.

SEARCH

Search for:

CALENDAR

March 2010

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« Feb
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

NOTE ON COMMENTS

To leave a comment, click on the comment link at the end of the Posted on line under the title of the desired post. You do not have to be registered to leave a comment, but comments will be subject to editorial discretion--that means, no spam, no links to hate or p0|2n sites, and words that will get this site removed from strict SafeSearch queries will be replaced by @#$%.

SUBSCRIBE TO INTRAVENOUS CAFFEINE

Be There! Do That! Buy The T-Shirt!

Available at http://253056.spreadshirt.com/

Sends Us Lotses of Muneyz

No, seriously, send money. These squirrels demand pe-CAWNS!

Highlighted events

No events to show

SEE MY OLDER CARTOONS AT

VISITORS

Dissatisfied customers since 2003
(includes Hail Dubyus!)


Caffeine Suckers Since 2009