Revolutionary Grrl 5–How to deal with surveillance …

As the two police units leave, Revolutionary Grrl comes back out of hiding.

Dealing with surveillance...

How does Revolutionary Grrl deal with surveillance? Find out next week!

In the meantime, it’s Hallowe’en. Trick or Treat! and boy, does NSA have a trick for you! Not just Angela Merkel–who has been thinking twice about that shoulder rub der Dubbleyü gave her–but 35 other national leaders (at the last count I can remember) have had their phones tapped by NSA! Not only that, but 60 million phone calls a month from Spain to add to the 70 million from France. Well, 50 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong, but we’ll add 20 million more to make sure.

The treat is that it’s making the world safer for the US. After all, they claim that it saved us from over 50 terrrrrrrrrist plots already. HOCKEYPUCKS! With that amount of data, I don’t care how much computing power you have, you’re never going to find important information–UNLESS you already know what you are looking for. Is that how they’ve been getting all those al-Qaida targets? Playing 6 degrees of Osama bin Laden from his old cell phone contact list? Now we know why that pizzeria in Islamabad got droned–someone who Osama called, called someone who called someone who called someone who called someone who ordered a pizza with everything–they must have been terrorists–no pork sausage.

This isn’t about protecting America. It’s spying on people just because WE CAN. Do they honestly think they can find out anything about a terrorist plot just by sifting through several billion phone calls a month? Hell, no. This isn’t a tool for protection, it’s a tool for prosecution. Once they find out who the terrorist is, they can track down any accomplices who are stupid enough to use their throw-away phones more than a week.

And the congresspeople who defend this tool? They’re just a bunch of tools themselves! Besides, we already have a network for spying on people. It’s called the Internet. Except that’s only useful for finding out what kind of porn the terrorists have been watching.

And cat videos.

Unless you’re Angela Merkel. We got everything on her. Who ya gonna call, Angela? Make it Ghostbusters–you got too many spooks on the line listening in…

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An Anniversary Nobody Really Cheered About

Well, at least we kept Peoria from being nuked by Saddam Hussein...

Please Note: the Anniversary Cake is Yellow

Last week, we saw the passing of the 10th Anniversary of the Iraq war—ooops, excuse me, Congress never declared war, so, ummmm, what do we call it?

When the airplanes struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, somewhere amid the horror of what I was seeing rose an additional realization, “Oh, my God, we’ve just had our Reichstag Fire.” I could see with horrifying clarity that this would be the defining moment that turned the United States from its democratic principles to something totally antithetical to the dreams of our nation’s Fathers. We have resisted the impulse of creating concentration camps for Moslems–we incarcerated many, but mostly exiled them for visa transgressions. We have created gulags where we gathered a mostly hapless group of alleged terrorists whose major crime seems to have been being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the wrong person wanted to collect a reward. We HAVE built massive PRISONS, but these are privately run camps to provide slave labor and corporate profit and anyone can enter. We passed the grossly obscene “Patriot” act through which almost any crime can be considered to be an act of terrorism–when the need arises.

Our incursion into Afghanistan almost looked legitimate. We claimed the head of, what was his name, Osama bin Laden? Yes, he was there, later on he claimed credit for “9/11”, which our government was already doing within minutes of the tower falls–since it had pointedly ignored the warnings from the intelligence community of terrorist actions inside the US. He was there, but the Taliban government had the nerve to ask for evidence before they would consider handing him over. So like a western posse, we went in and cleaned up the corruption in Rock Ridge and hunted down bin Laden until we were just yards from his hiding place in the mountains when…

Wait, what? The real danger is from Iraq? The country which had been under UN sanctions for a decade? Whose dictator, Saddam Hussein, couldn’t even afford to buy shoes for his army? HE had weapons of mass destruction? Yes, we had the ominous YELLOW CAKE requests–which turned out to be forgeries. We had George Bush and Tony Blair smirking their way into war. We had Dick Cheney and Condi Rice promising us mushroom clouds of doom if nothing was done immediately. We had a mountain of evidence that Colin Powell presented at the UN. I remember listening to him and being absolutely convinced by the man’s sense of sincerity… until the next morning, when I realized that all that evidence had no context. That if you believed it was something bad it was, but those conversations about hiding things could have just as easily been hiding the porn when the inspectors arrived.

And so we went off and destroyed a country within weeks. Killed several thousand Americans and maimed 10s of thousands. Killed 100s of thousands Iraqis and destroyed the infrastructure of the country. Wasted around two trillion dollars (when asked about the loss of a trillion dollars from the Pentagon budgets, Donald Rumsfeld remarked, “I’ll have to look into that,” and didn’t) which the Tea Party is now trying to collect from the poorest among us. For which sinful errors of judgment or outright acts of war-mongering for profit no one has been held accountable.

Many of us felt powerless to do anything to stop it. Only after the deed was done did I decide that I could do a political cartoon series against these criminals. I was scared too–protesting the war COULD have been considered an act of terrorism according to the Patriot Act.

HAPPY F$%^&*G ANNIVERSARY.

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And the Magic Word is: al-Qaeda

What? We're still fighting 'al-Qaeda' in Afghanistan?

Say the magic word and we can have troops there until doomsday.

“You Bet Your Life!” “Say the magic woid,” Groucho would say, but our answer today is, “and we can have troops anywhere until doomsday.”

President Obama made a surprise trip to Kabul the other week as part of his up-and-running campaign against the Mittster to emphasize that HE was the one to have success in our Middle Eastern snafu, that the troops supported him and–possibly an afterthought–shore up some agreements about our post-2014-withdrawal presence in Afghanistan. What? you say–we’re going to keep a presence in Afghanistan? You bet your bippy. We still have a “presence” in Italy, Germany and Japan, 67 years after the end of WWII, much to the dismay of the Japanese although, except for the Okinawans, nobody is saying it very loud.

So the issue is, how many troops will we keep in Afghanistan after we remove all our troops from Afghanistan? I bet you thought “removing all our troops” mean “removing all our troops”! How cute! Don’t you know? According to the President, we’re still fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

AHhhh, the magic word! Al-Qaeda! Everything is justified after 9-11 by the use of that name! It justifies almost 11 long hard years of wasting countless dollars and thousands of American lives–not to mention the 100s of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives–and is the ne plus ultra raison d’etre for this morass (and I do mean MORE ASS!).

Now you may argue that there’s really only two al-Qaeda operatives IN Afghanistan since almost all of the left for Pakistan. We don’t really know what we know about al-Qaeda levels–it’s one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s unknown knowns. But that’s the way we are. We can’t make war on an ally, so we do the next best thing and make war on their next-door neighbor to prove how tough we are. That doesn’t mean we can’t break the rule sovereignity by pulling an assassination raid in Pakistan to get rid of Osama bin Laden–al-Qaeda again justified it!

Now our friends on the Republican side of the aisle and Fox and Friends have been raising a stink lately (a year later) over whether or not Obama SHOULD have authorized a raid that THEY would have authorized in a New York minute but now have to be critical of since Obama led the charge. AND getting upset that Obama is “spiking the ball” for having accomplished it, forgetting that George W. Bush spiked the ball on first down before we’d gotten anywhere NEAR the endzone. But that’s the way it is. Remember, they were FOR killing Osama before they were against it!

The I Ching says the superior man’s actions are both good AND correct. Unfortunately, superior men seem to be in short supply in politics today.

I will be in the Philadelphia area next weekend for ZENKAIKON, specifically, the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, PA, May 11-12. I’ll be returning on Sunday, so I won’t be doing a cartoon next weekend, but will return on the 20th. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there!

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The Rapture DID happen on Saturday–just nobody made it …

Newt Gingrich's head explodes from his own lack of consistency..

Newt stands up for his nomination--and sits down again.

First of all, I apologize for not posting last week and not putting up a note that I wasn’t posting. I’ve been getting headaches from eyestrain–I’ve needed new eyeglasses since the start of the year but there was always something that was more important to do. Finally getting a week where I didn’t have a damn thing in the way, I went to the eye doctor the week before. That didn’t stop the headaches, of course–it just set the ball in motion.

You see, my eyes are so screwy, it takes a couple of weeks to get a prescription filled. I’m near-sighted–with astigmatism. But old enough to need reading glasses. And prisms to get the two eyes to look in the same place. Now that doesn’t seem like a lot. But it’s enough to expect the glasses to be screwed up the first time they send them back. I told the fitter this as I went to try them on. He laughed. Then three hours later when he admitted–ooooo, yes, they put the lens centers in two different places–they went back for the second try.

Now, regular readers will know that I am not an excitable person. Do I get mad at the smallest things? Never! It’s the big f#$%^&s that get me angry! So I expect two tries to get them right. It’s not until we get to the third try that doesn’t work that I get PO’d! Since it takes a couple of weeks between each try. And the fourth try arrives nearly two months after the eye exam. In the meantime, I’m still getting eyestrain headaches. And last weekend, I wrote a note saying no post. But forgot to post it. Mea culpa.

Well, much has happened. It’s been a good week for sex scandals! We found porn on Osama’s hard drives. And I do mean hard! That probably isn’t a scandal to anyone except a “hardline” Islamic fundamentalist, but give a guy a break–he was a “hard” man to classify. He wasn’t a holy man. Just a man interested in holes…

Arnold Schwarzenegger showed that his commitment to family values was so high, he actually had two of them. Families, that is. One with his wife, Maria Shriver, and one with his housekeeper, Mrs. Baby Mommy. “Who iss your Daddy and vat doess he do?” Ahhh, gotta watch out for them gays, destroying the institution of marriage. That’s OUR job!

And Dom Strauss-Kahn made the discovery that power is not ALWAYS the ultimate aphrodisiac and when a woman screams NO and runs away, she doesn’t mean, “Give it to me in the face, you sexy hunk!” Not that anyone would call DSK a sexy hunk. Except maybe Claude Levi-Strauss or Ben Stein. Imagine, an economist needing to get sex by force. You’d think he was a short ugly uninteresting toad. Hey, he IS a short ugly uninteresting toad! Next Case!

And finally, a maybe. Newt Gingrich has been busily digging himself a hole to stand in by backtracking over his campaign and running over it until it can’t make an insurance claim against him. Imagine the King of Sunday morning snore fests being taken by surprise by DAVID GREGORY??? Well, it seems he’d been keeping a half mil debt at Tiffany’s for a few years. Hmmmmmm, did the third MRS. GINGRICH know about this? All I can say is–she’d better not check into a hospital anytime soon…

Sorry, the Rapture didn’t take place last Saturday. Damn! I was counting on getting the neighbor’s 60 inch TV in the post-Rapture looting!

See you next week 😀

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FOX NEWS Reports: Obama Bin Laden Dead–oops, we mean OSAMA

Donald Trump takes credit for Obama's ordering the successful attack on Osama bin Laden.

Donald Trump's hair takes credit for the successful Navy SEAL attack on bin Laden...

TRUMP DECLARES: I WOULDA DONE IT YEARS AGO

Well, well, well, ding dong the witch is dead–we finally seem to have gotten Osama bin Laden. I am loathe to actually draw bin Laden. The last time I did it, I received an email from a gentleman of rather poor English skills suggesting that the rest of the accursed Western cartoonists and I should stop making fun of Mohammed (blessings and peace be on his name) if we wished to remain healthy. Only not quite as nicely. While my cartoon was definitely NOT mocking Mohammed, I guess if you don’t write English that well, you don’t read it much better and any protestations on my part that he may have misinterpreted my work would probably not have mattered that much anyway. Sorry, I can’t afford a 24-hour guard on my house. So no drawings of bin Laden.

Besides, how could I adequately satirize a man who single-handedly (well, OK, with a handful of followers) perpetrated an act which set the American people on a crazy ass course where they willingly gave up freedoms that the terrorists were jealous of, started two wars that had nothing to do with revenge for the events that inspired them, but which cost hundreds of billions of dollars per year for nearly 10 years, materially aiding greatly to the destruction of the American treasury? Osama never dreamed that his airplane hijackings would actually manage to bring down the Twin Towers–similarly he probably never dreamed that one act of terrorism could cause the American dream to self-implode. President Obama is to be lauded for finally terminating the proximate cause of our national misery. But the national misery continues since we are still dealing with those two wars, which will not be ended if our military has its way. Nor will the Treasury be repaired, since far more damage was done by continuing idiot tax cuts as we doubled our expenditures and since the economy of THE ENTIRE WORLD was broken by the greed of our bankers–who have been punished by smaller bonuses for that year. So the burden has been placed on the people responsible for … not protesting the idiot actions that others perpetrated and soon we will be destroying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and the rest of the social safety net to pay for the tribute we owe the ruling class. Land of the free market and home of the gravy.

One Fox News affiliate managed to mangle the news: But while this was defended as an unavoidable typo (unavoidable by IDIOTS that is), the standard Republican boilerplate response has been to universally applaud President BUSH for his great efforts in avoiding finding bin Laden for seven years as the reason for Obama’s successful effort a mere two years and a few months into his presidency. Thanks to the troops and oh, yeah, you too, President Obama.

At least we were able to watch ALL of Celebrity Apprentice before the news. Otherwise, after the reception he’d gotten at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, we’d have to face the wrath of the Donald’s hair turning rabid…

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