Intravenous Caffeine

Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

Two Little Maids From School Are We…

Newt

Awwwww, aren't chibis soooooooo cute and idiotic?

For those of you not into Japanese comics, a chibi is a diminutive character that usually performs the role of the “cute, annoying sidekick”. It actually means “small child” and adult characters can morph into their “chibi” forms when they are behaving stupid and childishly, bouncing up and down like a two-year old on tear in a temper tantrum. 🙂
Well, it seems that old Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck (whom I didn’t draw) have looked at the glass and called Sonia Sotomayer, Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, a racist–not noticing that this particular piece of glass was a mirror not a window. Her offense? Suggesting that someone of her background might have a broader range of knowledge and experience than a white guy. From Susan Crile in the Huffington Post comes the actual quote: As evidence, media figures like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, have pointed to a speech Sotomayor gave at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 1992. During the speech, she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Oh gee, maybe a little self-congratulatory, but racist? Well we all know the strategy from the Karl Rove playbook, “Thou shalt accuse thy opponents of thine own fault before they accuse thee!” By doing this, you make your opponent seem childish and unoriginal if they turn the accusation back on you…i.e., “You’re a racist.” “No, YOU’RE a racist.” “No, YOU’RE the racist…” etc. etc. You get the picture. Pundits like Gingrich, Limbaugh and Beck are trying to appeal to the basest of their base–not the intelligent, informed conservative, but the xenophobic nuts who have hijacked de facto control of the Republican Party. Whatever happened to the party that could boast liberals like Nelson Rockefeller–yes, at one time, it was possible to use liberal and Republican in the same sentence and within living memory too! Better start kissing the Hispanic vote goodbye, guys, you can have your wish of being the “whitest of whites” party. Pass the Clorox, please.

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Aussie Doctor Saves Boy With Carpenter’s Drill–Now That’s One Man Who Knows How to Use His Tool!

Hollywood presents its version of Crocodile Drill Dee, M.D., an Australian doctor who saves lives with a carpenter's drill while fending off man-eating crocodiles.

BASED on a TRUE STORY

Let’s face it, the news hasn’t been very inspiring of late. If you voted against Obama, you’re in a foul mood because you think he’s turning America into the Socialist paradise, if you voted FOR Obama, you’re in a foul mood because he seems to be reneging on half of his campaign promises. The credit card reform is a big pile of nothing–gee, they have to tell me BEFORE they raise my rates, that’s sure gonna protect me if I’m having problems with keeping up the payments I’ve already got. Nothing seems to be happening here that hasn’t already been commented on–so what do you do? When things get tough, the tough go to Australia! Australia, land of eucalyptus-buzzed koalas, fighting kangaroos and didgeridoos! Populated by marauding bands of post-apocalyptic tonsorial victims! Or Mel Gibson when he’s not on the wagon. Now usually, the only news coming out of Australia is how many people got consumed by crocodiles or turned into quivering masses of nerve-dead gelatin by the local poisonous fauna. Or sports, which is the same thing. But this week, there was a heart-warming story about a boy who’d fallen off his bicycle and hit his head on a curbstone. Now normally, he’d’ve just picked himself up and cracked open another Foster’s, but this poor lad managed to conk himself good and his parents took him to the local hospital. Well, the doctor in charge of emergency realized that the boy had massive internal bleeding inside the skull and if pressure wasn’t relieved on the brain quickly, the kid was gone. There was no neurological unit at the hospital and no time to send him to one where there was. So our doc does the next best thing–he sends down to maintenance for an electric drill. That’s right. Ye olde Black and Decker! He calls up a doc in another hospital to consult and, sterilizing the drill bits, he plunged in. Blood spurted from the brain pan which told him he’d made the right move and the boy is on the way to recovery. Now that’s using your tool!

I can’t help but think what Hollywood will do with this story. You KNOW, someone’s going to buy up the rights. Maybe Spielberg–he’ll think it will be a perfect role for Shia LaBoeuf. After all, he thinks everything is a perfect role for Shia LaBoeuf these days. But we will have to change a few details–like have a crocodile attack in the middle of the operation! After all, crocodiles practically walk the streets of Melbourne, don’t they? And get rid of the 9 year old boy–we need a hot babe for romantic interest. We can STILL say, “based on a true story,” because we paid for it and some of it did happen, kinda sorta, but it would be a helluva lot more interesting if it happened the way we’re gonna show it. Oh, and let’s give the doctor an annoying sidekick, maybe a talking wallaby–the wallaby will be CG.
Here’s the original article in case you missed it: Australian doctor uses household drill to save boy

There will be no cartoon on Monday because of the Memorial Day holiday.

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Bizarro World: Cheney Demands Document Release, Obama Keeps Photos Secret

Bizarro Obama, claiming the need for secrecy, prepares to wrestle Bizarro Cheney, armed with customary shotgun, who demands document release.

The two Super Bizarros of the Right and Left prepare to battle

Harry Shearer in the Huffington post has called the new reality the Mirror World edition. Did somebody yell, “Simon Says: Everybody switch sides”? Screw it, Harry, I think it’s worse than that, we’ve formally entered BIZARRO World. We’ve been phasing in and out of Bizarro World ever since 9/11, when people were evacuating shopping malls in the midwest, convinced that Saddam Hussein was about to bomb them, but now with Cheney demanding the release of documents to show how effective our use of torture was and with Barack Obama, Mr. Transparency in Government, deciding to fight the release of torture photos, I think we’ve taken up permanent residence and Kal-El ain’t gunna come to rescue us. William Rivers Pitt thinks everyone is damn scared that the real dirt will come out and if Seymour Hersh is right, there’s some really horrible stuff we’re going to find out about how we conducted our “enhanced interrogations.”
Now, President Obama has decided to revive the military tribunals for Gitmo prisoners–you know, the ones he promised to end during the election campaign? And Republicans are dancing all over Nancy Pelosi for allegedly being untruthful about she knew about prisoner interrogations, in order to distract the country from the lies that President Bush told us about “We don’t torture.” Right is left, up is down, in is out…
In other news, after all that brouhaha about Obama addressing the Notre Dame commencement, a little over 2 dozen protestors showed up and Obama entered to a standing ovation and gave his speech to thunderous applause. The official White House transcript includes a protestor’s boo that Katharine Zaleski said showed his commitment to greater transparency. While being open about dissent is admirable, being transparent about the little things while maintaining secrecy about the big ones is backasswards…Bizarro World.

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Is this really to protect the troops or to protect the people who gave the orders to them?

President Obama tries to convince the public that not releasing the torture photos will protect the troops.

Would you like maple syrup or strawberries and whipped cream? Oh, no, not ze whip!

Poor President Obama. He’d REALLY like to get past this little torture problem that the Bush administration dumped like a load of crap on the Oval Office rug. But it just keeps coming back. Now the claim is, that in spite of his campaign promises of transparency, he will oppose releasing the torture photographs and that this will somehow protect the troops. There’s a possibility that this is true, but this writer believes that the president is being disingenuous. What not releasing the photographs is going to do is protect the president from having to do something about the perpetrators of these crimes. And I don’t mean the grunts and CIA operatives who actually performed the “enhanced interrogations” but the chain of command that issued the orders, back to and including former President Fratboy–I mean, Bush.
There is a long-standing tradition of treating previous administrations and their officials with kid gloves. You publicly give them the respect of having done whatever they did for the best reasons and especially, if there was anything fishy about it, you treat it as a hands off situation. The time to have done something was while the administration was in office–and that means use of the constitutional impeachment procedures. The problem is that the Bush administration committed high crimes and misdemeanors. They broke our laws against torture and international treaties against it. Yet, back in 2006, Nancy Pelosi took the impeachment process off the table, effectively leaving only one course of action, investigation and possible charges only after the change of administration.
Now the Democrats have been acting as if they were complete innocents in the matter. But it seems that Speaker Pelosi had been informed about the use of torture, and tacitly supported it by not doing a goddam thing about it. Nancy is also being disingenuous and trying to say that congressional leaders had only been informed about the possibililty of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, in other words, she knew that torture MIGHT be used, but not that torture actually WAS being used. Come on, now, Nancy, if a CIA spook tells you he might have to do something, chances are he’s already doing it. But this goes to the heart of the matter. Maybe the Bush administration is directly culpable for this crap, as former VP Dick Cheney is proud to admit, but there are a lot of people who are complicit in that they didn’t DO ANYTHING to stop it even though they were in a position to object or, if their voices were overborne by the “soft on terrorism” rhetoric of the time, leaked it to the news media.
Which brings us to another complicit group. The news media were cheerleaders for the so-called War on Terror. At some point in time, if there had been rumors that we were practicing torture, and there had, the news either suppressed the stories or said, so what, these were the people who attacked America. It wasn’t until the Abu Ghraib photographs started showing up on the internet that they were forced to break the story. Now the line many editors are taking is that we are ALL complicit because 100% of the American people were behind Bush’s war and nobody cared if we stepped on a few innocent Iraqi toes if it meant making America safer. What these apologists are forgetting is that a substantial portion of the American people were not gung ho about invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 and which did not have any weapons of mass destruction to threaten us with. But these people, through the complicity of the news media were marginalized and vilified as traitors, commies, anarchists, cowards, surrender monkeys or Frenchmen.
So this is the problem that Obama faces. If he allows the release of the photographs, they are probably so awful that the clamor to do something will be tremendous. But this will open a can of worms that will not just affect the former administration, but also members of his own party, journalists and god knows how many others who had the power to do something but stood by and did nothing.
But some of us didn’t.
See: How Americans Came to Support Torture, in Five Steps
Analysis: Obama revives old arguments on photos
Lawyers scoff at W.H. photo claim
Babes in TortureLand: Media Torture

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Compromise Position: You can go to the prom, just don’t dance…

See what holding hands and rock'n'roll can lead to?

See what holding hands and rock'n'roll can lead to?

The thing about authoritarian types is that they usually don’t have any good reasons for the things they tell you to do or not to do, they just want to screw around with your life and make you hop to their commandments. Does it say anywhere in the Bible that dancing is evil? I quote from “Vertical Thought”: “The Bible doesn’t forbid dancing when it’s done properly. Psalms 149:3 and 150:4 speak of praising God with dance. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to dance, and 2 Samuel 6:14 tells us that King David danced when the ark was being brought into the city.” Ummm, excuse me, I don’t see the word “properly” anywhere there. I see that three of the instances were connected with God, but Ecclesiastes just mentions “a time to dance”. And that sure as heck doesn’t imply that you have to be praising God in order to dance or else it’s Eeeeeevillllllllllllll.
So anyway, some poor schmuck, Tyler Frost, out in Ohio got stuck in a fundie school by his parents and when it came time for his girlfriend’s senior prom, he got told by the principal, Tim England, that if he attended it, he’d be suspended so that he couldn’t take his final exams and therefore couldn’t graduate Ohio Christian school tells student to skip prom. After all, the school has rules against dancing, listening to rock music and holding hands. “Are you going to live your life to please God or DISPLEASE HIM AND BE DAMNED FOR ALL ETERNITY.” The article doesn’t mention any rules against having sex, btw. Presumably if you don’t hold hands, dance or listen to rock, the thought won’t enter your head. I’m sure the Bible doesn’t mention not listening to rock music since it wasn’t invented back when Moses wrote Leviticus and Deuteronomy, or maybe it’s implied by Moses striking the rock twice (he didn’t hear the water running the first time) and being punished for it… As for holding hands, considering the list of sexual practices that the Bible DID prohibit, perhaps Moses thought it was a little low on the importance scale.
The key to it all is the necessity to bow to authority: “The handbook for the 84-student Christian school says rock music ‘is part of the counterculture which seeks to implant seeds of rebellion in young people’s hearts and minds.'” Rebellious young hearts and minds have only one thing to rebel against–old farts who insist that you obey them unquestioningly. The kid’s stepfather thinks that the school should not have authority outside of school, as, in fact, the courts have decided on other issues. If I were the stepfather, I’d throw in the Ecclesiastes reference and ask them why dancing is wrong if the Bible itself says that there is a time to dance. And sue their asses.

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