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Totally Unfair and Completely Unbalanced

Netanyahu Does The Ass Dance, OR: Shin Chan In Tel Aviv

Netanyahu is portrayed as Shin Chan, wiggling his butt at the US.

Netanyahu was so depressed after his meeting with Obama he went home and announced more settlements...

Well, let’s see. No sooner than the curtain came down on Act I of Health Care Reform, but it was rung up again for Act II. Republicans bent on obstruction and repeal, tea partiers bent on…well, tea partiers just BENT. Not sure I want to keep watching, second acts always end BADLY. In other news, Il Papa just got directly tied to one of the abusing priest coverups. That wasn’t long in coming. We’ll have to see how this one plays as well. No, I think I’m going to address something else that I’ve been meaning to before it’s crowded off the news by other catastrophes.

You gotta hand it to Netanyahu–he has the chutzpah of the guy who murders his parents and then asks for mercy from the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan.

Joe Biden, our beloved BFDer, goes over to Israel for talks. He has this lovely grip-and-grin moment with Netanyahu in which they theoretically reach some understanding on the Israeli-Palestinian problem, then no sooner than Biden turns around, Netanyahu announces 1600 additional illegal settlements on land that is supposed to be Palestinian. Oy, what a hullabaloo. Netanyahu apologizes. Not for the settlements. No, the “timing” of the announcement was bad. Ben, Ben, Ben. The announcement that you’re going to do something illegal is ALWAYS gonna be $%^&*( bad. It’s just worse when you push it into our Vice President’s face.

So we step up the process and Obama gives him a talking to. Things look like they’ll settle down. Oh, by the way, we’re building 20 new apartments where that old hotel used to be–in the Palestinian half of Jerusalem. ZING! Bad timing again, Benjamin?

Now Obama’s really pissed–amazing how much stronger he’s been acting since he lost the supermajority in the Senate. He and Netanyahu have a meeting. Closed Doors. No one says what the meeting is about, but poor Bennie returns home, kicking cans down the street on the way and mumbling, “It’s not fair.” The members of the hardline government line up behind him and say, “There, there, Bennie, those Americans were being mean.”

Now, I know there are those out there that think, like the conservative Israelis, that Jerusalem, (pun alert) an island of treasure to the Abrahamic religions, should be completely in Israel’s hands (/pun alert), David’s city and all, but the fact is that MODERN Israel signed an agreement dividing the city in half. Likewise, the territory that once upon a time was Biblical Israel is now divided between the Palestinians and Israelis. Sovereign nations honor agreements. Oppressive goon squad regimes don’t and we all know how THAT turns out. Granted, there has been great provocation, but you don’t put out fires with gasoline.

And Bennie, the US is NOT your best friend. It’s your ONLY friend. Don’t rub your ass in our faces and expect us to kiss it. Remember, you’re in the same position as our teabaggers. The Palestinians are out-reproducing you. Just as white people here will soon no longer be a majority, Palestinians will outnumber Israelis and what are you going to do then? What happens then will be decided by what is done now. Be a mensch.

(Today’s cartoon in memory of the late Yoshito Usui, creator of Shin Chan, who died last September in an accident and whose last cartoons were published this month’s Weekly Manga Action. And condolences to the family, friends and fans of Robert Culp, who died earlier this week).

CLOSED FOR CONGRESSIONAL RECESS MARCH 29- APRIL 11 WE SHALL RETURN, MONDAY APRIL 12

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The National Health Care Soap Opera Hits a Curtain–Intermission or Climax?

Making believe they are the true Amaricans, teabaggers hurl racial and other epithets at the Congress ...

Teabagging's true colors--and I don't mean red, white and blue

After a year of deals, compromises, debates, broken promises, lies, protests, counterprotests, Health Care Reform(?) is passed. With all the incredible rancor and venom, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have to be congratulated for actually getting SOMETHING done. There are about 32 million people who will have them to thank for actually having some kind of health care, and countless others who will not be denied coverage for “pre-existing conditions” or other BS. Is it a perfect bill? Hell, it may not even be all that GOOD a bill. It strengthens the stranglehold of the health insurance industry–that mandate for all citizens to buy health insurance can be seen as nothing less than a bribe to get the parasites to give up denial of coverage and if anyone thinks that the insurers are going to keep rates down and risk lowering executive salaries and bonuses, I’ve still got that bridge in Brooklyn I’m offering on eBay.

But let us be generous and think of it as a first step in what is likely to be an arduous journey. Real Reform for the rest of us lies further ahead. Let us be thankful for the people who won’t be forced to die for lack of medical care.

You would think the votes wouldn’t be so close. But all you have to do is look at the demonstrations over the weekend to see the bitterness that poisoned the hope of better legislation. Teabaggers running through the House offices, banging on doors and shouting. Hurling racial and other insults at Representatives as they prepared to vote. Spitting on them. One person in a wheelchair was mocked and told his “free ride” was over.

It wasn’t because of the sweeping nature of the plan. It kept to guidelines established by Republicans decades ago. This bitterness arose because some people in the US could not abide the thought of a black President and wanted to do anything in their power to destroy his tenure in office. They were whipped into a fury by Fox News and demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. Responsible Republican leadership has been out to lunch. They excuse this behavior instead of telling the teabaggers to stop acting like children. And they did this because the teabaggers were pulling the stunts they themselves knew they couldn’t get away with. Finally, after the vote, Boehner told everyone to start acting like adults.

But the genie’s out of the bottle. This is not the end of the teabaggers, I betcha. I hate to see what will happen next.

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What did the Pope’s Nose and when did he nose it?

Pope Benedict has nothing to say about the abuse that occurred under his brother's watch.

Sergeant Schultzinger...

Whenever a coverup starts getting uncovered, the big question that always arises is about the boy at the top. OK Girl at the top too, corruption is an equal opportunity employer. The question is, “What did they know and when did they know it?” In other words, were they involved in the coverup, or were they just clueless schmucks. Warren G. Harding was a clueless schmuck. He let his people organize Teapot Dome AND let them talk him into appointing just the right people to look the other way without any idea that these guys were not just great guys to have a poker game with. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, knew a lot about the Watergate break-in from the moment the “plumbers” were arrested and they were arrested doing a job that he’d authorized in principle.

So we come to the Church and its seemingly endless abuse scandal. Seemingly endless because although the cases of abuse are all relatively recent, there’s no way of knowing just how far back this abuse had been part of the Church under-culture. Certainly Catholic schools always had the reputation of “beating kids into shape,” but before the 20th C, it was generally accepted as a given that some kids needed “molding” in that manner and that all kids stood to need a whuppin’ now and then just to remind them of their place. But we’ve pretty much abandoned that in Western society for some time now. And the abuse we’re talking about is not just physical punishment, but sexual abuse as well.

Anyway, for the last few years it seems that every time you turn around, another country has uncovered physical and sexual abuse carried out by priests, nuns, brothers, teachers, etc.. And finally it has hit Germany, where the Pope Benedict was a bishop and later cardinal and where his brother Georg Raztinger directed a choir for a good 20 years, and guess what? Allegations of abuse has rizz! Not about Georg, who seems to have done nothing untoward except slap the boys around a bit, but who, of course, had no idea that any sexual abuse was going on by his subordinates.

And naturally, brother Joseph, now Pope B, had no idea of it either, nor of abuse going on in his diocese, even though he’d issued a directive to treat these cases with “confidentiality.” I guess confidentiality includes not telling your boss something smells under the woodwork. Right now, Irish bookmakers have sliced the odds against his early retirement.

Now, the rather conservative Cardinal Schönborn has suggested that in light of these scandals, perhaps it’s time to examine the celibacy rule. The Vatican says no, nothing to do with it. While I normally hate to agree with the Vatican, it’s undoubtedly true that priests aren’t abusing children because they can’t get any in a normal fashion. A molester is a predator who tries to get into a position of trust and power IN ORDER to abuse it. There are probably as many abusers outside the Church as in–it’s the hypocrisy of the ones inside of it that makes this such a scandal.

However, the Cardinal is right in a more roundabout way. Right now, no one with normal sexual urges wants to become a priest. That cuts out a big swath of your non-insane employment pool. The eastern churches have married priests, the Roman church only adopted celibacy as a requirement in their holier-than-thou Middle Ages. And they knocked that requirement off for eastern and Anglican churches that re-established communion with Rome.

But if it does happen, it ain’t gonna happen soon. And I don’t think that Joe Ratzinger will resign either–if he weathered the Hitler Youth problem, the scandal has gotta get closer to home than a bunch of maybes.

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Beckstianity 101–Social Justice is un-American

Glenn Beck casts stones at Jesus for being a commie Nazi for preaching social justice..

Hey, Glenn Beck also listened to Born In The USA's lyrics for the first time too.

Now I don’t like to knock a guy twice in the same week. Not that I think it’s unfair, but it always strikes me as a lack of imagination on my part. Surely there’s someone ELSE you can lampoon, Greg. Oh, of course there is–and stop calling me Shirley. But Glenn Beck, bless his pointy little head, has managed to do so.

Of course, last Thursday’s cartoon wasn’t really a mock on der Beckstein (although the text was 🙂 ). Getting Eric Massa on his show SEEMED like a good idea at the time. How was Beck supposed to know that a Democrat might not be disloyal to President Obama? Or that he would think that male-on-male tickling orgies might be misconstrued as sexual in nature? Or that he would take little Glennie to task for the alacrity with which right-wing commentators and Teabaggers call everyone they don’t agree with Nazis or socialists?

OK so his counterparts on Fox News all told him so. Can’t blame a guy for trying, right?

But he also managed not only to reveal that he never actually listened to the lyrics to “Born in the USA”. I guess for the last 25-and-a-half he’s been looking at the FRONT of the album cover with The Boss’s tight-jeaned butt smiling at the camera in front of a flag, head-banging along and singing BORN IN THE USA every time it came around. Yeah, Baby, Born in the USA! And for 25.5 years he never actually “listened” to the lyrics to find out what Bruce Springsteen had to say. Well, I can understand that, sometimes even us boys from Jersey find it hard to understand New Jersey. But to ADMIT IT, as if he just found out something everyone in America already KNEW! that just boggles the mind.

Only to be topped by his warning to the faithful. Now if you thought 25+ years of cluelessness was bad, check out the evidence of a LIFETIME cluelessness. He told his audience that if they heard the words “social justice” in their churches, they should run away as fast as possible to find some other church that did NOT believe in “social justice”, because “social justice” was nothing less than a codeword used by Nazis and Socialists! Now I’ve commented before on the peculiar form of Christianity some people espouse, the Calvinist belief that the poor are miserable, not just because they deserve to be, but because they WANT to be. Because if they didn’t “want” to be poor, why they’d just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make a Horatio Alger success of themselves. So any talk of “social justice” actually allows them to go along, living off unemployment and welfare. This he says, in the middle of a recession where 1 out of 6 people of working age is either unemployed or underemployed. Way to go Glenn!

But the corker is that hitherto, lots of church leaders thought Glenn was the bee’s knees. Now, they’re up in arms–because if there’s one thing that Christian churches have in common, it’s preaching charity, helping your fellow man, fighting for social justice, because their founder, that #$%^&* liberal Jesus Christ, said it was important. More important than praying as a matter of fact. Even the Mormons, who most people figure on being iffy Christians–and Glenn Beck, having been raised Catholic, converted to Mormonism in his adulthood. Looks like SOMEBODY hasn’t been paying attention in church for a long long time. I mean, we all try to not listen to sermons, but usually some of what was said sinks in after a few decades of repetition. But it’s just like Born in the USA. Glenn Beck just doesn’t pay attention. He’s off in his own little world, dreaming dreams no man ever dreamed before, because they’re too #$^&*( crazy to begin with.

Well, Glenn’s finally “clarified” his statements–I think now he says he meant Big Government instead of Nazis–and apologized in the standard approved format and his faithful congregation have returned to the fold, knowing that Glenn didn’t really mean what he said, even though he did when he said it. But myself, I’ve got to wonder–does this man even HAVE an attention span?

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I guess we’re lucky Eric Massa didn’t try to tickle Rahm Emanuel

Glenn Beck gets a vision of Eric Massa trying to retaliate against Rahm Emanuel by tickling him to death

We TOLD Glenn Beck not to look!

Poor Glenn Beck! He was sure he was onto the key to the downfall of Obama’s socialist fascism. Rush Limbaugh told him not to do it. Bill O’Reilly told him not to do it. Michelle Malkin told him not to do it. But…he did it. He booked Eric Massa.

Eric Massa had been loudly proclaiming that he was being forced out of office because he was the key vote for dooming health care. Salivate, Glenn, Salivate! What did they do to you? What kind of pressure did they put on you? Well, I have non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. NEVER MIND THAT–the WHITE House–what did they do? OK, there were these sexual harassment allegations. AH-HAH! And those weren’t true at all? Well, of course, I groped a few people. Guy people. I mean, who doesn’t when you’ve had a few?

Ummmmm…

And then there were the tickle fights. Nothing sexual at all there. How can you say that’s sexual harassment?

Ummmmm…

I’ve been fighting these charges all my life. What we need to do is campaign reform! Stop calling each other names like socialist, fascist! You can be a progressive and a fiscal conservative at the same time! What we don’t need are these teabaggers pretending the deficit didn’t happen until Barack Obama took office.

Ummmmm…

Don’t worry Glenn, you didn’t waste our time. THAT night. Now try not wasting it every OTHER night!

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