And as the laser sight sweeps around, Harry Reid pulls the nuclear option

Will Revolutionary Grrl take out the drone before the drone takes out her? A race against time!

AH-HAH! Revolutionary Grrl has that paintball gun! Will she be able to take out the drone, before the drone takes out her? BTW. that drone is a laser-sight machine gun mounted in a quadopter, or 4-rotary miniature helicopter. Stephen Colbert failed to fly a toy-sized demo one that was brought on his program. This is a larger version of the same thing, which could be put to use to deliver medical supplies, emergency equipment, food, whatever to dangerous locations. Ammo, probably. And yes, there are already experimental machine gun mountings available.

This week has been all-Kennedy assassination, all-day, for several days on the television, with everyone and their brother remembering where they were when they heard. I remember where I was–in school. I kept thinking that “this couldn’t be happening” as my teacher gave us a moment for silent prayer. I spent the next several days hoping that this was a bad dream from which the world would wake up. We were glued to the television set at my house. Even more memorable was a few days later. Lee Harvey Oswald was being transferred from the Dallas jail he was being held in. My mother saw him and said, “There’s that bastard, somebody ought to shoot him,” and walked away to make Sunday dinner and suddenly–BAM! Somebody indeed shot him.

And I remember how old I felt when I mentioned to a younger friend about how vividly I remembered the day that Kennedy got shot, and she asked me with great concern, “They shot Teddy?” And now I can feel doubly old, when I acquire a new set of friends–who don’t remember Teddy! I’m afraid Bobby’s gotten lost in the shuffle.

The awesome power of the boob tube–bringing you live murder on the minute. How it has developed–now we can manufacture life-and-death situations for groups of nobodies so that the rest of us can be entertained by their ingenuity as they vie for a prize!

In the meantime, Harry Reid, after 5 full years of minority obstructionism, has finally pulled the plug and said “ENOUGH!” and taken the so-called nuclear option–going back to the original constitutional procedures for Senatorial advice and consent. NOTE that it is ONLY being used for approval of appointees. The minority can still veto any legislation they feel compelled to. Mitch McConnell, in a fit of Shakespearianism, has cried, “Damned be he who first cries Hold, Enough!” and told Reid that he would rue the day that he burst the dam on the largest number of obstructed appointments–SINCE THE REPUBLIC BEGAN! We can only hope that Messrs. McConnell, McCain, Graham, Cruz and the rest decide to blockade every bill in the coming year to force Reid into following Little Boy with the Fat Man and get rid of the filthy buster altogether.

For this, O Lord, we thank you.

Oh–and George Zimmerman’s temper has gotten him in trouble … again!

And in keeping with the spirit of thanks, we will be partaking of the annual feast again this year with old school friends. And after doing 9 weeks of an adventure comic with the new-found knowledge of WHY so many webcomics are “two dudes talking for 3-4 panels, with a punchline badum-tish!”, we will take the week off and truly be thankful. We will return on December 9 with the next installment of Revolutionary Grrl on Intravenous Caffeine. Once again, if you like what we’re doing, please click the LIKE button below and share with your friends. And Redditors, please vote us up! Happy Thanksgiving!

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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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4:00 pm for America?

The seesaw beliefs of Christine O'Donnell

It must be 4 pm for the United States of America with tea parties in full swing and the Republican party is running around with wheel chocks to keep them cannons on deck. Joe Miller up in Alaska doesn’t just want to gut Social Security like most Republicans–he thinks Unemployment Insurance is UnConstitutional! After all, why should we have to pay for those lazy slobs when they could just pick themselves up by the bootstraps and get a job–in India, where so many of our jobs have been outsourced. You think they’d paid MONEY into that so-called insurance. There goes a man who’s never had to worry about his next meal. Funny how that kind of person always knows what YOU should do in a situation they’ve never experienced. Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent he beat out of the primary, may run as an independent.

Then there’s Sharon Angle in Nevada. You know, the one that thinks the Second Amendment gives us the right to an armed insurrection if we think the gummint has turned tyrannical? She evidently parses that out from “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.” I wonder what was in the Founder’s coffee THAT morning! She’s also said that the citizens of Nevada need to “take out” Harry Reid and she didn’t mean for dinner. As all people who speak without the intervention of brain cells, she had to retreat from this statement and explain that she meant they had to take him out OF OFFICE. Fine, Sharon, but please, try passing your words through that space between your ears next time.

Then there is our latest darling, Christine O’Donnell. The winner of the Sarah Palin look-alike contest who dated Satanists in high school before becoming a professional Christian. I guess the ability to spin on a moral dime — or on an unholy altar! — is considered a plus in tea party circles–except when it isn’t! So far, the established right has harped on her financial problems and, shall we say, the alleged creative use she’s made of campaign funds to help allay them, but her views on self-gratification have always been right on the spot! That one–there–no, there–yes, mmmmmmmmm. PUNISH ME GOD!

The problem is that American cannot laugh off these tea partiers, no matter how crazy they seem, because some of them are going to be elected. The Republicans might be trying to keep them in the fold, but they aren’t herding sheep, they’re trying to herd cats, and if you’ve ever tried to get a cat into the carrier to go to the vet, you know exactly what I mean. While they might seem laughable, so did a bunch of weirdos that dressed like overgrown boy scouts in Weimar Germany. The good thing about the tea party is it has no leadership, not even Glenn Beck, no matter how hard he tries. The bad thing is that someone WILL come along who understands how to play to it. And that’s when I visit my relatives in Canada for an extended stay.

In other news, I have debuted a collection of my cartoons from the Bush era. BUSHWHACKED: The Wurst of HAIL DUBYUS! appeared for the first time at InterVentionCon last weekend and is 80 pages of high quality reproductions of some of my best Bush era cartoons from the original 300 DPI files. I’ll be hawking it at other cons throughout the year, but you can buy it at IndyPlanet. This blog is not commercial–I’ve been doing it out of a sense of “doing something” to make a difference–so please take a look and help defray the costs of my artistic and satiric endeavors 🙂 If you’re ever at a comics convention where I’m appearing, I’ll be happy to sign your copy!

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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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Health Care Reform–Anorexic Shock?

While the insurance companies moan about their non-existent lost profits, health care reformers start to ask if they have bargained away more than they have gained.

Is this what we bargained for?

Let’s start off by saying that Joe Liebermann is such a jackass. There, that feels good, doesn’t it? Practically on the very day that the Congressional Budget Office projects that not only will Health Care Reform with the public option not increase the deficit, it will lower it, Joe Liebermann says he will join the filibuster because of his concern that it will increase the deficit. This is the same Joe Liebermann who as a young senator supported abolishing the filibuster, but now that he is older and wiser, realizes that it’s the only way a dedicated minority can tie the federal government in knots. I say “dedicated minority” since that excludes the Democratic Party, which is constitutionally incapable of agreeing with itself. And since Joe caucuses with the Democrats but votes with the Republicans–he calls it independence, other call it “being a quisling”–he wants the dedicated minority to be able to screw things up as much as possible.
Suffice it to say, however, that since Joe Liebermann has been flirting with the Republican Party, he probably can’t read anymore–otherwise, he’d never have made such an asinine criticism. But, you know, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Is the “public option” something worth all the effort that’s been put into it? According to that same CBO report, the public option is only going to affect 2% of all Americans…by 2019, up to 6 million people will make use of that long and hard fought for provision. Now 6 million people is nothing to sneeze at–except when you compare it to the most probable 2020 population of just over 300 million people. And that’s 10 years down the road. The public option won’t even kick in until 2013. Hell, most of the baby boomers with be on Medicare by then. *I* will be on Medicare by then! Moreover, the public option isn’t going to be free–it will have a price sticker roughly equivalent to private health insurance. I say roughly because it’s going to be a little bit higher–we don’t want it to actually compete with private health insurance! We want that industry to stay healthy, even if it starves the middle class! That’s kind of like eating nutritious meals so our tapeworm doesn’t get malnutrition. And furthermore–everyone will have to have health insurance or pay a fine! The poor will get a subsidy so they can afford to buy it, but we’re talking about an enforced expansion of the health insurance customer base. You would think the health insurance companies will be pleased by this. Nosireebob! They’re too busy griping about not being able to drop customers because they have expensive conditions. If that profit margin goes down, they’ll have to raise rates to protect their executive bonuses! About the only good thing about the public option as it now stands is that it has backdoored a tax on the top 1%. But not to worry–they’ll soon find a way out of THAT!
The question is, with all the stuff negotiated away to achieve this public option goal, is the final result what we bargained for? I mean, we gave away our ace-in-the-hole, single payer health care, what the people of this country both need and deserve, even before negotiations started. Since then, it’s been like Chico and Groucho negotiating a contract, stripping aways clauses until all we have left is the sanity clause–and as we all know, there ain’t no such thing as a Sanity Clause! In the efforts to get something that could be called a “public option”, have the various committees thrown away so much substance that all that is left is skimpier than a stripper’s bikini? Kucinich’s state-by-state single payer option got tossed because it was too meaty and might have jeopardized passage of the program, but it’s altogether possible the program is going to die of anorexic shock all on its own. Some people say that something is better than nothing, but we really have to ask ourselves if we are not actually condemning ourselves to another ten or more years of slow strangulation by the parasitical health insurance industry just so we can say that we achieved “something”?
I don’t know–as they say on cable innuendo news, I’m just asking–but I’ve reached the end of my column, so let’s end up with something we can all agree on… Joe Liebermann is such a jackass!

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