Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for October 21, 2012

“The truth is what we want it to be.”™

“Snerdly’ find a new gig moonlighting for someone other than Rush??

Play the Republicon game!

Or should I say: “The truth is what you want it to be.”™

“alternate reality … why do they feel compelled to make everyone else live it?”

Elementary, my dear Dr. Watson: To spend billions in order to make a “return on investment” — hundreds of trillions off of working people in the form of wage slavery.

We’re not talking just U.S. economy here; we’re talking multinational economy, world economy.

Plutocracy is the enemy of democracy.

Dylan, indeed, who wants to work for a cartoon dog?

Plutocracy is your friend! Did you think that DIebold was out of tricks? That flipping 300,000 votes in Ohio in 04 was a fluke? You ain,t seen anything yet. Mittens has this one bought and paid for.

When some poster, on this or any other message site, starts ranting about the “liberal media” or, equivalently, the “mainstream media”, it’s a telling sign that this is an opinion that can be safely discounted.`Heck, a lot of the Conservatives don’t even bother spelling “mainstream media” out any more, it’s just “MSM”. Helps smooth the thought process, I suppose. And it’s expected they should rant. Political commentator Stephen Colbert probably said it best: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

“What good fortune for governments that people do not think.” “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep telling it, and eventually they will believe it.” “It is not truth that matters, but victory.” — Adolf Hitler.

“You left-wing-pinko-maggots can’t handle the truth. So we give you our version of it!”

“Truth” in the coming wonderful plutocratic world tomorrow = minimum wage: enough to keep a tin roof over your head, and one room to hold a bed, a shower, a toilet, a pipe to hang your clothes, a washer-dryer, a fridge (if you pay extra), a cupboard and a table. Welcome to unregulated free-market capitalism. Your weekly pay can’t quite cover your weekly expenses, but you can barrow up to a certain amount from the company store, in which everything costs slightly less than it does in stores outside your compound. Consequently you go deeper and deeper in debt — till at the end of your working years (from age 6 to age 76 = 70 years).

Your weekly balance of pay minus company-store debt balances at approx. $100. Since there are 50 working weeks per year, 50 weeks times $100 debt balance per week = $500 debt plus interest. $500 debt per year times 70 working years = $35,000 plus compounded interest = $3,500,000 you owe Bain Capital Multinational (BCM) at the end of your working life and the beginning of your retirement at age 70 years.

Any medical you wish to buy is added on, as well as any education you desire for your children. (If you have to ask how much money, you can’t afford to send your kids to school. You may home-school them if you wish, after your 10-hour work-day. (If they are to receive any education at all they will have to work their way through school.)

Meanwhile, the CEO of your company, BCM, lives in a 1000-room house overlooking the Pacific and drinks wine at $10,000 per bottle. His pay+bonus = a million dollars per year plus a billion dollar golden parachute in case he mismanages the company and has to leave to go manage another company.

If you don’t vote GOP you get fired. Two-hour notice max. Lots of luck finding another job, since unemployment hovers around 40% and is kept there by “unregulated free market” forces.

Don’t even think about buying an internal-combustion car at $200,000 each minimum. Gas: $100 per gallon. Get a bike and pedal. The exercise’ll keep you healthier.

Work hard and try to climb to become CEO yourself. Your chances of getting there are the same as those of winning the lottery. Besides the CEOs kids have the “connections” to get that corner office that you’ll never get.

Instead, your lot is to work hard, pray even harder, and be ready to meet your Maker, the great CEO in the sky, at any second.

Oh, taxes! Yes, taxes. The job providers pay none, in order to “provide the conditions for your employment.” You pay payroll taxes and sales taxes. You pay no capital-gains taxes, since you have no capital gain. Willard pays no taxes of any kind at all ever since he is a “job provider”, not even sales taxes on the seven Cadillacs, a pink one, a blue one, a silver one, a gold one, a black one, a white one, and a jade one — a different one for each day of the week. Each one has its own elevator to store in the overhead garage.

WELCOME TO THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF WAGE SLAVERY!

I will SO glad when election season is over and we can get onto more important things like preparing for the next one…

Said site actually exists-not brave enough to actually load it, tho.

“Romney refuses to own up to what we have been saying about him…therefore he is a liar”

On the subject of fact checking: I read a variety of news articles. When I almost invariably get to the line that reads, “According to one person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on this subject…..” WHY BOTHER? We have no way of confirming that, we don’t know if it was made up, and it is probably wrong.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” ― George Orwell, 1984

Flip flopping on facts means you’re wrong half the time. If it’s intentional, then it’s lying.

Also, this: http://bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm

Reality is nothing more than a Liberal conspiracy! Fantasy is my game!

Why doesn’t the American People read The Declaration of Independence and get on with it?

It takes one to know one. Trudeau is a propagandist and has been his entire career. He makes Goebbels proud.

He’s baaaack! Yes! Just in time to watch the GOP machine do what it always manages to do, only now on steroids with all that big $ from the big corporate donors, thanks to our current Supreme Court. Thank you GT. Brilliant as always.

I wondered where that last debate moderator got her information on the Prez’s Benghazi Bungle.

" Ed Lazear chaired George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers". This tells me all I need to know about this guy.

Somebody cued up the Hitler comments a bit early today…

In terms of the woman’s body, it would be nice if things were as some Republicans think they are. Too bad it isn’t true that in the present day no one ever becomes ill from pregnancy, no one dies in childbirth and no one ever gets pregnant from being raped. The fantasy world of the GOP.

The future does not look bright for those of us getting older under an RR administration at all, (which is of course to say all of us). We will all need medicare someday. Medicare was designed to serve a drastic need on the part of older retired people. Medical debt is enormous. Vouchers won’t cut it. This is one of the main reasons why an RR administration should never come to be. For all his flaws, Obama has a record of at least fighting for the middle class. He deserves a 2nd term. Romney doesn’t deserve a first one.

Well, when one considers that half of all Americans are of below average intelligence, and that a good many more aren’t much smarter than that, and that their vote counts more or less the same as anyone else’s, it certainly gives one cause for concern. It’s all too easy to sell the suckers on the notion that because the Constitution says “All men are created equal” (just ask ’em; they read it just like they read their Bible…) all their “facts” are equal too.

I am not mentioning this stuff about reproductive issues because I want to talk about it, but if it isn’t talked about from a different point of view, the GOP will have their way. If we don’t speak up, they will be happy to fill in the void! The same is true of the 2012 election in general, of course. No matter how much name calling from the other side we have to endure, we have to make sure our voice is also heard.

I agree with your thoughts. In terms of reproductive rights, what the GOP has been up to would be amusing if it weren’t so serious. The GOP head in the sand approach to pregnancy issues is potentially deadly to women as well as far more complicated than what they seem to realize.

In terms of fighting back against creationism being taught in public schools, there are many things that one can do. Vote, volunteer, stay informed about what the local school board is doing, stay informed about what the state school board is doing, get involved in local school board elections, get involved in state school board elections. Religion is not a bad thing, but it doesn’t belong in our public schools. The GOP often thinks they are the only ones who own the pledge of allegiance, the flag and the church. Not so. There are many liberals who are also believers. Maybe the conservative religious folks would be well served to go back and read Matthew 25.

When in doubt, the GOP folks love to trot out the old commie name calling bit… No matter that it makes no sense, they love to say it anyway.

Often, critics of American public education like to play the game of comparing our schools with others in the world. I believe that it should be recognized that 20% of US students speak a language other than English at home. Over 400 different languages are spoken in US schools. Also, English language learners often go to the poorest schools and live in abject poverty. Lawmakers and others are ignoring poverty as one of the reasons for the achievement gap. In Finland, for example, only 4% of children live in poverty. In the US, 22% of our students live in poverty. Finland is not a socialist country, by the way. Finland has a robust capitalist economy. So, that is how I explain it. I don’t think that it should be that way, but to say otherwise is to simply not acknowledge the reality as is.

Finnish 15 year old students have consistently been in first and second place in Math and Science in global rankings. Upon visiting Finland recently, Diane Ravitch (a well known author) found that Finnish teachers were horrified to learn that US schools are increasing the use of standardized tests, basing teacher evaluations on how well students score on tests, and will receive merit pay if students do well. There is no standardized testing in Finland and teachers are responsible for the curriculum taught in their schools. In US schools where poverty is not a factor, US schools do very well comparatively.

I realize that I did not give a bumper sticker answer to the question of problems in US schools. Often, we have to delve a bit deeper than that if we really want to solve a problem.

These so called fact checkers while not answering directly to the Demoncratic party are certainly made up of mostly liberals so it ammounts to the same thing.

p90x ryan says that he ran an under 3 hour marathon. wrong. he says that president obama made gm plant in his district shutdown in 2008. wrong. he couldn’t even distinguished colt mccoy and brandon weeden from a guy who comes from a state obsessed with football.

You take the controls of a badly damaged aircraft that is falling out of control. By great efforts you prevent it from crashing. But half the passengers and half the crew are working against you to prevent you making the necessary repairs, and then they announce that because you still have not brought the plane up the altitude it was at when you took the controls, all the problems are your fault. It is simply a cheat to use “the day Bust left office” as your reference point. One week after Bush left office, one month after Bush left office, his policies were still completely in effect. It took 9 months for the new administration to make any difference, and even that was much less than they might have with even a modicum of co-operation. Here’s some more facts for you: when Reagan took office, unemployment was at 7.4%. It held there for a year, then soared to 10.8% (higher than in this administration) and at the time of his re-election had still not been brought back down to 7.4%. On the date of Reagan’s second election, there had not been one day in his administration when as many Americans were employed as on the day he took office. And he entered office with a much healthier economy than Obama did, and still unemployment rose to a higher peak than it did in Obama’s administration. It stayed at that peak a shorter time, and things were clearly improving when we was re-elected. I just want to point out that Lazear is stating a meaningless fact. Of course the economy is bad. But Obama did not become supreme master of the universe when he took office. The only evidence that would matter is something that proves or even suggests that things might have gone better with different actions on his part. Just because the patient is recovering more slowly than expected, it does not mean the physician is incompetent. And certainly it does not mean that you should fire him and hire a witchdoctor instead.

If you really don’t see it as a problem that many of the students in the US do not speak English as a first language, then I really can’t help you understand, I am afraid. Maybe we should just go back to beating up on teachers and teacher organizations as we have been for the last several decades, since that has worked so well.

We actually handle truth rather well, all things considered…

@FriscoLouI guess you won’t be watching the debate tomorrow night.

“… fumigate the office ….”

Only a racist would make such a post — as though blacks carry lice and fleas.

You’ve posted so many untruths in the past, CJ, that, thankfully, most readers will simply blow right past this nonsensical post.

I don’t beieve in truth. I’ve heard so much of it in 62 years that turned out to be someting less that it makes as much sense to believe outright lies and save the transition time.