Tom Toles for April 01, 2018

Who?

Here’s one, “DO YOU LOVE THE PRESIDENT?”. There is only one box for “yes”.

An instructive article on the citizenship-question issue: – https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-motives-behind-the-trump-administrations-new-cens us-question-on-citizenship .

“No? Then let me see your papers.” he says, motioning to the police.

Is “involuntarily” one of the choices?

Admiral Ackbar says IT’S A TRAP.

Civil disobedience is the way to go. Tell them how many people live there, then close the door.

“Of course and I’m as truthful as Donald Trump”

 

“A census taker once tried to test me.”

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆⇆

✅ 224 million Americans are eligible to vote

❌ 95 million don’t

In 2016 28 % of the eligible voters were for Trump, and 29 % of them were against Trump

☛ 43 % of eligible American voters do not care who is president ☚

❓

If 4 out of 10 of our neighbors, coworkers, bosses, acquaintances, etc. have zero interest in our democracy or in governing themselves, there are a heap of questions we all need to be asking each other that have nothing to do with the census.

{Off the cartoon’s topic:}

HAPPY WOULD BE OUR EASTER – {1.20 limericks}

‘Twould indeed be a HAPPY Easter

were The Donald out on his keester.

America would thus have increased her

ability to soar

much much more

when Trumpists had finally released her.

==========

“Would you say the President is doing a good job, or a great job?”

With any luck, crooked liar Trump will be gone before the census is taken.

Easy question and easy answer: nope. And, if that question ends up on the actual form, I urge open-minded white Americans to not even fill it out. That will push up the immigrant and non-white results. Will the survey be accurate? No. Is it now? No.So both sides should somehow work together so that America has an accurate census. Otherwise, the US will be considered an outlier state—even more than what Trump has already done to damage us!

This is the reverse of Nancy Reagan’s drug campaign. The census worker has no info on you ( worked the last campaign, so I know), so you simply “just say yes” ( si is not recommended).

Questions for today: Did you try to reply to somebody else’s reply (say Jan Jones’s reply to Sandy Smith’s original comment)? Do you remember when GoComics used to preface your post with an automatically entered blue-text “@Jan Jones”? Do you wonder, as I do, why they considered it any kind of “improvement” to stop doing that?

Sinclair Group Forces All Its Local TV Anchors To Denounce “Fake News,” In Support Of Trump Agenda.

The broadcaster has aligned itself with the Trump administration: In addition to the “one-sided news” script featured last week, Sinclair stations are also required to run political commentary from the network’s chief political analyst, Boris Epshteyn. Epshteyn previously worked for the Trump White House and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“At my station, everyone was uncomfortable doing it,” one unnamed television anchor at a Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned station told CNN earlier this month, referring to the “one-sided news” script.

“They’re certainly not happy about it,” an unnamed KOMO employee told the Post-Intelligencer Friday, referring to their colleagues.

This is what the unchecked corporate domination of our media has led to.

If it doesn’t scare you, it should. The purpose here is to erode Americans’ faith in journalism as an institution. It is constantly echoed by Trump himself in his attacks on CNN, the New York Times, and (just today) the Washington Post. Once that is accomplished— once Americans are trained to reflexively disbelieve what their own legitimate media sources are telling them— then all restraints on the wholesale abuse of political power are swept away.

Can Donald Trump Be Impeached?

I don’t think Trump has a conscious intent to vandalize liberal democracy — he doesn’t even understand what it is. Rather, his twisted, compulsive insecurity requires him to use his office to attack, delegitimize and weaken every democratic institution that may occasionally operate outside his own delusional narcissism. He cannot help this. His tweets are a function of spasms, not plots. But the wreckage after only one year is extraordinary. The F.B.I. is now widely discredited; the C.I.A. is held in contempt; judges, according to the president, are driven by prejudice and partisanship (when they disagree with him); the media produce fake news; Congress is useless (including both Republicans and Democrats); alliances are essentially rip-offs; the State Department — along with the whole idea of a neutral Civil Service — is unnecessary. And the possibility of reasoned deliberation at the heart of democratic life has been obliterated by the white-hot racial and cultural hatreds that Trump was able to exploit to get elected and that he constantly fuels.

The Democrats find themselves in opposition a little like Marco Rubio in the primaries. Take the high road and you are irrelevant; take the low road and you cannot compete with the biggest bully and liar on the block. The result is that an unimpeachable president is slowly constructing the kind of authoritarian state that America was actually founded to overthrow.

There is nothing in the Constitution’s formal operation that can prevent this. Impeachment certainly cannot. As long as one major political party endorses it, and a solid plurality of Americans support such an authoritarian slide, it is unstoppable. The founders knew that without a virtuous citizenry, the Constitution was a mere piece of paper.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/books/review/impeachment-cass-sunstein-can-it-happen-here.html

We have a president? I thought it was some orange idiot pretender upon the throne.

There is a psychopath in the oval office. Dumpster sucker, prove me wrong.

Reminds me of when Michele Bachmann complained about the census questions developed under the G W Bush Administration saying they were too intrusive to people’s privacy and blaming the Obama Administration for them. She encouraged everyone to leave most of the questions blank.

The next census might be a good time to leave the ethnicity, religion, and other minority identifying questions blank.

One one side of the page: “Are you a citizen of Donald Trump’s America?”

On the other side of the page: “Are you a citizen on the right side of history?”

Please mark only one.

@Radish

There’s at least SOME pushback from at least SOME people against the Praise the Trump and Pass the Ammunition media. Retired Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters, explaining why he left the Fox propaganda channel: "You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room. A year and a half ago, you might have heard George Will discussing policy with a senator while a former Cabinet member listened in. Today, you would meet a Republican commissar with a steakhouse waistline and an eager young woman wearing too little fabric and too much makeup, immersed in memorizing her talking points.This wasn’t a case of the rats leaving a sinking ship. The best sailors were driven overboard by the rodents.As I wrote in an internal Fox memo, leaked and widely disseminated, I declined to renew my contract as Fox News’s strategic analyst because of the network’s propagandizing for the Trump administration. Today’s Fox prime-time lineup preaches paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law.Four decades ago, as a U.S. Army second lieutenant, I took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” In moral and ethical terms, that oath never expires. As Fox’s assault on our constitutional order intensified, spearheaded by its after-dinner demagogues, I had no choice but to leave.

Thank you everyone for all the News I found out about here. Lots of bright people, knowledgeable and involved.

Today trump says the DACA deal is dead and Happy Easter!

The last decent Republican President we had was Eisenhower. Next would be Nixon (he started the EPA and started relations with China. And I believe that he had a better healthcare plan than what the current Republicans are proposing and Obamacare)