Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for April 01, 2011

Is it odd that I wouldn’t be shocked?

Did you see the stealth fighters in panel 4? I didn’t think so!

Fairly close to reality … just without the bombing (yet). It does seem that war has been declared on teachers and schools (severe budget cuts, unilateral removal of collective bargaining rights, …) while our military budget sees no limit and gets everything and more than they ask for.

Ouch - nice job TDB

Shock Doctrine brought home …

shock and awe

What seems to be lost on so many of those who blindly support the teachers is the fact that Wisconsin has lost something like 165,000 jobs since the recession began in 2007. With unemployment benefits being expanded to as much as 2 years, just where do these sycophants believe that the money to cover the teachers’ demands will come from? Yeah yeah, I’ve read the pundits talking about Governor Walker’s creating the budget mess and then using it to set against the teachers and other state workers unions, but the actual truth of the matter is that, much like GM and Chrysler and the companies hamstrung by UAW contracts with benefits that continue to rise at an almost logarithmic rate, this situation would come to a head in another year or two anyway. Ask the 165,000 (in Wisconsin only) who have lost their jobs and yet still must manage to pay taxes if they believe that the teachers should make some concessions too. Why should teachers be any different from any other workers who are having to deal with the consequences of this depression? America’s military retirees are facing cuts and reductions in the benefis which they were promised to partially compensate for generally lower pay (until most recently) and yet they seem to have no recourseat all. They can’t unionize. They have no collective bargaining powers apart from the groups which lobby Congress on their behalf. Who do you believe has sacrificed more our military members or teachers?

@ MisngNOLA: What the republicans have glossed over, ignored, and even denied and lied about, is that the unions in Wisconsin AGREED to take pay and benefits cuts. The Union protests are PURELY about the banning of collective bargaining. The budget issues were met, the gap was closed, but Walker, and his cronies wouldn’t accept that, so they stripped the bill of all of those pay and benefits reductions, and attacked the ONE thing they wanted to get rid of: the collective bargaining power of the unions.

“Who do you believe has sacrificed more our military members or teachers?” Yeah, let’s pit the military against the teachers! Bombs away! Enough with the educators teaching history, let’s make them history!

(/snark)

False paradigms and reductionist scenarios do not a democracy make.

Don’t move on to NPR yet, Ruben! We still need to turn the principals into strongmen and have Halliburton hand them large cash payments so they’ll “get on board” with the program. Then we can send right-wing apologists like misngnola in to explain to the different factions that the only way to save the schools was to destroy them.

well given that the % of the US budget allocated to military spending is 60%… I think I’ll have to go with… teachers.

But you know continue to advocate for increased military spending, it aint’t done until we mythologize every single aspect of the killing machine.

where should the money for the schools come from? Hmm, let’s see, that’s a tough one… hey, maybe from the military budget

You sure “tell it like it is.” I wish our Congressen would admit that we simply cannot afford to continue supporting our grossly ineffficient militaary machine.

Let me get this straight. If I don’t want my money taken from me involuntarily to be given to people I don’t believe deserve it, that’s the same as dropping bombs on them?

That’s the same lame thinking that results in “But if the government didn’t provide schools, there’d be no schools”.

Cry me a river—no, a stream—no, a babbling brook—better yet, a pretty pisspot for the financial woes of the military industrial complex, the only industry who’s government expenditures are sacrosanct and for some inane reason off the books durning the Bush war mongering years (what do we pay for our inept and illegal CIA?), costing nearly twenty times more in federal expenditures, 44.4% to fund current (as of 2009) and past wars, compared to 2.2% allocated to education and jobs. Source: Budget Chart: President Bush’s FY 09 Budget Proposal, Friends Committee on National Legislation, February 15, 2008

funny, when I don’t want my money taken from me involuntarily to be given to people I don’t believe deserve it (i.e. the military), I get called unpatriotic

“With unemployment benefits being expanded to as much as 2 years, just where do these sycophants believe that the money to cover the teachers’ demands will come from?” I will worry about that when I see those few with a massive and growing share of the total wealth are sacrificing like everyone else. And obeying the law, and paying consequences when they break it, and accepting reasonable regulations.

jimjammer, I think I can probably speak for person when I say I would gladly pay your share of the subsidies for abortion if you’ll take over my share of the war budget.

Like I said, jim, it’s gotta be a trade. The portion of your taxes that goes to subsidize abortion is pennies. The portion of my taxes that pays for the war machine is hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars.

Of course, there’s another option; the pennies you’d save by withdrawing abortion subsidies from your taxes could be pro-rated to cover the costs of raising and educating the unwanted children born by withholding of same.

Rich women sometimes have abortions just as assuredly as poor women, but they can pay for them without subsidies. And those born into an economically-disadvantaged situation are far more likely to cost society big bucks later on, if only in prison costs.

I was converting it to dollars and cents because those are the terms of the argument. As I said, women who could certainly afford to raise their children have abortions, same as those who can’t. As to whether they’re unwanted, who wants ‘em? Again, are you willing to poney up for their education and upkeep? That’s of course far from the only argument, as well, but it’s the one closest to the point if we’re talking about the procedure being subsidized.

Women have had ways of ending undesired pregnancies for thousands of years, and have used them, whether it’s been legal or illegal, whether it was safe for the unwillingly-pregnant woman or not.

But the thread of the argument raised by pschearer and followed by person and then you and then by me is, in a pluralistic society, what personal discretion do we have or should we have to say yae or nay to the uses to which our tax dollars go? How much we DO have is “Not much.” How much we SHOULD have is a more interesting question, because as we’ve all seen we all have different ideas, equally strong, about what we want our taxes used for.

But hey, “money” is issued and regulated by governments anyway, and our taxes, however high or low, are simply “rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

Nola, you supported Bush-Dick’s invasions & occupations of Afghanistan & Iraq! Where do you think all our money went?? Your president spent it!

The states have lived on the edge for the last decade, because your Bush-Dick cut funds for the states while driving us into terrible debt in order to occupy Iraq and slaughter thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Now, you suggest that America’s heroes ruin their own careers and their small salaries, because a handful of rich men sent poor men to kill men, women, & children to line the pockets of the rich men?

Governor Walker handed money to the wealthy, then claimed that Wisconsin’s budget did not have enough for teachers. Who does more important work than do public-school teachers?

The teachers made concessions. Walker ignored them in his craving to end collective bargaining and break the union. He is a tool for corporations, who do not want union money in competition with theirs in this post-Citizens United world.

In the 2010 election, Big Corporations funneled millions of dollars to push its tools into Congress and into state houses. Now, they want to eliminate their taxes and return the U.S. to the late nineteenth century: no unions, no income tax, no child-labor laws, no F.D.A., no O.S.H.A., &c.

By the way, the state AND federal government pay unemployment benefits.

BrainKook:

Cry me a river! I noticed you didn’t throw your bud O-bomb-a’s name in your “Bush-Dick” rant! What’s he? A saint? Just like Jimmy Hoffa I guess! Union’s are just as guilty of sucking money from the little guy as corporations!

It is always funny when people like MisngNOLA accidentally prove their own point is wrong. While ranting against teachers he manages to say “logarithmic rate” (which would be a rapidly decreasing rate of increase) when I think he meant to say “exponential rate”. If our engineers had math skills like that, our soldiers would soon be reduced to using sticks and clubs to fight off tanks.

Where does jim live that his tax dollars go to subsidise abortions?