Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for October 25, 2010

Careful Zonk, Reichsfuhrer Holder says he will persecute you.

The moment Zonk was hoping for has finally arrived. Who cares about California’s budget crisis? Zonk will provide anyone who seeks it with the means of denial. Politicians can’t hold a candle to him, the wizard of delusion.

Death to Spammers!

I was looking forward to seeing how things would work out with Jeff and Mr Overkill. Zipper and Zonker are two of Doonesville’s least exciting creations.

All it takes to stop the spammers is an improved CAPTCHA on the sign-up page. Those were my faves too Baslim, Zonker being the Doonesbury character that I patterned my life after.

baslimthebegger, I forgot all about those! I loved them, too!

Why do I get a pop-up everytime I flag?

Both Wally from Dilbert(R) and Zonker have been my role models since I met them, with each contributing valuable insights to get me past rough patches in my life.

OK, gocomics, you need to modify your system to fight spam better, or folks like me are not going to renew. This is ridiculous.

Time it takes to scroll past spam: 0.4 seconds. Time it takes to post a diatribe about spam: much longer. Total waste of time.

Garry Trudeau interviewed on KCUR today at 11:00 (CT) you can stream from iTunes or from station’s site www.kcur.org/ListenLive.html

Thanks, John @ GoComics

Time to snark about folks who post diatribes: still longer.

Total waste of time.

Time it takes to scroll past a diatribe about spam: 0.4 seconds. Time it takes to post a diatribe about a diatribe about… I think you get where I’m going with this.

seriously, though, is the spam any worse than the incessant pop-ups? or do “genius” folks not have to deal with those and that’s why they’re complaining?

There were some good comments yesterday, and yesterday’s strip was Doonesbury at its political best. For a while, I thought that the Tea Party movement had taken over the Republicans. I now see that the Republicans are simply pandering to the Tea-Bag folk in order to regain power & keep the wealth coming to them.

Representative Boehner has never cut a program. Big Tobacco owns him, and if he becomes speaker, nothing will change. Of course, if the Republicans win control of the House and either win the Senate or split the Senate evenly, nothing will get done. If they try to repeal health-care reform, the Senate will not pass it. If they pass anything that goes against President Obama’s agenda to move America forward, then he will veto it. The tea-bag folk are in for a rude awakening when they see that their new bosses are actually their old big government, spend-into-debt, old bosses.

Yesterday, Scaaty & 3hour made some good points, particularly 3hour’s point about Bush-Dick’s lack of regulation. Lack of oversight on Wall Street & the banks and a disingenuous trust of Big Business led directly to the Great Republican Recession., and the Republican Party & the right-leaning mainstream media are conning the tea-bag folk into reinstating those same crooks.

Terryfitz, I agree with you (from yesterday) that the one must look closely at all politicians. Let us not tar them all with the same brush. Let us make sure that we look at them closely and in the context of how they are trying to work w/in the current political system.

Commentator, any honest tea-bag folk cannot be against Medicare, because a huge number of them are ON Medicare. Part of the Tea Party movement is fear & loathing of the “other”, represented by Obama (and by those “terrible illegals”, who, in actuality, almost all have jobs and do not use social services at a greater rate than do native-born Americans). Tea-bag folk think that it is all right for themselves to have Medicare, but there are “others”, “out there”, who are “abusing the system”.

Would like to write more, but I gave myself a fifteen-minute limit. Must work: Good day, all.

P.S.: Thanks for the link, Glynn.

BrianCrook,

What makes you think a rational well mannered post belongs on this page? :-)

Why wouldn’t it be the tea-bag folks’ right to have health care that they’ve paid for through salary robbery…err deduction for most if not all of their working lives? Do you really believe there’s no difference between getting something completely at someone else’s expense and getting something for which you were ostensibly told you were paying for? I get so tired of people who don’t understand the difference between “quid pro quo” and “pro bono”, and act like those who expect something for their money are loony somehow.

@ Neocon from yesterday

Let me see if I can sum up your points:

1) Only fools would want to reduce the deficit.

2) Government agencies can not (or should not) be more productive with taxpayer money.

3) Asking governments (state, local,or federal) to work more productively is stupid.

Got it. Are you sure you’re not really Nancy Pelosi? :-)

Just wanted to post a comment to those flagging the spam in the morning…

THANK YOU!

By the time I read this in the afternoon, all the spam is gone! I guess it takes a certain minimum number of people flagging it to make it gone, but I thank you for your efforts, and it does indeed do something!

You are correct, Rad ish. As of 8:50AM EDT, they have been. Prior to that there were as many as 5 separate ads in the form of comments on many of the toons and editorials.

If you want to effectively hunt down and flag spammers on GoComics, save the links:

http://www.gocomics.com/comments?page=1 http://www.gocomics.com/comments?page=2 http://www.gocomics.com/comments?page=3 etc….. http://www.gocomics.com/comments?page=20

in a bookmark folder (Firefox), and “open all in tabs”.

You can very quickly spot the spam by using your “page down” key. I probably flagged a couple hundred over the weekend.

RIchardRussell, I meant a pop-up ad! I’m not a n00b.

@Nemesys

1) Only fools would want to reduce the deficit [by promising to cut spending while ignoring the fact that 90% of the deficit comes from lost revenues]

2) Government agencies can not (or should not) be more productive with taxpayer money.

[In fact taxpayer money spent on new jobs–or even just given to people to spend–ADDS to the total GDProduct. And a growing GDP strengthens our balance of payments and therefore the $, further reducing the deficit by lowering the cost of borrowing]

3) Asking governments (state, local,or federal) to work more productively is stupid.

[On the contrary, state and Federal govts. have got to PRODUCE more jobs, even though doing so means appropriating some of the capital available to the private sector–i.e., borrowing. Cuts in the private sector, on the other hand, merely increase the burden on the public (Nancy Pelosi), which has to take care of the workers let go. Autocratic organizations strengthen their “small platoon” (Edmond Burke) at the expense of society]

@ Neocon,

On the contrary? But that’s what you said yesterday, almost word for word.

As to what you’re saying today, governments cannot produce more private sector jobs as a result of borrowing money… they can only produce those jobs by creating an environment in which business and industry can make a profit, from which government takes a fair percentage as taxes.

However, when the percentage is unfair, either through direct taxation or on indirect fees and policies, businesses shop the international market and send their factories elsewhere. It happens with individual states, too, when factories relocate from areas with heavy infrastructures (such as New England) to southern states with more business-friendly climates.

Governments at all levels perform like businesses. They provide a service within a marketplace. The stockholders (the citizens) elect the CEO and the officers. They are not monopolies, but compete with other governments in the open market. If they are run unproductively, make poor investments, and lose money, the stockholders are able to vote with their feet and invest in another vehicle.

Government CAN provide the shoehorn, but government is not the shoe. Once the shoe is on, it must get out of the way. Unfortunately, in a political environment where those in charge decry taxable corporate profits in favor of unsustainable government expansion, there is great reluctance to remove the shoehorn so that plan don’t walk.

Run firefox and get the ad block plus add-on. No more pop-ups. You can also enable things if you have problems, but i rarely do.

Preventing pop-ups (ads): @Potrzebie et al.- Google [hosts file], and install one. Suddenly, hundreds of ad and malware URLs will map to your own ‘home’ machine IP address (127.0.0.1), where (we would hope) they aren’t found.

This works on Windows, Mac OS’s, and Linux with all browsers.

It’s one of the first things I do in a new install.

Looks like Sour Diesel to me. I wonder what Zonker tells them to get them to grow?

You wanna have some fun? The tea party morons HATE IT.

Go to:

palinaspresident.com

and click on everything. EVERYTHING. The windows, doors, desk, phone closet, pictures, bridge to nowhere on her desk, keep clicking…on the closet, the valences, the…EVERYTHING, and you’ll see why the mindless schmucks hate it if, indeed, they understand it.

“BS here I come.”

I’ve been there Mike Price, Did you ever find the # of wolf kills, or where Iranistan is?

@Nemysis

You are assuming high taxes are driving business overseas? I would disagree. Even when federal, state, and local taxes are included, the tax burden in the US is still one of the lowest in the G8.

Cheap labor is a far bigger factor, especially for industrial workers. Even many north-to-south moves in this country were primarily for that reason.