Two Party Opera by Brian Carroll for October 25, 2023

instead of Benjamin Netanyahu?

Now Israel would attack another country if Bush was in charge.

You picked Cheney. His name was Dick, right? Dick.

Salivating, yes. And probably aroused.

Wow., Joe Biden has us deep in Ukraine. His admin has deployed warships to the middle east. Biden has set deployment readiness units to the Middle East. But Carroll is featuring BUSH as the warmonger? You are jumping the shark Carroll. Wake up and smell the BIDEN WARMONGERING!

Welcome back again, Brian.

Welcome back Brain.

I’m sorry that THIS is what pulled you out of retirement. Another sad episode of history that probably will not end well.

Good ‘toon, Mr. C!

This whole site hasn’t been bully since right after your last post. Coincidence? I think not!

That’s US, gunrunners for the world. :o/

So glad to have you back, Brian!!

That’s what lying loser republicans do, now they are warring on the USA democracy.

Echoing many others here: Glad to have you back!

Thanks, Brian. Hope this is a regular occurrence.

Yes, Bush, you are.

Brian, so good to have you back. Please stick around and give us more—-many more great toons.

Censorship policies required Brian Carroll to draw Bush painting to express the gratification he derives from violent acts of revenge — instead of stroking his erect p_n!s.

I really cannot imagine Dubya loving war. IMO, he loved — and loves — being accepted as one of the movers and shakers. And he loved being told what to do in a way that made it seem like his idea. Total puppet.

Of course I could be wrong: I’m TERRIBLE at dealing with people in real time. But go ahead, stand back over here and look at his history… and tell me that’s not what you see.

{:^)

Good to see Two Party Opera back with a good one

I popped in here on the off-chance that there would be a new toon, and there was! I hope we get to see some more new toons. There is just so MUCH to ridicule in the world of politics in these crazy treacherous modern times.

Welcome back!

https://www.theonion.Com/george-w-bush-debuts-new-paintings-of-dogs-friends-g-1819595637

Yay! TPO is back!

Welcome back! You have been missed!

W. Bush is just happy more people are committing war crimes to take the pressure off of the ones he committed while President of the USA.

Trump allies screening over 50,000 foot soldiers for power grab never seen before

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape, and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers, according to an AP report.

In addition to anti-LGBTQ+ laws, the handbook lists a number of frightening policy changes, which would include a Justice Department overhaul and proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.

The Heritage Foundation normally compiles its own staffing lists, but reports from the group show that they, along with many other Republicans, were unhappy with the previous staffing choices made by former President Trump.

Now, about 50 other rival conservative organizations have set aside their regularly scheduled competition to work together and team up with the Heritage Project.

Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage project, said there’s a certain amount of “fantasizing” about the president’s capabilities.

“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” he said.

The three of them, The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports, have proposed a new conservative legal group that would be called the Society for the Rule of Law Institute — which would challenge, from the right, Trump and his allies’ “anti-constitutional” and “anti-democratic” actions.

In an op-ed published by the New York Times on November 21, Conway, Luttig and Comstock lament that the Federalist Society — a major right-wing legal group — “has failed to respond in this period of crisis,” arguing that a non-MAGA “conservative legal movement” is badly needed.

“A second Trump administration would be very different from the first,” wrote Moynihan. “Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions. It has three major parts.”

The first part, he wrote, is to install a “deep bench of loyalists” into government positions, something for which the Heritage Foundation is already helping him recruit. The second part is to bring back his proposed “Schedule F” designation, demolishing merit-based hiring in the civil service and making tens of thousands of career government workers subject to dismissal and replacement based purely on loyalty to the president — effectively replacing their oath to the Constitution with an oath to Trump.

“Members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy in Washington will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank,” The Guardian reported. The Heritage Foundation, once considered the premier conservative think tank, by 2016 was a pro-Trump group. Now, Heritage is behind the massive Project 2025, which aims to install tens of thousands of pro-Trump loyalists into the federal government if the ex-president re-takes the White House.

“The first day,” The Guardian explains, “includes panel speeches about the Ukraine war as well as topics such as Transatlantic Culture Wars. It is expected to feature guests including Magor Ernyei, the international director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the institute that organized CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary.”

Federalism Has Been a Disaster for the Working Class

Story by Colin Gordon

American federalism is often touted as a source of local democratic engagement, political innovation, and responsive public policy. But in practice, the American states have served not as “laboratories of democracy” but as laboratories of autocracy and inequality.

American federalism is a dramatic disappointment. Historically, it can be judged by the company it keeps. “States’ rights,” of course, served as virtuous camouflage for slavery, for Jim Crow, and for the long (and continuing) backlash against the civil rights movement. “If one disapproves of racism,” the political scientist William Riker concluded bluntly in 1964, “one should disapprove of federalism.” Every Republican president since Richard Nixon announced a “new federalism” of some description, invariably as a gambit for dismantling national standards and regulations, eroding civil rights protections, or starving redistributive social policies. While at times frustrated by the variety and fickleness of state policies, economic interests are now deeply invested in federalist devolution as a reliable source of “business-friendly” labor, social, tax, and regulatory policies. Broadsides against “our centralized, micro-managed, Washington-based bureaucracy” (Newt Gingrich) or invocations to “drain the swamp” (Donald Trump) are animated less by the supposed virtues of decentralization than they are by its spoils. “People do not go to war for abstract theories of government,” W. E. B. Du Bois observed in response to efforts to memorialize the “states’ rights” Confederate cause. “They fight for property and privilege.”

Devolution of political responsibility, advertised as a means of democratizing policy, is almost exclusively employed as a strategy for thwarting popular goals or aspirations.A “resource” constraint, in turn, ensures that well-heeled economic interests will always wield more political power than votes

Well, we now know that Brian Carroll’s New Year’s resolutions didn’t include regularly posting new strips.

Happy New Year anyway, Mr. Carroll.

At least Radish the Wordsmith keeps the strip alive.

It’s worth it to check in just to see what he has to say.

And if Brian wants to drop a strip or two, that’s fine, too.

03.03.2024 – – website blocked by Mozilla. Last time this happened was when his security certificate expired; not getting a meaningful response from Mozilla this time.

Brian! – you take such long vacations that your website falls apart!

Heritage Foundation Staffers Polishing Jackboots For Anticipated March Into Trump’s White House