Recent Comments

1. over 9 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   The Strip is great; the comment is on the Gocomics site: so much greed, so much commerce, so much movement, so much chaos.

   Life is crazy enough, easiest solution is to bail on Gocomics forever. Maybe Ruben will escape his hideous contract and I’ll catch him elsewhere.

   Later . . .oh, correction, not really.

2. over 13 years ago on Paul Szep

   I believe there’s a lesson here for all sides. Belief-based news (even though JW slipped out of news a while ago) does us no more good than belief-based science or history.

3. over 13 years ago on Tom Toles

   @motivemagus: sadly, it seems a disingenuous game of musical chairs from both sides.

   It would be both appropriate and civil for the HOUSE dems to hang out the “Do Not Disturb” sign and let the new majority advance some leadership ideas and court their support.

   More likely, in a dangerously long recession, both sides will play chicken (OK, dead chicken) hoping the other side takes the heat for the last period of no growth before the upturn.

   The Stewart rally had its inanities, but they’re to be credited for pointing out that the grownups have historically inhabited the center, and that it was the fringers’ burden to show they were pertinent. The cable industry has sold us on believing that we HAVE to choose between extremes because good sense is boring and they can’t use it to sell Viagra.

   If the corporations are really in charge, then we’re no longer a republic anyway, we’re an oligarchy. If those folks at the rallies want someone to “take our country back” from, I’d suggest Boeing, and Northrup Grumman, and Blackwater, and United Healthcare, and Cygna, and Oracle, and General Dynamics, and KBR, and BP, and Exxon, and AIG, and Citi, and Capital One, and Goldman Sachs, and Cargill, and Chevron, and Constellation Energy, and Dow Chemical (yes, they’re back) and Dole, and FreedomWorks, and GE, and … well, you get the picture.

4. over 13 years ago on The Argyle Sweater

   I think it was a Hot Italian that did it, but it’s just a flesh wound; I’m chorizOK.

5. over 13 years ago on Tom Toles

   @Rockngolfer: some parlimentarian here will know better (like whether the current non-voting DC rep is actually #436), but my take is that it’s fixed at 435, and that since DC would never have the population for more than one, it would have to come out of some other state’s pocket.

   DC statehood proposals will always fail, because the thought of two more senators elected by brown people is enough to keep Saxby Chambliss up ALL NIGHT.

6. over 13 years ago on Tom Toles

   Most of you will remember a 1969 short feature that ran in theaters called “Bambi meets Godzilla”. I’ll assume that’s true since it’s still running on Youtube. It’s a VERY short feature.

   “Bambi meets Godzilla” makes a great allegory for the 1% of America that owns 50% of its wealth. You can buy almost anything, but come election day in what’s left of the republic, David Koch has the same number of votes as Joe the Plunger.

   To modern US neoconservatives (oddly enough, called “neo-liberals” in the rest of the world), it’s known as, “that democracy-problem thingy”. You have to find a way to effectively appoint the members of all three branches of government by controlling their access to corporate media and campaign funds; that’s why Murdoch and Ailes built a propaganda conduit to rent to them. If you get thirty guys together who have annual incomes on the order of one to ten billion dollars each, it’s not that difficult.

   In the eighties, it was called “Morning in America” and “trickle-down economics”. This year, it has the same initials as “toilet paper” (renting buses doesn’t really cost very much), appropriate because the Koch brothers—used here as a metaphor, there are thirty or so other players in these majors–own Angel Soft, as well as Brawny Towels and the Roberts Court to deal with any unforeseen spills. The Kochs felt comfortable in June of this year in inviting Justices Scalia and Thomas to a meeting of 200 or so close corporate friends to help plan the “culture of prosperity”.

   We are already an oligarchy, headed by people who control things that you need, things the Mafia would love to control: Energy. Health Care. The “security-industrial complex”. We’ve already returned to the Robber Baron days, when the Rockefeller family owned their own US senator outright.

   But please, don’t be in a hurry to scrap the machinery of the old republic. We may need it again, and if we do, there won’t be time to build it from scratch.

7. over 13 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   This is a first-time post after a year or so of looking-in.

   There’s certainly a substantial representation of the usual positions.

   Over the past thirty years, we’ve elevated rapacious individualism–the non-virtue of selfishness–to a state of acceptability-by-overexposure, kind of like gratuitously lewd dialog in prime-time sitcoms. Alack and alas—and probably a bushel and a peck as well, it serves the common good not a dime’s worth, and seems to serve only a sort of auto-erotic purpose recently denounced by a rising belief-based candidate.

   For an actual improvement of conditions, there may be some merit to moving to the center, reducing one’s name-calling-to-plain-talk ratio, and finding one’s indoor voice. Dated, but still better than actually working at being ignored.

   Anyway, I’ve enjoyed most of the snappy repartee. Thanks for all the ginger.

   Serio