2023 and Me

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It Is What It Is

This past week, in an interview on Axios, Trump had this to say about the 150,000+ deaths from coronavirus this year: "It is what it is". You actually have to take your hat off to something like that, something so sublimely, elegantly, ferociously tone-deaf — something even worse, in fact, than Biden's immortal "you ain't Black", and that's saying something.

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Back To School

Capital and the State are trying to whip the working class back to work during a pandemic, but it won't be entirely successful unless they can whip the kids back to school.

Unsurprisingly, Texas and Arizona — two states leading the nation in Covid-19 cases and stupidity — are whole-hog into it.

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Come into my parlor...

...said the spider to the elephant.

Lately, the US media have developed an annoying habit of declaring every damn’ two-bit rinky-dink Congressional election a Referendum On (Insert Issue Here). This time, though — in the same manner that a thousand monkeys on a thousand keyboards could write a Shakespeare play given enough time — the media managed to get it right by stating that the victory of underdog Democrat Kathy Hochul over GOP screecher Jane Corwin in a special election in New York is, in fact, a referendum on the GOP’s Medicare/Medicaid “reform” proposals.

While the GOP’s “reforms” tanked in the Senate, most Republicans there are still clinging to it like the Raft Of The Medusa, although the Washington Post — in its classically understated fashion — refers to Senate Republicans as “uneasy”, although a more accurate characterization would be “pissing their pants”. As ol’ Jerry Garcia said, The Wheel’s turnin’ and you can’t slow down, can’t let go and you can’t hold on… They’re stuck where they are, like the mutant fly with the human head in that old Grade “B” horror movie, able to do nothing but give out with desperate, hopeless, tiny shrieks for someone to “Help mee-eeeee… HELLLLP MEEEEEEEE…!”

Mind you, these days, I’ve never been the type to believe that this country’s problems will be solved through an ethically bankrupt two-party system or an electoral system that’s broken beyond repair — or through elections at all, for that matter — but, still, I can’t resist the urge to do the Happy Dance after seeing a nasty rich old howler like Jane Corwin having her ass greased by a rookie Democrat.

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Whoa! I've been picked up by Gawker!

A couple of days ago, Gawker's Alex Pareene penned an excellent article about the quality and attitude of the reporting at Washington political rag Politico, specifically referring to their article "The Drama Queen Caucus". Over the past couple of months or so, I've been spending a lot of time reading Gawker for their excellent reporting on the O'Keefe/Breitbart "ACORN Pimp" scandal as well as their media critiques and -- I must confess -- their edgy and unique style of gossip reporting; so, when Pareene's article on Politico appeared, I couldn't help but play a little bit of Devil's Advocate regarding the nature of the current Washington scene and the importance of healthy cynicism in this comment:

Awesome article, Alex, and you're right on about Politico.

Still -- I was born, raised, went to school, grew up and spent pretty much all my life and career in and around Washington — throughout Vietnam, Watergate, the Energy "Crisis", Reaganomics, New Democrats, you name it -- and I can tell you that anyone in this town without a well-developed sense of cynicism is easy pickings for the likes of Clinton, Bush, Obama & Co.

I've learned to read the Washington Post the way a Muscovite learned to read Pravda way back in the day.

Your characterization of Politico is right on the nose, but, let's face it — the current ruling class in this country really is a bunch of self-centered, vain, preening sociopaths who really do live for the foto ops, the CSPAN Moments and the Sunday morning talk show gigs. Many years of experience have taught me this.

They may be right totally by accident, like a busted clock, but Politico really is right about Dennis Kucinich: he really is a time-wasting, gutless, pussified faux Progressive attention whore who talks a good game about serious policy reforms, but is totally ready to roll over for the Democratic Party —- especially when it comes in the person of a slick flash bastard like Barack Obama, who probably promised him a new pony, just like he did to the rest of us in '08. By rolling over for the Democratic leadership on the healthcare bill, he pretty much pissed away any credibility he had left on the Left —- assuming he had any to begin with, after his dickless performance at the '04 Convention.

Well, imagine my surprise when I logged on to Gawker last night to scan for the latest Teabagger/O'Keefe/Breitbart shenanigans and found myself annointed a Comment Of The Day along with my 2008 Kucinich Campaign Poster! That's right, gang; the Kid's a hit in the Big Apple! When it rains, it pours, I guess.

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Happy Anniversary, Obamabots!

Well, here we are, a year into this glorious new post-racial, post-partisan Hope'n'Change Era, so let's just pause to take stock of all the momentous Change that President Booker T. Obama has brought us:

The Economy: worse. President Hope has given away absurdly huge buttloads of our tax money to bankers and Wall Street. Bonus? Of course. That's what the bankers have done to us for the past year or so.

Health Care: worse. To paraphrase a recent Keith Olbermann broadcast, it's not health, it's not care, and it sure as hell isn't reform. President Change's idea of health care reform involves shutting single-payer supporters out of the "debate", massive corporate giveaways to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the threat of fines or jail for people who don't buy corporate health insurance even if they can't afford it -- and if you can afford decent health insurance, President Yes We Can wants to tax the living shit out of your benefits. Still, with any luck, that Coakley woman will lose that special Senate election in Massachusetts, and it'll be Sayonara Charlie to The Bill That Needs Killing.

Civil Liberties: worse. Some doorknob in Detroit tries to blow up a plane with his underwear, and the next thing we know, President Hope wants to institute Jim Crow for Muslims and make us all to pose for digital x-ray porn. Meanwhile, one of President Hope's fellow Harvard punks over at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs wants to assign CIA spooks to troll duty at any blogs that happen to bug him.

Illegal Foreign Wars: worse. President Change -- or, as Code Pink called him during the campaign, the "Peace Candidate" -- makes a big-ass deal out of appearing to seriously ponder the situtation before initiating a 40,000-troop escalation of the war in The Graveyard Of Empires -- or, as it's more commonly called, Afghanistan. The Nobel Prize committee finishes slurping the dregs out of the bottom of the Kool-Aid bowl and awards President Change a Nobel Peace Prize; President Change, on accepting the Prize, gives a pro-war speech. Now, that's class.



So, congratulations to one and all of you Obamabots who allowed yourselves to be motivated by fear and desperation and fall for the first slick-assed huckster who can speak in complete sentences and knows how to pronounce the word "nuclear". I just can't thank you enough.

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T-shirts and Stickers at Mike's Schwag Shop.

Decision 2012 (pardon my Herblock)

Oh, gaahhhdddd! Not only another election cartoon, but a cartoon with items metaphorically labeled, old-school! Jeez, I can hear my pal Gregor yelling right now... "Goddammit, Mike! Herblock is DEAD!"

Yeah, y'know... once the election ideas get going, it's pretty much hopeless. The usual Repuglican "stars" are already making noises about running; we're hearing about Sarah Palin possibly running (sigh), and Newt Gingrich (spit) -- and I even heard about Dick Cheney (double spit) on Joe Scarborough's program this morning (triple spit).



OK, granted, 2012...I may be a bit ahead of myself, here, but still... if you check out The One's record of achievement (or lack of same) in just his first year in office, plus the rash of FAIL in the special elections this year, you're looking at a raft of Donkeycratic politicians with a whole fistful of "achievements" pinned to their respective asses, and damn' near little ability to defend them come next year's midterms -- which, by the way, will be held after the Afghanistan debacle's had about a year to soak in.

So, would that be next year's repudiation of last year's repudiation?

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2012: They Were Warned

It's the end of the world as they know it...
but they feel fine!

Those of you who've followed my work for any length of time will remember my complaints about the early start of the Presidential "election" cycle (John Edwards announced on Christmas Week, 2006) in the form of the four-part "Jackass Slate for 2008".

So, here it is, at least a year before the "official" start of the 2012 Presidential campaign season, and here I am already doing a '12 Election cartoon. I don't know what else I can say for myself, other than that when the muse visits me, she absolutely refuses to quit pestering me until I've committed a creation to paper. It really was a "perfect storm" of events, recently: we had the epic FAIL of the Obama Administration in the areas of healthcare, the economy, and the war in Afghanistan; the Democrats stumbling in the recent elections in Virginia and elsewhere; the GOP hopefuls for '12 already jockeying for position; Obama's approval rating finally dropping to a level representative of normal objective reality; the ominous spectre of a sound butt-paddling for the Democrats in the 2010 off-year elections -- and a movie just out about the end of the world in 2012, which was pretty much the icing on the conceptual cake.

Now, I'm not into clairvoyance or prophecy or any of that woo-woo, but the events of the past year -- most notably the healthcare "reform" debacle -- had gotten me to thinking that at least in one respect, the Mayans may have been on to something...



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Radio Hate

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Just so we're on the same page, here: community organizing group ACORN registered large numbers of black voters in Chicago for the last big "election". As is common in many registration campaigns, there's a fair number of wise-asses registering dead peoples' names, or fake names. Also, as is required by law by boards of elections in any US city I've been to, any bogus/invalid registrations are reported, to keep the voter rolls cleared of all the dead people, and all those Luke Skywalkers and Donald Ducks.

So, anyway, outfits like the Drudge Report (has anybody informed that bonehead that the '90s are over?) get hold of this and, in their own predictable, inimitable fashion, proceed to blow this up into some kind of bogus "scandal" and throw it to the rightist k00k crowd like so much fresh, raw meat. Still, you've got to love Drudge, if only because he carries on in the finest shrieking tabloid tradition -- never let the facts get in the way of a good story -- along with providing us all with some good cheap laffs.

Now, just to refresh your memories, one more time, here's the video of a small group of black youth selling little plastic flags at the September 12 Teabaggers' rally being threatened and harassed, and accused of being "ACORN People" (as if there were something wrong with that in and of itself)...

Death Panel

That's right, gang; looks as if Sarah Palin may have been right about the "death panels", though perhaps only in the same way a busted clock is still right twice a day -- that is, for the entirely wrong reasons.  The recent push to eliminate even "public option" -- having only the barest, slightest whiff of national healthcare to it -- has confirmed my own suspicion: the "death panel" is real. Here they are now, rendering a recent decision affecting healthcare access not just for your wizened grandma, but for your own personal self.



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Teabagger

The recent Teabaggers' Shindig over at Senate Park(viewable above) has certainly left me inspired, to say the least. Never did I hear a gang of astroturfers yell more loudly about not being astroturfers even as they were funded by big, fat rightist PACs run by characters like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, and never did I hear more yelling from a group about how they aren't about Left or Right, even while they never missed an opportunity to slag the Left -- or even on ordinary Liberals, for that matter -- as the lot it was my fortune to cover this past Fourth Of July.



Even more hilarious was their total ignorance of the causes and effects of events that happened before January 20, 2009 -- forgetting, for instance, that the current corporate bailout fiasco was pushed by George W. Bush. Listening to the howls from the stage and checking out the composition of the crowd, it was as if the single reaction from the Teabagger Massmind boiled down to "OMFG, the President is a N1GG3R!" -- like the old-timer in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, hollering from the top of the church steeple, "Here comes the new sheriff, and he's a big..." ...and it sure as hell didn't help any as their event was organized and staged by members of a well-known White Power band, Pokerface.

So, considering all this, I thought to myself, "Self, it's time you did a poster that announces the imminent arrival of the National Teabaggers' Convention coming to town on the 12th of September, and maybe inspire some of the local anarchists and antifascists to organize a little welcoming committee." So, I did.

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Organic cotton t-shirt at cafepress.com, $17.99

Show Us Where It Hurts

When you're a K Street big shot, you like your local politicians to stay bought and keep their campaign promises, and that's why around the turn of the century, Anthony Williams would've been your man. Among his top priorities as Mayor was closing down DC General Hospital, the city's only public hospital and, in spite of constant alarmist rumors in the Washington Times, not a hell hole.



Among the other jewels of the Williams Legacy was his keeping of campaign promises to close homeless family shelters, to close and sell a fistful of public schools for redevelopment as condominiums or health clubs, and to run poor and working-class people out of DC and replace them with people who can afford to shop downtown and who are most likely to vote for Anthony Williams (or someone like him... like, say, Adrian Fenty).

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Anthony Williams' Greatest Hits

Sam Smith, author of the Progressive Review, also wrote and edited its "City Desk" column about news and issues local to Washington, DC until his retirement to Maine in early 2009. One of my favorite City Desk columns appeared around 2000, where he details Anthony Williams' numerous achievements during his first term as mayor of DC -- the closing of city shelters for homeless families, the closing of schools for redevelopment as condos, the deterioration of city services, the closing of DC General Hospital -- in a column entitled "Anthony Williams' Greatest Hits". As the run-up to the '02 mayoral election campaign was just getting started, I thought this series would be an excellent and easy-to-remember reminder to potential voters about what, exactly, Anthony Williams had given this city in the past three and a half years.

One happy accident here was, during the initial sketching, finding out how easily my rat could be made to look like Williams with some extra whiskers, a little shock of hair here and there, and a bowtie. I wish now that I'd saved that issue of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine with the cover story on Williams -- while he was running for re-election, I think -- and the photo the Post used was one of him when he was about three years old, wearing an outfit almost identical to the suits we saw him in while he was Control Board honcho and, later, mayor: that dull-assed gray thing with a plain white or light-blue shirt and that friggin' bowtie. So, apart from being a soulless Ivy League technocrat and servant of oligarchs, Anthony Williams really did look like his momma dressed him.

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Life: What a Wonderful Choice

About the same time the anti-abortion fanatics were defacing Dave Letterman's program with their "Life: What A Wonderful Choice" issue ads, their foot soldiers in the field were busy bombing clinic and shooting at doctors -- and patients. A spate of clinic shootings and bombings around mid-1995ish went largely unremarked on by President Bill, as I recall, as Mr. Bill may have been busy trying to provoke Iraq and "reform" welfare (as we know it).



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Clinton's (insert failed domestic initiative here)

With President Bubba ensconced in the Oval Office, we saw a quickly-established pattern of failure in domestic policy initiatives followed by dick-wiggling and small-scale military intervention overseas -- or some bad-assed "criminal justice" action at home -- in an effort to appear "Presidential". This was especially noticeable in the areas of economic stimulus and the last laughable attempt at health care "reform".

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