Government Shutdown News Network

 
Hey, there, US news media consumers! Interested in finding out what else is going on in the world besides the government shutdown? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hah, tough shit. Curious about what's up in Greece, the Sudan, or Palestine? Too goddamn' bad, all they've got for you is government shutdown news. Like it or lump it, chumps.

For the past day or two, pretty much every US "news" network has been nothing but wall-to-wall government shutdown babble, and MSDNC... uhh, MSNBC has been the worst of the lot, with continuous Obamacare pimping overlaid with 24/7 government shutdown hysterics, taking a break only to allow one of their resident windbags, Chris "Baby Eater" Matthews, to plug his new book about his days as a flunkie for Tip O'Neill -- at one point, being interviewed by his wife, f'crissake.

All I can say is, thank Allah for Al Jazeera. 

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The Tide of War

So, apparently, Obama gave a speech the other day about Afghanistan. Mind you, I haven’t watched a single Obama speech ever since the ‘04 Democratic Convention keynote and the Inauguration. That was pretty much all I could stand; since then, about all I could handle was the occasional video clip on TV, or the transcripts posted on the Web. From all accounts, it was classic Obama, a rehash of the Iraq “withdrawal” announcement: out of all the clips and reports I saw, two “money quotes” really stuck in my craw, and one of them was that “the tide of war is receding” — and just in time for next year’s election. Who’da thunk it?

It’s reported that our Boy Emperor is bringing home the troops he sent when he first escalated the slaughter in Afghanistan, leaving 70,000 still there, plus leaving himself an out — of course! — allowing him to stick around if things aren’t working out for the Empire. All told, this “withdrawal” means a continuation of the war until at least 2014 — conveniently, a year into the incoming GOP administration, at which point the Liberals and Progressives will have miraculously rediscovered their anti-war voices and be cynically filling the streets again.

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Greetings From Haiti!

Y'know, I hardly know where to start with this. Perhaps I could start with this gob-smacking foto of ex-Presidents Bubba and Chimp, both smiling their most smarmy and smug smiles as they accept the position of Special Envoys in charge of the Haitian relief effort. That's right, ex-President I Invaded Haiti In The '90s and ex-President Heckuva Job Brownie have been placed in charge of Haitian earthquake relief, and the bastards are frickin' smiling... and President Timberlake, there, seems just barely able to contain himself as well. What perfect cover for a little bit of that "vulture capitalism".



Or, perhaps this amazingly soulless, brutalist David Brooks column from the New York Times might work for you. In it, he calls for the throwing away of any tolerance or respect for foreign cultures and calls for "intrusive paternalism" at least half a dozen times in a page and a half of thinly-veiled racist spewage. In spirit and letter, it's really no different from any similar racist spewage about Haiti and the Dominican Republic published in the New York Times a century or so ago; Noam Chomsky writes in Year 501:

Times editors lauded the "unselfish and helpful" attitude that the US had always shown, now once again as it responded "in a fatherly way" as Haiti "sought help here." Our "unselfish intervention has been moved almost exclusively by a desire to give the benefits of peace to people tormented by repeated revolutions," with no thought of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise," for ourselves. "The people of the island should realize that [the US government] is their best friend." The US sought only to ensure that "the people were cured of the habit of insurrection and taught how to work and live"; they "would have to be reformed, guided and educated," and this "duty was undertaken by the United States." There is a further benefit for our "black brother": "To wean these peoples away from their shot-gun habit of government is to safeguard them against our own exasperation," which might lead to further intervention. "The good-will and unselfish purposes of our own government" are demonstrated by the consequences, the editors wrote in 1922, when they were all too apparent and the Marine atrocities had already aroused a storm of protest.

However, if comic relief is what you're after, don't despair; former US Senator John "Senator Goodhair" Edwards is going to Haiti to help out, also -- with cameras conveniently present, of course.

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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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Capitalism Works Best When Left Alone

At the Capitol Hill Teabaggers' Rally this past July 4th, I spotted more than a few signs saying "Capitalism Works Best When Left Alone", and it got me thinking, what vast new entrepreneurial opportunities have been denied owing to government regulations and petty tyrannies such as the Clean Water Act, The Pure Food And Drug Act, or the Glass-Steagall Act...?

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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

Feeling Stressed Yet?

So, anyway, there's been a lot of yammering in the press lately about President Obullshit giving a "stress test" to all the banks. Now, just so I've got it straight: Obama's been pissing our tax money away on a bunch of fat, waddling, failing big-assed banks -- as well as his Wall Street buddies -- and he's just now getting around to giving them a "stress test"? D'ahh ha ha ha hah. From the looks of things, those "stress tests" probably aren't any less bogus than those cheesy "stress tests" run from kiosks or card tables on the streets by the Church of Scientology.

I don't know about the banks, but I'm sure there's about a hundred million or so workers and their families who are feeling pretty goddamn' stressed right about now...

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The Language of Washington

"Bipartisanship..." "On the table..." Y'know, gang, I'm actually from DC, and all this Capitol Hill Sunday Morning doubletalking bullshit still makes my brain hurt. Still, a well-informed citizen is a well-armed citizen; so, after many, many Sunday mornings of slogging through hours of Meet The Press and Hardball and Face The Nation so you don't have to, I've put together this quick guide to the phrases and words you hear the most in Washington.



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via AP: "Obama's top economic adviser: 'free-fall' ending"

I kid you not, gang...that was the actual headline on this Associated Press story, reporting on Obama henchman Larry Summers' remarks at a meeting of the National Economic Club of Washington, where he commented on the supposed end of the long, long dive the economy's taking right now.



Of course, Mr. Summers coyly sidestepped any mention of when or how or how suddenly this free fall would be ending which, of course, put me in mind of all those great old Road Runner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote finds himself taking yet another long fall from the top of a tall mesa and lands so hard that he leaves an impression of himself in the ground.

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Oooooh, LOOK! The FUTURE!

So, here we are hardly a week into this Shiny New Hope™ and Change™ Era, and we've already pretty much seen what The One and his Donkeycratic cohorts are all about: The Future. They want to move forward, move ahead, don't look back, don't stop thinking about tomorrow (MoveOn just wants to take another swig of Kool-Aid and – move on). They're so much about The Future, in fact, that they want to totally ditch the past – including their enabling of war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, their role as accomplices in the destruction of the Constitution via USA PATRIOT, their endorsement of US-backed Israeli atrocities in Palestine.



Do you people – those of you who know who you are – honestly think the Donkeycrats will so much as lift a finger to bring the Bush mob to justice? Arrest Bush? In your goddamn' dreams. President Timberlake has kept Robert Friggin' Gates on as Secretary Of War, f'cripesake – not to mention that The One has also already gotten his hands bloody in Afghanistan and Pakistan this week. Does this look like the kind of guy who's going to raise so much as a murmur of objection to the crimes of the Bush Regime, anymore than he's spoken barely a whisper about US-financed Israeli war crimes in Gaza? Wake the hell up, US Left.

To bring Bush and the Gang to justice would require the Donkeycrats to admit to their own extensive complicity in crimes against the Constitution, international law, and humanity in general, crimes the Bush Regime could not have carried out without help from the Donkeycrats – kinda like the spot they found themselves in about ten years ago this month. To have impeached Bubba Clinton for his complete "rap sheet", aside from all that blowjob nonsense – murderous sanctions against Iraq, the continuous bombing of Iraq, the "Lewinsky Bombing" of Afghanistan and the Sudan, the two and a half months' continuous saturation bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia – would have required the Donkeycrats to 'fess up to their having allowed it with barely a peep of protest.

In other words, don't hold your breath.

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Nerobama

So, I'm on the street shooting these demos where people are demanding that Emperor-Elect Timberlake "say something" about the Israeli rape of Gaza, as if with enough pressure – if you call sign-waving and delivering white roses "pressure" – he'll suddenly have a Eureka Moment and go on TV and "do the right thing".



Now, I often like to joke around with my friends about how most Americans' long-term memories don't go back past the last episode of "Desperate Housewives", but lately it seems to be the dead-assed truth, and that includes The Movement™. Anyone who thinks that Obama actually has substantially different ideas about the situation that he's just waiting to express until he's officially El Presidente has obviously already forgotten his notorious wet, sloppy blowjob of a speech he delivered to last year's AIPAC Convention shortly after becoming the presumptive (spit) Donkeycratic Party nominee for Maximum Leader.

So, everybody, just knock it off about getting Barack Obombirana to "speak up" about the slaughter of Gaza. The guy's already said everything he needed to say about Gaza in that lickspittle AIPAC speech. Check it, gang...

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Obama's Economic Stimulus Plan for DC

So far as most of us can tell, the "economic stimulus" plan issuing from The Office Of The President-Elect (snicker) includes the most staggeringly pants-pissing amounts of cash to prop up failing corporations, banks and executives, and jack for the rest of us, unless we're prepared to summon up some cajones and engage in a little good old-fashioned shop-floor smackdown, like those laid-off screen-door plant workers in Michigan.



On the local level, here in DC, as Inauguration Day – or, as now known to some, Barack Obama Day – approaches, The One's economic stimulus program for DC has finally begun to jell; according to The Office Of The President-Elect (smirk), this plan will take a two-pronged approach: one prong for the quite well-off, and another big prong for the rest of us...

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Obama's Big Bus!

At least up until the last "election" or two, you used to hear a lot – especially from the Donkeycrats – about the proverbial "Big Tent", ostensibly used to symbolize the Party's diverse constituencies, but actually just a cheesy way for your Party to pander to segments of the voting population it normally wouldn't give the time of day to.

Once again though, huge props to the Obama Cult for taking this concept a bold step further. Amazing, how quick and efficient he was, too.



Hear that, UFPJ? Hear that, Code Pink? He already wants to expand the war into Afghanistan? He's roped in your votes, he's got what he needed from you, now your ass is under the bus!

Environmentalists? Didn't he shift his position on offshore oil drilling? D'ohh, under you go. Looking like some awesome parties at the Inauguration, though.

Gays? Lesbians? Let's not even go there. He doesn't even want you to be able to marry. He's even invited that born-again creep, Rick Warren, the Purpose-Driven Gay Basher, to speak at his friggin' Inauguration! Why the hell did you all go for him so much? Doesn't matter, you're gone anyway. Crunch. Ouch.

I could go on, but you can see where I'm headed. The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round...

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White House Bathroom, Jan. 21, 2009

Rahm Emmanuel? Tom Daschle? Eric Holder? Hillary, f'crissakes? Just in case you're still wondering – no, you're certainly not the only one marveling in awe at the number and quickness of the old Clinton mobsters and washed-up old liberal interventionists crawling out from under their rocks to score cushy gigs with the incoming Change Administration.



No goddamn' wonder President-Elect Change practically broke his neck falling over his wingtips trying to disavow himself from the Donkeycratic Leadership Council when they were giving him big ups way back at the dawn of the last Presidential "Election" campaign – c'mon, you remember the beginning of the last campaign, a little over two years ago...yesssss... two...years ...two looo-ooonngg yeee-eeeaars...but, anyway...have any you Hope'n'Change voters out there begun to sober up and realize that you voted against a third term of Bush, only to get a third term of Clinton, except without Bubba himself? Or, perhaps, even worse...? Yes, now, at last, the truth can be told...

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