Political Cartoons 2013: Click Here To Hate Yourself

Hobby Lobby is on my list of boycotts. As a person of many hobbies I go to Michael's or Joann's instead. (also on the list is Wal-Mart. Since Thanksgiving I've been shopping at Winco)

I'm not quite comfortable with trying to make the GOP into some cartoonishly evil villain that does evil for evil's sake. Things are far more subtle and nuanced than that.
On the other hand: their entire fucking record. I mean during an election year, during an election year, they are voting down bills to give veterans jobs? They are refusing to renew bills supporting battered women? They are quashing meaningless UN resolutions that only say "Good job USA" supported by their former presidential candidates while giving speeches about how much they misunderstand the bill? Come on!

That's five more steps than political cartoonists take. All they know is the saying, devoid of all context or historical significance. Like Reagan playing "Born in the USA" or Metrobank's "Lust for Life" commercials.

Wait...why the little red cap on the dome?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/01/michele-bachmann-holocaust-taxes_n_855910.html

...sure, Taxes = The Holocaust. Isn't it just obvious?

Á g̷͉̣̟̕o̶̡̙̱͇̣̣̮ớ̛̬̲̬̰̼̞d̦̞̩͔͍͔͓͜ͅ ḩ̡̝̲e c͈͇͡o̶̡̙̱͇̣̣̮mes̺̟̲͘.

An aside: You should probably avoid Michael's when possible also. They got bought out in 2006 by Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group. Since then they've been on a mission to make the company lean for IPO, including reducing all stores to 5 or less full time employees (everyone else is part-time with most getting less than 20 hours a week), gutting the healthcare they provide so it doesn't actually cover anything and is cheaper, etc etc... They are literally following the playbook of making the store look good on a spreadsheet so they can IPO, take their money and run.

I'd love to hear your opinions on where they are weak and need improvement and how universities will still never be held as accountable as for-profit schools.

Fuck.

I didn't think this was controversial. The University of Phoenix's graduation rate is 16%. Regular universities need more regulation along the same lines, but uh they're not a disaster zone like the for-profits so it's not an overwhelming priority.

I believe the only regulations that actually got passed were these debt-related ones, which I think some got thrown out in a court case recently. None of them would deal with the horseshit they pull.

I wasn't aware being critical of for-profit colleges was controversial, either. The combination of an unholy terror of a student loan system with the complex problems that the unregulated profit motive adds to adult education means that it's a no-win scenario. Conventional universities have their problems (not least how so many of their administrators want to emulate business without considering the fundamental differences in incentives), but as they currently stand U of Phoenix and its kind are up there with the plague of private emergency rooms in terms of how they impoverish us as a country by preying on the most vulnerable. That doesn't mean everyone who works there is a bad person, it just means that the strategic picture matters regardless of what individually decent people are trying to do within it.

I think it's both stale and misleading. The criticism of the "do nothing" UN is a reflection of the limits of its power as dictated by the realities of diplomacy. What the UN does is mitigate harm and interject where it can in non-controversial arenas (or at least ones where the opposition can be ignored or overruled), but it can't change the realities of what powerful countries want. The fact that this criticism comes so often from within the US, a country that has done at least as much as the worst rogue nation to undercut the UN's authority, through bureaucratic intransigence and a refusal to negotiate on its litmus tests, is particularly striking.

The UN is not anyone's salvation. It's a way to coordinate diplomacy and turn potentially massive conflicts into smaller ones. Every day that Syria isn't a regional war is a victory for the UN. Every day that Syria continues to murder its people is on Assad's tribes, the governments that built it into a military dictatorship, and the countries who continue to shield it as part of their global realpolitik.

I do see where you are coming from but I think the fact that the UN draws the line at chemical weapons instead of drawing the line at any murder whatsoever is kinda shitty and stupid.

I'm not trying to shit up your thread with things other than horrific cartoons, but that arbitrary line exists as a result of the preferences of those who won wars and dictated preferences in the past from a position of strength, which has historically been done with a huge dose of hypocrisy and a clear sense of what would be most disadvantageous to potential threats to their authority. The UN has many things that are nice ideas and some not so nice ones that are supported by a simple majority of its members that would indeed be game-changing if enforced outside of position statements and amendments to its charter of sweet dreams, but the stuff that gets things done is mostly a consequence of the limits powerful countries want in place. Thus, there's an enormous mechanism in place to stop nuclear proliferation in small states that lack a security council wingman, but virtually no checks on the sales of conventional arms to anyone who isn't on the current shortlist of international bad actors. The one is certainly better than nothing, but actively shutting down the other means that everybody in the arms industry takes a hit, and no powerful country seems to want that.

What's preventing Syria from using chemical weapons is likely their potential utility as bargaining chips and the red lines drawn by its allies and would-be opponents, directly, most especially the ones that are physically near it. The UN is only the place where some of these conversations about these things take place, and where the conclusion that are most agreeable get written down. It's a means to an end, not a solution in and of itself.

What do you think would happen if the US was held to the standard of "any murder whatsoever"? Russia? China? Just because the world tolerates a certain amount of baldfaced status quo-favoring with nukes and chemical weapons restrictions doesn't mean that the same logic can be indefinitely extended to much more generic offenses. You don't want true believers as diplomats.

That poor DOWNTRODDEN girl right there makes over $400,000 a year :*(

OOP! Drunky Duck didn't want to interrupt the build up to his terrific reality TV executive zinger to comment on the shooting so he made it into an addendum!
The War on Drugs: a terrific example about how prohibition doesn't work for anything but The War on Drugs.

GUYS THERE IS A MOVIE ABOUT A BLACK GUY IN THE THEATERS! YOU KNOW WHO ELSE IS BLACK??


*sigh*

Good. Good for them. Personally I'd like to see those plastic bottles of water outlawed everywhere.

The Free Market RULES! Hey stop selling your stuff!


"Abortifacient"
I like that he abandoned his "Doonesbury but disabled" style 'cause he found himself a super keen picture of the president with his head down he could trace!
PS: this is a Sunday comic. Hobby Lobby is always closed on Sundays.

(translation: I think my readers are even dumber than I am)

This is part of the intended purpose of the thread. A political cartoon sparks a conversation. I consider that a victory.
On one hand you're absolutely right and, to add, it is a civil war. On the other, it's estimated that 60,000 Syrians were killed before 2013, most of that comes about from mass air bombing any signs of any protests anywhere whether violent or not. It just seems to me that something stronger should be said than "Don't use these particular weapons" when thousands of innocent people are being killed.

"Abortifacient"

It's a Phrygian cap. The cartoonist presumably read A Book on the French revolution - maybe Jonah Goldberg wrote one? - and decided to accuse Congress of jacobinism. Which I guess means Martin Niemöller is warning us that the Nazobinunists are going to guillotine the $250,000-400,000 middle class next, and then there'll be no one left to speak up for the cartoonists.

WHY WOULD YOU GIVE A TRANSLATION FOR LES MISERABLES

So, like an onion, it's layered. A stupid onion.

It's almost as if these "cartoonist's" read these retorts and are just trying to piss us off more.

I'd classify the McCoy brothers as professional trolls for the most part, they seem to delight in trying to make Liberals angry (a lot of the time too hard, passing easily into eye roll territory). The rest are just...either really dense, honestly dense, or, worst of all, actual true believers.

looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

Hahahahaha, wow. Just ... just ... WOW.



Also, fuck you, Day by Day.

Drones to enforce healthcare laws.

I'm unclear why Muir doesn't just take his comic to its logical conclusion. The president is already planning to kill US citizens with drone attacks or hire terrorists to do his dirty work for him. His self-reflection is a kickass sniper, right? Where's the comic where he solves all our problems by assassinating such a villain? Not like those clueless gun-fearing liberals will be able to do anything about it. I know, it's going way too far for anyone sane, but 'Christianist'? Nope, no sanity there. God FUCK DAY BY DAY.

What's up with this? I read Al Jazeera -- they have some decent reporting. Is there something more to this other than Gore + Arabic Name = Bad?

Oh, most assuredly. Just when you keep painting Obama as not just simply wrong on the issues, but actively trying to kill Americans, how much further does the nutball have to go? The Les Miserables travesty is just astounding in its idiocy too. Sure, imprisonment for stealing food and whining about taxes for the absurdly rich go hand in hand.

Do we get an Oliver Twist begging for just a bit more return on his capital gains next?

Why is there a cat? Get that cat away from that cliff! It's sweating!

My mind is going, Dave.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.

Oooooooh.
Al Jazeera gets some of it's funding from Qatar, which is a country that got it's money from oil and, as everyone knows, Al Gore HATES oil and gasoline because he's a hippy dippy jerk who whines whines whines about the environment so it's SUPER hypocritical for Al Gore to sell his TV Network, Current, to Al Jazeera.

Basically the weather has been too warm to make a "Haha Al Gore if global warming why cold???" comic so "Haha Al Gore likes oil" will have to do.

I realize I'm late here, but man oh man would I like to believe that the Pantsy Award is areal, physical item that they send to the lucky recipients.

BUT REMEMBER: that "spending" does NOT include military spending. To reduce military spending is to die.
(this metaphor is seriously flawed)


Yup.


Don't worry, 99% are still there
(Norquist is ALWAYS drawn as an unkempt beardo, even by his supporters)


Daring, bold, original.
Any other words that don't apply to Tinsley? Sober?

Holy shit.

I'm not sure which way Drunky Duck leans. Did he think his Top News Story series was so great that it was worth putting this one off, or did he think that this take on the fiscal cliff was so fucking golden that it was worth publishing even though it's late as hell.

Yes.

You know what's sad? My first thought was that Obama wanted to reload from a previous save. I am a dork.

Holy shit a new challenger has entered the arena.