5. November 2008 by admin.

Congratulations to President-elect Obama, blah blah blah.  I disagree that we all woke up to a new reality, but I agree it’s the end of an era.  My youngest daughter will never know a time when presidents were only older white men.  That does make me proud.

But even the historical significance of Obama’s win isn’t the real reason we should pat ourselves on the back this morning.  Yesterday we, the Joe the Plumbers and Sixpacks and old ladies wearing bathrobes and house shoes lined up in an orderly fashion, sometimes in lines stretching for hours, to quietly choose who we will fractiously follow for the next four years.  Without a fuss, fight, or mob action in the streets we handed off control of the most powerful military in the world.  By paper and electron we entrusted to a quasi-stranger our finances and our hopes for the future.

And then we went home.

We waited patiently for the polls to close and the results to be tallied.  We trusted it would be done honestly and accurately.  For the most part we conceded defeat with grace and mostly accepted victory with magnanimity.  We went to bed and woke up the next day and went to work or school or just on with our lives, having a vague satisfaction of a job well done but focused on the tasks and needs of the day ahead.  Another election had passed, and life went on.

The fact that we see this as normal is incredible.  The fact that we, the toiling masses, have the ability to infuse a person with the power that comes with the presidency is extraordinary.  The fact that we don’t see it that way is mind boggling.

Sometimes it comes across very clearly that we do live in the greatest nation on Earth.

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27. October 2008 by admin.

I need a scanner.

Halloween would seem to be a great time to launch my Guys in Robes comic strip.  The quasi-pagan origins and popular mythology tying the holiday to Satanism would make it easy to compose the first few strips, and then the onslaught of of the mid-winter holidays would allow me to maintain momentum.  Alas, the economic downturn has affected even the web comic industry, forcing hard choices.  Given how much the kids squawk if they don’t get fed the scanner may have to wait for the after holiday discounts.

Maybe it’s the mists of memory, but Halloween seemed to be a bigger deal when I was a child, o lo those many decades ago.  I remember packs of becostumed munchkins roaming far and wide, filling pillowcases with tooth-rotting goodness and generally running wild.  Now we’re lucky to have a couple of dozen trick or treaters come to our suburban neighborhood.  With All Hallows on a Friday I’m hoping for a better turnout this year; it looks like the weather may cooperate.

The transformation of the Halloween party into a “Fall Party” or “Harvest Party” in schools is just amusing to me.  For 364 days a year the Conservative Christian movement howls about allowing religion to be taught in schools, and arguing that we should “teach the controversy” about creationism (intelligent design’s true face) vs. evolution. Yet when a school wants to permit a social activity only notionally connected to another belief system, suddenly ‘religion has no place in school’ and it is ‘harmful for the children.’  Remember this commotion in eight weeks when these same voices start complaining how Christmas break morphed into winter break.

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21. October 2008 by admin.

PBN: This is a real conversation I had with my oldest daughter.  She didn’t get the movie channels.

I’ve been trying to think of a decision McCain has made since gaining the nomination that I agree with.  Or even that seemed to make sense.

His choice of Palin for veep is excretable.   Coming on the heels of his attempt to paint Obama as inexperienced it seemed either painfully hypocritical or woefully ignorant.  I understand his need to shore up his conservative base, and his desire to add a woman to the ticket to try to woo disgruntled Hillary supporters, but a small town mayor and first term governor under investigation for abuse of power was the best he could find?  Was Elizabeth Dole giving Bob’s Viagra a run for its money when he called?

I wish I could have been in the Straight Talk Express when the stock market tanked the day McCain made his fundamentals and strong statement.   That had to be the day team McCain realized the universe hated them.  The bewildering decision for McCain to “suspend” his campaign to inject himself into the well developed Congressional/Administration negotiations only added additional chaos and implied that McCain was making decisions by the seat of his pants instead of after careful deliberation.  That’s a stupid but understandable trait in a fighter pilot.  It’s potentially disasterous for a man leading the most powerful country in the world.  I still suspect that his attempt to postpone the original debate was an attempt to co-opt the VP debate and avoid the chance that Palin would embarrass herself more than she already had before a national audience.  Nothing I saw or read indicated that McCain’s presence positively influenced the eventual outcome, and the rebellion of the House Republicans underscored his inability to forge consensus and lead his own party.

Drop Bill Ayers already.  No one who doesn’t already support McCain cares.  Today “Weather Underground” is a spelunking report, not a feared terrorist organization.  Ayers doesn’t even have the street cred of having done time for his crimes, prosecutorial misconduct notwithstanding.  If a passing association with a member of a discredited organization espousing a discredited dogma is the best the anti-vetting department of McCain’s campaign could come up with against Obama, then the best argument against voting for Obama is he is too damn boring to be president.

I still don’t like Obama much.  His message of Hope and Change comes across as hypocricy and catering.  His famed charisma must be hiding behind his elite intellectual snobbishness.  But I’m still going to vote for him, because at this point I can’t find a reason not too.

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16. October 2008 by admin.

Who did the McCain campaign hire to teach John how to act on camera, William Shatner?

The bifurcated screen for last night’s debate was very unfortunate for the GOP nominee.  McCain spent most of the time looking wooden, and the rest angry.  He also came across as rude, continually interrupting and talking over Obama.  His carriage, demeanor and body language painted the picture of an unhappy man lashing out in anger.  Given the way world events have worked against his presidential run I can understand why John would be frustrated, but wearing his heart on his sleeve like he did last night just strengthened the arguments of his critics’ claims that he doesn’t have the temperament to be president.

Not that Obama did much better.  His sly smiles and aloof demeanor reinforced his image of being a snobbish elitist.

Side Note:  A lot has been written today about the amount of time McCain dedicated to William Ayers, the liberal peace loving terrorist of the 60’s.  I haven’t seen anything about McCain’s lack of support for ethanol subsidies.  This isn’t new news, but when a national candidate disses an issue this important to the Midwest (we may be fly-over states, but we still have electoral college votes) I would have expected to see someone mention it.

PBN: I just thought the seating arrangement last night was funny when juxtaposed on their presumed political leanings.

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9. October 2008 by admin.

I’ve been very bad this week; things keep getting posted late.

I’m working on minimizing that in the future.  I may even succeed.

The latest installment of Always Time To Do It Over will be posted today.  It’s going to be a bit short, but sometimes they just are.

Politics has obviously been the predominant theme over the last few weeks.  This makes PBN easy to figure out (they usually aren’t made until the day they’re posted) but annoys some readers who aren’t that interested in my political take and would prefer I stick with the Geek/gaming jokes.  To those readers I promise, after the election the political humor will subside.  Slightly.

Last post I promised explanatory blurbs for the comics, and since the only ones I can remember are the last 3, those are what we’ll recap.

The report of the abysmally low approval ratings crossed my consciousness as a NPR wake up alarm.  My sleep fuzzed mind processed the information and asked itself: If this is a government of the people, are we a nation of self-loathers?  This is why my wife sends the kids in to wake me instead of doing it herself.  The coupon clipping dialogue is fairly typical of what happens at the kitchen table Sunday mornings.

I was grocery shopping and saw the Seal cereal.  Whoever designed those boxes is clueless or one sick puppy.  Which is probably the animal we’ll next see on a cereal box.

I watched the debates with a collection of friends and family of various political stripes.  The debate comic is a collection of their observations.  Between them and my being to lazy to change even the poses in the panels, this was a really easy strip to draw.

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8. September 2008 by admin.

I would like to thank the U.S. Government for making my job as a cartoonist so easy.

When it was first announced that Fannie Mae & Freddy Mac were going into receivership,  I started working on the verbage for the takeover.  Treasury Sec. Paulson gave me the weekend to reminate, and I’m pretty happy with the result.  Of the comic at least, not the government intervention.

It galls me, but I have to agree the move was necessary.  Continued turmoil in the housing market is an albatross around the neck of the economy, and if there’s any hope of breaking the recession there needed to be a big check on the downward economic news spiral.  Unfortunately, it’s being written from our childrens’ future.

The housing mess was avoidable.  Proper oversight would have caught the NINJA (No Income, No Job or Assets) loans, and this morning we discovered  Freddie Mac had overstated its financial cushion.  And yet, over the next few days the directors of Fannie & Freddie will be given a nice quite severance package in the millions.  They don’t deserve it.  If any small business owner had gone bankrupt while obfuscating their debts, they would be ruined and face potential legal action.  Take the golden parachutes and instead use them to pay off the mortgages of people who bought houses in good faith, the ones who didn’t try to pick up a McMansion but instead tried to buy into the American dream.  The three bedroom, 1 & 1/2 bath folks.  Pay off their mortgages and let them put that money into buying that new car they need, or saving for their kids’s college, or even just to be able to quit that second job so they can spend some time in the home they’re fighting for with the family for whom they bought it.

And a thought to leave you on:  We just put the housing market  under the control of the people who didn’t act to protect it in the first place.

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4. June 2008 by admin.

I tried, I really did.

I’ve opened this blog repeatedly over the last three days, and tried to write something pithy and relevant, but every time I reviewed what I had, I realized I could have taken any number of earlier posts, changed the names of the states holding the primaries, and it would have been hard to tell the difference.

I almost did that to see if anyone noticed.

But now, after five months (has it only been five, and months?) of posturing and politicking, Barak Obama has made history by becoming the first openly Blackish candidate on a major party ticket. This is an incredible accomplishment, and he deserves the kudos and congratulations that are being heaped upon him.

So, Hillary, having fulfilled her promise to stay in until everyone in America has been given a chance to vote, bowed out gracefully last night and pledged to work to restore party unity and help Candidate Obama win the White House and undue the ravages of eight years of Bushology.

What? She didn’t? Surprised? Nope, neither am I.

If you inhale deeply, you can smell the whiff of sulphur from the match Hillary lit to warn the Dems of her willingness to engage in scorched earth politics if she is not given a position of power in the party, most likely the Veep slot on the ticket. Hillary seems to believe she is entitled, nay, even destined, to lead America to a bright and shining future. Of everything we’ve seen this election cycle, or even for the last 10 years of election cycles, her almost religious zealotry toward this idea scares me. If she became president, what would she do to achieve her goals? What would she feel justified to do to those who stood in her way?

New subject: in a Politics/Geek crossover, this young lady here:

http://users.livejournal.com/_allecto_/34718.html?page=1

posits a three post discussion on how the tv show Firefly is a misogynistic racist sexist rapefest which demeans and depowers women. I thought I was putting up a blog that was poorly researched, bigoted, and distorted my subject matter. Man, do I have a long way to go.

Posted in Geek, Politics | 1 Comment »

31. May 2008 by admin.

The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee is meeting today to decide what to do with the delegates from the errant states of Michigan and Florida.  Conventional wisdom is they will be Solomonic and divide the delegates in twain, either by allowing only 1/2 of the delegates to be seated or giving each only half a vote (note to the DNC: do the latter.  The delegates are going to be a lot angrier about being kept away from the convention than not given a full vote.  They’re going to Denver to PARTY, and 1/2 a vote justifies their attendance.)

This will end nothing.

Sen. Carl Levin has already said he will appeal any ruling that doesn’t result in the entirety of Michigan’s delegates being seated with full voting rights.

This has taken on a life of its own.  Democratic voters in both states are threatening to cross party lines and vote Republican in November; both Democratic leaders in Congress are leaning on uncommited Superdelegates (do they have their undies outside of their longjohns and wear pansy red booties?) to finally get off the damn fence; and the Speaker of the House using the term “scorched earth” to describe any future Clintonian attempts to take the fight to the convention.  I think Nancy is wrong.

Let the fight go to the convention.  It would make for great theatre, and would draw attention to the convention like nothing has in YEARS.   Incorporate mud wrestling bouts between Obamaites and Clintonings as side shows/reality t.v. spinoffs.  Let the whole thing be settled in a death match with wild tigers a la Gladiator.  Let the victor eat the losers spouse and children.  After all the whetting our appitites have gotten for blood throughout the nominating process, it would be a terrible disappointment to see all of this get settled in a dry meeting of lawyers.

Unless afterwards they were all defenestrated into a pit of alligators.  That would be cool.

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28. May 2008 by admin.

Not really. Except that last part.

Scott McClellen seems to have decided he’s not interested in working in a McCain administration with his defenestration of President Bush and his administration. Allegations of lies internally, deceit externally, lambasting Iraq & the Katrina response, and trash talking fellow administration peers will not endear him to many in the Republican/conservative job market. And his ability to play nice and keep his mouth shut won’t win him any points in a Democratic administration or campaign either. I hope he got a large advance for his book, it looks like he might need to live off of it for a while.

I was especially touched about his description of at their first meeting after it was decided Scott would go. Describing President Bush: “tears were streaming down both his cheeks.” Wasn’t that one of the Hillary’s detractors arguments against electing a woman, that she’d be too emotional?

Obama evidently didn’t listen to his family discuss their history very closely, mistaking which Nazi death camp his uncle helped liberate. I’m not sure which is more amusing, Obama accidently giving himself a quasi-Godwin or the Republican attempts to use it as fodder against him.

And from the “You Know It’s Over” file: the ONLY mention I could find of Hillary on the Washington Post’s, NY Times, or Fark.com was a NYT article on Hillary’s new campaign t-shirts.

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22. May 2008 by admin.

So now Hillary is saying she’s willing to take the FL & MI delegates battle to the convention.  So even if the Superdelegates all decide for Barack on 3 June, the Democratic clusterfuck could drag on till August where the candidate can be decided in smoke free back rooms (I doubt you’re allowed to smoke inside the convention hall any more).

At this point, someone needs to ask Clinton nicely:  “What is it going to cost to make you go away?”

And the Daily Mail ran an article on how Chelsea might be setting up a run in 2016.  Their evidence?  A vendor in Florida was selling “Chelsea 2016″ buttons.

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