Cartoons of the Week

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. Since when is Hillary's campaign debt my problem, or any voter's problem? Don't shed any tear for the Clintons - they are millionaires dozens of times over. It's also worth noting that they've earned every penny of it. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Clintons' public service and always will, but I couldn't care less about her campaign debt, and I wouldn't donate a penny toward it. Sorry, Hillary, but you'll be just fine.

I thought it was a little cheap for Obama to write a check to Hillary toward her campaign debt, and the press just lapped it up. Talk about buying supporters - it just seemed a little beneath Obama to do such a thing. Then again, Obama can't control what the press reports on, and the press never disappoints - as usual, the coverage has ranged from the inane to the insane - real issues be damned.

I know I'm being a little critical of Obama here (I'm not above that, and I'm not a sheep), but McCain deserves the most criticism, by far. His nakedly obvious courting of Hillary supporters is beyond revolting, especially since the Clintons have been GOP enemies #1 and #1a for the better part of 20 years. Now all of a sudden McSame and his ilk all have a "tremendous amount of respect for her"? You've got to be kidding me.

If Hillary's supporters vote for McCain en masse (and I simply don't believe that will happen), then these morons deserve exactly the sort of country we will get - more of the same Bush failed policies. And these will be the same people who will march in the streets and spend the next four years whining and complaining about his presidency. Judases, all of them.

I don't blame Obama for foregoing public financing, but he'd better live up to his word, and make more than a half-hearted attempt at fixing the way we finance our elections (and not just the presidential elections, either). It's a system that's clearly broken, and until it's fixed, our democracy won't truly return to the people it really belongs to - everyday American voters. As things stand right now, corporate interests (aided by their lobbyists) run Washington, and I'm including both political parties here, without qualification.

I smiled when I saw this one. That's right, America, it's time for generations X & Y to take over. Clearly, older Americans aren't happy about it. Guess what? Too bad.

To first Carlin cartoon is the best one I saw all week. I didn't get a chance to write about Carlin's passing this past week, but it really did sadden me. I grew up watching him (most of the time, without my parents knowing about it). I didn't always find his stuff funny, especially his more frivolous observations about our language - "Why do we park in a driveway and drive on a parkway?" Answer: I don't really care.

But, an overwhelming majority of the time, I loved his observations, humor, and most of all, his political activism. His best work was definitely his fight against our country's censorship laws. It's not a stretch to say that he's had a remarkable and enduring influence on our culture, and our First Amendment rights.

The best personal tribute I can think of to Carlin...

George, we'll fucking miss you.

Okay, so it's not original, nor particularly witty. But, it is fitting and heartfelt.

There are certainly a number of reasons for the mortgage disaster facing our country, and millions of home owners, but I've little doubt that a lion's share of the blame is from not regulating the mortgage industry.

Many anti-government GOPers (a double negative, IMHO) love to decry government regulation, but many times when investors and American citizens have gotten screwed in the last decade or so, some sort of deregulation has been behind it. From cable TV, electricity, mortgages, the airline industry, oil prices, the environment and the credit card industry, (and many other areas) the working men and women in this country all get financially raped when it's left to the corporations to police themselves. I'm not for excessive regulation, just smart and appropriate regulation.

I'm wondering when our federal government is finally going to wake up and deal with the levee systems that are supposed to protect our towns and cities from mother nature's fury, a problem that is only going to get worse in the coming decades with global warming?

What's going on in the Midwest right now is another classic example failure of the oft-repeated GOP mantra, "(Topic X) should be up to the states." A story in the New York Times this week revealed just how mismanaged the levee system is all along the Mississippi River (including New Orleans, which is still very poorly prepared for a major hurricane). Some levees are privately owned, others managed by the state, and the NYT story even quotes some government officials saying "we don't even know where some of the levees are."

Really? This is the best way to manage this system? I don't know if a federal take over of the levee system would be an improvement, but can it be worse than what we're seeing now?

I've been railing against our horrific energy policy for a while now, and I know I've promised I'd share some letters that I'm writing to the Obama campaign about this critical '08 election issue. I'll have more on it tomorrow. However, for now I'll say this, the cartoon immediately above is as apropos as ever. We can and we must vastly improve the mass transit capability in the U.S., as well as build a massive infrastructure for hydrogen cars, most notably filling stations for these cars.

Right underneath terrorism, homeland security and reigning in the deficit, energy policy must be an urgent policy in the next administration, no matter who wins the presidency.

I'm not significantly wowed by McCain's battery proposal, but it's a start. I wrote it several times this past week, and it's worth repeating - Obama MUST step out in front of this issue in the coming weeks and months to show voters he has bold, revolutionary energy policies of his own.

Pretty soon, it's going to get to the point that people simply won't fly, including me. I will always have to fly to some extent, since I have family on both coasts, but sadly, it won't happen as much in the coming years unless airlines fares get reigned in. (Fat chance) Just in case you live in a cave and you don't grasp the enormity of the problem of our reliance on fossil fuels, here's another nugget to chew on over your morning breakfast - it's all well and good to come up with alternative energy sources for our automobiles (in itself a monumental task), but what about airplanes? Tractor Trailers? Our jet fighters that protect our homeland? It's not hyperbole to say that coming up with an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels is perhaps the biggest challenge ever faced by humankind. We can do it, if we can stop fighting and arguing how for five minutes, and must up the political will to just get busy with the research and incentives for people to do this.

What a shocker - it's certainly a cliché but an apropos one - but Barack Obama should use this in his campaign (or a close cousin of it) - Are you better off now than you were eight years ago? For an overwhelming majority of Americans, the answer is an emphatic No. After that, hammer away at McCain's record of supporting Bush on nearly, oh, everything, and even moreso now that he's supporting Bush's tax cuts and just about anything else he thinks will court far-right conservatives, the people he needs to have any possible hope of succeeding in November.

If he does all that, Obama will have a chance for his own Mission Accomplished banner come November.

I find it incomprehensible that our government can't do more to prop up the sagging dollar. It just strikes me as unreal that the Bush administration (and Congress) all sit idly by while the dollar plunges. As an added bonus, this is driving up the price of oil (but is not the only reason), because the price of a barrel of oil is based on American dollars. Great. Is there an orifice on our bodies that the Bush administration hasn't screwed during the last 7+ years?

I still can't believe that an American institution like GM is having the hard times that it is. Actually, all of the Big Three in Detroit are bleeding profusely, and part of that reason is rising oil prices. All of them mercilessly milked the SUV cow dry in the 1990s and the early '00s, and now they have little to show for it.

Part of me (okay, a small part of me) thinks that GM deserves it. If for no other reason (and there are plenty) than for killing its EV-1 program in the mid-1990s, a program that came up with a viable electric car that had zero emissions and ran on no gas at all. The movie Who Killed the Electric Car does a great job in revealing much about his outrage.

Who knows? Maybe GM can turn it around. If not, almost all of its misfortune is of its own doing.

This one says it all, & it underscores another thing I've been saying for years now - when Bush and his supporters love a judicial decision, they praise the responsible judges and the decision, but when they dislike a decision, they whine about "activist judges" who are "legislating from the bench." You can't have it both ways, people. Then again, with Faux News, I guess you truly can.