Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 16, 2014

Amazing how the Ebola crisis ended right after the election.

Now the big fear is getting China to talk about carbon reduction and climate change. Next week it might be bad pizza invading frozen food shelves?

@argythreeAs of November 14, there were no active Ebola cases in the US.

@Night-Gaunt49Do you think Fox News or the New York Daily News care about what’s happening in west Africa?All they did was bash Obama for not stopping the flights from west Africa. Obama didn’t stop the flights for the same reason he hasn’t banished fire breathing dragons and unicorns; because they DON’T exist.The lone non-American Ebola victim to travel to the US took a flight from Liberia to Belgium, and then he took a flight from Belgium to the US.The same people who accused Obama for having too many “czars,” demanded that he appoint an Ebola czar. Just to shut them up, he appointed a coordinator. The announcement was made through a press release because Obama knows, his critics are more interested in creating an artificial panic than they are in really addressing the problem.

Great piece of reportage there, Roland. One of your best.

Dem ads dwelt on a fictional war on women, Ferguson, and the Koch brothers. With occasional nods to puritanical fears of trans fats, pesticides, GMOs, fluoridation, coal, carbon footprints, corporations, rising sea levels, etc…

Is this strip three years old?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/09/07/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives/#.VGiGlfTfr0c

Global warming, climate change, taking away women’s rights, health care for everyone with no rate increases … the Democrats are hardly innocent from fear mongering to their voting base.

Damn! What stupidity resides in the mind of Doonesbury!

Just a fact, there were very few political commercials for this last mid-term election here in Virginia. Yet the best bet for Senate, Mark Warner came close to being sent home.

99% OF PRECINCTS REPORTING

Mark Warner (D / Inc.) 1,071,980 49%Ed Gillespie® 1,059,056 48%Robert Sarvis (L) 53,547 2%

Gary loves Obama, no mater how incompetent he is.

Excuse the typo, that should have been “supporters”…

Obama says that he has to run the country as best he can on his own because the Republicans refuse to do their job. This simply makes it clear that he doesn’t understand what the Republican’s job is. The Republicans in congress are doing their job very well. If they can’t accomplish anything that Obama won’t veto, then they can stall so that the Democrats can’t accomplish anything either. Their intention is to keep everything just as it is, unless they can manage to return to the “good old days” of the 19th century, before there was a middle class and when only the landed gentry were voters. And, they have a great strategy for accomplishing this. 1. Disenfranchise everyone you possibly can, unless they are dependable Republican voters.2. Produce ads and media emphasis which emphasizes those politicians who are corrupt and incompetent. Paint all Democrats with the same slime. Lacking sufficient actual slime, simply make some up. This undermines the people’s trust in their government and makes them feel like helpless pawns, so they tune out the whole process and accept the status quo. 3. Support the “job creators”, who are the recipients of a huge portion of the GNP, although that GNP was produced by working people, who are receiving less benefit from it every day. This gives them the money to accomplish the other two goals, and leaves everyone except the “job creators” with increasingly less money to mount a counter campaign. So, this is the way we are going lose the middle class and become a country inhabited only by the very rich 1%, and a 99% who are too busy working two jobs to survive to notice.

Indeed, fear is a big motivator for right wingers. This has been known for some time, though more glaringly lately.

Republicans wan to be in charge but they don’t want ot govern, it’s too much work and it is easier to fool the stupid masses with Fox News and Hannity and Limbaugh. They are also cowards who love to start wars that they can send other peoples children to die in because they are too chicken to serve. Except of course for frauds like McCain who served to please daddy and get his ingeritance. Repugs have more guns and support looser gun control than any one in the world because of this cowardice. Look at the ‘stand your ground’ laws that bring back the wild west with horrible results. They are so frightened all of the time, so paranoid and suspicious. Basically they are terrorists at heart, supporting a program of keeping the public terrorized to gain control and keep it by taking away rights for the non-fearlul to participate in governing. Watch the movie Idiocracy for the full, true picture of the Republican psyche.

As if the Democratic ads were any better, " The Republicans are going to take your rights away and put all women in nunnery’s and don’t forget they want to totally gut public education!!".

It’s the one ting the right does better. They’re so good at this, ‘but the left is just as bad, so we’re even.’ No, it’ not the same. The left always had a more sober tone and don’t crowd the debate with odd and false agendas from religious nuts, climate-deniers and gun-worshippers. The left also has nothing remotely similar to the FOX propaganda machine

So far at least, the U.S. has had about the same number of ebola cases as Rush Limbaugh has had ex-wives……..Does anybody know if Rollie is married? I can’t seem to recall his wife popping up ever but I’m thinking maybe there were a few scenes of him at home way back when.

The amygdala (Latin, corpus amygdaloideum) is an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe.

Shown to play a key role in the processsing of emotions, the amygdala forms part of the limbic system.

In humans and other animals, this subcortical brain structure is linked to both fear responses and pleasure.

Its size is positively correlated with aggressive behavior across species.

In humans, it is the most sexually-dimorphic brain structure, and shrinks by more than 30% in males upon castration.

Conditions such as anxiety, autism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias are suspected of being linked to abnormal functioning of the amygdala, owing to damage, developmental problems, or neurotransmitter imbalance.

I surmise from the above description that the cure for conservative paranoia is castration!

One of the few times Roland made sense.

Staying with Trudeau’s phrenological simplification for a moment, shouldn’t paranoid federal agencies anticipate biological and terrorist threats, so we don’t have to? This election was about competence and people weren’t seeing it.

More like fear of Obama waving his magic pen and creating 11 million new Democrats to vote for things they themselves admit they haven’t read. and do not understand, and that’s the Democratic representation, the very people who, at least in committee, should have read the document at least once.

If you’re not willing to read it, you certainly aren’t qualified to vote to pass it.

Heh, summation, Liberals are liberal because the part of their brain that evolved to detect threats is atrophied.

Still in denial about responsibility, compromise, and law/order, her Garry? I guess all those DNC attack ads about Ebola, ‘women war’, and on and on didn’t register in your apartment.

Funny how Garry ignores that the Koch brothers give hundreds of millions to help educate the poor and provide legal counsel to the poor through education programs for criminal lawyers; what have Soros and Steyer done that even comes close to helping, exactly?

Isn’t the amygdala the oart commonly called the “lizard brain”?The “you’re either for us or we’ll bomb you back to the Stone Age!” part? (No apologies to W)

As opposed to the liberal which has no brain whatsoever,

The “war on terror” is one of the most expensive wastes of money and manpower in U.S. history; three more- “war on drugs”, war on Afghanistan, and War on Iraq. As bad as Viet Nam was, at least we actually had an “ally” who called us into THEIR country, despite the fact we should have been their for Ho in 1945.(Which would have prevented him from turning to China (who many Vietnamese still hate) or Russia, and going “commie”.)

If Republicans really wanted to take on an enemy threatening to destroy the nation- it would be a war against fear, not making it their staunchest ally.

From September 2008 to December 2008, 2.6 million jobs were lost — a rate of 650,000 per month. In January 2009, the month Barack Obama took office, 818,000 jobs were lost.President Obama did not inherit a slowdown or a recession; he inherited a total economic COLLAPSE. There has been uninterrupted monthly job growth since October 2010. In September 2010, there was job growth in the private sector but net job loss due to government layoffs. Currently, we have the lowest initial weekly jobless claims (WJC) since 2000, when the economy was humming at a remarkable rate. The WJC for week ending 10/11/2014 was 266,000 — the lowest WJC since April 2000. Just for reference, the WJC number economists look for is 400,000; that is considered the break even mark between jobs created and jobs lost.Mitt Romney promised to reduce the unemployment rate to 6% by the end of his first term, 2017. It isn’t 2015 yet and the unemployment rate 5.8%.Newt Gingrich promised to get gas $2.50 a gallon. There are places where gas is now below 2.50 a gallon.

@DavidHuieGreenYou could say that, taking into account the opposition he has gotten from the GOP. Sarcasm on both our part aside, I would be lying if I said there haven’t been moments when I’ve been disappointed. But, I have no regrets in voting for him twice. Both times, he was the best man for the job.

leftwingpatriot@DavidHuieGreen“You could say that, taking into account the opposition he has gotten from the GOP. Sarcasm on both our part aside, I would be lying if I said there haven’t been moments when I’ve been disappointed. But, I have no regrets in voting for him twice. Both times, he was the best man for the job.”.That would be possible if he were a monarch. HE doesn’t pretend to be..Even if he were, others outside of government would have to cooperate for him to be successful. Technological innovations by many played a part. Further, others did cooperate and it is not their jobs to be rubber stamps, whereas part of his job IS to convince them..I agree he was the better man running the first time. He may have beenn the better man the second time..I personally doubt politicians are better economists than economists and they argue about what is the best way to improve the economy, so maybe he fixed it or maybe he slowed it down. Unlike you, I am not certain one way or the other.

@DavidHuieGreenIf you re-read the initial comment that you replied to, you will notice that I do not give credit to anyone. I merely wrote the statistics and statements by politicians that are available to anyone.There are things that are out the President’s control but he gets the blame and sometimes the credit for what happens in the nation. One could say, Bill Clinton lucked out to be President at the time of great technical innovation. Nobody knows what role he played in creating 22.1 million jobs but he is happy to take credit for it.I don’t have the same faith in economists that you do. I have heard too many argue in favor of a value added tax (VAT) — a national sales tax. I know how this hurts consumer spending from my time as working as an assistant manager in a drug store in the heart of Manhattan. The store was filled with travelers from Europe, South America, and Asia buying products that were far cheaper than back in their home country. Economists claim that a VAT is fairer than a progressive income tax because it taxes high income and low income at the same rate. In fact it is disproportionately unfair to low income people because it whittles away at what little disposable income they may have. It will hurt consumption, the driving force of the economy.

“I don’t have the same faith in economists that you do.”.What faith?My point was that they don’t agree on what is best so how do others pretend even greater understanding?I’m pretty sure I spelled that out.

“If you re-read the initial comment that you replied to, you will notice that I do not give credit to anyone. I merely wrote the statistics and statements by politicians that are available to anyone.”.True.You did not make a testable claim for some reason.You simply laid out extensive parallel statements comparing the economy under President Obama with how it was under another president and more pessimistic promises of other politicians...It reads as if you intended to imply they were related and relevant. I don’t know why you would pretend to back away since they very well may mostly or partly be.. The thing, though, is that one example of unanticipated innovations is hydraulic fracturing. No matter how it turns out, it has moved the supply of energy into the USA. NPR pointed out the reduction in fuel price has been like aa major stimulus package but they didn’t even mention that it did it without the associated increase in national debt. In fact, another factor they ignored was the fact that more of the money spent went into the pockets of Americans who are spending it in a multiplying effect..Would this have happened under some other president?Likely but uncertain, too many variables, like What would have happened if 9/11/01 had been stopped?Very likely we wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq..What would the Americans who were killed in the attacks and the invasions have accomplished?We’ll never know.