Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 03, 2010

Duke’s on a roll!

I’m thinking they spilled 7.4 Kajillion barrels of oil…

When Duke’s on a roll, don’t bother him with facts! That’ll just slow him down.

Since BP doesn’t honor its commitments anyway, it doesn’t matter.

a buck a barrel sounds like a good hedge bet.

Coyoty: I definitely have issues with BP; but “not honoring its commitments” is not one of them.

$20 billion of its commitments?

Replying to yesterday’s remarks:

Everyone has the right to express an opinion, Drome. That we must continue to protect. Joining the A.C.L.U. is always a good step in protecting our right of free speech.

I can understand how someone who lost a loved one in September 11th might want to wreak vengeance or feel less tolerant toward Muslims. It is the same understanding that Palestinians have toward Israelis, that Palestinian-sympathizing Arabs have toward Israel & toward its best friend, the U.S.A. As September 11th showed, however, we cannot simply act on our emotions. That is the reason that you & I agree that the mosque, if it conforms to the zoning statutes, has as much right to exist near Ground Zero as does any other building. No religious structure, however, should any longer get away w/out paying its fair share in property taxes.

Falsely shouting “fire” in a theater is not banned because it is criminal. It is banned because it recklessly & directly endangers the public. The chance of simply “disturb[ing] the public peace” is precisely the reason that we have such a strong protection of our freedoms of speech & the press. Lew’s favorite radio personality, Rush Limbaugh, disturbs the public peace each week, yet I defend the little fuzzball’s right to do so.

I am not sure about your quote from Earl Warren, since he found segregation to be illegal. As for your last sentence, many of your remarks are ambiguous & paradoxical, but I would not call them unneighborly. Unneighborliness is in the eye of the beholder. Let us not make it a criterion for freedom of assembly.

“Y’all said you wuz tired of furners…”. We Southerners love to hear effete Ivy League elitists do their version of our accent. Trudeau’s stab at it is embarassingly lame. As is this whole arc.

On the positive side, always good to see Duke in a strip. RIP, Hunter S. Thompson.

how did toggle get mixed up with this group ?

With Duke on PR I suppose BP will hire Steve Dallas as their attorney next.

BRIAN Good morning. Just wondering how you know what my radio listening habits are. Do I play it too loud. Are the neighbors complaining? Am I doing a criminal act by disturbing the peace? What station is Rush on? Haven’t heard that DJ you are scared of in years. What, are entertainment personalities out to overthrow the world? Hmmm? Was that in a comic book I missed as a child?

You want the ACLU to protect your free speech (not Rush’s) and at the same time you want them to amend the First Amendment so the government can destroy a church they don’t like by taxing it to death. Where does the third part of the First Amendment come in, you know, the couple of words about freedom of assembly. Do we keep assembly or does that go in the waste can with freedom of religion?

Now I.m not as literate as you, so I can’t quote this statement nor give the author. The power to tax is the power to destroy. Now that may be a paraphrase so you can dismiss it out of hand. What you cannot dismiss is what it says in plain English in the First Article of the Constitution of the United States from which every other law in this country is based. Free Speech including you, including Limbaugh, including every editor of every rag), Free Religion (whether you bow to the East, bow to the Pope, or bow to you radio). and the Freedom of Assembly so we may rally and let our concerns be known.And you think in your wisdom this should be changed.

I know how you have made excuses for not serving your country in any manner. But you think you are important enough to deny the men and women who did of their Constitutional given right to Free Religion.. Didn’t you buddy Marx say a few nasty things about religion. Been reading him as an adult? Are those all men should be financially equal tripe as attractive as they were when you were a undergrad who knew everything? Or have you grown up?

A good comic ruined by a couple windbags. Get a sense of humor, guys!

I missed the posts yesterday and I know this isn’t the place but I’m going to do it anyway. As far as the mosque goes, I say build it. I was in ASA which worked for NSA. When we built a new embassy in Russia it was full of bugs. I am sure that if a mosque is built near ground zero or anywhere that is that big we will have more listening devices plus a few other classified projects going on there. Remember, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Unfortunately, it is pronounced “seven point four kajillion dollars” – kind of ruins the final emphasis that you see in the written form.

May the fleas of seven point four kajillion camels infest your armpits Mr. Hayward.

Go Lew!!!!! I remember Brian from SOTU. Same old stuff and no common sense.

Kajillion. Must have missed that range of numbers in math class.

Compulsive factoid checker here: “The power to tax is the power to destroy” is a mashup of two (quite similar) statements by Daniel Webster and Chief Justice John Marshall, but usually attributed to the latter, in a case before the Supreme Court in the early 1800s.

If only we could somehow get those two gentlemen to comment on GoComics….

Lew and Brian – you’re a waste of space here. Go to some political forum.

Lewreader,

You’re very literate… for a Martian…

@sandfan - as a Northerner, I didn’t see this as an attempt to represent an actual Southern accent, but as an over-the-top parody of how Duke would represent it. I can understand why you’d be sensitive about it, our culture looks down on anything but a Hollywood accent…but my guess is Trudeau was trying to make Duke look silly, not Southerners.

Re: politics and Doonesbury

GT’s brilliant knack for clarifying political issues by oversimplifying them in a cartoon is what keeps most of us reading his strip.

I’ve gotten a lot more out of GT’s portraits of characters like Duke by looking up summaries like this one from Slate. Just one paragraph from the full summary is enough to show how GT’s inventiveness feeds on political emergencies:

“Tapped by George Bush to serve as Maximum Proconsul in post-invasion Panama, he moved on to smuggle guns to the Kuwaiti resistance, then opened Club Scud, a popular wartime watering hole in Kuwait City. After working on David Duke’s campaign, he moved into the “nonprofit” sector, opening Nothing But Orphans. One of his first charges, according to DNA test results, was a long-lost son, Earl. Abandoning the orphans and Ms. Huan, father and son lived in a trailer in Las Vegas, pursuing the gaming arts and trafficking in stolen Beanie Babies.”

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/thecast/index.html

@Sandfan..Duke isn’t a Louisiana native, so the accent is intentionally lame. As for the arc being lame, a discussion of corporate spin seems appropriate to me, as BP and their contractors attempt to deflect and mitigate the justified anger of a country. Perhaps you bash GT whenever possible due to a difference of political views?

@Lew..Religions are free from federal income tax as NPO’s, so the federal government will not be taxing a mosque or any other place of worship. Remember, the constitution establishes and limits the federal government, but not so much state and local governments. The full quote of Marshall’s as I saw it was “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” The difference is key. A reasonable, equitably assessed property tax is not going to “destroy” anything. If a local government was allowed to tax any or all religious instituions at an unfairly high rate, they could indeed run them out of their locality, but I am certain there would be a successful lawsuit in that case. Thus, religions are still protected from unreasonable taxation.

Ps. @ Brian

My irony in this forum doesn’t bother you, nor does yours me, because we both know our clowning is a harmless show of vanity, like Doonesbury itself. An ambiguous building near a cherished monument, on the other hand, is certainly going to “endanger the public” in the neighborhood of Ground Zero, even if it doesn’t upset citizens like yourself for whom the ACLU represents a more attractive society than those who have failed to exclude evil from their world.

Congratulations (although I’m sure they come as superfluous) on your enlightened tolerance.

FYI: religous entities are not for profit entities and all funds made or recieved pay for their maitainance and upkeep are not subject to tax.

That last phrase is kinda important.

“As September 11th showed, we cannot simply act on our emotions.”

If Neolib had been on one of the top floors at the WTC, she would have refused to lose her cool by screaming or jumping out the window. She would have been cooked to ashes before admitting that someone wanted to kill her.

I am not so sure about that, Sandfan. Is it not time for Duke to go the way of Hunter S.? Zonker is fifty, so Duke must be eighty by now.

Lew, I am glad that I do not use your full moniker, since it is evident that you are not much of a reader. In no wise did I claim fear over your buddy, Rush Limbaugh, and I complimented the A.C.L.U. for protecting everyone’s freedoms, not simply those on one wing of the political spectrum or the other.

As for the notion that levying property taxes on religious buildings would destroy them, that was shown to be nonsense yesterday. Cinemas pay property taxes, but their freedom of choice of movie is not impinged. You pay property taxes on your house, and you are free to blather inaccurately here and on two dozen other forums each day.

As for serving my country, I certainly do not take a backseat to you in that respect. Please stop shrieking, “I was a Vietnam vet! You must be nice to me!” There are many ways of serving this country that I love & wish that you loved, and I do so constantly.

Mostly, Lew, when I read your remarks, I feel sorry for you. If they don’t get better—at least more relevant, accurate, & coherent—then I’ll just start ignoring them as I do with Anandy’s, Harley’s, jack’s, & maybe some others’.

Well, I return to the unpacking. I have acquired too many books & magazines, and I must find a place to squeeze them in. On this date in 1492, Christoforo Colombo set sail westward from Spain, seeking a short cut to India. Today is also Niger’s fiftieth birthday, and the 71st birthday of Jimmy Nicol, who replaced Ringo on The Beatles first European tour. Good day, all.

@stebon, GT is far more relevant than your comment. How can he be “going back for material” when he is discussing the ongoing spill and clean-up? The administration has backed and had passed more critical legislation in it’s first 18 months as any in recent memory, despite the GOP minority doing nothing but whine, oppose, and spew negative spin on every initiative.

When you speak of “the vast majority”, you are obviously misled, probably isolated by who you associate with and where you get your news. While it is true that some of the independents that backed Obama have changed their minds, he still has an approval rating higher than Bush had at any time during his last 3 years in office. Many of those who no longer approve do not understand that it will take years to turn around an economy that was shedding jobs like a Husky in Florida when Obama took over.

Check this: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-presapp0605-31.html

Compare the numbers for Obama and Reagan (select the names at the left to view individual graphs) in their first few years. They are very much alike, because Reagan also had to take part of the blame for a recession that he couldn’t possibly have prevented.

BRIAN I am sorry you take my literacy into question but lf you want we can take some reading classes together. Twice you said I was a folloewer of Rush Limbaugh after I said I did not listen to that entertainer. Remember I asked if you were scared by entertainers? Look the word up. Rush is a paid entertainer. He gets paid to say whatever he is spewing.

In all the comments only one person mentioned Vietnam. Why did you bring it up? Again, we can take reading classes, I mentioned service to country. I personally volunteer, as I have in the past, but you bring up that horrible war the Dems got us fighting in. Look up advice vs fight. while you have the dust off your dictionary. That’s the bookie thing, not Wikipedia.

In my city, 52% of the property is owned by government or non-profit. Every January and July 1st I am reminded by the outrageous tax I pay to sleep in my house. Perhaps the city should put up toll booths on the highway, charge admittance to the capital, and tax every prayer.

Religion and the ACLU? When a local town tried to use the biggest hall available, 2 parents and 1 student complained that the building was a church. Although the church offered to remove all religious artifacts, the ACLU sued under the First Amendment. This was not the Federal government, this was a small town who budget was destroyed in defence. ACLU won. The kids wrote, “Dear Granny, come to my graduation unless it rains. Then graduation will be held inside and you will not be welcome.”

If belief in God and His Son, Jesus the Christ, is just a myth and therefore harmless, why are so many people scared of that belief to the point of harassing those who hold the belief dear?

I accuse BrianCrook of inappropriately touching kittens. I accuse Lewreader of being a Cthulhu worshipper. Let’s call him Cthulhu Lew. I accuse palin drome of being backwards. I accuse stebon of being stebon.

This is fun!

Lew, I do not have time to reply to all you points. Two things: You write so frequently & assertively about Rush Limbaugh, and your own remarks are so full of distortions & inaccuracies that I presume that you chose Limbaugh as part of your regular entertainment.

Please supply some sources, citations, for that story about “a local town” & the A.C.L.U. Thanks.