Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 22, 2012

Shut up, Alex!

Maybe she could text or something.

??? Just last strip Grams was driving. They doing car fire drills on the highway?

While Gram’s speech could be historic, Alex’s speech has become histrionic.

Get over it Alex.

Republican Todd Akin made one of the lead items in the British news Yesterday evening.I presume that evidence will soon be found that his ‘High School’ certificate showing he passed his Biology examination was in fact genuine (and not, as would be presumed from the quality of his knowledge on conception, a forgery).

Knock it off Alex!

3 days… at least now we have a steering wheel.

Alex – is a speech really likely to be historic when it’s for such a mediocre candidate?

If this were reality, the only question of interest about the speech would be whether Joanie was intellectually honest enough to take her party to task for all its scheming & maneuvering instead of standing up for itself. If the Dems hadn’t pushed a change to state law before Ted Kennedy’s death because they feared Mitt Romney or some Republican governor appointing a (gasp) Republican (!) to finish the term and because they took the electorate so much for granted they figured they could prop up just about any candidate with a pulse (Coakley) and walk away with the special election for “The Kennedy Seat” – they wouldn’t be faced with incumbant US Senator Scott Brown today.

I think Gram is having trouble believing it too…

Now it can be told! All those years ago, when her soon-to-be estranged husband Clinton’s buddy complimented her french fries (which led to the famous “My wife – I think I’ll keep her.” line) – Joanie was using a recipe from Elizabeth Warren’s famous cookbook.

@rmbdotYou can see the top of the steering wheel in the third panel yeesterday and the first of the day before, plus there are hints of it in the bottom right hand corner of other panels.

But yes, Alex is now driving (for which I DO need to see the steering wheel, to remind me that it is on the ‘wrong’ side…), still without a seatbelt. Joanie, however, seems to have taken the opportunity to put a seatbelt on, though she’s sdjusted it so it will probably not stop her hitting hte dashboard when Alex crashes into the car in front because she is too busy talking to Joanie…

Also, while I’m the only one awake to post, some thoughts on trolls (wake up at the back there, DTpi, because I’m afraid this is addressed at you, among others).

We know that we have a particular troll, GuardSGT, who has said that he keeps on posting the same things because we haven’t yet accepted them. We will therefore typically get a minimum of half a dozen posts a day from him, in a nice little bunch.

If he is ignored, those half dozen posts have minimum impact on the discussion; they’re the equivalent of a short ad break. If they are responded to, he also responds, and we get about fifty extra posts of which forty are dross and ten are decent comments that get lost. So DON’T RESPOND. At all. Ignore him. As we say in the UK, send him to Coventry – pretend he doesn’t exist.

Even worse, don’t spend half a dozen posts discussing trolls (yes, I’m aware of the irony, I am British after all…). In particular, don’t inconvenience electrons just to take a potshot at the trolls and the trolling you expect to follow. Personally, I have to say I find that just as unpleasant, and just as much trolling, as the posts from GuardSGT.

So, here’s a plea. Let’s make this the very last post today in which trolls are mentioned. Let’s leave the comments from trolls swinging in the wind unanswered.

Now – Todd Akin, WTF…? As Mike31g said, it made the British news too. To be frivolous for a moment, I do feel sorry for Jon Stewart – what a week to be on a break…

Doonesbury can be a good strip when it is not blatantly a political advertisement like it is this week. I hope hope hope that Warren loses.

Gram finally has her seat-belt on. Granddaughter ought to follow example.

of course Warren will lose. will all Mitt’s money, how can the votes not have been already bought and paid for. the centerfold guy can’t lose. the Dems always know how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. lol

gosh people, this is a comic strip. not everything is the same as in real life., like we have bubbles with words containing the things we say. just follow the conversation. that’s entertaining enough.

if it were real life, the Right would not allow such thoughts to be said, nor would teh media allow them to be said. the outrage from teh Right would never stop, the press and teh Elites would die from shock if such thoughts were allowed to be printed or spoken. lol

Apparently, when Alex and Joanie stopped to get out and change seats, Alex forgot to put her seatbelt on. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Bad role model for our impressionable readers.

waiting for the flurry of guardiness.

I thought someone decided that it was such an old car that that was why you couldn’t see the seatbelt, since years ago we only had lap belts instead of shoulder belts. Well, that would explain it anyway. That and the fact that the artist may have just made a little mistake. I am sure that happens a lot.

Nowadays the kids call females dudes too.

Akin is a big inconvenience for the Ryan/Romney ticket. Ryan and Akin sponsored several antiabortion bills the last few years. This is why they want Akin to be gone very badly. However, they made their bed, so now I guess they are stuck with him. It seems interesting that other countries do not have quite the controversy over abortion that we have here. The GOP has even gone so far as threatening to shut down the entire federal government just because they are unhappy about Planned Parenthood funding, which does provide abortions, but also provides many other health services to women, abortions are a small part of what they provide. Anyway, that is the basic background. At least Elizabeth Warren is in Massachusetts, where even her opponent is prochoice, unlike Claire McCaskil in Missouri.

I think Doonesbury has been clearly political from the beginning and if you are looking for something neutral, not topical, heaven knows you have plenty of alternatives. Go for it.

There are 2 types of people in ‘that’ political party. There are the true believers(blind followers) and then those that use ‘spin doctors’ for everything else. Never the twain shall meet.

Mr. Trudeau is losing his edge. These last few months have been boring!

Hey, fellow Doonesburians, today’s “Curtis” has some stuff that would set off some firewords around here. (I meant to say “fireworks,” but maybe what I did put was more apt.)http://www.seattlepi.com/comics-and-games/fun/Curtis/

@Beleck3You mean Carl Rove’s money. Check out today’s Democracynow.org

Although the Warren/Brown race doesn’t involve abortion, I am sure they do have differences. the extra right wing social conservative crap just doesn’t seem to work in Massachusetts. It doesn’t work in California and other places in the US as well. Then, there are the red states…

Sorry Karl, I misspelt.

@montessoriteacher In Britain, abortion simply isn’t a party political issue. Whenever there is a debate in Parliament (which is not very often) there is a free vote, and MPs vote according to their conscience. Although Labour, as a centre-left party, has more MPs sympathetic to ‘right to choose’, and correspondingly Conservatives have more ‘pro-life’, a great many MPs will be voting contrary to those stereotypes.

As for the idea that you can’t get pregnant from ‘legitimate rape’, I don’t think more than a handful of people over here had ever heard the suggestion. But then, with the exception of a few of the stranger Academy schools, biology is taught here without any religious baggage.

I wonder if people in Britain expect the liberals to fight with one hand behind their backs the way we are expected to here in the US?

To those here who are unfamiliar with the rules of “pigeon chess”, here is a quick primer:

1) Pigeon coos something outrageously stupid.2) Rational individual challenges the outrageously stupid statement, often providing actual data.3) Pigeon loudly and repeatedly asserts that rational person is a liar, and pigeon only speaks the truth*4) Repeat steps 1-3, ad nauseum…

*also known as the “I know you are, but what am I?” gambit.

" “dude” is a male reference!"πNot any more apparently. I’ve noticed, in valley-speak that the valley-girls call each other dude a lot. Language morphs, particularly on the I-net.

To My Fellow Doonesbury Readers, Everybody knows where I stand politically, so I make the following statement hoping I am wrong.

Barack Obama will lose this election. The direction of the economy, the unpopularity of the healthcare law, Romney out raising Obama and the voter suppression laws all point to an Obama defeat.

Regards,LWP

All this partisan fervor reminds me of the 3rd grade playground wars we had at the John C Calhoun elementary school in Clemson South Carolina, “My God, king, team, band, is better than your …” I’m afraid everybody’s going to peak before the convention and we still haven’t finished talking about Jim Crow.

After the recent threads on Jim Crow, I started thinking about the various reaction to those laws, from MLK’s non violent civil disobedience, to the Black Panther’s advocacy for armed resistance  and social Maoism. Both paths were a struggle that ended in bloodshed for the principals, one from the outside and the other from within. The Panthers were founded in Oakland in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton (Minister of Defense) as a way of protecting the Black community from police brutality, and in the process burned their presence into the American conscience.

Twenty-three years ago today, Huey Newton was gunned down  on the streets of Oakland in a drug deal gone bad, 3 bullets to the face. His dying words, “You can kill my body, but you can’t kill my soul. My soul will live forever.” A lot of twists in the road led up to this moment, a rather ignominious end but maybe not unexpected.  Huey was not able to navigate down the sometimes parallel paths of criminal thuggery and radical revolutionary. Like Bob Dylan said, “If you’re going to live outside the law, you better be honest.” Newton was barely literate when he graduated from high school, but he ended up earning a PHD at UC Santa Cruz before he was sucked back into the hood. In the between times he became a charismatic figure in the struggles against Jim Crow racism, with chants of, “Free Huey Newton” and Panther activism. Not all of the founding Panthers were as trapped by the hood as Huey. Bobby Seale has moderated his outlook and has written a cook book. Soul on Ice author Eldridge Cleaver was initially attracted to the Panthers because of their message of armed resistance. He later had a falling out with Newton, who started advocating a less violent focus. After his run-in with the law Cleaver went on the run via the traditional route of radical revolutionaries, Cuba, Algeria, France. It was in Algeria that Cleaver ran into Timothy Leary and put him under revolutionary arrest for the counter-revolutionary crime of advocating drug use, duh. Cleaver later returned to the US as a born again evangelical and then became a Republican. In fact he played a big roll at their pep rallies. In ’85 he ran for the Berkeley City Council as a Repub and lost, if he had run 15 years earlier they would have elected him #1 Komrade of the City. Eventually Cleaver became disillusioned with Christianity and, can you believe it! became a Mormon, hummm.  I know everyones favorite conservative commentator is Wm F Buckley and I thought people might like to know his interview with Newton went better than the one with Vidal.

 Newton never got to see the A’s beat the Giants in the World Series, today if he went by 9th St he wouldn’t notice much difference, the Cyprus Freeway collapsed in the ‘89 earthquake 2 mos after BGF member Tyrone Robinson murdered him, but that’s about it. Revolutionary resistance did not bring much meaningful change to that street.  

I am late coming to the comment table today, due to some personal business, but I do see that our favorite Troll is here, as usual mouthing his broken record, Reich-wing balderdash. I guess like Goebbels, is you repeat a lie loud enough and often enough, somebody might believe it.Guess what , Demütigen Soldat ? Wir glauben Sie nicht, sie und wir nicht hören Sie Ihre liegt !

I’m pessimistic about the future of Homo sapiens on this planet: Global warming seems unstoppable, due to both natural and human causes. Human nature is intractable and bent on destroying humans. The planet itself, however, cannot be destroyed by humans. After we have destroyed ourselves (maybe a remnant will survive, but not on Mars or elsewhere in outer space), earth will re-invent a new web of environmental life with perhaps another dominant species in less than a billion years. But even if it does, planet earth has only 5 billion years left before the sun, having burned up its hydrogen thermonuclear fuel, balloons out and engulfs earth.πWhat to do? Enjoy each other, via Jesus’ method (do unto others as you would have others do unto you), and hope there is a God after all.πBut God is a deep unfathomable mystery, far beyond the penetration of our puny brains, even if assisted by the coming quantum supercomputers all networked together. And even if there is a God, there is no guarantee a continued existence of the soul will have any material existence ever again.πOkay, so maybe you believe in the transmigration of souls. Good luck with that . . . .

I think the Dems have to plead not guilty to partisan fervor. They better hurry up and get some of it or they can kiss the presidency goodbye.Eldridge cleaver was related to kc mayor Emanuel cleaver, who is now a US congressman.The liberal republicans have basically left us, though all the GOP tries to accuse each other of being too liberal during their primaries. However, there are plenty of conservative Democrats.

Perhaps Tropical Storm/ Hurricane Isaac will do what the Democrats or the protesters can’t do – rain on the Republican’s parade in Tampa next week ? Maybe there is a god of retribution ?

Thanks for looking. Nice to know people are looking for my comment! I’d hate to be considered a troll and avoided.

The thought of human manipulation of DNA producing something biologically superior is a non-starter IMO. There’s too much avarice and ego in the human makeup to permit “intelligent” design!

So while all of you are airing your political leanings, I’m wondering…Did the honeymoon end suddenly? Where’s Leo?

Well, I think you know your science, corzak, but about your implicit optimism, I’m not so sure.

I hope you’re right and I am wrong.

If you go by the Constitution, which the government hasn’t for over 30 years, they should keep its nose and money out of almost everything.