La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for August 23, 2014

LA must be reading the replies to his comic strip: regarding the reference to the question, “‘Why don’t YOU take some in YOUR home!?’” And, just wondering, why would anyone say, “’I’M GONNA KILL YOU!’” I must be missing something here…

Well, I see you toned down your post from the one you took down, indie. Which is good, since it was so shouty. I find it curious that La Cucaracha drives you to such apoplexy that you make posts that even you regret and delete later. There’s something really clouding your judgement about this strip. Did Lalo run over your dog or something?.As for your tiresomely repetitive questions, really, what’s it to you? How many would he need to take in to satisfy Your Highness? And how many people have you actively helped out this week, and in what ways? Specifics will do quite nicely. What is it exactly you do when you’re not single-mindedly bashing this strip? Why are you only interested in hating on one comic artist when there is a whole universe of them to be hated on?.As to children reading comic strips, that’s something parents will have to consider for themselves. Compared to the content children are exposed to on television and the internet, this is tame, tame, tame. It’s not all Ziggy and Leave it to Beaver out there, you know.

“Conservatives think with their wallets, Liberals with their feelings.Neither one is good by itself.” Please remind the Liberals about that last sentence. They keep spending because it makes them feel good.

Adopted a 4 pack of Colombians in 2000. LOVE My Kids.

The reason I’m on here, responding to the likes of you, indie, (and dzw, and Jeff, and mdavis, and zippy, and joe, etc.) is because there need to be folks who balance out the constant right-wing yammering that you all do. And yes, indie, despite your protestations to the contrary, nearly all your arguments come from the right-wing end of the spectrum. The reason I speak about hate is that most of that crowd has consistently demonstrated hate for brown folks. And you yourself have consistently demonstrated hate for Lalo—or have you dropped your quest to have him removed from your paper? And after all y’all’s slime, you don’t seem to be able to take some tart replies in turn..The fact that you can’t take the same kind of criticism you dish out on a daily basis is pretty unsurprising, actually. It’s probably the same thing that seems to have drawn you here in the first place: this strip for some reason hits you close to home, and you need to lash out against it, again and again and again. And yes, I’ll be here to reply to you, because that’s what needs to happen to bullies.

Yet again, indie, you prove yourself to be the master of projection. Here’s what many of your arguments against me and others boil down to: “Don’t criticize my criticisms!” You say I’m full of myself, yet you have decided you personally know what’s best for the entire subscribership of whatever newspaper it is you claim to read. You talk of free speech, yet you are on record in these comment pages as wanting to eliminate La Cucaracha from your newspaper altogether. I have never told you not to post here. In fact, a couple of times I’ve made quite clear that I would not do so. But you falsely accuse me of doing so, which I assume is because (1) your skin is so paper-thin that you think any criticism of what you state is a call for you to leave; or (2) you have learned from the Bush/Cheney years that it’s better to lie now and hope people forget about that little part later..And I wouldn’t doubt #2, because for being so “indie”, you sure do trot out lots of right-wing talking points. My beef with Clinton over his neocon-lite foreign policy notwithstanding, you know what he didn’t do? Mount an all-out invasion of a country based on lies. (And if you’d done any but the most shallow of reading about the war in Iraq, you’d understand that Congress in fact did not have the same intel as the Bush administration did. That in fact, major players in the Bush administration massaged intel to the point of fabrication the intel that reached both Congress and the public.) An invasion that, conservatively, will cost us a trillion dollars. You know what Obama did do? Eventually take our fighting forces out of Iraq. I absolutely think he should have done so sooner (and never sent a single killer drone into the skies in West or Central Asia), but Republicans are still calling for more and more military involvement in the region, more boots on the ground, more missiles in the air—and then holding veterans’ care hostage to unrelated pieces of their mean-spirited agenda. There is a clear difference. As to your economic history of Clinton, let’s just say it’s incredibly incomplete..I agree with you to an extent about healthcare. It should be a single-payer system, and cut the insurance companies out of it completely. But unfortunately we’ve got the Heritage Foundation/Romneycare plan, and it’s done a great deal to insure millions more people and measurably save thousands of lives. Oh, and saved the vast majority of independently-insured folks money in the process. Yes, people have actually seen their rates go down as the extent of their care has gone up, as a direct result of the exchanges and the requirement that insurance companies spend a minimum percentage of their premiums on actual care. Oh, and the overall rate of the rise of healthcare costs has slowed dramatically. Read! And think! The fact that you’d conflate health care with, say, smartphones (“There are hundreds of thousands of companies in this country but Obama has not given them the same sweet deal”) tells me you think health care should simply be a market-driven sector, which further tells me you have a very simplistic notion of economics..As for liberal rich folks, I think they should be taxed at far higher rates than they are, just like conservative rich folks and completely apathetic rich folks should be. What’s your point here? Or are you simply grasping at whatever you can to win a (nonexistent) point?.Speaking of where to put La Cucaracha, where would you put Doonesbury? Bloom County? The Boondocks? (Yes, I know that the latter two are no longer running new strips and the former only runs on Sundays.) And by the way, what’s that label you hate? Oh, and which comics do you like? You’ve never answered that question. And you do complain so when other folks don’t answer yours.

So, don’t take them in and they won’t be there to threaten to kill you.

And you know these things how…?

Why would be so presumptuous as to apologize for me, indie? And why would you try to take measures to silence either myself or yourself? After all your complaints that I’m trying to silence you? If you can’t deal with vigorous disagreement, well, you might have some issues to work out. But I will not tell you to leave this forum. (I may, however, encourage you to diversify your posting habits. But that’s merely a suggestion.). If you don’t like reading my voluminous texts (yours aren’t exactly tweet-length themselves), you’re perfectly free to ignore them. Just as anyone else is free to do, or not. But if you think I’ve lied, say specifically how I’ve done so. I’ve been very specific with you. You don’t like personal attacks, yet you personally attack a comic artist. Me, I’m fine taking my lumps, but I’m also no wilting lily who’ll just let them go unanswered. You no doubt will feel a sense of moral superiority from this reply, and maybe even relief that you’ll still get to post here because I’ve had the bad manners not to accept your statespersonly treaty terms. Excellent! Brilliant! I hope it adds great happiness and joy to your day. And I look forward to continuing to respond to your posts here.

Dear indie;

I for one hope neither you nor agrestic ever leave; you’re both too much fun to have around.

On a side note – I can’t help but notice that every time you try to get one over on agrestic you start calling him/her Ms Agrestic (by the way there is no period required, Ms is not an abbreviation). To the best of my knowledge, agrestic has never admitted to a gender but you keep driving home that word Ms. Are you so misogynistic that you naturally assume that pointing out that someone might be female gives you an argumentative advantage?

Your pal,don57

We should praise those who adopt and care for the refugees. We should also encourage them to take in additional people in need into their homes.

If I recall correctly (which I do), I also said, “Who says I’m a woman?” All of which, as I believe I said way back then, was to point out that it doesn’t do to simply assume that maleness is the default. And who’s to say I’m not a third gender? Who’s to say you’re not? But I haven’t made that assumption of you, because frankly it’s thus far been irrelevant to our discussions, as it still is. But I must say, it’s interesting that you so deeply want to pin some gender or another onto me.

Re: “Children are starving in the USA!” I totally agree with that observation. Which leads me to say their needs should come first. I know whereof I speak…

agrestic is not the troll here.