Cartoon Saturday

Yep ... it's been another week for the books ...

A sophomoric, low-budget film deliberately designed to be insulting to Islam's prophet Mohammed predictably enraged much of the Muslim world and led indirectly to the murder of the US Ambassador to Libya ... because, of course America was blamed for it; in other can't-we-all-just-get-along-related news, anti-Japan demonstrations in China over ownership of the disputed Senkaku (Diayou, to the Chinese) islands in the South China Sea turned violent as demonstrators stoked by bellicose news broadcasts stormed the Japanese embassy and Japanese-owned businesses; GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, asked about the biggest hurdle he would face in the upcoming debates with President Obama, claimed that the President would lie, saying, "I think the challenge that I'll have in the debate is that the president tends to, how shall I say it, to say things that aren't true" ... a subject on which Mr Romney can speak with authority, given some of the howlers he and his campaign have unleashed recently; Congress continued to do absolutely nothing, but at a frantic pace; and in Wisconsin, a judge ruled major portions of a state law restricting the the collective bargaining rights of public employees to be unconstitutional according to both the Wisconsin and US Constitutions.

Deploy the cartoons - stat!

Mitt Romney has had a pretty rough week, but has greatly improved his political marksmanship by practicing shooting at his feet from the hip. You have to wonder if there isn't something behind it all ...

One of my friends posted this wonderful cartoon on his Facebook page ...

The economy continues to lurch and gasp along under the steady and forceful leadership* of the President and Congress, leading commentators to seek new and innovative ways to deliver the same relentlessly bad news ...

As the specter of "sequestration" becomes a more imminent threat, particularly in terms of potentially enormous cuts to the defense budget, I thought some military-themed cartoons might be appropriate ...

And this one's a classic, riffing on the same general theme ...

 I've got an enormous number of cartoons dealing with penguins. Here are a couple of the better ones ...

And ...

And tattooed penguins ... ?

A staple of cartoon humor is the propensity of ladies to want to manage how their men dress, as exemplified by the well-known comment "are you going to wear that!?" Of course, men sometimes have their own ideas of how women should dress ...

And to wrap things up for this week with a burning and topical question ...

And so another week spirals down the drain of history.

In other news, today Agnes and I celebrate our thirtieth anniversary - thirty years of admirable restraint that has prevented Agnes from killing me despite all temptation ... and as my friend Bakr noted in a helpful comment on my Facebook page, "if she'd killed you a few years ago, she would be out of jail and free by now."

I have strange friends.

Well, anyhow, we will celebrate by going out to dinner tonight and spend much of the rest of the weekend making final preparations for our long-awaited and desperately-needed vacation that begins on Tuesday. More about the effects of that event on this blog to come. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, have a good day and a great weekend. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* Ha, ha ... just kidding.