Cartoon Saturday

We've made it two weeks into September - only two and a half weeks until the odious buffoons in Congress try to shut down the government again ...

The New York City Police Commissioner has apologized to former tennis star James Blake, who was mistakenly tackled and handcuffed by police in a mistaken sting operation; the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, celebrated the attainment of a deal to end sanctions on his country by predicting that Israel will not exist in another 25 years; in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, 107 people were killed when a crane collapsed and crashed through the roof of a mosque; Queen Elizabeth II of England became the longest reigning monarch in British history this week, her 63 years on the throne surpassing the record set by her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria; and as Pope Francis prepares for his upcoming trip to the United States, opposition to his progressive agenda and outlook has begun to generate a conservative backlash in the Vatican.

This week, in honor of the religious bigot in Kentucky who believed she had the right to impose her beliefs on everyone else ... and the morons in and out of government who supported her lawless and unconstitutional actions ... our theme cartoons focus on religion ...

This will probably be the next issue ...

Perhaps God is trying to tell us something ...

The more things change, the more they stay the same ...

How you'd do a boat mitzvah ...

Hellfire, brimstone, and marshmallows ...

Each religion is more tolerant and peace-loving than the next ... as long as you believe in the one true way ...

And then there's the prosperity gospel for the 1% ...

In a perfect world, this is how it would all end up ...

My peaceful religion can beat up your peaceful religion ...

If Moses had received the Ten Commandments today ...

And that's it - God willing - for another Cartoon Saturday. It should be pretty nice day here in NoVa, weather-wise ... highs in the mid-70s and lower humidity. We're supposed to have thunderstorms this afternoon, but since we could use the rain, I guess I shouldn't complain.

Have a good day and a great weekend. Come back tomorrow for Poetry Sunday ... more thoughts then.

Bilbo

The Right-Cheek Ass Clown for September, 2015

It's a new month and there are lots of ass clowns to choose from for the ... honor ... of being recognized in this space for the superiority of their buffoonery. There are so many candidates this time that I was tempted to go to a weekly award for the next month or so; nevertheless, I have decided to stick with the normal schedule.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dear Readers, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the

Right Cheek Ass Clown
for
September, 2015

Joint Awardees

Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz

This award was a no-brainer, as both Mr Huckabee and Mr Cruz - one a former and one a current elected official of the United States government, and both campaigning for the presidency - openly supported another government employee who refused to obey the law. President Obama has been excoriated by the GOP for his alleged failure to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed*," and yet these hypocritical grandstanders encourage government employees to ignore the law when it does not comport with their personal religious beliefs. 

Mr Huckabee, like many religious conservatives, insisted that Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis was being persecuted for her religious beliefs, and stated that, 

"Kim's stand for religious liberty is a pivotal moment in our nation's history."

Actually, Ms Davis was jailed for failing to do the job for which she was elected, and for preventing other clerks who work for her from doing theirs. Her actions constituted an attempt on the part of an elected official to impose her own religious beliefs on others in blatant contravention of the Constitution** and the law.

For their flagrant abetting of lawlessness and their grandstanding buffonery in fanning the flames of religious intolerance, odious gasbags Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz share the Right Cheek Ass Clown Award for September, 2015.

Have a good day. Keep your religious beliefs to yourself; if you insist on imposing them on others, perhaps you would be happier in a place like Saudi Arabia, where you can get a job with the religious police and beat people you believe are insufficiently pious.

Come back tomorrow for Cartoon Saturday. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

* Article 2, Section 3.

** Article 6, Section 3, and the Third Amendment.

Some Historical Observations on the Iran Nuclear Deal

Unless you've been living in a cave in Outer Mongolia for the last few months, you've heard of the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action" ... otherwise known as the "nuclear deal" ... which has been worked out between Iran and a group of other nations consisting of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, France, China, and the European Union. The essential idea behind the agreement is that in exchange for allowing some limits on its nuclear activities, Iran will get relief from economic sanctions while being allowed to continue its atomic program for peaceful purposes.

Not everybody is happy with this arrangement. Republicans in particular are beside themselves with fury, accusing President Obama of everything up to and including treason for negotiating what they consider to be a terrible deal with a dangerous and untrustworthy foreign government, ignoring the will of Congress as expressed by the "Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015," and for considering the deal to be an "executive agreement" between the President and Iran rather than a treaty constitutionally subject to Congressional review. News outlets in this country are hip-deep in stories with headlines like "21 Reasons the Iran Deal Is a Bad Deal."

Opponents of the agreement generally cite two arguments:

1) Iran has broken every treaty it's ever signed; and,

2) The Iranians can't be trusted.

Now, I don't know all the details of the agreement, and I certainly don't know whether it's a good deal or not, and by whose definition ... most of what I know is what I read in this very good summary article on CNN. Nor have I seen a list of all the agreements and treaties the Iranians are said to have broken. I also don't know whether or not we can or should trust the Iranians ... but I doubt they think they can trust us.

Yes, I'll bet that many senior figures in the Iranian government don't think they can trust us any more than we trust them. One of the criticisms thrown at the agreement by GOP critics is that "the Iranians have broken every agreement they've ever made." This may or may not be true. But from an Iranian point of view, it's the US government that has a long and distinguished history of ignoring and breaking treaties ... after all, how many of the solemn treaties signed between the US and the Indian tribes in the 18th and 19th centuries continue to be scrupulously observed today?

The Iranians also remember (even if we choose not to) that the CIA engineered the 1953 revolution that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran and its Premier, Mohammed Mossadegh, on behalf of Western oil companies angered by Mossadegh's decision to to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. The coup organized by the CIA put Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi - a man detested by many Iranians - back on the peacock throne ... an action that led eventually to the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah and put a radically anti-American Islamic government in power.

And let us not forget that the Iranians have the recent experience of seeing Republican members of the US Senate contacting them directly in an attempt to undermine their government's negotiating position. If you were the Iranians, would you trust a government that not only can't speak with one voice, but which actively seeks to undermine itself? A government including elected officials who tell them they can't trust in the worth or longevity of any agreement it signs?

Who can't trust whom?

Again, I don't know if this is the best deal that could have been worked out. I don't know if the President has handled the negotiations as well as he might, or if he should have treated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as a treaty subject to the consent of a Congress that was reflexively opposed to it, anyhow. But I think that those in our government who are howling to scrap it and start over, using the threat of military force to drive the Iranians back to the table, are being abysmally stupid. After all, look how well military force has worked in Iraq ... a much smaller country. What message does it send to our allies who joined in the negotiations and who have a stake in putting limits - of whatever sort and longevity - on the Iranian nuclear program. And finally, consider that the Iranians have no particular reason to trust us any more than we do them.

Have a good day. Stop shouting and think this through rationally. Use this article by Peter Beinart to help you.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Size and Space

I was a young lad at the dawn of the Space Age. I watched early science fiction television shows like "Men into Space" (and had my Colonel McCauley space helmet in the closet alongside my Davy Crockett coonskin cap and my Foreign Legion kepi) and followed the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. My uncle Joe, Dad's brother, worked as an engineer at NASA and sent me all sorts of things from Cape Canaveral (later Cape Kennedy, then back to Cape Canaveral). I wrote letters to all the Mercury astronauts (except - petulantly - to Gus Grissom, whose Mercury spacecraft "Liberty Bell 7" sank in the ocean after landing*). In my collection of letters is a note I got back from a young Mercury astronaut named John Glenn, who returned the photo I'd sent him with the comment that "I'm sure there are a lot of pretty girls out there who would like your picture more than I would."

When men first walked on the moon, I was camping in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Colorado, and didn't learn that the mission had succeeded until we came down out of the mountains a few days later. I chewed my nails with the rest of America when a critically damaged Apollo 13 limped back to earth, mourned with the rest of America when the space shuttle Challenger exploded during its flight, gasped at the wonderful pictures of Jupiter and Saturn taken by the Voyager spacecraft, wondered at the marvelous photos returned by the Hubble Space Telescope, and cheered when NASA threaded the eye of a needle billions of miles away, sending the New Horizons craft past Pluto with a degree of accuracy nothing less than astonishing.

I love the space program, and the way it fuels our imagination and our desire to do great things.

But it also makes me feel small and humble in consideration of what it means in terms of our place in the universe.

I told you all of the above so that I could call your attention to this fascinating article published last week in the Vox online magazine: 11 Images That Capture the Incredible Vastness of Space. I won't share all the images with you, but these are some of the ones I found especially thought-provoking:

The first one reminds us that our sun is "incomprehensibly huge" ... as this image suggests:

But even as the sun may be "incomprehensibly huge," it's the merest pipsqueak in comparison to other gargantuan stars we have discovered, as shown in this comparison chart ...

This picture shows how Saturn would look from earth if it were as far away as the moon ...

And remember that comet where the Philae probe landed last year? This shows you how big it is in relation to the city of Los Angeles ...

It took the New Horizons spacecraft nine years to reach Pluto, more than 4 1/2 billion miles away. The nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, so far away that we have to use light-years, the distance light travels in one year, to express its mind-boggling remoteness ... Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light years away. And the most distant object yet seen by humans - with the assistance of powerful telescopes, is 13.1 billion light years away.

The realm of science fiction gives us warp drive (from "Star Trek"), hyperdrive (from the "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" series), "jump drives," "light speed," and other literary and cinematic dodges** that allow man to conquer the inconceivable vastness of space. But none of those are likely to arrive in our lifetimes, and so we will remain here on our infinitesimal blue speck in the endless span of eternity, using our telescopes and our unmanned spacecraft and our imaginations to consider what ... and who ... might be out there beyond our vision.

I don't know about you, but it makes me feel pretty humble***.

Have a good day here on our rapidly changing pale blue dot. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* I felt bad about that after Grissom was killed in 1967 in a tragic fire during a pre-launch test for their planned Apollo mission, along with astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee. 

** We won't mention the "ludicrous speed" attained by the evil Dark Helmet in Mel Brooks' film, "Spaceballs."

*** And if you need another dose of humility, check out the classic 1977 short film "Powers of Ten."

Term Limits

One thing you hear a great deal of discussion about, but very little action on, is the topic of term limits for our elected representatives. It's one of those things everyone thinks is a great idea for all those worthless bums in Congress ... except for their own Senator or Representative, who is a fine gentleman and a sober and responsible statesman. This is why term limit propositions never go anywhere.

The Constitution does not place limits on any elected position except the presidency; the 22nd Amendment limits the President to two terms. Article 1, Section 2, Clause 1 establishes a term of two years for Representatives, and Article 1, Section 3, Clause 1 (later modified by the 17th Amendment) establishes a term of six years for Senators; however, there are no limits placed on the number of times a particular Senator or Representative may be reelected.

The practical result of this is that the people of a state or a congressional district can keep voting a particular Senator or Representative into office as long as they want until he or she - quite literally - dies of old age*.

Now, this might not be a problem if all that were important is that the people who are being represented are happy with the job their Senator or Representative is doing. After all, the elected official is supposed to do their will, is he (or she) not? But because important positions like committee chairs are awarded to members of Congress on the basis of (1) which party's in power and (2) seniority, we can end up with certain members wielding extraordinary power and shaping the actions of government in consideration of the interests of their state or district, without regard for the welfare of the nation as a whole. Consider the enormous amount of Federal spending that made its way to the relatively small state of West Virginia during Senator Robert Byrd's long control of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

And it gets more problematic when you consider the impact of unlimited terms coupled with congressional districts which have been gerrymandered to death in order to preserve the seat for one party, or to minimize the representative abilities of the other. The combination of the two is a guaranteed recipe for perpetual control of a district by a single party and the insane congressional gridlock we see today.

I believe term limits should apply to all elected officials - not just the president. A recent Facebook post by Representative Lee Zeldin (R, NY) expressed support for term limits and asked for feedback on several potential options:

(1) Four two-year terms;

(2) Six two-year terms;

(3) Two four-year terms;

(4) Three four-year terms;

(5) The status quo; or,

(6) Something else.

Rep Zeldin's post had gotten 202 comments the last time I checked, with option 3 (two four-year terms) having a slight lead.

We need to have an option that allows for legislative continuity without homesteading. We need term limits that provide enough time for an elected official to learn the ropes and be effective, but not enough time to go legislatively native, letting power go to the head and forgetting where he or she came from.

As I see it, two-year terms are much too short. Members of Congress already spend too much of their time engaged in fund raising for the party as a whole or for their next election, which is always right around the corner. This limits the amount of time they have available to do the job they were elected to do.

Four year terms are better: they allow the individual to learn on the job and become effective, and let the voters see whether they got what they thought they elected. There's more time between elections, and so (theoretically, at least) there should be less time spent on fundraising. I believe the optimum structure is to elect Senators and Representatives the same way we do the President: for a maximum of two four-year terms ... a total of eight years in office.

This would, of course, require an amendment to the Constitution, but I think it is one that would be much more worthwhile than some of the many amendments that are proposed each session.

So, Dear Readers, what do you think? Are term limits a good thing or a bad thing**? If they're good, what do you think is the appropriate limit and why? Leave a comment, because enquiring minds want to know.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

* See Claude Pepper of Florida and Robert Byrd of West Virginia for examples.

** Sadly, there are no limits on stupidity, regardless of length of term ... so be careful who you vote for.

Labor Day

Today, September 7th, is the American holiday of Labor Day, meant to honor the American labor movement and the contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of the United States. Most of the rest of the world has its equivalent of Labor Day as well, and most countries observe it on May 1st, which is known as International Workers Day.

It seems to me that Labor Day in its traditional sense of honoring the American labor movement and the contributions of workers is pretty much a sham nowadays. Conservative legislators and governors have gone out of their way to gut the ability of unions to represent workers, and big business puts profit over the interests of its workers by shipping jobs to other countries where labor costs are lower and they aren't bothered by pesky nuisances like workplace safety rules, taxes, and other job-killing^TM measures. Working men and women are viewed not as valued members of the business team to be trained and nurtured but as an expense to be minimized.

And so, for this holiday honoring what's left of the American labor movement, and the underappreciated American worker, this cartoon from last weekend's Cartoon Saturday collection applies in spades ...

Have a good day, and enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend ... assuming you have a job and were fortunate enough to get the day off.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Poetry Sunday

Wes Craven, the director of such frightening films as "Nightmare on Elm Street," "Scream," and "The Last House on the Left," died this past week. In his memory, I thought this week I'd feature this poem that seemed appropriate ...

Scary Movies

by Kim Addonizio

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,
and I keep expecting some enormous
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean
and drag me from my kitchen
to the deep cave that flickered
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless
between my older brothers, pumped up
on candy and horror—that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This
is how it feels to lose it—

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.
I think of a friend's voice

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies
when I'd come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as struck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air
they'd grab me by the ankle and pull me
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older
I would know better, and now
they're dead, and I'm older,
and I know better.

on her answering machine—
Hi, I'm not here—
the morning of her funeral,
the calls filling up the tape

Wes Craven is gone, but there are other directors still churning out scary movies. For my part, I'm waiting to see Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak when it's released next month ... the trailers alone have scared me poopless.

Have a good day, and enjoy the rest of your Labor Day weekend. Tomorrow we'll have more thoughts related to the holiday - come back then.

Bilbo

Cartoon Saturday

Today is Saturday, September 5th - the first Cartoon Saturday of the new month! Since Agnes and I are visiting the family in Pittsburgh this weekend, I don't have time for the usual bad news summary, but I'm sure you're familiar with it all anyway.

In honor of the Labor Day holiday weekend, this week's collection of theme cartoons deals with - what else? - jobs and the workplace.

We lead off with this ultimate Labor Day greeting ...

An interesting question: how do you call in sick when you're teleworking from home?

Never say things can't get any worse at work ...

This is how employee recognition seems to work in most places ...

I've worked in cubicle farms that are like this ...

Labor Day greetings from the people overseas your job was outsourced to ...

I can see this coming ...

Some of us are more easily replaced by machines than others ...

What happens when downsizing doesn't work any more?

This one really speaks to me!

Happy Labor Day! If you have the day off, enjoy it. If you don't, you can at least be thankful that you have a job.

Come back tomorrow for Poetry Sunday. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

Great Moments in Editing

It's a new month, and time for our latest collection of Great Moments in Editing ... I know you're anxious, so let's get right to them ...

I wonder if it was the math teacher who figured this out ...

It must have been a heck of a prom ...

I wonder what the first clue was ...

Well, it's not in my garage ...

I like it when the job qualifications are clearly spelled out ...

Okaaaaaayyyyy ...

Sometimes editors need specific directions ...

I suppose this is true. I just hope it's not anyone that's in the current running ...

If the rattlesnakes are walking, I'm running ...

And finally, some people are easily amused ...

There you have it - our first collection of editorial gems for September of 2015. Have you seen any good bloopers, in print or on signs in your area? Send me a scan or a photo for a future iteration of Great Moments in Editing, and I'll give you credit for the contribution. No cash ... just credit.

Have a good day. Come back tomorrow for Cartoon Saturday. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

Great News!

As we bob helplessly in the swirling cesspool of political BS and chicanery, there's a ray of hope for those of us wishing for better! I call your attention to this article from last August 19th: Nearly Complete Human Brain Grown in US Lab.

Yes, Dear Readers, according to the article, a professor at a laboratory at Ohio State University has grown a brain equal in maturity to that of a five-week-old fetus, which would make it the intellectual equal of many current members of Congress, supporters of Donald Trump*, and the Tinfoil Hat Brigades. If the experiment continues and results in a fully-developed brain, we may be able to dispense with the expense and the scripted ass-clownery of elections by simply growing the brains we need, or replacing the ones that have gotten lost ...

It can't be any worse than what we have now, could it? And who knows, in time, the price of a new brain might come down to where anyone could afford one ... even for those who continue to support political parties that steadfastly work against their economic interests.

Have a good day. See you tomorrow for September's first collection of Great Moments in Editing. More thoughts then.

Bilbo

* The man memorably described in a wonderful Op-Ed article by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as, "... a last-call candidate who looks good in the boozy dark of political inebriation."