CSotD: Hey! You Got Politics In My Funny Papers!
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I like to alternate humorous and political cartoon days, but sometimes the categories cross so here we are. Mike Baldwin has the least political of the funny cartoons today, but the Boring Company is owned by Elon Musk.
He claims he thought of the name while stuck in a traffic jam, which is problematic because (A) they bore tunnels so the name is logical and (B) I’m disinclined to believe much of what Musk says. But it brings everything full circle because the cartoon suggests the same thing.
But hold on a moment, because half a block from where I’m sitting is a small access hole with an iron cover — too small to be a manhole but perhaps an elfhole — and on the cover is the word “Boring,” suggesting that some decades ago, well before Musk thought of it, some other company that made holes called itself that.
However, I can’t find any listing for them, so I guess they were bored to death. Or something.
Dave Whamond also does political cartoons, but this gag ran in his humor panel, and it’s funny or it’s not funny, since depending on what state you live in, it might just be a statement of fact.
Even then, you have to take things with a grain of salt the size of the Ritz, because there are a lot of cowards and quislings so intent on obeying in advance that they’re banning things nobody asked them to ban, which makes for good outrage but can be reversed if local people raise a little hell over it.
Which is to say that I doubt Pete Hegseth ordered the Naval Academy to take out all books by or about African-Americans but to keep Mein Kampf on the shelves. I’m not even sure how many books he could name, much less order banned.
And then there are rumors and attempts at satire, such that the Smithsonian had to put out a statement denying that they had tossed out the lunch counter where civil rights sit-ins took place.
It’s not healthy for a society to become so corrupt and stupid that you can’t tell the jokes from the news.
Nor is it healthy for “stupid” to become a segue into a discussion of our educational system.
Rabbits Against Magic has often had a political twist to it, and this sad commentary goes from a discussion of how American schools are still run like 19th Century factories, but then switches to discuss how politicians have carved out a way to take money from public schools and award it to private academies.
We’ll get into that more when SCOTUS rules on tax-funding religious schools, but what is already happening is that not only is the money being taken from the public schools, but it’s not necessarily going to people who need it.
Many were already able to afford private tuition, and a lot of states have bumped up the income requirements so that you can be pretty well-off and still qualify for aid.
Meanwhile, they’re tightening the rules so that fewer people can get help for things like medical treatment or food stamps, and, as Wiley points out, the impact of Dear Leader’s trade wars is likely to be the middleclass redefined as pretty much everybody.
I saw that Temu and Shein are doubling and tripling prices, which will discourage some people from buying cheap crap they don’t need, but also that people are taking personal loans to buy groceries, which they probably do need.
Barney & Clyde takes on the rampant corruption in which donating millions to fund the inaugural ceremony (nudge nudge wink wink) lowers the risk of your company being sued, though the DOJ has now been told to investigate ActBlue, the top fundraising mechanism for the Democratic Party.
And when Dear Leader isn’t selling cryptocoins to major supporters, he’s selling White House tours and dinner with the president.
I remember when people got upset because Billy Carter was hawking beer.
I remain puzzled by the War on DEI and I think it’s because, like Critical Race Theory, it’s being attacked by people who don’t know what it is, and perhaps also because, as Alcaraz suggests, it’s being attacked by people who weren’t practicing it anyway.
Pledging to have your company follow DEI was performative to begin with, particularly in the executive suite, but throughout the business. For a company to announce they’re canceling DEI just means they’re not going to try to hire women and minorities, which sounds a lot like they’re going to try not to.
However, at ground level there are help-wanted signs on so many businesses these days that it would be quite a luxury to discriminate one way or the other when you desperately need someone of any sex, ethnicity, religion or race to show up on time and come back the next day.
I’m waiting to see what happens when ICE has deported all the braceros while there is a fatwa executive order telling businesses not to discriminate against American-born white folks. It’s already the law that farmers have to give citizens first pick of the jobs nobody here wants before they can hire migrant workers.
And with all the grants being canceled, we can’t hope to develop lettuce that picks itself.
Not all the politics on the funny pages is progressive. The McCoy brothers offer what could be a salute to Kristi Noem, who shot a dog she couldn’t train rather than offering him to somebody who could.
The joke, of course, is that dogs don’t deserve attorneys or trials, because decisions like Gideon and Miranda were the actions of liberal judges, who also don’t deserve due process before being condemned.
In his well-reasoned analysis of the Dugan case, Harry Litman observes that Pam Bondi’s public statements violate the U.S. Attorney’s Manual, which forbids prosecutors “from offering opinions on a defendant’s guilt, supplying their own character assessments, or making any statement that could influence the outcome of a trial at the charging stage.”
But trials take time. Lynchings are efficient.
Great Minds Think Alike
As Joyce Vance says, “We’re in this together.”
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