(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
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Hard politicals times are an inspiration for gifted political cartoonists…
(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)
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(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
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(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
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(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)
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Magda in Black
I interpret this movement as “We’re damned tired of being shot, your thoughts and prayers aren’t working, do something that matters.”
Whereas some of my coworkers interpret it as ” These kids who want to take away our guns.”
” Its a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack”
Baud
@Magda in Black:
There’s absolutely nothing we can do on the subject that won’t be interpreted that way.
Magda in Black
@Baud:
Because “they” live in a world of absolutes.
Pun perhaps intended
trollhattan
@Baud:
@Magda in Black:
My conclusion: we should take away their guns.
Mary G
The Parkland kids have put out a Google document with those orange price tags for every state showing how much money per kid the NRA has donated to their politicians. They are encouraging students to print them out to hang on their backpacks at school. So smart!
Also, too, California’s tag reads “Priceless” because the NRA doesn’t bother here. Lots of other blue states do too. Arizona and North Carolina are the highest at more than $7 per student. Makes sense, those are red states with a chance of turning purple, and they can’t have that.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: These days I can’t even bear to hear the lies David Brooks spouts on a weekly basis on the Snooze Hour. He thinks the kids are being too shrill.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
Somebody said on the news the other night that the thing about these kids is that they just aren’t scared. Donald Tяump doesn’t scare them. Laura Ingraham doesn’t scare them. The N.R.A. doesn’t scare them. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t scare them. Nothing scares them. They’ve lived through something that, thankfully, few of us ever will, and they just don’t have any fear. After what they’ve gone through what they went through and then lived to tell about, why the fuck would Laura Ingraham think she’s going to scare them or intimidate them into shutting up by mocking them? She’s a long way out of her depth.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Frank Stallone attacked David Hogg and called him a “p*ssy” and I think did something that could be called incitement to violence– is that a crime? He then deleted the tweet, cause he’s a big brave he-man, and protected his tweets, like a he-man. I guess he doesn’t know that on the internet, nothing ever really goes away. And I don’t know how to copy and paste screenshots
For those of you to young to know, or who use your memories for useful things, Frank is Sylvester’s brother, and once had some sort of musical career for an hour and a half. I wanna say he had a song on the Footloose or Flashdance or maybe Miami Vice soundtrack.
Spanky
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Or what they said to Ted Nugent.
Kay
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.):
That’s true but they’re so young they don’t have any history with these cable news celebrities either. They come to this clean. They probably don’t see them as powerful – they didn’t see them at all until this thing started. What’s the age of the average Fox viewer? 50 or better? Do they even know who Ted Nugent is?
That’s really when they’re cruelest, teenagers- when they flaunt their youth and your…irrelevance – you got no comeback to that :)
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: You should go back to posting on the FP, we need you and your wisdom.
Kay
@Spanky:
That’s exactly it. That’s what’s effective- “wait a minute, who are you?”
Ted Nugent is a lot of things but one thing he’ll never be is 17 years old again.
Thoughtful David
Responding to a question in the thread below about what “honest conservatives” to read to challenge our own beliefs: There aren’t any. Full stop.
To be a conservative today you have to be disconnected from reality, because as Colbert said, reality has a well-known liberal bias. To be a conservative you intentionally can’t understand that:
* Cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenue.
* Having a gun in the house makes you more likely to be killed by a gun.
* To reduce abortions make birth control free and readily available, and give single mothers free child care.
* Most people on Medicaid are already working.
* The cheapest way to deal with the homeless is to give them free housing.
* It costs those of us with insurance when a person with no health insurance goes to the emergency room.
* Etc. I could go on and on.
All of these are facts, with strong supporting evidence. But if you’re a conservative, you can’t believe any of it.
So, no, there are no “honest” or “reasonable” conservatives out there to be read.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Mary G: It was one of my proudest moments working for the Obama campaign in 2008, the campaign organizer (a former student of Obama at the University of Chicago) in the area used our big old empty office as headquarters. We would phone bank, be a sorting house for pamphlets and door hangers and the campaign organizer basically slept on the couch in the upstairs office. It was wonderful throwing my arms around Jason the day after the election, because we hadn’t turned North Carolina purple, we had turned North Carolina blue. It has been done before, it can be done again. I won’t be there to help but I know that there are the boots on the ground there who WILL make it happen.
dmsilev
@Magda in Black: The good news there is that once someone has decided that even modest gun control proposals are equivalent to ‘gonna grab my guns’, they’ve shot their rhetorical wad so to speak. They’re caught in a corner and can’t deal with genuinely modest and genuinely popular proposals such as closing the gun-show background check loophole. They come cross as fanatical and won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with them.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
Thanks. I saw an old friend over spring break- I haven’t see her in decades. I asked her if she remembered our going out for her 21st birthday – I said “you were so young!” She said “you were young too- if I was 21 then you were 22”
OMG, REALLY? That’s TRUE :)
For some reason I froze her at 21 while I continued to age and then I put us both together….but in the past.
SiubhanDuinne
IMO, the best political cartoons are the ones that take two (or more) different — even unrelated — news stories or memes and join them together. That Jack Ohman at the very top of the thread is a fine example.
Adam L Silverman
@Kay: But he will continue to groom 12-17 year olds.
Catherine D.
One of the five Ds running for NY 23 just came to my door. Didn’t sign the nominating petition because I don’t know enough yet about all of them, but we vented about Rs for a good bit.
Kay
@Adam L Silverman:
Right. Which would make them think he’s even grosser, if they knew. But they won’t bother to find out because they don’t care.
My son went out on the school walkout, which was very orderly and somber. They didn’t get punished which he believes is because two smart girls led it, which is probably true. You get good grades you’re pretty much golden in that school. They give them a lot of leash as long as they’re churning out A’s.
Emerald
@Mary G: I note that Vermont is not priceless, and is not the lowest amount, either.
Wilmer is gonna have to answer for his NRA support, finally.
OzarkHillbilly
@trollhattan: I like to say about gun owners, that we all know someone who has no business owning a gun. If you don’t? You’re the one.
Davebo
@Spanky: The guy who loves carrying around assault rifles yet literally shit his pants to avoid the draft.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
For the bird lovers among us, Mr DAW’s BIL took these pics of birds in Ecuador a week or two ago. They were there on a birding trip.
Adam L Silverman
@Kay: Like Scott Walker, if I saw him within 100 feet of a school, park, and/or shopping mall I’d call the cops.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Because it is basically true. We do want to take away their freedumb to own deadly weapons that they can not control. The military, which after all is about killing people, controls deadly weapons. They control them a lot more than we as a society do. They understand what those weapons are for, their one purpose, to kill people. When they don’t have authorization to kill people, they control the access to weapons. We should do less?
Adam L Silverman
@OzarkHillbilly: Everyone knows who Dana Loesch is, so that’s an easy one to answer.
Kay
@Adam L Silverman:
We had a lawyer who did juvenile court appointments here for a while. I don’t know what he was saying to these kids but they were offended at how many cuss words he used, even though they swear constantly amongst themselves My sense was they thought he was trying to make them like or accept him, which is just the kiss of fucking death. Contempt. Sheer, withering contempt. They want him to act his age, observe propriety, be a grown up. He can’t have their thing.
Mandalay
@Kay:
This is what Nugent said when explaining his Vietnam draft dodging:
Not unlike fellow draft dodger Trump on the Parkland massacre:
Draft dodging legends in their own minds.
Kay
@Adam L Silverman:
I have some gut sense of foreboding about Huckabee. He is exactly the sort of person I made a wide berth around in my youth. He has mean eyes. I wouldn’t want him in a school. Not fair, but there it is. Just…no. No volunteer coaching for you!
Ruckus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.):
Having been shot at will do that to you. But I will say that it’s not that they aren’t scared. It’s that they are not afraid to say why they are scared. And of whom. Those names you stated, they aren’t scary, they aren’t armed, they aren’t coming to their schools and towns and shooting them up. They are making that a much too much reality but they aren’t the ones with the guns, just the ones doing all the yelling that people have the right and privilege of shooting the people they don’t like. The kids aren’t scared of them because they aren’t as scary as the shooters, the believers, the shooters.
They aren’t scared because words aren’t scary, especially words from idiots. Guns are scary because they can maim and kill you instantly.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: between Jethrene and the son who tortured dogs, and the one who tried to board a plane with loaded gun, I’m guessing there was some shit going on in the Huckabee house
@Adam L Silverman: Tom Cotton and Rick Santorum. I don’t know what ain’t right about those boys, but those boys ain’t right
JR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Staying Alive was the movie, the ill fated sequel to Saturday Night Fever. Directed by Frank’s brother.
OzarkHillbilly
@Adam L Silverman: She is the Queen of people who have no business owning a gun. I suppose ted nugent would be the princess.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I don’t think Ted was ever 17. He went from being 4 to being 45 in about 20 seconds. And back to 4 again in the next 20. He will never grow up, he’s not capable.
Adam L Silverman
@Kay: I think he’s most likely a hitter, not a molester. Walker has that creepy vibe though. And Nugent is a self confessed hebephile.
bemused
@Kay:
Sarah is a chip off the old block. She reminds me of a few really mean grade school teachers.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oh, please, her, with her wanting to get home so she can bake pies.
They’re classic preacher-grifters. They should be traveling the country passing a hat at fake revival meetings. I knew enough to stay away from people like this by the time I was 8 years old.
scott (the other one)
@Mandalay: That’s the thing: the Parkland students have more combat experience at 17 than famous tough guy Ted Nugent does at age 69.
scott (the other one)
@Ruckus: Anecdata: I know a fair number of self-described gun nuts. I know a lot of veterans. There is virtually no crossover between the two. That doesn’t seem coincidence to me.
Kay
@Ruckus:
Friends of ours who live in upstate NY have a 17 year old and he went to the DC march. His friend’s mother called him a “pussy” for going. They’re just horrible people. Any random teenager is vastly superior to these “adults”.
Ruckus
@Thoughtful David:
It’s far worse than that.
There really isn’t an intellectual conservative anything. There never has been. It’s not about intellectual anything. Conservatism is about power and money. It always has been and always will be. It’s dishonest because of what it is and that so many have tried to hide what it is about. Read any conservative tome from any time frame, it’s all about having the power and money. Getting it and maintaining it. Lots of bullshit to hid the concept from the light of day but that’s the basis of conservatism. Say it with me class, Having All the Power and Money.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I have no memory of George Romney, and having seen the elder Bushes operate in real time, I’m skeptical of the canonization of retired politicians who spawn awful politicians, but I’d like to think the old man would be utterly disgusted with his granddaughter (and her entitled knob cousins aren’t much better)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ruckus: there’s a lot of sentimentality about Jack Kemp, as a conservative Republican who cared about poverty and blah blah blah. The only actual idea I’ve ever heard associated with him– and it’s not like I’ve researched it– was “enterprise zones”.
Jager
The cops in Sacramento shot 20 rounds, 8 hit Stephon Clark, 12 went somewhere else and the gun humpers think they are going to snap awake at 3 in the morning pull out their 9 and hit an intruder or drop a bad guy at the mall? These people think they’re in a movie.
Somebody ought to mention to Ted, that the first thing he’d hear in the US Army would be a DI in his face asking him, “Nugent, who do you think you are John Fucking Wayne?”
Schlemazel
@Baud:
And that is why their opinion should be ignored. The kids are doing that.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Fixed.
Schlemazel
@Kay:
One of my classmates (who was kind of an asshole) filed for CO status in 1970.
His dad was a Col in the Marine Reserve & the football coach. I am sure that was a fun time had by all
Ruckus
@scott (the other one):
There are gun fetish vets. Never think they aren’t out there. There are over 22 million living vets in the US. Not all of us hate guns.
Hell I don’t hate guns. Don’t like them either.
Yes they are inanimate killing objects but they always have been. It’s the gun humpers, the people who think guns are the answer to everything, when they are the answer to only one thing, death/destruction. Ask Adam, he’s very well versed in the fact that guns are rarely the answer. The military is willing to use them, most understand that it’s a last resort for an untenable situation, not the first.
Jager
@Jager: I just looked at a thermal image of the backyard where Clark was shot, the cops were no more than 25 feet from him when they fired. In the picture you can see the cops at the corner of house and Clark on the ground. Damn.
Ruckus
@Kay:
I don’t know about ANY random teen but I’d bet, with you, the vast majority are better.
Some people think that being an adult has bestowed some magical powers of reason and sanity upon them, when just living doesn’t do that in the least. They stopped learning about being a better person and became a bitter person when they figured out that being an adult really wasn’t any better and in many ways was worse. All that responsibility and shit. Plus it lasts longer. I think it’s quite possible they are jealous of teens. Or it could be they are just assholes.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, that was a good one.
You want some power and money? OK just to keep you from making too much noise we will give you some power and money, as long as it’s contained to people we hate and would be fucking over anyway. Not too much power and money, we can’t have that, just enough to get you to shut the hell up.
Librarian
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “You guessed it, Frank Stallone.”
Another Scott
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): Very nice. Thanks very much.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sab
@scott (the other one): I know a serious gun nut who is also an Iraq war veteran. He is also a white local cop in my mixed race city. Talk about a disaster waiting to happen.
Ohio Mom
@Ruckus: I remember enterprise zones as being blocks of land in low-income neighborhoods handed over to private companies with all sorts of tax breaks and lots of free, made-to-order infrastructure, all for some vague promises to hire a few locals.
The lucky low-income neighborhood got industry in their backyard, just what everybody wants — really, if this is what everybody wants, there’d be no such thing as zoning and there would be a factory around the corner from me, instead of another suburban subdivision.
Anyway, the neighborhood was degraded and the only ones making any real money were the private companies.
Jack Kemp’s big talent was generating good PR for himself.
Ruckus
@Ohio Mom:
Conservatism. It’s all about power and money, getting as much of the first so they can steal all of the second. Always has been, always will be. Some might be nice about it, for cover, most won’t give a damn about nice.
Now politicians are about power, that’s the nature of the job. Not all of them are about abusing that power, because not all of them are about stealing all the money. Not all that is except all the conservatives. And they may not all be about stealing all the money for themselves but they are about stealing it for someone.
Cckids
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
People said this a lot while Romney was running, but I kept thinking “but George raised this kid”. I know parents aren’t all-powerful, but you do have influence on what kind of human your kids turn out to be. Maybe George was too busy being socially liberal at work to see that he was raising an asshole.
Mandalay
@Ruckus:
Laura Ingraham being a great example of that. This is another tweet on the Parkland students that she sent out five weeks ago which mostly slipped under the radar:
The notion that teens aren’t entitled to criticize Marco Rubio, an adult, simply because they aren’t old enough is just absurd on its face.
Mnemosyne
@Mandalay:
The right wing goes further than that — they insist that no teenager has the right to criticize any adult, because teenagers are lower on the hierarchy than adults are. Teenagers are required to respect adults at all times because they’re social inferiors, period.
Amir Khalid
@Jager:
John Fucking Wayne, like Ted Pants-Shitter Nugent, never served in real life. Wayne, I have read, was the despair of movie directors because he was not convincing as a military man.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
At least they understand what being a social inferior is. Of course they mistake looking in a mirror for everything they blame everyone else for.
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
In the military the hardest part for a lot of people was figuring out that you do far better if you go along rather than fight the man. Because boot camp was there to teach you exactly that, be a productive part of the team and the team won’t beat the shit out of you. Not being a productive part but not a rebel would get you no friends. Being a rebel made your life a living hell. The majority knew that going in. But there always seemed to be some that needed that extra bit of instruction. And did they ever get it.
John Wayne always seemed to be the type to think his shit didn’t stink. That would have made him a rebel in boot camp. But he swaggered well on screen and that was what mattered.
John Fremont
@Ruckus: I’m a Marine veteran, and most of the gun fetishist vets I know have been rear echelon pogues, like me. Infantry and armor vets I know that have seen combat aren’t so gundementalist in their attitudes about it. I don’t hate guns either but I respect what they can do so I want to see stricter and comprehensive laws on gun ownership
Ruckus
@John Fremont:
Best buddy, 45 yrs is a Marine vet, landed in Chu Lai on the eve of the Tet offensive. Carried an M16 for 13 months with him every where, never fired it once. He hates guns. Me, navy, carried a loaded .45 on in port watch for 2 yrs. During my last 4 months in I served in the Shore Patrol, only the gate guards had guns. I don’t hate them as I said, but don’t really give a shit either except that people keep shooting each other. And they keep doing it just because. We have heard all the concepts about staying safe but we never really hear any police reports about people protecting themselves with guns when someone breaks into their house. What we do hear are assholes going into schools and killing kids. What we hear is people going to a concert and 58 of them get shot. BTW I’m only once removed from one of those LV people. Guy I used to work with, the person next to him was shot in the torso. I’ve heard of outposts in Vietnam that got overrun and not that many died. In 2 years we have at least 20% more gun deaths than American military who died in Vietnam from any cause.
OK soap box away. I’d bet that a lot of vet gun humpers are non combat vets. Most of the combat guys that I know got all their gun jollies when people could and did shoot back. A lot of combat vets that I’ve met wish they could forget their time in country. I’d bet a fair number of non combat vets are more like drumpf and tad nugget, their desire to be manly men is outweighed by their innate chickenshit natures. It’s great to be a beer bar hero, without having to experience the sheer terror of people trying to kill you on a daily basis. I don’t know this first hand but I did spend 2 months in a naval hospital with about 30-40 guys who couldn’t be allowed out on their own. Today it’s called PTSD, and some of them had it very, very bad. I doubt all of them ever got well. Every day one Marine sgt and I would be let in through the 2 sets of locked doors to sit in group and then out later. It was not entertaining in the least. Yeah I can’t imagine many real combat vets liking guns. I sat in a group 2 yrs ago trying to deal with my cancer with a young guy, one of the youngest I’ve seen, probably late 20s, he had the same look in his eyes as most of those 30-40 guys 40+ yrs earlier. Life wasn’t going all that well for him either.
Anne Laurie
@Cckids:
George Romney was governor of Michigan while my Spousal Unit was growing up; every Michigander I knew during the 15 years I spent there remembers him fondly, even the ones who considered him either a coddle-the-poors RINO or a secret fascist playing reasonable for the cameras.
Only ever met his son Mitt for a few seconds, when he first started glad-handing his way to the governorship of Massachusetts — but that contact set off my Gavin deBecker instincts *so* strongly, I suspect Mitt might just be one of nature’s natural sociopaths. (Certainly his poor wife & his grown kids all have that glassy-eyed Stockholm Stare, and every story they tell reinforces the theory.) Not much a parent can do with a kid born like that, I’m told, apart from try to keep him from hurting others, while he’s under their control…