Monthly Archives: August 2009
Looks malignant…
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
TDS: “Ahmadidn’t Win”
Jon Stewart offers some interesting thoughts (and video clips) on this week’s Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taking the oath of office for a second term in an election (selection) that was anything BUT legitimate…
Alabama Sheriff Asks Governor To Send In National Guard During $4.1M Budget Cut
Without state aid, he wrote in a letter to Riley, his office “cannot provide the level of public safety that residents of Jefferson County deserve and expect.”
“If state funding of deputies’ salaries is not an option, then I must call upon you to activate the National Guard,” the letter to Riley said.
Gibbs: Rush Should Be “On Thin Ice” For Nazi Comments
Gibbs says: “I think anytime you make references to what happened in Germany in the ’30′s and ’40′s. I think you’re talking about an event that has no equivalent. I think anytime anyone ventures to compare anything to that – they’re on thin ice.”
The Watering Hole: August 8, Nixon Resigns
On this date in 1974, Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, announced that he would resign as president, effective at noon the next day. Unlike Sarah Palin, Nixon found the idea of resigning before his term was finished as “abhorrent”. The first video was the few minutes before Nixon delivered his speech (something he referred to as “the broadcast”.) The next two videos are the speech itself.
This is today’s Open Thread and you can either remember Nixon fondly or talk about anything else.
Five minutes before he resigned…
Resignation speech Part I:
Resignation speech Part II:
Join the More-On Tours!
You too can be a disrupter!
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jeff Danziger, Syndicated Political Cartoonist
This is the Health Care Status Quo the GOP wants to Protect
I admit, I couldn’t watch more than a third of the video. People who have given up their right to think are mindlessly yelling GOP talking points to disrupt townhall and other informative debates on health care reform. In so doing, they act to protect a for-profit system that causes needless suffering and kills their fellow Americans.
Feel free to post your thoughts and experiences below.
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It is Friday Isn’t it?
Music Night seems like it needs a little bit of horse into the arm. I apologize for the poor quality of this one but it sure as hell is better than that Orchestral Manoveurs in The Dark tune I considered… Come on gang lay down some tunes that I can enjot at the crack of dawn…
END SOCIALISM NOW
The largest part of the Federal Government goes to a massive socialist program: SOCIAL SECURITY!
In this program, wealth is redistributed from young, working Americans to pay their grandparents for NOT WORKING! These are folks who had a lifetime to save for their golden years but didn’t want to make the sacrifice. Now, merely by virtue of living long enough, they get a free ride.
Not only do they draw a paycheck for the rest of their life without having to do one more day’s worth of honest labor, their medical needs are paid for by the taxpayers as well.
We should all live like the Waltons. No, not the family that owns Walmart – the Waltons from the old TV series. They made their living chopping down old-growth trees for their family-owned lumber mill. Grandma and Grandpa lived with the kids until the day they died. They worked until they could work no more. That’s how it should be. The Waltons were the image of the American Utopia: a working class family struggling to make ends meet during the Great Depression.
We should end socialism now and return to the days of the Waltons.
The Blog Post Every American Needs to Read
Want a real life story about the French healthcare system? Not a story from a guy some guy knows who is a friend of a colleague, but from an American who, while in Paris on vacation, had to suffer the indignity of that socialist country’s terrible emergency healthcare system? Read it now.
Sometimes it’s best to start a long story at the very end. In the case of my emergency eye problems in France, it’s the part of the story where the French medical system keeps refusing to let me pay for my $3000 surgery.
Go on. Click that link!
And pass it along!
The Watering Hole: August 7 – The Kon-Tiki
On this date in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl’s balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, beached on a reef on Raroia one of the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 4375-mile journey across the South Pacific. It was an effort to demonstrate that Polynesian settlement of the Pacific could have started from South America.
While Heyerdahl proved that a westward migration was possible. DNA evidence seems to prove that the migrations were primarily eastward.
An Open Letter To “White America”
This is not a white country. It was not founded to be a white country, nor a Christian country. The founding fathers were a mix of Christians and non-Christians (second more detailed source). Most notably, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin were all well outside mainstream Christian thinking during their day. Jefferson went so far as the create his own version of the Bible in which he removed all of Jesus’ miracles. James Madison was quoted as saying, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”
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“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.“
This country was established on the principles and values of the Enlightenment, which were most often at odds with the beliefs of Christianity during their time.
This is not now, nor has it ever been a Christian country. White culture is not synonymous with American culture, and the simple fact that you don’t like to be called racists doesn’t make your racism any less real. Seriously, a very sizeable chunk of the GOP base refuses to belief that our president was born in this country, despite a total lack of evidence to suggest otherwise versus a birth certificate, newspaper announcement, and the word of the current Governor of his state that he was in fact born there. Guess what? That’s racism at worst, blind, hateful partisanism at best. You have no reason to hold on to your lunatic ravings other than your pre-existing hatred for our current president.
As for the tea-bagger town hall protests, while the individual citizens showing up to drown out the basic necessity of reasoned discussion between Congressional leaders and their consituents — how anti-Democratic can you get? — do represent some segment of “real Americans,” so too do the overwhelming majorities of participants who are simply looking to be informed on the details of the health care plan, and the reasons their representatives are supporting it. Despite what some on the Right like to claim, shutting down townhall meetings is not in the least democratic, and in fact, is a tactic dating back to the earliest Communist uprisings in Russia. Just so you know the company you’re in.
The only thing I’m learning from all this is that this movement is hysterical, and wildly misinformed to the point of being unconcerned with the objective reality most of us reside in.
The Slob Fishermen of Japan
Richard O’Barry who once trained several dolphins for the “Flipper” series has created a documentary, The Cove, which will be released on August 7, 2009. This documentary exposes the fishermen that needlessly slaughter up to 23,000 dolphins a year in Taiji, Japan.
(From MSNBC)
It’s no exaggeration to say that “The Cove” could do for Japan’s slaughter of dolphins what Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” did for the meat-packing industry or Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” did for polluters. Whether you’re a fervent PETA activist or someone who still likes eating veal, you’ll find yourself shaken by the revelations of this powerful new documentary.
Dolphins, as it turns out, swim some 40 miles a day in the open sea. They have a very sophisticated sense of sonar, in which their undersea cries allow them to understand their surroundings. Not surprisingly, they hate being stuck in small tanks — most dolphin shows keep large quantities of Maalox and Mylanta on hand, we are told, because the intelligent, finned creatures suffer from stress-related ulcers in captivity. (The dolphins’ permanent smile hides their true feelings.)
If only the dolphins could change their facial expressions, then we would know how they feel about being confined in a tank. We place these free animals in jail with a life sentence of entertaining people.
Faring far worse are the dolphins that are slaughtered by the hundreds each day between September and March off the coast of Japan; they’re lured into a cove, and those that aren’t sold off to trainers are butchered.There’s a case to be made, of course, about killing animals for food, but the film tells us that dolphin meat is so saturated with mercury — 22,000 parts per million, when the legal limit in Japan is 0.4 parts per million — that it’s too poisonous for human consumption. And yet, Japan defends its right to kill dolphins, even buying off impoverished nations to vote alongside Japan in international conferences that manage the capture of whales and other cetaceans. (It’s worth noting that most Japanese citizens have no idea that this slaughter is even taking place; city dwellers far from the coast are shown reacting with horror when shown the filmmakers’ footage.)
This inhumane slaughter of these highly evolved and intelligent mammals is appalling and reminds me of the Slob Hunters of Pennsylvania. Neither of these butcheries are for food.
The Japanese fishermen consider dolphins to be a nuisance, kind of like field mice in the corn shed and therefore, they are to be destroyed. Japan has over fished the waters surrounding its island nation and is now competing with dolphins for fish for making sushi and other Japanese dishes.
Of course, this film has stirred up some contraversy with tourists and places like Sea World.
Long notorious for its brutality, the Taiji slaughter is a so-called “drive hunt,” during which fishermen in a string of boats use clanging sounds to herd dolphins into small coves. Once penned, some dolphins are picked out by dolphin trainers and animal brokers for purchase and transport to amusement parks and resorts. The rest are killed with spears, knives and clubs in an orgy of cruelty. As the film graphically shows, the sea water churns into a bloody froth. The cries of the dolphins are pathetic.But is it really possible that American tourists buying tickets to Sea World are somehow supporting this hunt and others like it? To understand the answer, it helps to know how amusement parks obtain their animals.
Read more about the dolphin trade here.
There are videos on YouTube showing the dolphin slaughter. Be warned… these videos are very graphic and that is why I choose not to link to them.
Until this needless slaughter of these intelligent mammals is stopped, I will boycott all products that come from Japan.
(Point of View ~ Cats r Flyfishn which may not represent the views of other Zoo Critters.)
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Rachel Maddow: “Intimination”
Here is your MUST VIEW video for today!! Nobody can articulate the issues and the facts surrounding them like Rachel Maddow. Nobody!
Msnbc’s Rachel Maddow exposes the big money backers posing as average Americans behind the anti-health care reform event “Recess Rally.”
These people will stop at nothing to prevent healthcare in this country from being reformed, and made accessible to all Americans. This was one of Rachel’s best segments yet.
Imbeciles scream the loudest…
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle Editorial Cartoonist and Animation Artist.
For Nick’s animations, visit Nick Anderson: Animation Archives.
For Nick’s cartoons, visit Nick Anderson.
Hotel Kitty
We took a trip to the beach last weekend and stayed in a hundred year old hotel. Wonderful place! No phones, and no TV. All the rooms are based on famous authors. We stayed in the Agatha Christie room. It was filled with clues to a murder mystery…
There are two ‘hotel kitties’ that roam about freely. This kitty, Shelley, came to visit us the last day, and jumped on the bed to take it’s nap—like it owned the place. Cute..
~ Photo by nwmuse
Here comes the bride…?
My daughter pointed out this wedding entrance video to me. I wonder if this is the one the cartoonist is referring to.. It looked like so much fun!
So, how much fun is it okay to have at a wedding…(?)
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
The Watering Hole: August 6 – Hiroshima
On this date in 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in Japan by the Enola Gay, a United States B29. This marks a most grim date in the history of warfare.
Following is an reenactment of that event:
If that is not horrifying enough, current weapons can are capable of driving a shock wave for a distance of 30 miles from the blast center in less than a minute. Only about 2000 fusion warheads could level every structure ever made by mankind. The United States and Russia each possess more then that. The blast below was close to the power of the Hiroshima blast:
About .466 grams of mass is converted to energy by a 1o kiloton nuclear blast. That’s equivalent to to the mass of 1/5 tsp. of water. Those atoms that are not left in their original state are converted into atomic ash in the form of other elements and isotopes, some of them, in turn, radioactive. The neutron flux from the blast converts some materials used to make the bomb into either radioactive isotopes or causes them to split into other elements adding to the devil’s brew. This ash is distributed by wind currents and falls to Earth thousands of miles down wind. Larger fusion(H-Bomb) ash clouds can circle the Earth several times, but generally remain in the same hemisphere.
Creative Reichting 101
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jeff Danziger, Syndicated Political Cartoonist
Health Insurance->Lobbying->Talking Points
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Paul Jamiol, Jamiol’s World
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Location, Location, Location
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Paul Jamiol, Jamiol’s World
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Prescription
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle Editorial Cartoonist and Animation Artist.
For Nick’s animations, visit Nick Anderson: Animation Archives.
For Nick’s cartoons, visit Nick Anderson.
Denial
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Matt Davies, NY Journal News
Schuster Interviews “Birther” Orly Taitz Over Obama’s Birth Certificate
From the War Room - Alex Koppelman at Salon.com
Full disclosure: I was supposed to be on MSNBC this afternoon talking about the Birthers and their release of what they claim is a copy of President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate. (It’s really an obvious forgery.) But shortly after I agreed to go on, the booker called and said they had to cancel. The reason why, it turns out, is that they’d booked de facto Birther movement leader Orly Taitz instead.
But in this case, I think this interview served a purpose, as Taitz did a fair amount of damage to her cause all by herself. Anyone who was on the fence and watched the interview could not possibly come away from it thinking she’s credible.
For me, this is a continuing theme I keep seeing over and over again. The birthers and teabaggers do an interview to obfuscate, lie and scream over the interviewer hoping someone will believe them. When you have facts and logic on your side, there is never a need to lie or yell. I agree with Koppelman, she hurt her chances of anyone taking her seriously after watching that. Me personally, I could only handle about three minutes of it……
