Comments on: When Political Cartoons Get Snowed Under

By: Jamie P.

Jamie P. — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:24:31 +0000

What, no one’s commenting on “your hat is gay”?

By: Steffen

Steffen — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:48:04 +0000

I think this is a very apt political cartoon.

The elephant is really rubbing the shoveler’s nose in it… but he’s just as trapped.

By: Dyfsunctional

Dyfsunctional — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:13:22 +0000

gramma(r): I agree. If there’s one area where CIDU Bill has dropped the ball, it’s in the lack of a page specifically dealing with the lame global warming jokes, exactly as you described it. Yessirree.

By: paperboy

paperboy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:28:02 +0000

Yes; back to the CARTOON. The point I (and others) made is that, good or bad or whether he started it, Obama ISN’T “digging out of the debt”, so the image is misleading. (Now let’s all go read what Paul Krugman says about the National Debt)

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:23:48 +0000

And, back to the cartoon, note that while Obama is dressed for the weather, the Republican elephant is not. In his tux, he looks clueless about his environment, or perhaps he is in denial that there even was a snowstorm.
Kind of like supporting the increase in debt when times were good, and debt should be decreased, while complaining about it when times are bad, and a stimulus is needed.

By: gramma(r)

gramma(r) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:58:26 +0000

Okay, on a somewhat related note: the climate issue is actually CLIMATE CHANGE, not global warming. Warming is only one part of the changes we’re seeing, but I’m getting tired of jokes based on the idea that any excessive cold disproves the existence of climate change because it’s been mislabeled. Maybe Bill should start a new category, The Yawn Page, for every unfunny global warming cartoon. There sure are a lot of them.

By: mkilby

mkilby — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:56:18 +0000

… flame-bait … republicans have railed against “entitlement” programs for decades, but have been totally unable to make any headway in eliminating them….

If the flame-baiting continues, at some point CIDU Bill is going to shut the door on this thread. That might even be the logical strategy for our collective mental health: [troll mode] Republican entitlements simply have a different target audience; they are concealed within weapons allocations for the Pentagon, plans to open up coastal regions for off-shore drilling and old growth forests for clear-cut logging, and tax cuts for the wealthy. [/troll mode]

Or, we could simply cool everything off with a nice link to a funny cartoon about snow (with a dab of politics thrown in). See: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/walters10.jpg (discovered in the Comic Riffs blog).

By: src666

src666 — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:49:43 +0000

Whups, sorry, I forgot to put any flame-bait in that one. Here’s my theory regarding the debt: The republicans have railed against “entitlement” programs for decades, but have been totally unable to make any headway in eliminating them. That’s because they are VERY popular with the people, even the people who don’t currently benefit from them.

During the previous administration, they implemented a plan that would allow them to reduce or eliminate the entitlement programs they despise so much: Crushing Debt. By spending their way into record deficits, they could so thoroughly cripple our ability to generate revenues, and increase our debt obligations, that it would no longer be a matter of convincing the people to cut the programs.

Putting the economy into a tailspin helped ensure that no further expansions of these programs could be made, and that it would soon be necessary to start trimming them. If they could sustain the pressure on reducing the government’s income, they could, over time, eliminate the entitlement programs by the simplest measure - make sure there was no money for them.

Meanwhile, they were also reducing the government’s ability to regulate industry, due to the fact there is no money available to expand oversight. This takes care of any pesky rules that prevent them from raping the economy upside down and backwards.

All this was done by a sect that loves their ideology more than they love their nation. For more information on this sect of “conservatism”, see “Iraq, War in.”

Enjoy!

By: RHJunior

RHJunior — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:41:33 +0000

Horseleavings. The original projections were for the unemployment rate to be nowhere CLOSE to 10%. It is now OVER 10%. But hey, when you can revise history to suit yourself…..

Getting back to the comic: Bush’s domestic spending plan had already doubled the deficit; Obama and the Democrats, with their MULTIPLE TRILLIONS of dollars doubled it again. The national deficit for this year alone is four times deeper than any point in history—- and it took this nation over two hundred years to gain as much debt as Obama saddled us with in ONE YEAR.
This makes the entire premise of the comic— Obama “trying to dig out of debt”— a farce. Only in fairyland, in a drug-addled delusion, or in a Democrat socialist daydream do you get OUT of debt by spending MORE. He and the Democrats have put us further and deeper IN debt than ever before in history.

By: src666

src666 — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:34:15 +0000

Mark M, Cash for Clunkers cost us $3 Billion. To you or me, that’s a lot of money, but in terms of our economy it’s chump-change. While it’s effects were at best debatable, I would say in the worst case it was mostly harmless. On the other hand, please lay out a program to prop up one of the very few industrial sectors this nation still has, which ensures that our automakers have a fighting chance in a horrendous economy, and which is also guaranteed to work.

That’s the big problem - “guaranteed to work”. There is no economic policy you can make that is guaranteed to have the effects you desire, unless your desire is to collapse the economy. Lowering interest rates, raising interest rates, lowering specific taxes, raising specific taxes, these all have effects that far exceed their obvious scope, and they all ripple throughout the economy in ways that are VERY hard to predict.

The best anyone can do is listen to rational advice, target their efforts as best they can, and cross their fingers.