Humor – Page 41 – The Wrongologist

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 28, 2014

The Saudis make its relationship with the coalition very clear:

We learned this week from the Wall Street Journal that Mr. Obama made a deal with the Saudis. They will lend legitimacy for our attacks against ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra). Then, the US will move against the Assad government in Syria. The neocon editors of The Economist are doing victory laps. Here is the “Obama Accomplished” photo from The Economist story:

Despite the new strategy, Obama is not sleeping well:

America sends troops to Africa, Cuba sends doctors and nurses:

Finally, in new analysis from the Pew Research Center, fewer Republicans believe in evolution today than did in 2009:
• 43% of those who identify with the Republican Party say they believe humans have evolved over time, plunging from 54% four years ago
• 48% say they believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” up from 39% percent in 2009.

How unbelievably stupid does one have to be to believe that evolution is a hoax? It’s only a guess, but it is probable that a poll would show a higher percentage of Americans believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. Here are the data:

Never let facts get in the way of a good belief system.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 22, 2014

Will this be the Military Service Patch for our never-ending involvement in Iraq?

The Old Lady from South Carolina (OLFSC), on Fox a week ago: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

This is a war we’re fighting! It is not a counterterrorism operation. This is not Somalia. This is not Yemen. This is a turning point in the war on terror. Our strategy will fail yet again. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.

He said the same thing a decade ago. Then-freshman Sen. Lindsey Graham (OLFSC) worried that Saddam’s (nonexistent) cache of nerve gas “could kill millions of people”.

Some people think Arabs are an existential threat, but climate change is a myth?

The Arab Nations really are backing our ISIS effort…Really:

We will see if we truly have an exit strategy:

In other news, independence remains elusive in Scotland:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 14, 2014

In this week’s “Parade of Bad News”: Yes, the Wrongologist remembers where he was on 9/11, but where we are today is way more important:

Mr. Obama must plan carefully whenever the “Coalition” gets together:

Nobody said building an ISIS “strategy” would be easy:

After the speech, the “coalition of the willing” didn’t include the 535 Commanders-in-Chief in Congress:

In other news, here’s why the NFL didn’t get it right the first time:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 7, 2014

It seems that we have nearly reached peak moron, but since WWIII ain’t gonna start itself, Mr. Putin and the guys at ISIS are trying to do what they can to move us in that direction:

NATO is happy to get back to an enemy it understands:

Putin wants peace with Ukraine, now that he owns about 1/3 of the country:

Turning to domestic news, on Monday, the Senate will vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The Democracy for All amendment, Senate Joint Resolution 19, allows governments to distinguish between people and corporations. It won’t pass in the House, so the Koch Brothers will be free to continue marching the Country toward Fascism.

The public finally got behind the issue of personal privacy when nude celebrity photos were hacked from the cloud:

And the fight we really want to win goes on:

Finally, RIP Joan Rivers:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 17, 2014

Difficult week. Ferguson MO, Iraq and RIP Robin:

The media is making a thing of Robin Williams’s suicide. Media coverage and commentary is wall-to-wall, just like when Seymour Phillip Hoffman OD’ed.

They ignore that CNN says that there are 22 suicides a DAY among America’s veterans. What has happened to proportionality in the press?

A study published this week in Health Affairs states that spending on behavioral health disorders is expected to decline from 7.4% of total health spending in 2009 to 6.5% in 2020, while actual dollars spent are projected to increase from $172 billion in 2009 to $281 billion in 2020. More needs to be done.

From the police blotter:

We heard on Friday that Michael Brown may have stolen cigars from a convenience store. The media says that it shows the kid was no saint. But people aren’t shot for shoplifting, they get arrested and need help from lawyers like these philadelphia criminal lawyers to help reduce their charges. This is despite the fact that shoplifting costs American retailers approximately $14B annually. Once again, the media are conflating the dead boy and his possible crime with the right of the people to free assembly to protest a grievance against their government, as well as the threat that is posed to ordinary Americans by militarized police.

The Ice Bucket Challenge throws cold water on Obama:

We revise our view of Iraqi history:

Iraq owns us. 4 US presidents in row have been called to action there:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 10, 2014

On Sunday, we reach for humor and less seriousness, but lately, the cartoons aren’t funny, they tend toward the ironic, or are downright scary. Maybe that is understandable, since we are back in Iraq. ISIS is now as bad as or worse, than Al-Qadea, which might be good news for the Wrongologist’s defense stocks!

Why is the Iraqi government outgunned by a rogue group of thugs?

Anyone?…Bueller?

Expanding “Arabia” to the wider Islamic world, we Americans have been on very sandy ground, from Kabul to Baghdad to Benghazi. And, like quicksand, we can’t escape:
• We’re working with Iran in Iraq, but against them in Israel and in Syria
• Iran is working with Palestinians in Israel, but against them in Syria
• Turkey a member of NATO, supports Hamas against Israel, but is against Assad

Nations in the Middle East are frequently allies on one front and enemies on the other. Somewhere in that paradox is the solution. Now that we are out of Afghanistan, will we have to fight the new terror group of the month, or the new terror group of the year? Can we be the police department to the world, yet keep our social contract and our domestic freedoms intact?

Military recruiters are about the same the world over:

T.E. Lawrence – Britain’s “Lawrence of Arabia”, warned that Arabia is not a hospitable place:

Iraq didn’t stop being a cesspool when we left;

Reingagement is a tough equation to solve:

In other news, the leaders of Africa came to DC to hear our new pitch:

Finally, Jim Brady died this week. The Wrongologist’s company was a vendor to the Brady Center, and played a very small part in building public support for the Brady Bill:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 3, 2014

For those on vacation, or without access to the Interwebs, here is a summation of this week’s wrong:
• The Senate couldn’t pass a bill to impose taxes on companies that move overseas
• The House didn’t vote on Mr. Boehner’s immigration bill because Sen. Ted Cruz blocked it
• We brokered a 72-hour cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that lasted 90 minutes
• The Times of Israel took down a blog post that made a case for genocide
• Mr. Obama admitted that we torture

That’s not a lot of humor to work with, but here are the best. Congress hurries to not finish their work:

Ted Cruz driving baby Boehner:

Genocide of Palestinians is contemplated in the Times of Israel:

Yochanan Gordon framed his premise as “a question for all the humanitarians out there”:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Umm, wasn’t that the excuse Nazis gave the world about Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals?

And Mr. Netanyahu told the White House not to force a truce with Palestinian militants on Israel. He apparently advised the Obama administration “not to ever second guess me again” on the matter.

So, it looks increasingly like we need a 3-State solution:

In yesterday’s speech, President Obama said “We tortured some folks” and that “we shouldn’t be too sanctimonious”. The President:

It is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had… A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots…That needs to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.

Apparently, some people didn’t agree:

"We tortured some folks." Nope. Actually the CIA and the military did that. Don't try to put that shit on the rest of us, Obama.

— onekade (@onekade) August 1, 2014

What would cause Mr. Obama to make this “apology” for torture? Has he lost touch, or is he living in a bubble of intelligence advisers that he can’t or won’t fire?

This is reminiscent of the way that J. Edgar Hoover controlled (or intimidated) presidents in what we used to think was another age. Who, or what, is making this president say such crap, and not take what are to most of us, obvious actions?

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 27, 2014

A corporatist meme took a face plant this week. Bloomberg Business Week charted CEO pay vs. stock market return, based on data supplied by the executive compensation consultants, Equilar. It shows that there is very little correlation between CEO pay and company performance.

Equilar ranked the salaries of 200 highly paid CEOs against their company’s stock market return, and the scattering of data looks mostly random, implying that CEO performance appears to have little to do with CEO compensation. The graph plots the relative ranking of 2013 stock market return against the relative ranking of 2013 CEO total compensation. If you go to Bloomberg, the chart below is interactive. You can hover over a dot and see information on the CEO and company.

Bottom line: there’s essentially no link between how well CEOs perform and how well they are paid:

Based on this, it seems that corporate boards are unable to predict how well their chosen CEO candidate will do once on the job, since the trend line, which didn’t plot in this screen capture, shows that the correlation is ~1%. That explodes the myth that a primary metric used by company board compensation committees to justify CEO pay is stock market return.

CEO pay isn’t the government’s business, but corporate governance is. When governance is based on something other than what shareholders are told, it is worth a look.

In other news, the immigration issue continued, with Texas Governor Perry’s grandstanding. He was joined by many in Congress and in the media, some of whom wanted to be sure that the Texas National Guard was armed against the threat implied by children illegally crossing our border.

Lady Liberty’s meditation on immigration is lost in the noise:

An alternative strategy might build sympathy for the kids’ plight:

In Obamacare news, courts made two opposite decisions using the same facts:

It was another week of some Advising but very little Consenting:

The loss of MH17 brought no new facts, just grandstanding here as well:

Gaza, along with Ukraine, show how missile use has changed in 45 years:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 20, 2014

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” ― Edward R. Murrow

Your aspiring blogger visited the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan yesterday. It was very moving and quite crowded. A striking thing was remembering how uniform the reactions of other countries were. They all felt badly for America, many offered help.

Our citizens were very united, showing sympathy for the families of the people lost on that day, working together to search for possible survivors, supporting George Bush in his attack on Iraq.

We are paying a huge price around the world for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We no longer have the sympathy of the world, many nations no longer trust us, and quite a few have become our enemy. Our overreaction to 9/11 here at home, from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to the Patriot Act, to the rampant excesses of the NSA, to the financial disaster of going to war while we cut taxes, have left us divided at home. Our foreign policy is reactive, while we have no domestic policy.

The Museum is displaying a brick from Osama bin-Laden’s Abbottabad compound:

Makes you wonder what ELSE they brought back from the mission. In other news, nobody likes Dick Cheney’s bloviating about the Middle East:

The Malaysian Airliner disaster hurts the world, just like 9/11 did:

Keeping score in the Israel – Palestinian war:

What are we learning this time?

There were domestic issues to think about, like Obama’s transparency:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 13, 2014

“As things now stand, we could easily become the first people in history to lose democracy and its constitutional freedoms simply because we have forgotten what they are about”– Sam Smith

Young children illegals could reach nearly 100,000 this year:

On the other hand, perhaps Texas can be convinced to keep a few:

Not that Texas wants them. All across Texas the fear of the diseased immigrant is reaching near epidemic proportions. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said recently:

…we don’t even know what all diseases they have…Our health care systems can’t withstand this influx

Err, wrong again, Louie. According to the Texas Observer, UNICEF reports that Guatemalan kids are more likely than Texans to be immunized for most infectious diseases. Guatemala has universal health care. Vaccines are 100% percent funded by the government. Overall, 93% of kids in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are vaccinated against measles. That’s slightly better than American kids (92%), and certainly it shows that there is no tsunami of sick crossing our border. BTW, according to the World Health Organization, neither Guatemala nor Honduras has had a reported case of measles since 1990.

Not so, here in America, where we have 500 measles cases this year. Why? Because, freedom.

In other news, Mr. Boehner has a lawsuit:

The 38th time that the House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they passed the Authority for [Employer] Mandate Delay Act. That demonstrated the House’s willingness to delay the employer mandate. Then the Health and Human Services Department did exactly that, delayed the employer mandate. Strangely, that is EXACTLY what the Speaker’s lawsuit will say is the reason to sue Mr. Obama. Some of the GOP want to impeach Mr. Obama. They basically view a mechanism that was built in to deal with abuses of power as a way to nullify election results that they don’t like.

Sarah Palin was up front with her view:

If the House votes to impeach Mr. Obama, the Senate would then rule on the validity of the charges. It takes a two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove a president from office. Even if the Senate goes to the Republicans, that isn’t happening. So maybe they should move on:

Israel continues their drive towards Palestine:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Humor