SlowpokeBlog

Just in case you haven't heard: despite warnings, the Bush administration slashed funding for hurricane preparedness and levee construction in New Orleans, since the Iraq War and tax cuts were more pressing matters, dontcha know.

Well, I just couldn’t resist running with that Breaux quote referred to in my last post. I’ve had a lot of patience with the Dems through the years, but for me, their deer-in-headlights response to the looming Supreme Court crisis just takes the cake. This isn’t some debate over pork in a highway bill. This is the Big Chalupa.

To her credit, in a recent speech Sen. Diane Feinstein sounded dubious about Roberts, and -- at last! -- turned the tables on the Repubs’ "judicial activism" canard. But then you get stuff like this [Update: Senator Landrieu's site has been changed to provide hurricane rescue info, so no more link here. There was a whole page devoted to her hosting Roberts at some function, complete with warm words for Roberts and high-res, media-ready photos of the two of them together]. I mean, gag me with a judge's gavel! Would a Republican senator butt-kiss an ultra-leftist judge on his or her website like this? I don’t think so. (Sorry to pick on your senator, Louisiana, when you're in the throes of natural disaster. Also, I realize posing a left-right continuum here is bunk, but the need for brevity limits me at the moment.)

[Update: Since I wrote this post, Landrieu has taken an impressively firm tone against Bush's handling of Katrina, suggesting that he stop posing for "photo ops" and that she might have to "punch him" if he keeps blaming local and state authorities. Good for her. But I stand by my earlier point about Democratic senators posing for, well, flowery photo-ops with Roberts.]

You Can’t Always Please the Base

Aw yeah, this one goes out to all the ladies in the house. Recently-retired Louisiana Senator John Breaux (D) on John Roberts:

Judge Roberts "is a good family man with beautiful children," Mr. Breaux said. "You have to be very careful about how you approach digging into the background of somebody who appears to be a good guy."

Thus illustrating the point of this cartoon exactly.

Update: This North Carolina blogger has an amusing post ("Today's Puzzler"...) on the Breaux quote that sums everything up very nicely .

This cartoon is not intended to make fun of people who are having trouble making ends meet because of high gas prices (taken as a percentage of income, the poor are, after all, hit the hardest). Rather, I'm addressing the mentality that we can consume with reckless abandon, and then find it somehow unfair or surprising when prices go up. Also, I liked the idea of casting Hummer owners in the role usually occupied by people earnestly trying to save large ocean mammals.

Large Vehicle Owners Hold Gas Station Vigil

PS - Regarding last week's strip, reader Tom helpfully points out the Snopes entry on the origins of the myth of NASA and the sun standing still.

In case you haven't seen the WaPo article, here are a few things Supreme Court nominee John Roberts had to say about women:

Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. consistently opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women's rights during his years as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House, disparaging what he called "the purported gender gap"...

...he said that a controversial legal theory then in vogue -- of directing employers to pay women the same as men for jobs of "comparable worth" -- was "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist."

Roberts's thoughts on what he called "perceived problems" of gender bias are contained in a vast batch of documents...

Imagine if Roberts made similar comments on issues of race: "Roberts referred to the 'purported race gap'"... "Roberts said that the legal theory of directing employers to pay blacks the same as whites for work of comparable worth is 'staggeringly pernicious' and 'anti-capitalist.'"... "Roberts' thoughts on 'perceived problems' of racial bias are contained in a vast batch of documents"... If that were the case, I believe his chances would, rightly, dim significantly (though you never know for sure these days). I mention this not to diminish the very real problem of racism in this country, but to illustrate how discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you slice it. Because gender equity is perceived as some soft, fluffy fringe issue -- often by progressives who are otherwise astute -- the wimpy Dems will give him a pass. Why, to even criticize Roberts' anti-woman positions makes YOU the radical!

Roberts exemplifies the right-wing ruse of hiding behind "strict constructionism" while advancing a pre-existing, ultraconservative agenda. I am reminded of Adam Cohen's excellent piece in the NY Times from April, which is fortunately still available to the public here. A quote:

Justice Scalia likes to boast that he follows his strict-constructionist philosophy wherever it leads, even if it leads to results he disagrees with. But it is uncanny how often it leads him just where he already wanted to go.

This guy is a '50s-era dinosaur who is dangerously unqualified for the 21st-century Supreme Court. The Dems should not worry about being seen as "obstructionist," because the American public doesn't give a fig. Mark my words, if he is confirmed, we'll be asking ourselves, "How did we let this happen?"

I've had a couple readers ask me about the second panel of this week's cartoon, in which I mention that 300+ school districts are teaching that NASA research proves the sun stood still in the sky, as mentioned in the Bible. Unfortunately, that panel was getting so wordy that I didn't have enough space to go into more detail, so here's the background.

The NY Times had an article a couple weeks ago about a new Bible course being taught in public schools under the guise of "historical" and "literary" study. But in reality, it's a highly sectarian class being pushed by the fundamentalist right.

HOUSTON, July 31 - When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools.

Hundreds of miles away, leaders of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools notched another victory. A religious advocacy group based in Greensboro, N.C., the council has been pressing a 12-year campaign to get school boards across the country to accept its Bible curriculum...

In one teaching unit, students are told, "Throughout most of the last 2,000 years, the majority of men living in the Western world have accepted the statements of the Scriptures as genuine." The words are taken from the Web site of Grant R. Jeffrey Ministries' Prophecy on Line.

The national council's efforts are endorsed by the Center for Reclaiming America, Phyllis Schlafly's group the Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council, among others.

Here's the bit about the sun:

Some of the claims made in the national council's curriculum are laughable, said Mark A. Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who spent seven weeks studying the syllabus for the freedom network. Mr. Chancey said he found it "riddled with errors" of facts, dates, definitions and incorrect spellings. It cites supposed NASA findings to suggest that the earth stopped twice in its orbit, in support of the literal truth of the biblical text that the sun stood still in Joshua and II Kings.

"When the type of urban legend that normally circulates by e-mail ends up in a textbook, that's a problem," Mr. Chancey said.

I believe some readers may have thought I was talking about the earth-revolving-around-the-sun controversy, which is understandable, especially since I mentioned Galileo in my last blog post.

I shouldn't need to say this, but to be clear, it's not religion that I'm criticizing here, but the insistence of some on proselytizing in the classroom.

This past weekend I watched Barbara Kopple's "Harlan County, U.S.A.," a documentary about a Kentucky coal miners' strike in the mid-early '70s. It's filled with all sorts of appalling stuff that will leave you emotionally drained by the end; it's also a stark reminder of how unions have been eviscerated since then. Most mind-blowing moment: a company spokesperson arguing that black lung is an overblown myth and coal mining poses little health risk. Some things never change. (I saw a coal miner's lung at the Body Worlds exhibit -- see earlier post -- and it looked just like a shiny, lung-sized chunk of coal.)

Also saw a PBS series, Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance, which has all sorts of interesting parallels to today. The Medici sponsored the scientific work of Galileo, which eventually drew the wrath of the Pope. As Mr. Slowpoke said, today Galileo would be accused of liberal bias.

One of many ironies about right-wing ideologues is that they tout the virtues of hard work and achievement, yet if you achieve academically (and are not some Judge Roberts type), or just happen to care enough to be well-informed, you are demeaned as an "intellectual elite." Really, they should clarify that when they talk about success, they just mean making money.

I have employed the line "Freedumb is on the march" in this strip, which I readily admit is far from original. After writing the strip, I did a Google search, which revealed several instances of that exact phrase. It appears in a number of blog and message board comments, often courtesy of someone called "realitybasedbob." Suicidal Tendencies have a new album called "Freedumb." NOFX have an old song about censorship by the same name. A band called The Future Patriots have a song called "F-R-E-E-D-U-M-B." It also seems to be a somewhat common protest sign slogan. Nonetheless, I think it fits this particular cartoon nicely, and deserves wider use.

Hallelujah! Rather than turn our clocks back in October this year -- inducing soul-crushing, early darkness on otherwise lovely fall evenings -- we'll be waiting until the first Sunday in November. I'm already lamenting the earlier sunsets of August, the encroaching night a reminder of the winter to come.

To my great irritation, there was a column in yesterday's NY Times by someone who has a problem with extending Daylight Savings time:

Congress has an amazing new scheme to cut crime, automobile fatalities and energy consumption. There is one hitch. We have to stay in bed until sunrise during the first week of November - lights out, televisions and radios off and please stay away from that coffee maker.

Get up after the sun rises? Well, I never!

Of course, doing so might interfere with breakfast, school attendance, morning workouts and jobs. That's because during that week, the sun won't rise until 7:30 a.m. at the earliest.

On behalf of all the beleaguered non-morning people out there who must suffer the ungodly noise-making of their early-bird, busybody neighbors, I say tough cookies, you morning-centric wanker. Having the sun rise at 7:30 a.m. is far more reasonable than having it set at 5:30 p.m., which is just sad. Late winter sunrises are nature's way of telling us to sleep in.

I confess to snarfing the occasional CLIF bar, so I don't exactly consider myself above the energy bar fray. Nonetheless, it seems the marketing of said bars is getting a little out of hand.

The New Energy Bars

Well, I've actually been back from the Funny Times party in Cleveland for a week, but all it takes is a few days of travel to utterly discombobulate my routine.

Editor Ray Lesser and co-founder Sue Wolpert kindly let me stay at their home, along with cartoonists Andy Singer (No Exit) and Isabella Bannerman (Six Chix). It was the first time I'd met the very cool Ms. Bannerman; I also got to meet "American Splendor" creator Harvey Pekar at the opening party at the Funny Times offices. We talked about his upcoming projects (four books, two of which will be collections, I think), and I told him that I included a story in my senior thesis written by his wife, Joyce Brabner.

The next day, I saw the "Body Worlds 2" exhibit at the science center (not part of the official Funny Times program). I did not want to go at first, as the exhibit consists of numerous plasticized corpses and body parts, but by the end of the afternoon I was like, "Oh, a plasticized corpse skateboarding. Been there, done that." The weekend's events also included a Lake Erie beach party, a tour of the graveyard where John D. Rockefeller and James Garfield are buried, and a big outdoor BBQ and concert to which subscribers were invited, some of whom stopped me to say nice things about Slowpoke, which is always pleasant and highly encouraged.

Here's a shot of us in the graveyard (L-R: cartoonist Matt Wuerker, Sue Wolpert, Andy Singer, myself, and Ray Lesser):

This week's strip will be posted a day late, as I'm currently in Cleveland for the Funny Times' 20th anniversary party. Apologies to all you faithful Monday visitors out there. A report of my adventures in Cleveland will follow.