08:07 pm - Prickly teleprompter
Wow. Republicans are crazy. Here's today's Prickly City, making fun of President Obama's use of a teleprompter (which, btw, everyone else has stopped doing by now anyway, lol comic strip lead time).
Notice the comments. The very first one sets the tone:
Hmmm isn’t it intersting, how when “Others” were in office every little gaff was fair game.
But now that our Glorious leader has been annoited and coronated, we must now all “respect the dignity of the office”
The comment section has other statements along these lines from other Prickly City fans, accusing Obama supporters of being as censorious and intolerant of Obama jokes as militant Muslims are of Mohammed cartoons.
But are any of the detractors in the thread actually doing that?
Shows how out-of-ammunition Obama’s opponents are when all they can dis him for is using teleprompters all the time - just like little Bushie always did, and that great communicator always did (when he wasn’t pretending he couldn’t hear the reporters’ questions), not to mention both Clinton & Bush Sr. always did.
Nope. They're just pointing out how weaksauce it is to make fun of a politician for using a tool that many other politicians, Democrat or Republican, have been using for years now.
Republicans have lost their minds.
You actually see this a lot. For example, if you pay attention to the way Republicans talk about Clinton, it's pretty obvious they think we see him as some kind of saint, the way they view Reagan.
He's by no means as Teflon coated as Reagan was... I've heard criticism on both sides of the aisle, some of it deserved. Bill Mahrer went off on him for being wishy washy. It's bunk, but his critics won't hear it.
Reagan did some good things and some bad things. He's more popular than he deserves, though, in my opinion.
Every once in a while, I'll reread my old Tom Toles books. Scary how many of the political cartoons were applicable in subsequent administrations.
Very true K.T. - here's a few that have lost their minds in my town...
http://www.wcpo.com/news/local/story/Ci
*huffs* >.<
*hugggggggggles*
But one of his latest turns of thought has me foaming a bit at its silliness. He wants to save the kids of America from the horrors of tobacco use by banning fruit and candy flavors of cigarettes.
I started using tobacco when I was 12, 25 years ago... and there was no such thing (at least in the US) as a mass-marketed, fruit-flavored cigarette or smokeless-tobacco product. (My memory may be a bit faulty, though.) Back then, you had your "wintergreen" and "menthol" (which is very much NOT the same as wintergreen) and "natural" flavors, and we liked it that way.
I'm pretty partial to fruit-flavored (and whisky-flavored) tobacco products, but getting rid of them won't stop me from enjoying my poison... and I very much doubt it'll do much to stop others -- it's not the flavor, it's the nicotine, and menthol/wintergreen will still exist, and still give a milder face to the more harsh basic flavor of tobacco.
Just an entirely silly gesture, IMO, one that didn't even need making. It's illegal in many (if not all?) states to sell tobacco to minors, anyway. What more needs to be done?
But, the banning of the candy flavors is similar to the banning of cartoon characters (Joe Camel in particular); anything to limit the side advertising of tobacco is a good thing IMO. However, the more important part of the legislation is tobacco is finally under the jurisdiction of the FDA, so at least there can be some oversight over the amount of nicotine and the companies are not trying to boost it. I hope that eventually the US gets Canadian style warning labels, which are huge and very strongly worded, as was also promised in the bill.
The whole deal about fruit and candy flavors is ludicrous. My point was that I don't consider them much of a factor in enticing people to use tobacco products. The most serious issue -- peer pressure -- is already addressed.
It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, FDA will regulate regarding tobacco. I'm pessimistic because of the special interest groups and lobbyists, but something good could happen.
Kids will do what kids will do, regardless of laws.
And Wilson is using bad grammar is an idiot is a bad thing.
probably doesn't even know what teabagging *really* means... ;-)
It reminds me of this kids' book I read a long time ago, called "Some Friend". For some reason I'm thinking it featured Sesame Street characters. I forget which ones, so I'll just call them Rod and Nicky. Rod's on his way to Nicky's place to ask to borrow this hat of his. He starts off thinking about how good a friend Nicky is and how he'll totally be willing to loan him the hat. "But... what if he doesn't?" he thinks. This train of thought continues rolling downhill until he's believing Nicky won't let him have the hat and will be angry at him for wanting it. "Some friend!" he scoffs. He gets to the door, rings the doorbell, and when Nicky opens it he just shouts "YOU CAN KEEP YOUR STUPID HAT!" and storms off.
That almost seems to be what's happening here. Republicans have latched on to their own paranoia, or perhaps the paranoia the party's higher-ups have been feeding them so much that they've forgotten what's real and what's just their own crazed imaginations.
I saw a tiny bit of this during the Bush years (people speculating that anyone caught posting anti-Bush sentiment on the Interwebs may one day face imprisonment), but this was all from crazy ranters on message boards and junk, not serious political commentators or even bloggers. And, to be even fairer, if any President in history seemed poised to do something so insane, it was Bush.
However, when in interviews, that is a bit of a different story.