My old home town got whacked by tornadoes yesterday. I’ve been looking for photos to get a sense of the damage — does anybody have anything up online yet?

… and the answer, of course, is “yes” — here, here and here, for starters…

Had to put a cat to sleep — she went from apparent health to complete decline in about a week. Turned out she was riddled with cancer. She had a good, long, happy life, but that doesn’t make the moment any easier.

Buy my damn book.

A new, anti-war album from Neil Young is apparently on the way:

Demme, who filmed the award-winning documentary Neil Young: Heart of Gold, writes in an e-mail, “Neil just finished writing and recording – with no warning – a new album called Living With War. It all happened in three days.” How rock ‘n ‘roll is that?

Demme continues, “It is a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq…Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon.”

Details are pretty scarce, but the featured track, titled “Impeach the President,” features a rap with Bush’s voice set to the choir chanting “flip/flop” and the like.

Story.

Reading the article in the Times this morning about the increasing number of retired generals who are calling upon Donald Rumsfeld to resign, I wondered how the pro-war clap-harder right would respond. I mean, these guys are retired generals, who’ve seen the mess firsthand, and this is the conclusion they’ve come to. Surely the armchair warriors can’t impugn their motives, in the way that they often declare that the media “want” America to lose (the idiocy of which I covered, in parable form, here).

Well, actually it looks like they can.

(Another related cartoon here.)

The Republican scumbags in Washington and their well-trained Democratic toadies can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned. It’s hard to hide my rage over the fact that the poverty rate has gone up every year of the Bush presidency, yet we’re greeted with infuriating news like this :

IBM, for example, is banking a $2.8 billion refund—well, better to call it a “tax savings”—because instead of paying the normal corporate tax rate of 35 percent on $9.5 billion in profits it earned overseas, the company paid only 5.25 percent. That’s the magic of the American Jobs Creation Act, a piece of legislation that passed with comfortable margins in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law by President Bush just two weeks before the 2004 elections.

The AJCA, which was pushed through during the last fit of panic about outsourcing, was ostensibly designed to encourage companies to add jobs here. It gave a small tax deduction to American manufacturers, and it offered a one-time tax holiday in 2005 when corporations could repatriate their foreign income at a massively reduced tax rate. This repatriation, the theory went, would encourage R & D and capital investment in the United States, leading to new positions down the road. But, like President Bush’s creatively named Clear Skies initiative and Healthy Forest Restoration Act, the American Jobs Creation Act has not lived up to its title.
. . .
Analysts anticipate that American companies will have repatriated around $350 billion in 2005 as a result of the law. While it’s hard to make a straight calculation because of the vagaries of the tax code, that works out to a savings of roughly $104 billion on corporate America’s tax bill. At Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that announced the single largest repatriation—$37 billion—the one-time windfall works out to approximately $11 billion. That kind of tax savings buys a lot of $600-an-hour lobbyists, though not, apparently, many scientists and salespeople. In its annual report, Pfizer doesn’t list employees by region. But the company’s total head count dropped to 106,000 at the end of 2005, about 8 percent fewer jobs than at the end of 2004.

I know I’m sounding like a shrill liberal here, but screw it. The American government should never, ever trust corporations. No, not because of some cartoonish fantasy of a CEO devising new ways to poison the environment and eat babies, but because looking after our best interests isn’t their job. Their job is to make as much money as possible, period. I’m not making a moral judgement here. Getting rich isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we shouldn’t ever expect corporations to put aside their own financial interests for ethical concerns.

Which is why it’s so damn frustrating to see this supply-side bullshit pop up again and again. It seems like a truism that businesses care more about the bottom line that anything else, but that level of common sense is absent from our government today. I’m all for capitalism and I think the stated goals behind a lot of conservative economic incentives are pretty good. Give tax breaks to corporations to reinvest in the country and help create jobs? Sounds like a great idea. Yeah, I said it, I agree with the Republicans. I just wish the Republicans agreed with the Republicans.

When a politician tells you they want to cut taxes to help jumpstart the economy, create jobs, or whetever, they’re lying to you. Yes, there are schools of economic thought that support their trickle-down theories, but these aren’t honest differences of opinion, they’re shameful lies. If they really thought their tax cuts would benefit working Americans they’d put it in writing. There’s nothing stopping politicians from making their tax cuts only apply to companies who create X number of jobs or invest a certain percentage of their profits within the U.S., but that never happens because conservative politicians are for the most part too craven to put their money where their mouth is.

Now corporations are laughing all the way to the bank with $104 billion in tax refunds and all we can do is sit back and wonder why people still believe a word that comes out of the mouths of the corporate whores in Washington D.C. Of course, that’s just how they wanted it. It doesn’t matter whether or not we feel robbed, the getaway car escaped a year and a half ago.

This came in while I was out on book tour:

I live in Kuwait, and just ordered your Great Big Book of Tomorrow from Amazon. I have a little bit of a problem and was hoping you could help me out.

Some background: stuff from Amazon usually gets to Kuwait no problem, although 9 times out of 10 it is opened by customs to check if it contains any pornographic material or material considered to be an afront to Islam. Censorship is rife here, and although almost any magazine or newspaper you can think of is sold in the bookshops (from Harper’s to Cosmo to USA Today…I kid you not), any photo that is slightly ‘fleshy’ or depicts images of ‘god’ is swiftly seen to with a big black pen. If there is an entire offending article, or the questionable picture is really big, they just rip the whole damn page out. It’s rather frustrating, as you may be halfway through an article about ETA activity in Spain, only to discover that the last page has been printed on the back of a Calvin Klien advert, and then you’re stuffed.

Anyway, to get to the point, the officers at the Kuwaiti customs found something offensive in your book. I got to page 172, only to discover that page 173 - 4 had been roughly torn out. I have no frickin’ idea what they could have found so offensive, and, man I’ve got to know! I mean, I am a bit pissed off that my book is somewhat ruined, and I thought about writing to Amazon to send me another copy, but what a colossal waste just to get one page. And who knows, the customs dudes might rip that page out again.

The cartoon that the guardians of morality in Kuwait found offensive can be seen here. It’s the same cartoon that the guardians of morality in Oklahoma found so offensive when it first ran (more on that here). It’s nice to know that my little cartoon can help fundamentalists the world over discover how much they really have in common.

If you’re a Democrat, you might want to figure out how you’re going to vote in the Iranian War Resolution of 2006. “What war resolution?” you might ask, but don’t be so naive. We all know that from a marketing standpoint you don’t introduce a new product in August…I mean, April. Right now we’re in the viral part of the marketing campaign. Just like you can’t sell floor cleaner to someone who doesn’t think they have a dirty floor, you’re not going to convince people to nuke Iran without making an argument that they’ve got it coming.

Seriously, how would Democrats respond to a use of force resolution against Iran? The obvious answer would be to oppose it on the grounds that the Bush Administration has already shown itself to be dishonest and incompetent with Iraq, but do the Democrats in D.C. have the guts to vote against a war resolution, especially when it concerns a country that, in contrast to Saddam Hussein’s caginess, is openly flaunting its nuclear technology? Considering that it was a Democratic Senate that gave Bush the authorization to invade Iraq in 2002, I have my doubts about whether the current slate would be willing to risk looking weak on national security in order to do the right thing.

Things look peachy for the Democrats right now, seven months out from the midterm elections, but let’s not confuse disgust with the GOP with an infatuation for Dems. Even now with all of the troubles the GOP has had, I’d be willing to bet they’re a scare tactic away from regaining their strength in the polls. If th Democrats want to win in November, they need to start connecting the dots for the American people before they get put on the spot. It’s not enough to wring your hands in public and hope for the best, you’ve got to make the case again and again that Republicans are wrong for the country and that they can’t be trusted with another war. If you must, make jokes like “The Bush Administration wants to bring their Hurricane Katrina style of leadership to Iran”, but do something. Please.

Y’know, I’ve given Bill O’Reilly a lot of flack over the years for being a bully, a blowhard, and a fool, but you’ve gotta give him credit for one thing. He really is the only person on TV standing up the the secular left in defense of Christian symbols like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny (via C&L) :

The problem is even worse than O’Reilly points out. At the last meeting of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy™ Barbara Streisand gave a PowerPoint presentation about ways to remove the Tooth Fairy from the public square and Michael Moore spoke at length about how the Bush Administration has been largely fabricating the serious threat posed by the Boogey Man. Needless to say, their hatred of Christianity was on full display.

Why do you still believe anything this administration says? How many times do you have to be shown that pretty much everything they tell you is a lie before you stop trusting them? Seriously, do you have some kind of mental disorder, or are you just not very smart? (Or do you understand that it’s all bullshit, but don’t care?)

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

Story here.

1. If you got a set of the Sparky & Blinky statuettes before the company went out of business, and would be interested in trading them for a signed TMW original, shoot me an email. (I went digital in 1999, so there’s a finite supply of original strips. I sell one or two a year on eBay; they usually go for upwards of $500.)

2. Yet another unsolicited testimonial about the new book:

Like others I know, I’ve spent the past several years reading your cartoon for free every Tuesday on Workingforchange.com. This afternoon, after cashing my check, I did my duty by swinging by my local bookstore and purchasing a copy of your book. And WOW! It surpassed all expectations; I plan to buy an additional copy for my brother and sister-in-law. For one, the vivid colors are lost when the comic is read online, and really add something to the art. But by far the best reason to buy this book is to have all of the cartoons in one place, in top visual form. This collection of comics, viewed together, acts as a timeline of our descent into collective insanity, presented with nightmarish hilarity. And the title fits: your book is an absurdist view of hell.