Oy
Just, oy.
Hey hivemind
I need a title for my next TMW compilation, preferrably something that summarizes the increasingly weird zeitgeist. Send me a winner and you’ll get credit in the book, as well as a signed print of the cartoon of your choice. And some Pearl Jam swag if you want it. Couple of notes: (1) “TOO MUCH CRAZY” has already been suggested by several readers, not to mention my wife, and is under consideration. (2) It’s very, very unlikely that you will come up with a play on the word “Tomorrow” that I have not heard several hundred times before. With that in mind, your ideas are eagerly solicited: tom (dot) tomorrow (at) gmail (dot) com.
What Atrios said
My marker for Obama was whether he’d get a health care bill with a public option. He didn’t. A year ago passage of some sort of health care reform seemed inevitable, and not a tremendous challenge. Only a year of dithering and bipartisaning and gangs of wankers and pre-compromising and, frankly, failure to put forward something simple and popular jeopardized it.
The bill’s more good than bad, but it isn’t what we should have gotten. It isn’t what we voted for.
If passage of this bill helps a single person anywhere, then it was worth passing in whatever form possible. Health care in this country is a total clusterfuck, as anyone who’s ever dealt with an insurance company knows. But teabagger freakouts notwithstanding, this only barely qualifies as a victory.
The downward spiral
Regular readers of this site are aware that these are not good days for alt-cartooning. The latest bad news: citing budgetary constraints, Salon is dropping my friend Ruben Bolling’s fantastic Tom the Dancing Bug strip. I find this extraordinarily depressing for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that TTDB (as we insiders call it) is the cartoon my own cartoon wishes it could be when it grows up.
Ruben is looking for a new home on the web, but in the meantime you can always find his comics at his ucomics page, which I strongly encourage you to bookmark.