About This Week...

This week's Troubletown, as you can see, has everything you could want: meat, a doghouse, Blagojevich, condoms, nice drawings of Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi and Obama burying a dead GOP elephant. Huh??

A couple mornings ago when the alarm went off (set to NPR so that we can always wake up to sound of a pledge drive), the first thing I heard was an announcer saying, "Nobody really knows what shovel-ready means."

I know what it means, I thought. "Shovel-ready" is stimulus-package-speak for a project that has cleared all bureaucratic hurdles and is ready to go. But, come on, it's a much better description of someone who's dead and ready for the graveyard––like the Republican party!... Maybe I'll use that in my cartoon, I thought. Nah, that's too stupid. I won't use it, I thought.

Bipartisanship is over already, despite president Obama's efforts to be placating to the defeated Republican minority, who's members appear to be spittle-mouthed crazy over the particulars of the bill, and are led by John McCain, the whitened old fool who's just coming off of two years of breathtaking, high-profile ineptitude. But is that what's really going on? Have they even read the bill? When the Reeps declare that there's pork in the bill, that's stating the obvious. Of course there's pork, enormous loads of it, but it's Democratic stimulus pork, the kind of slow-cooked pulled-pork Democrats like, full of human services and entitlements–– that they earned by kicking your asses, sorry losers!

It's not like the Reeps don't know that, nor that they haven't given away great piles of pork themselves, deliciously expensive five-star restaurant pork, in every way imaginable to every evangelical crackpot, armed mercenary, Afghan warlord, Brown and Root criminal, CEO, banker, and and oil executive. They basically opened up the treasury and blew the money out the door and windows with fans. They sent stacks of hundred dollar bills weighing tons on pallets to Iraq. Oh, yes, they are very fiscally disciplined.

So I thought it would be funny to imagine all the porky things Democrats supposedly love and that Republicans hate being forced down the Reep's powerless throats. There are also shades of Tom Delay and all the nasty things he did to the Dems when they were in the minority, like giving them the crappiest offices, making them hold their "inquiries" in the janitorial closet instead of a real hearing room. He's a felon, you know, but is he in prison?

Greg Palast and Robert Reich wrote good stuff about what they think is going on. Hell, all I know is it's funny. See, this is why my cartoons come out so mixed-up and undecipherable.