Let's start with the Birthday Boy, because it's one of the few bright spots in the day.
Garfield turns 40 today and there's a hoohah going on including a book and a lot of coverage.
Rather than simply steal his links, I'm going to let DD Degg provide them.
But I will add to his collection the interview I did with Jim Davis back in 2003.
As for the strip, I don't read it, but I'm a fan because I think it's a good way to introduce kids to the comics, which is critical to the survival of the format.
As Davis and I discussed in the interview:
That well-considered level of rudeness is what has made "Garfield" a hit, particularly with the younger crowd that Davis wants to amuse, attract and maybe educate a little.
"About 12 or 13 years ago, Editor & Publisher did a 20th century comics poll," he says. "They found that a lot of people who read newspapers said they learned to read through the comics. A third said they had the comics read to them by adults, and another third said they just looked at the pictures until they were able to figure out what the words meant. That was what I did."
Works for me.
And now onto the other Orange Creature, the one who is not healthy for children and other living things:
Things have become so depressing that even Watson has gone dark on us. However, while this generation of children will have to live through some Hell, their plight has not gone unmarked.
I'd note, to start with, that the UCC church on our village green (yes, like the one in Back to the Future) is now sporting this banner. It's not like America is going down without a gurgle.
And here's a comforting notion: We see stories about how X-percent of Republicans support this or that Gestapo tactic or lie-based policy, but, according to the latest Gallup poll, only 26% of adults consider themselves Republicans.
Then again, only 29% are Democrats.
It's those 43% in the middle who have to be reached.
We could start with better reporting, because "Fake News" is less a threat than "Incompetent News" or "Click-Baiting News," particularly when one party is deliberately lying.
Which brings us to our first ...
Juxtaposition of the Day
Unfortunately, they're both right: The report is long, but it's not secret and there is an executive summary at the beginning and it doesn't matter, because nobody is going to read it.
In the case of Lester's beach goer, it would be lovely if she settled in with the actual report, but she's more apt to hear the dishonest summaries that highlight FBI breaches and leave out the conclusions.
For instance, as anyone with the memory of a cocker spaniel remembers even without reading the report, the two agents who were having an affair and exchanging personal messages were taken off the case and their work specifically examined, so their ethical breach remained one of marital infidelity rather than political infamy.
Or, as stated in the Executive Summary on the second freaking page of the document ferchrissake:
(O)ur review did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed; rather, consistent with the analytic approach described above, we found that these specific decisions were the result of discretionary judgments made during the course of an investigation by the Midyear agents and prosecutors and that these judgment calls were not unreasonable. The broader impact of these text and instant messages, including on such matters as the public perception of the FBI and the Midyear investigation, are discussed in Chapter Twelve of our report.
They came down on Comey harder, because his failure to consult superiors was not simply a breach of procedure but one that mattered in his sending to Congress (not to the press) the message about the emails found on Weiner's wife's laptop.
However, it was his failure to consult that was the issue of concern, not the specific action he took.
My issue with the whole thing is that, while the report itself is some 500 pages long, the executive summary is only 14 pages and I think a reasonably intelligent reporter, and any editor handling the story, should be able to read and comprehend that short a document.
Which means that, if the only thing you got from the report -- as headlined by my local paper -- was that Comey was insubordinate, somebody is incompetent or else is, unlike Strzok and Page, allowing personal bias to impact their work.
Though I'm more tolerant in the case of Dear Leader, as seen in Mike Smith's cartoon, because we know that he does not read and we also know that his staff spoon-feeds him only positive news, so that, unless Fox & Friends shifts their direction (and wouldn't you like a look at their private emails?), he's probably not getting the straight scoop.
Juxtaposition of the Day, Blasphemy Division:
There have been a few "What if they separated Jesus from his parents?" cartoons, but Eagan makes a somewhat more direct reference to the Massacre of the Innocents, prior to which Joseph, forewarned by an angel, took his family to Egypt as refugees seeing asylum.
Granted, it would have been Herod's men, not Romans, but the event itself is folkloric, so analyzing uniforms is less critical than asking why a political party that relies in large part on people who take the Bible as literal truth would so openly mock Scripture by quoting it to defy the central message of Christ?
The answer being that they treat the Bible the same way they treat the Inspector General's Report: They take the parts they want, invent things that aren't even in it and ignore that central message.
Steve Benson shows us where that has brought us, and neither Norman Rockwell nor Phil Ochs deserve to see what we've become.
Hmmm. Thom Hartmann pointed out that I.C.E./Fox and Friends only showed boys being held, presumably because the audience they're aiming for is scared of angry young brown men. Both cartoons here, in contrast, show young girls, which are felt to elicit more sympathy. Just sayin'.
Posted by: Brad Walker | 06/19/2018 at 11:18 PM