September 3, 2004 by s.z.

Volcanic Family Circus Today's Cartoon  (See it here): Those Circus kids are being raised by television, aren't they?  Anyway, today we see Dolly sitting about two inches away from the big screen TV watching a smoke-spewing volcano situated on a weird green expanse.  Dolly says, "Hurry!  The volcano is about to interrupt!" Analysis: This is an obvious reference to Zell Miller's appearance on "Hardball," except it was Chris Matthews who interrupted, and Zell was the volcano who challenged Matthews to a duel.  Another amazing glimpse into the then-future by Bil Keane! Prediction: Remember how master interrupter Bill O'Reilly used to dream of challenging Al Franken to an Old West-style shoot out ?  "If this were the Wild West," he said, "I would have shot him between the head!" So, I think Bil is predicting that O'Reilly and Miller are going to bring dueling back as a way to resolve disputes.  And one day Vice President Dick Cheney will challenge Patrick Leahy to a duel for saying mean stuff about his involvement with Halliburton.  Cheney will kill Leahy, be charged with murder, and then later be charged with treason.  So will Zell Miller.  Everybody else lives happily ever after. Well, that's what it meant to me.  When your boss isn't watching, tell us what it means to you.. 6:35:17 AM

Bush Gives Acceptance Speech; Local Woman Watches, Because Nothing Else On I watched the Bush acceptance speech.  While I briefly fell asleep, I don't think this necessarily means it was boring.  However, it was pretty boring.  So, as a public service, here's a condensed version.  You can check it against the text posted by Atrios if you want to verify my accuracy. ========= During the past four years as your President, I have accomplished many great things.  Most notably, 9/11. Since 2001, Americans have been given hills to climb, streams to ford, rainbows to follow, until we find our dream.  Now, because we have made the hard day's journey into night, we can see clearly, for the rain is gone -- and there ain't no mountain high enough to keep us from you.  Now, because we have faced challenges with Resolve, the stains wash right out. We will build a safer world and a more hopeful America, and nothing will hold us back. And we'll do it our way, yes our way, make all our dreams come true.  For me and you. We love our First Lady.  It's the law. I am the father of two spirited, intelligent, and lovely young women. And if our beloved First Lady ever finds out about them and the First Mistress, I am toast.  My brothers and sister are my closest friends.  I talk to them once every couple of months.  However, I talk to Karen Hughes everyday.  See, I pay her to be my friend, and to pretend that I have super powers, and to shut the hell up when I don't want to listen to her.  That's why America is the greatest country on earth. My Dad used to work for Ronald Reagan.  That makes Ronnie my grandpa or something. I believe that every child can learn, that every senior deserves to have confusing and unhelpful prescription drug coverage, and that every rich person deserves a tax break. But I believe that the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.  Again, I mean. The times, they are a changin'. [The crowd cheers.]  These days, people lack job security.  [Yay!]  Two-thirds of all Moms also work outside the home. [Some people applaud weakly, others look confused, and others angrily shake their fists at the notion of working women.] In my World of Tomorrow, you will be able to ride to your new technical job as a hamburger service technician in a personal hover car.  In order to create jobs for the Workers of Tomorrow, we must make America the best place in the world to do business, perhaps by getting Bill O'Reilly to lead boycotts against all the other nations.  Or hey, we could try magic.  Maybe I could catch that Lucky Charms leprechaun and make it give me its pot of gold, and I could use that to make our country more competitive.  Oh, and I could eliminate frivolous lawsuits -- that would help a lot.  Let's start by killing all the lawyers.  Okay, just the trial lawyers -- we'll need the tax attorneys to help us avoid paying taxes.  So let's just kill John Edwards for now.  And then there will be great jobs for everyone! Taxes suck!  Tax forms are confusing.  Math is hard!  In my next term, I will simplify the tax codes.  Wouldn't you all rather have a flat tax?  Hey, if it's good enough for my millionaire friends, it should be good enough for you. From now on, crappy places to make a living will be called "American opportunity zones."  Avoid living in them, if you have a choice. Oh, and in a new term, I will start caring about poor people who don't have access to health care, and will ensure that every poor county in America has a community or rural health center.  See, I will mail a first-aid kit to the coffee shop, community center, or farm implementation dealership, and that way everyone's heath care needs will be served.  Or how about faith-based rural health centers?  We could give some federal funding to the Baptist Ladies Missionary Society, and they could learn to do CPR and pray for the sick and afflicted.   Plus, in order to make America's workplaces more family-friendly, the labor laws will be changed to offer workers comp-time and flextime instead of unfamily-friendly overtime pay.  Now you can't say that John Kerry is the only one who has ideas about jobs and health care! To build a more hopeful America, we must help our children reach as far as their vision and character can take them.  Of course, rich children will be more far-sighted than poor children.  Their character will be more grabby too.  For everybody else, there's "No Child Left Behind," which empowers teachers and local school districts to teach to federally mandated standardized tests. Let me tell you about a Hispanic school where only 1/10th of the kids were left behind.  That proves that we are challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations. No dejaremos a ningún niño atrás.  No deja almost nine-guns child Atrios. In this time of change, most new jobs are filled by people with at least two years of college, yet only about one in four students gets there.  So, only 1/4 of the new jobs are being filled by people.  Damn those robots for taking jobs that could be filled by Americans, if they were only smarter! In a new term, we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for the government's health insurance programs.  Hey, we could have done it this term, but it's only medical care for kids, so who cares? My opponent's policies are dramatically different from ours. Senator Kerry opposed Medicare reform and health savings accounts.  He opposes marriage, children, little puppies and lowered income taxes for kindly, old billionaires. To be fair, there are some things that he is for: satanic rituals, wife-swapping, and raising the taxes of innocent wealthy people.  His policies are the policies of the past. Ours are the policies of the FUTURE!  We are on the path to the future, and we are not turning back -- because we're lost, and we're too macho to ask for directions. Because a caring society will value its weakest members, we must make a place for the unborn child.  My evangelical Christian friends, you can interpret that to mean that if I am reelected, Roe V. Wade will be overturned.  And my other Republican friends, you can take it to mean that unborn children will have a place -- a place on the tax forms as a deduction. Because the union of a man and woman deserves an honored place in our society, I support the protection of marriage against activist judges.  However, it's on its own when it comes to threats like Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde. My opponent, Hollywood John Kerry, recently announced that he is the candidate of "conservative values."  It is to laugh!  I blow my nose at him, the so-called John Kerry; him and all of his silly Democrats.  I fart in his general direction!  His mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries!  If he doesn't concede defeat now, I shall taunt him a second time! Oh, and he said something mean about RONALD REAGAN's presidency.  Get the rope, boys! Three days after September 11th, I stood where Americans died, in the ruins of the Twin Towers. Where was I on Sept 11th, 12th, and 13th, you ask.  None of your damned business! Since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. And then I read the comic strips.  Garfield is my favorite.  I also like to glance at the sports section.  Sports are good, because there's a winner and a loser, so it's easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and there's not all that confusing nuance.  Oh, um, September 11th!  I will never relent in defending America -- whatever it takes. No matter how much of your money and how many of your children's lives it takes, I will continue to make you safer by screwing up the war on terror overseas, so I don't do it here. And my strategy is succeeding. Four years ago, Afghanistan was the home base of al-Qaida.  Now bin Laden is on the lam, and we don't know where his group's home base is.  Four years ago, Libya was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.  Now Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Quebec are.  Four years ago, Iraq was a gathering threat -- now it's a quagmire.  And now more than three-quarters of al-Qaida's key members and associates have been detained or killed -- and quickly replaced by new members and associates, whom the Iraqi invasion helped to energize against us.  Don't you hate that Saddam Hussein?  Hey, everybody believed me when I said he had WMDs, so it's not MY fault I was wrong.  The choice was: do I forget the lessons of September 11th and take the word of a madman (and all those madmen who said he didn't have WMDs and posed no threat to the US), or do I take action to defend our country from a threat which may not exist, having no real plan beyond using my wicked cool weapons and action figures to whup some foreign ass?  Faced with that choice, I will defend America every time. [Brief interruption for two Code Pink protesters to say something about peace or something, and then to be dragged out by the Praetorian Guard; the President has to speak over the delegates who are demanding four more years of whatever the protesters were advocating.] Anyway, the Iraq thing is going great, despite what you may believe.  The freedom seeds have been planted and someday we'll be able to sniff the fragrant flower of liberty in the Middle East, and it will pollinate the rest of those stupid countries, which will make us all safer, because a free country will always want to sell us oil. And I don't care what Frenchy Kerry may say -- I happen to SUPPORT America's soldiers in Iraq.  Here, let me read from a purported message allegedly sent home by a so-called Army Specialist.  He wrote, "The various terrorist enemies we are facing in Iraq are really aiming at you back in the United States.  Except that you're not here, and if we weren't here, they wouldn't be aiming at either of us.  But in any case, they're evil, we're good, and that's why you shouldn't blame Good President Bush for all of us soldiers who are dying over here."  That young man is right. John Kerry hates this young man.  Again, my opponent and I have different approaches. I proposed, and the Congress overwhelmingly passed, 87 billion dollars in funding needed by our troops doing battle in Afghanistan and Iraq. My opponent and his running mate voted against this money for bullets, and fuel, and vehicles, and body armor, and the rider authorizing a trillion dollars for humanitarian aid for Halliburton execs. That's the difference between my opponent and I: I want to spend your money to give brave American soldiers the bullets, body armor, food, and oxygen they need, while he spits on our soldiers, and sleeps with their wives while they are overseas.  But hey, you can vote for him if you want, I guess. My opponent also makes fun of our allies.  He called Tony Blair a "poopie head."  He drew a mustache on Prime Minister Howard's wife -- not a photo of her, but on her actual face!  And he ran over the Emperor of Japan's dog.  And you thought he was this suave, sophisticated guy whom all the other countries liked!  Well, they don't. Freedom.  Liberty.  Reconstruction takes a long time, so quit your griping! More freedom.  More liberty.  God said so. Self-deprecating humor. People say I'm pretty great. Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.  Yes, I've been talking to the space aliens again. Now vote for me or I will kill you all! ====================== So, George W. Bush's acceptance speech.  Not one of his best, but at least it didn't contain any uses of the word "nucular."  Yesterday we learned from the NY Times that Karen had been helping him practice it. "He's ready,'' Ms. Hughes insisted, adding that they had been conducting "reading out loud'' sessions to "figure out what parts need to be tightened and which parts work and which parts don't." Well, I thought the part about the pet goat eating things like cans and canes worked well, but I thought they should have tightened the part where the goat protected America by eating the madman's weapons of mass destruction. 5:03:24 AM