Even Senator John McCain conceded, “Apple claims to be the largest U.S. corporate taxpayer, but by sheer size and scale, it is also among America’s largest tax avoiders.”

Steve Sack / Minneapolis Star-Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Sack)

Apple is not alone. They’re in very posh company. Senator Carl Levin, who called Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, to Capitol Hill this week, cited a study by Citizens for Tax Justice that 30 multi-national companies pay zero dollars in federal taxes.

And in case you missed it, Senator Harry Reid, who was widely panned during the election for saying Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for a decade, was right! Through some resourceful faith-based loopholes Romney has effectively laundered money through the Mormon Church. There was a very good reason Romney didn’t release his tax returns. They made him look like a tax cheat. Mainly because he is.

What could our country possibly do with all the money innovative accountants ship away? You may have heard about a tornado that hit the suburb of Moore, Oklahoma this week. It leveled a swath of the town causing an estimated $1 billion in damages. The two Senators from Oklahoma both voted no on Hurricane Sandy relief for the North East. Senator Jim Inhofe says tornado aid is “totally different” from aid to another wind-based natural disaster. Senator Tom Coburn, who is usually pro-government-aid when tragedy strikes his own state (like the ice storm of ’07) is asking for off-sets in the federal budget to pay for Moore’s losses. Basically he wants to cut services to the rest of the country so tornado victims can rebuild.

Apparently government aid in the richest country on Earth is a zero-sum game: if one person gets help, someone else gets denied.

And speaking of being the (still) richest country in the world, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives our infrastructure (roads, bridges, levees, dams, sewage system, ports etc.) a D plus. They estimate we need a $3.6 trillion investment in our public infrastructure. And that’s without a Category 3 hurricane hitting our most populated city.

During the Apple hearing, Senator Rand Paul called for Congress to apologize to the company for dragging them to Capitol Hill: “Apple has 600,000 jobs they’ve created—American jobs—and we want to drag them before this committee to chastise them.”

But Paul actually made the most inadvertently salient point: “I am offended by the spectacle of dragging in here executives from an American company that is not doing anything illegal.”

Right. Everything they did was legal. Everything Mattel did to pay no federal taxes from 2008-2010 is legal. General Electric; legal. Verizon Communications, Boeing, Con-Way, Ryder System, Duke Way, El Paso, PG&E Corporation and the rest of the 30 multi-nationals all took advantage of legal tax advantages. Mitt Romney, who came within a mere five million votes of being the President of the United States, did nothing illegal to avoid paying taxes. It’s just unpatriotic. And unethical. But because of their lobbying lawmakers to make loopholes, it’s legal.

But frankly, it’s deplorable.

And here’s why: Because these giant corporations are getting a free pass by the very premise they create jobs. They’re in essence piling their tax burden onto their workers. When sycophantic Senators like Rand Paul genuflect to corporations as “job creators” what they really mean is “taxable income creators.”

So the people who work for a living give a chunk of their paychecks to the government to pay for things corporations need to conduct business (courts to protect; Congress to rig). Workers get to fund the country for the privilege of having a job.

And the (actual) privileged, whose money makes a living gets to outsource their tax obligations as a thank you from lawmakers.

This has led us to two current record highs in America: Corporate profits and Americans on food stamps.

Is there an app for that?

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Daryl Cagle / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

On September 11, 2012, he got his “opportunity.” Our embassy in Benghazi, Libya was overtaken and four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed. Mitt condemned the President of the United States that same day, suggesting that Obama “sympathized with the attackers.” That’s right. The man who made the call to shoot Osama bin Laden in the head was suddenly a terrorist sympathizer because Romney wanted to be Reagan and needed a Carter.

Would cheerfully ginning up the events in Benghazi win Romney the White House? No, his accusations were offensive and demonstrably untrue.

But losing an election means nothing to Republicans. They’ve had nine congressional hearings about Benghazi. What have they uncovered? The fact that you can have nine congressional hearings and uncover nothing.

According to the Global Terrorism Database amassed by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, there were 64 attacks on diplomatic targets during the Bush Administration. Still, former veep Dick Cheney said of Benghazi, “I think it’s one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career.” Having the memory of a goldfish must be very soothing.

Benghazi is a cynical attempt to gain traction with a nontroversy. The more Congress spends time investigating, the less time they have to spend being ineffective at negotiating with the President. In other words, doing their jobs. Under John Boehner’s leadership the 112th Congress passed just 219 bills that became laws. The least since we’ve been counting; half the amount of a normal Congress in a two-year term.

But what about all the other scandals!?

Since the president who touted torture as a foreign policy, lied us into two quagmires and outed an undercover CIA agent in retaliation for her husband’s New York Times op/ed, has been out of office for a couple of years, our bar for scandal is pretty low.

The IRS uproar is an example. In the wake of Citizens United, the only agency with the authority to oversee tax exemptions has every right to be skeptical of non-profit 501(c)(4)s. These groups, after all, are begging for a government handout under the guise of providing “social welfare.” Plus they’re allowed the anonymity of their donors. Some tea partiers want to see all welfare recipients take drug tests, you’d think a couple of extra questions on an application would be warranted. According to the Inspector General’s report, of the 300 groups who were flagged by the Cincinnati IRS office for greater scrutiny, only 100 were tea party groups. The other two-thirds—the vast majority of those flagged? Liberal groups. Other non-profits. Has the tea party fallen victim to the worst injustice since colonialism, slavery and the Inquisition combined? Most definitely.

Is this a scandal? Meh. Will this exist everlastingly in the mouth foam of those with Obama-as-Hitler placards? You bet!

The Department of Justice bypassing courts and seizing Associated Press phone records is this week’s only real scandal, the only breaking news story that deals with a violation of Constitutional rights. It’s a clear infringement of the free press. It also happens to be a violation that George W. Bush committed as a matter of policy. The right wing was fine with it when a Republican did it.

But now that it’s Obama’s DOJ it’s a bit less palatable.

The difficulty for the right-wing Indignation Industrial Complex is that they don’t like the press. They only like their press. But they also dislike Obama.

Getting the right wing up in arms over the DOJ intimidating a mainstream media outlet — or even more to the point — a cracking down on whistleblowers within the government — could be tricky. Because the enemy of your enemy isn’t as intriguing as innuendo and just making stuff up.

Or as a tea partier I was on television with this week put it, “We still haven’t seen the birth certificate yet!”

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Mike Keefe / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

I normally ignore The Donald as a publicity-hound half-wit celebrity shill. But now that he’s a rape apologist, he deserves a response:

The natural product of men and women together is not sexual assault. Rape is not an eventuality. It’s not a method of conception as (thankfully still-a-Congressman) Paul Ryan likes to refer to it. It’s not a means of god “gifting human life” like former Senator Rick Santorum believes. There’s not illegitimate rape and legitimate rape as former Congressman and 2012 senatorial candidate Todd Akin felt the need to clarify.

There’s just consensual sex and a felony.

Rape is a crime.

So Trump’s “genius” solution would be to ban women from military service? Segregate the sexes? What about the men who are sexually assaulted by other men? Them too? If we’re going to blame an entire gender for their innate rape-ability, it’s worth mentioning men can also be raped.

But that nuance isn’t what Trump is tweeting about. It’s the idea that men are just going to commit rape, so women need to be covered, hidden, separated, escorted, and armed. A burka and a Beretta: Welcome to Trump’s America.

Ah yes, weapons profiteers conveniently think the cure to rape is arming all women. Well servicewomen are all armed. Try again.

The gun-dealing industrial complex, specifically the NRA, likes to Monday Morning Quarterback all tragedies. How could it have gone better? If you had their product on you. Guns are a crime panacea especially when coupled with hindsight.

Trump has basically blamed all servicewomen for being assaulted. They’re culpable in their own rape because a) they’re women and b) they’re serving alongside men.

Instead of blaming the victims, how about blaming rapists? Instead of banning women, how about banning the perpetrators?

We are so conditioned for deference to all who wear the U.S. military uniform that it’s hard to be critical. Because everyone who serves is automatically dubbed a hero regardless of whether their service is heroic or not. The idea that they could commit hideous crimes is uncomfortable. It’s akin to pedophile priests. Because these are holy men whom we are taught are pillars of their communities, the idea of them being child rapists is tough to accept. We like it when there are good guys and bad guys. Not where there are purported good guys who also commit sexual assault.

We need our boogeymen not to be morally complicated for us. Just simply and purely evil is best.

In the context of rape, the victims are easier to vilify. They could have been asking for it. They could just have “buyers remorse” as former Colorado senatorial candidate Ken Buck put it. They could be lying. They could have put themselves in that position. They could have worn the wrong thing. They could be trying to destroy a good man. They could be too attractive. They could have decided to work in the U.S. military.

No wonder rapes are the most underreported crime we have — we assume rape victims are partially responsible. Rape is something that can be avoided by a victim so the culprit is entitled to some understanding.

Separate the rapists from the military, not the women.

And bring our troops home.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

There are an average of 10,000 gun homicides every year in the U.S. If you add gun accidents and suicides it’s over 30,000 deaths each year according to the World Health Organization.

Bill Day / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Day)

We lose the equivalent of a small city of Americans every year to gun violence. Each year an entire Bangor, Maine is gone. Virginia Tech has 30,000 students in total. Every year the equivalent of a Virginia Tech loses their lives.

The Iraq War took 4,488 American soldiers’ over 10 years.

Nearly 10 times that die from civilian firearms. Every year. No war declared. No goal. No land to win. No regime change. No liberation. No spoils to be had. No armistice. No end game. No plan. No strategy.

The only upside is if you’re a weapons profiteer. Then the body count means wealth. Their future, at lease, is secure.

The weapons industry costs taxpayers untold billions in the form of lost wages, court costs, Medicare and Medicaid costs, insurance claims processing costs, emergency responder budgets and increased policing. All due to our cities being awash in their ubiquitous and unregulated product.

Otherwise it’s a pointless public health crisis that Congress seems pretty OK with. They tell us they don’t want to upset hobbyists by entertaining policy that effects personal arsenals. In the U.S. that’s actually a sufficient answer warranting no follow up. Try explaining that to someone in Japan where they have fewer than two gun-related homicides a year.

Thirty thousand Americans were shot and killed last year and roughly 30,000 will be shot and killed this year.

We accept this as a byproduct of freedom. There’s a legally immune, enormously profitable industry that’s spun a jingoistic fairy tale about how buying more of their product will make us safer.

America has the highest civilian gun ownership in the world. We should therefore be the safest country on the planet. We are not. We have the highest rate of firearm deaths in the top 50 industrialized nations. Of those 50 nations there are around 100,000 gun deaths a year. We contribute a third of them.

(John Lott’s “study” claiming higher gun ownership means lower crime has never been replicated. Save your letters, it’s bunk.)

The September 11th attacks killed 2,996 Americans. We have the equivalent of 10 9/11s every year in gun deaths. They hate us for our freedom.

In Plato’s The Republic, he relays the Allegory of the Cave. There are prisoners who were born and raised in a cave and the shadows of a fire off the cave walls are the only thing they’ve ever seen. It’s their reality. To them it’s normal. Then one prisoner is released. He sees the sun for the first time. He realizes everything he’s ever known was wrong. When he returns to the cave he tries to tell to the rest of the prisoners about the rest of the world. This upsets the prisoners so much, it’s said they’d kill him if given the chance.

This is what it’s like in the gun debate. We’ve accepted our fate—children are occasionally just going to be mowed down by gunfire in school. Or going to a suburban movie theater has certain risks. Or inner cities are just supposed to sound like Fallujah circa 2005. When you bring up other parts of the world that don’t have this issue, you’re treated as a heretic, tyrant and inevitably a Nazi sympathizer/Hitler fanboy.

Yes, the prisoners in the cave suddenly want to kill you. And in this case, they’re armed.

The point remains: We don’t have to have a country like this. We don’t have to live in a country where a 5-year-old kills his 2-year-old sister with a Crickett rifle made for kids. We can pass sound policies which reduce lethal weapons and their capacity. It is possible.

Freedom, after all, is being able to leave the cave, walk down the street and not get shot.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Taylor Jones / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Jones)

While perusing the weirder corners of the Internet the other day I stumbled upon the Flat Earth Society’s website. They believe—and claim to have plenty of evidence—that the world is not a sphere, it’s flat. Why? According to their site it’s because the world looks flat. The first question in their FAQs is, “Is this a joke?” The answer: “No.” What about the moon landing and space travel, they’re asked? It’s been faked.

What’s more lazy? Fifty years of an international conspiracy to commit massive (not to mention expensive) fraud to needlessly trick the world into believing our planet is shaped like a basketball? Or some dude looking at the ground beneath him and saying, “It looks flat.”

I find it comforting to think of just how lazy the Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were. Yes, they went through all the trouble of learning how to make a bomb, constructing said bomb and walking to the finish line of the most prestigious street race in the world with moderately heavy backpacks.

But that was basically it. No attempts to hide their identity. No going through all the trouble of writing a manifesto to explain or indicate the goal of causing the senseless deaths of onlookers. Not even a declarative sentence, actually. No saving up money before the event so they could skip town. No trying to get rid of evidence. No attempts to change their identity. No backup plan. No thoughts on maybe not terrorizing your hometown where you’ve gone to school and people recognize you because your picture is in their yearbook.

There are reports the duo were preparing to carry out other attacks; the pitiful half-hearted assertion of slacker terrorists everywhere.

Yes they were cruel, callous and malicious—but thankfully they were also lazy.

This event has inspired a menagerie of conspiracy theories that I put into two categories: the false-reports-are-true theories and our-preexisting-assumptions-are-even-more-valid theories.

There are hypotheses that incorporate since-corrected errors that ended up in the news media: A Saudi national, a “dark-skinned man,” or anything mentioned in the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The idea is that these were the truth and the corrections are the cover-ups. According to my Theory of Relative Laziness when you have journalists not doing their due diligence coupled with a denial of new information (meaning you get to stop reading and think you’re right) both can be attributed to simple laziness.

Within seconds of the bombs going off a popular conspiracy sham artist (I’m not naming) tweeted out something to the effect of “The government did this, the government always does this so they can take away our civil rights.” (Civil rights mean your right to stockpile weapons and ammunition. A “right” that’s not being threatened even in the wake of people with arsenals making threats.) No investigation, no pausing for the victims, no evidence pondered, he knew—the government did it.

Conservatives will tell you government can’t do anything well. Liberals will tell you government is flawed but it’s the best we’ve got. Nowhere on the political spectrum or in any evidence-based reality is the U.S. government hyper-competent and perfect at accomplishing their objectives. Never.

But it’s the laziest punditry there is: Everything went off as planned, everyone is in on it and I’m the only one brave enough to say anything.

It’s apparently also pretty lucrative. Little overhead, low production costs, no need to employ a fact-checker (or copy-editors).

A lot of the world can be explained by the simple fact that someone isn’t putting in a full effort and isn’t interested in doing their job. See every column I’ve ever written about Congress.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Mike Keefe / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

Dr. Gosnell along with several co-defendants/employees are charged with eight counts of murder from medical malpractice. They were arrested in January 2011. Their trial is this month.

Who, you may ask, would go to a clinic when it reeked of cat pee? I wouldn’t buy cat food at a place like that. Who would go there to get a medical procedure? Desperate women. Poor women. Due to increased restrictions on abortion procedures: out-of-state women with no other options.

This case is an indictment of oversight of women’s clinics. Gosnell had his practice for nearly 40 years. One example cited in the report was from a decade ago when an employee filed a complaint with the Board of Medicine. The investigator had an off-site interview with Gosnell and then dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.

To their credit the National Abortion Federation rejected the Women’s Medical Society’s application, but they also never reported them to other authorities. There were several others who turned a blind eye to the abhorrent conditions.

The report notes, “Once law enforcement agents went in, they couldn’t help noticing the disgusting conditions, the dazed patients, the discarded fetuses.”

In a checklist of egregious and shocking allegations, Gosnell, an African-American man, treated white women from the suburbs better than his other patients. White women were attended to by an actual physician (as opposed to employees impersonating one) and seated in the one clean room in the clinic: Gosnell’s office. When asked by his staff why he treated white women differently he remarked that it was “the way of the world.”

Those who want to see all abortion illegal have charged there’s a media blackout on this case. Those who’ve read the report can see this case is about the horrors of illegal abortions. What Gosnell did was not legal, hence why he’s in jail.

The grand jury report sums it up, “We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion.”

This political football is really at the core of how this clinic was able to operate. It was only shut down due to an investigation of illegal prescription drug activity. If Gosnell would have just stuck to butchering women of color, he’d likely still be open for business.

I’ve written extensively about criminalized abortion, abortion clinics and fake abortion clinics where no doctors work and false medical information (and no health care) is state funded. One piece won an award and the panel of judges possibly doubled the readership of the exposé.

These stories are hard to sell. There’s no demand for these articles. If these tales were centered on erectile dysfunction, there’d be greater public interest and a coinciding news hole. But there’s not. Editors don’t really like stories about abortion. Abortion is icky. It’s a “women’s issue” about their nether regions—way off down there. Abortion is not a happy story. It’s why it’s quietly omitted from publications due to logical editorial decisions everyday.

Women’s publications can’t ONLY cover abortion or they’ll go out of business. So the trumped-up outrage over the alleged lack of press on the Gosnell case is ill-considered. Even John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of two Congresses that have voted to criminalize abortion dozens of times, has jumped onto that conspiracy bandwagon, tweeting: “The American people deserve to hear the whole story about the #Gosnell.”

But those who want to see abortion go back in the shadows are amiss in wanting the “whole story” of Gosnell to be told. The “whole story” is that Boehner and the GOP would rather have more Gosnells practicing illegal abortion than places where women can obtain safe medical care.

So as cynical and pessimistic as it is, Gosnell summed it up best: “It’s the way of the world”—the world of illegal abortion.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant (click to view more cartoons by Englehart)

Other times she would just go for the shorthand: “Your teacher lies to you.”

For most of my elementary school attendance that was the line: What they’re telling you in school is wrong. When I asked why we had to go to school since they didn’t tell us the truth, she said because that was the law.

The cruelest lie from my teacher was about Santa Claus, who was billed as giving toys to all kids who were good. All kids except for poor kids … which were us.

Evolution before the high school years meant very little to me. I was much more incensed about not being able to believe in Santa Claus. Every philosophical debate with my mother started with my adamant pro-Santa position backed by hours of holiday films and ended with a theological stalemate where I doubted my mother’s credibility.

By the time I was old enough to read on my own (my mother refers to all non-bible tomes as “devil books”) creationism was quickly dismissed as nonsense. Great minds had suspected evolution far before Charles Darwin’s, “Origin of the Species,” going back to the ancient Greeks and Chinese. There’s plenty of self-evident evidence (see: the flu virus). Yes, it’s just a theory, but so is gravity.

I say this because I don’t think creationism hurts children any more than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. These are myths we’re told as kids, find out they’re not true and go on to tell them to our own kids. It’s tradition; who cares? My mother had every right to fill my head with all of the weird ideas in hers (she also believes in the End of Days which explains her love of Fox News).

It’s the teaching of creationism in schools that’s the issue. First off: you don’t “teach” creationism, you deny science, evidence and reason with a story. Second: Going to the doctor instead of praying is already putting faith in science over religion. That debate is over (unless you’re a Christian Scientist). “Teaching the controversy” is teaching two myths: creationism and that there’s a lack of scientific consensus on evolution. There’s a lack of political consensus on creationism, but that’s it.

We don’t teach the differing opinions in physical education. We don’t say that exercise is what science says is healthy but it’s just a theory and then offer up crackpot alternatives to exercise. We leave that to parents.

The creation myth doesn’t harm children; creationism harms schools. Universal public education is there for the public good (a phrase Republicans replaced with the word “takers”). If they’re not teaching basic science then they’re not doing what we need them to do. The integrity of our public schools is what’s at risk.

Right now, in 2013, states like Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Indiana and Arizona are considering bills to discredit their public schools with 1st century stories about our origins; or even worse with a more recent “creationism-lite”—the misnomer Intelligent Design. These so-called Academic Freedom bills have been voted down over and over again, but like the mythical nine-headed Hydra, once one head is removed, two heads grow back armed with legal loopholes and code words for creationism.

In Louisiana, where their “academic freedom” bill was signed by the governor in 2008, private schools that now receives taxpayer voucher money are reported to tell their students the Loch Ness Monster (another mythical creature) is proof evolution never happened. The state is third worst in the nation for math and science.

In the Information Age we’re letting our schools erode.

And with some irony, devolve.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Daryl Cagle / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

Also, Latinos can no longer be characterized as an invading force hell bent on killing us all (remember “the fajita flu?”). Self-deportation, a Republican policy idea to make this country so unpleasant for people who appear to be Mexican that they leave, has attempted to self-deport since Republicans figured out Latinos are also votantes (voters). They are now reaching out to Latinos or as Senator Rand Paul said at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, “I am a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

With no more gays and Latinos to kick around, who’s next? I’m guessing Republicans are not going to run on sound public policy ideas. It’s not that I’ve become cynical watching the Grand Old Party gain ground by telling minority groups to get off their lawn. It’s just that I’m a realist. Republicans have enjoyed the fruits of the Southern strategy (aka the art of blaming “the others”)—it’s not easy to just turn that off.

Who’s next? Perhaps people on food stamps: currently one fifth of the country.

Conservatives have already shown a healthy disdain for people who receive any government aid but reserve special scorn for those on food stamps. About 47.8 million Americans are on the program. During the election, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said, “The African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” People on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are at an all-time high because, well, poverty is at an all-time high. Who’s easier to raise your voice at than the voiceless? I mean, the working-impoverished should be clever enough to ask their parent’s for a loan, right? Republicans should be licking their chops to get a bite out of America’s hungry.

But let’s not forget children on welfare!

Tennessee lawmakers have floated a bill to deduct 30 percent of benefits from families on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families if children don’t get good grades. These kids are getting free school plus a whopping $185 a month for their family to live on?! The poor kid in school everyone picked on for wearing the same sweater every day? Up till now they’ve had it too easy. They could be crowned the Republican’s new welfare queen!

Don’t forget non-Christians!

North Carolina Republicans have introduced a bill saying the part of the First Amendment specifying the state shouldn’t establish a religion doesn’t apply to them. The bill reads: “Each state in the union is sovereign and may independently determine how that state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion.” An official state religion? Why has no one thought to do this before?! Why has no one looked at Saudi Arabia and thought, “This place is great! We should make North Carolina more like it!” But since Americans have made the mistake of letting Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Muslims, Jews and Scientologists live here, now they can redeem themselves by letting the GOP malign them to turn out the Republican base.

I’m sure there are many more for Republicans to choose from. Hatred of the French is cyclical. Scientists have an annoying way of disagreeing with Republicans. “Sluts” should also get at least an honorable mention as a potential group. Since conservatives have been against certain kinds of marriages, single mothers have gotten a pass. They could make a comeback. But as long as Republicans don’t stand for anything other than freedom for corporations, they will need to find a group of people to be their boogieman.

Without gays and Latinos, Republicans are just cradling their crosshairs with nothing to point it at. But don’t worry, they’ll find one soon enough.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Which pretty much sums up every debate I’ve ever had on religion. Liberals will tell you Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jewish hippie who hated money and communed with the outcasts of Roman society. He threatened the status quo and was executed for it. From this narrative “real Christianity” means challenging authority and helping the poor and the disenfranchised. It’s an all-inclusive religion based on tolerance and peace. Also they’re vehemently opposed to capital punishment.

Nate Beeler / Columbus Dispatch (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Conservatives will tell you Jesus battled Satan. They see Satan everywhere: Muslims, Jews, Communists, single women, sex, homosexuals, hippies, Satanists, Atheists, rock music, rap music, facial hair, the Pope, Obama, government spending, China, drug use and (the one I’m totally on board with) yoga. In their Bible there’s war and punishment. There are rules, and if you follow them you don’t incur god’s wrath. It’s simple, it’s rigid and it’s biblical. “Tolerance” is code for Christians being persecuted for their beliefs. Also, Jesus loved guns.

In the 1700-year history of Christianity there have been revitalizations, revisions, reformations and Mormons. Christianity is eternally getting back to the true meaning of Truth. It’s a battle over who holds the deed to the proverbial Garden of Eden. Christians disagree with other Christians as to what Christians believe.

The point is: Religion has the charm of conforming to one’s opinion. Christendom has been splintered since the moment it was dubbed Christendom.

The reason? Religion is subjective.

Every group thinks they are the ones doing it right; others are mistaken. Church is a marinade of confirmation bias.

Nowhere is this more tangible than the debate over same sex marriage. Those who have a visceral dislike of homosexuality have decided their version of Christ would also condemn gay rights. Those who think love is the ultimate virtue think their version of Christ is pro-all-marriage. Those who oppose it will point out parts of the Bible that agree with them. Those who are for it will point out the parts of the Bible that agree with them.

Religion and opinion could be synonyms in most instances.

(Author’s note: I will get emails this week telling me that I’m wrong about Christianity and that the real Christianity is something that the writer believes in. The letters will tell me I’ve missed the mark and try to persuade me to their belief of their beliefs. It will happen. It’ll come from very nice, well-meaning people without a sense of irony.)

Which is why a piece of legislation like Kentucky’s House Bill 279, also known as the Religion Freedom Act, should give us all pause. The state’s House Democrats overrode the Governor’s veto to pass the law this week. The real push, I suspect, to fast track this bill comes from church leaders who are paranoid they could lose their tax-exempt status if they openly denounce homosexuality, so they clamored for a shield. The (now) law reads there should be no burden placed on a person’s “freedom of religion.” It then specifies: “A ‘burden’ shall include indirect burdens such as withholding benefits, assessing penalties, or an exclusion from programs or access to facilities.”

The faithful don’t want to be discriminated against for discriminating. Of course they don’t, being discriminated against is awful.

HB 279 is opposed by anyone who’s ever been on the wrong side of vehemence. It gives Kentuckians the right to ignore laws they disagree with based on their opinion/religion. It’s the right to act on prejudice. Or as one supporter told a Focus on the Family affiliate, the bill’s aim is “to practice their beliefs in the open.”

So the question is where does my religious opinion end and your civil rights begin? Does my conviction trump your liberties? It’s a showdown of rites versus rights.

When it comes to equal protection my faith is in the U.S. Constitution rather than the Bible.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Bill O’Reilly deciphered the secret scheme to de-Christian Christmas. On his Christmastime program last year he said, “I absolutely agree 100 percent that the diminishment of Christianity is the target and Christmas is the vehicle because the secularists know the opposition to their agenda—legalized drugs is in that as well—comes primarily from the Judeo-Christian traditionalist people.”

Peter Broelman / Australia (click to view more cartoons by Broelman)

Smother the Christmas and then couples with two grooms will get survivor benefits! Afterwards it’s meth and abortions for all! A reasonable plan.

Every year O’Reilly and his ilk talk about this plot, evidenced by major retailers using the phrase “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Of course “holiday” is a contraction of “holy days,” so their dander is clearly canned snow. But that doesn’t stop it from showing up every December.

Part-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin recently announced her bandwagon hop onto the seemingly one-sided War on Christmas with her upcoming book, “A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas.” (Which is like saying, “A happy Administrative Assistant’s day IS a joyous Secretary’s Day!”) In a statement, Palin said the book “will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas.”

Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge was a rich miser who had contempt for the poor and the working class. He would totally be against food stamps, social security and Medicare. In short, Scrooge, like Palin, would likely be invited to speak at CPAC and other Americans for Prosperity-sponsored conferences. Palin would hang out with Scrooge in the greenroom.

But let’s say those who are convinced there’s an effort to downgrade Christmas by not commercializing the religious aspect enough are right—why have these cunning secularists left Easter untouched?

Why does the outrage machine not crank up around the end of February to “take back Easter from the godless?”

After all, Easter is named after the Teutonic goddess of fertility, Eostre. So Walmart using the term “Happy Easter” isn’t playing up the Christian part of the holy day. Eggs are pagan symbols of fertility. Same with bunnies (as in “reproduce like a”). It’s ripe to accuse secularists of trying to make it more about spring and re-birth than Jesus’ resurrection.

So why haven’t they?

I’ll try to answer that with numbers. Americans spend about $16 billion on Easter ($2 billion just on candy) and on Black Friday (Friday named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess Frige), the day after Thanksgiving which marks the beginning of the Christmas buying season, Americans spend around $52 billion. In total we spend in the area of $500 billion on Christmas.

There is a “war on Christmas” because there are spoils to be had over Christmas. There’s a giant Christmas pie and each slice is worth fighting for. If Easter raked in nearly half a trillion in sales, the outragemeisters would suddenly claim it was under attack by pagans trying to obscure the Christian message by making it about pastel colored eggs.

Yes, there would be books, possibly one by Palin’s ghostwriter, about the War on Easter and the over-commercialization of the holy day means you need to buy the book. Better yet, buy some as gifts—there’s a price break at 10!

This stems from the prosperity gospel. It’s where Christians conflate Jesus with Ayn Rand and believe that wealth is a sign of god’s grace and poverty is proof of his contempt. It makes for profit-seeking prophets. So instead of indignation that materialism is corrupting the message of Christ, the umbrage is aimed at mall Santas having the gall to sit near signs reading, “Happy Holidays!”

So why isn’t there a war on Easter? Because there’s really no money in it. It’s not worth the fight since there’s so little payoff. It’s the same reason no one has ever invaded Antarctica.

But conversely, if there were a plan to destroy Christian holidays, Easter would be a great place to start.

The self-appointed watchmen are too busy cashing in on Christmas to notice.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

But I think their story is illustrative.

Cam Cardow / Ottawa Citizen (click to view more cartoons by Cardow)

My in-laws live in a generic suburb of modest mid-century tract homes in the middle of strip mall sprawl. They have a well-attended lawn; two mid-range cars in the driveway, a loyal lab mix sleeping on the porch. They both worked in middle management in not-important-enough-to-name small businesses tangentially related to serving the housing industry for over 20 years each. They paid off their mortgage. Their son, my husband, was the first in their family to attend college. During the housing boom they looked at the massive amount their small three-bedroom home was worth and opted not to partake in the equity, but knew it meant they were secure. The future was bright.

In short: They were living every part of the real American Dream. Not the grandiose one where we’re all millionaires or soon-to-be millionaires. The one where we all have a job, a home and our kids are better off than we were. My in-laws had that.

The middle-class mantra since the Great Depression has been if you do the right thing, you’ll be ok. Work, save, pay bills and pay your taxes. You know—be responsible. Those in the middle-class believe everyone gets the opportunity for success, and failure is something you choose. So when bad times fall on those in the middle-class, it’s assumed it’s because of some moral shortcoming. Drugs, gambling, divorce—something they did. Something they therefore could have avoided doing. These tales become suburban parables, gossip with a moral to the story. “So and so had that shopping addiction and now the house is for sale. Tsk. Tsk.”

You’re familiar with the next part of this story. Giant, faceless, soulless corporations gambled, colluded, lied, stole and were otherwise reckless in their deregulated pursuit of profits. These conglomerates were so giant, in fact, they had to be immediately saved by the same government. Too big to fail: the premise of every monster movie ever made.

My in-laws had no part in any of that. They just faithfully and unwittingly paid their taxes to prop up companies like Bank of America. They also pay for government that doesn’t represent them; it instead represents Citigroup.

My mother-in-law was the first to be laid off. A few months later, her husband’s company also downsized. They’re 55 and 56 years old. Too young to retire, too old to be hired. Their health insurance is $1,000 a month each. That’s $24,000 a year just for health insurance (for perspective: the annual salary for a minimum wage worker is $15,000). They’re still a decade away from Medicare.

Their unemployment insurance has, of course, run out. They’ve yet to find work. Their house is worth half of what it was during the boom. They don’t travel. They don’t buy anything. They don’t have much of a choice. Their savings is going quickly.

What happened to them is government and corporations got together to make life fuller (richer) for corporations. Wealth was redistributed away from the middle and went to the very, very top. The term a “government by the people” was said with a wink as vampiric corporations were thought of as … people. “People” that do business in the U.S. but magically exist in the Caymans. Yes, coming from a victim, this sounds like a conspiracy theory. “They” raided my in-laws’ retirement.

But really: Their golden years did go to Goldman Sachs.

As Congress shortsightedly wants to outlaw abortion, bicker about debt-ceilings, vilify those on food stamps and take more recesses than the average kindergartener—the middle-class is an abstraction. The middle-class is just a thing they mention to try and mask being an elitist, beltway insider, corporate toady.

But the real middle-class—the actual human beings—are not getting help from the politicians they voted for. Instead, the politicians they voted for are helping the companies that the middle-class, in turn, is forced to subsidize.

It’s not a theory, it’s a conspiracy fact.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Lest we think for a moment we are somehow beyond Freud’s third stage of psychosexual development, look no further than the gazillions of dollars made off of Viagra and Cialis in this country. Not to mention all the coy commercials with sexy-seeming middle-aged dudes we’re now all subjected to.

I relay this because I’ve traveled, I’m married to a dude and I leave my apartment occasionally, so I therefore realize and am sensitive to the preoccupation the men of our species have with their manhood. I understand.

But last Tuesday when anti-male-circumcision activists from a group called Intaction (you’d be forgiven for guessing they were called U.S. Uncut), interrupted President Clinton at a Clinton Foundation Millennium Network talk in New York, someone had to take umbrage with the outrage.

They were there, eight members strong, to protest Clinton’s support for male circumcision in Africa to battle their very real AIDS crisis.

That’s right, someone is trying to do something about the AIDS epidemic in Africa and there’s a group unrelated to anyone dying of AIDS in Africa protesting one of the tactics. Not because those tactics don’t work (there’s a lot of evidence that they do), but because they personally don’t like them.

I also want to mention that I am very sympathetic to activists. I’ve spent a lot of time with activists. They believe they can change the world because other activists have done just that. They are more sensitive than the rest of us, that’s what makes them activists. In that way they’re our conscience, screaming at us to do the right thing. Even if I vehemently disagree with the cause, I respect taking a stand.

With that being said: Really? Male circumcision?

On Intaction’s website there’s a woman holding a picket sign that reads: “Circumcision removes the most sensitive part of the penis.” Like I said, I’m married, to a dude—therefore (very) skeptical of that claim. There’s really no evidence of that being true in any study (funded or anecdotal).

But my main issue is: of all the things that one can chose as the evil they must devote their lives to stamping out … this is it? Not famine, war, disease, poverty, pollution, corruption, child abuse, slavery, exploited sex workers, exploited children, sweatshops, union busting, soda size-shrinking, forest razing, coal mining, whaling, shark finning, the prison industrial complex, the death penalty, illiteracy, female genital mutilation, AIDS in Africa, being Jamie Dimon, bullying, disenfranchisement, predatory lending, being Walmart, being Monsanto, being any subject of any documentary on Netflix, being Netflix, pornography, child pornography, United Airlines (I don’t forget), censorship, racism, sexism, classism, high taxes, low taxes, handicap access and any land use issue within 10 miles of your home? Not one of those is more important than the extreme ick factor (because it’s not supported by data) of a ubiquitous snip on your extremity?

Not to trivialize anyone’s personal connection—no actually I do want to trivialize it. It seems rather shortsighted to dedicate a bunch of one’s time to being that self-righteous about something that myopic.

What’s really disingenuous about this “cause” is the claim that men are the victims of what they call mutilation. They equate male circumcision with female circumcision, which is false. They also have the gall to compare themselves to the Jews during WWII.

Men have more power than women; historically, currently and otherwise. It’s creepy to have superiority and be a crybaby. It’s like Kim Jong Un feeling sorry for himself.

Call it a-few-inches-below-your-navel-gazing. It’s called junk. It’s just not more important than the estimated 22 million people with HIV/AIDS—70 percent of the world’s cases—in Africa.

Seriously, grow up.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant (click to view more cartoons by Englehart)

In this case the caretaker is Congress (specifically the Republican-controlled House) and the thing they’re enjoying making unwell is, well, us: the country, our economy, postal services, meat inspections, air traffic control, infrastructure, law enforcement, military, credit rating, commerce, and every other part of a country thought of around the globe as a super power.

This disorder can sometimes be traced to an early legit emergency, where the caregiver with FDbP first experiences the rush of admiration they’ll later crave. For the GOP it’s probably September 11, 2001. It was on that day the then-leader of the Republican party (the same dude the GOP no longer acknowledges exists, they’ll even listen to Mitt Romney speak before uttering his name) finally got to do everything he wanted without question — all with an over (and brief) 80 percent approval rating. He preemptively invaded Iraq without paying for it, flattened wages, made the rich richer and transformed higher education into a profit-driven industry. More importantly he got Democrats to shut up while he pretended drunken-sailor-spending was compassionate conservatism.

So the idea was planted: The country in peril equals Republicans to the rescue! Even more important: Republican ideas — no matter how unsound — getting implemented.

“My child is SICK — quick cut taxes!!”

And when deregulating the banking industry led to widespread fraud and abuse that ended up buckling our economy — causing another crisis — again Republicans got to do what they’ve always wanted; privatize profits and nationalize losses. The Republican-president-who-will-not-be-named bailed out the banks — those bastions (bastards) of the alleged and largely make-believe free market, saying famously, “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

Which is akin to saying you’ve abandoned religion to save the church.

“My baby is running a fever! Hurry up and give wealthy white-collar criminals money and immunity!!”

After Republicans lost the White House in 2008 they decided if Obama succeeds, it’ll be bad for them. It was about getting back those glorious not-spoken-about-GOP-president years when they could rack up debt and use the word “liberal” like it means skin lice. And as soon as the GOP got control of the House the government has been on the verge of a shutdown virtually every month.

Republicans get to hold vigils (press conferences) lamenting the suffering of the country they’ve sworn to protect, while we all stare at our televisions with a creepy feeling and a suspicion we’re not quite able to place.

Republican Factious Disorder by Proxy: “We love our country; we’re the unsung heroes of this inexplicable illness (we’re inducing). All we ask is that you’ll make our monument on the National Mall tasteful.”

Our ailments are fabricated by Republicans and the antidotes are also fabricated by Republicans. Our spending problem? They made it and now only they can fix it. Our deficit? “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” said Veep Dick Cheney. Now? They matter. Especially to Republicans who like to use the word “Reagan.” They’ve shown their willingness to shut down the government (downgrading our credit in the process) to reduce the deficit. They’re basically sabotaging the country and calling it, laughably, patriotism. Or even worse — common sense.

Obama, for his part, keeps on trying to govern by consensus with a Republican party that waits for consensus so they can oppose it.

They have to, in effect, abandon their principles in order to save their principles (see: the individual mandate; Chuck Hagel; the DREAM Act etc.).

Make sense? Of course not. It’s still a guiding ideology for the party of Bush, post-Bush.

We have a factious disorder because of our factually dysfunctional opposition party. Budget showdown, debt-ceiling, fiscal cliff, sequestration — these are all symptoms of grand scale Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome.

Yes, it’s twisted. And yes, we’re sick … and tired of it.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

John Cole / Scranton Times-Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Cole)

What about the families from the Amish schoolhouse shootings? Virginia Tech? The 2007 Northern Illinois University shooting? The Gabby Giffords shooting in Tucson? The Carson City, Nevada IHOP massacre in 2011? The Aurora Theater shooting? Or the parents of the first-graders gunned down in Newtown?

Those families will never have their proverbial day in court with gun dealers thanks entirely to what is known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005. A Republican House and Senate sent George W. Bush a piece of legislation shielding gun dealers and makers from lawsuits, ensuring they cannot be held liable for any crimes committed with their products.

In essence it curbs the rights of Americans to obtain redress for wrongs—the basic idea of tort laws.

Wayne LaPierre said of the Arms Act, “This is a historic day for freedom. I would like to thank President Bush for signing the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in twenty years into law. History will show that this law helped save the American firearms industry from collapse under the burden of these ruinous and politically motivated lawsuits.”

This act of Congress wasn’t about the Second Amendment. It wasn’t about individual rights whatsoever. It was based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution—commerce, meaning business regulations, not personal liberty.

So let’s recap: The ATF doesn’t have a full-time agency head. It’s under-funded and unable to criminally prosecute gun dealers and straw purchasers. Studies have indicated straw purchasers are the number one way guns flood our streets and get into the hands of “bad guys.” The agency that should be cracking down on this doesn’t have the funding or the leadership. And thanks, again, to the Feds (Congress) weapon profiteers can’t be held civilly liable either. What a wonderful time to be a gun manufacturer.

These arms dealers get to spend their profits to spread Obama-will-take-away-our-guns propaganda, hence driving up sales of their deadly products, which are all reward and no risk to them.

It’s like the Wild West but the Wild West had more gun control enforcement.

The Arms Act hoped also to thwart a trend of lawsuits by cities and counties claiming they were picking up the tab for gun violence which could be avoided if the manufacturers made weapons safer (trigger locks etc.), to save the industry from becoming the “next tobacco.” The Detroit Free Press reported in 1999, gun violence cost taxpayers $850 million a year in medical care, increased security, prison costs, lost tax revenues, decreased property values, police salaries and court costs. New Orleans was the first city to try and make the case that gun manufacturers were in fact negligent.

But not now. Not after the GOP gleefully passed the Arms Act.

The industry has lobbied to give themselves blanket immunity. Those who make their living off of making and selling deadly weapons have never had it so good. There is no other industry that gets this kind of freedom. They’re free from innovation and market forces. There’s no other industry (especially one that can easily be held responsible for so many American deaths) that isn’t susceptible to criminal OR civil entanglements. It’s a charmed industry Congress rigged to be successful and bullet proof. If only we all could be so lucky.

From the street level gun dealers’ golden era looks distinctly dystopian.

Any talk of gun safety needs to include tort restoration. Give us back our right to take manufacturers who neglect to make their products safer to court. Give us back our right to hold dealers accountable when they turn a blind eye to selling to straw purchasers and the mentally ill.

Gun owning is about personal responsibility? Then gun dealing should be too.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Daryl Cagle / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

I say this to Republicans who seem to be aspiring now to win the Latino vote: Cubans are not Mexicans. So when the party touts Florida Senator Marco Rubio as their go-to Latino – Politico called Rubio “the fresh-faced ambassador to conservatives” (It’s since been scrubbed) – they’re not wooing the 31 million Latinos who identify themselves as Mexican-American, the biggest Latino group and therefore biggest Latino voting bloc in the U.S.

Cubans may speak Spanish, and be from someplace else, but their immigration experience is unique to the island they come from … and our policy toward said island.

And Puerto Ricans, the second largest Latino group in the country, are also not “illegals.” They’re Americans. The island is a U.S. territory. I’m just trying to help you out, Republicans.

The point is: Putting Marco Rubio out on immigration reform is cynical conservative tokenism (àla Sarah Palin, Herman Cain and Nikki Haley), but it also proves the hypothesis by Mexican-Americans: Republicans don’t actually care about them. One clue is that they assume they’re pretty much Cubans.

Immigration reform’s focus (and sticking point) is what to do about the estimated 11 million people who live here without documentation. A 2005 Pew Hispanic Center report says 56 percent of them are from Mexico, 22 percent from other Latin American countries (mainly Central America), 13 percent are Asian, 6 percent Canadian and European and 3 percent African. (None are Cuban.)

These 11 million people – nearly 80 percent of whom are Latino and using what Newt Gingrich called “the language of the ghetto” – make up our underground economy and exploited underclass.

Republicans have loved vilifying this group of people: From candidate for Governor of California Meg Whitman saying we should “prosecute illegal aliens and criminal aliens in all of our cities, in every part of California,” to Arizona’s SB 1070 and Congressman Brian Bilbray saying you can tell if someone is illegal (not by their race, but) by their shoes. Bilbray lost his seat, by the way. And Meg who?

Mitt Romney’s “plan” was for self-deportation. He also went after Mensa contender Rick Perry for educating “illegals” in his state. But then went on Univision with a dark bronze tan to address Spanish speakers.

Mitt who?

Republicans have opted for a Southern Strategy: a South-of-the-Border Southern Strategy. It failed. Now they’re trying to reverse course.

The Hispanic Leadership Network, a GOP-affiliated group, suggested the party nix the words “illegals” and “aliens” and not use the word “amnesty,” which some tea-buzzed Republicans took as a challenge to see how many times they could use all three in a sentence. It’s hard to teach the Grand Old Party new tricks.

Republicans moralize about illegal immigrants. “We’re a nation of laws: they broke the law. End of sound bite.” If we can make the subjugated underclass somehow immoral then their continued exploitation is therefore acceptable. The labor they do doesn’t need to be fairly paid for – it’s penance for breaking the law. To Republicans, the wave of immigration from Mexico is a giant chain gang. When they get here, they’re automatically felons so they deserve what they get.

But this has backfired on Republicans. It lost them the White House (yet again). They realize this. They want to be in power. That means they need the Latino vote. Their solution is to prop up a Cuban-American (whose parents came to this country before Castro) to go on Hannity and relay that his plan for the undocumented is for them to stand in line: “You have to wait your turn behind everyone who applied before you legally, and when your turn comes up, you have to qualify for the visa you’re applying for.”

Giving weight to a Cuban-American on illegal immigration is like giving credence to the head of HSBC (or Barclays or UBS for that matter) on prisons.

Yeah, very little personal experience on the subject.

Godspeed, GOP.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Bill Day / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Day)

It’s with that in mind that I say I am disgusted with Lance Armstrong. He’s a fraud. Whatever there was to admire about him was a lie. He’s a fake. A phony. A cheat. It’s hard to hate a cancer survivor. Lance has always had a way of making the difficult seem easy.

I find what he did; the lies, the bullying, destroying people’s reputations to be irredeemable. I don’t think he should be forgiven. I think the best thing that should happen to him is to be forgotten.

He’s repulsive to me. As I watched his “come to Oprah” interview in which he came clean about his doping, I was reduced to only expletives. “Schmuck!”

Then it occurred to me how rare it is that someone who’s been living a lie—a lie as big as the one Armstrong was living—admits all. The public is not used to a full confession. Liars tend to stay liars and go to their graves as liars:

Big tobacco, OJ Simpson, Ken Lay, George W. Bush, pedophile priests, BP and a long list of really puffy professional baseball players (who got passed up to be in the hall of fame this year) just to name a few.

We’ve become immune to baloney in politics. Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster, said last August, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” which ended up being the most truthful thing said by Romney or his surrogates until his concession speech.

Romney’s VP pick Congressman Paul Ryan, in a staple of his stump speech, blamed a factory closing in his district on Obama when it had closed during the Bush Administration. They repeated over and over again that the work requirement for welfare had been done away with by the president. It wasn’t. Nor did Obama start his presidency with an apology tour.

Romney even lied about his own plans. In the first debate he said his health care plan covered pre-existing conditions, a lie his own spokesperson had to set straight.

During the primary Romney’s stump speech had a line claiming: “We are the only people on the earth that put our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem.” One brief medal ceremony at the Olympics could debunk that. At a CNN debate, Romney quipped, “I’m Mitt Romney—and yes Wolf, that’s also my first name.” His first name is Willard.

Paul Krugman at The New York Times coined the phrase “post-truth politics.” James Fallows at The Atlantic called it the “Post-Truth” Age. David Corn asked, “Campaign 2012: The End of Political Truth?” I joked at the time Romney was singlehandedly trying to kill all fact-checkers from exhaustion. It was a fire hose of half-truths on a candid day.

Oppo researchers Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian in their compelling memoir titled “We’re With Nobody,” wrote, “Say what you will about Nixon—he was a tyrant and arguably a criminal—but he recognized the importance of facts. In an era when people create them out of whole cloth, and are rarely called to task for it, the idea of breaking into a building to steal documentation seems almost quaint.”

Speaking of which: Karl Rove just signed a four-year contract with Fox News.

And now the second-most unlikable human being on the planet, Lance freaking Armstrong, has admitted his deceit with some Oprah-level candor. It’s almost a shock to the system.

I say this even though it hurts: We can’t punish honesty. We have to be able to, you know, handle the truth. If we really want people coming clean we have to reward coming clean. Allocution has to have some merit. Right?

It’s all true! In theory. We can probably wait for a less repugnant personality than Lance to test it out.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Mike Keefe / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

If you asked an American living at that time what they thought about the Klan, they would have thought of it as “the way things were.” Having a clandestine Klan standing strong for the interests of Anglo-Saxons and terrorizing minorities was a normal part of living in Jim Crow America, and why would something that widespread ever be any different?

Today the Klan has maybe 5,000 members according to their own reporting, and they’re considered a hate group. They’re fringe on a very mainstream day.

The point is: Things change. Goliaths fall. It happens.

We think of people in the past as having foresight to the future. This way we can, with authority, say what the Founding Fathers would have thought about things like traffic lights. But people living through history (also known as the present) often have a status quo bias. What’s going on right now is it. This is, how it is.

And this is how we’ve viewed the death grip of the NRA on our politics. “Members of Congress have ranked the NRA as the most powerful lobbying organization in the country several years in a row,” brags the NRA’s Wikipedia page citing a 1999 Fortune article. And because whatever gets repeated enough in the Beltway becomes common wisdom: You can’t do anything about the flood of guns on our streets because the NRA is the most powerful lobby in America – ever!

Any talk about gun control has been a nonstarter. Remember Bob Costas in the beginning of December talking about guns during Sunday football in the wake of an NFL player’s murder/suicide? He was raked over the coals. It was inappropriate! How dare he soil the sanctity of sports night with his dirty pinko agenda!

Then a week later there was Sandy Hook. Twenty first-graders were slaughtered by a gun enthusiast’s arsenal (who was also killed by the same means). The usual voices denouncing any cries for action on gun safety were quickly drowned out by a steady hum of Americans who are tired of weapon manufacturers dominating the debate.

On January 9, the two year anniversary of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the Tucson Police Department held a gun buyback program. Arizona has some of the most liberal gun laws in the nation, also (as par for the course) it ranks among the highest gun deaths per capita. The NRA said destroying those 206 guns turned in was illegal and threatened to sue to stop it. They said the police department would have to sell those firearms according to what they interpreted as the law. The National Rifle Association opposes just the voluntary act of getting guns off the street?

This is not a group championing individual freedom. This is weapon fetishization.

The NRA wants the Tucson PD to effectively sell guns to the public.

President Obama who, contrary to Internet message boards, has expanded gun rights while in office, came out with an comprehensive reform package including: ending the suspension of gun violence research; universal background checks; a ban on high capacity magazines; and appointing a full-time permanent director to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). All things the majority of Americans agree with.

The president also incorporated what the NRA called their “meaningful contribution” which was looking at violent video games (some of which are produced by the NRA), armed guards in schools and looking at the mentally ill as potential spree killers.

But the NRA doesn’t want to work with the president. They denounced the announcement before hearing it. The NRA wants to advocate for the absolute unchecked rights of gun manufacturers as they march over to the fringe.

Goliaths fall.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Only the right wing will say yes.

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view more cartoons by Fitzsimmons)

It’s a go-to (think lazy) response to any criticism of the right: The left does it too. Even more so, probably.

If you say the right is still utilizing the Southern Strategy while trying to disenfranchise African-Americans, they’ll say the left are the real racists. James Taranto of WSJ.com wrote, “To keep blacks voting Democratic, it is necessary for the party and its supporters to keep alive the idea that racism is prevalent in America and to portray the Republican Party … as racist.” According to conservatives, liberals are the ones who really have a war on women. (Republicans just want to nationalize their wombs.) Democrats are the ones who really don’t want diversity. (All the old white men in the Republican Party are just a coincidence.) It’s not Mitt Romney who was shockingly untethered from facts in the most suspended-reality campaign in modern history; Obama lied about closing Guantanamo!

Yes, Republicans are rubber, Democrats are glue…

Whatever you say about Republicans they’ll try to pin that tail on the donkey.

This false equivalency benefits the right. A pox on both your houses disengages people from the political process and that helps Republicans. As we’ve seen in the midterms: When fewer people vote, more Republicans get into office.

The two parties are not, as we say in math, opposite equals. At all. Especially in math. As Bill Clinton said in his 2012 DNC speech, “Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic.”

When Republicans were in charge they started two unfunded wars and took the unprecedented (for a reason) step of giving deep tax cuts — also unfunded — during a time of war(s). They spent like proverbial (and literal) drunken sailors. They increased the size of government (Department of Homeland Security) and increased the deficit while decreasing revenue. That’s what Republicans did when they could do everything they’d always hoped for: They made a mess of the place.

Now Republicans are shocked! Shocked by the state of their beloved country! It’s a disaster!

Republicans are aghast and determined to find someone (non-Republican) to blame: illegal immigrants, single mothers, “Washington,” Pelosi, Obama, ACORN, New Black Panthers, Old Black Panthers, Planned Parenthood. Maybe if they just habitually say “Benghazi” no one will pay attention to what Republicans do when they’re in power.

Oh and all this spending — it’s akin to sin and treason and everything distasteful now that Republicans no longer in the Oval Office. The phony outrage is palpable. As Speaker of the House John Boehner tweeted, “Too many Americans are still out of work & Washington still spends too much, taxes too much & borrows too much.”

If you ask a Republican, Democrats are responsible too. Yes, Democrats didn’t shut down the government when the first and second unpaid-for Bush tax cuts were up for a vote. They didn’t abuse the filibuster to stop Republicans from passing (the also unpaid-for) Medicare Part D. They didn’t impeach Bush when they had the votes. In short: Democrats didn’t act like Republicans act when they’re in the minority so they didn’t try hard enough to keep Republicans from melting the world’s economy.

See? Democrats had the power to be just as disruptive, cantankerous and disrespectful of the process when they were in the minority. Therefore, both parties (can) do it.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The whole thing is disgusting. They’re all crooks. You shouldn’t even bother to vote or be involved. You should just look away. That’s how Republicans like it.

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© Copyright 2013 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. 

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

But this is the solution the NRA offers: Too many shootings requires more people armed and able to shoot. The problem AND the cure are basically the same: lots of guns.

On the other side is a call for ban of certain types of guns. This immediately gets into the weeds of “weapon-ese.” Semi-auto? Assault weapons? Machine guns? Military-style characteristics? High capacity magazines? Bayonet mount? Flash suppressors?!

Which if you don’t really care about guns (just care about being shot) is a booby trap set by gun enthusiasts. Because if you don’t know what semi-auto actually means (it’s a ridiculously broad term) — they can always tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Which is true. Then the much-coveted conversation about guns in America is over.

Because in America you can’t hate guns. That’s not a legitimate stance. You have to love guns, possibly own a couple and be able to talk about them competently in order to have a seat at the table. Mitt Romney had to say he hunted “varmints.” Really.

The problem with the assault weapons ban is that it’s something. It’s something for a nation, in the wake of Sandy Hook, crying out for some kind of SOMETHING. Anything but the bogus and tone-deaf prescription for more weapons on the streets made by Wayne LaPierre of the NRA.

There’s a perfectly understandable cry for more gun control, which the assault weapons ban claims to be. It bans certain types of purchases on future weapons but it’s not (in reality) a good law. It won’t actually (as gun enthusiasts love to point out) affect gun deaths. Most gun deaths are by handguns. It’s the legislative equivalent of banning large bags of candy to curb obesity, when the real issue is the wide availability of said candy.

Gun lovers gleefully pointed out last week that Chicago, with its assault weapons ban, police-issued Firearms Owners Identification Card mandate and its refusal to issue open carry permits plus its ties to President Obama, had their 500th homicide of 2012. If we cherry pick this information (disregarding the fact Louisiana and Mississippi with their lax gun laws actually consistently lead the nation in murders per capita) it appears gun control is futile.

Recently the Chicago Police Department requested the University of Chicago Crime Lab researchers study the guns used in crimes. In a groundbreaking report they found those guns were bought legally and locally in Cook County (where Chicago is located). Even more specifically from Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale. The Sun-Times reported, “From 2008 to March 2012, the police successfully traced the ownership of 1,375 guns recovered in crimes in Chicago within a year of their purchase.” They continued, “Of those guns, 268 were bought at Chuck’s — nearly one in five.”

“How do the guns get on the street?,” the study asks. Straw purchasers. People without a record legally buying a weapon and then selling it. Which is outrageous and illegal. But the ATF — the law enforcement organization that would crack down on these sales — the Sun-Times points out, has been largely budget-cut out of business and doesn’t have the resources to track it or prosecute those crimes. It’s an agency that hasn’t had a full-time director in six years thanks to Congress insisting it requires a Senate confirmation. In short: In Cook County, Illinois (as with the rest of the country) it’s easy to get a gun and easy to sell a gun.

This leads me to one plea: If we get one bite at the proverbial gun safety apple, don’t make it the largely cosmetic assault weapons ban.

Federalize background checks, waiting periods and databases. Close the secondary market loopholes. These are things even card carrying NRA members agree with. Slow the flood of guns. But most importantly give the agency responsible for enforcing those laws a director and funding.

Then we can all learn weapon-ese and it’s not completely useless.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Dario Castillejos / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Dario)

For example, my generation doesn’t have to be married. This is the product of our mothers’ saber rattling. Being married is no longer necessary; now it’s a choice. And with a choice, there’s leverage and you get to negotiate your own terms. Free market!

Because of federal legislation, specifically the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974 ensuring single women could obtain their own credit card, we can now be financially independent. It’s not just Roe v. Wade, it’s women demanding birth control access and informed health care decisions. It’s women lobbying for gender parity and equal protections.

Due to feminist victories, this country has changed. Our mores have changed. Women have changed. Marriage has changed.

Nothing illustrates the quagmire this has made for Republicans more than Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s campaign for the GOP nomination for president. Bachmann stated in a speech in 2006 that she hated taxes but studied tax law in order to be “submissive to her husband.” During the primary, at a debate in Iowa, she was asked if she were president would she, in fact, be submissive to her husband. The question drew boos from the crowd, but it was on point: She was running to be commander-in-chief, but claimed to have this conservative traditional Christian marriage. For women to be the Republican ideal, they have to be unqualified to be president.

It’s a weird balancing act. Republican women are required to enjoy the fruits of feminism while championing every force that’s ever opposed it. This was made clear when Sarah Palin was tapped to be the first-ever female GOP veep candidate. Members of her own party criticized her for running for office with such young children. Palin tried out the short-lived phrase “conservative feminism,” which is up there with giant shrimp and authentic copy.

It’s an impossible standard for female Republican politicians: They have to be coy and a leader; feminine and effective; homemaker and career woman; traditional and radical feminist pioneers.

Republicans have lost battles in the war on women they initially (and unsuccessfully) launched as a war on religion. They have a woman problem. They have also maintained the majority in the House. How do these two things mesh up? The Speaker of the House chose committee chairs that are all men. A sea of white Grand Old Party dudes.

This illustrates the dichotomy of gender equality for Republicans: They want women to vote for them; they want to say they have women in their caucus; they want women to be Republicans; but they clearly don’t prefer them as leaders.

Before the GOP committee chair choices looked like the mug shot lineup for a white middle-aged groping suspect, this wasn’t as obvious, but now it’s undeniable: Republicans treat Republican women like tokens. Palin was used as an “us too” shield combating a diverse Democratic ticket. Just like Governors Nikki Haley and Susana Martinez get mentioned as a comeback to the criticism of a way too homogeneous party.

Brian Kilmeade, host of “Fox and Friends,” summed up the Republican opinion on women perfectly. When asked how Fox News, the entertainment wing of the Republican party, finds such stunning conservative stars to be on their network, Kilmeade offered, “We go into the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and we said, ‘Can any of these people talk?’”

Binders full … of women.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Dave Granlund / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Granlund)

At one point in the evening someone with a British accent turned to me and said: “Your elections are way too complicated.”

It occurred to me that I was in a room full of people reporting to countries far older than ours, all with far (far) younger democracies. The U.S. is still a young country with the oldest constitution still in use. And this juxtaposition is made painfully apparent on Election Night.

The U.S. Constitution specifies an indirect election of the president. This was a compromise between Congress electing the executive office-holder and direct popular vote. A popular vote would mean the sparsely populated (think slave states) wouldn’t get the same representation as all the white male land owners states. So the Electoral College was settled upon. Which is why today Alaska has three electoral votes even though it has less than the population of Staten Island’s – it’s because of slavery.

It’s also why you’ve been dutifully voting since the second you turned 18 (provided you’re under 54 years old) and you’ve never actually directly voted for the leader of the free world.

Does this now make sense some 200 years after ratification? Now that we no longer have a slave-based economy and the franchise has been extended to women, the answer is, “No.” It now means Ohio with its 18 electoral votes gets to be the belle of the ball every four years and states like California and New York with their combined 84 get largely ignored by the two national candidates. It means your vote in Florida has more value than your cousin’s vote in Wyoming.

But it really means our system is overly complicated, fragmented and largely viewed with suspicion by voters. Because the way we vote for a president is antiquated and convolution it leads to distrust. Local lawmakers can disenfranchise voters in national elections as we saw with the arbitrary voter ID laws in battleground states. There were concerns (think hysteria) that voting machines owned by Mitt Romney’s son in Ohio would deliver the election to the Republicans. The group Anonymous (or someone claiming to be Anonymous) took credit for thwarting Karl Rove’s alleged attempt at stealing the election. Then on Fox News the panic was over voter fraud.

There were long lines, lost ballots and chaos on Election Day. Different voting precincts with different rules and sometimes different philosophies on who should cast their ballots we’re highlighted in the national media. What it all leads to is a voting result which have a whisper of illegitimacy. There’s a lingering doubt as to if the elections were fair and therefore the result valid. And it’s partisan: The Left will say that of George Bush stole the election, the Right about Obama.

We could solve this issue by modernizing elections. Not only tossing out the Electoral College and letting Americans directly vote for a president, but making the requirements uniform (i.e. universal suffrage). This would make voting in Oregon just as relevant as a voting in Cuyahoga County.

A census is constitutionally required every ten years and we don’t leave it up to each state to compile it. But we leave our national elections up to (in some cases) the county officials?! Federalize federal elections. We have national standards for schools and milk safety but we can’t vote the same way in every state?

We can change this. And there’s no better time than three years and eleven months before the next presidential election begins.

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view more cartoons by Beeler)

Therefore, Obamacare is here to stay. It’s over.

But lo and behold: People like health care. Strangely enough, sickness equaling bankruptcy isn’t preferred, but having affordable health insurance is. Being taken care of (instead of dropped) when faced with a disease is novel to some Americans and they’ve developed a taste for it. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, only 33 percent of Americans actually want to see Obamacare repealed. More Americans believe in Big Foot than Footing All Medical Bills.

It passed the House and the Senate. It was signed by the president. It was held up by the Supreme Court. The presidential candidate who ran against it lost. This is Obama’s America: Your private insurance company finally has to act ethically. Huzzah.

So what’s next? Republicans ran a micro-targeting campaign aimed solely at old white southerners. The Grampa’s Old Party did their best to get fewer and fewer people to vote for them. While ostracizing “other” Americans, they ended up isolated themselves. They implemented voter ID laws and tried to make it as difficult as possible to vote. (For them, but also in general.) They wanted fewer votes, believing less is more … for Republicans. In the 2012 cycle Republicans ran against everything popular with Americans — like birth control and taxing rich people. They shrunk their party down to the hardcore: the outer core left alone to cringe at what their former party had become (four words: front runner Michele Bachmann).

Here’s how Republicans can gain back their popularity: Admit Obamacare was their idea. Go on, just admit it. They renounced it once Obama embraced it. It’s now law. It’s popular. Reclaim what is (ahem) rightfully Republican!

Just admit the individual mandate was first proposed by Nixon, promoted by George H. W. Bush and fleshed out by the Heritage Foundation. It was the “conservative answer” to the health care issue — it was the “free-market solution” to reform. Admit Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich peddled the government mandate to purchase private health insurance as the Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Just ADMIT it was Mitt Romney who, when governor, implemented the individual mandate in his state. Just admit Romney said (in one of his many incarnations) the individual mandate would ward against any Massachusettsians being “free riders.”

It’s the law of the land. People like it. So own it. It’s yours anyway. Tort reform is the saddest answer ever to the “what would you do instead of the individual mandate?” question, because “that was OUR idea!!” is the real answer. It’s a sensible, pragmatic, pro-business solution and Republicans used to be all of those things.

So be Republicans again: Tout Obamacare.

Then Republicans can run on it. Obamacare works? “See? I told you so!” they can tell people who still vote Republican. Individual mandate equals personal responsibility. Everyone pays their own way! Republican. Republican. Republican.

Let liberals whine about the public option. Let them pine for socialized medicine. Let them lament that private insurance won’t bring down costs enough. Let them finger-wag about all the issues we’ll have to face going forward. Republicans had a plan, the plan was put into place, Americans tell pollsters they like said plan — now conservatives should defend the Republican plan.

Hey, what’s a little Etch-a-Sketch among friends, huh? Re-set? Re-launch? A little Romnesia goes a long way. Not all the way to the Oval Office, thankfully.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Patrick Chappatte / The International Herald Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Chappatte)

Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, in the 1600s was an actual wall. The settlers of New Amsterdam built a northern border to guard themselves against the English and Native American encroachers. In recent times it could be re-named Barricade Street. It’s a militarized zone with checkpoints and barriers to presumably thwart an attack on the stock market. Those precautions did little when Wall Street was flooded — under water — during Hurricane Sandy. The markets were closed for a third time in their history: The first being the blizzard of 1888 and the second being the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he “will preserve a military that is so strong, no nation would ever dare to test it.”

Romney wants to build more ships instead of building infrastructure so we don’t need ships to get down Canal Street.

As I write this parts of Manhattan are still dark. Crews are still searching for missing family members on Staten Island. The final death toll has not been tallied. The victims not yet buried.

We’ve been shortsighted. We’ve marginalized those who warned us. We’ve treated environmentalism as an irksome fad. We’ve given cadence to nontroversies and called it balance. We’ve spent trillions to protect ourselves against terrorists and done nothing to keep our biggest cities above water in a storm.

“One of the very important national security threats we face is climate change.” Said Senator Barbara Boxer in a 2007 cable interview. In the 2010 mid-terms, her opponent sacked Hewlett-Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina, made it into a campaign commercial and said: “Terrorism kills and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather.”

Yes, the weather. This frivolous weather thing the hippies keep harping about just devastated the biggest, most densely populated, city in the country. The city that never sleeps shut down completely. The structural damage and loss in revenue are unprecedented. Even before Sandy, our weather-related fatalities far exceed the Americans who’ve died from terrorist attacks. Since September 11, 2001 there have been roughly 30 Americans killed by terrorism (depending on how you do the numbers). Meanwhile, extreme weather deaths in the same time period have totaled 6,408 as of 2011, according to the National Weather Service.

But the word “terror” is what’s ginning up the right wing and the phrase “climate change” never got mentioned once during the presidential debates.

Associated Press photographer John Minchillo captures this folly best in his photograph of seawater rushing in to the Ground Zero construction site during the storm. A picture worth a thousand words; at least two of them being “global warming.”

“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet,” mocked Romney during his acceptance speech at the RNC. Romney’s answer to this crisis has been to hold campaign events with campaign-purchased canned goods (something the Red Cross has said to please NOT donate to them) in swing states and not answer any questions about what he’d do with FEMA if elected.

In contrast, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a press conference minutes after the storm passed: “I’m hopeful that not only will we rebuild this city and metropolitan area but use this as an opportunity to build it back smarter. There have been a series of extreme weather events. That is not a political statement; that is a factual statement. Anyone who says there is not a change in weather patterns is denying reality. We have a new reality when it comes to these weather patterns; we have an old infrastructure, we have old systems. That is not a good combination and that is one of the lessons I will take from this, personally.”

Maybe the old moniker of New Amsterdam could be the clue to our future: The Netherlands has figured out how to keep the sea away from their cities. They build infrastructure (dikes, dams, floodgates, canals, drainage ditches and pumps.

But for Americans, the saturation of terrorism spending has left us drowning in our streets.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. 

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view more cartoons by Fitzsimmons)

You’ll still hear Obama detractors say they don’t know him. “The president still doesn’t have an agenda for a second term,” said Mitt Romney last week. The president has laid out his plan for a second term during his convention speech, stump speeches, interviews — there’s even a brochure. But the Right claims it’s Obama who’s being cryptic. Secretive. There’s a scandal-obsessed media — an entire industry ready to pounce on the slightest misstep of any notable but somehow they’ve all conspired to protect Obama from scrutiny.

Sure.

But as far as Romney goes, I really don’t know who this dude is: I’ve watched dozens of speeches, read hundreds of articles and sat through 23 national debates and I can’t tell you where Romney stands on any issue. And it’s not for lack of trying or just general contempt (which I suspect is the reason some on the right feign ignorance of Obama’s positions), it’s from too many answers to every question. I had assumed Romney was just going to sell himself as the opposite of Obama. I based this on his odd claim that he will repeal ObamaCare, the health care law modeled after the reforms Romney implemented while governor of Massachusetts. That seems arbitrary rather than reasoned policy, so I expected that would be the theme: Romney the not-Obama.

“The president has communicated weakness,” says Romney on Obama’s foreign policy. But then during the foreign policy debate-in-name-only Romney happily agreed with Obama on everything from the withdrawal date in Afghanistan to drone strikes. On Egypt: “I believe, as the president indicated, and said at the time that I supported his — his action there,” relayed Romney.

Romney has mainly been running against himself on YouTube. For every position he’s held, he’s also fervently held the opposite — effortlessly switching sans explanation. He’s a candidate who was for the Lilly Ledbetter Act, then against it, then neutral. He’s been both for and against minimum wage increases; for and against the auto bail out; for and against gun control; for and against the Bush Tax Cuts; for and against a woman’s right to choose; for and against more tax cuts; for and against Reagan.

I was asked to speak at a high school a few weeks ago and the civics students earnestly wanted to know where Romney stood on the issues and I really wanted to help them. One of the teachers asked if it’s more instructive to look at what Romney says when he thinks there’s no camera or when he knows there is one. I told him it might be the former. But I’m not sure. Mainly I just threw my hands up and said, “Look, I’m not a spokesperson for his campaign.”

You can’t go by what Romney has said because he’s said a lot of things … most of which contradict each other. You can’t go by his record because it’s even further from what he’s said (he never raised taxes while governor just tons of “fees”). What’s left is a debate over what you think he might mean versus what he really might mean. If you value evidence at all — this is “sketchy” territory. It’s all speculation and reading between the lies.

Yet everyone seems to have their theory as to who the real Romney is: He’s a moderate — he’s a hard-line right-winger — he’s a vulture capitalist — peacenik, etc. But who is he really? What would he actually do as president? He’s untethered from all his former statements (including ones made minutes ago) so it’s anyone’s guess.

Because Romney has been on all sides of every issue, he’s lined up perfectly with his opponent at one time or another. The only way Romney has been clear is by diluting his positions beyond recognition. Just by continuing to say inconsistent things (and plenty of them) the only thing we can all be certain of is he’s not Obama.

It’s an intellectual impossibility to vote for Romney because there’s no telling what he’s actually for. He really is just a not-Obama.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

But perhaps the worst, due to its lack of challenge in the stenographic media, is the answer on any abortion question: “I’m against it except for instances of rape, incest or the life of the mother.”

This (at least sometimes) is Mitt Romney’s stance on abortion. It wasn’t his running mate, Paul Ryan’s, until he joined the ticket. But Romney, after being staunchly pro-choice disclosing his family friend, Ann Keenan, died of an illegal abortion in 1963, now says he’d like to see it illegal once again. Except, he says, for women who are victims.

Romney and victims: It’s becoming a theme. If you worked at one of the companies Romney took over at Bain, Texas Governor Rick Perry called you a victim of “vulture capitalism.” Romney assesses a whopping “47 percent of Americans see themselves as victims” and the only way to get a medical procedure legally in Romney’s America is, yes, to be a victim.

What sounds like a not-so-extreme position on abortion rights is actually much worse than an outright ban.

If there are exceptions for ending a pregnancy requiring the recipient prove she was raped, two things happen: 1) Just as with total criminalization—abortion goes back underground. 2) Rape is trivialized.

The accusation of rape has always been plagued by the counter-accusation of an ulterior motive. “She’s trying to destroy a good man.” “It’s just the remorse talking!” “This is blackmail.”

Or as Paul Ryan-endorsed Wisconsin State Rep. Roger Rivard put it last week, “Some girls rape so easily.”

To put this into perspective, think of what Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s victims had to endure to get justice: Sports fans rioted on campus after they came forward.

In order to terminate a pregnancy women who are raped will have to defend themselves against yet another charge: She just wants to get an abortion.

An exception for rape means not only ending legal abortions, it means profoundly changing rape.

As with anything, if abortion moves out of the light, it will find its place in the shadows, and then we’re back to where Mitt Romney’s family friend, Ann Keenan, found herself in 1963: bleeding to death from a botched back alley abortion.

Abortion rates don’t change with legality. A 2007 study by the World Health Organization found the same number of women who want abortions get abortions regardless of whether or not they’re legal. What changes is the numbers of women who die of unsafe procedures. In fact, the study noted, in Ethiopia abortion was completely illegal and also the second leading cause of death among women in that country. If you want to save lives—you want legal abortions, sex education and widely available birth control.

This rape clause is horrible public policy. This is not anything remotely resembling how a free country functions. This is not valuing life. It’s valuing easy answers to viscerally complicated issues.

If you morally disagree with abortion, then I suggest you don’t get one. But to nationalize women, to make their bodies legally akin to public incubators, is not the kind of country we want to live in.

It’s a country we should keep in our rearview. Abortion needs to stay legal, and most importantly—private.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Yes, it’s election season and along with the primetime presidential debates — everyone wants to debate poll numbers.

Tak Bui / Canada, PoliticalCartoons.com

But there’s another poll warranting even greater scrutiny: A Pew Research Foundation report just released claims they found 20 percent of Americans do not identify themselves as religious. This, according to the foundation, is up from 2007 when the number was just over 15 percent. In the 30 years of age and under category, it’s 33 percent — a third of younger Americans will tell pollsters they’re not religious at all. With 90 percent saying they’re not interested in seeking religion whatsoever.

Just to put this into perspective, 19 percent of Americans are white evangelicals and 22 percent identify as Catholic. Their numbers are now on par with the “unaffiliated” and yes (gasp) atheists.

But here’s the problem when pollsters ask Americans about our religion: We lie. When someone with a clipboard asks us about our belief in god and our church attendance we give the answer we think we should instead of the truth. According to the Pew study in 2012, 73 percent of Americans were religious and 68 percent said that religion plays an important role in their lives. According to Pew: “[American religious importance] is far higher than in Britain (17 percent), France (13 percent), Germany (21 percent) or Spain (22 percent).”

How do we know Americans are embellishing their churchiness en masse? If 37 percent of Americans went to church weekly or more and 33 percent went monthly/yearly — you know what you’d see at churches? Lines of people. A hundred million people every single Sunday. Instead churches (even iconic mega-churches) are going bankrupt and the pews are collecting dust instead of donations.

No, when it comes to self-reporting religious devotion Americans cannot be trusted.

We under-estimate our calories, over-state our height, under-report our weight and when it comes to piety — we lie like a prayer rug.

A different study at the University of Michigan looked at the rate of self-reported church attendance by Americans in contrast with actual attendance. “America maintains a gap of 10 to 18 percentage points between what people say they do on survey questions, and what time diary data says they actually do,” said the report.

Which means Americans attend church as frequently as (gasp) Europeans. Only unlike those heathen Europeans, we feel the need to say we’re in church when we’re actually watching the NFL. In short: Americans attend “church.” Wink. Wink. Air quotes.

On the other hand, there’s no evidence people are telling pollsters they’re atheists and then secretly go to church. The deceit is one-sided.

So if we have been consistently over-reporting our religiosity by 10 to 18 percentage points, it’s reasonable to suggest this current estimate of non-religious Americans to be at 20 percent, could actually be closer to 38 percent. Which is on par with the largest religious group in the U.S., Protestant at 42 percent.

What does this mean? It means the non-believers, agnostic, non-theists, secularists, spiritual but not religious, and moral without mythology folks could be the actual silent majority.

It’s possible we’re completely surrounded. Shh.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. 

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Coaches will yell it at their athletes when they’re falling behind, “Do you want people to call you the 112th?! Do you? Then get up and get back in the game!” A nasty burn in a breakup: “You’re too 112th to live with, Darrel.” This Congress should not have its jersey retired—but quarantined—nothing we ever like, respect or care about should ever be called 112th.

Bill Day / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Day

Out of 112 Congresses this batch of Brooks Brothers barnacles has managed to break the institution. Their public approval rating is hovering around the margin of error—and that’s only because some of the people pollsters called think the president is Martin Sheen.

Because of the abuse of the filibuster, the Senate can no longer function. The filibuster is a storied device to pause a vote with a Senator’s yammering. Now it’s used as a veto threat. It’s as if the “hold” button was rigged to just hang up the call (and then block the number). Anything less than one party having 60 lock-step voting members means a stalemate. Without a super majority “nothing” is now the only thing possible in this deliberative body. The same amount of votes it takes the Senate to amend the Constitution is now what it takes to rename a post office.

Speaking of which, that’s basically all the 112th House has done for two years: re-name post offices. Naming things that already have a name. That’s what they’ve been doing on our dime. Out of the paltry (and pathetic) 124 laws that have originated in the House, 27 of them have named post offices. Two have issued commemorative coins. That means of the two years this House has met they’ve only originated 95 bills that have become laws.

How do they compare? Well the average number of laws originating in the House in a normal (not mind-numbingly obstinate) Congress is around 300. The 111th House, under Democratic majority, made 254. The 109th House, with a Republican majority made 316 laws. Going back to the 1970s, the 93rd Congress had 337 laws originate in their chamber.

What has the House been doing? “Nothing” would be something to aspire to. They’ve been introducing symbolic, go-nowhere bills that will never be brought up in the dysfunctional Senate and therefore never make it to the President’s desk. Their bills have mainly been to outlaw abortion and overturn the Affordable Care Act. That’s right: Not only have they been ineffective at MAKING their own laws—they’ve been ineffective at unmaking other laws.

They’ve voted 33 times to overturn ObamaCare. As if the president was going to sign that piece of legislation. Ever.

Jobs, jobs, jobs? More like: Blah, blah, blah.

I asked a congressional staffer the other day if working in the lowest rated Congress in the history of counting was like being on the set of “Gigli.”

His answer? “Pretty much.”

Part of this is our fault. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, we voted in a bunch of people who think government is ineffective so they have to prove themselves right once on government dole.

But really, I’ll just quote congressional candidate Wayne Powell running against House Majority Leader Eric Cantor: In a debate last week the retired Army Colonel said, “You don’t like government. You should just resign and then I’ll take over.”

Indeed. But instead on October 5, 2012, Congress will take (yet another) break. They will not resume their idle busy work until November 13. They’re taking five weeks off so they can campaign to keep their jobs they don’t really do.

Like I said: morally bankrupt.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Bagley)

Thus started the exchange known as “The Kitchen Debate.”

This was during the height of the Cold War and just two years after the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik, beating the U.S. into space. And there was a young Nixon, according to his memoirs with a head full of Tolstoy and other Russian writers, in an impromptu debate partially captured on Ampex color videotape with modern GE appliances as set dressings. A perfect 1950s political and technological snapshot.

The Soviet press had dubbed the dwelling Taj Mahal. “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down?” Quipped Khrushchev through an interpreter. “Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”

The builder of the modest American home, All-State Properties, proclaimed their homes were a “secret weapon” in the Cold War. “It gave ordinary Americans a high standard of living and inoculated them against the contagion of radical ideas,” writes historian Clifton Hood.

Nixon touting mortgages from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority relayed, “Any steel worker could buy this house. They earn $3 an hour. This house costs about $100 a month to buy on a contract running 25 to 30 years.”

Nixon was having a back and forth with an actual communist—not an imagined one. And the answer to actual communism was quality of life: People could afford a home filled with gadgets by working. The actual communist dismissed these staples as unnecessary—things people could do without so the state could build more rockets.

This October, Americans will be subjected to three televised presidential debates. It’s clear the parameters of the Cold War are gone. Now it’s between Nixon Republicanism, offered by Obama (derided as socialism, conflated with communism) and the corporate divinity offered by Mitt Romney.

“You should be able to make it if you work hard,” says Obama on the stump. “You should be able to get ahead if you act responsibly. It’s that idea that built the strongest middle class on earth, and made us an economic superpower.”

Contrast that with Romney: “There are 47 percent who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” To Romney, these are things we can do without so the state can give rich people more tax breaks (and build a bigger military).

In 50 years, the Republicans have gone from building the middle class with the aid of government to admonishing the middle class for utilizing government. At the RNC the speakers who mentioned their family’s economic rise actually showcased the government programs they now oppose: Chris Christie’s father took advantage of the GI bill; Paul Ryan went to college using his father’s Social Security; Romney’s family (according to his mother) was on welfare when they came back from Mexico. It goes to the core of the GOP message this year: We’re not going to cut your benefits—just the other guy’s. With the fine print: Also, we’re going to have to cut your benefits.

Our socio-economic debate has definitely moved out of the proverbial kitchen … and through the looking glass.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

It’s a bit like saying, “We don’t need food—we can just eat pizza!”

Jeff Parker / Florida Today (click to view more cartoons by Parker)

This is a confusion the right wing revels in. It’s why during the health care debate there were protest signs demanding the government stay out of Medicare. “We’re here, we’re misinformed—get used to it!”

“Sometimes, even presidents need reminding, that our rights come from nature and God, not from government,” says GOP VP nominee Paul Ryan on the stump.

It’s a hefty statement that has yet to get a follow up question. Which rights do we get from God, exactly? The right to choose another religion? Isn’t Free Speech an affront to a couple Commandments? Has anyone ever checked out a theocracy like Saudi Arabia and thought, “Look at all those civil rights!”?

Ryan is bastardizing the battle cry to establish self-governance against the divine right of kings. Prior to the French and American Revolutions, in the Dark Ages, kings were assumed to be kings because it was thought god wanted them to be kings—therefore everything they did was god-like. So thinkers—and this country was founded by thinkers—came up with a way to separate the powers of god and rulers—self-governance: Three branches of self-government; a bill of rights; checks and balances. Specifically a secular government made up of regular citizens and not kings. This government framework being a design to secure individual rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness etc. etc.)

Is the right wing denouncing self-governance? Well, yeah, pretty much. If rights, according to Mr. Ryan, come from whichever purely subjective interpretation of God is en vogue this week and not from the body of democratically elected leaders adhering to a constitutional guide, it’s a position the Tories or the crown loyalists would have supported.

And the alternative to self-governance? The alleged free market? Privatized tyranny is still tyranny to its subjects.

Personally, Time Warner is not my idea of freedom.

Which leads me to the question: Since corporations are people according the Romney/Ryan ticket, does God give them rights? We’re talking about the divine right of Exxon-Mobile here: this is important.

“There are 47 percent who are with him [Obama],” said Romney on a recently verified tape made last May. “Who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.”

There’s something very telling about a dude sneering at those dependent on the government while being under Secret Service protection.

What of this remaining 53 percent Romney is trying to woo? Who’s independent of the government? Walmart depends on the government to feed their workforce via food stamps. Nearly all other businesses depend on the government for law and order so they can conduct business. Wealthy people have property. Government protects property rights. Banks got bailed out—by the government. Roads are maintained by the government. Air travel, regulated by the government. Also our elderly, disabled and yes our poor, assisted by the government.

If you’re voting for a president, you’re voting for a government worker. Your vote means you have some confidence in government as to its legitimacy and efficiency. If you’re donating to a presidential candidate (or some sympathetic super PAC) you’re putting your faith in Government.

Which means, in short, you are depending on government.

We are all the 47 percent.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Cam CArdow / Ottawa Citizen (click to view more cartoons by Cam)

It was a chilling reality in 98-degree heat.

The RNC should have been the funnest place on Earth to be a Republican this past August 27-30. Well, maybe it was the funnest place on Earth if you’re a Republican. Maybe they’re no longer fun. They didn’t appear to be having a good time. By most accounts they were cranky.

The fracturing of their party started the moment John McCain picked Sarah Palin. In case that doesn’t seem fair, let me explain: When Palin “went rogue,” suddenly the disciplined Grand Old Party became awash in tea; a pack of rogue elephants indulging in any nuts available. The party of Lincoln quickly became the party of Akin, a politician whose sin was saying what he and his party believe (which is basically thinking you can sell any myth, no matter how ridiculous, by saying a doctor told you it was true).

For the second straight time, the RNC’s week started off with a hurricane cancelling the first day of the convention. Republicans have not only become climate deniers—they’re weather deniers now too. August? Florida? Sure!

The end of the week was marked by a primetime speech by an octogenarian offended by a potty-mouthed imaginary President Obama sitting on stage. “I’m not going to shut up. It’s my turn,” said the Hollywood legend turned metaphor for the GOP during the Obama administration, Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood is fed up with a President Obama who only exists when two or more Republicans are gathered together.

On the other hand, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) was packed full of the folks Republicans are trying to take their country back from: gay couples, inter-racial couples, non-Cuban Latinos, workers, non-billionaires, “sluts,” immigrants, African-Americans, liberals, civil servants, Reagan Democrats and women who aren’t just a Republican’s mom. Basically what America (love it or leave it) now looks like.

The DNC looked like America in 2012. The RNC looked like America in 1912.

The DNC was also impacted by weather. Bank of America stadium was sold out, according to the campaign, with a waiting list of reportedly 19,000 wanting to see the President of the United States speak. The final night event was cancelled because the open-air stadium wasn’t able to accommodate electronic equipment in the rain. Typical Obama: yes, he disappoints people, but often for something far “above his pay grade.” The chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus, after voting in his party’s vindictive platform calling for more Americans to have fewer rights—was on auto-tweet the whole week of the DNC, “Is this going to be the last of the vitriol from the Dem party during their convention? Why aren’t they talking about the issues?” he wrote.

The idea both parties are just opposite equals, that they’re really the lesser of two evils—six of one, half a dozen of the other—is a narrative the Republicans like to sell. They’ll tell you Democrats do the same thing Republicans are accused of doing. Republicans will tell you that Democrats want to kill Medicare, increase the debt and increase government spending. As President Clinton said in his speech at this year’s DNC put it, “It takes a lot of brass to go after a guy for doing what you did.”

The Republicans are angry victims of diversity and want their country back. And the Democrats? This year it seems they’re optimistic … which, for them, is real change.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

The classic multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme is where one guy at the top convinces people at the bottom to give the top money. The hope is the guys in the middle will recruit enough people under them to move from the middle to the top—hence the pyramid shape. The model is, clearly, and provably unsustainable. Only a couple of people (those at the top) do well. Everyone else gets ripped off.

In fairness, Amway, has massaged its methods enough to not qualify as the illegal type of pyramid scheme. It’s now the more legal type of pyramid scheme.

But the model—the idea of those at the bottom sacrificing their retirement benefits (pensions, social security, Medicare etc.) so that the top tier can pay even less in taxes is what Romney/Ryan are peddling. Mitt Romney wants to cut taxes for the wealthy. Paul Ryan’s budget would shrink benefits to give the savings in the form of a tax cut to the highest brackets. What didn’t work in the Bush years to strengthen the middle-class (evident by their Lost Decade), they tell us will work this time! Or as veep-pick also-ran, Senator (R-FL) Marco Rubio put it, “We have never been a nation of haves and have-nots. We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.”

No, actually, we are a nation of haves and have-nots. We have the worst wealth inequality of all industrialized nations. Our poverty rate is the highest in more than 50 years at 15.7 percent. Contrast that with the top 1 percent of Americans who own nearly half—42 percent of the nations wealth. Also that same top 1 percent only has 5 percent of the nation’s debt. So 99 percent of Americans own 58 percent of the pie and have 95 percent of the debt. We’re fatter, sicker, further in debt and using the most illegal drugs in the world—all signs Americans have become overspent from bad economic policies.

But the haves—these demigods of capitalism—won’t trickle their wealth down to us because of “uncertainty in the market” according to Republicans. Therefore we bribe them with an even lower tax rate!

Instead of calling it “trickle down” which has been largely panned for decades—the new term is “not punishing success.”

“If your priority in this country is to punish success vote for President Obama,” said the offshore account holder, Mitt Romeny.

If the rich get richer—we’re not getting thinner, healthier, solvent and off the crack needle. If the rich get richer, the middle-class doesn’t get more stable.

If the rich get richer, the working poor don’t get pulled out of poverty. If the rich get richer—they just get richer and park their money in Luxembourg (where at least their money will be near universal health care).

We’re actually not a nation of haves at all. Not if you go by a simple majority—or even a super majority—we’re a nation of have-nots. Have-nots being sold on a fantasy of wealth trickling down if we’re nice enough to the haves.

Trickle down economics is a pyramid scheme: It’s the rich telling us if we just recruit others to believe in the con then we will become the rich too.

It’s a lie.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of TheContributor.com. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

In what now seems quaint, the play takes place over a harried two days of delegate voting. That’s right. Not two years of campaigning. Not 20 debates. Two days. Like I said, quaint. Peppered with Gore Vidal witty one-liners like, “That man has all the qualities of a dog except loyalty,” and “In those days we poured god over everything like ketchup,” the play is a thoughtful commentary on politics of the era. The hinge of the saga is these two candidates have an arms race (how very 1960s) with their respective mudslinging. In the third act Larroquette’s Secretary Russell asks for a moratorium when he gets the power to take out his opponent. They’re on a crash course of mutual destruction that could blow up even their party.

In the end the ambitious-at-any-cost and the ambitious-yet-moral cancel each other out, and without a nod from the sitting president—who dies with contempt for both men for different reasons—a dull third candidate wins the necessary delegates. He’s described as neither the angel of light nor the angel of darkness. He’s dubbed the Angel of Grayness. The ending scene’s summation is that the “best man” indeed won.

The take away? The delegate voting process whitewashed, bowdlerized and watered down men of potential greatness.

Cut to:

The next night I went to see “The Campaign” starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis. Ferrell plays Congressman Cam Brady, a sleazy (again) womanizing incumbent who’s happily running unopposed for his 4th term. After he becomes vulnerable, the billionaire Motch brothers (played by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd) find a puppet candidate—the local yokel tour guide, Marty Huggins (played by Galifianakis)—to run against Brady, thus starts the title-promised “Campaign.”

The Motch brothers (a thinly veiled spoof on the right-wing bankrolling Koch brothers), of course, are in the process of selling the district to China and need to get rid of some regulations so they can build proper sweatshops in North Carolina. As amoral billionaires they invest in Republican politicians who gladly spew platitudes about freedom and god while genuflecting solely to the pursuit of profit. Its “art” imitating life … assuming your life has a Will Ferrell movie-amount of dick, poop and fart jokes in it.

Because this is a Hollywood movie, the puppet candidate ends up “doing the right thing” and dishes about money in politics which in this medium is so admirable it wins him a seat in Congress. After the credits roll there’s a brief scene of a Congressional hearing called by the now-Congressman Huggins, to investigate the Motch brothers’ financing candidates. The remark is made that because of Citizens United, they haven’t done anything illegal. But then to add to the sense of “feel good” and “everything worked-ness” the brothers are then tied to harboring a known fugitive (Huggins former campaign manager). Quick tacked-on justice. Roll the rest of the credits.

The take away? I’ll quote former candidate for the GOP nomination, former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer (who did dish about money in politics as a Republican and it got him disinvited to every single debate in the primary): “Washington isn’t broken, its bought.”

But in these two tales are a foreshadowing of the current GOP ticket: Mitt Romney, the Angel of Grayness; the candidate who in the primary stayed neutral and Etch-a-sketchy while the others self-combusted on each other’s volatility. He’s Gore Vidal’s “best man.” And then there’s the veep nod, Paul Ryan, a Koch brother candidate whose signature budget plans were drafted and scored by the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation and whose policies would greatly benefit billionaires.

Mitt Romney, a 1960’s lament. Paul Ryan, 2012’s crux.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of SoapBlox. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Taylor Jones / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Jones)

A Palin standard for being fit for public office is like a Donald Trump standard for public humility. Basically, no standard at all.

It’s really not fair to compare Paul Ryan to Sarah Palin. Sure it makes Ryan as a VP nominee seem less cynical——less Hail Mary——less desperate than if Palin had never word-souped the nation four years ago. If John McCain would have picked Tim Pawlenty in ’08, the Ryan pick would look pretty irresponsible. But now the GOP has the “Palin Standard.”

A better comparison for Paul Ryan is former Republican presidential candidate Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Both are from mid-western cheese-heavy states. Both are high-profile tea party Republicans in the lowest-rated Congress in the history of percentages. Even when Bachmann is causing international incidents with her xenophobic race baiting about the Muslim Brotherhood’s alleged infiltration of the U.S. government——she sounds as pleasant as someone selling orange juice on television.

If the 1980′s Michael J. Fox sit-com character——the beloved Reagan-idolizing Alex P. Keaton——were a self-hating public employee who cherry-picked all the worst parts of Ayn Rand, the Bible and the Heritage Foundation’s reading room, he’d be Paul Ryan! Quirky, young and clearly trying to fill a larger man’s suit——the rightest of Republicans love Paul Ryan.

Well they kind of love him. Both Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann are guilty pleasures for Republicans. They like listening to them beat up on President Obama and spout their cheery condemnations of liberalism, but they don’t want to admit it too loudly lest they get stuck defending ALL their ideas. Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll but now she’s not even invited to introduce anyone, let alone speak, at the upcoming Republican National Convention.

Obama tried to campaign against the Ryan Budget plan this past spring since the House GOP voted for it, but that was declared out-of-bounds. Now? It’s in play and Republican politicians are not thrilled about explaining their vote to give future senior citizens coupons for chemotherapy.

Bachmann and Ryan also share the distinction of being ineffective lawmakers. According to ThatsMyCongress.com, in her nearly six years in office “Bachmann has passed three rhetorical bills with no force of law, and one amendment that asks an Inspector General to conduct inspections.” Paul Ryan has been an incumbent for twice that time and has only introduced two bills that have become law: One renaming a post office in his home town, the other changing how arrows are taxed (how very 21st century).

Bachmann at least gets to distance herself from the Republican Congressional blank check given to the big-spending Bush administration. Under Ryan’s allegedly hawkish eye, his party started two unpaid-for wars, cut taxes during said wars, grew the government, exploded the national debt and then bailed out unregulated banks with taxpayer money. Paul Ryan voted yes for all of it and doesn’t ask for a correction when he’s called a small government conservative.

Both Bachmann and Ryan are also at the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to gay rights and reproductive freedoms. They both have consistently voted for any anti-abortion/anti-contraception bills that came before them. Ditto with expanding martial rights to same sex couples. Ryan, with all his libertarian billing, has voted to take away liberties from his fellow citizens. He is the government he’s warned us about: Freedom is for corporations, and regulations are for our private lives.

If Ryan is now the Republican mainstream, Bachmann is now the Republican mainstream. If Ryan is getting the full embrace of his party——Bachmann should be getting that same welcome into the fray.

Or in the case of Republicans in 2012, the fringe.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of SoapBlox. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

John Cole / Scranton Times-Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Cole)

“What America is not is a collective where we all work in a kibbutz,” Romneysaid at a fundraiser in Chicago this week. “Instead it’s individuals pursuing their dreams and building successful enterprises which employ others and they become inspired as they see what has happened in the place they work and go off and start their own enterprises.”

America, not a collective: Not a place where people work together, according to Romney. Just a place where bosses are untethered by the shackles of pensions, environmental concerns or worker safety regulations so they can create magical towers of tax-free enterprise which “employs others.”

Willard M. Romney, the Everyman.

Romney is not trying to be popular; he’s running for president on the Republican ticket. He’s still trying to get Republicans to like him and Republicans now make up less than35 percent of Americans. Reaching outside of their “big tent,” Romney spoke at an NAACP event, and after being booed by the crowd he explained it was because the attendees at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People want free stuff. He loves free stuff (like tax-free!) but finds it distasteful in people not clever enough to borrow money from their parents for college. Romney’s international tour was of a whopping three countries. Notably at least one didn’t boo him. In the immortal words of George W. Bush, “Don’t forget Poland!”

Romney doesn’t appear to be trying to win the support of the majority of Americans (or the world for that matter). He appears to be playing for the affections of a few key shareholders. Romney is a niche candidate of a tiny percent of Americans who think working for a living describes what your money does for you.

Let’s take stock of the groups Republicans are no longer attempting to appeal to: Wage earners. Women in their child-bearing years. People with pre-existing conditions. Unions. Public workers. The unemployed. Monogamous gay couples. The under-employed. Moderate Republicans. Muslims. Latinos. Oh and independent voters. We’re not going to see a “Romney Democrats” group pop up before November, save maybe a political wonk’s Halloween party.

Romney is nominee no one really likes. Fewer people will vote for Mitt. The only chance for a mediocre candidate to win the majority of votes is for fewer votes to be counted. Voter ID laws have become vogue in states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina and Indiana. All of a sudden the Grand Old Party is concerned about voter fraud, which even the Republican National Lawyer Association in a stretch of their data claims only 311 cases in the last decade. Other estimates put the number in the tens. Way more Americans have won gold medals than have voted fraudulently. So Republicans must “fix” this non-problem (in places which just so happen to swing states/counties/districts) by making it as difficult as possible to cast a ballot. On ABC’sThis Week, Washington Post columnist George Will called early voting “deplorable” because it interferes with campaigning. The horror! You know what interferes withvoting? Having a j-o-b. Early voting is the easiest way for blue-collar workers to be able to have their vote counted. Less early voting, fewer people who earn a paycheck at the polls. And that’s deplorable if you’re a Republican in the 2012 election cycle.

Republicans are working very hard to get fewer votes. Instead of stacking the deck they’re just trying to disenfranchise all the cards who disagree with them (you know, the majority of the country). It’s a reasonable strategy as their presumptive nominee (gah!) brands himself as the small government/voting bloc candidate who likes being able to fire people.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Mitt’s book is titled “No Apology.” He’s convinced the problem with Obama is that he apologizes for America. Because Mitt is so engrossed by apologies—he sees apologies that aren’t there.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

Mitt, he’ll tell you, doesn’t apologize for America. But he’s had to apologize for himself plenty. Aside from all the recent gaffes and gauche statements that managed to incense America’s closest allies in Europe, earning him the nickname “Mitt the Twit,” Mitt’s ever-changing policy positions are, for all intents and purposes, apologies. It’s saying his previous stance on, say, women’s health, was wrong. For example: when Mitt said abortion should be legal because a close family friend had died from an illegal abortion. He’s now saying he’s righting (ahem) his stance on the issue and declaring his vigil for his family friend to be over. He’s saying his crowning achievement as governor of a state, Obamacare, nee Romneycare, is now a plague on humanity and must be repealed.

A man who “retroactively retired” as CEO of Bain Capital can effortlessly adjust his positions. For a candidate who’s disgusted by apologies in his opponents—who hurls the accusation of apology as if it were a disqualifying offense to all that is wholesome—he sure walks back from, amends and revises the stuff he says a lot.

So since apologies are so important to Mr. Romney, I’d like to offer mine. I’ve said on numerous occasions (some of them broadcasted) that Mitt has been running for president for 20 years. I figured somewhere around 1992, Mitt, having witnessed his father’s failed run for president and his mother’s failed run for Senate, was watching the first Baby Boomer president (Bill Clinton) being sent to the White House. It was then he resolved that he, too, was going to run for president.

Now if that were true and his planning began the year Pope John Paul issued an apology for the Inquisition’s banning Galileo, Mitt would have made some different choices. His business practices would have been, candidly, more patriotic.

He wouldn’t have laid-off American workers, outsourcing jobs overseas, and then expect those same American workers to vote for him. He would have built something, instead of destroying corporations and getting rich off the charcoal. If Mitt Romney had been planning to run for president for 20 years, he would have anticipated releasing his tax returns (his father pioneered the practice) and made sure everything on there was something he could be proud of; returns he would happily release to the public.

So I was wrong. Mitt hasn’t been running for president for 20 years. He made money in a way that’s legal but now is embarrassed (think apologetic) about how little he’s paid in taxes, or what he’s made off his investments to show his tax returns to voters. He’s taken advantage of tons of loopholes, parking his money in foreign bank accounts. With his business record, he’d be a controversial presidential appointee, let alone a presidential candidate himself. Sure it’s legal. But it’s not ethical. Not for public service. Especially not for the most powerful position in the country.

So, Mitt, I’m sorry. I had been saying something about you that just wasn’t true. You haven’t been running for president for two decades. You haven’t been paying attention to what would play best to get yourself sworn into office.

You’ve been paying attention to your money.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of SoapBlox. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

“Karl Marx’s whole campaign was to eliminate—completely obliterate fear! Now we have a president following in his footsteps!” Rush Limbaugh would bellow. All his doppelgangers and dittoheads would repeat it on every corner of the Internet and talk radio: “Fearless is Marxist!”

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Bagley)

Those more moderate would just call him out of touch. “Obama doesn’t understand how Americans feel: they’re fearful of Obamacare!”

Mitt Romney would go on five networks to announce he’s always been a big fan of fear. “In America, the fear is the right height,” he’d declare. “Saying we have nothing to fear is foreign-sounding to a lot of Americans.” Days later, video of Romney telling a crowd not to be afraid would come to light. His campaign would counter with another weather balloon about his VP pick. “Paul Ryan? How about Ginny Thomas?” would be the entire body of an email to Romney supporters.

Internet message boards would speculate there’s an Obama plot to criminalize negative emotions … tied to fluoride in the water, of course. “Mr. President, what are you trying to hide?”

Congressman Darrell Issa would launch an investigation into this alleged plot outlined on these said message boards. Sideshow Michele Bachmann would mutter about how fear is profoundly Christian and Obama with his contempt of fear has shown his contempt for Jesus … and of course Israel. “Obama wants to destroy Israel!” Allen West would say it’s a form of slavery. John Boehner, wiping back tears, would proclaim, “Fear is a job creator—Mr. President why do you want to punish success?”

Suddenly fear would be a constitutional right. “Barack Hussein Obama is trying to take away our god-given right to be afraid!” “We have nothing to fear? I fear our right to fear will be stripped away if Obama gets a second term.”

Yes, the party that bravely came out against empathy (a trait lacking in all sociopaths) when Obama admired it in Sonia Sotomayor, would come out in favor of fear. It would become their signature issue. AstroTurf busses would drop grassroots activists on the capitol lawn for the Million Phobics March. It would mainly consist of security personnel (pro-fear remember) and Sarah Palin proclaiming, “Unlike Barack Obama—we’re god-fearing Americans!”

SuperPAC funded T-shirts handed out at the rally would read, “I’m god-fearing not Mohammed-quoting!”

Inevitably there would be Democrats being forced to defend denouncing fear. “Look, I think we can all agree fear is not helpful to Americans. No no, the president doesn’t want to see it criminalized. He just said, however inartfully, we don’t need it.” That would be dubbed a gaffe by the 24-hour news cycle. Right-wing commentators would gasp, “The administration all but admitted to their ambition of outlawing fear. ‘We don’t need it!?’ This is about freedom and governmental overreach!”

Nancy Pelosi would be asked to weigh in on the controversy. She’d say, “This is not a debate about who’s for fear and who’s against fear—this is about a struggling middle-class.” The video clip would end up actually setting up several debate segments on cable news shows about who’s for fear and who’s against.

To sum up: You have the right to be afraid! The Democrats want to take away that right! That is the choice this November!

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of SoapBlox. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

R.J. Matson / Roll Call (click to view more cartoons by R.J. Matson)

In short: Curling isn’t the only reason the Winter Olympics are lame.

While only 82 countries participated in the 2010 games in Vancouver, every nation save three (South Sudan, Kosovo and Vatican City) will be competing in the 2012 games in London. It’s truly a global event. It’s also the first time every nation will have sent a female athlete. Saudi Arabia, where women can barely vote let alone drive, is sending two female athletes to the games for the first time. Qatar and Brunei (also with spotty women’s suffrage) have women representing them as well this year.

The Summer Olympics are not just about seeing who throws farther than other people who can throw far. The Summer Olympics are a metaphor for what we idealize as the American Dream. Our impenetrable Puritan values: Hard work has a pay off. It’s the pageantry of the best of the best and how they got there. It’s sportsmanship sure, but for Americans the summer games is an opportunity for us to romanticize individualism.

Americans, after all, see ourselves as pioneers—as homesteaders—people who in our mythology can handle a hurdle race or two.

For us, Olympian rags-to-riches tales are what America is based on: Pulling on your bootstraps until you find yourself on the center rostrum.

Last week, President Obama botched paraphrasing an Elizabeth Warren line, “No one in this country got rich on his own,” and ending up saying (if you scrub all context) no one built their own business. The right-wing has been quick to refute this gaffe with a collective “did too!” The theme (at least) was clear: Success is a group effort.

Every Olympian represents an army of people supporting, nurturing and encouraging ability. No one gets to the Olympics on their own. No matter how naturally gifted—they’re on their way to London because people helped them get there. “People” meaning communities, parents and yes, governments.

I was raised in foster care. The alleged nanny state was my actual nanny. People will argue with me that I was raised by “people” and not the government. Which is like saying you don’t need electricity to light your home because you have a lamp. I know there was a mass of people (many employed by the state) investing their time and energy into my wellbeing. I showed up and did the work but I could not have done it all by myself. I had help. Tons.

That’s what the president was talking about: infrastructure. Our collective investment in our country.

When I watch the Olympics I see how the world treats its young people. I see their hope for the future on a balance beam. I see politics. I see progress. I see individuals representing the best of us—and all we can accomplish. I see the opposite of isolationism and selfishness. But mostly I see that truly American story of coming from behind and going for the gold.

Go team!

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the editor-in-chief of SoapBlox. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Darkow)

Now the AstroTurf outrage over this alleged ban (in reality, a size reduction) is bubbling up! This week a rally brimming with dozens of soda jerks calling themselves the Million Big Gulp March, shook their high-fructose fists at the mayor. The polling reveals a polarizing 50/50 split in support/opposition to the ordinance. Throw in a couple of commercials by the beverage industry saying they’re offering more fewer-calorie choices—and you have pandemonium!

In 1908, New York City was also the first in the country to have an ordinance against public smoking. Sure it only applied to women and was quickly thrown out, but still, a hundred years later eliminating smoking tobacco just about everywhere has cut down American smokers to only 20 percent of adults (most of whom live in West Virginia). When compared to the 45 percent who smoked cigarettes in the 1950s—it’s a success. Was it a knock to the liberties of smokers? Yes. Do we care? Nope.

Because we are not islands and we live in what is referred to as civilization, laws for the greater good while inconveniencing a couple of people are part of the deal. We do this with traffic: Just because stopping for 90 seconds will make some individuals late doesn’t mean we should ditch all stop lights. So unless you’re cutting your own firewood and living off the grid in a Ted Kaczynski-style cabin somewhere—what you do more than likely affects the rest of us. And in the case of smoking cigarettes—fumigates the rest of us. (Full disclosure: I’m an ex-smoker and now I’m unapologetically militant. A cliche, I know. Cough. Gag.)

“It’s not the role of government to save us from ourselves,” soda pop libertarians will say. That’s just not true. The government prohibits all kinds of things to “save us from ourselves”: lead paint, toxic children’s toys, asbestos, open sewers, terrorists, Occupy protesters, and swear words without a subscription.

In 1890s New York City, carbolic acid, a nasty neurotoxin with the ability to melt the skin off your face was—inexplicably—the go-to means of suicide in Lower Manhattan. It was easily available over-the-counter at drugstores, “a dime’s worth could kill several people” and it was the most gruesome death imaginable. The city’s coroner at the time, George P. LeBrun, reported 238 suicides in 1899 from carbolic acid. The following year the city’s health department (the same department that will more than likely ban giant sodas at New York movie theaters) made the organic compound frequently used as paint stripper require a doctor’s certificate for purchase. According to LeBrun’s autobiography, the following year the deaths by drinking carbolic acid plummeted to only a “handful of suicides.”

Did it eradicate suicide? Of course not. But was it sensible policy that arguably eased some suffering? Yes. Did it make us “less free?” Hardly.

And when it comes to obesity—we are the fattest generation of one of the fattest countries in the world. If obesity were a virus we’d have fundraisers and celebrity spokespeople drumming up panic. We’d have marches and vigils and Dateline specials. “Will you or your loved ones be next?!” We’d have a death toll counter on CNN. “Fifteen more victims claimed today!” But since it’s just our consuming too much (way too much) and economic forces encourage consuming too much (way too much) we waddle along not half as alarmed as we should be.

Here’s the thing with the obesity epidemic: Doing nothing is not fixing the problem.

Is a soda size ban a cure-all? No. Is it the best policy ever introduced? No. Will it make us all thinner? No. But it is a good start. Or really, a start.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

They would say things like “We are a nation of laws.” Things they say when they agree with the law—however unjust it may be (i.e. immigration).

Rob Tornoe / Media Matters (click to view more cartoons by Tornoe)

No instead there are calls for revolt. The perennially reasonable Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said in a written statement: “Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so.” And then added, “The whole thing remains unconstitutional.” Which is akin to saying just because something is a law doesn’t make it legal. Or just because they have hair on their face doesn’t make them mammals. The court, not some junior senator from a small state, ultimately decides what is or what is not constitutional. But unconstitutional is the word conservatives use for illegitimate. In chess this move is called flipping the board over and stomping away.

But it also feeds into the right-wing narrative that they are history’s most frequent victims. To them, the more egalitarian the country becomes the more persecuted conservatives are. The sentiment can be traced back to 1845 and the founding of the Know Nothings, a nativist group concerned the country was being overrun with German and Irish immigrants. The current tea party finds its sympathies much more inline with the Know Nothings than anyone who ever threw tea in the Boston Harbor. They’re each backlash movements sparked by “change.”

The Know Nothings became split on the issue of slavery and in the southern states morphed into what we identify as the Confederacy. Here you have a region of the country that quite literally fired the first shots of what was to be the bloodiest war in American history and to hear them tell it, it was the “war of Northern aggression.”

The Civil War for many didn’t settle things so why would we assume a 5-4 decision could?

Conservatives are still mad about the New Deal, even though it worked to pull the country out of the Great Depression. They’re still miffed about women suffrage, the Civil Rights Act and Roe v. Wade. In fact any movement forward giving more people more rights and greater acceptance is a point of contention with conservatives. Gay rights is framed as Christians losing their rights to vilify whomever they want. Women not being forced to pay for birth control out-of-pocket is the government restricting the freedom of religion institutions to dictate policy to the government.

Conservatives in the current incarnation of the Republican Party think rights are a zero sum game. If one group gains acceptance, it means another falls out of favor. The cornerstone of trickle down economics is that a rising tide raises all boats—but not when it comes to social change in the right-wing mindset. Then there are winners and there are losers. And conservatives on some level have to lose to prove their preexisting condition: They’re not bullies but martyrs—always hanged in the public square for their belief that only they should benefit from the Bill of Rights.

The Affordable Care Act is a law of social change. It insists on greater equality for women in health care. It stands up for the sick over the bottom line. It’s a step forward for human rights (finally) in our medical system. And it mandates personal responsibility (as with most laws). It’s far from perfect, and as with anything it can stand improvement—but does that make it an affront to Republicans?

In a word: Yes.

It’s health care reform policy, Republicans, going all the way back to Nixon, have touted as a way to avoid socialized medicine in America. So naturally its implementation is a major loss for their team.

Now more Americans can get private medical insurance and insurance companies have to spend a higher percentage of premiums on actual health care—but most importantly conservatives get to be the victims of “a communist plot to kill our freedom.”

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

We’ve had a one-sided battle with Sharia Law in the U.S. No one is fighting for replacing U.S. law with an Islamic moral code, but nonetheless Republicans are heroically fighting against it. Same with aborted fetuses in commercial food stuffs: Not something that’s ever happened but earlier this year Republican freshman Oklahoma state senator Ralph Shortey had the temerity to introduce a bill to outlaw it.

Davis Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view more cartoons by Fitzsimmons)

Republicans love what they call “simple solutions” but it’s really just the easiest possible answer to a trumped up crisis. In short: busy work. America needs to streamline for the challenges of the future so we can remain competitive (blah blah blah). Yet Republican offers are akin to organizing all the paperclips in the office by color and size.

Republicans and bureaucracy are, after all, frenemies. Sure they tell the media they despise bureaucracy, but secretly they love it when it makes them appear to be doing something. Even better if it keeps them from doing anything difficult.

For example: We’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic. It’s the number two leading cause of preventable death in this country. The Center for Disease Control estimates 112,000 American deaths a year due to obesity, which is down from their previous estimate of 365,000 deaths from poor nutrition and physical inactivity. The CDC reports in 2008 Americans forked over $147 billion in medical costs on obesity. We’re dying and going broke from being too fat.

But what are Republicans trying to warn us against? Terrorism. China. Russia. Obamacare. ACORN. The New Black Panthers. The Fed. All of which cumulatively killed no Americans last year.

It’s (ironically) lazy to try to and scare Americans about some elusive menace in order to avoid the reality that we’ve become the proverbial elephants in our own living rooms.

Illegal immigration? Republicans say to secure the border, build a fence and arrest anyone who even looks illegal. Mitt Romney said Arizona’s infamous SB 1070 should be a model for the nation, which would be something if Mexicans were still coming into the U.S. They’re not. Immigration from Mexico is now net zero. That is actually a way bigger problem than undocumented workers (whom we love in boom times for a way to circumvent the minimum wage and exploit a non-litigious underclass). It’s the fact we are no longer an attractive enough country to motivate Mexicans to come here.

But as we saw last week with the Supreme Court ruling on Arizona’s law, governor Jan Brewer’s just doubled down on a non-problem, “We cannot forget that we are here today because the federal government has failed the American people regarding immigration policy, has failed to protect its citizens, has failed to preserve the rule of law and has failed to secure our borders.”

For a party that likes to peddle free market and common sense, they sure get a lot of traction ginning up irrational fears.

Our energy plan is stuck firmly in the last century, but that’s not the point the presumptive Republican nominee decided to make. In March, Mitt Romney told Fox News that President Obama “has done everything in his power to make it harder for us to get oil and natural gas in this country, driving up the price of those commodities in the case of gasoline.” Gas prices were the thing Republicans were going to fix by paying attention to them!

With little fanfare, gas prices are down now, by the way. Production has increased overall under the Obama administration. Republicans managed to sound the alarm and assign blame for a symptom while steadfastly avoiding the cause entirely.

Think I’m way off here? Remember this is the party that in the wake of September 11th—an attack by citizens of Saudi Arabia, organized in Afghanistan by a leader hanging out in Lebanon—decided to invade (wait for it) Iraq.

Because things indirectly involved with real problems hate us for our freedoms.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Romney keeps on rolling gutter balls in front of the cameras: “The trees are the right height.” “I like being able to fire people.” “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” “I’m Mitt Romney—and yes Wolf, that’s also my first name.”

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

Normally the adage “a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth” applies. On the Jay Leno show, Obama famously compared his bowling skills to those in the Special Olympics. Many, including myself, were offended by the remark (mainly because the Special Olympics athletes are far better bowlers than Mr. Obama). The President apologized profusely for the statement.

But Romney’s greatest gaffes are less accidental nuggets of candor (like, “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.”) and more what you’d call disquieting sound bites of misfired pandering. Moments that can be summed up by the phrase “cheesy grits.”

Yes, he told a crowd in Mississippi during the primary, he had “cheesy grits” (as opposed to cheese grits) for breakfast and he was learning how to say, “ya’ll.” He would have been better off saying sweet tea (a diabetic coma-inducing regional syrup served over ice) is best with Splenda and he was learning how to talk … real … slow.

(Rick Santorum won Mississippi, by the way.)

Yes, when Romney attempts to show how in touch he is with Americans, he ends up displaying exactly how in touch he is with Americans. Meaning: Not at all.

This week, minutes after marveling at the 10-year-old touch screen technology at a Wawa in Quakertown, Romney was still stuck on regional sandwiches when he got to Cornwall, Pennsylvania. “By the way, where do you get your hoagies here?” he asked the crowd of supporters. “Do you get them at Wawas? Is that where you get them? No? Do you get them at Sheetz? Where do you get them?” According to reports the crowd booed until Governor Tom Corbett offered that the locals got their sandwiches at “delis.”

Here’s the thing: For a man whose book is titled “No Apology,” Mitt’s awkward Rand McNally riffing looks like he’s apologizing for not being from there. And in the case of Michigan (where he actually is from) not being enough like those who are from there. “Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” He’s telling us who he is by making it clear what he’s not: A man of the people … unless those “people” are corporations, my friends.

According to Moody’s Analytics, the unemployment rate would actually be a percentage point lower if the government employed as many people as we did in 2009. It’s a time when government IS shrinking—teachers and cops are being laid off and Mitt’s hoagie haven Pennsylvania lost 5,400 government jobs just this year. Mitt also does his best to seem obtuse. “[Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

Who could have guessed a rich man running for a government job would have the chutzpah (pronounced choots-paw if your last name is Bachmann) to stand up against more firefighters and teachers?

One minute Romney is touting his business experience and wealth as a qualification to be president—the next minute he’s trying to appear like he’s not (as Jon Stewart observed) the guy who just fired your dad.

President Obama should not bowl. Ever. And Romney, well, he should stop trying to relate to blue-collar living and just be the stuffy, privileged, Ivy League, over-educated, French-speaking, affluent Republican he is.

Mitt, if that is your real name (it isn’t), just be yourself.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

It’s like a fox claiming he has the insider knowledge to properly guard the hen house. “The farmer just doesn’t understand poultry.”

Taylor Jones / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by Jones)

As billionaire Julian Robertson who after giving $1.25 million Restore Our Future—a pro-Romney superPAC—told NPR last week, “I think Barack Obama is a smart man that the electorate put into power without any qualifications to run the biggest business in the world, which is the United States of America.”

The thing is the U.S. isn’t a business. Government isn’t a business just as an apple isn’t an orange. Running government like a business would be like running Yosemite National Park like a 7-Eleven—every inch is monetized to maximize profit–half off all 5-Hour Energy Shots on Half Dome! “A mountain of savings!” It’s a stunningly bad idea. It sounds clever in sound bites. They hope it sounds like Republicans are business friendly and quick with the flippant solutions: Government bad, business good—treat one like the other and both will be good! To me it sounds like the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) with a profit motive: another stunningly bad idea.

Vulture capitalism (to borrow a phrase from the leftist pinko Texas Governor Rick Perry) is hardly a good model for public service. Capitalizing on demolishing jobs doesn’t give you any insight into the common good, unless you take “common good” to mean just your wealthy friends.

This whole selling point of Romney having business experience therefore he’s the best to run the country implies that the economy collapsed because there wasn’t enough of a cozy relationship between government and business.

Yes, the world melted because Washington was too adversarial with Wall Street. It was Godzilla battling Mothra that trampled Main Street … instead of deregulated greed greased by conspiring politicians.

But Republicans, as you recall, came out firmly against empathy (when it comes to President Obama’s judicial appointments). But they feel empathy for corporations is what’s lacking in the Executive Office. They want a president who feels the pain of Big Business. Who understands that just like you and me corporations are people, my friends. And only the former CEO Romney can see eye-to-eye with a contrived paper-based legal entity.

It’s very telling that Republicans say government is a business and should be run like one. For them there’s no conflict—only interest. Government is just an extension of business. Like in 2007 when a reporter asked how many of Romney’s five sons were serving in the military. Romney’s answer: “One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president.” It’s just really all the same thing to Romney.

We don’t want our government to be run like a corporation. With any follow-up questions the analogy fails. Corporations don’t ensure rights. Especially rights which annoy yield like free speech and due process. Slavery was profitable. As was child labor. Pollution is profitable.

If making rich people richer was the sole purpose of government (like it is of corporations) we’d no longer have a country: We’d have Lehman Brothers.
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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

This of course is the slogan the National Rifle Association adopted in the 1970’s. It was then that owning a gun became an absolute right endowed by God and the Constitution. A blessing passed down by our forefathers to obliterate game and protect our property. The NRA was founded in 1870 and for its first hundred years it was for gun control and didn’t mention the Second Amendment as their cause.

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Bagley)

Adam Winkler points out in his delicious book, “Gun Fight,” what we call the “wild west” had some of the strictest gun control laws we’ve seen as a nation. The shoot out at the OK Corral took place, after all, because Wyatt Earp was trying to disarm the outlaw Cowboys in accordance with a Tombstone ordinance. The KKK was among other things, a gun control organization. They were trying to keep guns out of the hands of newly freed slaves … but still gun control.

The part of the Second Amendment omitted from the NRA’s slogan is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…” Yes, well regulated—it’s in the Constitution!

Now, to some, guns are as sacred as scripture. If you ask, again, this typical hyper-political gun owner why they need to stockpile assault rifles, you will get an answer much like Pat Flynn’s, a recent candidate for a Senate seat in Nebraska. “Really, we have our guns to protect ourselves against the government, number one,” Flynn said in adebate right before the primary. “Hunting’s number two. But protecting us against our government is number one.” Remember Flynn was trying to land a job in the government (he didn’t win his party’s nomination, by the way).

The idea is that we have to be just as armed as our government in order to be safer or have more liberty (or something). The U.S. government has unmanned drones armed with supersonic laser-guided anti-armor Hellfire missiles, “bunker busters,” and nuclear weapons. Are far-right politicians saying we need civilians to have shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles “for protection?” Of course they’re not. They actually do want limits on ownership.

And if you ask the most vehement gun rights advocate why Everyman Gun Owner shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, I’d bet you’d get the same answer as to why we don’t want every country to have the capability: “Because they could get into the wrong hands.”

So weapons-grade plutonium should be limited. But the ever-handy semi-auto Glock pistol with a 30-round high-capacity magazine is an absolute right?

A recent gun buyback drive in Los Angeles resulted in someone turning in a rocket launcher. Comforting.

So we’re not actually talking about limited vs. unlimited. We are talking about degrees of weapon ownership.

Guns fall into the wrong hands all the time. More guns and fewer requirements for ownership doesn’t curb this. George Zimmerman was the wrong hands. Zimmerman, a Florida man now infamous for shooting an unarmed black teenager at close range after a 911 operator told him not to engage the alleged suspect and wait for police to arrive, is now being defended by said hyper-political gun owners. There’s no reason a Neighborhood Watch captain should be patrolling his block with a criminal record and a pistol. Zimmerman was a catastrophe realized. Even in the wake of new evidence about this case, the fact remains if Zimmerman didn’t have a gun, 16-year-old Trayvon Martin would be alive.

The United States is number one in the world in civilian gun ownership. And since we’re not last in gun violence (we’re the 14^th highest in deaths—way higher in just injuries) it’s safe to assume that increasing the number of guns doesn’t decrease the number of gun deaths. Just like cutting taxes doesn’t increase revenue—making gun ownership unlimited doesn’t make us safer. It’s a lie. A fairy tale of the gun lobby. Completely unsupported by data or logic. A falsehood.

So unless you think all Americans should get Daisy Cutters this Christmas—you believe in regulations as to who gets a weapon, what kind and where they can have it.

Gun control laws are not tyranny—as the family of Trayvon Martin can testify to—a de-regulated militia is.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Rob Tornoe / Media Matters (click to view more cartoons by Tornoe)

The future scares us and we wish it could be more like it used to be. Therefore we freak out about change and demand tradition because it connects us to this proverbial Garden of Eden in our minds.

This logical glitch is a pestilence in American politics. Conservative politicians in particular pander to this notion; we must go back to the past. There it’s better becausewe were better.

Presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s punt on same-sex marriage is: “I agree with 3,000 years of history.” To him this means a love-based consensual marriage between one man and one woman; our current interpretation of marriage. Of course plural marriage, like that of Romney’s grandfathers has also been practiced in the last 3,000 years. As were arranged marriages. As were loveless contractual nuptials.Deuteronomy is pretty clear if a woman isn’t a virgin when she gets married she should be killed. It wasn’t until 1993 that North Carolina became the last state to remove the marriage exemption for rape. Regardless Romney, admits to agreeing with 3,000 years of marriage history. His Etch-a-Sketch must be set to history revision.

I personally don’t agree with any history before sewage systems, women’s suffrage or the Loving decision. I also refuse to romanticize any era before the advent of antibiotics.

The GOP’s objection to state-sanctioned monogamous homosexual relationships is, they offer, based on their belief in the Bible. The current crop of Republicans are less into Jesus (who didn’t like rich people or capital punishment) than they are into 1^stCentury values like stoning misfits in the public square. They’ve picked gay marriage to condemn as an evil out to kill us all, because for Republicans there actually IS a magic time in the not-so-distant past to be nostalgic for—specifically 2004. Then gay marriage was the perfect catalyst to get people to vote Republican. Hence Dubya’s second term.

And now? Now in the wake of the unremarkable ending to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which funny enough is no longer talked about), gay rights doesn’t have the same bite. In 2005 the Supreme Court made sodomy legal in all 50 states and since then there have been absolutely no reports of anyone turning into a pillar of salt. But Republicans who pride themselves on being traditional and firmly planted in the past regardless of folly—are going to try and chum the water with something as anemic as spousal privilege.

Last week President Obama said he supported gays being allowed to marry. This was the right thing to do. But it wasn’t the radical thing to do—it’s popular. Most Americans agree that homosexuals should be able to be married. According to a recent Gallup poll, 51 percent of Americans agree with President Obama on this issue.

Will gay marriage corrode the foundation of this country? When gay marriage becomes the norm (which it will eventually) we probably won’t even notice. We’ll get the same amount of wedding invites only all of these will be legal. You’ll know the same amount of gays you know now. Our children will have the same likelihood of being homosexual as they do now. Very few American’s lives will change. It’s just a minority—a persecuted, ostracized, demonized minority—of Americans whose lives will improve with the option for full-legal rights as a married couple.

That’s if the past is actually prologue … instead of paradise.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

We are now as mobile as we’ve ever been as a culture. Our phones are not tethered to any particular location. Our keepsakes, like photos and letters, are all saved on devices smaller than your average drugstore paperback. The bitter visual of a breakup – the splitting up of a couple’s CD collection – no longer exists since you both have copies of the same MP3s. Your computer fits comfortably in your lap – everything else is in your pocket. We now have the ability to go anywhere and bring with us more things utilizing less space than at any other time in human history.

Mike Keefe / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

We have the ability – the freedom – to roam more now than ever before. And yet our upward mobility is standing still.

Jason DeParle in The New York Times wrote in January this year, “Countries with less equality generally have less mobility.” And as Occupy Wall Street successfully pointed out the top one percent “earn” nearly a quarter of the nation’s income. While they have enjoyed an increase in wealth and a decrease in taxes, the rest of the country has seen a flattening of their prospects. The U.S. ranks near the bottom in income inequality and therefore upward mobility.

Time noted, “The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project has found that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of the socioeconomic spectrum in the U.S., you had only about a 17 percent chance of making it into the upper two-fifths.”

Americans have mobile phones with immobile socioeconomics. Put that in your made-in-China travel mug and sip it.

Why is this so? There are many factors and usually when there is an issue with many factors it means there’s a partisan divide as to its “true” solution. Former Senator, former presidential candidate, Rick Santorum mentioned the lack of upward mobility but subscribed boilerplate Republican cure-alls like deregulating businesses and cutting taxes for corporations. Arguably if that helped upward mobility – we’d have upward mobility.

President Obama also talked about this fact earlier this month. “It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it – a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class,” said the President to a Florida audience.

He continued, “By gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last – education and training; research and development; infrastructure – it’s a prescription for decline.”

The real solution is probably in the middle – which is often ever so slightly to the left of President Obama’s positions.

Conservatives, like the government-helicopter-hopping, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will say it’s the safety net that has made us lazy waiting for government checks. But countries with a better current mobility rate (most of the industrialized world) will note their social safety net is what makes mobility possible for the lower classes.

One thing which is supposed to ensure you’ll do better than your parents is getting a better education. However, tuitions are rising, grants are shrinking and student loans are becoming a plague of post-collegiate living. College is no longer the class-lift it once was.

This is where we are as a nation: Your Android can go anywhere with you … just probably not into the upper middle-class.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

Then the right-wing echosphere spent the next week bouncing the sound bite: “This isn’t about contraception, this is about religious freedom.”

America’s right-wing: Afraid of Muslims, suspicious of Mormons, terrified of atheists and martyrs of religious freedom.

Republicans botched their war on religion with the word “slut.” Oh and by proposing laws against women getting equal pay, and a right to privacy or recourse if a doctor lies to them. The Chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus, said the war on women is imaginary at the same moment Republican legislators around the country were introducing bills eroding women’s rights. So the war over what kind of war this was — religion or women — was lost by Republicans. Their best efforts to get a fruitful campaign about religious liberty backfired into a debate about gender equality.

To quote Rick Perry, “Oops.”

This party used to be better at getting traction with these wedge causes-they-call-wars. This has been their modus operandi to pummel artists, single mothers, monogamous gay couples, pot smokers, public employees and other subversives for decades: They create a fake crisis, say it will kill us all and then repeat it until our ears bleed.

How have they fumbled manufacturing a war on religion?! This is a John Carter level of a stink bomb: It’s totally formulaic — how can it fail?

Perhaps it’s just hard to convince Americans we are a Christian nation founded in religion with a tradition of religion in every facet of our lives from our money to our pledge of allegiance AND that faith is somehow being threatened. It’s like saying you’re the size of Goliath but everyone should view you as David.

Republicans really need a war on religion. Badly. A common foe would not only glaze over the fact their nominee Mitt Romney is from a new sect distrusted by other sects — it would unite (they hope) all people of faith into their special brand of ultra-conservative gospel. A gospel that mega-church pastor, tax-free status enjoyer Rick Warren summed up nicely on the holiest of Easter Sundays on ABC’s This Week: “I don’t believe in wealth redistribution.” Yes, when Jesus wasn’t hunting quail with his Glock sub-compact semi-auto — he was all over trickle down economics and scapegoating the poor for political gain.

A war on religion would give Republicans back their big tent. It would be a giant diverse group of people who would put faith in the Grand Old Party looking out for their eternal souls instead of just soulless corporations. All the hacking away at women’s rights, the social safety net and consumer protections would be given a pass under “religious freedom.”

Try it: “This isn’t about toxic drinking water/corporate welfare/millionaire tax breaks — it’s about religious freedom!” It works for nearly everything.

This will all go perfectly if they find an enemy. One good enough, or bad enough as the case may be, to compel all Americans of faith to give up their petty differences and come together as Republicans. Since the GOP needs this war on religion to push through their ironically social Darwinist agenda — they’re not going to give up trying to create one.

What does a preemptive victim searching for a persecutor look like? It looks a lot like the Republicans’ “war on religion.”

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Absolutely. However, ObamaCare is the opposite of socialism — it’s a market solution.

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

The right-wing got a “free” market solution to health care. That was their cause — personal responsibility their mantra — now it’s law. They got an entire reform bill incentivizing citizens to buy into private for-profit insurance plans. This is the Republican vision for America: Less government more profits for giant corporations. This core of the Affordable Care Act was an idea floated by President Nixon in 1974, touted by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, introduced by Newt Gingrich in 1993 and implemented by Mitt Romney in 2005. And now? Now it’s a big festering albatross around Obama’s neck.

As former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said in front of the Supreme Court last week, “We have not waved the white flag of surrender on socialized medicine!”

So the decades-old Republican big idea finally gets Democratic presidential ink and now, if you ask a Republican, it’s an unconstitutional government takeover of health care Stalin would have loved. Mitt Romney wants to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with RomneyCare. Essentially repealing the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. Leave it to a Republican frontrunner to vow their first act as president will be to waste time with redundancies while lamenting how ineffective government can be.

Now that health care reform has reached the Supreme Court, we will have a ruling on the law in late June. Will it be overturned fully or partially or upheld? It’s anyone’s guess.

Regardless of the outcome, personal responsibility in health care is a Republican pet idea they’ve strapped to the roof of the car.

It makes the case that their ideas should never be law because if partisanship beckons, they’ll rally against them and call any Democrats who signed the bill, Hitler.

Imagine if Obama signed the most recent Paul Ryan Budget plan — a blueprint to cut taxes further for the wealthy and further increase the debt by not taking in enough revenues. If Obama embraced it, Republicans would storm the Capitol calling it a tax hike and a Maoist plot with Wall Street. People in tri-corner hats with signs reading, “Don’t raise my taxes!” and “Stop government takeover of business!” would swarm The Mall. The erosion of Medicare would make Republicans faint on the House floor. “It’s a tenet of Marxism to kill grandma!” They’d gasp.

Just remember, when George W. Bush took office the budget was set to be balanced in a few short years. Social security was actually its namesake — secure. And then he went uber-GOP-with-a-mandate — didn’t pay for any of the wars he started — just showered seniors with unpaid-for Medicare Part D and sent everyone in the country a rebate check. And when this “free market capitalism” failed? He bailed out the banks and the auto industry with taxpayer money, famously saying he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

Now? Now the Republicans blame the deficit, the debt, the recession, the bailouts and (wait for it) the wars on the Democrat in the Oval Office.

It’s a take on the Pottery Barn rule, “You break it, you buy it.” The Republican version: “We break it, we blame you … and call you a Nazi.”

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Ask anyone in even a slightly purple state or in an even slightly contested district: Political ads are a plague come election time. And what exactly are we getting for our (estimated) $42 per potential voter? Not much.

Jeff Parker / Florida Today (click to view more cartoons by Parker)

Ads are not transparent, not fact checked and in many cases not accountable. Voters get to feel like Alex DeLarge in “A Clockwork Orange” during his aversion therapy (eye drops, anyone?) without knowing who’s footing the bill.

A way to combat this Stanley Kubrick-esque torment is just ban all political advertisements on television.

“That’s an assault on free speech.”

First off television is not an unregulated utopia of free speech – that’s the Internet (for now, anyway). Television, like it or not, doesn’t allow everything to be broadcast. There are standards on television. Our mores may have changed over time but generally we’re still okay with decency standards for television. Speaking is speech. Broadcast is regulated.

And it’s worth noting, 99 percent of Americans have televisions in their homes. It’s still the broadest, most viewed medium we have. Which is why candidates and advocates for candidates invest billions into blanketing it.

We don’t allow tobacco companies, for example, to advertise on television. Why? Because their products are poisonous and harmful to our citizenry. The same could be said for Swift Boating, Demon Sheeping and whatever Herman Cain is doing.

These ads are supposed to sway public opinion. But these aren’t actually opinions being targeted – they’re emotions. Most Americans have less of an opinion when it comes to politics and more of a visceral reaction to issues. Which explains why your “political debate” over Thanksgiving dinner ended up with you being pummeled with green bean casserole.

And there’s no better example of where to start hysteria than in 30-second fear and loathing campaign spots. Does this elevate political discourse? Civic engagement? Sound policy? Hardly. These ads are doing what tobacco does: producing a carcinogenic cloud.

“But you’re trying to limit a candidate’s ability to get their message out!” Look, if you can’t get your message out after 23 Republican primary debates – you don’t have a message. Candidates should be out on the stump, on television, at town halls and at debates. Absolutely. It’s the anonymous sugar daddies bank rolling ads the candidates can easily divorce themselves from that I suggest discontinuing. It’s like having all the benefits of a loyal Rottweiler and none of the legal liability once it mauls your adversary.

So just ban these spots. Let the hallowed ground of 20 minutes per hour of programming be for more wholesome things like erectile dysfunction treatments or reverse home mortgages. End candidate television advertising.

“If this happens what’s to stop a ban on ALL political shows?” Ridiculous. We haven’t had cigarette commercials for half a century and we still have smoking on TV. Banning a type of advertising that erodes our elections into secret televised slush funds won’t stop political programming.

What it will do is something about this flood – this deluge – this torrent of commercials – the most in the history of interruptions – that’s drowning our discourse.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

What precipitated your doctor’s reckless and unethical behavior? A group of lawmakers decided you don’t have a right to know the truth about your medical condition so therefore a doctor’s fabrications cannot be grounds for a lawsuit.

Mike Keefe / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

Your doctors and those lawmakers have decided they know what’s best for you. And you have no recourse whatsoever.

Would you feel conspired against by your state legislature and your health care provider? Yes. And this is exactly what women of child bearing age are facing on a state level: making it okay to lie to pregnant women if it potentially avoids an abortion.

Both Arizona and Kansas are considering bills giving your doctor the legal authority to withhold potentially crucial information about your health, and in this case your child’s.

This idea of lying to women has been in the quiver of the our-choice-for-you movement since before Roe v. Wade when abortion was legal only at the state level. In 1967, the first of what are now known as crisis pregnancy centers or fake abortion clinics was opened by a man named Robert Pearson in Hawaii. The blueprint for these ruses is still The Pearson Foundation’s manual, “How to Start and Operate Your Own Pro-Life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center,” published in 1984. Pearson writes, “Obviously, we’re fighting Satan. A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby.”

In this case, Satan is a girl.

And Satan, being the father of all lies and all — doesn’t have the right to the truth when he gets knocked up.

In the right-wing-maligned health care reform bill were strides for women’s health, equality and autonomy. The buried lede about Obamacare is it forced insurance companies not to treat a womb as a preexisting condition. Recently it came to focus (while being declared a war on religion) that birth control must be covered by insurance even if the employer is a religious institution (the exception being an actual church). For the last decade, Viagra was covered by insurance, no problem, and the pill was not. A dysfunction for men was covered and a function for women was out-of-pocket. The Affordable Care Act changed that.

And the right-wing opposes this as a “government takeover of health care.” But when they want to endow your doctor with the ability to dictate their values in the form of dishonesty — health care (specifically women’s) needs to be taken over by government. Stat!

As a culture, would we tolerate this if it were any other medical condition besides pregnancy? What if your doctor was being paid by the soft drink industry to tell you your obesity isn’t from your five liter a day habit? What if your doctor didn’t approve of vaccinations and you actually get Meningitis? What if your doctor thought it wasn’t right to tell you about your cancer screening results while in its operable window? And what if some yahoo state lawmakers decided – against all ethics and medical research – to agree with your quack doctor?

If those things seem outrageous then lying to pregnant women has to be too. If we want to live in a society where women have the same rights as men, being of child-bearing ability can’t be a caveat to equality.

Either women have equal rights under the law or they’re public incubators. And according to these attempted laws in Arizona and Kansas — we’re not equal.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

However, in this election cycle there are no real Southern candidates. Newt Gingrich represented Georgia but was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (and retains that accent). To contrast that, both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention events are being held in southern states (North Carolina and Florida).

Bill Day / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Day)

Here’s what the nation ignores unless there’s a disaster (or an election which could also qualify as a disaster): Of the bottom 10 poorest states in the union – nine of them are Southern states east of Texas. Mississippi is the poorest state of all. Child poverty. Unemployment. Under-employment. Lack of education. Lack of resources. The nation’s highest obesity rates are found south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Despite the conservative bona fides, the South isn’t pulling herself up by her bootstraps … mainly because she can’t see her toes she’s about to lose to diabetes. These are deeply and consistently Republican voters – but being poor and Republican is like being a cow and pro-leather. The South is a parable as to why that is: Their prejudices are being exploited to prod them into being against their own best interests.

In the South there’s been a long (and storied) resentment of outsiders coming in and telling them how to run their lives. But without fail, when the economy is bad anywhere – historically the first group to be blamed are the noobs. Hence why a new wave of anti-immigrant legislation has been pouring out of the southern region of the U.S.

Last year, Alabama passed HB 56 or Hammon-Beason Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act which led to a mass exodus of labor in the state. There were reports of crops rotting in the fields and an estimated cost to the state in the billions. Now the governor of Mississippi has endorsed a similar plan. Capitalizing politicians will say these heavy-handed laws are to keep out illegal immigrants but in practice it’s anyone who looks vaguely foreign being forced to show their paperwork.

Not exactly the land of the free. And sure not Southern hospitality.

Are immigrants, as these laws imply, parasites on the system? It’s actually the poorest (and yes, Southern) states that are the ones not carrying their own weight. For every dollar Alabamans pay in federal taxes, they receive $1.66 in federal money. In Louisiana it’s $1.78 per dollar. Mississippi gets $2.02 per dollar they give the dreaded federalgubmint.

There’s a way to help this region get off the federal dole: Welcome immigrants.

California has a huge immigrant population (both legal and illegal) and while certainly not void of any problems, the state still boasts of having the 8^th largest economy in the world. And grumble as you will about Californians, for every dollar they pay in federal taxes – the rest of the country receives nearly a quarter of it.

Southern conservatives can bemoan “paying for someone else’s birth control” but in this way the New England states are paying for “someone else’s” (namely the South’s) Lipitor.

Welcome immigrants. When you welcome immigrants – you welcome tourists, you welcome tax revenue and then, counter-intuitively, the South can be more self-reliant. That’s a conservative principle in a “severely” right-leaning culture.

The best thing the South can do to save herself is welcome the world. Be a place immigrants move to. Let smart people from other countries call themselves Alabamians. Let hard working people everywhere call Mississippi home. Welcome the world to the South.

Basically enact the opposite of HB 56.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Taylor Jones / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more Rick Santorum cartoons)

Their old standbys have fallen flat: Iran, abortion, climate change, child labor laws, and even gay marriage don’t have the sparkle they once had for the Grand Old Party.

Republicans can’t seem to get excited about Mitt Romney as their ‘80s-teen-movie-smug-rich-guy-stock-character nominee. Worse yet, he’s Mormon, which makes evangelical leaders grumble. So having a common enemy is the best way to bring everyone together for the proverbial good fight: Freedom.

“It’s important for us to win this issue,” Speaker John Boehner told reporters last week. “Our government for 220 years has respected the religious views of the American people and for all of this time there’s been an exception for those churches and other groups to protect the religious beliefs that they believe in. And that’s being violated here.”

Is Boehner coming out against anti-Sharia laws?! Or is he just conveniently forgetting the government isn’t always so deferential to the pious? Mormons had to forsake polygamy to gain statehood, for one. In 1862 the then-General Ulysses S. Grantexpelled Jews from his district of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky. And there were plenty of states where you couldn’t hold public office if you didn’t swear to believe in God (as opposed to Allah, Buddha or a flying plate of spaghetti) until the Torcaso v. Watkins decision in 1961.

This whole charade of religious freedom collapsed under the girth of Rush Limbaugh. He pivoted what was supposed to be a church and state issue into snickering about young women having sex. For three days Limbaugh railed on law student, Sandra Fluke, who testified for congressional Democrats, calling her a prostitute and a slut for speaking in public about the need for birth control coverage. So the GOP was trying to take the high (read: holy) road and there was their mouthpiece driving them all off a cliff demanding Ms. Fluke post sex videos on the Internet.

Now here’s the thing: Even Rick Santorum who (oddly) thinks birth control leads to more teen pregnancies – who has previously said states should have the right to ban contraception – now tells Piers Morgan, “It should be available.” This was tempered with the now irrelevant point about religious freedom. But even the way-out, cringe-inducing, extremist-in-a-sweater-vest has to confess birth control should be available.

Affordability is accessibility. If it’s out of your price range – it’s out of your grasp. It doesn’t matter if the pill is offered over-the-counter or in vending machines – if you can’t afford it – you can’t have it. Fluke’s testimony was not about the legality or morality of contraception – it was about students not being about to shell out over $1,000 a year for a medication in addition to purchasing medical insurance.

If Republicans admit they think birth control should be available – that means they believe it should be within price range.

The conservative talking point on health care reform was summed up by Rep. VirginiaFoxx: “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare,” adding, “Everybody in this country has access to healthcare.” In other words: Everyone has access to cake!

We don’t say everyone accused of a crime has access to a lawyer without providing one. We don’t say everyone has access to police protection but charge more than anyone can pay. We don’t say every child has access to education but require an outrageous tuition. Access is not abstract … unless you’re a Republican lawmaker.

No, when you’re a Republican “access” gets muddied with whatever sham controversy they hope will help them. This week it’s basic health care services for women.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Yes, Bachmann warned us of a foreign boogieman rising … one that’s been dead for over 20 years.

Monte Wolverton / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Wolverton)

Boo!

But warning of a zombie nation feasting on the metaphorical brains of the U.S. is consistent with a party now completely untethered from basic American history, science or any other evidence-based practice: The GOP is now a party standing proudly on a pro-fiction platform.

Yes, in their party, as an aide to Senator Jon Kyl put it last year, whatever they say is “not intended to be a factual statement” but to illustrate a point.

For example, this week Mitt Romney brought a Michigan tea party audience to tears recalling the 50th anniversary of the American automobile event he attended as a child … even though it took place months before he was born.

Former Senator Rick Santorum asserts public schools are an “anachronism” of the industrialized era as the reason they should be privatized. He said at the CNN debatelast week: “Not only do I believe the federal government should get out of the education business, I think the state government should start to get out of the education business and put it back to the local and into the community.” Just when millions of Americans have lost their homes comes a candidate in favor of home schooling.

Public schools are arguably what made us a country. The colonies had one of the highest literacy rates in the world at the time. In James D. Hart’s “The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste” published in 1950, he notes that in 1650 New England there were laws requiring “reading and writing schools.” Education was thought to thwart Satan at that time (note to Santorum there). Hart goes on to include a popular ditty of the era: “From public schools shall general knowledge flow, For ‘tis the people’s sacred right to know.”

Also, the principal writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was (gasp) publically educated.

Santorum, as a pro-fiction candidate, also dismisses colleges as “indoctrination mills.” One man’s indoctrination is another man’s accreditation to work in the sciences.

The four candidates still vying for the nomination are pro-fiction to the core: Somehow the President who okayed the assassination of Osama bin Laden, sent drone attacks into Libya and kept Gitmo open is an apologetic pansy – soft on our enemies. Obama has deported more illegal immigrants and spent more money protecting the border than any of his predecessors – but he’s ignoring the issue of illegal immigration. Romney keeps on promising if elected he’ll make the military so powerful no other country would dare attack us even though we have the biggest military in the world. Gingrich who says if given any power he’ll send U.S. Marshalls to compel radical judges to explain their rulings, deems “the pill” to be the epitome of radical governmentoverreach. Taxes? Too high even though they’re historically low (especially during war time). Tax cuts? A pay-for-themselves panacea even though the Bush Tax Cuts didn’tpan out.

Challenge their narrative and brace for the ad hominem attacks. You only believe this because you’re at least one of the following: liberal, socialist, unemployed, commie sympathizer, elite, dupe, European, journalist, gun hater, Muslim, Obama-bot, or (my favorite from my inbox) silly little girl.

Because in fiction you must create an enemy or there’s no story.

The pro-fiction party will tell you their ideas will lower gas prices, cut the deficit, end poverty, cut the size of government and make everybody super free by allowing the states to decide which rights to take away.

No matter how completely impossible – no matter how divorced from evidence or precedence – the GOP will continue to make claims not to be factual – but just to illustrate a point. Possibly that you should vote for them.

The Soviet Union must be watching this race right now and just laughing their heads off.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Yet according to his tax returns, he gives the least amount to charity of anyone else running. In 2010 Santorum gave 1.75 percent of his nearly million dollars of income. That same year President Obama gave 14.2 percent of his income to charity topping the most giving of the Republican candidates, Mitt Romney. That’s a whopping 12 percent difference with a president who Santorum says doesn’t have an agenda based on the Bible.

Now this would not be notable if Santorum were a godless hedonist who wrote tomes about how well selfishness has served him. But since he’s of the Christian faith and uses God as a personal reference on his resume, well, then it’s quite significant. Especially since the Bible is pretty clear on charity and helping the less fortunate.

But Santorum’s other problem is he seems kind of anti-women. Now when I say “anti-women” I don’t mean he kicks all women in the shins instead of shaking hands, or he’s scared of anything with an extreme waist-to-hip ratio. I mean he’s anti women being anything other than a mother or a soiled dove. “Traditional roles” for women have been either wholesome mom or the proverbial whore: Mother or outcast; Child bearer or streetwalker; Womb proprietor or back alley courtesan. Feminism traditionally has striven for equality regardless of gender. It’s been a cry for women to be able to branch out of the world’s oldest profession into some new ones. And yes, gasp, work outside the home.

In Santorum’s 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” the Senator wrote: “The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.”

And Rick’s recent declaration that prenatal testing leads to more abortions only solidifies the caricature of him as a shady backwoods holy man in any Timothy Olyphant television show. It’s condescending to women to be told they don’t need to worry “their pretty little head” about the health of their baby because if they had knowledge they’d “ruin their lives with an abortion.” It makes Santorum look anti-women-being-educated-and-properly-informed. Because giving birth is the most important role in life – anything else is worthy of popular scorn.

Santorum’s team has sensed this woman thing could be an issue. So he’s trying to soften the edges with the (ahem) softer sex. Last week when ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked about the anti-women working passages in his book Santorum said his wife, Karen co-wrote those passages. “She felt very much like society and those radical feminists that I was referring to were not affirming her choice … All I’m saying is … we should affirm both choices … That’s what the book says, and I stand by what I said.” Yes, the book, according to Santorum’s latest explanation, should have been titled “Affirming Choices.” Santorum: pro-affirming-choice. Sure.

I could make all these problems for Rick as a candidate go away. I have one simple solution: Give Karen an author credit. Yes, “It Takes a Family,” admittedly took a family to write, so why not accredit the co-author on the cover? Currently Karen isn’t even in the acknowledgement section – let alone on the cover or in the catalog information. So why not announce that the mother of your children isn’t just your personal incubator but is valued for her mind and opinion? It says your anti-women stance comes straight from the woman happily working in your own home. Do a re-issue of this collection of antiquated ramblings and tell the world she’s the wife who made you the anti-women candidate you are today.

It accomplishes two things: It makes Santorum seem generous (again) on paper, and it makes all of that Neolithic “women need to know their place” rhetoric in his 464-page manifesto seem more this millennium.

Sure it “takes a family” to write a book – but it “takes a woman” to make you look less like a sad desperate relic.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) has an odd obsession with ill-fitting metaphors. He famously proclaimed his only reason to kill the Affordable Care Act was to annihilate the president politically. “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” said the tea-touting Senator. DeMint has a pre-existing condition; he thinks an enemy’s high casualty melee is comparable to the inability to pass a sensible, relatively mild, reform bill. Well, at least when he’s talking about Democrats. As the kick-off speaker at this year’s CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) DeMint used a somewhat softer analogy: football. Specifically these two teams DeMint sees have different goals. “We don’t have shared goals with the Democrats…Compromise works well in this world when you have shared goals.”

Bill Day / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Day)

In football the teams are never expected to go in the same direction with the best interests of the fans in mind. Also in football, no team threatens to shut down the country as a strategy to win the game.

But maybe DeMint is correct: It’s really tough to compromise with a group that’s solitary goal is destroying you. Apparently taking the same oath to uphold the same Constitution, in the same country, drawing the same paycheck, in the same office building, in the same city and being of the same religion, sharing the same language and being mostly (85 percent) male, white and wealthy isn’t enough common ground for Republicans to even entertain working with those alien Democrats. It’s even tougher to compromise with a group who you could totally agree with but retroactively become against their own ideas once you propose them. Like say, the individual mandate every GOP candidate was for before he was against it. (Yes, except Ron Paul, keep your emails.)

Enter the “severely conservative.” This was the description Mitt Romney bestowed upon himself at this year’s CPAC. “I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” said the oft-frontrunner. “Severe” is a word normally associated with pain or really bad weather. With today’s GOP, not only do Republicans refuse to have the same goals — they deny all similarities to their enemy. “The President is not like us.” This is severely conservative.

In the same speech Romney promised to repeal ObamaCare even though it’s nearly identical to the plan Romney signed into law in Massachusetts, dubbed RomneyCare.

Let’s put it this way: If Romney “repealed and replaced” the “job-killing ObamaCare” with RomneyCare, no one would notice. If there were a taste test and you covered the labels — no one could tell the difference. You’d have a 50/50 chance of guessing which reform you were actually enjoying.

But to be a true severe conservative demands suspending disbelief. What must you be willing to accept? The economy buckling while a Republican was in the White House never happened. Bush never bailed out the banks or the auto industry. Deficits suddenly matter. Clint Eastwood is a hippie. And if the country continues to struggle it’ll be great for the GOP.

It reminds me of King Pyrrhus’ quote which sums up the term Pyrrhic victory: “If we are victorious in one more battle, we shall be utterly ruined.”

And well, these severe conservatives are acting like they’re winning.

That should tell us something.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Advertisements at that time, just as one example, started to feature unmarried couples to appeal to this group of consumers. This was a first and in the early ‘90s it was pushing the envelope. It apparently resonated. The advertisers gauged correctly: They successfully sold their products to Americans with the now documented lowestmarriage rate in history.

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view more cartoons about Komen)

The argument could be made (mainly by those who want to take us back to a mythical innocent time of the supposedly recent past) that it’s advertisers who’ve corrupted our culture and changed what’s socially acceptable through their manipulations. Or, if you have sold your proverbial soul to the gods of unfettered commerce – like the rightwing self-described Culture Warriors, or the (formerly) Moral (former) Majority – advertisements are the market speaking for the greater culture at large. And the greater culture, funny enough, largely disagrees with the rightwing.

Here’s how it works: Advertisers put out an image or an idea – the greater public concurs by buying those products. Successful ads equal agreed upon ideas. Marketing is, after all, the definitive pandering.

And here is what the culture is saying through advertisements: We like racial diversity. Why can I say that? Because commercials not only have racially diverse groups of friends and co-workers – they now regularly feature bi-racial couples in ads. In a Budweiser Super Bowl spot this year, there were black men flirting with white women sans scandal. If those spots are moving widgets it means consumers agree with the message. It’s a type of voting. Even if some viewers don’t notice or don’t have a visceral reaction one way or another – it’s an indicator of a new cultural norm.

Also Americans are okay with homosexuals. The American Family Association, an association for only pre-approved families, threatened JC Penney with a boycott after they hired Ellen Degeneres as a spokesperson. Now, Degeneres, besides being a comedic genius, is also a successful talk show host and a popular pitchperson for brands like Covergirl and American Express. The market has spoken time after time, and Ellen is adored and sought after. She also happens to be a lesbian, which has made her the target of the AFA whose influence is clearly eroding.

What else does the market proclaim? Well, Americans widely approve of birth control. And yes, even legal abortion. In the dust-up last week between Susan G. Komen for the Cure and Planned Parenthood the market picked the winner. It was Planned Parenthood. The nonprofit health care provider saw a spike in private contributions after Komen announced they would no longer give Planned Parenthood a grant to screen for breast cancer. And Komen’s brand has been forever tarnished by putting politics before their cure-finding goal. It’s already resulted in one resignation of the Vice President of Public Policy, Karen Handel.

You can think of the market as a leading indicator of our social mores and the Republican primary as a lagging one.

Disgraced former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, has been trying to play the well-worn Goldwater Southern Strategy to rile up the base. He calls Obama the food stamp president and said he wants to go talk to the NAACP about “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” He also said immigrants should learn English and not use the “language of the ghetto.” That phrase hurt him in the Spanish-named (former Spanish colony) state of Florida. Why? Because the market has spoken, we have our first biracial president and we no longer care for these antiquated wedges Gingrich peddles.

The GOP-worshipped market has chosen the winner of the culture wars, and it hasn’t looked favorably on its most devout.

Of course, the market for Republicans is just like the Bible or the Constitution. They worship it piously as long as they believe it agrees with them.

If their deified market is all-knowing and all-powerful – it clearly favors a progressive social agenda…and not the GOP’s.

Yeah…tough sell.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

When I hear “entitlement society” I think, “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts – he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests – it’s the entire “society” part.

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Bagley)

At the Monday Florida debate last week Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that — and if you created enough jobs doing that — it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”

So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?

This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.

“Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It’s one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noble pursuit.

Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash – it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!

The rich are not just over-paid – they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.

As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.

It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.

The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.

The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

This photo comes in the same week as Romney’s tax return where we learned Romney doesn’t actually work. He is in fact, as he’s claimed, unemployed. His money…makes his money. Millions and millions. He pays a tax rate of 13.9 percent – far lower than your average laundromat owner.

Taylor Jones / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Jones)

Which leads me to ask: Why is Mitt being photographed doing his laundry? Were there no Dukakis tanks available?

Apparently pleased with his Average Joe “real street” cred, Romney happily explained the image to NBC News, “We do our laundry at least once a week, because we’ll be on the road for 30 straight days. Who else do you think is going to do our laundry?”

When you are a multi-multi-millionaire, I can think of millions of people who could do your laundry. Isn’t Romney taking away jobs by washing his own clothes? First he outsourced American jobs, destroyed companies while the CEO at Bain Capital – now his quirky down-homeness is denying a gig to a professional fluff and folder.

When you don’t actually think about the plight of working people, you can assume you’re connecting to their “kitchen table” concerns by saying you have to do laundry at least once a week. We all do our laundry that much. Mainly because if you’re middle-class (or the former middle-class), you don’t have weeks worth of clothes; therefore you wash clothes all the time. It’s like saying you pay your bills at least once a month. Or you fill up your car with gas at least once a week. Or you worry about money at leastonce every other day. For normal people, this goes without saying, but for a candidate trying to appear normal, well, let’s just say it doesn’t wash.

Speaking of which, does one really, as the GOP-dubbed “vulture capitalist” with holdings in the Cayman Islands and some Swiss bank accounts want to have oneself associated with the word “laundry”? If you’re admittedly doing accounting tricks to pay as little U.S. taxes as possible, don’t you want to avoid a word synonymous with rich guy malfeasance? “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” said Romney at the NBC debate on Monday night in Florida.

Right: Millionaire plus laundry equals accidental editorial cartoon.

What’s next for this guy? Dressing up as a pirate and walking through foreclosed neighborhoods?

Also do you really want, as a Mormon candidate, to open up a conversation about separating whites from colors?! Gah!

The photo op was like answering a question no one asks: Who does your laundry? No one cares. A millionaire former-CEO insisting on doing his own cleaning is either lying or not a very good CEO.

A great politician can be all things to all people: an Elite, an Everyman; a Soldier, a General; a Fighter, a Thinker. A bad one can just pander and grovel for everyone’s approval. “You like that? Me too.”

Hey look guys, I’m doing my super-normal-every-week laundry. As the 3,000^th richest man in the country, who else is going to do my laundry, am I right?

I mean, there’s being clean cut and then there’s just…oh never mind.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

The first thing worth noting is this treatment of war dead is absolutely against the Geneva Convention. The second thing is we threw out the Geneva Convention when we invaded Afghanistan.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

Which leads me to the following conclusion: It’s time to end this war. It’s time to leave.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1963 memoir, noted that in Vietnam “the mass of the population supported the enemy.” This was an insurmountable obstacle (at the time) for the French and an ominous foreshadowing for a full-scale American conflict to come. A war the U.S. would engage in for 20 years through five presidents and an estimated 200,000 dead or wounded American soldiers.

Yet that is where we are with Afghanistan: The population is not on our side. I was recently on a television program with Michael Hastings, a reporter at Rolling Stone on Afghanistan. He said some of the Afghans still think they are fighting the Soviets (a nine year war which ended in 1989).

That is the best indication this war, for us, is unwinnable: We don’t really know who we’re fighting there and they don’t really know who they’re fighting there.

We’d actually have to educate people as to who it is they are trying to kill first…in order to “win their hearts and minds.”

We’ve been in a country called the graveyard of empires for a decade. Last year General David Petraeus announced his COIN or counterinsurgency strategy, integral in Iraq, would be implemented in Afghanistan too. The pillars of a COIN strategy are “security, political and economic.” Or as Petraeus wrote in the field manual “Success in COIN operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people.” Basically, nation building. We have to build a nation that will be stable, legitimate AND support the U.S. How does that happen? More time; more soldiers; more money.

Just one decade is not enough to make little progress in a country whose last successful conqueror was the Mongols…roughly 800 years ago. And whose type of government historically can be best described as tribal.

Front-runner for the Republican nomination Mitt Romney said in his New Hampshire primary victory speech, “He [Obama] doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority.  I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it.”

We have the largest navy in the world (twice as big as the second largest) and we’re in a ten-year-long struggle in a landlocked country.

This is a Romney “let them eat cake moment.” Oh we’re not winning with the biggest military in the history of the planet? The solution is to make it bigger!

Enough. Eisenhower, the last five-star general to be President of the United States, warned Americans upon his leaving office of the “military industrial complex.” Part of this complex is the insistence of “listening to the commanders on the ground.”

The commanders still insist we can win if we just try harder, stay long and commit more troops. But this is in their nature. Asking commanders on the ground if we should continue with a war is like asking a football coach if we should continue to have football games. Of course they say yes, they’re professionals and this is their livelihood. Their opinion should be treated as such.

In 2008, Obama was the recipient of more donations (6:1) from soldiers serving overseas than his opponent, former POW, John McCain. It was specifically because then-Senator Obama spoke of ending the Iraq War.

Iraq is over. Let’s end our involvement in Afghanistan too.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

They have former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich summing up the worst of the ‘90s GOP. Not only did he shut down the government during his tenure, he attempted to oust a president for doing what Gingrich was doing at that very moment. The Speaker investigated Bill Clinton for hanky panky with an intern (a paid one – FYI – oh the ‘90s were a golden age) while Gingrich was messing around with a Capitol staffer; soon to be his third and current wife, Callista.

Christopher Weyant / The Hill (view more cartoons by Weyant)

I’ve stopped using the word “hypocrite” for people like Gingrich. It’s a 75-cent word no one cares about. A better term is “fraud.”

Gingrich enjoys going after people for the things he’s guilty of; like when he said we should lock up Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. Gingrich describedthem as “the politicians who profited from the environment and the politicians who put this country in trouble.” This was before it was disclosed Gingrich was paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac for what any reasonable person would call lobbying. (He maintains it was anything from being a celebrity to being a historian that “earned” such a paycheck.)

He’s now attacking Mitt Romney for “making people unemployed” at the leverage buyout firm Bain Capital, while not mentioning Gingrich was on the advisory board at a competing leverage buyout firm Forstmann Little after his stint as Speaker.

Fraud.

But don’t worry, Republicans also have a sample of the worst of their party from ‘00s: Rick Santorum. Now Santorum believes your uterus doesn’t have a right to privacy. If Santorum has his way, women’s private parts are up for public scrutiny and federal regulation. He’s also bravely stood up for states being able to ban birth control and not wanting to make black/blah people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.

But Santorum ranks among the worst of the Bush Era because of a blah spot on the Grand Old Party called: The Terri Schiavo case. In 2005, Schiavo was in a decades-long vegetative state; her husband wanted to abide by her wishes and not keep her alive by artificial means. Her parents disagreed. They went to court. Then Congress got involved. Then the President of the United States at his home in Crawford boarded Air Force One on Easter to fly to Washington to sign legislation to “save Terri.”

Santorum was at the bedside of Terri Schiavo (uninvited) to make a national spectacle of himself. How’d he get there? Walmart corporate jet. Why was this Pennsylvania senator in Florida? Outback Steakhouse fundraiser. So an industry toady uses his corporate favors to publically moralize our most intimate issues? He’s pro-life, with the caveat of being pro-er-big-big-business.

A few months later in that same year, nearly 2,000 Americans died in Hurricane Katrina without a special session from Congress or a visit from Santorum. It’s hard to embrace the sanctity of life while corpses float along the streets of an American city. Santorum lost his seat by 17 points the next fall.

So worst of the ‘90s, worst of the ‘00s and just to add diversity – the cartoon of an absurd GOP future: Rick Perry.

All that really needs to be said about Perry is he was finally able to list all three agencies he’d cut while president and got a nearly standing ovation from an otherwise subdued New Hampshire crowd last Saturday at ABC’s debate. As they say in Texas, Perry is all hat and no…

“Uh … I can’t … sorry … oops.”

Which leads us back to the 1 percent (tipper) representing, Mitt Romney. Because all the other candidates remind us of bygone ethics violations, shameful hysterias, China or Ron Paul, the GOP looks like they’re stuck with Romney. But they do not love him.

His campaign has been like the rehearsal dinner for an arranged marriage: kind of sad, kind of inevitable – fun to watch from another party.

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© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Yes, 5 percent of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. Which means 5 percent of those polled didn’t understand the question.

Right after taking his comically oversized gavel, Speaker of the House John Boehner stated, “Hard work and tough decisions will be required of the 112th Congress. No longer can we fall short. No longer can we kick the can down the road. The people voted to end business as usual and today we begin to carry out their instructions.”

Joe Heller / Green Bay Press-Gazette (click to view more cartoons by Dupuy)

Translation: All the other Congresses have fallen short. We are going to be better than all of them. Hilarious foreshadowing ensues.

Boehner’s first act was to have (parts of) the U.S. Constitution read out loud on the floor and the entire (non-amended parts) of the document put into the public record for the first time. Why hasn’t it been done before? Maybe because it took 90 minutes of precious session time to not accomplish anything. Sense a theme?

On that same day incumbent Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX) and freshman Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) took their oaths while watching C-SPAN at afundraiser. They had to be sworn in later since it violated the Constitution to just raise your hand at the TV.

So this devotion to the founding document was all for show – a way to waste time giving lip service to patriotism while giving real fidelity to money. That’s the theme.

A theme consistent with pizza being a vegetable because Congress is an over-boiled, over-processed, unappealing lump.

The 112^th Congress is at its halfway point. And even if you don’t care about opinion polls and refuse to believe more people approve of scabies in principle – look at their track record: This Congress is only responsible for passing 80 laws so far. That’s it. Eighty. And 13 of those “laws” were naming courthouses and post offices. Other Congresses have passed five times the amount of legislation in their tenures. The 108^thCongress with Republican majorities in both houses wrote 498 laws in their two years. The 111^th with Democratic majorities made 383 public laws.

We’ve had to endure the threat of a government shutdown every three months. Think about it: April the government was going to shut down over defunding Planned Parenthood. Again in August over the debt-ceiling. In September it was to hold up disaster relief. And another shutdown was barely averted in December with a spendingbill attached to the payroll tax cuts. As a direct result of this Congress’ squabbling our credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poors. That is, in fact, “ending business as usual.”

If we take out all the partisanship – all the pontificating of what Congress should or should not do – the facts are they’re doing NOTHING but filling space, waiting out the clock and still threatening a work stoppage. Basically the worst of public salaried workers is the 112^th Congress on a productive day.

And this “nothing” is not appealing to Republican voters. It’s not making Democratic voters happy. It’s not making Independents overjoyed. In fact it’s uniting us all to a solid voting bloc – 95 percent of the country – who thinks this Congress has failed to do its job.

It’s failed America.

How do you get a Congress that is unanimously reviled? It’s simple: get voted in by the American people only to adhere to the needs of lobbyists and moneyed interests justified with cockeyed ideology passed off as “principles.” Oh and do it during the worst economy in several generations.

How’s that working out?

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Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter: @TinaDupuy

But like every wine connoisseur will think they have nothing in common with a wino; we celebrate gamblers but not degenerates.

Mike Keefe / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Keefe)

We don’t like people who lose and continue to place bets only to lose again. But here is the Republican Party wrapping up their year as unapologetic gamblers with America’s fate in their greasy hands.

And they’re on a losing streak.

“Ten thousand bucks?” proposed Mitt Romney to Rick Perry on a debate stage earlier this month. Romney couldn’t have said: “You are lying, Rick.” Couldn’t have said: “There you go again.” Couldn’t have countered with the fact Perry seems to get basic civics wrong and can’t list more than two things at a time. No, Mitt Romney had to make a wager; a wager for nearly a year’s pay for a minimum wage worker.

But this is what you do when you have a problem with gambling. This is what happens when you pass that invisible line from “risk taker” to “intervention subject.” When you lose — instead of contrition or reassessing your philosophy or re-thinking your lifestyle – you double down and hope to win. When your policies fail you prescribe those same policies as the solution.

It’s like a homeopathic remedy; put a hot compress on a burn. Sell your ideas as a remedy for the turmoil your ideas cause.

For example:

The housing bubble burst the entire world’s economy because there were too few regulations. The GOP double down? Fewer regulations!

There are Americans who live with dirty air and water. It’s been widely documented that fracking has caused earthquakes and tainted well water. GOP double down? Kill the Environmental Protection Agency.

The rich have never been richer. Wealth inequality is worse in the U.S. today than that of the slave-owning Roman Empire. GOP double down? Protect all tax cuts for the wealthy and propose new ones.

Unemployment plagues America. Long-term unemployment is becoming acutely painful. GOP double down? Cut the federal workforce!

America is losing faith in their government. Republicans say government can’t do anything right. GOP double down? Be the most ineffective Congress you can be. Currently Congress’ approval rating is just above the margin of error.

When you double down — you lose twice as much — twice as quickly. And that sums up Speaker John Boehner’s tenure just perfectly. If Congress were an actual casino they’d be required by law to at least have Gamblers Anonymous pamphlets available. “Did you ever gamble until the deficit was $15 trillion and still vow to keep the Bush Tax Cuts? Call us.”

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” famously said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the beginning of the lowest rated Congress in the history of the institution. Which to me is the biggest gamble of them all. It’s the notion that politics is a Zero Sum game. That if Obama loses — the GOP therefore wins. It’s just not true. Who loses are the people who always lose when it comes to Republican policies: the poor and the middle class.

That’s who’s bearing the brunt of the first gambling losses — and now the double down.

It’s us.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

I learned two things at that job: one, horizontal blinds are a malevolent plague on society; and two, Republicans don’t care about people who work.

Randall Enos / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons by Enos)

No, Republicans, in general, and disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, specifically, concern themselves with their fickle “job creators” not the staple of the American economy: job workers.

The overpaid, overfed, and over-hyped Gingrich said to an audience at a Nationwide Insurance luncheon earlier this month, “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”

Gingrich is willfully ignorant of the fact you can work and still be “really poor” in this country. You can show up every Monday and do your job faithfully and STILL not make a living. If you work full-time at the federal minimum wage you’ll pull in $15,000 a year before taxes (and yes, they do take social security, state and federal taxes out of those paychecks). Add children to the equation and it’s worse than the working poor – it’s the working impoverished.

Now 49 million Americans live in poverty – with 2.6 million falling into the category last year. That’s 16 percent of Americans. There are more Americans living in poverty than there are Canadians on the planet.

Gingrich is trying to equate poverty with a moral shortcoming. It’s a warped offshoot of the prosperity gospel – riches are a sign of god’s love – poverty is a sign of his indifference.

But also in this richer-and-therefore-holier-than-thou diatribe of Gingrich’s is an attempt to bust unions. He suggested firing union janitors to hire children to clean their own schools. Yes, a janitor with a job that pays him enough to live on is, in Gingrich’s eyes, a problem. In the call for hiring children and ending child labor laws is the call to end working for a living.

All the anchors of a middle-class living (pensions, benefits, decent salaries) are being dubbed “luxuries” by Republicans, to be sacrificed so magical “job creators” can be cajoled into saving us all.

Because, really, the greatest threat to America is that janitors are paid too much. Please. Wealthy janitors are, to borrow Gingrich’s phrase, “an invented people.”

Gingrich has a dark vision for a Shining City Upon a Hill: where poor children work in place of union labor. It’s basically the 20^th century played in reverse.

Working (even scrubbing toilets) should mean making a living. If someone who works is still eligible for food stamps and government assistance – it’s really the employer who is federally subsidized. These “job creators” are taking advantage of government programs so they won’t have to cut into their profit margins to pay living wages.

The best example of this is also the biggest private employer in the country: Walmart.

If Newt and his Republican same-thinks want to go after Welfare Queens and those who don’t value work – go after the Walmart heirs. According to economist Sylvia Allegrettoin 2007 the six Walmart heirs own more than the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And that was four years ago when their wealth was estimated at $69.7 billion, now it’s thought to be around $93 billion.

Will Newt take them on? No, Gingrich is showing his courage as a K Street custodian by kicking the little guys. Because really, it’s not that poor children need jobs to make them better workers – it’s that jobs need to be better to adult workers.

Is this kind of bravery to take on the least powerful (and some imaginary) among us resonating with Republicans?

Well, he is the new front-runner.

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Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter: @TinaDupuy

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more cartoons by Bagley)

Of course, he held his prop upside down.

And said, “It’s all right here.”

Indeed.

Republicans love to worship the Constitution as scripture. Perry keeps his next to his heart. They also love to talk about adding some Even Newer Testaments to this sacred document. They’re strict constructionists believing in the original intent but they’d prefer to see it improved drastically. Translation: It’s so perfect they’d like to see it changed.

Saturday, candidates talked about amending the Constitution to outlaw abortion, keep marriage heterosexual, term limit the Supreme Court and take away citizenship from children born to illegal immigrants.

English author Samuel Johnson famously said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. For Republicans, talking about amending the Constitution is the first defense against having actual policy discussions. The 112^th Congress has grinded to an all out halt by GOP obstructionism and instead of having an authentic plan to help the country that elected them, they opted to vote in (among other symbolic bills) a Balance Budget Amendment. This of course, like the majority of the bills the House will pass this year, will never become law.

This is bureaucratic busy work. A great display of government waste Republicans love to spend their time on the federal payroll talking about.

In order to amend the Constitution you have to get two-thirds majority in both Houses and then it has to be approved by three-fourths of state legislatures. Meaning: You have to build a broad consensus to change the founding document of our nation.

Republicans are not consensus builders – they’re talking point pounders. They’re re-branders. They’re more likely to ram through laws on the fly like Ohio Governor John Kasich’s union busting law which was months later overturned by voters – than super majority-sized popular things like taxing the rich. The middle-class will see a tax hike this year due to the payroll tax expiring. It appears Republicans are going to allow this to happen in order to protect the wealthiest Americans from paying more of their easier-earned cash to the federal government. Those who are being squeezed? Tax hike! Those who are squeezing? Lowest tax rate in two generations. Not a popular stance – but Republicans are taking it.

A Constitutional amendment demands wide support, something Republicans don’t bother themselves with.

Face it: they will never amend the Constitution even though it’s their favorite go-to non-starter.

However, a group that’s all about consensus building – at least at their meetings I’ve sat in on across the nation – is the Occupy movement. And their list of grievances includes money in politics and corporate personhood.

To Occupiers, corporations are like robots in every sci-fi movie ever made: they’re created by man, having taken on human traits (or in this case legal rights) and are turning on their makers … to eventually destroy the world. The Occupiers don’t see one party or another as an answer. They’re not like the tea party who are just a voting bloc for conservatives. They see both parties as being hostages to corporate money and complicit in the extreme economic inequality in the country.

How do they plan to tackle this? By calling for an amendment to end corporate personhood – to in effect overturn Citizens United. You’ll hear whispers of this among activists as a way to solve the problems that have prompted nearly 5,000 Americans to be arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience all across the country. Some polls show that over two-thirds of Americans would like to see the Constitution amended to overturn that decision.

The problem is we’re very used to this empty go-no-where non-solution of a Constitutional amendment from Republicans who know theirs will never happen; in that way Republicans have already preempted any earnest campaigns for an amendment.

I’ve brought this up to Occupiers and they are undeterred. They tell me they are, after all, the 99 percent, and there’s power in those numbers. They replied with what I’ve heard them say before: “We’re not going fast. We’re going far.”

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Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter: @TinaDupuy

Let’s talk news. And where the majority of Americans – as in over 50 percent (by most estimates) – still get their news – from their local nightly news show. Any discussion about how unaware Americans are when it comes to news needs to have its finger pointed at the proper culprit: Your local broadcast.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more cartoons by Cagle)

Yes, everyone hates Congress but loves their Congressman. Everyone thinks “the media” is biased, wrong and awful – but tunes in to their local anchor with admiration and trust. A pox on them all, except our guy…

Last week a PublicMind FDU poll went viral with the line, “Fox News [viewers] are five-points more likely than those who watch no news at all, to incorrectly say it’s the U.S. that is bailing out European countries.” The under-reported story (buried lede as we call it in “the media”) was of those polled 67 percent said they watched their local news. And that could explain why 36 percent said they didn’t know who was bailing out Europe and only 30 percent gave the correct answer (Germany).

Did you know that Iceland is having a revolution as a direct result of the economic meltdown centered in the U.S. housing market? How about Syria being sanctioned by the Arab League? Vladamir Putin has gotten himself back on the ballot in Russia?

And it’s not just the “reading off BBC headlines” news the local news misses – it’s the actual local news: Investigative news in the public interest. News about the economy, politics and local issues.

Your local news opts to put a camera in the face of a crime victim and be a staple of “fear porn” rather than ever tackle difficult segments holding the school board/city council/mayor/state legislature/governor accountable for anything.

Why can I assume without sitting down and watching a week of your local newscast that they’re more than likely gleefully doing a recap of what happened on Dancing With the Stars/American Idol/Survivor tonight? Because your local broadcast news is more than likely ratings driven. And because of the last couple of decades of ratings driven local news our Edward R. Murrows have all become Harvey Levins.

Why are Americans not even rising to the level of ill informed and topping out at totally clueless? Because as Homo sapiens, we are effectively distracted by shiny objects and Kardashians. Plus our monkey brains got a chance to evolve this long by being on hyper-alert for danger, so we eat up any story telling us about “the hidden dangers lurking in our homes!” So of course we tune-in as told and in that way reward our local yokels for their reportage. And local yokels as Homo sapiens … also like rewards. It’s a vicious circle.

But, now as there are Americans Occupying public spaces demanding economic justice and other Americans being baffled as to why that is: it’s become clear some of the problem is our local news broadcasts.

It is completely unacceptable for a 30-minute telecast with 10 minutes of commercials and two minutes of teasers to have any minutes for a Bieber. Nothing ever involving a Real Housewife is really news. Curb the fear porn. Plus it’s absolutely journalistic malfeasance to give airtime to any alleged psychic … even when they’re an octopus.

We have to change this. We have to demand that our local news isn’t just meteorologists in skimpy (think: shiny) cocktail dresses. We have to demand real news – the less sexy kind – the kind where the white-collar criminals break into our homes with the swipe of a pen. We have to ban celebrity gossip from the 18-minutes of need-to-know information we consume each night.

And the only way to change it is from the consumer up.

Tell your local station if you want to find out about Brangelina you’ll go anywhere other than your local news broadcast. Tell them you want to know about authentic issues involving our complex global community – or just NOT “a report” what’s airing on television next week. Either way will be an improvement.

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Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter: @TinaDupuy

And that’s really the thing – they all agree with each other. They want to kill regulations by dubbing them “job killers.” They want to kill jobs by calling job killers “job creators.” They want poor people to feel good about giving the wealthy their stuff and the wealthy to feel at ease about poor people NOT taking their stuff. And they want to cut government jobs to create other alleged jobs (wink, wink). And they want to stand up for the sanctity of life and the virtue of executions. They want government out of your life unless your womb is functioning. Then government is the only way to regulate it!

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more Bagley cartoons)

Oh and they all just hate Obamacare. They hate their party’s previous idea for health care reform because it’s tainted by anti-Republican Obama cooties. Yes, socialist, only-maybe-born-here cooties! And cootie vaccinations have been linked to mental retardation, which is both an explanation AND a warning.

The housing crisis? They blame Fannie and Freddie…but not the “banks.” They believe marriage is between and man and a corporation. They love business and their favorite size is small to go with their small towns. They have Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency in their crosshairs. Yes, they have an affinity for pollution because it smells like New New Neo-Con. Smog is just the Lord’s way of telling us our engines are running!

And they hate the bailouts and pretend George W. Bush didn’t do it (or anything else).

At a recent Republican event I attended in DC there was a booth set up where you could put on a Reagan mask and have your picture taken. If that’s not a metaphor for the record number of Republican candidates in the record number of primary debates – I don’t know what is.

Reagan? Totally awesome in every way. Mention that he raised taxes WHILE still tripling the debt and gave millions of illegal immigrants amnesty and there is a Rick Perry-sized blank stare coming your way.

Tax cuts! Oh are they ever for tax cuts. Taxes should always go down unless they’re flat. And flat taxes, those are on the way up!

They don’t believe in climate change or evolution – just punitive hurricanes and social Darwinism.

And they love guns. Everyone should be armed because everyone who loves guns (they assume) loves them because they LOVE guns.

The Second is the best when it comes to Amendments. They like the First okay unless it’s protesters who don’t pay them a speaking fee…or the press. Oh that media…they only have 564,345 chances to get their message across to the voters without the filter of the mainstream media. The injustice of it all!

And, yes, they want to waterboard prisoners – as if it’s not evident by the sheer NUMBER of debates – they are all very pro-torture.

“Oh but Tina, you don’t have to watch them all. You have a choice.”

No, no I don’t. I cover politics. I have to watch 383 hours a week of Republican debates for the next year because I never developed any usable skills. This is my penance for failing to make it as a paleontologist (first problem is I never tried). So now, I don’t have a choice. I’m stuck with my fate.

The point is: It’s too late for me. Save yourself.

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Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter: @TinaDupuy

His answer? “Because we are analytically correct.”

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click to view more cartoons by Fitzsimmons)

What does that mean? Apparently, they believe they have the facts on their side.  History certainly is. And as author Michael Lewis said when asked about the Occupy Wall Street movement, they also have justice on their side.

New census data released shows we have record high poverty in this country. It’s up to 16 percent or 49.1 million Americans (that’s over five New York Cities). We have the worst wealth inequality in the industrialized world (meaning we’re on par with some third world countries). We have the highest health care costs in the world. And a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute notes, “U.S. productivity grew by 62.5 percent from 1989 to 2010, far more than real hourly wages for both private-sector and state/local government workers, which grew 12 percent in the same period.” Basically Americans are working much (much) harder for much (much) less. Pair that with the fact U.S. businesses are making record profits and that’s why Americans have taken to the pothole-laden streets to protest.

It’s not just about the bank bailout. It’s not just about Wall Street. It’s about the goal of the wealthy to milk their fellow citizens until they’re completely dry. And while regular Americans are condescended to about their proverbial bootstraps, the U.S. government has helped the wealthy at every turn. So it’s no surprise they’ve won. And now that people are brittle and dusty – there are encampments all over the country.

The question isn’t, “Why are there so many people sleeping in parks?” The question is, “Why aren’t there more?

In the wake of this massive protest – right in the middle of the tenure of the lowest rated House in our nation’s history – a group of men and women whose approval rating of 9 percent is hovering just above the margin of error – what do they do? They pass another symbolic (think: busy work) nonbinding resolution to reaffirm “in God we trust” as the national motto.

I could have made that up as satire and I’d get a letter saying I was being too harsh.

Time spent on a bill (of which there are FOUR versions) reaffirming a phrase already on every denomination of money, every courthouse and most public buildings is about as contemptuous as this body of seat-warmers can get.

It’s “let them eat cake” with a little of King George III’s “the colonies will submit” thrown in for flavor.

Yes, the do-less-than-nothing House has passed a whopping 54 bills originating in their chamber in their nearly full year in office. Their counterparts in previous congresses usually author and pass three times that. And if you subtract passing go-no-where bills to defund NPR, Planned Parenthood and other specters like Obama Czars and take into account their days off (next year they’re only set to work 109 days out of the ENTIRE year) – they’ve put in a lot of effort to be ineffective.

Which is what you’d expect from self-hating government workers like the House leadership. They’re illustrating how lazy, stupid and useless government can be – by example.

To sum up: the American people are paying more for less, working more for less and asking more…and Congress is doing (wait for it) LESS.

The Occupiers are right. They are “analytically correct” in their assessment. Their government is failing them. As another Occupier put it, maybe it’s “time to replace Congress with people.”

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy.

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click for more Occupy Wall Street cartoons)

The weirdest dismissal of the encampments that has sprung up across the country is it’s just a bunch of homeless people — who’d be sleeping on the streets anyway. As if homeless people should have no voice in a discussion about economic justice. As if huge groups of homeless people shouldn’t warrant media attention.

I asked a protester in New York, Ashley Anderson, about this very thing: where is their rapid response to deal with all the rumors and accusations? Where is their team of media people? “This here,” he pointed to the crowded GA or General Assembly at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan a few feet from where we were standing. Every night hundreds participate in a slow all-inclusive assembly to figure out a consensus on what to do next. “This is like a healthy immune system. It can handle it.” He then said if anyone didn’t like what they’re doing, all are welcome to come down and tell them.

I’ve now been to four Occupations in two countries (I had a trip to Canada planned months ago) and the lamest rumor I’ve heard by carefully coifed talking heads is that the protesters are all something: are all Ron Paul fans; or all union; or all liberals; or all white; or all illegals; or all students who don’t want to pay their loans back; or all “the people who always show up to a protest.” Occupy Wall Street and its solidarity encampments are more a lot of everything as opposed to all of anything. That’s why the rumors keep going — those who wish to discredit the movement pick out one person to identify with the movement and then they’re all Neo-New Redux Black Panthers.

At the (very crowded) Zuccotti Park I saw people with children in strollers but no one has accused all Occupiers of being overly fertile. Yet.

The under-reported story to me is how many veterans are at these Occupations. I spoke at length with a Canadian vet who served in Somalia in the ’90s and is now “pitching in” at Occupy Toronto. In the U.S. I met several vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. They volunteered to fight for a country they now feel has fewer opportunities for them and their families. Vets are the middle-class. It was the vets who created the suburbs and the Baby Boomers after WWII. They are as big of stakeholders in the country as anyone and they’ve been given a rotten deal just like the rest of the 99 percent. Vets have the distinction of being deified by the right-wing on occasion. That’s until it comes to having their benefits cut … then they should blame themselves for not being rich.

Meet the new face of Occupy Wall Street: Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old Marine and Iraq War vet who was shot in the head with a “non-lethal round” during a raid on Occupy Oakland last week. His skull was fractured and it put him in a coma. He has since woke-up to being a rallying cry for the movement. I followed a march in Toronto to the U.S. consulate to denounce police brutality in Oakland. I counted two national news trucks and a local reporter there to cover the demonstration. There was even a solidarity march to the U.S. Embassy from Tahrir Square in Egypt.

Olsen’s story is compelling. Not just because he fought in a foreign war and while in his home country, utilizing his first amendment right to peaceful assembly he was fired on by police. His may be the name you know from Occupy Oakland, but like Rosa Parks, he’s part of a bigger story. He’s a symbol for something we’ve managed to not talk about. Which is we’ve had two (sometimes three) wars in this country in the last 10 years and those who’ve fought overseas are coming home to an America with a shockingly high poverty rate. An America with the worst economic inequality in four generations. An America with less for those who work and fight and die.

Which is why they’re camped out and asking the question: “What have we been fighting for?”

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

R.J. Matson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch (click to view The 99% cartoons)

She lost everything as a result of the economic meltdown and yet still puts it on herself for not having anticipated or planned properly beforehand. I tried to explain that protesting a rigged system isn’t the opposite of personal responsibility. Doing what you can about the cards being stacked against you and 99 percent of your fellow Americans is, personally, responsive. And that is what Occupy Wall Street and their international – viral solidarity demonstrations say they are there to do.

There’s a bastardized quote attributed to John Steinbeck that says socialism never took root in America because we all think we’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The actual quote, which Steinbeck wrote in America and Americans, is more pointed, “I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”

We’re not really a culture of delusional dreamers who all believe someday we will be wealthy. There are some, sure. Their escapist fantasy involves a windfall and a secluded island. There are also those who (still) actually become rich. But for the vast majority of Americans – the myth is less we are going to be rich – the myth, which led us to the extreme wealth distribution debacle we’re now in – is that we’re all homesteaders.

You don’t have to grow your own food, build your own house or “paint your own wagon” to believe you could if you really wanted to. And really, did in some indirect way.

We’re a society full of pioneers, pilgrims and immigrants. We were a religious freedom sanctuary from England and then penal colony for England – insulted, neglected and over-taxed by the empire. This led us to tell the King of England off then engage the most powerful army in the world at the time for our independence. And we succeeded at it. Then people from all over the world flocked here to find refuge and opportunity. It’s led Americans to have a bit of bravado about who we are as a people. We think of ourselves as rugged individualists. Because it takes courage and determination to leave your country and forge a new life in this one – and most of us are descended from those people.

It’s not so much that we think our destiny is to be rich – it’s that we believe our destiny is ours. We make our fortunes or we don’t make our fortunes. We block out of our minds that roads aren’t a naturally occurring phenomena; that buildings take legions of workers to erect or that energy comes from somewhere. We think we do it all and when we fail – it’s our fault.

So when things don’t go our way, we don’t blame outside factors. When we fail we don’t see that the game is fixed. We tug at our bootstraps and feel anguish at our own deficiencies.

The reason why Occupy Wall Street is resonating still with Americans is because there are those who’ve been living with shame for what they see as not being self-sufficient…enough. They’re not “embarrassed capitalists” they’re mortified homesteaders. They’ve been laid off, they’ve lost their homes, their retirement is gone – they feel personally humiliated that (according to their personal creed) they didn’t do the right thing and maybe could have avoided this defeat.

Occupy Wall Street is letting people who’ve been in the shadows know that they’re not alone and they didn’t cause this. It’s something Americans at their core don’t usually believe. It’s actually a tough sell. But the movement is growing so apparently there are some converts.

Americans in general, and the downtrodden specifically, are figuring out they’re not alone. They’re, in fact, The 99 Percent.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Mike Keefe / Denver Post (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

And a couple hundred years after that? Well, now pirates are a multi-billion dollar Disney franchise.

The point is: there’s hope for Wall Street. Yes, Bankaneers – as I’ve decided all profiteers from the economic collapse should be called – should stop lamenting that they’re misunderstood. They are not. They’re greedy, shortsighted and smitten with their own power. We get it. Instead, they should just embrace the villain role full on. And maybe they too can inspire a theme park ride someday. (Perhaps a roller coaster where only one out of every hundred gets a lap bar. Just an idea.)

Follow Bank of America’s lead: Bank of America has been criticized (fairly) for not paying any (not one cent) of federal income tax in 2010. This was after they took federal bailout money, during a year where they reported a $10 billion profit and WHILE they were foreclosing on American’s homes. But BofA didn’t just stop there. They just recently announced an additional fee for their customers to access their own money: a $5 a month charge to use a debit card. Which still isn’t “CGI level villainy” just yet. So, in September this year, the giant – too big to fail – mega-bank announced it was cutting 30,000 mid-level jobs to save $5 billion in costs.

Funny how all corporations are now the euphemistic “job creators,” even after they proved to be (over and over again) job-cutters. Yes, the swashbuckling job-cutters! Arrr!

The lesson here is go all out. Don’t try to make anyone like you. Don’t try to deflect scorn – raise fees AND kill jobs. Go ahead – you think Black Beard held back?

Also, the whining is just atrocious. David Moore, CEO of Moore Holdings wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal last week where he reported a homeless man heckled him after the author had just given him a dollar. This anecdotal evidence is all the proof this cheap guy in an expensive suit needed to conclude: Obama has done this to him.

“I do not recall another president in my lifetime whose negative drumbeat about large segments of the population has been so relentless,” he wrote.

Apparently Moore can’t recall anything before the Obama administration, when dissent was equated with treason. “With us or against us.” Also it’s quaint (in a boy-in-a-bubble way) that he thinks CEOs and his Wall Street pals are a “large segment.” Muslims and gays are both larger groups than the top 1 percent and unless Moore is three years old, there’s been a negative drumbeat against them in his lifetime…even by a president.

The sniveling is not going to get the Bankaneers romanticized. There’s nothing sexy about being a privileged creep and trying to make yourself out as a victim. Dignity is much sexier. This is no way to get a theme restaurant modeled after you!

So buck up, Bankaneers! What you’ve done to your country is immoral, egregious and unethical – regardless of whether or not it’s legal. There are privateers in pirate movies too. They’re doing the same stuff as the criminals. “Just doing my job” is not a good excuse when you’re responsible for millions of others losing theirs.

There’s no such thing as gilded rage. Embrace the disdain. If money is good for anything – you can at least shove it in your ears to drown out all the jeering.

It’ll be a sub-plot to the sequel: “Bankaneers of the Wall Street: The Curse of the Volcker Rule.”

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Daryl Cagle / msnbc.com (click to view more Occupy Wall Street cartoons)

Which is exactly what the media have been doing to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The demonstrators have said they want economic justice.

And inevitably a talking head will wonder: “What do they want?”

The demonstrators will say they want economic justice.

Then an anchor will say, “There’s not really a cohesive theme with these protesters.”

The demonstrators will march with signs that plainly read they want economic justice.

Then a reporter will offer: “There’s not really a central message permeating in the crowd.”

Yes, the media have gone “Grampa with a telemarketer” on Occupy Wall Street.

That hasn’t hindered the Occupiers from resonating with Americans. The protests have been growing. The movement has been growing. Occupy LA is down the street from my home. Their numbers have nearly quadrupled from the first week. They now count 253 tents at City Hall and have the blessings of the City Council to stay as long as they need. It’s hard to confirm reports of all the other Occupations, it’s rumored to be in the hundreds. I can verify 24 demonstrations across the U.S. where they are “occupying.” There could be dozens more by the time you read this. People from all walks of life are taking to the streets to cry out for “economic justice.”

Now the local news will report: “The demonstrators don’t have any specific unifying points so far.”

Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill coined the phrase, “All politics is local.”

Also, all politics is personal. The housing crisis took peoples’ homes. Families have been uprooted and kicked around by giant soulless corporations. There’s nothing more personal than putting a family’s furniture on the lawn. There’s nothing more personal than seeing “bank foreclosure” signs all in a row in your neighborhood. There’s nothing more personal than witnessing your community, already struggling in the last decade, thrown further by indecipherable market-speak terms like “derivatives” and “bundled securitized mortgages.”

And then there are the students: the victims of direct-to-consumer student loans. And, yes, it’s personal. Education prices have gone up but the federal loan programs’ maximum amount have not. So kids with no means to pay for college other than borrowing, are being forced into paying credit card-like interest on their education with loans that are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, with no statutes of limitations, and can’t be refinanced. These students carry signs reading, “Debt is slavery.” It’s more like sharecropping, which is slavery while being told you’re free.

And there’s the unemployed. They’re the nation’s statistics now donning Guy Fawkes masks. They are the “lagging indicators” who are tired of being called lazy. They want to work and can’t. Those who can’t find work don’t care about the circular firing squad in Washington of everyone blaming everything on whatever side they oppose. For the unemployed, it’s also personal.

Politicians won’t take personal responsibility for the crisis — and so Occupy Wall Street has no choice but to be nonpartisan. Or just bipartisan in their frustration.

It’s the least partisan political movement I’ve witnessed. The phrase Glass—Steagall gets thrown around at Occupy Wall Street like the Volstead Act did at speakeasies. Glass—Steagall, was signed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and made much of what the banks did to tank the economy then (and now) illegal. The Gramm—Leach—Bliley Act also called Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 basically repealed Glass-Steagall. It was passed by a bi-partisan vote in the Republican-controlled Congress and was signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

The Republican George W. Bush then “destroyed capitalism in order to save it.” And President Obama, with his mandate for change, and an entire nation hoping for accountability – hasn’t brought any banksters to justice or re-regulated them in any meaningful way.

Any call for “economic justice” that is also hyper-partisan is disingenuous.

And still someone with overly bleached teeth on television will remark, “Personally, I just don’t understand what these people are trying to say.”

Turn your hearing aid back on, Gramps.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Cam Cardow / Ottawa Citizen (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

Well, it was broadcast on national television.

By the way they snarl about the mainstream media on Fox News, you’d think they were disseminating their programs via ham radio instead of on the number one cable news network in the country. Fox News is as mainstream a media as any. And they’ve puffed up and promoted their pet protest group called the tea party for the last two and half years.

And just like the imaginary death panels in the health care reform act or the fantasy Sharia law threat – the tea party got its legs from Fox News.

So when criticism is lobbed at the tea party as being an astroturf re-branding of the Republican Party, sponsored by interest groups and corporate media, it’s because it is.

To put this into perspective, look at movement Fox News hasn’t endorsed and Karl Rove’s group, American Crossroads, haven’t chartered busses for: meet Occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street started as a couple thousand protesters marching through lower Manhattan and camping out at the detonator of the economic meltdown.

For the first two weeks, the protest was largely ignored by actual mainstream media. Then NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper sprayed a couple of young women peacefully assembling at this public demonstration. The footage landed on YouTube: Then there was attention. A skirmish with police. A Story. Last Saturday, 700 of the protesters were arrested by the NYPD. Another Story. Worthy of a mention even on the venerable Sunday Shows.

Who are these people? Are they the anti-tea party?

No. In fact they are not in any way like the tea party. If they were the tea party, the media would be giving value to all their political peccadilloes. Yes, “What does the tea party think?” has become a staple in American political discourse. And for what? They’re identical to Republicans. They have a public approval rating, according to some polls of 26 percent. And the tea party-led House suffers a historic low of around 13 percent (more people approve of salmonella).

Yet the tea party is given credence and credibility as a swell of a movement to give rich people and corporations more tax breaks. How is that populist, exactly? It’s a protest movement that just so happens to be suspiciously business-friendly. How, as they say in corporate-speak, synergistic.

This tea party now has a seat at the table of power. Their corporate sponsors must snicker every time they hear about the “tea party’s take” on whatever issue.

I was at an Occupy Wall Street solidarity demonstration over the weekend in Los Angeles. Around 3,000 people were there when I arrived. The first thing apparent is the crowd is young. These are not cantankerous retirees worried about the government getting involved in Medicare. No these are the children of the middle-class’ Lost Decade. These are kids whose American Dream has been eroding while the rich have gotten richer. These are the young people on Facebook and Twitter calling for an “American Autumn” to match the Arab Spring.

And the Arab Spring is a far better comparison for this group.

Like the Egypt and Tunisia uprisings, Occupy Wall Street are youths worried about their futures’ downgrade. It’s about the lack of prospects in the “land of opportunity.” Their battle cry: “We are the 99 percent and we are too big to fail.” They’ve succinctly stated their goal is “economic justice.” Pandering to the wealthy minority is the disease: Occupy Wall Street is a symptom.

What does economic justice mean? Maybe a better question is: How top-heavy can the wealth inequality get before something tumbles?

The hurdle for Occupy Wall Street is that it was not birthed on cable news. Cable news doesn’t own it so it can’t show it off like they have the tea party.

But the Arab Spring revolution wasn’t televised; it was re-tweeted.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News (click to view more cartoons by Zyglis)

But then there are notable suicides which involve famous people. Enter Jamey Rodemeyer: a 14-year-old boy from Buffalo, New York, who was tormented at school for being gay. Jamey made a video for the “It Gets Better Project” professing his love and admiration for Lady Gaga. A couple of months after posting the clip, the bullying apparently became intolerable and he committed suicide. Now Lady Gaga is tweeting about how she plans to lobby the President to elevate bullying to the level of a hate crime.According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suicide is the third leading cause of death among those 15-24 years old, compared to 11th in the general population. The teenage suicide rate is 6 per 100,000, nearly half of the general population’s at 11 per 100,000. It means that of the total number of suicides in this country, few of them are teenagers, but among deaths of teenagers, suicide is one of the leading causes.

Every day around 100 Americans kill themselves. Every day.

Jamey’s death was not a statistical anomaly, we just have a media which doesn’t report suicides if they can avoid it. But when Lady Gaga tweets about it to her 14 million followers, they can no longer avoid it. Jamey’s YouTube videos only add to the haunting nature of his story.

When you watch at Jamey’s videos and hear his promise to others that it “gets better” – one is too many. It feels like an injustice. And because Jamey’s plight hurts, we all want to DO something.

I don’t know how to eradicate bullying. I don’t know if we need more people in jail in this country, especially teenagers like those who bullied Jamey. I don’t know how to make kids nicer to each other. I don’t know how to make being a teenager less painful.

I do know that suicide needs to be taken out of the closet. The idea that if we talk about suicide – if we read about it in the paper – it’ll be so tempting more people will kill themselves is ridiculous. It reeks of superstition. Censoring stories doesn’t save lives.

Eighteen U.S. military veterans a day kill themselves. It’s a kind of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell that’s still being implemented. Over 6,500 vets a year die this way. That’s more soldiers dying at home in one year than in 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. And among those currently serving, in 2010 suicide took more lives of our military personnel than battle. The problem is so prevalent Obama is the first President in history to send letters of condolences to military families of troops who committed suicide.

Suicides for Native American males ages 10-24 are almost three times the national average. Also, Alaska has the most suicides per capita. In case you think it’s from lack of sunlight, New Mexico ranks number two. The vast majority of suicides are gun deaths.

The statistics on suicide are not done in real time; they’re not like opinion polls. The rate was steadily decreasing in the U.S. from the 1950s to 2007. But then, the world melted. Studies link higher rates of suicides to economic downturns. During the Great Depression, the rate spiked at 18.9 per 100,000 nationally (which is actually low for Alaska today). The iconic image of the stock market crash was of people jumping out of windows.

So we can guess that our national suicide rate is probably on the rise, across the board, along with the rising unemployment and a flailing economy.  We just aren’t reading the individual episodes in newspapers…unless Lady Gaga mentions them. Suicide is still stigmatized.

And since we’re highlighting an issue – here’s one of the causes: cut backs. As states are slashing their budgets, social services and mental health resources (including the VA) are disappearing. The number one cause of all suicides is mental illness and services to treat it are on the chopping block.

A falling tide sinks all ships.

A bad economy adversely affects our birth rate, health, increases in homelessness, domestic abuse, substance abuse and of course, suicide.

It’s the economy…stupid.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

There’s a knee-jerk response to dismiss the driver as being some dupe naively parroting slogans not meaningful in his tax bracket. (You’d never see that sticker on a Rolls-Royce.) It’s not just the success of Republican “messaging,” there’s more to it than that:

Jeff Parker / Florida Today (click to view more Class Warfare cartoons)

According to the CafePress page selling these bumper stickers, the five-dollar decal was created on December 4, 2008. For all you history geeks, that was before the Obama presidency. This sentiment even existed before the bank bailout. It was also weeks before reputed capitalist, George W. Bush, approved the $17.4 billion American auto industry bailout. Specifically, for GM, the parent company of Saturn.

“If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation for the automakers,” said Bush in the Roosevelt Room on December 19, 2008.

After GM took government money – taxpayer money – as an emergency loan to save their company suffering from a disturbing combo of willful blindness and ignorance of the market – the first thing the automaker had to do was downsize. They shut down factories and dealerships, shedding jobs; and even eradicated some brands. One of those was Saturn.

Now this driver can look forward to higher prices for parts and repairs for a vehicle that’s essentially worthless since it was discontinued. The Bush bailout of GM was paid for by this driver at least twice. So the trade-in value losses for putting a sticker on that car? No longer an issue.

Why does this anti-wealth distribution sentiment resonate with him? Why doesn’t he want banksters and CEOs to pay up?

“Because everyone deserves some of what you’ve worked hard for.”

This message was written and uploaded before the tea party, when the economy was still in free fall. And even though “thinkers” like Samuel R. Staley, a fellow at the Reason Institute, wrote the unintentionally hilarious talking point now being repeated by GOP lawmakers: “It appears we are two years into a ‘lost decade,’” the fact of the matter is the middle-class has already had a lost decade – the ‘00s.

In the middle-class wages are flat. The three million jobs Bush created in his eight years in office were moot since the population grew by 22 million. Prices have gone up, salaries have not. Home values have fallen, retirement plans are gone, savings are drained. Not since the 1930s has a generation been less prosperous than the one before.  In 2008, the economy for the middle-class went from long-term stagnation to suddenly much worse.

And this reasonably caused a fear reaction in this Saturn driver. What is he concerned about? Wealth distribution. Why?

It’s usually assumed that the reason Americans specifically don’t want to see taxes raised on the rich is because, in spite of driving a defunct GM brand four-door, they think of themselves as the “soon-to-be rich.” But a paper published in the National Journal of Economic Research in July suggests otherwise. They offer that it’s not hoping to be on top that makes us not want the wealthier to be taxed more – it’s the fear of being at the bottom. It’s referred to as “last-place aversion.”

The Economist wrote, “In keeping with the notion of ‘last-place aversion,’ the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the ‘rich’ but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.”

So taxing the rich isn’t about the fantasy that we’re going to someday be rich – it’s about the very real visceral fear of being, well, the poorest. If the government helps those below you, then they’ll be at your level – that’s the unfairness they’re afraid of.

Named one of the worst CEOs of 2008, GM head, Rick Wagoner received a $20 million dollar retirement package and an owner of one of his beaters has a bumper sticker decrying higher taxes for him.

The driver isn’t fantasizing about being Wagoner – he’s terrified of being driven even lower in the middle-class. And the GOP has successfully exploited that fear.

Because when people are afraid, they do all kinds of irrational things…like vote Republican.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Hajo de Reijger / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

Historians agree the best Republican President was also the first: Abraham Lincoln. Who’s second runner up? Which President has represented Republican values best? Easy. President Barack Obama.

First off – his signature legislative accomplishment was to implement a Republican/Heritage Foundation idea from 1989. Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans reads, “[N]either the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement…A mandate on households certainly would force those with adequate means to obtain insurance protection.”

The Heritage Foundation has since recanted and even filed friend-of-the-court briefs against the mandate. This is only after an alleged Democrat was for it. There’s been a pattern of this partisanship before policy since Obama was sworn in.

But if you ignore the misplaced (and often misspelled) vehemence against the first African-American president as a communist/socialist/Marxist/bad “ist” du jour and instead just look at the policy – we have a stellar Republican in the Oval Office.

Obama renewed the Bush Tax Cuts. Republicans love those tax cuts even more than they love being against something once Obama has signed it. In fact the President hasn’t raised taxes at all – just like Republicans say they won’t (see: “Read my lips – no new taxes.”). The only tax he’s raised is on smokers. Obama increased the tax on cigarettes even though he’s an admitted (reformed) smoker. But even that is ideal in a Republican hypocrite kind of way (see: too many anti-gay Republicans in gay sex scandals to list).

And on top of the Bush Tax Cuts – Obama cut even more taxes for 95 percent of Americans.

Plus, he’s cut the size of government! Yes. Regardless of all those email forwards your kooky great-aunt sends you from her decades-old AOL account – the public work force has been reduced under an Obama presidency – therefore “shrinking the size of government.” The reason we had no net jobs in August is because the public sector (i.e., the government) lost jobs due to cuts. The private sector gained the exact amount resulting in a push.

President Obama has managed to quell all anti-war protests and even start a new conflict. That is surely to be the envy of any Republican president who’s ever served.

Guantanamo Bay? Still open. Osama bin Laden? Shot in the head.

Talk about getting 98 percent of what they wanted. If the GOP didn’t have to change their goal post so Obama could never score in their view – Republicans could be dumping Gatorade on Rush Limbaugh by now.

How about the GOP-despised EPA? You know, that “job-killing” governmental regulatory agency GOP candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Ron Paul all promise will go dark when they become president? That agency’s pinko plot for cleaner air estimated to stop tens of thousands of premature deaths? Gone. And guess who said this about it: “I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.” Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH)? Maybe Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA)? Some tea party speaker at some quarter-full rally somewhere? Who said it? The socialist Nazi radical – current occupant of the White House – Barack Hussein Obama! He’s a wonderful Republican.

The right-wing says Obama is left of Lenin – in reality he’s barely left of Goldwater.

What does this mean? It means we currently have eight GOP candidates running against what’s essentially a GOP incumbent. It means we have eight mediocre Republican candidates running against the best Republican president since Lincoln. The safe bet is that a Republican will win the next election.

To be clear, I’m not a Republican – but I have undeniably voted for one.

In the ‘80s there were Reagan Democrats. I’ll solve this whole thing by just calling myself an Obama Democrat.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Bill Day / Cagle Cartoons (click to view our Cartoon blog)

Around 500 A.D., the world was experiencing some drastic climate changes. There was a super El Nino weather phenomenon on the west coast. Cataclysmic floods were followed by drought. The Moche, like most ancient peoples, are thought to have been very religious. They wanted to thwart this devastation and improve the weather by trying to appease their gods. So they sacrificed masses of their citizens. Just slaughtered hundreds of people in hopes of saving more.

Does this sound like religious extremism? Yes. Because it is.

Negotiating with nature is a very ancient thing to do:  Pre-science, pre-wheel,  pre-written language. As a species, we’ve always seen patterns in natural events and taken it personally. Floods are because of sin – droughts are because of witches. Earthquakes are God’s anger towards women’s suffrage and Chinese immigration, etc.

But now we know better. At least, some of us do. Sort of. Now we know the Earth’s crust shifts. It always has. All our continents used to be one; scientists refer to as Pangaea.  We know that continuing shift results in earthquakes.  Instead of hurricanes just appearing all of a sudden as a result of moral shortcomings, we can now track them via satellite for days. There is also a growing understanding about how global warming has intensified weather patterns, hurricanes have been made worse by pollution and the extraction process for natural gas known as “fracking” has caused earthquakes.

Yes, we have a greater knowledge of weather and seismic activities than ever before.

So when the East Coast experienced a rare earthquake – there was an archaic response from religious leaders. It wasn’t that these things happen on this planet we all live on – it was because of gay marriage. Rabbi Yehuda Levin told his YouTube audience, “[We] are starting to see the connection.” As if the earth never moved before cake toppers had two grooms.

It’s ghoulish opportunism. Just like in the wake of the quake that nearly leveled Haiti and killed thousands, televangelist Pat Robertson claimed it was because Haitians made a pact with the devil to liberate themselves from slavery 200 years ago. So Robertson’s devil ran an 18^th century anti-slavery Caribbean underground railroad? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? He has an odd religion. He also chimed into the “what did we do to deserve a non-fatal earthquake in DC?” discussion by claiming a crack in the Washington Monument meant something beyond why not to build a 555-foot marble obelisk on swampland.

Then there was a hurricane in the same area within a week. For capitalizing atmospheric interpreters – it’s show time! Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann told a rally in Florida – the state with the highest proportion of elderly (think Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries) and hurricanes in the country – that these events are a warning about government spending.

Because weather is a quid pro quo with God and the Republican Party’s agenda.

It’s time to build a wall (or a levee) between church and weather.

Natural disasters aren’t punishment. And religion isn’t a Doppler radar.

In 1693, the Massachusetts colonists thought a hurricane there marked the Apocalypse. In April 2011, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued an official proclamation for Texans to pray for rain for three days. Rain has yet to come and it’s categorized as a D4 Drought (there is no D5).

What does this mean? Nothing. It means church and weather should get a divorce and block each other’s numbers. Since church and state are no longer the same thing – church should secede from climatology.

It’s not for the sake of the weather – it’s really for the sake of the church’s credibility.

Because really, we could stop letting gays marry, eat all our vegetables, never cheat on our spouses and get to church three times a week – it won’t stop the weather…or the world.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

I don’t care about the “viability” of candidates. I am not a prognosticator. Well, if I were, I’d be a very bad one. I said former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was most likely to get the nomination because his name is the easiest to make puns with (i.e. Pawlenty of Votes!) and he was the first one to drop out of the race. Plus, I’ve yet to see anyone (besides me) make ANY puns with his name. Pawlenty of wrong guesses!

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

But I’m also not interested in “who could go all the way.” I’m interested in this moment in time. And if you look at the former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney – he’s perfect for the current Republican Party.

The first reason is he has five gorgeous able-bodied adult sons who’ve never spent a day in the military. Actually, none of the as-yet announced Republican candidates have children serving in the military. We’ve been in two wars now for nearly a decade each and yet the all-volunteer force is entirely made up of Americans not spawned from GOP candidates. For the last 30 years at least, the Republicans have been relentlessly, uniformly hawkish – but mostly with other peoples’ children. This disconnect was made evident in the ’08 election when soldiers donated money to candidate Barack Obama 6-1 over Senator John McCain.

The second is Romney’s hard turn (read: total flip-flop) on women’s reproductive freedoms. When Romney ran against Senator Ted Kennedy in 1994, unprompted he offered, “Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.” Of course, he wavered on that. His “family relative” was Ann Keenan, who died from an infection due to her illegal abortion in 1963 when Romney was 16. Now at 64, Romney toes the party line on abortion: He’s against it. He’s now against the law that could have saved his relative’s life.

But this is consistent with the Republican Party of today. The man known as “Mr. Conservative” himself – 1964’s Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater was not pro-life. His wife Margaret Goldwater helped found the first Planned Parenthood in Arizona in the 1930s. If ever there was an issue (or an area) for government to get out of – it’s a uterus. But as much as current Republicans like to bark that government is getting too intrusive – Romney and his ilk want the government to tell women what to do.

Speaking of the government telling us what to do – the health care reform “individual mandate” that Republicans are so rabidly against? That was a Republican idea (first introduced in 1993) Romney implemented in his state in 2005. Now? It’s a job-killing communist plot that will destroy America! Romney and his parallel Republicans were for this job-killing communist plot that will destroy America – before they were against it.

The third thing that makes Romney the ideal representation for his party is his time in the private sector. Yes, Romney calls himself (un-ironically) a job creator. And well, he did create jobs, but mainly in other countries. He cut thousands here at home. But he touts this accomplishment anyway. The GOP has become an anti-worker movement. They use the language of the common man, railing against “the elites.” But when it comes to policy – the GOP worships the privileged. They love the gilded class and don’t want them to have to pay taxes or hear a cross word about themselves. They’ve convinced non-elites that the top one percent are all-American magical job makers and that if we just make this tiny fraction of our country happy – our economy will once again flourish. There’s no evidence of this ever being the case. It’s pure fantasy. But Republicans treat lies like incantations – they just have to say something enough and it will manifest.

So regardless of whoever gets in the race or drops out – Romney is the ideal symbol of his party. He is the GOP. His story is the story of the Republican Party.

He’s perfect.

Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant (click to view more Tea Party cartoons)

Oh, and their battle cry while doing nothing which keeps the government from functioning? “Washington is broken!”

These imagined liberal freshmen are extremists. They’ve already signed a pledge with a liberal lobbyist saying that they will not – under any circumstances whatsoever – cut, alter or in anyway change social safety nets. So whatever burning national issue of overriding importance comes up their only solution is to adhere to their lobbyist’s pledge.

The Smurfs use the word “smurf” for all verbs. As in: “I’m going to smurf you!” These extreme no-lawmakers use “social security.” As in: “We can social security our way out of this crisis.”

And they want to re-write the Constitution. Yes, they say it’s a great document (blah blah blah) but it would be much better if it were amended to suit their sole goal of bringing down the incumbent President. So since the last amendment took 203 years from proposal to ratification – they decide no one can do anything until we have another amendment.

Then the polls say that Congress’ approval rating is at an all time low. The margin of error looks more favorably on the Congress than the American public. As a direct result of the brazen incompetence and blind ideology – a rating agency downgrades the country’s Treasuries. The stock market tumbles. These liberal tea party-like folks are caught on video cheering at the news of the chaos they’ve caused.

If they were liberals – Fox News would run headlines: “Liberals Hate America.” Well, basically Fox News would say pretty much the same stuff, but in this case it would be warranted.

These liberal obstructionists would be called terrorists. Not just maybe once in a private off the record meeting with the VP – but on the record and all the time. Since these liberal freshmen would seem to have the same economic goals for the U.S. as Osama bin Laden – that would be pointed out repeatedly. They’d be accused of treason. Their loyalty would be questioned: “Are they upholding the Constitution or their pledge?” There would be calls to deport them. People would tell them to leave the country and go wreck some other economy. They’d be dubbed a hoard of Neros fiddling with their pledges while Rome burned.

If liberals were doing to their country what extremist tea party Republicans are doing to theirs – it would be called unpatriotic. A whole tsunami of sound bites would sweep the country calling for the sabotage to stop.

Liberal dissent is akin to a security breach but conservative economic calamity is given a pass. We’ve treated the tea party like they are our country’s kooky, graying, drunken uncle at Thanksgiving dinner spouting some non sequiturs he picked up on AM radio. When really they are well-funded economic saboteurs who refuse to participate in the democratic process. Their goal of causing the executive branch of government to fail means our entire country goes with it.

The media likes to pretend it treats the political spectrum as opposite equals. The right is the same as the left – the other side of the same argument. Politics is not symmetrical nor is the coverage of the partisans. Nothing makes this clearer than the coverage and tolerance of the brinksmanship-happy tea party.

If liberals did this to their own country they’d be called criminals. The tea party did do this to their own country and they are treated like avant-garde Civil War reenactors.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Reality shows are like life, in that people on these programs do things people do in real life, (i.e. travel, date, lose weight) but the circumstances are contrived. The contestants are put in artificial situations with heightened rewards and it’s put on camera. The stakes are fake. The participants pre-screened. The episodes are scripted. It’s “reality” television.

Monte Wolverton / Cagle Cartoons (click to view our Cartoon Blog)

It’s like reality…only augmented for drama and ratings.

Enter the United States Government. Civics and public servants are usually a snooze fest. Rules and procedures and suit-fillers giving long speeches are not all that interesting. Sure there was the occasional duel involving a member of Congress in the last 235 years. Bill Clinton’s enemies brought us a primetime sex scandal. But for the most part politics was watching history in the making, which is like watching anything else being made…slow and tedious.

Think documentary.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment politics crossed over into full reality show mayhem. These things usually happen in a “perfect storm” situation. Meaning: it wasn’t just one thing. It was a couple of unforeseen events happening all at once – all horrifying to Republicans. One was the meltdown of the financial system in 2008. It was the moment Bush had to “abandon free market principles to save the free market system” with TARP. The other was McCain’s concession. Go ahead and watch the speech again. The homogeneous crowd looks like they’re at a wake for a Ralph Lauren and L.L. Bean murder/suicide as their candidate says Barack Hussein Obama will be his president.

If deregulation and tax cuts had done what they was claimed they would do and not wreck the world’s economy – then maybe having a guy whose middle name was the same as a Middle Eastern dictator we’ve spent trillions to take out, as the new president – wouldn’t have seemed so drastic.

But this is the moment when politics went from CSPAN to Jerry Springer. What happens when a guest on Springer gets accused of something and he’s clearly at fault? He gets louder and starts throwing out desperate accusations. “How do I know you didn’t give it to me?!”

So instead of contrition – they opted for defensive blustering with something vaguely foreign-sounding to blame.

This is the tea party: Freaked out Republicans. Lovers of unpaid-for tax cuts, unpaid-for wars and saturnalia on Wall Street were faced with the evidence that their ideas, when implemented, are terrible. So they took a cue from reality shows – they went full bombast. Then it was Obama (whose name also sounds like Osama) who passed TARP and doubled the debt (when that actually happened under the “compassionate conservative” Bush with a GOP Congress).

And just like when reality show producers figured out backstabbing and borderline psychopathic contestants meant ratings – during the health care reform debate the Republicans learned anything chanted by old people on television (no matter how nonsensical) dominates the debate. “Keep the government out of my Medicare!”

For the last two and a half years politics has been trash television. We’ve had right-wing stars staying relevant through mudslinging and shamelessness. The tea party wouldn’t be satisfied with just one Snooki. We’ve had fake stings by phony pimps and ideology-driven hoaxes. Astroturf is being sold as organic outrage.

In short: it’s staged. It’s over-produced indignation by interest groups that don’t do as well in the dullness of documentary style politics and need the chaos of the ridiculous to keep progress at bay.

Cutting government spending (think government jobs) during record unemployment? More tax cuts for the top 1% during record low tax rates and unprecedented tax exemptions? Do these ideas sound like something people come up with when they’re not just cynically throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks?

How many times do the cable news networks need to have a countdown clock up for congressional dustups that could shut down the government?

We’re being held captive by stunts. Choreographed stunts. This is not what deliberative government looks like.

This is what deliberate turmoil looks like.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Taylor Jones / Cagle Cartons (click to view our latest cartoons)

So because, as publisher of Skeptic magazine, Dr. Michael Shermer says, we are “pattern-seeking primates,” it was soon deduced that polio was linked to (wait for it) ice cream. Yes, the reason why the disease was rampant in the summer months is because it was then that children ate more ice cream. It was the sugar. In 1940, Dr. Benjamin Sandler published a paper “The production of neuronal injury and necrosis with the virus of poliomyelitis in rabbits during insulin hypoglycemia” in The American Journal of Pathology. Disregarding all the winter holiday intake of sugary treats, from then on out the anti-polio diet was to cut out ice cream.

We now know outbreaks of polio at the beginning of the last century in America and Europe were from the newly utilized flush toilet. According to Dr. John F. Modlin, current chair of the Department of Pediatrics, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, it was the lack of harmless immunizing infections during infancy due to better sanitation that attributed to the epidemic.

Get that? Not ice cream – flush toilets. May the two never be confused again.

Polio vaccinations were widely introduced in the late 1950s early 1960s and now polio is nearly eradicated in industrialized nations and minimized dramatically in poorer countries.

Now imagine if a celebrity in 1940 had a son with polio and she decided to start a campaign against ice cream because she trusted what Dr. Sandler said. Imagine she believed she was right, so any new evidence or studies refuting her belief were seen through a lens of conspiracy and victimhood. Couple that with getting a national platform on talk shows and news programs to spew her inaccurate garbage on an unsuspecting public – where would that have led us?

It would have taken longer to eradicate polio (meaning more American children suffering) and we’d possibly still look at ice cream with suspicion.

Cut to Marin County, California 2011: The richest county in California (ranking 20^th in the entire nation) is ground zero for a whooping cough epidemic. In the last ten years California has allowed parents to “choose” whether or not to immunize their children. This is because in the wake of a 1998 “study” by “Dr.” Andrew Wakefield falsely linking vaccinations to autism there has been widespread panic among well-meaning parents. So many children in privileged first-world homes are not getting immunized. This year six infants have died in California from whooping cough. Out of the 1500 reported cases so far this year in California – the highest rate of infection is in Marin County. It’s the worst epidemic, according to the CDC, the state has seen in 50 years. Doctors all across the state are telling their patients to get the whooping cough vaccination regardless of age. Now high school freshmen are being required to have the inoculation to enter school in the fall.

Wakefield’s work has been debunked entirely, his work has been called, “intentionally misleading” by the British Medical Journal and his medical license has been revoked. And yet because of celebrities like Jenny McCarthy – the myth lives on, and even measles is making a comeback.

Not getting immunizations is treated like a religious rite. We’re afraid to offend those who have faith in not inoculating their kids to allegedly save them from autism. Which means vintage viruses are in again. It means that the public is now at risk for diseases not seen in two generations.

The important lesson here is being able to change your beliefs when faced with new information. That’s science. The first concept of the atom was the “plum pudding model” by JJ Thomson. It turned out to be inaccurate. But the scientists didn’t stop there. Abrams didn’t stop there.

Sometimes we have to be wrong in order to ever be accurate. We did it with ice cream. We can do it with immunizations.

MORE: Tina Dupuy on The Young Turks Network talking about California’s Whooping Cough epidemic:

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Taylor Jones / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view our latest cartoons)

Now the debt ceiling, originally a WWI cap on bonds the government could issue (back when Congress insisted on actually paying for wars), is the catalyst for yet another insincere call to pass a constitutional amendment. Since 1962 Congress has raised the debt ceiling 69 times with no pageantry and little protest. Basically, the debt ceiling is a stupid wonky antiquated law we should scrap altogether.

But instead of a reasonable discussion about the health of our finance laws, the minority party (loosely) controlling one-half of one of the three branches of government is demanding two-thirds of the Congress get together to propose an amendment for then three-fourths of state legislatures to ratify BEFORE allowing the country to pay its creditors in the next few days. This can be summed up in one word: cynical.

It’s like insisting we touch down on Neptune before we land on the Moon again: It means you want to appear to be advocating “big ideas,” when, in fact, you don’t really want to go to either destination and despise travel in general. And since you know Neptune will never happen, you can be for nothing while appearing to be enthusiastically for something – albeit something impossible.

It’s cynical. It shows contempt for governing and a presumption that American’s are too ignorant to catch on.

If Republicans were serious about their newest go-nowhere proposal, they’d quietly try to acquire support from Democrats while trying to gather a consensus from their constituents. Just ask anyone alive during the Equal Rights Amendment debate in 1972. They will tell you how amending the Constitution is a lengthy, drawn-out, overwhelming campaign, and it was meant to be so. The GOP isn’t interested in this process.

Neophyte Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) favorite go-to non-solution is “constitutional amendments.” He’s a self-described libertarian. His admitted scorn for government showed when he proposed repealing the 14^th Amendment to eradicate alleged “anchor babies.” This was an idea to strip citizenship from children born in the U.S., thus creating more illegal immigrants. Paul now says he’ll filibuster raising the debt ceiling until a balanced-budget amendment is passed. He told ABC News in June, “We will vote to raise the debt ceiling if we get a balanced-budget amendment.”

With the deadline of Aug. 2 rushing down, Republicans flooded the Sunday morning talk shows this week with a show of solidarity in – you guessed it – cynicism:

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) on CBS’s Face the Nation: “Why in the world isn’t there the votes for a balanced-budget amendment in the U.S. Senate? That’s the question Americans ought to be asking.”

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) on NBC’s Meet the Press: “The only plan on the table that’ll keep us from default and will keep us from falling to a negative rating is the Cut, Cap and Balance Plan.” Then he followed with the dubious statistic, “Now folks can say that it’s outrageous to balance our budget, but over 70 percent of Americans think we need to.”

Over on ABC’s This Week, Raul Labrador (R-ID) magically added to the popularity of the GOP’s pet proposal: “Eighty percent of the American people want us to have a balanced-budget amendment. I’m not sure why the President is standing in the way of that.”

Why is the President standing in the way of this sham demand? “I think it’s important for everybody to understand that all of us believe that we need to get to a point where eventually we can balance the budget,” President Obama said at one of the many press conferences on the debt ceiling. “We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do that; what we need to do is to do our jobs.”

Speaking of jobs, that’s what the GOP ran on: jobs. But once sworn in, they’re nothing more than ineffective congressional seat-fillers on the public’s dime.

We as citizens need to call their bluff. They don’t want to amend the Constitution.

Their real goal is the pyrrhic victory of making the President fail because they think the GOP will rise from the country’s ashes.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view our latest cartoons)

And by “telling,” I mean it is now clear he has not read much on the science of homosexuality.

The American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. Gay-cure or conversion therapy is condemned by the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Counseling Association. Remember those gay penguins? The science is not still out on this one.

Republicans have a bad habit of deferring to science as an authority only when they wish to inject doubt (see: climate change, evolution, round Earth). This is a basic misunderstanding – if not misuse – of science. There are always more questions in science because that’s what science is: an intellectual systematic study – basically tons and tons of questions. So it will appear indecisive if your worldview demands certainty. There used to be unanswered questions about how bees could fly – but we still built legions of planes. On the other hand the “theory” of gravity is not controversial, but if you look hard enough there’s bound to be a crank somewhere disputing gravity on the basis of feeling that it’s wrong.

“Some reputable scientists are not 100 percent convinced gravity exists.”

We, as a culture, have decided we’re not going to practice the harems, plural marriages and incest the Christian Bible mentions and instead have opted for love-based non-arranged marriages as the ideal. Our mores are clearly flexible, but somehow the religious right has cherry-picked a hard line on homosexuality. Why? Pure politics.

In the same Meet the Press interview, Gregory described Pawlenty as a “boilerplate Republican.” Gay marriage was a boon to Republicans in the 2004 election. It gave George Bush the “political capital” to attempt social security privatization.

Now an Iowa group called Family Leader has a “marriage vow” pledge they’ve managed to get two GOP candidates (Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum) to sign. The pledge it’s a primer for plenty of proposed wedge issues: pornography, polygamy, adultery, women in combat, Sharia law and one we haven’t seen in more than 150 years – slavery.

Republicans embrace hot-button social issues as a way to get their disastrous economic policies passed. It’s like Three-Card Monte: while all eyes are on the two grooms – white-collar grand larceny gets decriminalized.

Why is it important for Republicans to insist homosexuality is a choice? Why even get into the logical snag of someone WANTING to WANT to be attracted to the same gender? Here’s why: If you can choose being gay, then homosexuality can be condemned as a moral shortcoming. And the immoral having the audacity to demand acceptance is the perfect rallying cry for the GOP base.

If you can’t choose to be gay, and it’s something you’re born with – then being against homosexual civil rights is just plan old-fashioned prejudice…something the rest of us choose to condemn as a moral shortcoming.

The easiest way to marginalize a group of people is to call their circumstances a “choice.” The poor? A choice. The under-paid? A choice. Drug addiction? A choice? Single motherhood? A choice. Each is arguably more complicated than this dismissive one-word declaration. However, if you disagree – you’re against personal responsibility! Yes, the GOP is the party of personal responsibility…unless it’s abortion rights or whom you wish to marry. Then the Government should save you from yourself.

The actual choice in this issue is choosing to deny science when it doesn’t fit your agenda. The actual choice is choosing to use a group of people who want to become a family as a political prop.

The choice is using “choice” as a way to parlay prejudice against a minority into ballot ink.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant (click to view our latest cartoons)

McCarthyism became deeply unpopular with the American public. Senator McCarthy had a 35% approval rating in November of 1954. A month later the Senate censured him.

Yes, Senator McCarthy – at his lowest point – was TWICE as popular as the 112^th Congress which now boasts a 17% approval rating.

But this 17% proves we are still “united” as a country. Over eight out ten citizens can come together in mutual disdain for the overpaid, underworked body of suit-fillers loitering in our nation’s Capitol.

The 111^th Congress had the lowest approval rating in two decades. But now, even they can hold their previously most-despised heads up high – they averaged 25%.

The 112^th ran on jobs and the economy, giving President Obama a famed “shellacking.” And with a newfound majority in the House the only thing they’ve done is pass “symbolic votes” making an abortion harder to get. So abortion – a procedure the majority of Americans will never need nor seek out – is what the House is singularly focused on preventing, all under the guise of getting Government out of (some of) our lives.

Yes, the GOP has taken a hard right turn. Cap and trade? Health care insurance mandate? The EPA? Unpaid-for wars? Racking up a huge deficit? All are originally Republican ideas which Republicans are now against. And when I say “now against,” I don’t mean they are now for a more liberal alternative. The GOP is now for nothing. In French it’s called laissez-faire. In English it translates into “let it be” or “lazy.” In American politics it means “a do-nothing Congress none of us approve of.”

The House cannot go any further to the right. America’s top 1% has twice the net worth of the bottom 80%. Add to that – we don’t even ask the uber-super-rich to pay much in taxes. Bloomberg News/Businessweek put it like this: “It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.” And the House passed the Ryan Budget Plan (another symbolic vote), lowering taxes on the top brackets even more, shifting the burden to the rest of us and forcing seniors to “choose” their health care “options.” This is a “plan” that still won’t cut the deficit or balance the budget (but will raise the debt ceiling – hint).

The GOP tried to peg President Obama as a radical socialist when he really just turned out to be a moderate pragmatist. So now Congress has to be against everything a moderate pragmatist is for…which ends up meaning their platform is – NOTHING.

Republicans like to say this country is right of center, which is akin to saying the average American child is slightly above average. They say this, but then they go way off to the extreme right “cut and run up the deficit” when in the House majority.

So if Congress can’t go any further right and their approval rating has never been lower – how about turning in the other direction? The majority of Americans want abortion to be legal. Even more want the rich to have their taxes raised. We all want infrastructure. We all want Americans to have jobs. We all want our seniors to have health care. We want fair laws and reasonable immigration. We tell pollsters, at least, that we are also moderate pragmatists. But somehow we’ve elected a group of do-nothings the Know Nothings would denounce as dogmatic.

The House of Representatives needs to start representing America and not just their rapidly-righter-facing ideology. Pyrrhic victories are not actually victorious for a country with a struggling economy.

The iconic illustration of the Great Depression depicts Americans somberly standing in breadlines. The iconic illustration of our Great Recession? It’s going to be GOP congresspersons on their government-funded Blackberry’s tweeting jabs about the president on taxes…while in recess (of course).

Really, who are these 17% of Americans who approve of these people?!

Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant (click to view more Wal-Mart cartoons)

Let me explain: I was covering the first stop for the Progressive Caucus’ “Speak Out for Good Jobs Now” listening tour held in Minneapolis attended by Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) among others. The first audience member to speak was one Girsheila Green, a young mother from Compton, California, who has worked at Wal-Mart for three years. Ms. Green told the crowded church how in her tenure with Wal-Mart, she’s received two raises and is now a manager. She makes nine dollars an hour (one dollar above the laughably-low California minimum wage). She pulled from her pocket three cards she claimed most Wal-Mart employees at her store have: a 10% Walmart employee discount card, her employee ID and her EBT card (what used to be called food stamps).

She relayed that 80% of her store is on food stamps. I’d argue one is too many.

It’s true, Girsheila doesn’t have to work at Wal-Mart if she feels she’s not being paid enough. She can go work somewhere else. She’s not being forced to work for a wage that won’t feed her family. The same argument can be made for child labor, dangerous working conditions and other labor issues settled in the 20^th century by workers standing up for their rights.

Girsheila’s individual choice is not the issue at all. Since Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the country, generally doesn’t pay its “associates” or “Wal-Mart family members” enough to live on – the giant multi-national corporation is relying on the U.S. government to feed its employees. We, as taxpayers, pay for Wal-Mart’s cost-cutting tactics. Profit? Privatized. Nutrition? Socialized.

Think of how many employees use their food stamp cards to buy groceries at the store where they WORK. It’s like a nurse having to file bankruptcy due to medical bills.

It would be different if Wal-Mart were a struggling little startup where loyal employees believed in the company’s vision, so being temporarily paid less than an intern is understandable.

But since Wal-Mart is by all measurements a success – it’s no longer okay for them to benefit from government handouts. They need to pay people who work for them like people who work for them and not like disposable volunteers in blue vests.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), just-announced candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, testified in 2005 to the Minnesota Senate. She stated if we eliminated the (laughably low) minimum wage, we could wipe out unemployment. Yes, instead of paying one person eight dollars an hour which makes him eligible for food stamps and (in some cases) Medicaid – let’s pay eight people one dollar an hour and they can be eligible for food stamps, Medicaid AND General Assistance. Basically, allow the government to take care of the work force so private industry can have the profit. This is corporate welfare. This is also corporate socialism. The government covers what Wal-Mart gets away with not covering.

To those who enjoy Wal-Mart’s ample profits – it’s welfare check money laundering. To those who tout “free market” principles, it’s not one of those.

Bachmann, who hopped on the tea party bandwagon when it first rolled out on socialized roads, has decried the government even though her family farm and husband’s clinic have received government money. Bachmann denied this money has benefitted her personally; her financial disclosure forms completely contradict that statement.

Bachmann and the tea party are like a 30-year-old who lives comfortably in the family home while railing against parental tyranny and bemoaning the mediocrity of the meals his mother cooks.

In the real world, taxpayers should stop subsidizing Wal-Mart’s low wages. Let them pay their employees a living wage. Better yet, let them live up to their own rhetoric when they hire their legions of working poor – let them be treated like “family.”

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view our latest cartoons)

So you don’t like everything President Obama has done? No one should. We’re Americans!

Disappointment is good. The worst thing in a democracy is for one person or a group to be elated because all their pet issues are satisfied completely. Dictators are satisfied. Unanimity is tyranny. The very quotable Sir Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

And if we took a vote on that – we wouldn’t all agree.

Our Founding Fathers get painted with a brush known as “hindsight bias.” Because our government is stable with the same constitution for over 200 years we think of our founders as having planned it so they must have seen it all coming. People don’t concur on the Founding Fathers’ beliefs and intentions nor did the Founding Fathers themselves. They were split between the Jeffersonians, the Federalists, the Anglophiles and the Francophiles and even those respective groups were not in lockstep.

The Hamilton-Burr duel was the climax of the conflict of the Democratic-Republicans and Federalists. That Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton whose portrait is in your pocket on the ten-dollar bill, was killed as a result of political acrimony starting at the beginning of the country. The only thing The Founders agreed upon completely was being alive during the 18^th Century.

Modern politicians, like those trying to appeal to the tea party, will claim they understand the Founding Fathers’ intentions and how we’ve gotten away from them. Yes, there was a perfect time in the past and if we just change accordingly we’ll be perfect again.

So if the Founding Fathers fought with each other in vigorous debate (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams also had a falling out after the 1800 election) and none of us will ever be 100% content with our government as it is the nature of democracy – why is the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in our Declaration of Independence? Candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Herman Cain mistakenly said “happiness” is in the Constitution. It isn’t. And the phrase is now a battle cry for accumulating affluence – or doing what we feel like.

Dr. Carol V. Hamilton wrote in the History News Network, “The Greek word for “happiness” is eudaimonia.  …[Its] invoking Greek and Roman ethics in which eudaimonia is linked to aretê, the Greek word for ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence.’ In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, ‘the happy man lives well and does well; for we have practically defined happiness as a sort of good life and good action.’  Happiness is not, he argued, equivalent to wealth, honor, or pleasure. It is an end in itself, not the means to an end.”

Meaning “happiness” as Jefferson knew it when he included the phrase meant serving your community and seeking the greater good. Happiness to him was more altruism than bankroll. Think of soup kitchen coordinators as pursuing happiness. Think of poll workers as pursuing happiness. Think of adult literacy volunteers as pursuing happiness. Think of social workers and foster parents as pursuing happiness. Think of the Red Cross as pursuing happiness. Think of firefighters, paramedics and police officers as pursuing happiness. Think of your neighborhood council members as pursuing happiness. Think of PTA members as pursuing happiness. Think of public defenders as pursuing happiness. Think of free clinic physicians as pursuing happiness. Think of community organizers and advocates for the poor as pursuing happiness. Think of church leaders as pursuing happiness. Think of mentors as pursuing happiness. Think of civic nerds and all those annoying people who put you on their community actions mailing lists as pursuing happiness.

That is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s no conflict and that we’re happy. We’re not meant to be happy. We’re in a democracy.

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Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.



Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy.

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (click to view our newest cartoons)

Essentially, the media is a mirror of us.

We’re shallow, petty and often stupid. We miss points – focusing on the wrong things and completely ignoring the bigger issues. We’re prone to obsess on trivial rivalries and scandals instead of thoughtful substantive discussions about things which affect us most.

Especially in America where the vast majority of our media is profit and ratings driven – the media is programmed by us to give us what we want. Whether we like to admit it’s what we want or not (think stories about whoever is filling the role of a Kardashian or a Bieber).

“The media” isn’t some monolith in lockstep. Maybe there was a time when generalities applied. The press didn’t dish about polio-afflicted President Franklin Roosevelt’s pain. They never ran pictures of him in his wheelchair at his famed whistle stops. It could be said that there was a conspiracy by the press not to highlight the personal struggle of the president. But that was then…

Now there are over nine 24-hour news channels (the big three and their spin-offs). Plus places to watch foreign news like BBC and Al-Jazeera English all over what used to be “the dial.” With the inclusion of ousted MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann going to Al Gore owned Current TV this month – it appears there will be yet another channel for people to turn to for their news.

Then there’s the Internet: The latest figure is over 50 million blogs worldwide are being updated at a near-constant rate. Even if most of those blogs are about inane personal escapades and obscure hobbies – there still could be ten million or so blogs in the world dedicated to news. And what drives traffic to the most widely read blogs in the world? Search engine optimization (SEO) about whoever is filling the role of a Kardashian or a Bieber.

If we wanted a somber and serious Edward R. Murrow to deliver the important news of the day – we’d all tune in and the ratings would be gangbusters. But we don’t. Most media criticism comes from the assumption that we want Murrow but we get TMZ – instead of the empirical (and slightly embarrassing) fact: We want TMZ.

Like any other business, the media is driven by consumption. We choose to click on the links about baby bumps and Anthony Weiner’s namesake appendage, so more stories like those get produced. We swarm to tidbits about Sarah Palin’s feuds with public figures – and even with history itself. Most of us don’t want serious news – we want sagas of nip slips and sports scores. Editors know this, anguish over it and sometimes give in. Which is why you see major metropolitan newspapers complying with the demand of a celebrity-obsessed public – it’s an attempt to up their readership by any means necessary.

The media and the press have never been more democratized than they are now. Anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can read or start a blog. Anyone can be a part of what is known as “crowdsourcing” or what Wikileaks’ Julian Assange calls “scientific journalism.” And yet, when we talk about the media, we act like it’s something separate from us – like we, as consumers, don’t play the most vital role in “the press.”

Not all news or even popular news today is only celebrity gossip or niche partisan hackery. We even make some decent choices. NPR, the go-to example of hard-hitting comprehensive thoughtful news, has 27 million listeners each day. Their show Morning Editionreaches 13 million people daily. Contrast that with Fox News Channel, the highest rated cable news channel averages 1.75 million per show. The highest rated of the networks’ evening news programs (right now, NBC) only reaches around eight million nightly.

These ratings are ultimately our fault. Yes, there are millions of choices, and ultimately – to borrow a phrase – they report and we decide.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and host of TYT Now. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Murad (Jack) Kevorkian, whose name has been synonymous with doctor-assisted suicide, died last week at 83. He spent eight years in a maximum-security prison for helping the sick end their suffering. But Kevorkian was no angel…of death. He was eccentric, flamboyant and obstinate about his pet cause. He taunted the authorities, doing himself no favors in the process. But he did force us as a country to talk for a minute about the rights of the dying.

David Fitzsimmons / Arizona Daily Star (click for more Kevorkian cartoons)

Kevorkian himself died quietly in a hospital due to a blood clot.

We tend to treat death as something we can beat. You’re supposed to beat cancer, the number two cause of death in this country. We celebrate those who triumph over disease. Survivors become centerpieces of schmaltzy fluff segments on the evening news. We whistle past the fact we are all at some point going to die.

Three states have Death with Dignity Laws: Oregon, Washington and – due to a court decision and the failure by the state legislature this year to outlaw it – Montana. In these states there are actual death panels: procedures to carry out the wishes of the dying including how to administer the final overdose of barbiturates.

The problem with the Health Care Reform Lie of the Year – the made-up death panels (beside the fact it wasn’t true) – is it made end-of-life issues politically taboo. The rumor of a secret Star Chamber Government Death Panel has inhibited any openness to the conversation about physician-assisted suicide.

Yes, opportunistic fear mongering has scared us away from addressing our ultimate fear.

My 12-year-old dog had lymphoma. Her body rapidly decomposed while still alive. Zombie tales must have been first inspired by helplessly watching the sick suffer. That was my puppy – unable to eat or manage stairs. Her nose oozed blood. Her breathing became progressively more labored. She was not going to get better. Her vet pleaded with me to put her down. “It’s the best thing you can do for her now.” I had my hand on her head as she passed.

I’m not advocating everyone who is sick and not going to get better should be put down. Also, to be clear, I’m not equating dogs with people. But, I would like to think I myself could be allowed the same compassion my dog received when it comes for my end.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival debut, currently airing on HBO is the documentary by Peter D. Richardson, How to Die in Oregon. Since the state’s Death with Dignity act was passed in 1994, approximately 500 people have partaken. The film opens with #343, Mr. Roger Sagner, being handed a lethal cocktail of drugs while surrounded by his family and loved ones. He’s asked if he has any final words. He pauses, looks down at the ground and declares, “I thank the wisdom of the voters of the state of Oregon.” Then he sips the barbiturate slurry and lies down. We then follow an activist, a volunteer, an opponent and an advocate of the law. It’s pragmatic, honest and intentionally haunting.

The film brings up an interesting question: What do end of life decisions look like in a free country? Currently, they look like they are ruled mostly by religious paranoia and rather than by individual choice. Part of the problem is we hope we won’t die, so we don’t want to think about it. Since death actually scares us, scaring people about death takes little effort.

A law in Oregon which has helped 500 people over the last nearly two decades has not been a “slippery slope,” and it has not encouraged statistically more suicides. In short, that law has not lived up to any of the fears put forth by opponents. And yet, sadly, this type of legislation will rot in the field in most states.

The person who rubbed our face in our own mortality, the most famous and wacky of Death with Dignity advocates, Dr. Kevorkian is no longer with us. He’d probably appreciate the irony in calling his death a loss for the dying.

But to quote another health care reform canard, “Do you want the government in between you and your doctor?”

Because in 47 other states – it is.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and host of TYT Now. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view our newest cartoons)

What creates jobs? Demand. You and me and all the other unwashed masses demanding a product or service forces businesses to hire more people. It’s not “the rich” out of the goodness of their hearts hiring poor slobs to help them out. It’s a simple Econ 101 staple: Supply and demand.

Demand is a good old democratic/egalitarian tenet of the power of the consumer.

Supply is the purview of businesses and the acclaimed entrepreneurs .

We want – they deliver. Basic economics. Basis of civilization.

Supply-side economics is…well, one sided. And currently not growing anything but wealth disparity.

So why treat “the rich” as some fragile group of demigod humanitarians who will wither if ever subjected to a tax increase? Republicans act like taxes are the kryptonite/Achilles heel/Samson haircut to their mythical hero job creators. Americans are noted for being resilient, hardy and enduring people. But the rich must have constant coddling, or they won’t survive?

One type of job created by high demand and, therefore, wealth is lobbyist positions. Lobbyists are a security force hired to protect your pile of cash. And since the Republicans just so happen to be the party that will tell you wealth as a virtue, poverty as a personal failing and taxes as the most putrid of punishments – well, it sounds like the said pile of cash defending itself.

Despite the soaring deficit due to unpaid-for tax cuts and unpaid-for wars, the solution to the sagging economy in the Republican-controlled House is…wait for it…more tax cuts.

Yes, the Republican proposed “JOBS Act” calls for the top corporate tax rate to be cut by 10%. It also dismantles Unemployment Insurance as we know it.

More unpaid-for tax cuts?! Sound familiar? In a word: Yes.

“Just because we proposed it in the past doesn’t mean it was not a good idea,” House Speaker John Boehner told POLITICO. “The fact is, we’ve had a lot of good ideas. We’re trying to package this in a way where the American people understand what it’s going to take in terms of changing policies here that will create jobs in America.”

Why do Republicans believe the wealthy are solely responsible for the economic well-being of the nation? If the rich were the job creators – they have failed at the task (ahem, 9% unemployment) so because of that the GOP should stop kowtowing to them. If a chef, whose job is to create meals didn’t create meals (except maybe overseas), he’d be fired – not “given more incentives” to create meals.

President Bill Clinton, who left office with a budget surplus, said last week at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation Fiscal Summit in Washington, “The, the idea that the lower the tax rates are, the better everything’ll be has been debunked now for 30 years both in positive terms when I was president, and in negative terms by quadrupling the debt once and then doubling it again.  So, I mean, how many times do we have to see this movie before we know how it ends?”

Yes, if deregulation and unpaid-for tax cuts were the secret to a robust economy – we’d have a robust economy. The Democrats are pegged as the party of “tax and spend” – but at least when you TAX and spend – the spending is paid for.

Here’s some demand-side economics: Pay for spending. Tax the rich.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and host of TYT Now. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Luojie / China Daily (view more Global Warming cartoons)

Needless to say, Camping was wrong. We’re all still here. No unprecedented earthquakes. No chaos. Just an unholy deluge of End Time witticisms on a day like any other.

The notable thing is, according to the Pew Research Center, 41% of Americans (including plenty of politicians) believe in the Rapture. They don’t all necessarily believe in a specific date. Just that it will happen and most likely before 2050. So basically, 41% of Americans believe sometime in the next 40 years – it’s over.

Which is fine. I don’t care in the slightest what myths people believe. Whether it’s reincarnation, ghosts, chupacabras, yoga or the free market – it’s totally ok with me.  Pluralism is a mark of true freedom – of a free society. As Americans we can hold all sorts of beliefs and still at the end of the day (or End of Days) be American.

So if you agree that Camping’s firm date and preparations for Judgment Day were silly – and that having wacky convictions are acceptable in a free country – then you can agree that believing we are in the End Times is fine – as long “End Times” isn’t our environmental policy.

There’s an adage, “Trust God, but lock your doors.” How about, “Believe in the Rapture, but still plan for the future.”

With that being said: Climate change is real.

Weather is to an inch as climate is to a mile. Meaning: Climate is the big picture, and weather is what’s happening on The Weather Channel. Meaning: Winter is not evidence against the Earth’s warming.

Patterns of extreme weather are caused by climate change. And 100-year floods every decade and devastating tornadoes don’t care what you think about Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentations. Unless you own stock in an oil or coal company, then still doubting the glaciers are disappearing, is denying against your own interest.

The weather doesn’t care if you believe in global warming, don’t believe in global warming or do but don’t think it’s caused by human activity. Weather kills indiscriminately, regardless of opinion.

According to reports, despite any climate change deniers, FEMA is still preparing for more floods and bigger hurricanes. Which, dare I say it, is smart government planning: Listen to scientists.

Click to view cartoons about The (non) Rapture

Because there is no global warming “debate.”

There’s consensus among scientists (people whose job is to study the big picture of climate) – and then there are others who for whatever reason just say “nu-uh.” A debate is when two sides each have a plausible case to present: A Middle East peace plan is a debate; a solution to our unmatched incarceration rate is a debate; a strategy for a more effective education system is a debate.

Global warming denial is like closing your eyes to make your opponent disappear.

Saying there is a debate on global warming is like saying there’s controversy surrounding teal really being a color. And I will be able to use that comparison as long as President Obama does not come out in favor of the color teal…

The debate we should be having right now is what we’re going to do about climate change. What this will mean for our future, and what steps are necessary.

And since the Republicans like to claim to be the adults making tough decisions for our children and grandchildren – let them prove it by being leaders on climate change legislation.

You know – open their eyes.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and host of TYT Now. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view our newest cartoons)

Politicians who are already adept wafflers and wrigglers are shadowboxing with their pre-Obama-Admin-selves. It’s a very avant garde off-off-Broadway production sponsored by Koch Industries and Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Yes. Weird, but totally worth watching.

In 2009 Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich merrily made the talk show rounds denouncing Obamacare as “rationing.” During the health care reform debate he warned Americans of those “death panels.”

Yet what about the conservative-maligned individual mandate? Turns out Newt touted it as a shiny Republican idea – the gleaming hope of the nation – a superior proposal to anything the Clintons could ever come up with in 1994.

But now he’s against it. Well, kind of against it. This week on Meet The Press, David Gregory pressed Gingrich on this very issue. The politician said, “Well, I agree that all of us have a responsibility to pay — help pay for health care…I’ve said consistently we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond…” Gregory then asked, “But that is the individual mandate, is it not?”

Gingrich’s answer, “It’s a variation on it.”

So Newt agrees with Obamacare unless it’s called Obamacare. Then he’s against it. Because it’s Obamacare…and that’s secular socialism according to the thrice married author.

Then there’s former Governor of Massachusetts and current resident of San Diego Mitt Romney who last week went to the University of Michigan and opened with how his brother attended their rival Michigan State. This is akin to going to New Jersey and starting with, “Trenton is great! My sister lives in Manhattan!” Romney should have quit while he was ahead.

As governor, Romney signed a bill in Massachusetts for what ended up being the model for Obamacare. But now he strangely must denounce Obamacare, so he says he’d repeal and replace it…presumably with a similar version of Obamacare he’ll then be for. It’s indeed a difficult stance to take. His speech became a game of Semantic Twister where he sprinkled in words like, “freedom,” “dreams” and “innovation” into a lesson about the GOP’s BFF, the Tenth Amendment. This coincided with the fifth anniversary of Romneycare in Massachusetts.

Romney’s law is popular in his state. People who live under the dreaded Obamacare model – like it. It’s not perfect, but neither is the highway system, and we don’t talk about repealing and replacing that.

“It’s difficult to see how an acknowledged success in Massachusetts can become a presumptive failure nationally,” said Duvall Patrick, the state’s current governor. “But you know, this is more about politics than policy.”

Speaking of policy: What is the new Republican idea on health care? Is their new idea to kill their old idea? That’s not actually an idea. And “leave it up to the states” is a plan like “it’s there” is an atlas.

But perhaps the most tone-deaf unapologetically obtuse thing said by a Republican politician on health care comes from newbie Senator Rand Paul who, at a hearing of the Senate HELP Subcommittee on Primary Health, announced anyone who believes in universal health care is advocating slavery. Yes. Slavery. Because a right to health care would mean poor U.S. doctors (the highest paid doctors in the world) would be conscripted along with (according to Paul)…janitors.

Really? Slavery?

Ask anyone who’s ever been middle-class under age 65 and found themselves sick if they feel free. Ask anyone who’s ever stared at a pile of medical bills wondering if bankruptcy is the only answer if that isn’t a form of indentured serfdom.

Senator Paul’s namesake Ayn Rand collected Social Security and Medicare. She knew her medical expenses could cost more than she made writing books. So for all the bloviating about the evils of government – the fantasy fiction writer who inspired selfishness and elitism had a deathbed conversion to socialized medicine.

I believe there are atheists in foxholes. And, apparently, libertarians on Medicare.

But they’re playing Semantic Twister. Now, right hand red.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and host of TYT Now. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Nate Beeler / Washington Examiner (view more cartoons by Beeler)

That is – unless you’re a House Republican.

Yes, 21 Republican members of the House, complete with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, have signed a letter condemning a leaked draft order by President Obama forcing federal contractors to disclose their political donations.

It seems like a pretty easy win for the Obama Administration. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which breached the levees of corporate (including foreign) donations to political campaigns – signing an executive order for more sunlight in elections should be welcomed. It’s very American. It’s very democratic. It’s very necessary.

We cannot hold our lawmakers accountable without transparency. And if we can’t hold them accountable – they’re not working for us. Actually we’ll never know who they work for.

Nonetheless, GOP lawmakers in the House made public (strangely) their desire to keep campaign donations from federal contractors secret.

Remember, Republicans don’t think public jobs are really jobs because they’re financed with taxpayer money. Ask public workers who raise families on those checks if they have real jobs – you’ll perhaps get a different story. But this re-branding of government employees as budgetary tapeworms has been the excuse for public workers to lose collective bargaining rights in states like Wisconsin and Ohio.

David Brooks inadvertently said it best when drawing the distinction between public and private unions: “Most important, public sector unions help choose those they negotiate with. Through gigantic campaign contributions and overall clout, they have enormous influence over who gets elected to bargain with them, especially in state and local races.” Now, replace “union” with “government contractors.”

Yes, I know Brooks didn’t mean contractors, nor did the Republican campaign against public workers mean contractors. The problem is their grievances for one apply to both.

They claim people who work for a living don’t have real jobs because they draw a paycheck from the government – but federal contractors who also draw their paychecks from the government should have full protection from any disclosure. This means Republicans want to give fewer rights to the people teaching our kids to read and more rights to the super-shady regularly-sued likes of Blackwater.

Don’t mercenaries already have enough immunity? After voting for the gift-wrap-to-the-rich Ryan Budget plan to dismantle Medicare and give millionaires even more tax cuts – is this really what the House Majority Leader wants to champion? Secrecy for corporate donors? Do they only represent “we the people” with an asterisk? As in: When you define corporations as people – then they’re fighting for “the people.”

President Obama should note the reality star anthem, “Let your haters be your congratulators!”

A bunch of lobbying groups – the American League of Lobbyists, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have come out against this order. They’ve mentioned it would threaten their influence in Washington. It’s the best possible endorsement of any executive order.

I suggest calling it the “Lobbyists Hate This Order.”

It has a nice ring to it.

Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act (DISCLOSE) died in the Senate last year. That’s a failure of Congress. An executive order can remedy that.

When it comes to government best to turn on the lights and watch the cockroaches scatter.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and host of TYT Now. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Gary McCoy / PoliticalCartoons.com (click for more Trump cartoons)

Cut to: Donald Trump’s protruding lower lip as he scowled at jabs mentioning him at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner. Trump has been relentlessly trumpeting the “birther” conspiracy as part of the charade that he’s running for president. A bid for attention and ratings is more likely. But he’s been capitalizing on the Republican rumor that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Trump boasted how proud he was that he “did what no one else could” and made the leader of the free world release his long-form birth certificate halfway through his first term…won via landslide.

Trump even claimed he sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to find out if the President of the United States was really born there. He’s yet to release any evidence of this alleged investigation, but Republicans are still more likely to believe that story than they are in Obama’s eligibility to serve as chief executive.

Basically, Trump was begging for some proverbial chop busting. He showed up last weekend at the swanky DC gala of journalists and celebrities, and the President was armed with some Trump/birth certificate bon mots.

“Donald Trump is here tonight!” said Obama. “I know that he’s taken some flak lately. But no one is happier, no one is prouder, to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

Between Obama and headliner Seth Meyers, Trump was the butt of most of the evening’s jokes. He laughed at none of them – making Trump the only one who didn’t find them hilarious.

When you don’t have a sense of yourself, it’s possible to be a joke without even realizing it. Bill Maher on his show Real Time last Friday said, “Trump’s hair, it’s a dilemma for a comedian, because, for one thing it’s one of the funniest things we’ve ever seen. On the other hand, everybody is doing hair jokes on Donald Trump.”

The more ridiculous Trump becomes, the easier the bits get – the more abundant they become. There is such a thing as bad publicity – it’s in the form of a joke. It’s tough to recover politically from being a punchline. Just ask Dan Quayle.

Minutes after the President announced Osama bin Laden was dead, filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted, “No matter what Obama says, bin Laden’s not dead until Donald Trump sees his death certificate.” Then Mo Rocca made the same joke; Then New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, comedian Albert Brooks and author Tom Bodett. Then hundreds if not thousands of other less notable joshers tweeted the same idea. Masses of others retweeted it. Business Insider ran a satirical piece with the premise. In a record setting Twitter event – this was an unprecedented amount of identical Twitter quips.

Before Twitter existed, a comedy writer once told me a “Leno joke” is defined as the first joke you think of and throw out that Leno will do that night. Comedian Andy Borowitz wrote me, “In the Twitter era of comedy, the first person who makes the joke is the winner and everyone else is a Winklevoss.”

But what is it when hundreds all have the same thought at the exact same moment? A wisecrack so widely and independently generated there’s no possible ownership for it?

What this example of parallel thinking tells me is that Trump is, in fact, a joke. The first sign you’ve become a parody of yourself is when the jokes about you write themselves.

Trump is still pretending he’s going to run for president. He, of course, has said he wants to focus on real issues like $5 gas.

I think we should appropriately demand to see the proof.

Brian Fairrington / Cagle Cartoons (click to view more cartoons)

Buying war bonds has been a tradition in the United States since before we were the United States. That’s how the Revolutionary War was funded. That’s how we raised money to “wage” war. We taxed, rationed and pitched in. It was part of patriotism.

The Iraq War? Afghanistan? Now, Libya? How are we paying for it? With the deficit.

During Bush’s “bullhorn moment” after the towers fell on 9/11 – when stunned Americans desperately needed their Commander to tell them what they could do for their country – he told them to go shopping. Americans put something shiny on their personal credit cards, and Bush put a couple of wars on our collective one.

Now “deficit” is the GOP’s doomsday buzzword. Veep Dick Cheney famously told the Treasury “deficits don’t matter.” Of course, that was while they occupied the White House.

But now deficits will destroy the country! Ed Gillespie, Counselor to the President during the Bush Administration, said Obama, the nation’s multi-tasker-in-chief has “deficit attention disorder.” They pretend the GOP never voted to compound the deficit by okaying unpaid-for tax cuts, spending increases and corporate welfare during the blank check days of the Bush Administration. But now everything distasteful is pinned to Obama – the Republicans will tell you they’re the only ones serious on this deficit issue…and by the way – it will kill us all!

Last week every House Republican (except Ron Paul and three in purple districts) voted to privatize Medicare, cut taxes further on the rich and hope this will magically reduce the deficit. Even though the Congressional Budget Office reported it wouldn’t.

“Fiscally responsible” has become code for “tax cuts for the wealthy.” “Adult conversation” means “poor people pay up.” Throw in a misplaced “socialism” or two, pretend the corporate-funded Tea Party speaks for the majority of Americans, and you’ve been chewing the fat with the current GOP.

So all that trying to scare old people during the health care debate about rationed care and death panels? Guess what? The Republicans in the House just voted FOR that. It’s an interesting tactic to vilify your opponent for what you later gleefully vote for when your party suggests it. Like when Bush called Al Gore a “big-spending, big-government candidate” – right before Bush nearly doubled the national debt from $6.1 trillion to $10.4 when he was in office.

Here’s where the fight comes in: The Republicans have decided that unlike their demigod Ronald Reagan – they will never ever raise taxes for any reason – ever. Speaker Boehner called it a “non-starter.” They not only want to renew the Bush Tax Cuts (which even Alan Greenspan says should expire), they want to give the top 2% an added tax cut. “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” No. Actually we have both.

Republicans claim to be the arbiters of fiscal discipline, but their record says otherwise. The Ryan Plan, which passed the House, was like a cat burglar writing the charter for the neighborhood watch.

“We’ve never had a war with no tax to support it, including the Revolution,” said former GOP senator Alan Simpson, co-chair of Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, to a Denver audience over the weekend. He continued, “People are told in Congress if they raise taxes by a nickel, they’ll be strung up by their heels in the town square.”

It’s not a novel idea. It’s not a new idea. And if you’re into Originalism it’s an idea the Founding Fathers created: Tax for wars. Tax for them or issue savings bonds. But pay for wars. But pay for them another way than a deficit. Put the trillions we dole out to stay in foreign countries at the center of American public debate.

It’ll bring into focus the literal battle cry uttered repeatedly by troops in Baghdad: “We’re at war; America is at the mall.”

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click for more budget cartoons)

There’s an entire industry (cable “news”) solely devoted to bold assertions as entertainment. This means we’re subjected to a colossal amount of failed predictions and prognostications. Yes, if both sides say they’re absolutely correct – at least one has to be wrong.

But as Americans we like the courage it takes to stand up and be inaccurate. We hate handwringing and pandering – it’s just not fun to watch. We still like that swagger of a sure-of-himself cowboy. We love to love them, and we love to hate them – which is why Republicans tout Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “brave” despite being unable to bring themselves to call it “pragmatic.”

Ryan, widely admitted Ayn Rand fanboy who seems unaware that she wrote libertarian-fantasy fiction while collecting social security and Medicare, is the new GOP “it” guy. After the State of the Union, Ryan gave the rebuttal (dubbed a Debbie Downer), and his name is what the GOP wants you to think of since they’ve been re-branded as the fiscally fretful Tea Party.

And, in homage to Republican titles meaning the opposite of what they’ll actually do (e.g., The Clean Skies Act), Ryan’s plan is titled, “The Path to Prosperity.”

In early April, Ryan wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.”

Ooh, a study! How authoritative! The Heritage Foundation also loved the Bush Tax Cuts. LOVED them. In April 2001, they released a study stating: “The Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis (CDA) conducted a dynamic simulation of the proposals in the President’s tax relief plan. The final results show that the Bush plan would significantly increase economic growth and family income while substantially reducing federal debt.”

The federal debt grew nearly $5 trillion under the Bush Administration.

And increased economic growth? New York Times’ economic journalist David Leonhardt wrote of the Bush Years, “In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise.”

In the 14-page 2001 report complete with color graphs and footnotes, Heritage Foundation authors D. Wilson and William Beach decided the Bush Tax Cuts would:

1) Effectively pay off the federal debt;

2) Reduce the federal surplus by $1.4 trillion;

3) Substantially increase family income;

4) Save the entire Social Security surplus and increase personal savings;

5) Create more job opportunities.

They continued, “As Chart 1 shows, over 1.6 million more Americans would be working at the end of FY 2011…”

You don’t need to be an economist or have ever uttered the phrase “think tank” to know each point, to put it gently, did not come to fruition.

To their credit the Heritage Foundation still has the report on their website, which is what I call actually “brave.” Especially since their “analysis” was erroneous – completely and unequivocally wrong. The limp excuse that the Heritage Foundation couldn’t have accounted for 9/11 still doesn’t explain why they continue touting the same failed policies over and over again. This time – Ryan’s. Trickle-down, supply-side, make-the-rich-richer policies have not done what they were supposed to do. In fact and in “reality,” they’ve done just the opposite.

How will this time be different? It won’t.

But being louder and doubling down can effectively obscure the track record.

And has.

Consider it: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more cartoons)

First, it’s way too progressive for today’s rabid rightwing. And if the Republicans saw this Amendment as a win for Obama – it would have to be stopped by any means necessary.

All the President would have to do is say he thinks it’s important for Americans to have freedom of speech, religion, the press and assembly.

Then the Tea nee Republican Party would call them “Obama Freedoms.”

Right-wing blogs next would tap, “What do Hitler, Machiavelli, Darwin, Che Guevara and the New Black Panther Party all have in common? They all love Obama Freedoms.”

“Obama Freedoms will indoctrinate our children to be secular Islamists who want taxpayers to pay for gay marriage abortions at Ground Zero,” Newt Gingrich would say in some Vaseline-lensed ominous music-packed video he’d hawk on his website.

Lawmakers would rush the House floor to accuse freedom of speech as being “bad for business.” Others would call it “disruptive.” Speaker John Boehner, calling himself an originalist, would decry (get it?) any changes whatsoever to the Constitution. “Hell no, you can’t!”

AM talk radio would chime in: “Obama Freedoms will even apply to people here illegally! Drug dealers will be able to protest in your front yard! We’re a nation of laws, not Obama Freedoms!”

Others would use it as an opportunity to rail against the press. Media critic Sarah Palin would take to her Twitter account, “LSMwnt 2Bfree noh8ve Obma& wrk,cost jobs. Hurt 4US kllrep$. SeeFB post.”

Inadvertently proving themselves, in fact, lame — an entire 24-hour news cycle would be devoted to deciphering her tweet. Then the self-proclaimed modern-day Shakespeare would make up a word just for the occasion: virrification. It’s a cross of verification and vilify and maybe viral, but no one would know for sure. It would just seem to fit perfectly for the issue, and then it would be overused until it lost all irony.

UrbanDictionary.com would offer to use the new word in a sentence: To kill the bill, use virrification (see: refudiate and squirmish).

Lopsided, meaningless polls will be taken: “Do you think people who just so happen to call themselves journalists should be free to do so?” The results will be split. People will comment, “I don’t know how comfortable I am with people being able to say ANYTHING they want. We’re in three wars!” And, “Free speech will shove pornography down our throats!”

Commercials would be launched, and the amendment would be called a “government take over of religion” by Koch-brother-funded shadow groups. Average-looking character actors would be hired to say how scared they are of Muslims stoning their children in schools.

“You know what Obama Freedoms will do to this country?! Criminalize bacon! What could stop them?”

Fox and Friends would snicker that being able to assemble peacefully should be called “The Gridlock Amendment.” They’d point out if it gets passed, it would cause traffic and clog America’s thoroughfares. Traffic costs jobs and money! It will ruin this country! “People should be working, but instead the government wants to force us to be on the streets with picket signs.”

Democratic lawmakers, trying to sound reasonable instead of merely capitulatory, would say there’s too much in the bill – that these controversial freedoms need to be in separate bills so they can be debated individually. “It’s just not realistic to put all these – what the rightwing are calling ‘Obama Freedoms’ – what I’m calling basic rights – in one Amendment to the Constitution. I’m proposing a series of Amendments which can be voted on individually – that way we can have an opportunity to debate each one.”

The First Amendment – arguably the foundation of our democracy – if brought up today would die in committee.

Yes, our time is just that stupid.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy.

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune (click to view more cartoons)

Which pretty much sums up Tax Day 2011. The middle class and small businesses have been wrecked by “too big to fail” Goliaths who engaged in ethically reprehensible – yet shockingly legal practices. And now, regardless of how our government failed to guard against an economic catastrophe, we still have to pay our share of taxes to that same government.

So we all have to “tighten our belts” now, right? All of us? In this together? To get through this tough economic climate…together?

Well, apparently, “too big to fail” also means too big to pay federal taxes.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released his list of the top 10 worst corporate tax avoiders. A post on his website notes, “Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.” It continues, “Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS…Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.”

There are other names on Senator Sanders’ list: Chevron, Boeing, Valero Energy, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ConocoPhillips and Carnival Cruise Lines.

Yes giant corporations – making giant profits – and keeping it all by engaging their cost-effective cavalry of accountants. And in some cases actually getting paid by the treasury.

A Government Accountability Office report in 2008 found that nearly two-thirds of US companies pay no income tax. So when teachers, firefighters and policemen are being fed a line about “shared sacrifice,” it really means “shared sacrifice” among other teachers, firefighters and policemen.

Of those on Sanders’ list of corporate tax cheats, Bank of America seems to be in the crosshairs of a few organizations. And rightly so, Bank of America paid no federal income tax in 2009. None. And yes, it was a bailout recipient during the final days of the Bush Administration. Some 115 foreign tax-haven subsidiaries enabled the Bank of America to not pay federal taxes to its namesake – America. So it’s fitting that the Move Your Money project mentions them specifically. Wikileaks is also releasing damaging documents about the banking behemoth.

And US Uncut, which describes itself as “a grassroots movement taking direct action against corporate tax cheats and unnecessary and unfair public service cuts across the U.S. Washington’s proposed budget,” calls Bank of America their primary target.

US Uncut accepts no donations whatsoever and held demonstrations over the weekend. The rallies successfully shut down BofA branches in DC and San Francisco for the day.

So far the idea of corporations actually paying their taxes has garnered a wide spectrum of support. Last week, Bill O’Reilly and guest Lou Dobbs got miffed at General Electric not paying any federal taxes. It’s mainly because O’Reilly could somehow blame it squarely (and unfairly) on Obama even though it’s been going on since the current President was a state senator. On his Fox News Channel show, O’Reilly said, “I want GE to pay their fair share like the rest of us.”

And the leftwing – most notably The Nation magazine among others – has been covering US Uncut’s actions with interest.

Wait – Bill O’Reilly and The Nation actually agree on something?!

Carl Gibson, spokesperson for US Uncut, explains the support: “This message is magnetic – if you make money here – you should pay taxes here.”

Here. Here.

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter @TinaDupuy

Politicians pandering to the Tea Party love to talk about a free market. It sounds sexy. It sounds like wealth and freedom got married and had a perfect concept. If capitalism is a religion ““ free market is the savior. This free market will punish bad behavior and reward virtue. The free market knows all and endows accordingly. We don’t need to worry because the free market will figure it all out.

Jimmy Margulies / The Bergen Record (click to share)

What is never mentioned when propping up the immaculate free market is the defining characteristic of the idea ““ honesty. It’s transparency and allowing shareholders and consumers access to real information, good or bad. A free market is essentially crowdsourcing or democratizing business. And you can’t make informed decisions without accurate information. That’s a tenet lawmakers and business tycoons tend to glaze over when touting their “principles.”

Deregulation is also a tenet of free market economics ““ it’s keeping the government out of Business. Deregulation has proven to be much more popular than its “honesty” counterpart.

And if the word “deregulation” brings to mind Gulf seagulls suffocating in crude oil and rows of tract homes in foreclosure, then you have the gist of it. The housing bust crashing on bundles of what became toxic assets was not technically the “free market.” It was a horribly mutated half-breed hybrid of the venerated free market.

And the free market can fix it just like Sasquatch can fix it. Meaning: they can’t. Because no matter how much they’re talked about neither exist.

The housing crash was a semi-legal, giant and complex Ponzi scheme. Yes, the Ponzi scheme named after 19^th century-born fraudster Charles Ponzi who fittingly didn’t use the name Ponzi while doing his namesake scheme.

The truth is we don’t have a “free market.” Never have and probably never will. So when politicians like representatives Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann talk about how this savior-in-theory can deliver us ““ it can’t. Using this super sexy sounding concept of “the free market” is exactly what got us demonstrably bad policy. Just like the inadequate regulation and insufficient honesty which caused our current gigantic recession.

The debate over regulations is always “less vs. more.” Instead, how about better regulations and more of those?

So AT&T, a huge cell phone provider, wants to become even bigger. The first thing you need to know is, according to OpenSecrets.org, AT&T is the number two “heavy hitter” of the last 20 years. The company has given to both parties a total of $46,292,670. The top single recipient was Speaker of the House John Boehner ““ a politician who loves talking about the illusory free market, occasionally with a dry eye. Second, AT&T was already broken up after an anti-trust case in the 1980s. AT&T regrouped and started growing bigger in 2005.

In the next 12 months there will be debate over whether regulators should allow this giant merger. One of the arguments for the merger will be: “This is the free market at work.” How rewarding a giant company for being a giant is a good thing and the government (i.e., the people who’ve been receiving campaign donations from said giant company) should stay out of it. It’s akin to saying we should feed horses what we feed unicorns ““ because look how great unicorns are.

The bottom line is: Lack of competition hurts consumers. The cell phone companies are already unique in that if their service is awful (as an iPhone user I can testify that with AT&T there’s no “if”) ““ you have to PAY to leave them. It’s like if a restaurant gave you food poisoning, and you had to pay them $200 to let you stop eating there. Congress could have outlawed this practice ““ but they didn’t.

Already, all cell phone companies except T-Mobile were compliant in George W. Bush’s NSA warrantless wiretapping ““ so much for the government staying out of business.

Now if regulators approve of this purchase, a company which already doesn’t have to work that hard for our business will have to work even less. While this is great for AT&T ““ it’s not great for us. AT&T should not be allowed to buy T-Mobile.

And politicians shouldn’t be allowed to say this anti-competition, secret, virtual monopoly is somehow their mythical “free market.”

“””“

© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter: @TinaDupuy

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Notably, Forward, predates the signing of the national civil rights bill by the better half of a century. She was nearly 30 years old before women had the right to vote. Ditto for the first labor movement.

When it comes to progress, Wisconsin and Forward have been ahead of their time.

Now Forward has been at the heart of the last month of protests and rallies in Madison. She’s the centerpiece. Protesters have utilized her as a billboard to express their frustrations. She’s been blindfolded while wearing “recall” signs. She’s been adorned with pro-union and anti-Republican lawmaker placards. Last Saturday during the biggest rally since the standoff began, she was wearing a Guy Fawkes now identified as an Anonymous mask while holding the “blue book” of Wisconsin Law and procedure in her hand.

The morning after, a handful of Wisconsin women removed all the debris and instead laid flowers at Forward‘s feet. They held a sign, “Women’s Vigil for Labor Rights.” Their children clad in “Cops for Labor” t-shirts bounced around the stairs of the Capitol as they posed for pictures from passers-by.

Melissa Austin, wife of a Madison Police Department detective explained, “Flowers sometimes mean saying good-bye. You put flowers on somebody when they die”¦But flowers are Spring. Flowers are coming. Flowers are a renewal.” She added, “It’s not saying good-bye to Forward, it’s what’s to come.”

Sarah Mackesey also held the sign. A Madison police officer on her day off, Mackesey offered, “Forward is our motto and Forward rocks.”

Wisconsin’s new Republican governor Scott Walker had been insisting he needed to eradicate the public employees’ collective bargaining rights to “balance the budget” ““ a budget he made worse when he gave tax breaks to corporations.

Walker’s real goal was revealed in a conversation with a man impersonating the oil heir David Koch. Walker wants to be like Ronald Reagan. He wants to “do something big.” Under the guise of “fiscal responsibility,” Walker has been trying to kill a long time foe of the right wing ““ organized labor ““ and with it wages, pensions and working conditions for which people have fought for decades.

“Balancing the budget” has become the lukewarm excuse to bust unions much like the iffy deviated septum is why you have to get that nose job. “I do Botox”¦for my headaches.” Sure. “People making $40K a year to teach kids are greedy parasitic union thugs.” Uh huh.

If this had happened in another state, the response would have been different. But in Wisconsin people have always thought of themselves as easygoing, open-minded and mellow ““ and their reaction has been visceral. Besides the big rallies overtaking the Capitol, many Wisconsinites have been showing up to be near Forward as a part of their daily errands. “Go grocery shopping, protest Scott Walker taking away union rights, pick up school uniforms and start dinner.”

These purported “union thugs” held G-rated, family-friendly, stroller-packed affable demonstrations. In true courteous Wisconsin fashion one of their chants to the 14 senators who left the state to hold off a vote was “Thank you!”

The several generations of Wisconsinites sauntering around the Capitol in the cold are even more of an apt symbol of what organized labor, pensions, health care and a living wage mean for working people: It’s family. The ability to take care of their families.

The protesters I talked to are afraid for their families and concerned for their neighbors. They’re shocked by the injustice and ashamed they weren’t more vigilant when electing Walker. But mostly they’re resolute.

“It’s painful standing up for your rights,” said Austin, noting her generation born in the “˜70s has never before had to deal with this kind of strife.

Austin relayed, “They [rights] were fought for”¦” Mackesey jumped in, “Again and again and again!”

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© Copyright 2011 TinaDupuy.com

Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and fill-in host at The Young Turks. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com.

Follow Tina on Twitter: @TinaDupuy