Is there a "red line" for political cartoonists?

Let me say that although Barack Obama is not, in my personal opinion, the greatest President we've ever had (for the record, that would be FDR), he's so much better than the two mindless idiots who ran against him and the mindless idiot who preceded him that there was never any question about who I'd support. I don't object to people criticizing him, though, when deserved and when conducted with either factual analysis or wit.

Likewise, although I don't always agree with him, I usually think Pat Oliphant is one of our better political cartoonists.

But his recent bit, showing Obama with none other than Richard Nixon, is over the top. Equating somebody with Nixon is not much more a) inflammatory and b) irresponsible than connecting him or her with Hitler. It's Internet-blog-commenter stuff. Oliphant was around for the Nixon years, and he should know better.

Frankly, if the White House did sic the IRS on the TeaBaggers, well, my left brain says "Oh, dear. That's not very good." But my right brain whispers to me that I'd have done much the same thing, except that it might have been Seal Team Six, not the IRS, that I'd have unleashed. This is why, as I've said over and over again, I will never run for office. The conflict between doing the right thing and the thing that feels right would kill me.

I know you'll be as shocked as I was

The Detroit Emergency Financial Manager says that things are lot worse than anyone thought. Especially those people who claimed that Detroit was turning itself around and didn't need no stinkin' Financial Manager. Astonishing.

Not the fake ad

If you read The Ann Arbor Observer and like to search for the fake ads they run every month, here's a tip. It isn't the one advertising a book called Many Believable Lies, written by some hack named McConnell. That one's real.

Don't mention the war!

I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.

Visualize John Cleese in his role as Basil Fawlty, Director of Customer Satisfaction at Fawlty Towers, doing his Hitler imitation for a bunch of visiting Germans. Then read this piece about L. Brooks Patterson, doing his version.

The man is -- unique. That's all I can say. I especially like the picture of him using a comb to simulate a Hitler mustache.

Ha! You thought I was making that up! Made you look!

Inevitable, I suppose

The Internet has come of age, now in its twentieth year. A woman over in West Michigan is accused of setting up a FaceBook account for the purposes of ... wait for it ... harassing herself. Read about it here, if you want. Personally, I'd rather skip the details and know nothing more than the bare fact.

Lazy

Too lazy to bother trying to expand on or embellish this hatchet job done on Ron Paul by James Kirchick. There is apparently no limit to the insanity Dr. Paul is capable of -- and if there is, he has people who will exceed it for him.

OK, you figure this out

Thad McCotter, the former Republican Presidential Candidate, former Republican Congressman from Livonia, and former, um, I guess that's it, who flamed out of the 2012 GOP primary like a gift camel from Mali, is suing his former (there's that word again) aides for -- not making this up -- deliberately committing fraudulent acts in order to keep him from running for Congress again. (At least that's what the sketchy story on MLIVE says -- I thought he wasn't running for Congress again, due to his involvement with the Presidential race, but maybe he was just hedging his bets.)

Now, let me go back over that, in case you're as baffled as I was: McCotter is suing two of his ex-staffers for deliberately (he says) falsifying signatures on his nominating petition, specifically to keep him out of the race. That is, knowingly doing things that were illegal and that could (and did) get them (them, not McCotter) prosecuted. Motives are not mentioned.

Let's see, here. Who could have put them up to such a dastardly deed? Of course, if you're a Republican, you might assume that the Democrats did, striving to keep a brilliant, effective flag-bearer of the party from opposing them in the crucial race for a seat representing that powerhouse of commerce and culture, Livonia. Or, if you're a Democrat, you might be inclined to believe that the GOP told McCotter to keep his cotton-pickin' hands off the Presidential race (he did say some uncomplimentary things about the GOP, during the twenty minutes or so that he was a candidate), and suspect that they acted to spank him for interfering with their carefully-orchestrated Romnapocalypse. Either way, the whole thing is so spectacularly stupid that it only makes sense in a state whose GOP Party Chair thinks homosexuality and alcoholism are parallel constructs and whose Democratic Party couldn't find anyone to run against Rick Snyder except a guy named "Virg."

But at press time, odds were running twenty-eight to one that it was North Korea, attempting to get Dennis Rodman a foreign service appointment. Go ahead, look me in the eye and tell me it makes any less sense that way.

Idle hands are the devil's iPad

Having several ELP (extremely low productivity) days this week, due to a cold or something along those lines, I'm seeing more amusing video than usual. Here are two examples, which should be watched in sequence:

One has to do with goats screaming like humans.

The other has to do with humans screaming like goats.

Don't bother to thank me. It's all in a day's work.

Apple chops don't translate to cheap clothes, apparently

In an effort to stem a tide of falling revenue (can you stem something that's falling? I'll think about that later), JC Penny, the middle-market, middle-class purveyor of shirts n' shorts, hired away Ron Johnson from Apple. Mr. Johnson was credited, at least, with the Apple Store idea and probably other things I don't know about, since I pay as little attention to video game manufacturers as I do to major league -- well, anything. Didn't work out for 'em, dollar wise.

Since a) I know nothing about big retail marketing and b) I haven't been in a Penny's for decades, I have to take some of this on faith, but apparently, Johnson's big idea was to do away with sales and coupons. To his astonishment, the customers weren't amused. Apparently, his response was "Our customer just doesn't understand our pricing."

This reminds me of a meeting I was in, years back, in which a QA Engineer characterized some aspect of a user interface as "unintuitive." The lead developer said, "Well, it'll be intuitive once we explain it."

In fairness, I did like the Penny's "screaming" commercial, although many didn't, for some reason.

Recent Reading

This is going to be a bit abbreviated, since I haven't read much that anyone else in his or her right mind would want to, and since some of it was re-reading. I do that, often, when things in the current world just remind me too much of things that went on way back when. I go look up my old books on 'em and refresh my memory.

• The Guerrilla Reader, Walter Laqueur. 1977, Temple University Press. This is an old anthology of writings by, for, and about insergents, and I went back to it specifically to check up on Auguste Blanqui, a mid-nineteenth century theorist, writing about the abortive uprisings in Paris, c. 1848. Blanqui was deprecated by later socialists, mostly because he was highly critical of the pen as opposed to sword.
  
• Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, Eric R. Wolf, 1973, Harper. Dry and pedantic, still a useful source for the underlying economics of revolts. Things about numbers and money that you won't find in the military books or in the wilder-eyed revolutionaries like Franz Fanon.
  
• The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot and of Monmouths (sic) Rebellion, Forde Grey Tankerville, 1685, published in facsimile by Forgotten Books. The lengthy written confession and request not to be executed for treason by one of the people who plotted against James II, prior to the Glorious Rebellion of 1688.
  
• The Duke of Monmouth's West Country Rebellion of 1685, Nigel Clarke, Clarke Publications, No Date. Competent if not especially gripping self-published history of the least-competent coup d'etat in English history.
  
• The Entire Berke Breathed Collection, Berke Breathed, Idea & Design Works Llc, 2009-2011, 6 volumes, all told. The obsessive Bloom County, Opus, and Outland dailies and Sundays, all of it, every last one. Had to do it.
  
• The New Zealand Wars 1820-72, Ian Knight, Osprey, 2013. A brief and useful summary of the Brits vs. Maori conflicts that went on in Kiwi-land for a large part of the mid-nineteenth century.
  
• The War of the Running Dogs, Noel Barber, originally written in the Sixties, now republished by Cassell (April 1, 2007). A highly uncritical and British-biased look at the Malayan Emergency. I re-read this periodically, just to remind me how thoroughly the Brits could behave like Nazis when they were challenged by upstart locals.
  
• The Jungle Beat, Roy Follows, another old one, republished by Eye Books (June 1, 1999). Follows was a member of the Malayan police, charged with finding and eliminating Communists in the hinterland. Much more realistic and down to earth than the Barber book above, but with no big picture. He just tells you what he saw.
  
• The War in Algeria, Pierre Leulliette, 1964, Heinemann. Another highly disillusioned and critical account of the North African revolution against the French, by a French Para. Originally, Saint Michael and the Dragon. Highly recommended. Banned by the French Government when it originally came out.
  
• Probably six other things I've forgotten.