I thoroughly enjoy most of Ms. Lay's work, particularly the whole "metaphor world" series that ran a while back with the ID Lid and all that. But I have to say I'm missing the context of the last panel here. Is it a message addressed to people like some of the previous posters, who just don't seem to get the layers of her work, or is a retirement announcement? Or something else that I've haven't accounted for?

Whatever the answer, I hope it's not the leaving-the-business one, as I would really miss her work if so.

This has nothing at all to do with being gay. Personally I don't care what sexual escapades a politician gets up to, as long as it's consensual and doesn't frighten the horses. It's when they indulge in something that they are simultaneously trying to criminalise and suppress that it becomes a problem.

The acts described here are just as bad as the anti-choice Senator who tries to repeal RvW while sneaking his daughter into a clinic out of state. It's just as bad as the Representative who votes for war while pulling strings to keep their own kids out of service. It all boils down to the same thing - the pious insistance that others live to a standard that the legislator themselves cannot maintain.

Why is it always Republicans who get caught in these binds? That's easy enough to answer at least. It's because they are the ones steeped in this ethos, the idea that people shouldn't be human but instead be perfect, or at least wear the veneer of perfection. This is what pushes them to the extremes, and magnifies their crimes with the lens of hypocrisy.

The people who are raised with conformity to "norms" as paramount above all. The people who are conditioned to repress, reject, and despise everything inside of them which is different. The people who constantly paper over the cracks in their facade instead of admitting to being human. The people who cultivate self-deception to the level that their self-image ceases to be a true reflection of the self, and reality is no longer apprehendable to them.

It can be appalling, comic, infuriating, or reassuring when they are caught in their hypocritical crimes, but it should never be surprising.

Wouldn't it be simpler on everyone if we just paid Halliburton $3 billion a week to shoot 100 of our own soldiers? Same net result with no messy foreign entanglements.

The next fuck that reflexively badmouths France in my presence will be looking into colonic reconstruction surgery shortly thereafter.

Or did all these jingoistic pricks just forget where the big metal lady with the torch came from?

You can fix him up with me for one evening. Seeing how hard the neocons have assraped our nation, I'd be more than happy to return the favor at least once.

The invasion of Iraq has been ongoing since the term of Bush I, and anyone who saw its resumption under Bush II as a surprise was clearly asleep in their chair.

That being said, there is virtually no chance of the mainstream media news covering this. The news ceased being about the news right around the time Walter Cronkite retired, and the final stake in its heart was the birth of 24-hour cable news. Now news is about getting you to watch the damn screen long enough to absorb some commercials. And what gets you watching the most? Tragedy, that's what.

War is tragedy on an operatic scale. Sure, another missing white girl is compelling in its voyeuristic intimacy, and a tsunami is gripping in its appalling magnitude, but only a war has the chance to reach out and grab your own life while it unfolds. War is #1 for ratings, and therefore all for-profit news outlets are de facto pro-war now.

Sure, impeachment hearings might make a ratings boost in the short term, but they're so complicated and the pictures are so dull. A war is a far better bet, and whoever can guarantee the war guarantees the media's support. It's folly to think that this will change so long as mainstream media is a product and not a service.

I didn't use to be this cynical. But then, America didn't use to be this fucking evil, either.

Just a gut feeling, nothing more, but it seems to me that OBL is probably dead. He had(?) enough medical problems to make this a reasonable assumption, and the fact that there's been such a lapse in new video, coupled with his supposed "young look" in this one, sounds to me like he's undergoing the Brian O'Blivion process these days.

I mean genuine issues, like jobs, healthcare, public safety, the environment, accountable taxation, and transparent government. Because I'd really like that, instead of the quadrennial circus on the same fucking hot-button issues over and over.

People keep telling me "Americans are really smarter than they seem". Well, I don't see it. What I see are people Marshall McLuhan'd into soporific stupidity, voting against their own interests and spouting "reasoning" that was discredited decades (or centuries) ago.

The aphorism that "Americans get the government they deserve" has never been truer. As a nation populated half by incurious and moribund bigots, and half by distracted and ineffective idealists, is it any wonder the political system is such a perfect mirror?

So Fred, like me, is an appalling nihilist with complete disdain for his fellow countrymen? A callow cynic who sees Americans as possessing the vision of a cave fish, the courage of a domesticated turkey, and the course-changing agility of an oil tanker? A person, in short, who sees America as an empire in twilight?

Hmm, perhaps somewhere inside he IS just like me.

Can't wait to see the travelling show for the Skin Flutes.