I decided to have a bit of fun today with our local County Legislators. The curious layer of bureaucracy we know as County Government has been in trouble for its lax accounting of – and puzzling attitude toward – the public checkbook. Un-audited Cell phones are merely a symptom of a greater personal spending problem exhibited by some of the legislators and their staff. Some of them genuinely don’t seem to understand that the taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for their personal expenses.
I am not a reflexively anti-tax kind of guy…Money is needed for the greater good if you want to live in what we know as “civilization.” But in the Lower Hudson Valley, many many people pay HUGE sums of money in the form of state and local property/school/income/sales taxes. And many, many people here pay more in property/school taxes than they do in federal income tax.

Times are tough, and people’s tax bills aren’t going down. So they become very sensitive about silly things like legislator’s phone bills.
County legislators should really pay attention as they may find themselves on the wrong end of a growing movement to make their particular branch of government extinct. If that doesn’t make them shudder, perhaps the idea of having to go out and buy their own private cell phones will.

What a shocker! AG Michael Mukasey has declined to prosecute anyone who had anything to do with the childish – and illegal – politicization of Bush Justice Department hiring practices. Mukasey told the American Bar Association that he considered the use of a political litmus test in hiring prosecutors to be a bad thing (eh, bad/criminal, what’s the difference…)
Perish the thought, but he has inadvertently I’m sure, created the appearance that he isn’t prosecuting anyone in the justice department because there are no non-Republicans left to purge. But that can’t possibly be the case, can it.

It’s difficult to know whether or not Georgia thought we had its back if it decided to anatagonize an increasingly restless and unreasonable Russia, but our great leader certainly didn’t work hard to disabuse them of that notion. The new democratic Georgia was probably the most pro-George W. Bush country on the planet (emphasis on “was.”) Adoring, flag waving, Obama like throngs turned out to see Dubya when he visited the fledgling democracy and pledged unity, friendship, solidarity, etc. Perhaps Georgia thought The Bush administration would not want to pass up another opportunity to award another Halliburton contract. Or perhaps they simply shouldn’t have chosen the same exact time to get brutally crushed by Russia as Dubya’s scheduled meeting with the US olympic women’s volleyball team.

To ice the bloody cake, Russia rejects US criticism of its violation of a sovereign state as hypocritical because of (drumroll) Iraq. Our global moral authority is now officially spent.

Meanwhile, we wring our hands over Barack Obama’s foreign policy experience.

I would post the rough pencil for this one…But there is no rough pencil! I was scraping the cartoon barrel last night, hating all the ideas in my sketchbook. Taunted by my gray, pencil lined mediocrity and a looming deadline, I ducked out to procure some caffeine from the cafeteria, came up with this idea, scooted straight back to my drawing board, took a deep breath, and started inking. Took me about an hour.
I remain hopeful that that doesn’t happen today…

– Bonus art student tech tip: When I scanned the inked drawing, and looked at it on the screen, I felt that the sword blended too much with the armor breast plate, so shot for time, I splodged white-out along the bottom tip of the blade, (not hard to spot for the fastidious and eagle eyed among you…), rescanned the cartoon – and it magically looked okay!

The real opening ceremonies were breathtaking. No other word for it. China considers its hosting of the Olympics to be a true honor, and it shows. It’s amazing what an authoritarian regime can get its people to do!!

Speaking of which, did anyone see our great leader schlumping in his dignatary’s chair, checking his watch during the ceremony? It’s okay, Mr President. According to polls that’s pretty much how most Americans feel about your final few months in office…

Both Obama and McCain are taking positions on energy that run counter to their position on energy before they were their party’s respective “presumed nominees.” There’s apparently a fine line between carefully honing your position around volatile economic conditions, and flat out saying stuff everybody knows you don’t believe. Presidential races are like these weird alternate realities where voters have to support their candidate based on what they did and said BEFORE they sold their souls to run for President. They have to do this while watching, hoping and praying with gritted teeth that all their positional readjustments are purely to appeal to the broadest, most simplistic voting bloc. The assumption must be that they will hopefully break the cockamamie promises of August if elected. Right?

When you’re reading a political cartoonist complaining about cynicism, you know it’s bad.

I almost like this cartoon, although the drawing didn’t come out of my pen quite the way I intended it. On a related note: Is it just me, or does anybody else think that whoever coined the term “staycation” should be subject to enhanced questioning while locked up indefinitely and without charge in Gitmo?