Time to admit it, I just can't do this every day...

I had a break as I changed jobs, but I'm realizing, that I just don't want to read Mallard Fillmore on a regular basis. So, I'll bid adieu with this little video.

Oh dear, he's going to try to stretch the "joke" over multiple strips

Of course one of the things that Bruce manages to completely miss is a fundamental difference between the liberal and conservative mindsets. Conservatives (if I may make an over generalization), tend to submit to authority, whether it's spiritual (thus fundamentalism) or secular (thus AM radio). Liberals, on the other hand, are rather averse to this, and tend not to take anyone wholly as an authority. Put two liberals in a room and you'll get three opinions.

It's also worth noting that in that 400 scientists from Saturday's strip, some of them are people who dispute just some small part of the consensus, or in some cases, are willing to point out some parts of An Inconvenient Truth that they feel are making claims a bit beyond the science, for example, saying that a single hurricane cannot be attributed to global warming, although an overall increase can, while Gore gives the impression that Katrina was directly caused by global warming. Wow, that 400 number, small as it was, is overstating the dissent.

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Déjà Vu all over again

Isn't this supposed to require more than a few months of commentary to happen. I'm reading today's strip and thinking that it seems familiar. That's because it is.

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Well thank heavens that whole racism things is taken care of

After all if people are making claims of being connected to Martin Luther King, then there's certainly not any issue of racism in this country.

So, the media should stop printing letters to the editor about driving while black.

And no talking about racial discrimination in lending. Can't happen here. White politicians are trying to show that they're connected to MLK.

And there's no racial discrimination in employment practices, it's just undue media influence.

So let us all, as we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday (actual, not observed), celebrate, for his dream has come true. Your will be judge on the content of your character, not the color of your skin (offer not valid for non-white Americans).

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Hi Bruce

I was wondering how long it would be before I saw this in the logs:

I can only guess that it's Mr Tinsley himself.

As for today's strip, we learn that (1) Bruce is easily sold redundant software by the guys at the electronics store (2) he's got a Windows machine which is probably vulnerable to hackers even with the software (3) he's got a bunch of racist stereotypical attitudes.

Somehow, none of this was a surprise.

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Sundays three times as wrong and in color

OK, let me just take one to show how something that might seem like an appealing objection is based on stupidity and ignorance. Why does the post office charge more for square envelopes than rectangular ones? Because rectangular envelopes can be machine-processed more easily than square envelopes which have to be manually processed.

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400 scientists can't be wrong, can they?

Oh my gosh, the Republicans got 400 scientists to claim that there's no such thing as man-made climate change. That pretty much settles it, then doesn't it.

An interesting quote from The Washington Times:

After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp.

Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.

It sounds like he's saying that he's denying that they're funding the scientists. But notice that he actually isn't. Bill Clinton would be proud.

But 400 scientists! That's a lot of guys. Surely that bashes a hole in the whole climate change thing, right? I mean there can't be that many scientists paid by the oil companies, can there?

Oops. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists has over 31,000 members. And many of them disapproved of the AAPG's stance on climate change (that is, they felt that anthropogenic climate change was real). They eventually forced the AAPG to change its stance so that there is no organization of scientists which believes that climate change is just a natural process.

Sounds like consensus to me.

If even the AAPG can't hold to the party line, we have to be pretty proud of the Republican Senate staff's effort to find 400 dissenters across the globe. Like Abraham haggling with God, they're desperate to save, if not Sodom and Gomorrah, the idea that climate change is just a natural variation.

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It's funny 'cause it's true!

I have to admit it, we liberals like to blame everything on the Bush administration, but the truth is that they're completely blameless. Getting us involved in a quagmire in Iraq? Not their fault. It was the terrorists. Rising deficits? Not their fault. Terrorists. The resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan? Terrorists. Gutting the constitution? Terrorists. Politicizing science? Terrorists.

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Is Bruce trying to make a monkey out of me?

Every so often, there's an attempt at a joke that completely falls flat. Is this meant to be a jab at the pro- or anti-evolution crowd? Is the recycled caveman attacking evolution or creationism? Who the hell can tell? Not me.

Personally, as a Christian, I find the creationists to be offensive. They've managed to reduce Christianity to an absurdity. Trying to read Genesis chapter 1 as literal natural history rather than as the beginning of salvation history not only forces Christianity into defending absurd propositions (e.g., carbon dating has errors in huge orders of magnitude), but misses out on the primary message of Genesis chapter 1: That God created the earth and all that is in it, and that it is good.

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Caveman bush, perhaps?

I'm guessing that Bruce, in his timeliness, is making reference to Bush's sliming of McCain back in 2000.

In other news, Clinton won the New Hampshire primary on the Dem side and McCain on the R side. While I was hoping for Obama to make a clean sweep, it is nice that it's likely that my vote on February 5th will mean something. I just fear that my curse will continue and I will end up, once again, never voting for a winning candidate in a presidential election.

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Once again priorities are mixed up

I've gotta say that while a real playoff system for college football would theoretically nice (although what do I care? Most of the colleges I've attended didn't even have football teams, and those that did were so low in the hierarchy, they took public transportation to away games), it would be even nicer if people wouldn't be declaring the elections over after exactly one state has had its say.

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Bruce channels Johnny Hart

That's the only possible explanation for today's especially incoherent strip. I sometimes wonder whether it might be better if Mr Tinsley didn't try to make jokes.

So as near as I can tell, this is a strip set in the bizarre world of B.C. where there are both cavemen and Christianity. But perhaps most amusing about the whole thing is that Bruce has to be enraged by the fact that politicians no longer run to the right, but there is effort among the Democratic candidates to appeal to the left-wing segments of the party. And what's more, that those candidates are the ones winning elections

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You see it's the party that's failed, not the philosophy

Bruce reminds me a bit of American Marxists in the post-Stalin era, who insisted that it wasn't that Marxism was wrong, but that the Russian implementation of it wasn't real Marxism. And if only we had Reagan, the six years of Republican one-party rule wouldn't have been a disaster.

Because, after all, Reagan would have been busy sending arms to Iran to support illegal wars in Central America, running up a debt that we're still paying off, and pandering to the religious right without actually giving them anything.

The fact of the matter is that conservatism as a philosophy gives us exactly what we got under Bush, and it will take a generation of forgetting for people to start voting for them en masse again

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Holy cow, climate change denial still lives

Coming tomorrow, "It was cold today, that sure proves that the whole climate change thing is a hoax."

And for the record, it's not that climate change is making more hurricanes, but that the hurricanes are more intense.

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O O Obama

And today Bruce continues his metaphorical accounting of his disappointment in the Republican field. His boy Mitt Romney had a pretty sad second-place finish behind Huckabee. Now, winning Iowa doesn't guarantee much as Pat Robertson can attest, but it can be a boost, and I'm hoping that my man, Obama can take the momentum of Iowa and turn it into a nomination.

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Return this

Hmm, what to comment on. There's the fact that when my wife and I were at Target on Tuesday night, the return line was fairly short (and the check-out lines were shorter).

Or perhaps Bruce is hoping he can return the current batch of Republican candidates and find someone with some, any appeal, since today marks the Iowa caucuses.

But perhaps more to the point is the idea that Bruce is clearly busy returning gifts so he can use the store credit to buy some liquor.

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New Year's Prediction: Readers will be shocked when Mallard Fillmore tells a joke (but not today)

When you've got a party which has decided that they and they alone have a monopoly on religion, particularly Christianity, and Romney himself makes a big (albeit lame) speech on religion (I mean, come on, freedom requires religion? As a religious person, I don't buy that), of course he's going to be asked about religion, especially since a sizable number of Republican primary voters consider his religion to be non-Christian, if not a modern-day form of Baal-worship.

But I'm sure that Bruce is really just upset that there's all this focus on the negatives of the Republicans and nary a peep about the note in Vince Foster's briefcase.

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I lied

Heavens, the thought of reading a week's worth of the strip and commenting on them all in one sitting, no not for me.

Instead we get a stereotypical attack on Clinton. Because in Bruce's twisted mind, she's so desperate to win, she'll slime people merely for endorsing and supporting one of her opponents. Even if, as he claimed in one of the strips last week, their impact is minimal. I guess I'm next, for my own Obama endorsement.

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