Recent Comments

1. about 7 hours ago on Mike Luckovich

   What?

2. about 13 hours ago on Rob Rogers

   Why would he? $9000 fine? He’ll easily make ten times that by whining to his devoted followers about how horribly horribly I’m being persecuted send money now oh poor me small bills gladly accepted did you see what they did to me again what, were you going to spend that all on baby formula.

3. about 14 hours ago on Mike Luckovich

   She claims she can make the tough decisions? Well, the tough decision in this case would’ve been to live with and care for the dog that didn’t behave exactly the way she was expecting it to. The easy way out is to just dispose of it, shrug it off, and move on. I hope none of her kids have Down syndrome.

4. about 14 hours ago on Monty

   Books and movies have different requirements. Books often have to go on and on to describe a scene, whereas a movie only needs a brief establishing shot. In a book it’s possible to pause the action in midstream to drop in a bit of history as to how the character got there and what’s going thru her or his head at the moment, but there’s no convenient way to do that in a movie short of the kind of voiceover that almost nobody enjoys. In a book if you run across something you don’t quite remember from earlier, you can go back and check it out again, but you can’t do that in a movie. But movies can give you much better versions of accents and unusual appearances than books can.

5. about 14 hours ago on Frazz

   Teachers are only human. They get down in the dumps sometimes, too. Most of them show up for work anyway and don’t take it out on the kids.

6. 1 day ago on Non Sequitur

   I take your point. When I say I have catlike reflexes, I mean that I’m good at heading toward the nearest food.

7. 1 day ago on Mike Luckovich

   No, we are not being “a little melodramatic here”. What I described is what pregnancy entails, no matter how long it’s been going on. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s fun; quite the contrary. And nobody should be forced to go thru it against their will.

8. 1 day ago on Mike Luckovich

    however at this point in time it is illegal for the FBI to go around plucking out nails of people.

   Indulge me. I’m hypothesizing a more authoritarian regime (one which a lot of people in this country would dearly love to see and which is by no means an impossible proposition). That regime is determined to root out people who oppose it, and — assuming some kind of national outrage as in “Remember the Maine”, “Remember Pearl Harbor”, or 9/11 — it’s not at all unlikely that it could pressure Congress into going along with repealing whatever laws you think are currently shielding you.* So, no such laws to protect you. What is there in the Constitution that you could appeal to to save your fingernails?

   *Please note that Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here was a work of fiction, but it described one way in which it can indeed happen here, so let’s just dispose of that as a convenient excuse right now before you even attempt it, OK?

9. 1 day ago on Non Sequitur

    Demoncrats … have set this all up very well.

   Wow, just wow! Now I’m waiting for Ricardo Montalbán and Hervé Villechaize to come out and start singing “Welcome to Fantasy Island”.

10. 1 day ago on Mike Luckovich

     Your point has ben nullified.

    No, it hasn’t. What the Civil War and the subsequent 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments established was the supremacy of the federal government over the states when it came to individual rights, the exact opposite of what the Confederates contended then and you contend now. Interesting that you chose to use the word “nullify”, since state nullification of federal legislation, as advocated by South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, was one of the separationist principles that inspired the Civil War.

     And since I did not address your pathetic analogy, the FBI is prevented by law from doing such things.

    I can see why you’d denigrate the analogy, because clearly following it to its logical conclusion puts your attitude in quite a bad light. But “the law” is considerably easier to change than the Constitution, and it’s not hard to imagine a future in which anti-crime sentiment in America ends up repealing those laws and telling the FBI to go all out in finding scofflaws and bringing them to justice (much in the tradition of J. Edgar Hoover).

    And who said anything about punishment? Fingernail extraction is just an “enhanced interrogation technique”, similar to waterboarding. Those agents who I’m imagining coming around to your place might introduce themselves by saying “Well now, Mr. World, you say that you’re entirely on our side when it comes to advocating that the federal government can do anything it dämn well pleases as long as there’s not a specific-word prohibition against it in the Constitution, but we’ve been given to understand by customarily reliable sources that you were just spoofing us, so we’re here to test your sincerity. Clearly, the word ‘fingernail’ never appears in the Constitution, and you being a true patriot and all, you surely wouldn’t object to our trying this proposition out on your fingernails, would you? (OK, Jim, get out the pliers, he’s shaking his head ‘no’, which I take to mean he wouldn’t object.)”