McCain jokes about bombing Iran

"Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb [Iran]..."
-John McCain


All I have to say about that is:



Thank God this guy has little chance of winning the primary, let alone the election.

LA Readers - how to follow Candorville

LA readers are continuing to write to the paper and myself asking how they can follow Candorville. Some have sent passionate e-mails, some have sent poems, which I truly appreciate. Some have threatened to cancel their subscriptions (which I think is a bad idea - not only do papers not listen to non-subscribers, but there's no point in cutting yourself off from a news source). I wish I could thank you all personally, but if I do that I wouldn't have time to write the strip.

Please keep writing or calling (calling is best, because it lets them know you're a real person) if you want to read Candorville in the Times, and keep in mind it sometimes takes months, or even years, for a paper to change its mind. In the meantime, if you'd like to continue following the strip, you can try writing or calling other papers you might be reading in the LA area (Daily News, Daily Breeze, OC Register, etc. - which are all open to running Candorville depending on reader requests). In the meantime, you can follow it online, at the Candorville website. You can sign up for a daily e-mail notifying you when a new comic has been posted.

Thanks again, everyone.

No really, it's brilliant, let's ANNOUNCE our coup

Billionaires do everything differently, including telegraphing their violent palace coups:

The Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has told the Guardian he is plotting the violent overthrow of President Putin from his base in Britain after forging close contacts with members of Russia's ruling elite.
In comments which appear calculated to enrage the Kremlin, and which will further inflame relations between London and Moscow, the multimillionaire claimed he was already bankrolling people close to the president who are conspiring to mount a palace coup.

Of course, this could all be some publicity stunt for a Russian version of "The Apprentice," in which a kooky billionaire violently deposes a different Russian leader every week.

Candorville In The Loop

From today's In the Loop column (Washington Post):

Speaking of the House oversight committee, it's not often that someone below the rank of Cabinet member can merit a cameo appearance in a syndicated cartoon. But General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan, apparently to the amusement of some folks at the GSA, has won that unusual distinction, becoming a thinly disguised amnesiac in the cartoon Candorville.

Doan won the high honor after she repeatedly told the committee on March 28 that she could not remember details of a Jan. 26 videoconference presentation for top political appointees at her agency by White House deputy political director J. Scott Jennings, who works in Karl Rove's shop.

I don't think "robust" means what Bush thinks it means

From the people who brought us such hits as "Uraniam Tubes from Africa" and "Saddam Hussein blah blah blah 9/11" comes a new classic: "This economy sure kicks ass."

Apparently the White House feels its policies have created a more robust economy than existed during the late '90s. We all must have just imagined we were better off. Sure, the amount of people living in poverty has skyrocketed, but what does that matter?

If you keep in mind an early quote about the Bush administration's governing philosophy, allegedly from a White House aide, it all makes perfect sense:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Another quote that may be helpful when listening to the White House tell you why it's technically not such a bad thing that you've gone from working on a Ford assembly line to working at a Wal-Mart checkout line:

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
-Mark Twain (or possibly Benjamin Disraeli)