Chick-Fil-A has given millions to “family” groups…which are basically anti-gay groups.  The president of the company has cited the bible and how he believes in the man/woman family unit and only that.  In response to this, the Muppets have pulled a toy promotion they were doing with the fast food chain.  A lot of conservatives are now mad at the Muppets, with many seemingly unaware that the Muppets are actually fictional.  Not only are conservatives bad with irony, they’re really bad with comprehension.  In addition to pulling away from Chick-Fil-A, the Muppets are donating the money Chick-Fil-A paid them to GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).  Stick that in your waffle fries and smoke it!

Does this mean Chick-Fil-A will lose millions?  I doubt they’d lose anymore than they do by not opening on Sundays.  Let’s face it.  It’s delicious.

My editors really irked me last week over this issue.  I had a cartoon on the Boy Scouts with the “eat mor chikin” cow being “The Last Boy Scout.”  My editor was out and his assistant killed it citing “it’s OK to discriminate.  It’s an act of principle.”  Yes, really.  Friday, I saw a Mike Luckovich cartoon set for Monday’s paper with the same cows hitting Chick-Fil-A.  I complained to my editor that if I can’t hit a certain target, then we shouldn’t run a syndicated reprint that does.  That’s not fair to me.  They kind of blew me off.  Today I gave my editor this cartoon and carried on the argument until he got tired of me and I won.  Ya’ just gotta hang in there, kids.

Update:

Linda White, our assistant editorial page editor, said I misquoted her.  Actually, she’s right.  I meant to explain the position, but quotation marks imply that’s exactly what she said.  She’s a good sport and she’s a friend to so I asked her to email me exactly how she’d explain her position, which she did.

This is what Ms. White wrote:

A friend of mine is visiting from California (Hi, Rob).  I was running late to work and had to drop him off at his dad’s house and he knew I had to get busy with cartoon ideas.  Being helpful, Rob started reading the news to me while I was driving.  He read off all the sanctions the NCAA was leveling down on Penn State.  Thanks, Rob.

I felt killing the football program for a year would be a justifiable decision, but now that the sanctions have come down I think I like them better.  They basically killed Penn State’s football program.  Fewer scholarships, no post season games for four seasons, fined $60 million and they wiped out all the wins from 1998 to 2011 (which makes Paterno the coach with the fifth most wins in college football).  In addition to all that, The Big Ten later announced it will withhold Penn State’s share of conference bowl revenue for four years, an additional fine of $13 million, and also bar the school from the conference title game.

I don’t think it’s fair to punish the players and the NCAA agrees because they said Penn State players are permitted to transfer to any school without having to sit out a season.  There’s already a report from a high school coach that Alabama coach, Nick Saban, had telephoned about a freshman committed to Penn State.  It figures Nick Saban would be the first vulture on the scene.

Analyst are now saying this is the equivalent of a death penalty.  Penn State won’t be any better than a division two school.  Many predict the team won’t be competitive for at least a decade.  The biggest damage was done by the school itself.  How many years will it take to recover it’s reputation?

Michelle Obama is speaking in Fredericksburg Friday.  The free tickets for her speech are gone.  They blew out like crazy.  Of course it’s on a college campus where the Obamas are popular, and in Fredericksburg which is a blue city (surrounded by red counties).  But Michelle Obama is popular.  She’s so popular, Republicans have to make up lies about her.  Actually, Republicans make up lies about Barack too, but Michelle is more popular.

Tim Kaine might want to make some appearances with her since his run for the U.S. Senate is a very tight race.  Though I can’t figure out why it’s so tight, because his opponent is George Allen and I don’t know why anyone would want to return that guy to the Senate.

And  yeah, Tim Kaine kinda looks like Quagmire.

I hate puns.  I hate them because they’re usually obvious, unimaginative and non creative.  For people who write to fall back on a bad pun, to me that’s just lazy.  That said, I’m sure a lot of cartoonists are about to draw a comparison between the villian Bane in the new Batman movie to Romney’s former company Bain Capital.  I’m shocked I’ve only seen one cartoon already with this comparison and of course Rush Limbaugh has cited it…showing how much that guy is a deep thinker.

Second off, it’s a bad comparison.  The Villain Bane would represent Occupy Wall Street more than a corporate guy maximizing profits.  Romney would be more Bruce Wayne, without the vigilantism.  Though I’m sure Romney has more than one secret lair with a car elevator.

Limbaugh said the entire Bane thing in the new movie is a hit on conservatives and Romney and such.  How stupid is this guy?  Bane first appeared in the comics in 1993, way before Mitt Romney ever ran for president, or even the U.S. Senate or Massachusetts governor…and probably way before most people had ever heard of Bain Capital.  On top of all that, this movie was in development way longer than the primaries ran…which I know is a very long time.  On top of all that, I thought the last Batman movie gave a thumbs up to a Republican presidents overreach.  Batman tapped into every single cell phone in Gotham City to find the Joker’s location.  It seems Dick Cheney would approve of such a measure as being a part of the Patriot Act.

Yes, I’m a geek.

Back to the original rant:  Cartoonists, writers, everyone…lay off the Bain-Bane puns and comparisons.  It’s weak, obvious and shows a true lack of creativity.  Aren’t you better than that?  Sadly, for a lot of you…no.  I will update this blog over the next week to showcase each Bane-Bain cartoon I come across.  You’ve been warned.

There was an outcry of sorts when the news came out that this year’s American Olympic team is clothed in duds made in China.  John Boehner and Harry Reid, in one act of bipartisanship, expressed dismay at this.

When you think about it, that might be the best representation of the United States, “made in China.”  Maybe we can use all the gold medals we win as a down payment on all that debt we owe China.

There’s a bunch of partisan conservative hacks attacking Democrats for expressing displeasure with this.  Wow.  Attack Democrats for wanting American pride.  They totally ignore that Republicans in Washington aren’t pleased either.

It should also be noted, that while Mitt Romney was running the Salt Lake Olympics (while he may or may not have still been working at Bain outsourcing jobs), the U.S. Olympic team’s uniforms were made in Burma.

Columnist George Will has pointed out that Willard Mittens Romney has been running for president since election night 2008.  He’s had three years to shore up his offshore accounts, his taxes and his history at Bain.  George Will is not a guy who’s going to vote for Barack Obama.  Romney is seriously a lousy candidate.  That tells you a lot about how bad the GOP field was this year for them to select this guy.

It also says a lot that McCain thought more of Sarah Palin that Mitt Romney.  Romney turned over 23 years of tax filings to McCain’s team.  McCain’s people went over those forms along with filing a report over 200 pages long on why they should NOT pick Romney as McCain’s running mate.

Romney won’t come clean on his taxes.  He says we should elect him on his business experience, although he didn’t have anything to do with business decisions at Bain, where he was CEO, sole stockholder, manager, etc.  Conservatives try to scare their base by saying Obama hates America, but it’s Willard who’s taking his money out of America and putting it offshore….along with a lot of jobs.

McCain looked through Romney’s past and didn’t like what he saw, but he liked Palin’s.  I don’t know if that says more about McCain or Romney.  A lot of people say Palin wasn’t vetted enough…but that campaign poured over Romney’s history, specifically his waffles on abortion…and investing in companies that worked with abortion providers.

Romney couldn’t pass the test to be vice president, but he can be president?  Was Palin (I think Africa is a country) more attractive to a ticket than Romney?  you betcha!

Republicans are about as good with science as they are with facts.  They want voter ID laws, despite there being virtually no voter fraud happening.  They want to test welfare recipients for drugs, which they did in Florida which cost the state $45,780 to discover 2.6% were using marijuana (despite that, 25 other states are considering the legislation).  I can’t come up with a joke to make that funnier.  The facts are ridiculous enough.

Now when it comes to science they’re just dumb, but they’re choosing to be dumb.  Global warming is real.  Sea levels are rising.  97% of all scientists believe in global warming, just like they believe the earth is round.  Anyone who disagrees with that is paid to disagree, or they’ve been fed that info from those paid to disagree.  A lot of think tanks funded by oil companies are the ones dishing out that dirt.  Oil will eventually run out, but working on alternative energies now cuts into oil profits.  These people will sacrifice the future for their short term gains.

The Virginia General Assembly is so sensitive to the facts, they don’t even want to hear the terms “global warming” or “sea level rise.”  They funded a study on rising sea levels on the Virginia coastline, but the folks doing the study were given explicit directions not to use those terms, as it would upset the Tea Party types currently holding office.  If you’re going to fight something, you should probably learn what you’re fighting and at least admit it’s real.

About the only issues the General Assembly focused on last year was illegal immigration and abortion.  When we’re all under water and jobless, we can think our state lawmakers for the attention they’ve given to our real problems.

A lot of people are giving Mitt credit for speaking to the NAACP.  He said a few things the audience didn’t like and he received a collection of boos for it.  He planned that.  During the boos, he stood silent waiting for it to soak in….for his ultra-conservative white audience.  He still has to prove himself to the Tea Party crowd and there’s nothing they’ll eat up more than Mitt going into a lion’s den of minorities and tell them what they don’t want to hear.

Mitt has a history of pandering to his audience.  It was “cheesy grits” in Mississippi.  He pandered while speaking at the NAACP convention but it wasn’t to those in attendance.  He wasn’t even speaking to them.  He was speaking to white-conservative America and to them, he pandered.

The audience was actually very nice to him in spite of the boos (they were more adult and mature than Congress when Obama speaks to them).  He’s lucky they didn’t laugh when he said he would be the best president for African-Americans.  I laughed.

I think this cartoon will generate enough comments (and emails) by itself that I don’t need to write about the issue.