The latest Poor Man comix are especially funny.

Tuesday night, while John King was going all Minority Report on the big touchscreen electoral map, suddenly:

King just smoothly turned and talked to the camera while the thing rebooted. Looked like this has happened before more than once.

Full disclosure: I have a financial interest in Apple, a Microsoft competitor, obviously. But still. Reminded me of last year at the cricket world cup, when the stadium scoreboard decided that New Zealand batters 8 through 11 had scored a “floating point division by zero”:

The news of Obama’s rock star visit to the House floor today, chatting up superdelegates, is bouncing around the blogosphere — but usually while overlooking this tidbit:

Clinton spent Wednesday in D.C. trying to lobby uncommitted House superdelegates, but she asked them to come to her… Obama showed up on their turf…

Even when reduced to begging, there’s still that same overbearing sense of entitlement that has crippled the Clinton campaign from day one.

Tuesday night in Indiana, Clinton insistently celebrated a narrow, short-term, meaningless victory, declaring it meant she was now “full speed” onward to her goal — precisely as everyone else was finally starting to see she can’t possibly win.

An overweening sense of personal entitlement… a prideful insistence on success in defiance of obvious facts… say, who does that remind us of?

And if that image offends her remaining dead-enders, let’s review: in the wake of 9-11, it wasn’t just George W. Bush telling the world “every nation has to be either with us or against us.” It was Hillary, as you can hear for yourself.

In October 2002, during the debate about giving Bush authorization to invade Iraq, it wasn’t just Dick Cheney telling the world in that Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It was Hillary, as you can read for yourself.

And in February 2005, it wasn’t just John McCain claiming that democracy was taking root in Iraq, and that the insurgency was in its last throes. It was Hillary, standing physically shoulder-to-shoulder with John McCain, as you can see for yourself.

Enough.

It’s September 12, 2001. You’re sitting in front of a TV, watching footage of the World Trade Center collapse over and over and over again.

All of a sudden, someone from seven years in the future walks out of a tiny temporal vortex, and tells you: George W. Bush is going to fuck this up so badly that in 2008, the United States of America will likely elect as president a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim. Oh, and he also admits he’s used cocaine.

I think it would have been easier to convince me of the reality of time travel. “No, no, I believe you really are from the future. But the other stuff, that’s CRAZY.”

A new poll by International Communications Research found 68% of Americans want Congress to use the power of the purse to bring all troops home from Iraq within the next six months. This is up from 54% last September.

While this was paid for by Democrats.com, ICR is a straight and narrow polling company. These are valid results:

Should Congress:

Give President Bush 100 billion dollars to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for the rest of 2008 and beyond
13.4%

Give President Bush 170 billion dollars to keep U.S. troops in Iraq in 2009 and beyond
9.8%

Give President Bush 50 billion dollars to bring U.S. troops safely home within 6 Months
16.8%

Require President Bush to use existing funds to bring U.S. troops safely home within 6 months
51.2%

Don’t know
5.8%

Refused to answer
3.0%

Starting this week, due to a slight rearrangement of my own work schedule, new cartoons will be posted on Salon on Tuesdays rather than Mondays.

Paul Rosenberg is writing a series at Open Left on the extremely important yet little-examined phenomenon of the creation of “shadow elites”:

While the notion of Fox News as “populist” is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore–and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power–the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded “elite”.

This is a very old game, and it’s way past time we got a better handle on it.

That’s from Part I. There is also a Part II.

The only flaw is that Rosenberg fails to mention the real elites who control all unseen: The Rotarians.

Here’s “Jesus Made Me Puke” by Matt Taibbi, an excerpt from his new book The Great Derangement:

Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us that under no circumstances should we pray during the Deliverance.

“When the word of God is in your mouth,” he said, “the demons can’t come out of your body. You have to keep a path clear for the demon to come up through your throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You can’t have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might even want to vomit, but don’t pray.”

The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then explained that he was going to read from an extremely long list of demons and cast them out individually. As he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our mouths open and let the demons out.

And he began…

“In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest! In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual abuse! In the name of Jesus…”

“In the name of Jesus,” continued Fortenberry, “I cast out the demon of astrology!”…

“In the name of Jesus Christ,” said Fortenberry, more loudly now, “I cast out the demon of lust!”…

“In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!” said Fortenberry…

“In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!” shouted Fortenberry…

“In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!” Fortenberry continued. “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!”

It’s things like this that make me convinced progressives, whoever we are, will ultimately lose and mankind will destroy itself.

That’s because incest, sexual abuse, astrology, lust, cancer, handwriting analysis, intellect, and anal fissures are genuine problems for people. Anyone who suffers from them naturally wants to know WHO’S RESPONSIBLE.

Bad political movements provide easy answers in the form of all-encompassing worldviews: it’s the demons, or the Joos, or the filthy Arabs, or the dirty Mexicans, or the capitalist swine, or Jane Fonda. (Or all of them working together.) Cast them out and all your problems will vanish.

By contrast, good political movements cannot provide easy answers, or in most cases any answers at all. What we think we can do is get us all $4 an hour more, plus health care and a little more control over our lives. What we can’t do is end human suffering.

Rationally speaking, this would be a giant improvement, particularly since the likely alternatives involve the deaths of billions. But irrationally speaking, we don’t want to just suffer less, we want to stop suffering. And this is something honest movements can’t offer.

That’s the problem. We’ll need to go to the barricades just to solve the problems that can be solved. But the larger problems will remain, and in the end, everyone will have to deal with them alone. It’s hard to get people to the barricades on this platform.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of a slight increase in pay
Plus a little bit less teasing for teenagers poor or gay
And a crappy little state for Palestinians someday
And that is all we’ve got
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
And that is all we’ve got

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has a new blog at the Atlantic.

This is great news, because Goldberg is one of the few people anywhere willing to grapple with the horrible weaknesses of the internet. For instance, here’s Goldberg writing in Slate in October, 2002 in support of the Iraq war:

There is not sufficient space…for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected.)

Yes—Goldberg would have demolished the ridiculous arguments against invading Iraq, if only there were enough space on the internet. Man, he would have ripped them to shreds! But that’s the problem with the online world, one that no one but Goldberg is willing to face: the internet has an extremely limited space for words.

Goldberg ran into exactly the same roadblock in one of his first posts:

I was telling Andrew about an on-line mugging I experienced at the hands of a person named Matt Haber, who is associated with the New York Observer…What bothered me about Mr. Haber’s post was not its insults (a couple of which were funny) but that he repeated a discredited accusation made by an ethically-challenged journalist about my reporting without having sought my comment.

You can understand how frustrated Goldberg would be by this. Matt Haber had quoted Ken Silverstein of Harper’s saying that Goldberg’s pre-war Iraq reporting “relied heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator).”

God, it would be SO GREAT if there were some invention that would give Goldberg enough room to demonstrate with evidence that Silverstein is ethically-challenged and his claim has been discredited. Even better would be if this invention allowed Goldberg to easily direct readers’ attention to such evidence elsewhere, thereby “linking” his post to it.

Perhaps someday science will provide us with such a glorious new means of communication. Certainly if it ever exists, Jeffrey Goldberg will make full use of it. He hates being forced to baldly assert things as fact and expect everyone to take his word for it. But given the internet’s terrible shortcomings, he has no other choice.

IT’S A COMMON PROBLEM: Other people who desperately wanted to explain themselves but just didn’t have the space include Madeleine Albright and Saddam Hussein.

As pointed out by Media Matters and many others, the networks have managed total silence — total — on the New York Times disclosure that many of their military “experts” have actually been financially-interested Pentagon flacks, although there’s plenty of time to report on Miley Cyrus showing her naked back.

As usual, Glenn Greenwald nails it:

It has now been more than ten days since the New York Times exposed the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda program involving retired generals and, still, not a single major news network has even mentioned the story to their viewers, let alone responded to the numerous questions surrounding their own behavior. This steadfast blackout occurs despite the fact that the Pentagon propaganda program almost certainly violates numerous federal laws; both Democratic presidential candidates sternly denounced the Pentagon’s conduct; and Congressional inquiries are already underway, all of which forced the Pentagon to announce that it suspended its program.

The rest.

This is funny. In a story about Hillary Clinton challenging Barack Obama to a “Lincoln/Douglas style debate”, the geniuses at Fox News accidentally used a photo of Frederick Douglas :