Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for May 22, 2022

I think they should have gotten an Oscar for best special effects for that, not tomatoes.

Pastis comin in hot! Lots to think about once again…I miss comics where the most challenging thing is watching the line Jeffy made looking for mom…

Daffy Duck for President!

Publishers aren’t regulated. A German publishing company which had been Hitler’s propaganda machine bought most of the American conglomerate publishers, and did the US Gov. say anything. Nope.

I’ve noticed that those who don’t believe in the moon landing also believe that Neil Armstrong saw aliens there.

Do we really need to restrict guns in public places?

Politician: We don’t.

Do we really need to restrict guns in government buildings?

Politician: We most certainly do!

Stephan, you really need to start considering your reputation. If you keep putting out stuff like this, people are going to start comparing you to Bill Mauldin. (Hmmm. Maybe I’m on to something)…Rat and Pig, Willy and Joe…but good work, Guy!

That’s the problem with letting the peasants think and speak for themselves. Sometimes they make errors that the great and the good must correct. Even the smallest errors can grow to become thought crimes. It’s so heartwarming to know that our politicians and billionaires love us and want us to be happy, so they protect us from ourselves.

Sad commentary!

Must be fun to be a writer and be able to say anything under the guise of Rat.

Yawnnnnnnn .

The Fairness Doctrine did not ensure fairness.It gave broadcasters a disincentive to cover controversial issues and ensured blandness.

Yes we do need all of that and the moon landing was not faked stephan. If you believe that, pull your head out!

Lies upon lies upon lies till the day that we dies! Alfred E. said it best, “What me worry?”

The “fairness” doctrine was crap though. It forced radio stations to play things nobody would listen to. Which effectively silenced people, as stations would just run neutral stuff entirely.

And somewhere along the line music became a casualty. So very, very wrong!

Do we really need law that address problems that don’t exist?

Rat believes that moon is real? How does he not realize that it’s a prop placed in the sky by the Deep State as part of the plan to enslave us? WAKE UP SHEEPLE.

The government has always been so messed up and evil.

Stephan, for the love of god, please look up what the fairness doctrine actually did. It didn’t make the media report things “fairly” (that would be illegal censorship). It simply required stations to aside time (often at times of low viewership) to present varying viewpoints. Further, it only applied to broadcasters, not print or cable news, rendering it effectively meaningless in todays tech environment. Finally, it was used by various administrations to harass political opponents on the radio. It’s just a fantasy on your part, and a dangerous one at that, that more government censorship would somehow make things better.

Hyper – media.

How we got here.

take that, libertarians!

One correction, the “Fairness Doctrine” only applied to Broadcasting – not Cable, not newspapers, not magazines. What it did was stop almost ALL discussion of issues because the broadcasters couldn’t afford to miss a side on an issue, so they just didn’t talk about it, Period. I was there… it happened.

Which moon landing?

DOJ is worried about increased domestic terrorism when Roe gets overturned. But I’m told that it is all false flag stuff by those that support it!

Always irks me when people refer to “the Moon landing” when there were really six of them.

For reference. The 1st Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech. The only reason the Fairness Doctrine was viable was that the public airwaves were considered a national asset and the rules were set for private access to that resource.It only applied to broadcast stations. The current group of lying miscreants such as FOX are cable networks and would never have been subject to the Fairness DoctrineNow you know that internet memes are not reliable sources of information.

Panel 5 is seriously mistaken; mental health funding was gutted in the early ’80s by Ronnie Raygun (well, by his handlers – he was never President, he just played one on TV).

Regan closed all the mental hospitals to save money, so here we are. ;-p

Ironically, the University of California dropped its history requirement (every student, regardless of major, had to take at least one history course in order to graduate) because it felt that the history requirement in the high school courses needed to enroll in the first place was sufficient.

This episode summarizes it perfectly.

Start with the DMV. I’ve seen brick walls more fun.

It will always be impossible to legislate against stupidity. :)

I wish you were wrong….

“Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How’s that again? I missed something.”“Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let’s play that one over again, too. Who decides?”…Robert Heinlein in “Time Enough For Love.”

We do mostly treat social media companies like publishers. They control what’s displayed on their sites. It’s just that the stuff that’s displayed is there because it gets users to respond to it. It’s just like print media. The Orthodox Church of Free Enterprise states explicitly that morality is defined by the market.

What? This happened during my 78.98 years? Probably began with ignoring IKE’s warning to beware of foreign entanglements.

Drink the Kool Aid much?

He spelled civics incorrectly. It should be civil classes.

While all of the above in the comic did contribute to the problem, I think the real issue is desperate people grasp at straws. As the American middle class has been gutted- starting with Reagon(may he be cursed)- and with the Democrats refusing to actually do anything to reverse the slide- the American dream has been reduced to ‘a roof over your head and no worries on paying for health care’- something taken for granted in every other industrialized (and most every third world) nation on this earth. When people see their standard of living slipping- or hanging in the balance (one paycheck from disaster) they look for something they can be sure of, and the ever elastic (as in impossible to disprove) conspiracy theories are a wonderful security blanket for finding the reason everything is going wrong.

“TOMATOE ALERT!!! [sic] VERY DANGEROUS!!!”

What’s funny about this strip is that, under the Fairness Doctrine, people who think the moon landings were faked would have be given equal time to air their views.

you know, when Abraham Lincoln was President, anyone could walk to the front door of the White House and knock on the door…anyone…and if he was at home, Mr. Lincoln answered the door himself…

And now the powers that be at least in some states, Republicans to be exact are erasing not only history and literature but literally people that do not conform to their ideal. And the supreme court is on the cusp of erasing our rights because they are NOT ’deeply rooted in the history of our country"

Barbed wire? For mostly peaceful protests? Seems a bit odd…

I wish there weren’t so many people on these forums whose motto seems to be “So many trolls to feed, so little time!”

The problem is that all those suggested solutions to the problem would have just created problems of their own, because none of them address the underlying problem, which hardly anybody knows about, nor would they believe it is the root problem now, even though it is. The handwriting is on the wall: ICHABOD.

Kinda sorta hints at the futility of putting one’s trust in the gummymint….

Spot on Stephan.

aoeet fcfetvist!

Thank you Pony! I did not know that either!

Donald Trump’s Presidency was faked.

He’s a realistic hologram projected directly from the Kremlin.

What about for the last panel regarding 2022 fears of COVID and Monkeypox?

The moon landings were faked. They got Stanley Kubrick to film them. However, Kubrick was such a stickler for accuracy that he demanded they be filmed on location.