Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for May 24, 2024

(Adds glasses and a tiny speaker on a necklace) Mr. Mind!

Buen provecho

Red states have defunded school systems to save money that could be going to the 1%, proactively starve out brain worms and the zombie apocalypse

Wow. Thanks for the lesson! I thought I was supposed to vote for the candidate that I believed the most strongly in, but obviously I don’t understand democracy.

Perfectly on point.

A wise person (a comedian), said the best way to vote is to put the person you least like last and work your way up.

Whoever is left is the one to vote for.

I don’t know how that works in first-past-the-post elections.

But at a guess, it would be to vote for the person who is most likely to win against the person you like the least.

If you vote for Jr., it’s like your vote counts twice! Once for the T urd Reich, and once for polio! (And measles. And small pox. And)…

This is the conundrum of our American two-party system. While both sides need work, in some cases lots of work, it’s numbers that count. By banding together in a party, we gain those numbers. The problem is, how can we effectively make real change by voting for the same one-or-the-other over and over? How can something new gain traction if we’re always voting defensively?

And then when there is no brain or spine left and you are completely anencephalic, you will have a terminal condition well-known in the medical literature as “Democrat”

Does my candidate have my interests at heart, or his?

repubs who think maybe trump’s not the best candidate say, “I’m gonna vote for Rifky Jr! He has dead brain worms too!”

Lalo Alcaraz conjectured that he got the brain worm because it heard there was a vacancy.

At this point, MAGAts are not really lying about the basic ideals on which they base their political philosophy. In order to be genuinely lying, you have to not believe it yourself. In the alternate universe created by Faux news, Rush Limbaugh, etc, the lies have been repeated so often, and by so many people that they are actually believing themselves now.

This is “truthiness” — Colbert’s word, meaning that what is self evident when you use your mind is less important than what you know in your gut. You believe your gut, not your mind, because you don’t like what you know with your mind. The problem with using your gut for thinking instead of your brain is that the products of the two organs become virtually identical.

Gas prices, inflation, economy, tanking investments, leaving billion of dollars of weapons for are enemies, directly giving money to Iran…Yep, Biden is doing a wonderful job…

Yes, a vote for anyone except Biden is a vote for Trumpian fascism. I don’t like it that this is so, but it is.

The U.S. election process has never been conducive to multiple-party elections. It is specifically designed to favor a two-party system. A third-party candidate is always a spoiler – historically, to the advantage of the Republican Party. ( Nader v. Gore v. Bush comes to mind ).Anyone other than the Democratic candidate who runs in 2024 is merely a strawman used by the Retrumplicans to draw votes away from their real opponent.

As a lifelong registered Independent voter, I’d never thought I would be urging people to Vote Democrat in 2024. But I love the country I was born in and fought for. I’ll do everything possible to make sure that a madman like Trump never is allowed to take the Office of President of the United States again and turn the U.S. into a neo-fascist dictatorship!

A nice allusion to the Condescending Democrat Fallacy at the end there.

Formerly, there was sometimes a Lesser Evil candidate. Now, there is no Lesser Evil.

And being forced to choose between only two candidates that just represent different heads of the same coin and who are funded by the exact same people isn’t a choice. people who keep voting for the same candidates over and over again and expecting a different outcome are literally insane. You better believe I am voting Third Party but NOT for Kennedy. I am a green Ecosocialist. I will be voting accordingly.

Duh.. .what?

The first tom the dancing bug comic that is mocking people with my opinion. Fair enough, we all gotta take the hit sometimes.

And I’m sure that vote shaming people who don’t want to vote for any pro-GENOCIDE candidate will work. After all, hilary clinton engaged in vote shaming, and she’s so charismatic. That’s why she won the 2016 elec— Oh.

I’m not gonna make fun of people who decide to vote strategically for biden when they live in a swing state (project 2025 is a thing). Your choices are a scumbag and an even bigger scumbag. But don’t pretend that biden is not aiding and abetting israel’s genocide of Palestinians. 10 years later, you will not be proud for supporting him, unless you just hate brown people (and many americans do).

america was wrong about the Vietnam War. america was wrong about the Iraq War and the war on terror in general. america is wrong to back israel in this genocide. Nothing has changed, no lessons learned.

Understandable concern, but we need to define terms here. Trump is a narcissist and a bully of the highest degree, but is not a fascist. He’s also a xenophobe but in no way an ethnic bigot. Finally, he’s blunt and crass, but not in any way psychotic or crazy and other term like that. I am defining all the terms I just listed here in alignment with their dictionary definitions. I’m not going to copy-and-paste those definitions; look them up yourself. I do not want Trump to be president again.

Biden is not simply old, his executive functions are demonstrably compromised. I have no desire to debate what is true and what we have all seen from him. Harris is not simply a poor speaker, she is demonstrably unable to understand basic rules of grammar and speech. This hints at, once again, executive function impairment, but it’s merely a hint. The Biden administration has gone out of its way to advocate against the mental health and physical safety of children, and seems hellbent in urging anyone who is not a White, cisgendered male to define themselves as hapless victims. Instead of urging these multitudes to define themselves as smart, capable and utterly in control of their lives. He and his administration wish to belittle and reduce good, magnificent people. I do not want Biden to be president again.

Speaking of defining ourselves as weak and incapable, we as a nation need to get beyond this self-defeating nonsense of lamenting the two-party system while simultaneously shrugging our collective shoulders and doing nothing about it. It is a profound disgrace that we are here once again, having to choose between two unlikeable and unpresidential candidates. Nothing about this is an American value.

Let’s change this deplorable system. Now. And not simply pay lip-service to fixing this problem after the election, because that’s just code for doing nothing. You want there to be a change? Don’t wait for politicians to take action. WE need to be the change we seek. NOW.

Just what kind of worm is it/are they? As a zoologist, I’d like the details.

The anybody-but-Biden crowd take it for granted you know they also mean, except Trump of course, that’s why they don’t add that.

This is only true if you happen to live in one of the five or six states that’s actually at play in this election. Nobody seriously believes the disgraced (and more obviously deranged every day) ex-president will get more votes than Biden, even if third parties siphon a few hundred thousand away. Trouble is, our Founding Fathers made a deal with the devil (that is, the southern slave-owning states) in order to get the Constitution ratified, and as a result we have the absurdity known as the Electoral College. You win enough states (particularly small states, who are over-represented in the EC) to get 270 electoral votes, and it doesn’t matter if you got several million fewer votes from the actual public. This has become pretty much the only way a Republican has gotten into the White House in this century.

Which means that in the 44 or so states that are solidly Blue or Red, tens of thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of people could vote third-party and it would have exactly no effect on the outcome of the election. Meanwhile, a few thousand (or a few hundred, or just a few) votes in a “swing” state can determine the election.

I live in IL, which is solidly Democratic. I have on occasion voted for third-party candidates. I had no expectation that my vote would have any impact on the outcome of the election (and it did not), but hoped that if a few tens of thousands voted for somebody to the left of the party’s candidate, the party just might respond by slowing down its shift to the right.

Okay. I guess I am complicating matters way beyond the average liberal’s ability to handle. I mentioned several things that even the main stream media has pointed out, but all I hear are wails of anguish that I am a conservative neanderthal. Let’s just take one issue.Gas prices. Average gasoline cost in 2020; $2.17. Average gasoline cost in 2020; $3.66. In 2022 it was $3.95! This is in Indiana and all you have to do is google it. The first thing Biden did after taking office was issue an executive order shutting down the Keystone Pipeline. We could pick each area I’ve mentioned and do the same thing, but liberals never want to look at demonstrable facts. All you want to do is bash Trump, even though almost everything was better in 2020 than it is now.

One fun background story is the “movement” among Swifties to write her name in, which has a very real chance of working. And, despite all the claims that write-in votes are just wasted votes, in this year’s first primary, the Democratic ticket winner in New Hampshire’s primary was a write-in. You probably don’t believe this, but you should look it up. The info is easily available online. Also, google “write-in vote winner” (or any similar phrase). You’ll find (and probably recognize) the names of several such winners in US history.

When I was teaching human parasitology and human neuroanatomy I would have definitely included this combo cartoon in my lectures.

If you look up this online: “Dems reportedly in ‘freakout’ mode as Biden continues to trail Trump” you’ll see the storm cloud gathering force on the horizon. Ya’ll have to ask yourselves Why this is happening? Don’t fall back on the tired old trope that everyone who would vote for him is racist, sexist, transphobic and all the rest. Don’t accuse half the residents (or more) of this country of being consumed by hate. That’s too easy. In fact, it’s lazy, foolish and ungracious. I’m certain some of you here will attempt to comfort yourselves with the idea that you and your fellows are morally superior, but this solves nothing and completely misses the point. Trump offers something that Biden and his party do not, and you need to appeal to the anxieties and yes, the love, of all those Republicans, Democrats and Independents who look at the modern Democrat Party and despair. You need to forge common ground and find a way to appeal to them.

What I think about is his comment that the brain worm died. Lack of a food source?