Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 02, 2012

Good to know that the House members are earning their pay.

Hey hey hey ! hey hey hey hey!

How about all those budgets that got submitted and brought up to a vote by Reid and company?

and the number 33 is symbolic- of Masons and Rolling Rock beer! There are deeper and darker waters to plumb…

I want to know what the Democraps have been doing. Other than hand wringing and the gnashing of teeth.

Multiply 33 by 20.1818182, and you get 666. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Maybe we should be paying these guys like farm workers; pickers get paid by the pail of garlic, or the box of tomatoes. Peg their pay to the bills actually passed and signed by the President. Just a random thought…

The failure of republicans to step up to the plate in this era, will echo through the centuries….

I was going to post something but what’s the use. I have given up on our government. The United States as a democracy (republic) has lasted longer than Our Founding Fathers thought it would.

Republicans in charge and THEIR health care plans – now there is a true definition of Death Panels. Old sweet 85 year-old Aunt Martha with no family? OUT ON THE STREET AND DIE OLD LADY! You deserve NO HELP! So sad, they would eat their young if there was money in it.

more democrats voted to repeal Obamacare than republicans voted FOR it!

Also…if democrats are so ineffective when they have the senate and the white house…why vote for them?

oh God!!! THE LAST THING we want to do is pay them based on the number of bills they pass! That’s like paying people on welfare based on the number of kids they have…uh…no..wait…we actually do that!

The 60 vote rule has made it hard for the Dems to get some legislation passed. Even when the Dems had 60 votes, some of those Dems were called Blue Dogs, who don’t always vote with the Democrats. Still, there were some goals which were accomplished, as outlined by Doughfoot above.

The use of the filibuster has skyrocketed in recent years, which makes it hard to accomplish getting legislation passed.

The house votes are “symbolic” only because the senate refuses to take up anything.

And where is the administration’s budget???

i know, i know. dnft. the reason jobs have been sent overseas. greed. pure and simple.

the comics are not funny any more. either they are stories or just plain blah. there is a humor deficit.

Hey, it works!! I cut out the panels and pasted them in a flip-book and it worked! Much better than the previous flip-book that featured 333,333 “NO” panels representing the Republican responses to any Obama proposal (in both the Senate and House of Representatives) over the past three and a half years! It’s a good thing that a yearly cost of living raise for congresspersons has been automated, or else the Republicans would have to face the agonizing decision of whether to vote “NO” on a pay raise every year!

As required by law, the prez has submitted a budget every year. It is not his job to pass the budget, which falls to Congress.

What kool-aid do some of you liberals drink. The senate dems are being well-paid cannot even pass a budget. Obama’s budget has never even got a vote from his own people. And you talk as if obamacare is the cornerstone of his accomplishments. What a joke as it will drive us further into bankruptcy. And the Dems wanted to keep the tax rates low – all Barry wants to do is raise the taxes, spend more money, increase govt size, more regulation, dump Israel, and be the King of the US. I can’t wait until he is gone and has to find real work in the public sector. 58% of jobs being created are part-time, low income – thank P Bo.

“Watch Congress act…” Do we really HAVE to? shudder

Obama has proposed tax cuts for 98% of the American people, those who earn less than $250,000 a year. He has proposed a modest increase for those who earn more than that, as in the Clinton era, when we had a budget surplus. I know I have said this before, but it seems to need to be repeated, as some have not heard or understood somehow.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting the results to be different.

That “solid Democratic majority” included Lieberman. See the fallacy yet?

Congress doing more is not necessarily better. If they pass 5000 pages of new laws and create 10 new Federal programs, is that success? We have plenty of laws and programs already. I’d rather they repealed 5000 pages of crappy old laws and eliminated 10 programs that were obsolete.

The reps are always talking about making teacher performance income driven – why not police, firemen, politicians?Every time a cop beats up a suspect and they win a judgement against the police department, or when we catch bad cops, why don’t we take part of it out of wages and/or pension?We could pay politicians based on successful laws and getting rid of redundant laws.

Sounds like he has read None Dare Call It Conspiracy.

The RR approach would bankrupt Medicare and they want to privatize Social Security. The elderly can hardly be expected to go out and get their own health care from a small voucher being offered by the GOP plan. After the Bush economic meltdown, imagine what would have happened if Social Security had been privatized and the elderly were to be on their own instead of the current plan for Social Security? The trickle down fairy dust didn’t work in the past, and it won’t work in the future. It may have worked great for the ultra rich, but for everyone else, not so much. Romney has opposed the plan of soon bringing home the troops in Afghanistan. He called the end of the Iraq war tragic.

a note to all who wrote above: THANKS GUYS! you made my day! SOOOO nice to see a bunch who are smart and able to see what’s going on… multiply by 20.1818182 and see the world through new eyes!!

Tank goodness we have such dedicated civil servants watching over us.

The Republican Party is the result of a lousy education system. A Party based on stupid. It is hard to believe that the “greatest” country in the world has a Presidential candidate who denies Global Warming and Climate Change. Romney is a fool and is scum.

If you want an interesting take on the Authoritarianism of the Repubs, read “Conservatives Without Conscience” by John Dean.

Anyone with interest in a better understanding of the dire threat of Climate Change should read “Storms of My Grandchildren” by Dr James E Hansen, eminent climate scientist with NASA. It is a magisterial book by a truly honest and caring scientist.

With the way things are going, we will soon have the same great, low cost health care as the Canadians. Only problem is that we won’t be able to just go across the border for better access to a CAT scan or MRI because WE won"t be across the border with all that high cost high tech equipment.

“Wanna help the economy:>’END’ the failed “War on[some]Drugs” with Harm Reduction …”

HEAR! HEAR! Mudd for prez with a science based platform for Harm Reduction, it’s certainly much more progressive than Obama’s, the hoops that guy will jump through to get elected.

What about the GOP’s pledge not to race taxes witch the rich backs and sponsor.Watch 60 min. from last week.

If you would have used the number of votes in the Dumocratic Hairy Reid controlled senate over the past 3+ years for a budget, you would have had ZERO panels in your strip which equals the ZERO quality of your strip.

Virtually every budget bill introduced by the House has had “poison pills” in it. A budget bill repealing ACA wasn’t going anywhere. Even if it had gotten through the Senate, it would have been vetoed. There has been no serious attempt by the Republican controlled House to introduce any budget except for the purpose of propaganda. To say that the Senate won’t pass the House budget is ridiculous if you actually look at what was in the budget.

The filibuster has to go back to the old days where you couldn’t phone it in, you had to be on that floor talking. Strom Thurmond had a catheter placed so he could stay 24 hours trying to stop the Civil Rights Act. He was a jerk on the wrong side of history, but he worked hard at being a jerk, and today’s Republicans need to put themselves where their filibuster is while they’re doing so much damage to the country.

Just one question: Why is the House leaning to the left? Shouldn’t it lean right?

Sorry, Gary, but most Americans apparently are on their side. That’s why the House is full of Republicans. That’s why the famed “Kennedy” senate seat now has a Republican in it.

You can make all the comics you want, but if you desire Obamacare, YOU are the minority. Until Dems get off this issue, they will continue to flounder.

I always look forward to your Sunday comics because of your amazing capacity for humor. But this one smacks of sour grapes.

Social change is hard. After the Voter Rights Act was passed in 1965, it didn’t mean that it was immediately accepted by everyone in the country. The concept of Medicare was vigorously opposed by many as well, at the beginning. Americans will begin to benefit more and more from the Affordable Care Act. Medical debt can be catastrophic for people. For all the $ Americans spend on health care it was rated 37th in the world by the World Health Organization. #37 is not a number we can be proud of. We are a rich country and we can have affordable health care. We are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have some type of affordable health care program. The health care program which Obama put forward was first put forward by my former GOP Senator Bob Dole. It was also similar to what someone named Mitt Romney put forward as governor of Massachusetts.

To get rid of the obstructionist A holes in congress vote Democratic in Nov. The party that has the “back” of the middle class at heart and less beholden to special interests that want to suck our economy dry for their own benefit.

The biggest part of the problem is FOR PROFIT health insurance corporations, whose first responsibility is to their stockholders. Hundreds, if not thousands, of wealthy investors have put millions into health insurance corporations’ stock, because they pay good dividends, which are taken out of the insured’s premiums that are not used to cover the insureds’ needs for health care. It is fundamentally wrong to collect dividends that deprive health insurance buyers of needed care. What we need is a NON-PROFIT health insurance system, hence no dividends to pay, no huge CEO compensation or bonuses to pay that are based on their ability to increase profits, hence stock prices and dividends, and no maintenance and interest on real estate projects built with premium dollars, on the speculation that they will earn back more than they cost, and thus boost that compensation and bonus money. The quickest, and easiest way to do that is to expand Medicare to include everyone. Despite the rhetoric from the right, which is uninformed, misinformed and ill-informed, and often nothing more than purposely false, Medicare, and Social Security have worked, do work and will continue to, as long as the right doesn’t get their hands on it, so they can privatize it. Every time privatization has been tried, based on the promise that it will be more efficient, more effective and cost less, it has failed to deliver on the promise, often drastically and catastrophically – witness the local water supply systems that have been bought by big utility corporations. Every time, the infrastructure maintenance has been ignored, and started to break down and fail, rates have doubled, and even tripled, and the corporation has failed to do anything about it. even abandoning the system, and leaving the customers to fend for themselves, which they were doing before, and managing just fine, because nobody was trying to make a lot of money out of providing an essential service.

Ah, so that’s the problem. We need a Republican Majority in the Senate so things can get passed. Thanks for the tip.

ROMNEY LANDSLIDE IN NOVEMBER?

AYE!======You do realize that it is a Federal crime to threaten the life of a presidential candidate, don’t you?

Nice avatar.

I have a favorite term for this: legislative self-gratification. The House leadership knows these repeal bills, and their ridiculous budgets, aren’t going anywhere before they even schedule the votes. It’s a waste of the taxpayer’s money, pure and simple. They simply refuse to get down to the real work of negotiation and compromise that is needed to get bills passed. Most of the session was spent attempting to make political points instead. They seem to have scored quite a few with the local troll population…

I heard they voted to De-fund you as well Gary, “for like the President, not working from the center when doing his Job!”But Sadly, like the 30 plus other bills that sit on Harry’s Desk, he’s not doing his job and bringing it to the floor on this one either.

inside the beltway has forgotten about the third rail

The Republicans obstruct government!? Who has yet to vote on a budget bill through at least three and a half years of Obama’s administration!? It isn’t the Republican-controlled House. Or are you just Harry Reid under an assumed name?

What?? Huh?? Eh??

One thing that is good about this comic it gives the democrats a place to spread their slime and to compliment each other on their their individual stupidity or ability to insult everyone who don’t think like them and make black look like white, good like bad, yes means no. etc., etc., etc. FOO!!

“etc., etc., etc. FOO!!”

Love the way OleEddie ends his posts with a flourish, “Oh, FOO!”

Was it difficult to become this poorly informed and downright stupid or does it come naturally?

Do not look at the man behind the curtian…its just John Boehner trying to resechedule another tee off time lost due to another Obamacare recall vote.

Yes it IS horrible how this Socialist President is forcing us into pouring money into the pockets of the Owners of the Insurance Companies, whether they want to provide health care with the insurance we pay for or not.Oh, right! The Insurance Adjusters did everything they could to PREVENT the Insurance Companies from paying out any of those dividends that the Stockholders EARNED by paying for STOCK instead of INSURANCE.

" It is something that is to be left to the States to figure out. Each can have their own solution from free to none."You mean like same-sex marriage, right?

I’d have sworn I had a 33 beer in ?1970" in the Manilla airport.

Not?

Eight legislative days between now and the fiscal catastrophe on 12/31, and what have the GOPers decided to do?

Vacation!