United We Scan

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To improve the efficacy of airport security screenings (so, uh, they work) officials are calling for the installation of the newest (and most expensive) high-tech scanners which see through clothing and create detailed images of naked passengers.

Despite ACLU protests that this will inconvenience terrorists and violate the privacy rights of the ugliest and lumpiest liberals, we support the use of the scanners. Although in some extraordinary cases, we sort of see their point...

Beloved journalist Helen Thomas
volunteers to try new scanner technology.
ACLU quickly files multiple lawsuits, screams, and rubs sand in its eyes.

Happy New Year - 2010

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Best wishes to everyone for the New Year! A fresh start, a new beginning, and (along about November) real Hope for Change!

And please...continue to send your prayers, hopes, thoughts, messages of support, and/or good vibes to Rush Limbaugh as he recovers in a Honolulu Hospital. Hurry back, Rush - we love and need you, now more than ever!

UPDATE: Rush has been released from the hospital, and is apparently in good health. Tests indicate no heart damage. He's going to rest for a few days, then return to the golden EIB microphone sometime this week. We couldn't ask for the new year to start off with better news than this!

New Year's Eve

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Dropping the Ball
A 2009 Summary of Obama &
The Democrats Accomplishments

Constant apologies abroad for everything from slavery to Hiroshima
Bows to Saudi royalty, the Japanese emperor, and Chinese autocrats
The on-again/off-again Guantanamo shut-down mess
The fight with the former CIA directors
The public show trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
The reach out to Ahmadinejad Castro, Chavez, and assorted thugs
The Honduras fiasco
Czars everywhere
The serial “Bush did it”/reset whine abroad
The Queen of England/I-pod fiasco
Gordon Brown gets DVD collection that won't play in England
Unceremoniously shipping back the Churchill bust
The end of the special relationship with the UK
The New York on-the-town presidential splurge
Air Force One panics New York by strafing the Statue of Liberty
Anita Dunn and her Mao worship
Timothy Geithner/Tom Daschle/Hilda Solis and their taxes
“No lobbyists” becomes open door policy
The Podestas’ insider influence-peddling empire
Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” chauvinism
The Special Olympics silly quip about bowling
Rejecting visit from Dalai Lama
Trashing Nancy Reagan (while thinking of Hillary Clinton)
The Skip Gates/police acting “stupidly” mess
The get-Chicago-the-Olympics jaunt to Copenhagen
Cap-and-trade boondoggle
“Millions of green jobs”
Ignore gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power production
Cash-for-clunkers
The Joe Biden gaffe machine
Jobs “saved” or “created” rather than references to the actual unemployment rates
Van Jones, the racist and truther
Desiree Rogers won’t testify
The blowback from, and silence about, the Rangel/Dodd corruption
The White House party crashers plan to take the 5th Amendment
The ‘bipartisanship’ con
The pork-barrel stimulus spoils
The demonization of the Town-Hallers
The Acorn Mess
The Kevin Jennings/Fisting/Safe School Czar embarrassment
The SEIU direct access to the White House
The Asian Tour comedown
Lack of action as North Korea tests ever-deadlier missiles
The politicization of the take-over of GM and Chrysler
The Obama readjustment in the order of paying back car creditors
"Turn in your neighbors" informer hotline at flag@Whitehouse.gov
The Emanuel “never let a serious crisis go to waste” boast
The Black Caucus/Rangel/Waters bid to bail out the inner-city radio stations
Yosi Sergant and the NEA
$1.7 trillion deficit
The planned $9 trillion added to the national debt
New income tax rates; health care surcharge talk; and payroll tax caps to be lifted
Rahm Emanuel’s promised payback to those states that trash the stimulus
The missing C-span aired health care debate
The promised website posts of pending legislation
Charges filed against Navy Seals for terrorist's bloody lip
Czechs and Poles sold out on missile defense
Sermons to and finger pointing at the Israelis
The failed ‘Putin helps to stop a nuclear Iran’ gambit
Voting "present" on the Iranian reformers in the street
Serial but empty deadlines to Ahmadinejad
The good war/bad war twisting and turning on Iraq/Afghanistan
The months-long dithering over Afghanistan
Renditions, tribunals, Patriot Act, etc. once trashed, now OK
Healthcare take-over
The 2,000 page proposed new health code
The embarrassing Nobel Peace Prize nomination
"Don't jump to conclusions" defense of Fort Hood terror suspect
The attacks on surgeons, Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc.
The Islam mythologies in the Cairo Speech
The al Arabiya “Bush did it” interview
"Louisiana Purchase" and other bribes to pass healthcare takeover
Napolitano's "the system worked" boast after attempted terror

(Special thanks to Victor Davis Hanson for assembling most of this list!)

Stacked Decade & 100th Follower

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Ring the bells! Shoot the confetti cannons! Hope n' Change Cartoons has just reached its 100th Follower!

According to the Obama administration's right-wing radical scale, that officially makes this blog and its readers a "Festering Splinter." With your help and support, we hope to grow to the rank of "Burr Under the Saddle," followed by "Fly in the Ointment," and maybe...someday...if dreams really do come true, rise all the way to "Pain in the Ass!"

Please know that I'm sincerely grateful to every follower and every daily reader who visits the site. Hope n' Change is a labor of love, designed to inject some wry humor into current politics while also steering people to important and substantive news stories. And of course, it also allows me to scream without scaring the dogs and children.

We're always looking for new ways to build readership - but the simple fact is that YOU can do even more than we can. By telling friends, sending links (there's a little envelope with an arrow at the bottom of the commentary for each cartoon - click it, and you can send the day's cartoon to one friend, or cut-and-paste a whole mailing list), or posting the cartoons to your favorite blogs.

We're all in this together, and Hope n' Change is humbled, honored, and cheered by your support!

-Stilton Jarlsberg, MD

Jam It Napolitano

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With the tough competition for "Dumbest and Most Obvious Lie of 2009" ticking down to its last few days, it looks like Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano may have scored the big win with her pronouncement that "the system worked"...even though it failed to prevent a man with known terrorist connections from taking a powerful bomb aboard a jet and activating the detonator.

Pressed to explain her bizarre remark, Napolitano clarified that she meant "the system worked" after the attempted bomb blast...presumably meaning that a taxpayer-funded defense lawyer was rushed to the Detroit tarmac to make sure Umar Abdulmutallab was fully informed of his rights, and perhaps to help him file suit against the passengers who jumped him.

Napolitano also said that the would-be bomber got his visa during the Bush administration...but failed to mention that the visa wasn't revoked after Abdulmutallab's own father recently warned US authorities that his son was dangerous.

Are other airline terror attacks planned? We have no way of knowing, because Abdulmutallab now has the right to remain silent. Napolitano shares that right, and we wish she'd use it.

Let Them Eat Poi

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As average Americans struggle with double-digit unemployment, and the Democrats prepare to launch the most expensive (and economy-busting) legislation in a half century, Barack Obama will be vacationing in a $4000-a-day mansion in Kailua, Hawaii ("the favorite beach of Hawaiian royalty").

While in Hawaii, the president will have the opportunity to inspect the tax-supported healthcare system which has caused so many doctors to quit and move that the president of the Hawaii Medical Association likens the state's medical care to a "third world nation." Or he can inspect Hawaii's public schools...as long as he doesn't visit on a Friday - when all the schools are closed because the teacher's union gave themselves 4-day work weeks.

And of course, when in Hawaii the president can pay a ceremonial visit to the "Changing of the Guard" which protects his birth certificate. Have fun, Mr president - and don't hurry back!

"None shall pass!"
Hawaiian "Keeper of the Birth Certificate"

Hot Pants

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The Obama administration barely escaped 2009's second successful terrorist attack on American soil when Umar Abdulmutallab's bomb failed to fully detonate as Flight 253 was descending into Detroit.

As much as we'd like to joke about an "underpants bomb," this is far from a laughing matter. Although Abdulmutallab had known terror connections, and despite the fact that his father had warned US officials months ago, his name was not on the "no fly" list. And it was only two weeks ago that the TSA accidentally released their top secret security manual online, making it possible (and in all likelihood a certainty) that Abdulmutallab knew his bomb components would pass airport security screenings.

And so Umar's 72 virgins will be kept waiting...while the American people keep waiting for this president to get serious about terrorism.