My Phone Call With Romney

I sat through 20 minutes or so of a live telephone "town hall" call with Mitt Romney on the other end last night. Wisconsin's primary is coming up on Tuesday, and Romney and his SuperPAC are spending heavily in this state. (I haven't seen any ads by the Santorum campaign, although his "Red White and Blue" superPAC has one ad up on TV.)

While I was on the phone call, there was one questioner who thought high gas prices were caused by oil company profiteering. Mitt told her he disagreed and blamed Obama for not drilling, mining and fissioning enough. Mitt saw great potential in natural gas, but avoided any reference to fracking.

The other questioners lobbed easy pitches like what his first executive order would be, whether he'd consider Paul Ryan as his running mate, whether he agreed that Governor Scott Walker is a national hero, and what he thought of President Obama's "I'll have more flexibility after the election" comment to Russian President Medvedev. For the record, Romney listed five first orders, from stopping "Obamacare" to opening up government contracts to non-union shops. Mitt praised Ryan's budget plan while promising that his own budget plan would balance the budget sooner (and said naming a running mate hadn't occurred to him yet). You'll also be astounded to hear that Mitt applauded Darth Snotwalker and disapproved of that flexibility remark.

If I had answered the call on the phone in the computer room, I could have put it on speaker. I could have live-blogged it and at least not have felt it a complete waste of time. But 20 minutes is about as long as I can stand to hold a phone to my ear and listen to someone else's conversation.

Between questions, a staffer urged us to press "1" if we agreed with Romney and would vote for him. I never heard anything about what to press if I wanted to ask a question. At least when I sit through these "town hall" calls from Paul Ryan, listening to all the questions from birthers who want to press the congressman about what he's going to do about exposing the president as a socialist or to compensate the Notch Babies, they regularly tell you how to ask a question. For Romney's call, I have to assume that even the woman who didn't like oil company profiteering first had to tell the Romney campaign that she liked and would vote for him.

Oh, and the staffer pronounced Mequon "McWahn." (It's "MECK-wahn.")

QToon: Tell Me All Your Secrets

I normally put these up on Wednesday, but I've been having computer issues at home.

I've been trying to figure out why "job providers" now need applicants to reveal their Facebook passwords.

They already had the ability (and the right) to visit your Facebook page and find out whether you Like lolcats or George Takei's jokes; whether your Farmville is overgrown with weeds or you've slaughtered entire neighborhoods in Mob Wars; and whether you've shared posts from 350.org, Tea Patriots, or TMZ. If all they wanted to do was check out how many photos you've posted of yourself stumbling down drunk in a bar or bleary-eyed in an Amsterdam hashish den, they could simply demand that you "friend" them.

But your password? Given that for the typical job applicant, applying for jobs is itself a full-time job, that's a lot of companies who would be able to pose as you and elicit opinions about you from your Aunt Brenda, the ex-boyfriend who still thinks you're coming back to him someday, that girl from study hall in high school, or that guy who thought you were the sax player in a jazz ensemble he was in back in 1973 but when he found out you weren't he kept you on as a friend anyway because you share a casual interest in "The Mentalist."  

What are employers going to demand next? The PIN to your bank account? The keys to your house?

This Week's Sneak Peek

Remember the old suspense tale that ends "The calls are coming from INSIDE THE BUILDING!"?

Well, this week's cartoon has nothing to do with that.

John Greenleaf Whittier Cartoon

Do they teach John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) in the schools any more? Has he ever made it into the Oprah Book Club?

Political cartoons used to be rife with references to poetry and literature, but those references can sail right by your average 21st Century reader. I might reach more people with a reference to The Hunger Games, if it weren't for the fact that I am quickly becoming an old fuddy-duddy. I had never even heard of the book or the movie until a few days ago.

Heck, I was taken aback when I saw a TV ad for the 3-D re-release of Titanic which started out with the announcer touting the film "from the director of Avatar!"

At any rate, the sad words at the end of Whittier's original couplet, for the benefit of those who aren't familiar with it, are actually "It might have been."

Q Toon: Suppose Marriage Equality

Seriously. If DOMA were still the unquestioned law of the land, the current Republican-led drive to suppress voting might still allow for a marriage license as valid ID. If things go the other way, the only thing that would keep Republican legislatures from requiring a digital rectal exam for same-sex couples seeking a marriage license would be the suspicion that gay men might actually like it.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I typically try to omit text from these weekly teasers; but today, that's all I'm offering.

Pogo Through the Wild Blue Wonder

I used a part of a Christmas gift certificate the other day to buy Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Wonder, Volume 1 of a promised 12-volume printing of every Pogo comic strip to appear in newspapers. I haven't decided if I'll buy all twelve yet; they could become mighty pricey at $40 each (plus the cost of another bookcase, since I don't have any room for any more books as it is).

I started reading with the Editors' Note, which the editors expressly did not expect anyone to read before the comics. I'm glad I started there, because they mention that Kelly's initial 1948-49 strips, drawn for the short-lived New York Star, appear in the back of the book. So, of course, the next thing I read was those early, pre-syndication comics.

A few of the characters (notably Porky Pine) hadn't achieved their ultimate form in the Star, but what really strikes one is how much stuff Walt Kelly is able to pack into every cartoon. For example, the first frame of the January 10, 1949 strip shows six characters, four of whom are talking and one of whom is loading a slingshot; plus a tree stump and a poster hanging from another tree. Three more action-packed frames follow. No daily strip would have room for such a thing these days!

After these initial comic strips, there are annotations by R. C. Harvey, which would perhaps be more useful as footnotes from within the main body of the book. I probably would not have recognized Cully and Hawgshaw as caricatures of Col. Robert McCormack (publisher of the Chicago Tribune) and William Randolph Hearst without having read all about it first. Now I'm wondering if the hog in the Jack Acid Society series I wrote about back in January might also have been Hearst, or just an evolution of the type.