The other possible outcome is deregulation of the puppy breeding industry, subsidies for puppy farms, tax breaks for puppy-fueled SUVs, and the rise of Big Puppy as a global economic force. No blood for puppies!

In the interest of saying something nice, I tend to agree with Clive Crook that Rick Warren has hopefully raised the bar in terms of how political candidates are interrogated:

I hope the network moderators were taking notes. No self-aggrandizement, no moronic gimmicks, no ceaseless quest for the gotcha moment. He asked good, searching questions in a spirit of urgent reflection, curiosity and goodwill. So it can be done.

But I’d like the bar raised even higher. Questions about the existence of evil, about what was the worst thing a candidate has done in private life, and so on were still fluff, substance-free nonsense that make a Myers-Briggs test seem scientific (which, having taken a few of them, it ain’t.) I did not come away from either “interview” with different impressions or new information or a better sense of how either man would drive the ship of state into the ditch. Maybe because I’ve been paying attention all along (or, to be self-critical, I’m stubborn), but I found that my ideas about McCain and Obama remain unchanged.

If we’re going to make this kind of thing a new ritual, we should open it up to other religions. What does either candidate really know about Islam, the religion so many American policy-makers fear? Or even better, how about that debate on science? Will that ever get off the ground? I would love to see Obama and McCain try to weasel their ways out of direct questions on evolution, stem cell research, global warming, and alternative energy from a strong scientific perspective.

Yeah, I know. Ain’t gonna happen.

In Part One, Unkle 800-lb Gorilla visits Dr. Mungo to help him with is crisis in confidence as a global warmonger. In Part Two, Bling-Bling the Globalizing Gorilla seeks Mungo’s help in resolving his world-wide financial crisis. And now, family counseling.

When I first thought of this idea, Russia had not yet attacked Georgia, but the current hostilities seemed right in line with these cartoony meditations on imperialism. Does anyone know if Georgia has a McDonald’s? If so, Russia may have just proved Thomas Friedman wrong.

Whup! Just did some googling. Emmanuel has beat me to this observation by 6 days. (Man, I’m slow.) And, yes, Georgia has a McDonald’s. So much for the Golden Arches Theory.

I meant to run a third installment of the “Shrinking Empire” story line, but ran out of time thanks to emergencies in my personal life. Still, it seemed necessary to address the current state of “dialog” between the two main campaigns for President on the subject of race.

This strip continues the “Shrinking Empire” gag started last Thursday with Unkle 800-lb Gorilla. I have been planning for some time to use Unkle 800-lb Gorilla and Bling-Bling (see cast) in a series on the current economic and war crises capitalism and imperialists have inflicted on the world. This coming Thursday expect to see them both in family counseling.

“Creative capitalism” is a new coinage for a very old idea. I read about it only this weekend when my copy of TIME magazine arrived sporting an essay promoting this concept by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose speech at the World Economic Forum last January in Davos, Switzerland has launched a great deal of discussion among reform-minded capitalists, investors, financiers, economists and advocates for the poor.

There is, of course, a blog. Creative Capitalism the Blog features essays by prominent intellectuals and public figures that editor Michael Kinsley plans to compile into a book for publication in the Fall. There are plenty of skeptics —especially from Richard Posner and Stephen Landsburg— but none of the criticism I have read so far has treaded beyond libertarian rejection of anything that falls short of maximizing profits. Recently a few representatives of the Gates Foundation, attempting to defend their baby, posted a memo that provides a handy distillation of “creative capitalism” principles.

Much of the debate here has centered on what, exactly, creative capitalism is. Here’s our thinking.

• This isn’t about changing capitalism, which has worked wonders for billions of people and will continue to do so. Yet roughly one billion people still make under $1 a day, about half of the people in the developing world lack access to basic sanitation, and one child dies every 30 seconds from malaria, a preventable disease. Market reforms and the spread of capitalism will help to address these problems over time. Creative capitalism seeks to harness capitalism in ways that speed this progress.

• Creative capitalism is an effort to get more companies involved in work that reduces inequity. It assumes that companies don’t do more of this kind of work today because they don’t face the right incentives: because they don’t see how to make a direct profit from it or how to enhance the value of the business more generally from doing it. Creative capitalism is about discovering these incentives where they already exist and about creating more incentives when the current ones are insufficient.

• This can happen in two ways:

1. Businesses can seek more effective ways to use existing market incentives—such as profit or recognition—to reduce inequities and serve the poor.

2. Governments, nonprofits, and philanthropies can use their resources and expertise to create new market incentives for businesses to reduce inequities and serve the poor.

I recommend reading the whole thing; the authors elaborate on those “two ways” and provide interesting examples. Skeptics, such as Posner, dismiss “CC” as little more than good public relations (to which I am inclined to agree), but John Quiggin, rebutting Posner, sees it as an existential matter:

And it may well be that behaving as a good corporate citizen is conducive to long-term firm survival. This isn’t just a matter of buying PR as Posner suggests. If political actors generally regarded the activities of a firm as socially desirable, they will presumably be less likely to take action that might damage it. And while political perceptions do not always coincide with social reality, it’s hard to believe, in global terms that the strategies adopted by major pharmaceutical companies in recent decades have been either socially optimal or tailored to maximize the chances that the industry, and the firms that make it up, will survive in the long term in something like their current form.

So far I have not found much discussion of this concept on the Left. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey talks about “conscious capitalism” as an alternative to the creative variety, but as a libertarian, Mackey rejects the government role Gates sees as so important. Like Starbucks and other baby boomer-founded enterprises, Whole Foods treats its employees like stakeholders and gives them a voice in choosing things like health plans. Which is nice, insofar as raising the bar on the quality of drudge work environments, but hardly challenges the fundamentally unequal relationship between owners and producers. Of course, I wouldn’t expect such from either Mackey or Gates.

Model Minority expresses the deepest form of skepticism I have seen so far.

Expecting capitalism to help people is like expect dope dealers to save the ‘hood. In fact, In many ways the crack game is capitalism in its purest form.

One last note: If Gates is serious about good corporate citizenship and enlisting government as a partner, perhaps Microsoft should start paying its fair share of taxes to the State of Washington.

I am quite tired as I post this cartoon, being that it’s late in the night closing in on the twilight zone (or, as Chuck Berry called ‘em, the “wee-wee hours” - but that just makes me wanna pee), I will quote Roberto Lavato’s take on Obama’s Grand Tour: The American Idoling of Empire?

Simply voting for and electing Obama will not solve the crisis of the rapidly declining empire hidden behind mainstream media euphemisms like “superpower” or “leader of the free world”; He could simply become the darker-skinned, smarter, friendlier front man for the most massive military empire in history -and we its willing imperial citizens, as indicated by George W. Bush’s skyrocketing poll numbers immediately following the Iraq invasion in 2003. Given that numerous polls of world public opinion now tell us that militarism, military occupation and war have leveled love of the U.S. just about everywhere, a timely and critical question to ask Obama during and after his Grand Tour is, “How many of the 737 military bases the Pentagon maintains in over 130 foreign countries on every continent are you willing to close?”

And, given what economists like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz tell us in thick books with startling titles like “The Three Trillion Dollar War” -that militarism is at the center of our growing national and global economic crises (ie; military spending busts budgets and increases debt, war decreases the amount available oil, war spending diminishes money for bridges, schools and health care, etc.) — we might also add the question, “And how quickly are you going to dismantle those bases?”

As Obama takes his charismatic calls for “change” global, neither he nor we can afford to continue turning a blind eye to the fact that all those bases, all those wars and all that imperial behavior have not just made us less safe in the world -and much poorer; they also unleashed domestic threats to the “civil society and rule of law” that Obama waxed patriotic about during his interview: unilateral decisions to go to war based on lies (lies accepted and repeated by most major institutions), a constitution shredded in the name of “protecting the homeland”, criminal corporations protected under cover of “national security” and an increasingly secretive executive branch accountable to no one.

How long ago was Part One? February 7, 2008. It’s not my intention to have the parts of series separated by months, but weird things happened. I came down with carpal tunnel syndrome, so I had to stop cartooning for a few weeks just to let my wrist and hand rest. Then the political primary season changed significantly, including Romney’s drop out. And, frankly, more pressing and interesting issues arose.

I returned to this second part not only to simply finish what I had started, but also to respond to all the speculation that McCain will choose Romney as his Vice President. There are a lot of conservatives out there who consider Romney the strongest choice to pair with McCain, who still can’t convince some conservatives that he’s genuinely on their side. How Romney - who will eat a plate of dog shit if told it would make him look more conservative - comes off as gen-u-wine, I have no idea. And some conservatives — Mormon-phobic evangelicals and anti-health care plan libertarians, especially — are not impressed.

I say go for it, John. I would love to see Independents run screaming toward Obama once they got a whiff of Romney’s aftershave.

Last Fall I did another Messing With Romney strip that kinda started the whole running gag and introduced his political consultants. I might keep those guys around. They amuse me.

When I hear either Obama or McCain discuss their Big Important Plans for the Middle East, one thing I wonder is, where are you going to get the troops? Aren’t we already wearing down the people we have over there with multiple tours of duty and longer assignments?

Another thing I wonder is, Are either of these guys remotely connected to reality? McCain has been smoking some neo-con gange for a long time now, and his pipe dreams scare me the most. But Obama’s Middle Eastern tour has revealed some scary fantasies of his own, so says Juan Cole.

Obama’s aggressive stance, on the other hand, could be counterproductive. The Illinois senator had praised the Pakistani elections of last February, issuing a statement the next day saying, “Yesterday, a moderate majority of the Pakistani people made their voices heard, and chose a new direction.” He criticized the Bush administration, saying U.S. interests would be better served by “advancing the interests of the Pakistani people, not just Pakistan’s president.”

Yet the parties elected in February in Pakistan are precisely the ones demanding negotiations with the tribes and militants of the northwest, rather than frontal military assaults. Indeed, it is the Bush administration that has pushed for military strikes in the FATA areas. Obama will have to decide whether he wants to risk undermining the elected government and perhaps increasing the power of the military by continuing to insist loudly and publicly on unilateral U.S. attacks on Pakistani territory.

Nor is it at all clear that sending more U.S. troops to southern Afghanistan can resolve the problem of the resurgence of the Taliban there. American and NATO search-and-destroy missions alienate the local population and fuel, rather than quench, the insurgency. Resentment over U.S. airstrikes on innocent civilians and wedding parties is growing. Brazen attacks on U.S. forward bases and on institutions such as the prison in the southern city of Kandahar are becoming more frequent. To be sure, Obama advocates combining counterinsurgency military operations with development aid and attention to resolving the problem of poppy cultivation. (Afghan poppies are turned into heroin for the European market, and the profits have fueled some of the Taliban’s resurgence.) Stepped-up military action, however, is still the central component of his plan.

Before he jumps into Afghanistan with both feet, Obama would be well advised to consult with another group of officers. They are the veterans of the Russian campaign in Afghanistan. Russian officers caution that Afghans cannot be conquered, as the Soviets attempted to do in the 1980s with nearly twice as many troops as NATO and the U.S. now have in the country, and with three times the number of Afghan troops as Karzai can deploy. Afghanistan never fell to the British or Russian empires at the height of the age of colonialism. Conquering the tribal forces of a vast, rugged, thinly populated country proved beyond their powers. It may also well prove beyond the powers even of the energetic and charismatic Obama. In Iraq, he is listening to what the Iraqis want. In Pakistan, he is simply dictating policy in a somewhat bellicose fashion, and ignoring the wishes of those moderate parties whose election he lauded last February.

The upside is that I got some fun reading done - Carl Hiaasen’s Sick Puppy, and Douglas Adams’ Mostly Harmless (which strangely I had not read before, despite my life-long love of Adams’ work). Sick Puppy is a comic novel set in the late 90s about an environmentalist with an anger management problem who stalks and torments a litterbug Republican lobbyist. It’s hilarious.

Anyhoo, there will be a cartoon tomorrow. Promise!

The other day Senator John McCain mocked Senator Barack Obama for doubting that the so-called “surge” (er, escalation) of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq would stabilize the country — a doubt that was nearly conventional wisdom last year, but conventional wisdom has pretty much changed its fickle mind lately, not only giving McCain license to ridicule his rival’s “lack of judgment,” but even prompting the Obama campaign to scrub its website of Obama’s criticism of the surge strategy.

All of which would be risible were so many lives not destroyed by this oil-grubbing, empire-addled “misadventure.”

Or if, say, the conventional wisdom not so simple-minded. As the Crisis Group report released a few months ago noted, whatever successes the “surge” advocates can claim are tenuous at best.

But on their own, without an overarching strategy for Iraq and the region, these tactical victories cannot turn into lasting success. The mood among Sunnis could alter. The turn against al-Qaeda in Iraq is not necessarily the end of the story. While some tribal chiefs, left in the cold after Saddam’s fall, found in the U.S. a new patron ready and able to provide resources, this hardly equates with a genuine, durable trend toward Sunni Arab acceptance of the political process. For these chiefs, as for the former insurgents, it mainly is a tactical alliance, forged to confront an immediate enemy (al-Qaeda in Iraq) or the central one (Iran). Any accommodation has been with the U.S., not between them and their government. It risks unravelling if the ruling parties do not agree to greater power sharing and if Sunni Arabs become convinced the U.S. is not prepared to side with them against Iran or its perceived proxies; at that point, confronting the greater foe (Shiite militias or the Shiite-dominated government) once again will take precedence.

Forces combating the U.S. have been weakened but not vanquished. The insurgency has been cut down to more manageable size and, after believing victory was within reach, now appears eager for negotiations with the U.S. Still, what remains is an enduring source of violence and instability that could be revived should political progress lag or the Sons of Iraq experiment falter. Even al-Qaeda in Iraq cannot be decisively defeated through U.S. military means alone. While the organisation has been significantly weakened and its operational capacity severely degraded, its deep pockets, fluid structure and ideological appeal to many young Iraqis mean it will not be irrevocably vanquished. The only lasting solution is a state that extends its intelligence and coercive apparatus throughout its territory, while offering credible alternatives and socio-economic opportunities to younger generations.

The U.S. approach suffers from another drawback. It is bolstering a set of local actors operating beyond the state’s realm or the rule of law and who impose their authority by force of arms. The sahwat in particular has generated new divisions in an already divided society and new potential sources of violence in an already multilayered conflict. Some tribes have benefited heavily from U.S. assistance, others less so. This redistribution of power almost certainly will engender instability and rivalry, which in turn could trigger intense feuds – an outcome on which still-active insurgent groups are banking. None of this constitutes progress toward consolidation of the central government or institutions; all of it could amount to little more than the U.S. boosting specific actors in an increasingly fragmented civil war and unbridled scramble for power and resources. Short-term achievement could threaten long-term stability.

But, hey, fuck that. Back to Afghanistan!