CSotD: Short takes, with only two (promise!) about the NSA
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Can't relate to this Rhymes With Orange too directly because we only use the ATM, and the dog doesn't expect food until he sees a person.
On the other hand, going to the coffeeshop's driveup leaves him disappointed indeed, since you don't get french fries with a cup of coffee, and our routine is that I get the Diet Coke and the burger-no-cheese-no-mayo and only a couple of the french fries before the rest of them go over my shoulder into the back seat.
However, I can no longer go to the walk-up ATM in the bank lobby because he has discovered that, if you go inside, they give you doggy cookies. Which is to say, I can go to the walk-up ATM if I want to, but then we have to go inside anyway.
Here's Hilary's pal Rocky (though I see she credits the gag to "Chloe the Lab.")
And there's some other stuff worth perusing there. Note that her trophy is the tallest! Boom! Take that!
Today's Bizarro required no words, nor do I have any.
But when Gary Varvel and I agree on anything, it's worth a bit of discussion.
It's possible that Edward Snowden is a complete genius who recognizes a way to leverage the oddly sort-of-semi-autonomous position of Hong Kong and the fact that he's embarrassing the US into some protection, but it's not a gambit I would have tried.
It reminds me of the guy in the Godfather who asks Don Corleone to whack his daughter's rapist: First of all, he doesn't quite know how these things work, and, second of all, he doesn't have the standing to make that kind of request anyway.
John Oliver — who is doing a great job at the Daily Show — had an interview with Fareed Zakaria the other night in which they spoke of the importance of China and US working out a relationship that is not based on hostility and competition, and how critical it is that both countries recognize this necessity. (see below)
As a result, any time you've got North Korea running around threatening Armageddon or some dissident jumping over the wall into the US embassy compound in Beijing, there's some embarrassed chest-to-chest confrontation in which neither person wants to actually take a swing but nobody wants to be seen to back down, either.
I think Snowden is creating one of those moments, and he's not only pitting the US and China against each other in a game of "Let's you and him fight," but also asking Hong Kong to push the limits of its relationship with the mainland.
To which the response surely must be "What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?"
On the other hand, after chewing the guy out, Don Corleone gave him pretty much what he had asked for. So we'll see. But if Snowden thinks he's among friends, he's more naive than is probably good for him.
As I said in the comments section of my initial post on this affair, Snowden reminds me of when I lived in Colorado Springs, and the people who went into Cheyenne Mountain for the first time would come out all wide-eyed with a combination of wonder and horror over what they had seen. Yeah, we can do some boss shit, man.
It's important to realize, though, that sometimes your initial response is the correct one, and "getting over it" is not.
So I'm not sorry Snowden revealed the information, though I differentiate between the leaker, who has to decide if he wants to pay the price for standing up, and the reporter who publishes what he has learned. (And here's a fascinating takedown on that whole thing.)
Civil disobedience is one part of the transaction, but then it becomes a matter of freedom of the press, and Ann Telnaes provides a link to this article about what a jackass Peter King is for his advocacy of prosecuting the reporter on the story.
It's not some big revelation that Peter King is a jackass, but I sometimes forget how I felt about him before I got over it.
In any case, either Snowden is a genius for positioning himself at the center of Hong Kong's relationship with China and China's relationship with the US or …
… or he's not. And I'll bet he's gonna find out.
Meanwhile, here's a kind of jawdropper, in the pot-kettle-namecalling category:
Really? Well, okay.
Here's what the still-superpower countries are up to:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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