I’ve posted a new entry for Weapon Brown’s Pen Pals, and look! The Mad Magazine blog just posted one of my Scooby Don’t! cartoons. So I guess we’re talking residuals, right guys?

Guys? Mr.Neuman? Sir?

I’ve got to hand it to the Little Movement That Could. As of last week I was among those who thought that this was another of those perennial noise parades that young leftists are great at starting but are usually only recollected when you find a DVD documentary of it on the New Release wall.

But from its humble beginnings on September 17th, the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown from a few naked folks demanding air time to hordes of smelly hippies sending the Short Hairs running to the store for underwear bleach.

And while history suggests that the modern liberal base does not have the organizational skills or the support in Washington to make a serious go of this, we are living in the age of surprises. If the cantankerous coots of the right wing could get off their pruney asses and briefly make Michelle Bachmann a contender for the Oval Office, how much more can we expect from these kids with all their supple cartilage?

Again, I do not want to get my hopes up. I was part of the frolic in NYC during the protests at the 2004 Republican Convention, and endured the same orange netting, aggressive cops and 36 hours in the clink, so I completely empathize with the OWS crowd. But from my distant pulpit I also behold the same things that caused the events of ’04 to add up to nought: a thousand complaints, no agenda, and a party atmosphere masquerading as unity.

I am encouraged, however, by some of the pluck these guys are showing. The Greek chorus they use in lieu of bullhorns is innovative and, from a superficial point of view, demonstrates that on some level these guys have their act together. I am also not falling for the media spin that the 99% don’t know what they stand for. They may not know how to articulate their common complaints for the camera yet, but in their hearts they know what brung ‘em. Enough time together out in the cold will bring that glue to the surface or drive them back to their dorm rooms.

It is also interesting to note just how prickly the conservatives are over this. The moment the Occupy movement started spawning imitators in other cities the right wing swung into reaction mode. Even the normally sedate Canadians are crapping kittens. Scroll ahead to 2:50 to hear Kevin O’Leary on the CBC’s The Lang & O’Leary Exchange give guest Chris Hedges the Fox News treatment:

Obviously anyone offering a voice to the people Occupying their various cities, especially those who can offer a narrative that the public can digest, is going to be red meat for the sharks of corporate media. These unfolding events must have Anne Coulter dewey enough between the legs to grow mushrooms, and one can already predict the books she and her ilk will pen if this thing lasts even one week longer, with titles like “The One-Percent Solution” and “Curb Their Enthusiasm: A Conservative’s Guide to Curb-Stomping Street Protesters”.

But the real enemy, as always, is going to be the indifference of liberal politicians to this stirring within the nation’s slumber. Liberal pols flee from the likes of street protesters like vampires from the noon sun. They do not wish to treat with any sort of base that has concerns ranging beyond butt sex, lest they intimidate the wealthy  folks they too spend their weekends with.

In the long term, if the Occupiers want to do battle with the Tea Baggers and win, they will have to make common cause with them in realizing that the real problem is Democrats who won’t choose sides.

Am I going mad or am I saner than I have ever been?? Once again, Apple Movie Trailers is filled with so many duplicate images I feel like someone has tattooed fractals on my retinas! This is it people… all of Alex Jones’ prophecies are coming true! Once you see the evidence below you will understand why I have to kill Alex and usher him into Messiahhood faster than anticipated!

The Ides of March		Heavy Times
	vs.

I trust I don’t have to explain this one to any of you. Come the Ides of March, we are all in for some heavy times (probably from the earth’s magnetic poles reversing!) The split-face imagery is merely a warning: truth is often confused with schizophrenia by those who have unplugged from the Spectacle!

Martha Marcy May Marlene		The Woman
	vs.

Nietzsche was the first to  theorize that a woman’s lies accumulate in her womb and flow out with her menses. Still, Woman’s wickedness has long been constrained through the masculine authority of the letter M. The message here is clear: our nation’s alphabet is losing the Culture War! When the poles reverse our protective Ms will all invert and the She Beast will be set loose upon a nation of emasculated nancy boys!

Immortals		Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance		The Hunger Games
	vs.		vs.

Stop, Hollywood! Don’t burn me anymore in the molten lava of your movie poster flame motifs! Your secret communiques have all been received! I am shaving my head and pouring Bac~Os in my ears just as you have instructed!

You can pretend you didn’t see what you just saw, but you can’t pretend that you aren’t in denial for pretending it! Grab your aluminum foil and meet me under the Main Street overpass when you are ready to face the truth! The Revolution can’t succeed without you! And remember: aluminum foil, not goddamn Cling Wrap!!

The Great Weapon Brown Art Sale has accomplished its goal! As I predicted, my irresistible artwork proved irresistible to many of you, and the money dribbled in over the months at nearly the speed of a trickle! I’d like to thank everyone who participated, and hope that when our economy is done imploding and we are all living like animals, you find the artwork as tasty as it is beautiful.

Also, the winner of the kickin’ “Brown Lantern” artwork you see at the top of the page is none other than James Hibbs! Congratulations James. Enjoy your prize with a little soy sauce.

I decided to take my outrage at the Battleship movie more publicker and launched a thread on the Something Awful forums, asking people to suppose what other board game-to-movie adaptations might be in the works. There have been some amusing Photoshopped speculations. Take a look! Below is my own prediction.

…

Chicago and Baltimore were great shows! I was happy to meet so many of my fans face to face, and only wish that some of you would invest in some face cream. Here is a round-up of a few of my precious memories. As usual a slip of the tongue here, a misinterpreted glance there, and I suddenly found myself in hot water.

I’m not sure who this chick is dressed up as, but if I had to guess, I’d say she is portraying the Black Widow from Iron Man 2, but from an alternate universe where Scarlett Johnansson lost the role to Janeane Garafalo.

How did I upset this red raccoon pirate? HOW???

Ur-Blockhead Rene Castellano shows off his newest acquisition: the Blockhead’s War page with Alley Oop’s dick. Yep. He’s the one who finally went for it. Rene Castellano, folks.

I leered at Hit Girl and told her “I’d hit that!”, and got what I deserved.

These are mushroom soldiers from Super Mario Bros., dressed up as I don’t know what from Kingdom Hearts. The logo on my shirt is like a swastika in their world or something.

Nine times out of ten, promising that I will “swallow the soul” of my customer leads to a sale. Not this time, though.

Honestly, all I asked Gumby was if–being made out of clay as he is and being exposed to the air and all– he was getting hard . I think he deliberately misunderstood me.

You have to be careful what time of the month you choose for cunnilingus, Vision. She’s called the Scarlet Witch for a reason.

Please, don’t shoot! It’s not a come-on line! There really is an oven mitt on your shoulder!

Teabagged by Captain Underpants. Nice knowin’ ya, teaching career!

…

Finally, I met those crazy guys from Red Letter Media, the ones responsible for the Star Wars reviews I will describe to anyone who will listen like some alien-abducted Alaskan lumberjack, in Chicago. They graciously took a couple copies of Weapon Brown off of me and returned the favor by gifting me with a copy of their cool movie, a Gremlins/Critters/Ghoulies homage called Feeding Frenzy. And look! They even featured Weapon Brown in their post-con video. Thanks guys! As soon as I’ve got some weed I am watching the hell out of Feeding Frenzy. I mean, I’m sure it’s great without drug-enhancement, but I don’t want to miss out on its deeper significance.

“Well, this shit won’t sell. Maybe we could E-bay the painting.”

Now that I have satisfied you beyond words with the revelation of  the identity of Mr. Priceless, surely you won’t mind another delay in the next strip? Surely not!

I will be in the alien state of Baltimore this weekend for the Baltimore Comic-Con (Artist Alley, table A181), so that means my drawing schedule has once again been screwed by my selling schedule. Next week’s update will be on Friday, and then, with Thor as my witness, I will be back to plain ol’ Monday/Thursday the week thereafter.

I have plenty of animated cartoons in the Megoplex that, if my webstats are accurate, haven’t been watched  in three years.Why not reserve an afternoon and watch them all?

And don’t forget, the Great Weapon Brown Art Sale wraps at the end of this month! Don’t miss your chance to win that sweet Brown Lantern artwork at the top of the page. Buy my artwork! I’m the only thing keeping this damn economy afloat!!

Keuth Koffler is a White House correspondent who maintains a blog called White House Dossier. This generally even-temperered conservative nonetheless provides ample red meat for sedentary Che Guevara’s like myself, and I comment on his posts often. I thought his most recent editorial deserved some deconstruction.

Keith leads off by taking the temperature of the zeitgeist, and–no surprise–discovers that America is in an unprecedented spiral into the abyss:

“There is a sickness gripping America, an systemic illness that threatens President Obama more than any particular problem. Because the problems are but symptoms of the illness. Two of the symptoms appeared just in the last few hours: the downgrade of U.S. debt, and the shooting down of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, killing 31 U.S. special forces. The downgrade is not just an economic blow; it’s a disgrace. (…) The illness, perceived by a country that overwhelmingly says things are on the wrong track, is such: This country is out of control, and the president is either incompetent or unwilling to lead it. Other symptoms abound: the abnegation of the U.S. leadership in the world, the rise of China to take our place, the failure to deal with a gnat like Qaddafi, the high price of gasoline, the millions of jobless American. The president has both created the illness and failed to cure it(…)”

Koffler’s sentiments could have been written by anyone at anytime during a period of economic malaise, and revisionist history (encapsulated in the last sentence quoted above) always trots at the heels of those who have just woken up to long-term trends. The skyrocketing price of gasoline , the ascension of China as a first-world economy and two fruitless wars are not new crises at all. They erupted into full bloom under George W. Bush. But dealing with these facts sanely would require that the Republican’s be willing to address publicly the emptiness of their own promises over the past decade. If this reconciliation to facts were paired with the anxiety of a largely deflated Democratic base, the resultant honesty could pave the way for a serious reconstitution of our leadership class.

Instead, the conservatives, their faces covered in crusted egg, have chosen the other route: The Tea Party, a rigid (and we see now see largely catastrophe-bent) resurgent right wing, which seeks to do in one congressional term what the Republicans have pledged and failed to do since Reagan: shrink government to the point of being able to “drown it in a bathtub”. But the Tea Party is both the product and victim of our times. Spurred by a rapid growth in spending. they have arrived too late for their dogma of a taxless Utopia to undo the damage that their own forebears have wrought.

Not that Obama has managed to distinguish himself as the man of the hour that the times cry out for, but considering the hog waller he inherited he could be doing worse. And yet the conservatives have employed pure schizophrenia against Obama from the moment that John Roberts fucked up his swearing-in. They demand leadership but put a shotgun to his balls from the moment he wakes up in the morning. How can a president lead a country where half the population questions his very citizenship? Meanwhile, seasoned Republicans cannot figure out whether to burn the president in effigy or seek asylum in Saudi Arabia. John Boehner has proven his impotence at wrangling the Uruk Hai of his upstart House, while even low simmer Republicans like Mitch McConnell are pleased to tell the nation that Congress’ agenda is not governance, but making Barack Obama a one-term president. Is anyone surprised, then, that the mood of the public is like one of children waiting for Mommy and Daddy to announce their divorce?

Koffler, again revealing his deliberate ignorance of recent history, continues to lay at Obama’s feet the sins for which Republicans past and present were  co-signers:

“(Obama) is a leader who has never led anything larger than a Senate office, and he is a liberal ideologue. The credit downgrade is the direct result of the president’s failure to get a handle on the cascading U.S. debt, a potentially existential threat to the nation. (…) His ideology trumped any sense of responsible management of the country. Similarly the war in Afghanistan. Presented by the military with the options of increasing troops by 80,000 to get the job done or 40,000 to maybe get the job done, he took 35,000. And just as even this limited number was starting to have some success, he began withdrawing them. If the job is not going to get done, it would have been better to take the option that had been offered by Vice President Biden – ignominious defeat, with the withdrawal of most troops while trying to keep the pressure on al Qaeda.”

I don’t know which is more delusional: the notion that our recent credit downgrade is the result of anything less than the game of Russian Roulette that the Republicans just played with our credit score in order to preserve unsustainable tax rates or the idea that there is a magic troop level  for Afghanistan that will get anything “done” except prolong a war where we have nothing –nothing– at stake. Al-Qaeda is gone from Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden is dead, and the American public simply doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Taliban. If this war could have been won– a term that even the army fighting it concedes has no meaning– it would have been won years ago. But conservatives, who think that there is still some prestige to be had by grinding down the poorest nation on the planet, just cannot let this one go.

Koffler’s rose-colored cynicism puts me in mind of a quote from George Orwell:

“Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. (…) This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice.”

But what “power” are conservatives idolizing? Surely not Obama, who they hate out of all proportion. Instead they bend the knee to today’s rough circumstances, because today is all they know. They cannot look backwards and see what has brought us here lest they see George W. Bush occluding Ronald Reagan. They cannot stare the facts of geo-capitalism in the eye to discover that free trade has given China the advantages that they are now exploiting with gusto. They hate the wars they loved only one election cycle earlier and do not know why we can’t just push a button and “get ‘er done”. Far from being exuberant patriots, today’s conservatives are extremely pessimistic, and it is their own rancor which feeds this outlook. This is masturbation at it’s most vicious.

The conservatives have chosen the path of bitterness, acrimony and power politics for their own sake. This is why they can’t see the prospect of China burning itself out as their economic growth wanes more rapidly then ours by dint of their enormous and now restive population.  They cannot anticipate the benefit to our economy  of calling it quits in the wars that America has, at heart, abandoned years ago. They see the end of our shuttle program, and don’t feel a swell of pride at all for a nation that just launched a probe to Jupiter, and will soon put another rover on Mars.

Ironically, what Koffler’s editorial reveals is the same fact disclosed by all that Reagan-humping the conservatives are fond of. They dislike Obama because he will not play the daddy. Conservatives are exactly the opposite of the macho, self-reliant John Galt’s they ooze over. They are traditionalists, and that means hearth and home and the strong embrace of a powerful father figure. That is what they want out of a president, not some mellow accommodator.

And Obama likes being a father! It is his strength. He even wrote a gushing children’s book dedicated to his daughters. But that (if I may wildly extend my analogy), is the problem. He is the father of daughters. The conservatives are little boys, and they have been breaking a lot of lamps lately.

It is time for Barack Huessein Obama to bring a little of that Hussein to the forefront. Give the conservatives the no-bullshit attitude they secretly crave. And that would begin by having them hike down their britches and brace for an ass-tanning. They just lost us our Triple-A credit score, and that is going to cost America plenty. If Obama is smart, he’ll let the Republican’s know that their father just came home, and he’s got booze on his breath.

What? You think this is a joke? You think I Photoshopped this?? This isn’t a joke, you assholes! This is a real movie! This has been made! It stars Liam Neeson! This movie has been made! THIS MOVIE IS GOING TO BE RELEASED!!

Why the fuck are you doing this too us, Hollywood?! I feel like the fat chick in Buffalo Bill’s torture pit! “It gargles our diarrhea or else it gets the hose again.” How can you do this to us after G.I. Joe and three Transformers movies?! Are we just ants under a magnifying glass to you??

“Peter Berg (Hancock) produces and directs Battleship, an epic action-adventure that unfolds across the seas, in the skies and over land as our planet fights for survival against a superior force. Based on Hasbro’s classic naval combat game, Battleship stars…” SHUT UP! I don’t want to hear any more!! You can’t base anything on Battleship! It has no plot! The plot is you are bored on a Sunday afternoon and so is your older brother!! This isn’t like Clue, you fucking idiots! Battleship has no characters except red pegs! Who have you cast to play the red pegs? Simon Pegg?? You would do that too, wouldn’t you, you FUCKS!!

Are you actually going to foist this on us? Fucking look at me when I am talking to you, you braindead sack of real estate!! Do you really think America is so lobotomized we  will pay ten dollars to see if you stick to the game’s fucking canon and sink the destroyer with two shots?? Do you think that is what America has come to??  Do you think we are going to sit on the edge of our seats while Liam Neeson pilots his damaged ship into position so he can say “E5!” and destroy the remaining alien space ship with a lucky shot?!

ALIENS??!!??

I’m coming to your house tonight, Hollywood. You did not know there was a line, but there was and you crossed it. I am bringing my nail clippers and Drano, Hollywood. We are going to have a party, just the two of us. The three of us, actually. You, me and hellish pain.The things I will do to you will make for a perfect sequel to Se7en… except there will be no Hollywood to produce it. That is a pity.

I want you to imagine what is going to happen to you tonight, Hollywood. Now stop imagining. Look out the window. I am at your door , Hollywood.

No no. Shhh. No more hoorays…. for Hollywood.

Now that we are down to the last 15 minutes of the debt ceiling debate, I am going to spoil the ending of this schtick-filled Washington blockbuster for you.

Obviously, with  the guarantee of a compromise that would sustain both sides in this Cold War telegraphed early, we now know that after Boehner’s plan reaches the Senate, it will be sent back without any balanced budget amendment language, and the end result will be  an increase in the debt ceiling that pushes the issue past the 2012 elections, with dollar-for-dollar spending reductions over ten years. The rich will enjoy their current blow job tax rates until the next president takes the oath, which will be Obama, after he handily trounces GOP nominee Michelle Bachmann who, despite profiting from a mysterious automobile accident that results in Rick Perry’s decapitation, will not recover from the revelation of Tweeted photos of her husband sucking Rick Warren’s nipples while wearing a Winnie the Pooh costume.

This so-called crisis had everything but Obama and Boehner outrunning a fireball and leaping from the capital dome into the cabin of Navy One. Today the freshman House Republicans gave their conciliation speech, beginning the process of diminishing the expectations of the birther fringe of their movement so as to get the public ready for what they will ultimately send to Obama: a blase´ hike in the debt ceiling spiced with a little paprika of spending cuts. In other words, the deal they could have gotten months ago, if only grandstanding wasn’t first on their agenda.

There will be some whining about the fact that Obama won’t allow this issue to be punted halfway down the field to re-emerge six months from now, but anyone could have predicted that this would never be allowed to happen. So instead we spent the last few weeks watching the lunatic fringe earn their salaries masturbating their egos in front of the American public like apes in a plexiglassed habitat, just to show the world that they’ve got jizz in their balls. You’re still in a cage, assholes.

Never trust a politician who talks about changing business as usual. Both sides have to want to change together or nothing changes at all. Running out the clock on this routine business was nothing more than the same Hollywood horseshit of letting the bomb count down to “1″ before cutting the red wire. Nowadays the real art is deciding which single digit to end on. The concept is so cliche´ that  the number has to have some sort of meta significance, like “4″ being the number of years of happy marriage the hero enjoyed before the villain killed his wife.

Both parties decided to thrill us by taking the doomsday countdown  to “1″, but no one is impressed by this kind of brinksmanship anymore. Cooperating for the good of the nation is the new nail-biting. Think these fuckers will discover that in time to stop dicking our emotions around?