The Funny Papers

Gary Varvel, Bill Day, Mike Smith, John Cole, Steve Sack, David Fitzsimmons, Steve Benson, Drew Sheneman, Nate Beeler, RJ Matson

Bobservations

Making America Great Again requires cutting Utah national parks down by about 90% and opening them up to drilling and mining. Well, it makes America great again for big business and corporations but not for people and the environment.

Carlos and I went to the movies on Sunday—Three Billboards—and he used his cane to help him navigate the streets. Inside the theater, though, we got all kinds of strange looks from people who saw us and wondered why a blind guy with a cane was at the movies. We both got a laugh out of that one.

Apparently, the Fat Bastard spoke about the Wedding Cake Supreme Court case and suggested that bakers put signs in their windows saying, 'We Don't Bake Cakes for Gay Weddings.' And thought that sounded so familiar but where have I heard ….’No colored people at the counter.’

Along that same note, if baking a cake for a same-sex wedding is endorsing homosexuality, then wouldn't voting for a pedophile be endorsing pedophilia?

And on that note, _____ foe, Arizona GOP Senator Jeff Flake donated $100 to Democratic nominee Doug Jones’s campaign for Senate in Alabama, and in the memo line of the check wrote, “Country over Party.” Too bad the rest of the GOP doesn’t feel the same.

In hysteria spreading news, Sean Hannity appeared on Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show where he and Steve Bannon agreed that they both might end up in prison if Obama’s double-super-secret deep state forces get their way. If only ….

The Silence Breakers are TIME's Person of the Year 2017 … the Fat Bastard came in second, which means, again, he lost the popular vote to a woman. The only thing that could be better than The Silence Breakers being Person of the Year this year is the people who finally bring down the entire Trump administration being recognized next year.

White Supremacist, and FOTHFB—Friend of the Fat Bastard—campaigned for Roy Moore last night and chastised Mitt Romney, who criticized Moore, for not going to Vietnam instead of doing his Mormon missionary work. Funny, because Bannon said not one word about Bone Spur Boy.

At the dentist this morning the hygienist wanted to tell me all about her busy holiday season while she had her hands and her tools in my mouth. I couldn’t even ‘Uh huh’ or ‘Huh uh,’ I could only ‘Ack.’

Ryan Zinke Wants To Pave Paradise And Put Up An Oil Rig .. Or A Strip Mine

As goosesteps along in his march to destroy this country and fill his bank account, his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended that four large national monuments in the West be reduced in size so that hundreds of thousands of acres of land ... national park land ... historical lands ... can be opened up to mining, logging and other development.

Zinke’s recommendations revealed in yet another leaked memo—how many leaks is that now for this corrupt administration—and has prompted an outcry from environmental groups, and people with a conscience, who are promising to take the Liar-In-Thief to court to block the moves.

 Zinke’s plan would scale back two huge Utah monuments—Bears Ears, to hence be known as Bears Ear, and Grand Staircase-Escalante, to be renamed, The Stoop— along with Nevada’s Gold Butte, now dubbed Pyrite Hill, and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou, call it a Travesty if you will.

Bears Ears was designated for federal protection by former President Barack Obama ... oh, now we know why _____ wants it decimated ... and is about 1.3 million acres in Utah that is sacred to Native Americans and home to tens of thousands of archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings.

Grand Staircase-Escalante, also in Utah, includes nearly 1.9 million acres and was designated by another democrat, Bill Clinton; the GOP has had it in their sites since 1996.

Cascade-Siskiyou protects about 113,000 acres in an area where three mountain ranges converge, while Gold Butte protects nearly 300,000 acres of desert that feature rock art, sandstone towers and wildlife habitat for bighorn sheep and the threatened Mojave Desert tortoise.

Sadly, the only sites _____ sees as historic are his daughter’s rack and his Golden Toilet.

But Zinke isn’t done; he wants to allow logging at a newly designated monument in a Maine forest and urges more grazing, hunting and fishing at two sites in New Mexico. And he'd like to destroy the oceans; two marine monuments in the Pacific Ocean would also be reduced, while a third, off the Massachusetts coast, would be modified to allow commercial fishing.

Hey, who cares what we destroy, how much of the planet we decimate, how much history we erase, how many endangered species we kill off if someone can make some coins, right?

AP

Meaningless Gesture By Meaningless President

Remember when _____ said he’d donate his salary because he’s just so rich he doesn’t need the coins? And then he didn’t donate a penny?

Well, this week, to his credit ... I’m almost choked on those words ... President _____ announced that he’s donating the first installment of his salary to the National Parks Service. 

Wait ... what?

Yup, he is giving the National Park Service a $78,333.32 donation, in what could be construed as a generous gesture were it not for the fact that _____’s own budget proposal calls for cutting $1.5 BILLION from the Department of the Interior, which operates the National Parks Service.

So, he’s taking away BILLIONS but donating THOUSANDS and he wants anyone to believe this is a good thing? Well, no one does, least of all the Sierra Club:

“If Donald _____ is actually interested in helping our parks, he should stop trying to slash their budgets to historically low levels. This publicity stunt is a sad consolation prize as _____ tries to stifle America’s best idea.”

And what a stunt it was; at a press briefing this week, _____’s spokestool Melissa McCarthy Sean Spicer made a yuuuuuuge display of handing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke the $78,333.32 check with _____’s abnormally large signature, written by his oh so tiny hands, displayed prominently.

The donation amounts to about one quarter of his annual presidential salary and is also .005% of the amount he cut from the Interior Department budget so, yeah, it’s another meaningless gesture by this meaningless president.

And luckily the media didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. Time Magazine reporter Zeke Miller, in light of the donation, asked Spicer if Trump was also considering reimbursing taxpayers for travel and security expenses for his weekend escapades to Mar-a-Lago.

Spicer was not amused.

Neither are the American people, Sean.

Occupy Democrats

Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake Are Selling Native American Holy Lands For Their Own Personal Gain

One of the most beautiful spots on Earth is the Grand Canyon in Arizona, but I’m kinda wondering how long we’ll be able to enjoy that spot, what with the antics of a pair of Arizona legislators.

Thanks to Old Man In The Senate, John “Get Off'a My Lawn” McCain, and his cohort in asshattery Senator Jeff Flake — oh so aptly named — an Apache holy site is about to be handed off to a foreign mining company that will scrape the land down about a 1,000 feet and leave a scar some two-miles wide. But hey, it’s just a Native American holy site, and, with money coming in from a foreign company, why wouldn’t McCain and Flake wanna get rid of it.

Resolution Copper Mining — a joint endeavor by the U.K.’s Rio Tinto and Australia’s BHP-Billiton — has had their eyes on Oak Flat because of the deposits of copper and other ores in the ground there. But Oak Flat was declared a protected area back in 1955 by President Dwight Eisenhower, and that has kept the mining threat at bay even in the face of multiple proposals to sell the land that have been brought before Congress over the last 10 years.

So, how does this happen now you ask? Well, it happens because of money; John McCain, lying hypocritical money-grubbing fuck-monkey just happens to be Congress’ largest recipient of campaign contributions from Rio Tinto, and Jeff Flake was once a paid lobbyist for Rio Tinto.

Surprise! And so, because their wallets are bulging with Rio Tinto cash, McCain and Flake made an end run around the opposition to the sale last December when they slipped a provision putting Oak Flat up for sale into the hundreds of pages of legislation that made up the Defense Authorization Act, a law funding the military whose passage was considered crucial, and basically guaranteed.

And so now this holy site, used as a ceremonial and burial ground by the Apaches, which pre-dates history, as shown by petroglyphs on the rock, is up for sale, to be mined, stripped and gutted; oh, and let’s not forget that Oak Flat is also a national recreation property, used by birders, campers, climbers and hikers.

The good news is that as soon as McCain and Flake cashed their Rio Tinto checks and snuck their little piece of legislation into a completely different bill, the San Carlos Apache Tribe began organizing a protest; tribe chairman, Terry Rambler wrote to other Native tribes:

“We have a dream that one day our children and their children to follow may freely practice the religious ceremonies that come from our Creator. We must stand together and fight those, like Resolution Copper, that seek to take our religious freedom, our most human right. If we do not, our beliefs, our spiritual lives, the very foundation of our language, our culture and our belief will no longer be in balance, and we will become undone. If we do not, the taking of one people’s human right threatens all human and religious rights.”

In February, over 300 members of the San Carlos Apache tribe began an occupation of the Oak Flat campground in protest of the impending sale, along with the support of the Sierra Club and the Arizona Audubon Society, Concerned Citizens, the Retired Miners Association, and Concerned Climbers of Arizona, and other Native groups like the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Tribe, the Jicarilla Apache Tribe, the InterTribal Council of Arizona, and the National Congress of American Indians.

The better news? What McCain and Flake have done can be undone. A federal environmental Impact Statement has to be issued before the transfer can take place and that process will take several years, so, We The People can put pressure on Congress to repeal McCain and Flake’s disgraceful rider.

Step one: contact your state’s Congressman and protest the sale; while you're at it, contact McCain and Flake.

Step two: the people of Arizona need to get John McCain and Jeff Flake — who are doing what’s best for their own personal interests, campaigns, and bank accounts and not what’s best for Arizona, or this country — out of office.

Seriously. If asshats and fuckmonkeys like McCain and Flake have their way, why don’t we mine and frack and drill, and pave over the entire country and sell the lands to foreign investors?

Ain’t that America?

Reverb Press

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