The war on rationality.

Just, oy.

I need a title for my next TMW compilation, preferrably something that summarizes the increasingly weird zeitgeist. Send me a winner and you’ll get credit in the book, as well as a signed print of the cartoon of your choice. And some Pearl Jam swag if you want it. Couple of notes: (1) “TOO MUCH CRAZY” has already been suggested by several readers, not to mention my wife, and is under consideration. (2) It’s very, very unlikely that you will come up with a play on the word “Tomorrow” that I have not heard several hundred times before. With that in mind, your ideas are eagerly solicited: tom (dot) tomorrow (at) gmail (dot) com.

Here:

My marker for Obama was whether he’d get a health care bill with a public option. He didn’t. A year ago passage of some sort of health care reform seemed inevitable, and not a tremendous challenge. Only a year of dithering and bipartisaning and gangs of wankers and pre-compromising and, frankly, failure to put forward something simple and popular jeopardized it.

The bill’s more good than bad, but it isn’t what we should have gotten. It isn’t what we voted for.

If passage of this bill helps a single person anywhere, then it was worth passing in whatever form possible. Health care in this country is a total clusterfuck, as anyone who’s ever dealt with an insurance company knows. But teabagger freakouts notwithstanding, this only barely qualifies as a victory.

Regular readers of this site are aware that these are not good days for alt-cartooning. The latest bad news: citing budgetary constraints, Salon is dropping my friend Ruben Bolling’s fantastic Tom the Dancing Bug strip. I find this extraordinarily depressing for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that TTDB (as we insiders call it) is the cartoon my own cartoon wishes it could be when it grows up.

Ruben is looking for a new home on the web, but in the meantime you can always find his comics at his ucomics page, which I strongly encourage you to bookmark.

Just carve out fifteen minutes and watch this. Trust me.

The missing public option. For the record, I don’t support killing the bill — any modest improvement will still affect real people’s lives. Maybe this Rube Goldberg contraption, sans public option, really is the best we could ever have hoped for, in this political climate. That doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating.

Here’s the full article referenced in the fourth panel.

As to the question of whether or not Obama campaigned on the public option, I defer to Ezra Klein:

For one thing, it was in his campaign plan, which is to say, he campaigned on it … The White House argues that they didn’t emphasize it in public speeches, and according to Salon’s Alex Koppelmann, that’s true. But speaking as someone who did a lot of reporting on their health-care plan, they emphasized it privately quite a bit. It was, in fact, their answer to a lot of the other flaws in their proposal. So whether Obama used it in his speeches, his campaign purposefully pushed it to, at the least, some reporters, which is to say they worked to ensure that people knew about the public option’s important role in their health-care thinking.

Obama’s latest statement on this is hair-splitting at best and misleading at worst. That’s even more true given how often he mentioned the public option after he got elected. And it’s a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama.

An update from our friends at Glox News.

Under the category of “I am not making this up”: Sarah Palin says she used to cross the border to Canada to get health care.

She now considers this “ironic.”

Okay, so life got a little complicated for me for awhile there, but things are starting to calm down … so hopefully I’ll be able to deal with the signed edition of the Philly posters before too long. (You can see the whole set here.) I have more names on the wait list than I have posters, so those are most likely all spoken for already, but if I do end up with any sets left over I’ll post a note here. In the meantime it looks like they’re starting to sell (unsigned) copies of the posters at pearljam.com (click on North American Tour Posters). The catch is, you have to join the fan club ($20, click on Memberships) to be eligible to purchase them, but if you end up buying the whole set, that’s just an extra five bucks a poster. (I have no financial stake in fan club sales, just posting this for those of you who might be interested.)

Friday edit: Second poster goes on sale at pearljam.com today, next two are up next week.

(Also adding, for TMW fans not familiar with the PJ poster world: these are 18 x 24 silk-screened posters — printing is much more beautiful than standard offset litho.)