A Disgusting Abomination

In a previous post I wrote about Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency cuts and compared them to the cost of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill and realized that comparison could also be made in a cartoon…so I made it.

As usual, the things you want to spend money on are foolish and wasteful, but the things they want to spend money on are absolutely necessary and one of the many things they want to spend money on (besides more tax cuts for rich people) is a big military parade on Donald Trump’s birthday.

Just in case you haven’t heard:

Trump wants a big military parade (just like his favorite dictators) on his birthday and getting all those tanks and planes and helicopters together in one place won’t be cheap and an Army estimate put the cost of the parade at $25-to-$45 million, but you know the Army lowballed the number because everything winds up costing you way more than the estimate used to convince you to do it and if you don’t believe me, just try having your driveway repaved.

After people complained about the cost of feeding his ego, Trump said the parade wasn’t actually tied to his birthday –it just happened to be on his birthday – and he’s actually honoring the US military which is refreshing change after he called the soldiers who died for our country losers and suckers.

When what Trump said about soldiers got out, people were outraged and being overly-willing to lie like a rug whenever necessary, Trump claimed he never said that, but a general who was with him at the time said, oh yes he did and here’s a story all about that:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/john-kelly-confirms-trump-privately-disparaged-us-service-members-vete-rcna118543

Because people who are promoting bills tend to lie their asses off about what those bills will cost, in 1974 the Congressional Budget Office was formed and the CBO’s job is to give non-partisan budget and economic information to Congress and politicians being humans cross-bred with weasels, agree with those CBO’s estimates when they’re politically convenient and disagree when they’re politically inconvenient.

But outside economists and academics say the CBO’s estimates are credible and right now the CBO estimates the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade and leave 10.9 million more people without health insurance.

(As the top cartoon indicates, estimates from other sources have varied, but the latest I read was $2.4 trillion which still doesn’t change the point the cartoon made about supposed spending cuts.)

According to the Associated Press, the bill has about $3.75 trillion in tax cuts which will be partially offset by $1.3 trillion in federal spending reductions on Medicare and food assistance.

And if you’re wondering who’s going to benefit from other people having no healthcare or food, the bill repeals the excise taxes on gun silencers and tanning services and makes some previous tax cuts permanent and National Dimwit Marjorie Taylor Greene recently made news when she admitted she voted for it without reading it and didn’t know it had a section banning states from regulating AI and I’m assuming that section was added by Representative T-800 from the Great State of Chaos.

Now here’s a story about the bill helping the rich and hurting the poor so I guess we should start calling the president Dooh Nibor which is Robin Hood in reverse and there just might be a cartoon in that:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/02/big-beautiful-tax-bill-deficit-trump

As (and here let’s go with “everybody”) could see coming, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have split up because two egomaniacs have a hard time sharing one spotlight and Elon gave Donald his letter sweater back and Donald returned all Elon’s love letters and they’re talking to Johnny Depp about having their butt tattoos removed because that deppshit had “Winona Forever” tattooed on his arm which must have gone over great with subsequent girlfriends and/or wives like Ellen Barkin, Kate Moss, Vanessa Paradis, Amber Heard, Joelle Rich and Yulia Vlasova.

Anyway…

Turns out Elon actually wanted to stay in government, but was “rebuffed” (because the first “buffing” obviously didn’t take) and like a jilted girlfriend, Elon went all nasty and called Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill a “disgusting abomination.”

Trump fired back and said the quickest way to cut the budget would be to eliminate the “billions and billions of dollars” the government gives Musk for building exploding rockets and cars that catch on fire.

Not knowing when to shut the fuck up, Musk responded and dared Trump to cut funding for his companies and said Trump should be impeached.

All of which is great for me because two immature idiots slinging mud at each other makes for great cartoon material.

Thanks, guys.

The Mysterious Dr. X Comes for a Visit

I hate to break it you if you’re a Midwesterner, but when you grow up in California you don’t spend a lot of time wishing you lived in a climate in which the air is so thick you can cut it into blocks and build a tool shed, so back in the late 1970s when my best friend told me he was moving to Kansas City to go to med school I laughed at him and made dumb jokes about avoiding twisters, cattle stampedes and banjo-playing hillbillies.

Turned out the joke was on me, because I got fired by the San Diego Union and was eventually offered a job in…wait for it…

Kansas City.

When I came to town I moved in with my friend and his wife and they were living in Gladstone and none of us had much money because I’d been unemployed for a year and he was going to med school and his wife was teaching school, so we’d look for cheap meals and go to Happy Hours and buy one beer each and nurse it through the evening while filling up on popcorn and any free appetizers a bar was foolish enough to leave laying around in our immediate vicinity.

But then my friend’s wife got pregnant (he was in med school, you’d think he’d know how to avoid that) and I had to move out of their house so they could turn my bedroom into a nursery and I still blame their daughter for costing me cheap lodgings.

I mean, some people are so self-centered.

The point of all this is my friend and his wife lived here for four years, but didn’t have the money or time to explore Kansas City and he just came back for a visit so I took him to some of the places that make Kansas City special like:

• Q39

• Pierpont’s in Union Station

• Liberty Memorial

• A Kansas City Royals’ game

• First Watch

• Garozzo’s

• The Drum Room

• City Diner

• Teocali’s

• The Savoy

• Boulevard Brewing Company’s beer hall

• McClain’s Bakery

• Rosedale BBQ

And…

• The Mercury Room

Which sounds like a fabulous time (and was) but when you do all that with a doctor, he makes annoying comments about the cinnamon roll you’re about to eat “spiking your glucose” or what a Bourbon Barrel Quad beer is doing to your liver or how the Q39 Judge’s plate is enough protein to feed a family of four for the next two weeks and in four days with my doctor friend I got diagnosed with hearing problems, a bad case of acid reflux and possibly high cholesterol and if I keep eating like that I’m sure to develop gout, Type 2 diabetes, the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu.

First off…

I don’t eat like that unless I have a visitor and I’m well aware that a steady diet of alcohol and pork is bad for you and will eventually result in you developing a beer belly and voting Republican, but at my age I’m playing with House Money and figure I’m going to eat and drink whatever I want whenever I want (thank God I don’t want to do it that often) and hearing how much damage I was doing to myself took some of the pleasure out it.

And…

The really annoying part is he was eating and drinking all the same stuff while dispensing medical warnings between bites and swallows which shouldn’t surprise me because doctors have to take the Hypocritic Oath and now that he’s discovered he can’t get Bourbon Barrel Quad in California he’s suggested I bring a case of it when I visit my mom on her 100^th birthday.

In any case…

That’s why there’s been a shortage of cartoons for the past week and when I asked my friend if he was OK with me writing about all this he said he’d prefer if I didn’t use his name or his picture probably because he still thinks I’m bringing him a case of Bourbon Barrel Quad that he doesn’t want to share it with anybody.

And now I need to stop writing immediately and make some doctor appointments.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/