If I only had a dollar for the number of times someone has accused me of hating the rich or wanting to punish success, I'd be a card-carrying member of the 1%. OK, I exaggerate slightly. But it's simply not true that that's where I'm coming from, nor is that the motivation behind OWS.

A couple weeks ago, the NYT published an article interviewing several wealthy people who had grumbly things to say about the Occupy movement. The quote that stuck in my mind was one from Adam Katz, the founder and CEO of private jet service Talon Air.

To many, 99 vs. 1 was an artificial distinction that overlooked hard work and moral character. "It shouldn’t be relevant," said Mr. Katz , who said he both creates jobs and contributes to charitable causes. "I’m not hurting anyone. I’m helping a lot of people."

It may well be the case that Mr. Katz is a decent person who's done a lot of good. But I find myself wondering: how does he vote? Does he support politicians who make it harder for ordinary people to be successful like him? Who appoint Supreme Court justices who seem hell-bent on creating plutocracy? Does he have any concern at all about our Gilded Age levels of inequality? Does he support the carried interest tax break that allows Mitt Romney to pay only a 13.9% income tax rate? These policies, and the arrogance, rationalizations, and excessive self-congratulation that lead to them are the things I hate. Not the rich. (Props, by the way, to the Patriotic Millionaires.)

Out of curiosity, I did a little digging about Katz's political contributions. According to this site, things ain't lookin' good.

I decided to take a week off from the Republican primaries and other assorted nonsense in order to address the pressing matter of "five-fingered" footwear. The other naked-themed items leapt out at me around the same time. I don't have a problem with minimalist shoes or other back-to-basics products, but I do find them curious cultural artifacts. Simplicity has major authenticity in this cluttered world. (Somewhat-related strip here.)

While researching this strip, I learned that Naked juices are owned by PepsiCo and Odwalla by Coca-Cola. It's like a high-end fruit drink proxy war!

I assume most people have heard about Mitt Romney's dog-on-car incident, especially now that even Newt Gingrich is attacking him over it, but to recap briefly: back in the '80s, Mitt stowed the family pooch in a carrier on the roof of the family station wagon for the duration of a 12-hour drive to Ontario. After several hours, the dog, an Irish Setter named Seamus, developed gastric distress that made itself evident on the windows of the station wagon. Mitt stopped at a gas station to hose down the dog and the car, and continued on his merry way, Seamus still riding aloft.

As I drew Mitt's bus, I got to thinking about the Romney campaign logo. I find the symbolism of these things fascinating. The Romney logo divides the "R" into red, white and blue stripes. It sort of looks like three people standing in a row, or an abstractly-shaped waving flag. But what I see most is an R within an R within an R: the rich protecting the rich protecting the rich.

It's no secret that poverty runs high among African-Americans due to a variety of historical factors, and I'm not trying to cover that up. Nor am I trying to pit racial demographics against one another. I'm simply pointing out that when you hear Republicans talking about people on food stamps, they tend to explicitly (or sometimes implicitly) refer to blacks, despite the fact that 5.15 million white households receive food stamps vs. 3.2 million African-American, as of 2009. The fact is, poverty is pretty diverse, and no one group should be singled out as "the food stamp people."

You'd think that decades in politics would knock the racist claptrap out of someone like Newt Gingrich, but, well, this is the GOP we're talking about. Instead, he just substitutes polite-sounding phrases like "African-American community" and "demand paychecks" for "those lazy blacks." How does one go about demanding a paycheck, anyway? I'd like to be able to do that, and have one show up. That would be cool.

The dialogue in the third panel refers to Ron Paul's Paranoid Kook Reports, which contained the theory that the LA riots only came to a halt because everyone went to pick up welfare checks. And right-wing noise machine poopshoveler Brent Bozell said on Fox News that Obama looked like a "skinny ghetto crackhead." Rick Santorum has also made similar comments to Newt's.

To be clear, my point here was not to pick on poor whites, but to criticize the singling out of one group when poverty cuts across multiple demographics. For data on food stamp usage, I looked at this USDA report (big PDF, via the ThinkProgress article linked above; page 75 has the breakdown) and this, which documents disproportionate rural usage, largely by children.

Har! Just a fun-lovin', booty-stealin' marauder! I'm sure these guys would get a real kick out of it:

Above video via a Plum Line post about a conservative laid-off mill worker who says Romney (and Bain Capital) destroyed his life.

Three years ago around this time, I was asked to draw a comic for C-VILLE Weekly about events in the year ahead. At first it felt like I'd been asked to predict the future, and I thought it would be difficult. But after a bit of mulling, I found I could write an entire two-page comic addressing many of the "big" news stories of 2009 -- Obama's inauguration! The Star Trek reboot! The First Puppy! -- before the year even happened. It made me realize just how much news is formulaic. Not to diminish the importance of good journalism; on the contrary! It is the antidote to normalizing fluff.

So I decided to do a mini-version of my "predictive" comic, in a sense. Just remember it in November when you hear some pundit waxing triumphant about the American electoral process, which will most assuredly have sucked in a thousand ways, no matter who won.

So Mitt Romney has taken to giving speeches chock full o' sound bites for the Tea Party, invoking Cold War paranoia and demonizing people who, god forbid, need to use the social safety net during hard times. An excerpt (via Washington Monthly):

"[Obama] seeks to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people to enjoy truly disproportionate rewards are the people who do the redistributing — the government."

What's remarkable about that quote, aside from the fact that it is ludicrously false, is that Romney and the rest of the Republicans seem hell-bent on destroying what little meritocracy is left in this country, and replacing it with aristocracy. Would Mitt be running for president today had his father not been CEO of American Motors and Governor of Michigan? What if George Romney had been a victim of corporate restructuring instead? Would Mitt still have joined Bain Capital, and would he still be passing on that cool $100 million to his sons? And the fact that son Tagg touts his interest in "private equity" in his Twitter profile... surely that's just meritocracy in action, having absolutely nothing to do with the Romney legacy whatsoever.

I really enjoyed drawing Mr. Perkins as Mitt, by the way. I think he plays the part well!