I have to admit I’m surprised, but apparently the Arizona Daily Star has decided that Trudeau’s current Doonesbury sequence would be just too much for the delicate sensibilities of the Christian conservatives in our midst.

It’s odd that those folks who have no hesitancy in trying to force their views on the rest of us are so tender-minded that they have to be protected against criticism by comic strip.

Perhaps the Star published an explanation for cutting this week’s Doonesbury and I missed it…but I bet they didn’t even have the courage to do that. (If I’m wrong I’m sure that some Citizen reader will point it out.)

You can read yesterday’s strip here. And don’t miss the scarlet A on the back of the woman’s clip board.

In today’s strip she meets Sid Patrick, one of the sponsors of the Texas sonogram bill. Insert your cursor here.

Critics of OWS seem to be obsessed with the notion that the movement needs to move on. “Okay,” they say, “You’ve made your point. It’s time to fold your tents and get organized politically.”

What these critics seem to want is traditional politics. Support candidates, run for office, vote. Something along these lines is certainly one way of being “political,” and the progressive movement is already ramping up to support candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

But one point that the Occupy movement has made is that the political system has become so dysfunctional that we need to broaden the definition of ‘political action.’ This has already happened. In two months OWS has shifted the nation’s debate away from the single issue of the deficit and, at least in part, refocused it on jobs and the reform and control of the financial system.

It would be a political act to hold marches and teach-ins the goal of which was to force the main stream media to expand its coverage of the influence of lobbying on legislation and the way in which our tax laws have been skewed to facilitate the flow of tax benefits upward to benefit the giant transnational corporations.

Critics of the OWS movement assume (or want us to assume) that the complaints of the occupiers are all personal, because so much of the messaging has taken the form of individual tales of hardship. Underlying all that (and some really amusing signs and slogans) is a very clear message:

This nation’s financial and political systems have become so dysfunctional that they no longer function to promote the general welfare.

So what is to be done? Certainly we should keep up the marches and General Assemblies; they are excellent tools for pointing out problems that need to be corrected and individual legislators do respond when their feet are being held to the fire of public anger.

We should support individual legislators at all levels of government, but we should be wary of being co-opted by any political party. The Obama administration would be enchanted to have the Occupiers leap upon the re-election bandwagon, but they tend to be more skeptical now than they were four years ago..rightly or wrongly. There’s still a year to go.

It is too soon after the resolution of the great debt crisis “compromise” to predict its consequences. It might after all turn out that money and jobs trickle down from the coffers of the protected banks, corporations and ultra rich.

Perhaps in the new America of fiscal responsibility the working class will be inspired to hitch up its collective britches and realize the American dream unhampered by the cost of compulsory of health insurance; unsnarled in safety nets; and freed of the cruel domination of labor unions. And all at the minimum wage.

In other words we might actually realize, and come to adore, the great conservative heaven

Of course there is always the chance that we will watch a process of slow decay as we produce a permanent under-class of the unemployed, and underemployed, whose lack of buying power eats away at small business, by denying those businesses customers.

Keith Olbermann has offered an excellent analysis of what the nation has been put through. He doesn’t think polite letters to  our congressmen are going to turn things around.

… the only response is to be organized and unified and hell-bent in return. We must find again the energy and the purpose of the 1960′s and early 1970′s and we must protest this deal and all the God damn deals to come, in the streets. We must arise, non-violently but insistently. General strikes, boycotts, protests, sit-ins, non-cooperation take-overs – but modern versions of that resistance, facilitated and amplified, by a weapon our predecessors did not have: the glory that is instantaneous communication.