P.S. Yes, I'm safely out of the mountains and just now beginning to get caught up with --- and make sense of --- the mountains of stuff that I very happily missed over the past week.

We desperately could use a toon or two around here of late. Sorry this is not a happier or funnier one though...

As to the extra punchline at bottom right, it's a reference to the quote misattributed to Churchill: "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities."

And, by the way, a better name for "Carbon Tax" is "Pollution Tax".

Yes, companies who dump huge amounts of pollution --- tons and tons of it --- into our atmosphere every single day ought not be able to do it for free, as they do now, since we all have to pay the price of cleaning it up, as we are now doing in spades.

[Hat-tip Joe Romm at Climate Progress]

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Last April, in an article which covered an ethics complaint filed by the Center for Media and Democracy against 43 Republican state legislators, The BRAD BLOG went to great lengths to explain how the "legislative task force" system employed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was not merely subverting but supplanting our representative form of democracy. It was an article that would later be reprinted by The American Trial Lawyer magazine.

But, leave it to a Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, like Mark Fiore, to provide a more succinct explanation of the same phenomenon in this relatively short but powerful animated toon...

In completely related news...Yesterday, the NYTimes' statistical wunderkind Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight tweeted: "Our model currently projects ... an exact tie in Florida. #SignsOfMayanApocalypse".

Little wonder then that Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Sec. of State Ken Detzner are more than happy to blatantly mislead the public, the media and the federal court system, as The BRAD BLOG detailed exclusively last week, about their attempted purge of suspected "non-citizens" from the voting rolls.

And it's similarly no surprise that, as University of Florida political scientist and founder of ElectionSmith, Dr. Daniel A. Smith detailed on Friday, the "Failed Florida Secretary of State's Voter Purge" has, to date, earned a 98.4% failure rate in its initial list of 2,625 voters identified as "potential non-citizens."

That, of course, is if you take the Sec. of State's word for it that the 41 registered voters they claim to have confirmed as "non-citizens" actually are. (How many of them even knew they were registered or actually ever voted is another question.) To date, the state has provided no actual evidence to verify those 41 non-citizens voters they say they've identified. And given both Scott and Detzner's documented track record of blatant dishonesty, we see no reason to give either of them the benefit of the doubt.

[Hat-tip @PoliticoRoger on the Twitters.]

And this comes from the New York Times, of all places, which Climate Progress' Joe Romm recently slammed for having "Abandon[ed] the Story of the Century and Join[ed] the Energy and Climate Ignorati," suggesting that "it is now worth seriously contemplating canceling your subscriptions to the one-time paper of record."

Then they, happily, go and do this...

Say it, don't spray it! Am I right, Mike Huckabee?!