The Sorensen Monologues

This Week’s Cartoon: Entitlements 101

So I really did see this billboard over the summer, on I-5 in southern Washington. Anyone who travels between Portland and Seattle with any frequency is aware of the cultural institution known as the “Uncle Sam billboard.” It always has some extreme right-wing slogan next to a likeness of Uncle Sam. Apparently a farmer started it decades ago, and now the fabled sign is maintained by his son. (I neglected to include Uncle Sam when I drew the cartoon; I was so gobsmacked by the sentiment that I forgot all about him. And the internet tells me belatedly that the exact wording was “Should people receiving entitlements be allowed to vote?”, but I’m too tired to fix it now.)

Clearly the sign is the handiwork of an ignoramus, but it touches on something that’s been bothering me for a while. Many Americans don’t understand the term “entitlements.” Anyone hoping to preserve the social safety net should avoid the word, which makes Social Security and Medicare sound like frivolous handouts to undeserving snots. The fact that anti-poverty measures like food stamps are also referred to as entitlement programs only adds to the confusion, not that denying voting rights to poor people is any less reprehensible.

I wouldn’t dismiss this billboard guy as a lone crackpot, either. TPM recently reported on conservative columnist Matthew Vadum, who suggested that registering poor people to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. I smell a meme.

SPX Appearance

I leave tomorrow for the 2011 Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD. I missed the last two, so I’m looking forward to reliving my old Fall ritual again (I used to go every year). If you’re in the area, stop by my table. I’ll be signing books and will probably have some prints on hand as well. I’d tell you the table number, but there might be some reshuffling due to earthquake-related repairs to the hotel, so you’ll just have to find me.

In related news, here’s a Washington City Paper interview with me in advance of the show. Many thanks to the estimable Mike Rhode. Coincident with this week’s cartoon, there’s an ad in rotation on that page with a BIG QR CODE!

This Week’s Cartoon: “Code Dependent”

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this as a media-type person, but I still do not own a smartphone. My rudimentary cellphone has become a perverse point of pride for me. I figure I’ve saved thousands of dollars over the past few years, so why stop now? Plus, I work from home, where there’s plenty o’ internet. Too much, in fact. Oh, I’m sure I’ll get an iPhone eventually… once they’re considered the Atari of mobile technology.

But these QR codes popping up everywhere, readable only by people who own a Secret Decoder Ring, seem just a little, well, exclusionary to those of us who are frugal with our phones. This will almost surely lead to a greater incidence of Cellphone Inferiority Complex.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Zip Homes”

I’m assuming everyone is familiar with Zipcars. I’m currently reading Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut. The chapter about housing contains some telling statistics (bear in mind that the book was published in 2005, before the bubble burst, not that things are oh-so-affordable now).

Between 1995 and 2002, rents in nearly all of the largest metropolitan areas rose astronomically. Median rents in San Francisco ballooned 76 percent; Boston, 62 percent; San Diego, 54 percent

A house purchased in Levittown back in 1952 for $6,700 ($44,647 in today’s dollars) sold for $300,000 in 2003.

Draut goes on to describe a family in San Lorenzo, CA. A young couple can’t afford to buy a home in the same town as their parents, who couldn’t afford to buy their own house if they had to buy it today. When you throw in stagnant incomes, massive unemployment, and austerity fever, it becomes clear that America needs… ZIP HOMES!

A Political Cartoonist’s Worst Nightmare

The political cartooning community was shaken today by news of Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat’s beating by pro-Assad thugs. They broke his hands to stop him from drawing cartoons critical of the President.

This horrifying incident reminds me of an exchange I had earlier this summer when meeting with political cartoonists from the Middle East and North Africa through a State Department program. Naturally, a prominent topic of discussion was the freedom of speech we American cartoonists enjoy. I was on crutches thanks to a skiing accident (I’m mobile now, thank you), and I made a dumb joke, obviously tongue-in-cheek, about how the Obama administration didn’t like one of the cartoons I drew. “Ah, so you are like an Arab cartoonist!” one of the visitors joked back. The whole room laughed, maybe a little too hard. Gotta admire the bravery of the Ali Ferzats of the world.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Big-Spending Bureaucrats”

There’s this persistent idea that government spending is akin to decadent and frivolous consumer spending. People speak of “greedy government bureaucrats” lusting after tax dollars as though they were hedonists seeking their next shopper’s high. As though the mundane work of keeping the streetlights on or preventing sewage treatment tanks from overflowing was like buying a Roomba.

I’m not saying there’s no government waste. The fact that Medicare can’t negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs is a big stupid waste of taxpayer money. So is outsourcing the work of the U.S. military to highly-paid mercenaries. And yet we don’t hear the self-proclaimed deficit hawks screeching about these hardworking-taxpayer-dollar-suckers. Somebody’s buying expensive toys, all right.

This Week’s Cartoon: “The Octangulator”

I didn’t really want to do another cartoon about Obama since I’ve done several lately, but I read a couple things recently that induced much brow-furrowing and teeth-clenching. One was this post by Robert Reich about what he’s heard from White House insiders:

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

Then there was this NYT article:

A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument [for economic stimulus] in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”

Everyone knows that Democrats can balance budgets until the end of time and still get tagged as tax-and-spenders. So this strategist’s solution is to stand like an unblinking cow in the middle of the train tracks and do nothing? For this, he or she actually gets paid?

I tend to catch some flak when I’m critical of Obama, and this week will probably be no exception. I often feel trapped between defenders of bad policy and poor strategy from the Dems, and those who seem to have unrealistic expectations without taking context into account. And by “context,” I mean that the cheese has fallen off the nation’s collective cracker. But we have to try to change that context instead of echoing it, as Obama has done far too much.

This Week’s Cartoon: “GOP Cleans Up Environmental Laws”

While the nation was distracted with debt ceiling shenanigans, House Republicans did something else that went largely and predictably ignored by much of the news media. They quietly slipped 39 anti-environmental riders, many of them eye-poppingly radical, into an appropriations bill. The riders would do things like: prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases for one year, stop coal ash from being treated as hazardous waste, and block the enforcement of new fuel efficiency laws that automakers have actually agreed to. The money quote from Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID): “Many of us think that the overregulation from E.P.A. is at the heart of our stalled economy.” Oh yeah, that’s it. Fortunately, many of these brilliant ideas won’t make it through the Senate, but you never know, now that we live in a hostage-ocracy.

As I first read about this, it occurred to me that Republicans tend to view environmental protections themselves as a form of pollution. If the GOP fought actual pollution with the same vigor they display in fighting pollution laws, America would be clean enough to lick. Don’t think about that too hard.

Oh, and on a somewhat-related note: it takes a lot to get me to LOL, but this item on TPM did it. Tea Partiers have swallowed a Glenn Beck-promoted conspiracy theory that the UN is going to take away their farms through a sustainability program called “Agenda 21.” To quote Beck:

Some people now have begun questioning and standing up to what, on the surface, seems like a harmless initiative just to save the environment. But it is not… once they put their fangs into our communities, they’ll suck all the blood out of it, and we will not be able to survive. Watch out.

(via Media Matters)

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This Week’s Cartoon: “Deficit Memories”

I realize I say this a lot, but I’m more frightened by the state of the nation than ever before. American politics have always been brutish and ugly, but the bottom has completely fallen out. Republican extremists are running the country like a James Bond villain threatening nuclear war if he doesn’t get his ransom, but there’s no 007 to save the day. Obama throws up his hands. Beltway pundits blame “Washington.” The hypocritcal lack of concern about deficits under Bush goes unmentioned.

This is not politics-as-usual. As Joe Nocera described it in the NYT: “Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.” And now they’re onto the FAA. I don’t see how this situation gets any better.

This Week’s Cartoon: “The Latest Debt Ceiling Demands”

Ugh, what more can I say. This whole thing reminds me more and more of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine every day. Manufacture a crisis, use the ensuing sense of panic to impose draconian cuts to programs people desperately need, and voila! Utopia at last. Never mind that Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times, and Dubya 7, or that Clinton balanced the budget, or that the vast bulk of our current deficit was formed under Bush. The hypocrisy is simply astounding.

The m&m’s in the first panel are, of course, a reference to Van Halen’s infamous contract rider stipulating that the brown ones be removed. David Lee Roth has explained that the point was not to be a prima donna, but to test to see if stage crews had read the contract carefully. I love this quote:

I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean ‘What is this before me?”… you know, with the skull in one hand… and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”

I decided to make the m&m’s that Republicans object to the green ones, since, you know, they hate anything green.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Bulb Wars”

The silliness and hypocrisy of Republicans’ lightbulb activism — especially their sudden concern about mercury in compact fluorescents after pooh-poohing efforts to limit mercury pollution for decades — was too much for me to resist. I should add here that it’s not just CFLs that they’re opposed to; low-energy incandescent bulbs are also available, and the energy law (passed under Bush) is intended to create a market for these by eliminating the cheaper, less-efficient competition.

While CFLs theoretically reduce mercury pollution by reducing the amount of coal power consumed, I have to admit I’m wary of the expectation that they’ll be OK for the environment as long as people recycle them instead of dumping them in the garbage. “Just take them to Lowe’s!” chirped a woman from the NRDC on a Colbert clip I watched recently. But honestly, how many Americans are going make the effort to do that? See the second panel of this cartoon for a clue. I suspect in 20 years we will have a “WTF were we thinking?” moment.

While Googling images of the tea party, I came across this photo of Sarah Palin supporters from the Christian Science Monitor.

Yes, these are the people fighting modern lightbulb technology and threatening to annihilate what’s left of the economy over the debt ceiling.

This week’s cartoon: “Post-Debt Ceiling Ultimatums”

In the midst of all the hand-wringing over deficits, it seems no one is bringing up the simple fact that the deficit will disappear if Congress does NOTHING. The entire debate is a crock of simmering crap, a thinly-veiled excuse for Republicans who don’t give a damn about deficits to gut social programs. It’s straight out of the GOP playbook. Run up massive deficits to starve the beast (see: Reagan, Bush Jr.), then squawk bloody murder when a Democrat is in charge, pinning the blame on them and forcing the Dem to clean up the mess (see: Clinton, Obama, Mark Warner as governor of Virginia). And no matter how irresponsible the Republicans are, or how cautious Dems are budget-wise, the grand narrative never changes. Dems are always characterized as big spenders, Repubs as pillars of fiscal probity. And when Dems point to loopholes like the private jet tax break, the Republicans’ talking point is: “That’s small potatoes. It would hardly make a dent in the deficit.” Well, if it’s no big deal, then why threaten to blow up the whole economy over it? And if minor expenses don’t matter, why threaten to defund NPR over piddling chump change?  These people are unserious frauds concerned only with dismantling the New Deal, and the media should treat them as such. Anyone — and any cartoonist — who takes these self-proclaimed “deficit hawks” at face value (especially that smug, dead-eyed, know-nothing doucheswizzle Paul Ryan) is doing a gross disservice to the public and to democracy itself.