The Sorensen Monologues

Whitefish Trip Photos

Here are some photos I took while visiting Whitefish, Montana for my Oregonian story. Enjoy!

Snow ghosts on Big Mountain

Close-up of the snow kangaroo

Looking down at Whitefish Lake

EAT at the Bulldog Saloon

One of many signs from defunct businesses hanging in the Great Northern Bar

Whitefish Depot at dawn

I didn’t get to talk much about restaurants in my article, but if you do go to Whitefish, I recommend Wasabi Sushi, Piggyback BBQ, and the sandwiches at Montana Coffee Traders. I ate cheap, but well!

This Week’s Cartoon: Freelancer Riot At Huffington Palace

A rare one-panel Slowpoke. I was sure someone must have already done this idea, but couldn’t find it anywhere.

I often hear people say that Huffpo’s unpaid contributors were fools for doing all that free work in the first place. Which is mostly true, but overlooks the fact that Huffpo also seeks out work from published writers and cartoonists. And they simply refuse to pay. As Matt Bors blogged last week, Huffpo contacted him while he was in Afghanistan, filing comics for paying clients. They wanted to post his work on the site, but darned if they just didn’t have the budget to pay for it! Not only was Huffpo being unfair to him, but to the publications that were buying the work. He said no, but this sort of situation creates an unfortunate race to the bottom for freelancers and paying publications alike. Which is why I try to avoid clicking on any links to the Huffington Post if I can.

For further reading, I suggest this article in the Columbia Journalism Review about an earlier case of labor exploitation involving AOL.

Oh, and you can read my Huffpo-AOL comments and those of several other cartoonists over at Washington Post’s “Comic Riffs” blog.

Lara Logan Rocks

I actually linked to this video nearly five years ago, but it’s worth a replay now. The clip shows Logan being interviewed a highly condescending Howard Kurtz, who was needling her about why the reporting from Iraq was so “negative.” I came away from this very impressed by Logan, and was saddened today to hear about what happened to her in Egypt.

[UPDATE: Reading more about Logan, I see she’s made some comments about Afghanistan that suggest she’s been embedded with the military too long. But I still admire the way she handled Kurtz here.]

Travel comic in The Oregonian

Now it can be told: I have my first graphic travelogue appearing in Sunday’s Oregonian, filling a full newspaper page and a half in the travel section. But you can see it online now! This is the most ambitious project I’ve taken on in a while, and I loved doing it. I’ll be posting some photos of the trip here soon.

Reader Mail, Surveillance Edition

Last week’s comic about the domestic use of aerial drones drew a number of interesting comments from readers. Here are a couple emails I received:

From Ogden Utah, TC writes:

The Aerial Drone comic hits particularly close to home! Our illustrious Mayor, Matthew Godfrey, has been trying to push the city council to approve a freaking blimp for surveillance purposes in our town.  It’s really smart. I think he’s trying to cover some of his more sinister ideas by pushing this asinine idea out in front.  I’m pretty sure our criminals run much faster than the blimp can fly.

TPM has more on that here.

Reader Bruce P, who I’m guessing is writing from abroad, who is writing from New Jersey, says:

In the second frame you have “Soon businesses jump on the bandwagon.” Here in my local Rite of Shoppes and the APe, they already have. Next to various products on the shelves are little boxes that extol the virtues of kitty crunchies, toilet paper, etc. These have a small video screen and a speaker to spout their drivel. They are motion sensor activated and trip when one gets within 3 feet or so of them. Life imitates art or vice versa….. None the less it is spot on.

Wow, I hope that doesn’t catch on further.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Year of the Mombies”

While much of the news media was rightly focused on Egypt last week, your friendly GOP-led House of Representatives was busy introducing a truly heinous bill called the “Protect Life Act.” This bill would allow emergency room doctors to let a pregnant woman die rather than perform an abortion to save her life.

This isn’t the pipe dream of some lone Bible-Belt crackpot from Upper Butt Scratch. The “Protect Life Act” is co-sponsored by one hundred Representatives, among them such right-wing luminaries as Paul Ryan and Ron Paul, whose libertarianism conveniently ends where ladyparts begin.

You know, we fight these battles year after year, and instead of seeing reason gradually prevail, we have a situation where the opposition only grows more radical and monstrous. It’s only a matter of time before these people are really running the show, and I shudder to think about what will happen.

On a cheerier note, look for one of my cartoons in the current issue of Ms. Magazine!

This Week’s Cartoon: “Drones Among Us”

I thought about doing a cartoon on Egypt, but at the time, I didn’t really have much to add beyond “Wow.” I will promise you one thing, though: if I do draw a cartoon about Egypt, it won’t involve the Sphinx, hieroglyphics, or King Tut. (I’m afraid to say I just found one depicting the Sphinx crying.  Really.)

This week’s installment is something of a follow-up to my previous cartoon about Predator drones, in which I envisioned using them to fight crime in the US the way we use them in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). Thanks to a tweet from a Slowpoke reader, I read this article about small drones being purchased for surveillance by the Miami-Dade police department. I guess I don’t have a problem with a SWAT team sending up a flying beer keg — that’s the nickname for the Honeywell T-Hawk drone, mind you — if they’re about to bust in on a house full of heavily-armed goons. But the thought of patrol by drone does seem a little weird on the face of it — so weird, in fact, the Department of Homeland Security won’t touch it (aside from the drones they use for border patrol, that is).

Photo taken from WIRED, who got it from Honeywell. If you’re really curious/geeky, the Washington Post has a video of this thing flying through the air. Oh, the research I do for you people!

This Week’s Cartoon: “Don’t Tread On Me”

I sort of feel like the tea party and progressives could almost find some common ground over the plight of ordinary people getting screwed six ways from Sunday in this economy. We share a disillusionment with Wall Street and, I would argue, concern with loss of community in the face of crushing bureaucracy. The general principle of localism seems like something we could agree on, to a point. But it all ends there, because the tea partiers, among their other philosophical shortcomings (and there are many), have a MASSIVE blind spot when it comes to understanding the way power works in this country. They refuse to see any abuses resulting  from unfettered, predatory, market-fundamentalist-style capitalism. Everything is the government’s fault. It’s such a simplistic view, it would be quaint if it weren’t also so harmful.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Fun With False Equivalence”

This comic has attracted more irate email than usual, with a longtime conservative reader referring to it as done “with vitriol.” I don’t see it as a particularly angry cartoon — if anything, it seems like my usual absurdist approach, showing how ridiculous militant right-wing rhetoric sounds coming from the mouths of famous progressives. (Aren’t we usually accused of being wimps?) I planned to do this strip ever since a blog commenter (not here)  hilariously referred to Paul Krugman as an example of incivility on the left equivalent to the insurrectionist language on the right that has come under criticism since the Giffords shooting.

To answer those readers who are upset, let me first say yes, I am aware that Obama once used that quote from The Untouchables. And yes, there have been occasional instances of Democratic politicians saying bad things, like the guy in Florida who said his opponent for governor should be shot for his role as CEO of a health care company that defrauded Medicare. But here’s the thing, people: you are forgetting to contextualize.

Only one side of the political spectrum has a broad, organized movement — once fringe, now growing ever-more mainstream — based on extreme paranoia of the government and the idea of resistance through armed revolution. This stuff forms the very raison d’etre of the Tea Party and various “patriot movement” subgroups. You have heard of the Oath Keepers, yes? If not, look ’em up. Much of the rhetoric I criticize in my cartoons comes from politicians stirring this particular pot —  they are pandering directly to their gun-nut base. They aren’t just trying to use more action verbs.

Now, about Loughner: while the cheese may have fallen off of his cracker, he was clearly paranoid about the government and into currency conspiracy theories. Dude was down with the gold standard! That’s classic far-right stuff.  To quote my colleague Clay Jones, who drew a controversial Sarah Palin cartoon that cracked me up:

I do know the rhetoric is too much.  I know it’s wrong to put crosshairs on human beings.  I know it’s wrong to mask threats as political overtones.  It seems conservatives would agree with that.

I ask that you ask yourself what I’ve asked myself.  Did the right wing contribute to this?

I can’t say it did.

And you can’t say it didn’t.

And one last thing: I don’t care about “scoring political points.” Giffords feared for her own life, as I’m sure many politicians do today. Something is wrong when running for office — especially as a liberal — feels so dangerous. That’s what really bothers me.

Reality Eclipses Satire, no. 87,493

I love this. In my cartoon this week, I suggested an absurd way that Michelle Bachmann might explain her quote that voters should be “armed and dangerous” over the cap-and-trade bill. As I learned today via TPM, she actually did walk that quote back a month later, saying the following:

“I want my people in Minnesota to be the most educated people. I want them to be armed with knowledge, so they can be dangerous to the policies of the left.”

Almost like my comic. Clearly I didn’t go far enough.

Slowpoke on NPR

Just found out my latest cartoon is on NPR right now. The comments section seems to have quite a few people trying to depoliticize the AZ shootings, blaming “both sides” for their partisanship. (Personally, I don’t think questioning the violent, paranoid rhetoric of Palin, Angle, Bachmann, et al, makes one particularly partisan, but whatevs.)

Not that there’s anything wrong with having strong political convictions. As reader AC wisely pointed out, people mistakenly believe “it is partisan politics generally, not any actual positions on either side, which is the problem.”

People Saying Intelligent Things

I liked Amanda Marcotte’s recent analogy:

Holding the right responsible for their paranoid, incendiary, violent rhetoric reminds me strongly of trying to put a cat in its carrier.  You know it has to be done, but you really don’t want to do it.  The cat is going to lash out.  She’s going to hide under the bed.  She’s going to hiss and scream.  She’s going to grab the sides of the carrier as you push her in, in a pathetic final bid not to go the carrier.  But you have the fight anyway, because you can’t just renege on your responsibilities the second they become a problem.

Matt Bors also has a good post:

And that’s where we are at. You can’t talk about the issues underneath this without being accused of “politicizing” it. The shooter is crazy and incoherent enough that we can all comfortably write him off as a “lone nut,” America’s favorite term to absolve us from looking at any of the societal problems that causes this type of behavior–or, god forbid, the tools he used to kill so many so fast. Unless the shooter fits into the binary mold of a mainstream liberal or conservative, we are content to pretend his behavior took place in a vacuum. “A lone nut! you’ll get those.”

There’s also a refreshingly nuanced take on my latest cartoon over at Comic Strip of the Day:

There are a number of cartoons about the Tucson shootings, ranging from “weepers,” which serve the important purpose of informing people that death is sad, to those suggesting a direct, specific correlation between the rhetoric and the action, as if the right wing had purposefully delivered a detailed “to do” list into the hands of the shooter. I haven’t seen many that managed to make a persuasive point, but I would count this as one…

As for countering her examples, feel free, but I want to see something more persuasive than the time Obama explained his planned debating style with a flippant reference to Sean Connery’s advice to Kevin Costner in “The Untouchables,” or a DNC map that used traditional archery-style bull’s-eyes to show the areas in which they planned special efforts. Don’t waste my time unless you have specific examples of times nationally-known progressives used rhetoric about “refreshing the tree of liberty” or “reloading” or encouraged people to bring firearms to political rallies.

Predictably, I’ve been accused by others of not looking at the oh-so-incendiary rhetoric of the left, but tell me: when is the last time you heard a “mainstream” progressive pundit talk about killing ATF agents?