The Sorensen Monologues

Color Blind

Reference material for this cartoon: this ThinkProgress post detailing the “Top 12 Conservative Freakouts After Obama’s Race Speech.” The tweet in the first panel is real; the tweet in the second panel is taken verbatim from former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), substituting “MLK” for “President Obama.” The other two I made up, but frankly it’s hard to get more extreme than this marvel of vacuousness from Breitbart.com’s John Nolte:

“I like living in a country where a black president elected twice complains about racism.”

I read these comments before I got around to watching the actual video of Obama’s remarks. Far from being inflammatory, the speech was sober and circumspect. There’s simply no hope for anyone who found it “racist” — they are lost at sea. And anyone trying to twist this sad story around to make Trayvon the aggressor: really? I guess only certain people are allowed to stand their ground when they feel threatened.

RFK Journalism Award

I’m incredibly honored to announce that I’ve won a 2013 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for political cartooning. Known informally as “the poor people’s Pulitzer,” this award is especially thrilling because you learn of it through a phone call from Ethel Kennedy herself. I happened to be in a flooring store trying to find something to replace an ugly carpet in my house when the call came. Let’s just say Ethel Kennedy was one of the last people I expected to be at the other end of that unrecognizable phone number. Afterward, I completely lost my ability to focus on carpets.

The award is due in part to my comic for Kaiser Health News, “An Open Letter to the Supreme Court About Health Insurance.”  Many thanks to KHN for giving me the opportunity!

I’m looking forward to meeting Mrs. Kennedy at the awards ceremony on September 26 — and shooting the breeze with the great economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Book Award.

An Ugly Decision

The Trayvon Martin decision was announced just a bit too late for my deadline this week. As it turned out, I was already working on a cartoon about a different court case — less tragic, but similarly mind-boggling in its outcome. The Iowa Supreme Court, which you can see in all its demographically-limited glory here, actually ruled for the second time that a male dentist could legally file his female assistant because he found her too attractive. Via TPM:

“Coming to the same conclusion as it did in December, the all-male court found that bosses can fire employees they see as threats to their marriages, even if the subordinates have not engaged in flirtatious or other inappropriate behavior. The court said such firings do not count as illegal sex discrimination because they are motivated by feelings, not gender.”

Maybe in the past attractive people have had advantages in the workplace, but no longer in Iowa!

Paycheck Swipe

I had no idea this payroll debit card nonsense was even happening until recently, when news broke about the McDonald’s employee who sued because she wanted another payment option. (The McDonald’s franchise targeted by the lawsuit has since agreed to offer a choice.)

Also quoted in the NYT piece is another employee:

Devonte Yates, 21, who earns $7.25 an hour working a drive-through station at a McDonald’s in Milwaukee, says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card.“It’s pretty bad,” he said. “There’s a fee for literally everything you do.”

Even if a worker managed to avoid incurring fees at that rate, $150 a year skims 1% off the income of a minimum-wage employee bringing home $15K annually. Just when you thought our current gilded age couldn’t get any worse!

AAEC 2013 Post-Mortem

So I’m back from Salt lake City. Have been for nearly a week. My experience of this year’s meeting of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists was somewhat marred by a freelance deadline and the fact that I had to leave a day early.

I’d hoped to finish the freelance job before I left, but no, I wound up working on the road — penciling furiously in the Denver airport, inking on the flight from Denver to Salt Lake while surrounded by an unsettling number of babies and toddlers. Inking on planes sucks, especially having to work around turbulence and beverage carts, but it is possible.

Despite my mobile cartooning heroics, I still wound up spending too much time in my hotel room working, which involved a dramatic climax in the form of a busted travel scanner. I knew my scanner was on its last legs, so I’d borrowed one the night before from The Economist cartoonist Kal Kallaugher. Kal had kindly lent me his whole portable studio, including Wacom tablet and pen. After my scanner failed the first time, I tried Kal’s, but the driver would simply not install. Sweating profusely at this point, I switched back to my old scanner, which kept making an ungodly buzzing sound. Eventually, after smacking it repeatedly with the Little America Hotel information binder, I managed to get a couple scans out of it. Honestly, I don’t know how I get myself into these situations.

Salt Lake City itself was lovely, with more hip bars and tattooed young’uns than you’d expect. They also have some sweet light rail. Prior to the convention, host Pat Bagley had featured me as a guest cartoonist in the Salt Lake Tribune, which was nice. I managed to drink with everyone I’d hoped to drink with, and met some new folks as well. I missed last Saturday’s grand finale because it was my anniversary, although I wound up stuck in the Denver airport for several hours because it was too hot for planes to take off in Phoenix (where my plane was coming from), so I missed my anniversary too. At least I didn’t miss my deadline.

New Gig: NSFWCORP Comics

I”m taking part in a cool new project: a comics page in the print edition of NSFWCORP magazine, a.k.a. “The Future of Journalism (with Jokes).” As of the current issue, the subscription-based monthly features exclusive comics from several creators, including Scott Bateman, Matt Bors, Brian McFadden, Ryan Pequin, Ted Rall, and myself.

The comics page is edited by Matt Bors, who has a press release up on his blog. The mag also boasts some smart writing, not to mention a great doodled balloon-dog mascot.

Giving Gas a Pass

I’m glad Obama gave a speech about climate change, but his ringing endorsement of natural gas development was disturbing. While a good portion of the speech was devoted to praising and defending natural gas, not once did he use the word “fracking.” He allowed that “sometimes there are disputes about natural gas” and said something about “modernizing” the infrastructure, but unless he has some radical new technology up his sleeve, this was a pro-fracking speech. Perhaps he hasn’t seen the devastating documentary “Gasland” yet. Having just watched it myself a few days before the speech, I’m having trouble squaring his statement “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing” with the irreparable mess being made right now.

Painfully Wrong

Overwhelming scientific consensus holds that a fetus cannot feel pain before 24 weeks. But let’s face it: the current assault on choice isn’t really about perception of pain — it’s just another excuse to chip away at abortion rights.

What I’ve Been Up To: Reubens! Travel! Lightbulbs!

It’s been a while since I babbled about myself in this space, so here’s a giant autobiographical news dump for you. Last month I took a trip to the Pacific Northwest to get my stuff out of storage, and am happy to report that I have a proper drawing table again after many months of using any available surface. My office is slowly shaping up, as I make my way through a giant crap pile in the middle of the floor. My main problem is that I have no place to put the crap, meaning I need to go out and buy some more crap to put the crap in, and I really have no patience for that sort of thing.

Upon returning from the Northwest, I took off for Pittsburgh for the National Cartoonists Society annual Reubens Weekend. I almost didn’t go, but am very glad I did, because I won the NCS Award for Best Editorial Cartoons! The Reubens are often referred to as the Oscars of the cartooning world, except with none of the media coverage of the Oscars. Here I am holding my lovely plaque, which I look forward to hanging in my office as soon as I buy some nails.

I also had the pleasure of appearing on a panel that weekend with several luminaries from the daily strip world. From left is moderator Hilary Price (she stood on a chair while orating at one point, a technique I will have to try on a future panel), Terri Libenson, me, Cathy Guisewite, and Lynn Johnston.

Photo by Barbara Dale

Never in my wildest imagination as a wee youngster reading the comics page did I think I’d be sitting beside THE Cathy and the creator of “For Better or For Worse” at a conference someday. Afterwards, some of us went out for delicious sandwiches with french fries in them at Primanti Brothers.

A day or two after the Reubens, I found out that I am a finalist in this year’s Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards. I can really get behind this award-a-day plan. At risk of excessive horn-tooting, around this time I was mentioned in the New York Times, in a review of Victor Navasky’s book on political cartooning. I’m listed as an omission from the book, along with several prominent cartoonists whose absence from any book on political cartooning is frankly bewildering.

Right now I’m knee-deep in freelance work and home improvement projects without end. I did manage to successfully change the lightbulb in my refrigerator the other day, and now I can see my food again. This has been my greatest recent accomplishment, aside from the NCS Award.

Next week I’m off to Utah for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists convention. Yesterday, I was the “guest cartoonist” for my colleague and all-around good guy Pat Bagley in the Salt Lake City Tribune; they ran my gun control strip from a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for further developments from the Beehive State.

Surveillance Bait

I find the NSA Prism program — what I know about it, anyway — to be problematic. But it does seem there’s a disconnect between public reaction to this particular scandal and our tolerance for the selling of highly-personalized data by tech companies in the private sector. I’ve read over the years about evolving technologies to offer individuals different prices and interest rates based on data collected through the internet; I have no idea how much this is actually happening, but the potential for abuse seems vast.

I’m not trying to suggest an either/or situation here in which government spying is OK and private sector data mining is not. The potential for abuse by the state is enormous and well-precedented.  But  Silicon Valley is no saint here; many tech libertarians seem to overlook this. Private data could be used to deny people health insurance and harm their credit — it goes beyond mere advertising. The arrangement with the Prism program just seems to me like foxes working with foxes guarding the henhouse.

Somewhat amusingly, while I was working on this very cartoon, I watched a music video on YouTube — The New Pornographers’ “Slow Descent into Alcoholism” — and immediately afterward was served Google ads for various detox programs. So there’s one particular data point on my record that might not be so accurate. At least, not currently.

Loan Bone

Interest rates on Stafford Loans could double from 3.4% to a usurious 6.8% if Congress fails to act by July 1. Many Senate Democrats want another extension of the current rate; Republicans want a variable rate pegged to the market at a higher figure. As Elizabeth Warren put it as she argued for giving students the same rate as banks:

“Right now, the US government is out there investing in large financial institutions, offering them money every single night [for] three quarters of 1 percent, and yet our students, if the government doesn’t do something, will be paying nine times that much,” Warren said to an audience of about 70 students and staff at the Northeastern Visitor Center.

Adding to the debt of poor college students at a time of ever-increasing economic inequality (and record low interest rates) while companies like Apple practice massive tax avoidance is simply ridiculous.

Those Lazy, No-Good Babies

As Paul Krugman noted in a recent column, the latest farm bill coming out of the House Agriculture Committee would kick around two million people off of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In addition to being a massively-boneheaded austerity measure that hurts the economy, such a move would affect large numbers of children. Ah, those lazy dependents with their culture of dependence! I guess we should make them earn their food by scavenging dumps for scrap metal or something.

And yes, I was thinking of that Free to Be You and Me sketch “Boy Meets Girl” with Marlo Thomas and Mel Brooks as I drew this.

For more commentary on this and our crueler tendencies, Comic Strip of the Day has a good post.