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Smearing the messenger

Seems like a lot of otherwise clear-thinking people are falling for the Fox News claptrap about liberals not being “open-minded” enough. This is how you wind up with another white conservative dude being chosen as a diversity hire for the extremely not-diverse NYT op-ed page. Yes, we live in politically-polarized times, and everyone is angry, and sometimes protesters go overboard (neo-Nazis do have a way of bringing out that response in people). But to dismiss progressives as “elitists,” “PC,” and so on, is just trading in insults. It isn’t engaging in honest, thoughtful debate — it’s just trolling.

Know Your Potheads

In his much-discussed column last week, David Brooks admitted to getting stoned in high school, but dismissed legalization, calling for a government that “subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature” and discourages people from getting stoned. I’m all for government that extols the virtues of the arts and nature, but decriminalizing pot is hardly tantamount to encouraging people to smoke it.

Blacks are four times as likely as whites to be arrested for marijuana, even though usage falls evenly across different racial demographics. As travel-guide author and TV personality Rick Steves points out in his statement on the NORML site:

“Last year over 750,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges. Many of them were sentenced to mandatory prison time. Our courts and prisons are clogged with non-violent people whose only offense is smoking, buying or selling marijuana. While our nation is in a serious financial crisis, it spends literally billions of dollar annually chasing down responsible adults who are good, tax-paying citizens in all regards except for the occasional use of marijuana.”

The Goatmaster General

This brief video provides a good overview of the destruction DeJoy has wrought and why he needs to go. 

Also: YOU are invited to attend a special series of free online panels at the AAEC Zoomfest on Saturday Oct. 9. We’ve got some fantastic guests! Keith Knight will talk about the second season of his show “Woke” on Hulu. I’ll be interviewing Ruben Bolling, Lalo Alcaraz and Marty Two Bulls will discuss this year’s controversial Pulitzer results. And much more! Check out the details here: https://editorialcartoonists.com/aaec-zoomfest21/

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?

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.

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.

Troubled Times

As a longtime loyal New York Times reader, it saddens me to have to critique the paper like this. The Times has always been a mixed bag, but some of their investigative reporting is very good. And really, the country needs a fully functioning New York Times — so we should all be trying to make it better, not destroy it.

That said, they have recently gone down a rabbit hole on their editorial pages. In their hiring decisions and topical obsessions, they have doubled down on a misguided attempt to not appear to have “liberal bias.” For example, they (or whoever specifically makes these decisions) have apparently bought into the hyperbolic, highly-distorting, and relentless Fox News obsession with a small number of overzealous college students as an attempt to smear all progressives. Fox’s game is straight from an authoritarian playbook, attacking academia and academics as the “real threat” to a free society, even as we are in the middle of an actual attempted fascist takeover of the country. (Meanwhile, Trump cozies up to people like Erdogan of Turkey, who literally throw academics in prison and fill populations with a sense of victimization at the hands of intellectuals, teachers, etc.) It’s worth noting that the Times actually hired as an editorial page editor a woman who, as a college student, was known for attacking professors who criticize Israeli state policies toward Palestinians.

Indeed, the Times’ self-righteous condescension towards, and stereotyping of, its own readership seems an awful lot like the attitude it chides “liberals” for displaying towards Trump voters — those saintly, salt-of-the-earth people who are definitely not racist (perish the thought!), and are above reproach.

Here are some suggestions for columnists they could have picked if they valued actual diversity of perspectives, and elevating underheard voices instead of dominant ones:

• • An environmental expert commenting on climate change and the rampant gutting of environmental protections
• • A Muslim, or Palestinian-American, who might talk about the criminally-neglected topic of Palestinian rights
• • A woman of color
• • An immigrant
• • A critic of late capitalism, talking about how to innovate away from its worst excesses and power structures towards a more sustainable system of commerce

The country desperately needs the Times to rise to the occasion and help good people preserve democracy in America. Some readers have canceled their subscriptions, and this may or may not be an effective form of protest. I’m not sure about the best tactics here, but I hope the Times sees the light soon.

Feedback Frenzy

It’s not just that every business transaction seems to come with some sort of feedback request, which is mildly annoying in itself. But the surveys themselves tend to be time hogs, as though we are all retired people with nothing to do all day but provide free market research. (Not that retired people necessarily want to answer four-page questionnaires, either.) I would like to be paid for my careful, extensive analysis of products or services, thank you very much!

Support these comics by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Now available on Patreon.

This week’s cartoon: “As the Mitt Spins”

Interesting questions have been raised about whether Mitt “retrocatively retired” from Bain so he could keep his wife’s health insurance coverage while she underwent treatment for MS. The Romney campaign won’t respond, which gives us a license to speculate. Of course, Romney is one of the few people who could actually afford to pay for MS treatment out-of-pocket. But given his aggressive efforts at tax avoidance, one suspects that he doesn’t like to part with money if he can help it. Unless he’s buying a car elevator for a ridiculous beach house.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Spawn of Hot Yoga”

I’ve been sort of burned out on politics lately, so apologies to those of you wanting something about the general in charge of a mostly-stupid war saying something stupid, and people asking stupid questions about whether the stupid comments should have been published.

I have nothing against hot yoga; I actually think it sounds kind of interesting. It’s been on my mind because I follow Black Francis of the Pixies on Twitter, and he tweets about it all the time. Some people have said they don’t get this one, which I find a little surprising — to me, it feels like a Life in Hell strip, or maybe a Roz Chast cartoon that’s just riffing on a concept. I suppose I’ll try to be more down-to-earth next week.

Just signed up for health insurance: Some advice for those still trying

I finally completed my application for health insurance through the federal exchange today, with the assistance of an independent insurance broker. I’d visited with a navigator earlier in the month who did a good job of explaining how the tax credits and subsidies worked, but I decided to do the actual work of filling out the Healthcare.gov application myself. For weeks I’d been getting stuck at the final verification stage that allows you to proceed to choosing a plan. So I called up a professional insurance broker here in Austin, who was very helpful.

First, if you created your account on Healthcare.gov a few weeks ago and you’re still having problems, it’s a good idea to start over with a completely new account using a different email address. This eliminated the problem I was having before; the new account allowed me to sail right through the application process.

Talking to a private insurance broker is also useful if you have specific questions about different plans or companies. You don’t pay their fee — the insurance companies do. For maximum choice in providers, I went with a PPO plan (as opposed to an HMO, which can have lower premiums, but puts serious limitations on which doctors you can see). Look on Yelp to find highly-recommended brokers in your area.

My husband and I chose a Silver plan with much better coverage than our current individual plans, and with the ACA credits, we’ll be paying approximately $150/month less in premiums.

Assuming all goes as expected, I’m pretty excited about having reasonably-priced, non-crappy health insurance. It was such a relief not to have to fill out endless forms about my medical history and pre-existing conditions. As far as I can tell, there is no “crisis” — the real crisis would be if opponents of health insurance reform managed to undo all the hard work that got us this far.

George Will’s Bowtie Rebellion

Conservative commentator George Will made news over the weekend with his announcement that he was leaving the Republican party over Donald Trump. The last straw, it seems, was Trump’s statement that a judge of Mexican descent could not be trusted to preside over the Trump University lawsuit impartially. You might get the sense that Will is deeply troubled by racism, until you start looking at stuff he’s written over the years.

Here’s further context for the quotes and paraphrased statements in the cartoon.

1. Willie Horton ad — From Will’s 1995 column, “22 Questions for Colin Powell”:

What exactly was objectionable about citing Horton and his rape victim as a consequence of that prisoner-release program?

(A common refrain on the right is that Al Gore introduced Horton during a 1988 debate with Dukakis, which is debunked here; Gore only brought up the furlough program.)

2. George Wallace — From 2007 Newsweek column on third-party candidates:

A candidate can succeed in giving an aggrieved minority a voice—e.g., George Wallace, speaking for people furious about the ’60s tumults.

An aggrieved minority? Oh-kay.

3. Hurricane Katrina — From September, 2005 column “A Poverty of Thought”:

America’s always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its banks, and last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois’s freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president’s inadequate “empathy” and an amazing criticism of the government’s “historic indifference” and its “passive indifference” that “is as bad as active malice.”

That flooding metaphor sure was tactful three weeks after the devastation of New Orleans. Will proceeded to lecture the locals on out-of-wedlock births.

4. More on Will and voter ID here.