The Sorensen Monologues
Thomas Friedman, Please Stop Trying to Help Young People
You know when a Thomas Friedman column is titled “Sorry, Kids. We Ate It All” that it’s going to be bad. This one does not disappoint in its more-centrist-than-thou fearmongering about government spending (way to lend credibility to GOP extortion tactics, dude!). “What are the chances of [young people] getting out of Facebook and into their parents’ faces?” he cleverly ponders, not invoking cliches at all. Among the solutions to mild Social Security shortfalls projected in the distant future he touts:
“…phasing in higher age qualifications for entitlements and cutting corporate taxes to zero, so the people who actually create jobs will have more resources to do so.”
Maybe young people realize deficit spending is not the problem — unemployment is. And health insurance too, which is being remedied by the Affordable Care Act. Maybe some of us even understand that corporations are already barely paying taxes, sitting on enormous piles of cash, and not hiring people. And maybe we don’t want our benefits cut in the name of not cutting our future benefits. Because that’s absurd.
Why Can’t They Compromise?
The bit about the End Times refers to Michele Bachmann’s remarkable statement last week that Obama’s arming of Syrian rebels was a sign that the Rapture is coming. Actual quote:
“Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand,” Bachmann continued. “When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.”
Well, who WOULD worry about the U.S. defaulting on its debt in that case? A global financial meltdown doesn’t seem so bad if you think you’re going to be Hoovered out of it by a celestial vacuum cleaner.
Previous installment of the flaming conservative here.
Janet Yellen: Triumph of the Female Wonk
Regular readers will note that I’ve had fairly strong opinions about the Fed chair debate. (See this cartoon and blog post about Janet Yellen and Larry Summers.) Naturally, I’m happy to see Obama nominate her.
If she is confirmed, this will be a victory for the quietly-competent wonkwoman. Nerds of various stripes have enjoyed a veritable Rennaissance over the past decade or so — tech developers and data gurus like Nate Silver have enjoyed immense fame and adulation. Yet the wonky lady has been somewhat elusive as a cultural archetype. Many exist, to be sure, but they are all too often rendered invisible. Wired Magazine was roundly flamed a few weeks ago for failing to name a single woman to its list of Government and Security experts you should be reading.
Of course, it took Larry Summers stepping out of the way to (hopefully) get the first female Fed Chair in U.S. history. One thing I found especially galling about that debate was that Yellen’s thorough preparation for meetings reportedly worked against her; Administration officials were said to prefer the freewheeling, off-the-cuff style of Timothy Geithner, or the chummy relationship that was cultivated with “stand-up dude” Larry Summers during the financial crisis. Lost in much of this discussion of personal style is who has been right.
Here’s hoping this glass-ceiling breaks big-time.
Sneak Preview
Is that Wendy Davis on my drawing table? Why, yes it is. This is from a long-form comic I’m working on for a nonprofit, to be published next week.
How to Save the Republican Brand
The New York Times ran an article the other day about the advance planning on the right that went into the government shutdown. I got a kick out of this line:
A defunding “tool kit” created in early September included talking points for the question, “What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?”
So the pamphlet in the cartoon is not much of an exaggeration.
New Facebook Page
I’ve started a new Facebook page where I’m going to be posting my comics and other things. This will be replacing the old Slowpoke Comics page, if you’ve been following me there. I hate to lose the large number of followers on the old page, but Facebook is somewhat inflexible when it comes to updating professional Pages. Please help me rebuild — go forth and Like!
The Conservative Health Exchange is Open
Those Koch-funded ads to convince young people to opt out of Obamacare were so weird, I have trouble believing they’d be terribly effective. Nonetheless, it pains me to watch billionaire fossils long-detached from the realities of America give bad advice to an economically-hosed generation.
Change the Brogram
A dust-up has been ensuing in the tech community over various tweets and statements made by the now-former Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, Pax Dickinson. To make a long story short, Dickinson has displayed hostility — often crassly — to those who would like to make the industry a more hospitable place for women. It is obvious that this sort of rhetoric contributes to the lack of women in tech and unhappiness of women in tech, but I’ll let these Slate and Washington Post articles explain more.
Debut on Medium
My “Surveillence Bait” comic on the NSA is up on Medium today. If you haven’t heard of Medium yet, it’s a new site for writers (and now cartoonists) started by the founders of Twitter. My colleague Matt Bors recently started a new gig there as comics editor, and will be posting his work and others’ to a section called The Nib. Check it out.
2003 vs. 2013
Shortly after posting this cartoon, a reader emailed me asking if I was saying that I wanted the US to bomb Syria. But this comic isn’t really about what we should do. I don’t have any good answers. What I find fascinating about this whole situation is how different our reaction was ten years ago to the idea of chemical weapons in the hands of a brutal dictator. In that case, of course, Americans had been knowingly misled to think Iraq had some connection to 9/11. Much of our nonchalance about Syria is clearly a reaction to the debacle of Iraq. But I can’t help but wish more of the skepticism and prudence people are exhibiting now (including many politicians who were gung-ho on attacking Iraq) had been around in 2003, when those of us who voiced such skepticism were pilloried.
Teddy Bear Devolution
Yes, I know there are more important things going on in the world, but hear me out. Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMA’s didn’t strike me as offensive so much as painful to watch. Cyrus probably has enough money to buy herself a giant animatronic bear every single day for the rest of her life, yet she still apparently felt compelled to do a cringeworthy PR stunt that seems like the ultimate amateurish knock-off of the kind of thing Madonna used to do so well. Am I saying “If a woman does this kind of thing it’s bad”? No. If a woman does this kind of thing truly badly, it’s bad. In the end it is kind of sad that she felt the need to objectify herself so flagrantly yet could not pull it off successfully; it had a hint of desperation. (There was also the questionable matter of the African-American female-bear-dancer booty-pounding, which has been discussed on the internet at great length.)
I had some fun researching this one. Did you know that there was a real Smokey Bear who lived at the National Zoo and received so many letters from children that he had his own ZIP code? Or that there was a Soviet adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh called “Vinni Pukh”? You can tell a lot about a culture by its anthropomorphized bears.
