The Sorensen Monologues

Put a Panel on It

I commend Obama for returning solar panels to the White House roof after their ignominious removal by Reagan some decades ago. It’s a symbolic gesture, but symbolism goes a long way when you’re the Prez. What’s irritating, however, is his glaring inconsistency when it comes to actual energy policy. Obama recently criticized the influence of the fossil fuel industry on Congress. But the coal from the Powder River Basin that the administration has been planning to auction off would, as Grist’s David Roberts put it, “undo all of Obama’s other climate work.”

The first coal tract, which was scheduled to be auctioned off last week, had no bidders. Nonetheless, I find myself utterly confused as to where Obama actually stands on climate change.

Creative Disruption

A subtle point this week, but one I’ve been meaning to make for a while. This article about Amazon founder and new Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos served as a reminder:

“But then, few newsrooms have ever been confronted with a new owner whose zeal for disruption is matched by his obsession with tinkering until he gets it right.”

I’m not opposed to disruptive technology, or change in general. iPhones happen. But simply valuing market upheaval for the sake of market upheaval strikes me as a little self-serving. It’s an approach that tends to benefit the owners of a company and the financial industry, which thrives on churn, but not necessarily the public. If anything, it seems most people could use a little more predictability and stability in their lives — the comfort of knowing their mortgage will be paid, and their health insurance kept.

Commenters on Daily Kos pointed out an essay by Judith Shulevitz on this very subject that had coincidentally appeared in The New Republic just a few days earlier. Well worth reading.

NSFWCORP Comic Unlocked

For the next 48 hours, you can view an exclusive comic I drew for NSFWCORP #4: TWEETS IN MEATSPACE. Link will expire after that!

The Don’t Show Me State

For more on this absurd story, this NYT article explains it all. In short, Missouri’s health care gag rule came about as a ballot measure approved by voters. It seems to me that such a speech-limiting law would be in violation of the Constitution, so the local Tea Party should be up in arms about it, right? In any case, Missouri, be sure to check out healthcare.gov (or even better, enrollmissouri.org).

Handy Chart: Janet Yellen vs. Larry Summers

Ridiculously condescending comments have been made about Janet Yellen — that she lacks “gravitas,” or that choosing her to lead the Federal Reserve would be a decision “driven by gender.” But it’s a mistaken assumption to think that those who favor her over Larry Summers are only doing so because she is female, or merely because they are still smoldering over Summers’ questionable comments about women while president of Harvard. Many people (several prominent male economists among them) support her because she is clearly the more qualified candidate. To quote from Ezra Klein’s excellent post on the subject:

“If you take Yellen as an example, she has more direct Fed experience than Ben Bernanke did, or than Alan Greenspan did, or than Paul Volcker did. In order to be competitive for the job, she needed to be much more qualified for it.”

This is not to say Larry Summers’ titanic oafishness is not a factor. There are so many egregious moments from his career that I wanted to include in this cartoon, but couldn’t — the fact that he sided with Ken Lay and Enron during the California energy crisis, even after some economists were raising the possibility of market manipulation; his dismissive attitude toward climate change while Chief Economist of the World Bank, and subsequent opposition to the Kyoto Protocol; his opposition to the Volcker Rule as part of the Dodd-Frank banking reforms; his memo to Obama significantly underestimating the amount of stimulus needed. The list goes on and on. Seriously, no woman who has been as wrong about as many things as Larry Summers would ever be considered to lead the Fed.

Yet the meme of the “brilliant” Summers persists. I’m sure the man has written some smart academic papers and may well possess great intelligence, but that’s not the same thing as getting it right. If you want to understand what’s sticking in the craw of Summers opponents, it’s that we’ve seen this story before. It’s the simple unfairness of of having to work so much harder to reach the top, and if you do, you’re seen as the “gendered” pick. It’s symbolic of every time a highly-qualified woman hits the glass ceiling when forced to compete with a loud, arrogant blowhard with a strong sense of self-entitlement and undeserved mystique of greatness.

I hold out some hope that Obama will make the brave decision here.

Digital Housekeeping

A couple items of note regarding my various online activity portals. First, I have finally finished making this site fully-functional! The “Order a Print” button actually enables you to order a print, and the illustration portfolio now contains more than just a few items for your perusal. I’ll be adding more content and features as time permits.

Secondly, I now have a new Twitter handle, @JenSorensen, thanks to a very kind Jen Sorensen in Colorado who gave me hers. Apparently she was getting a fair number of tweets about my cartoons. Back in the early days of Twitter, I came close to grabbing the handle myself, but decided not to because everyone misspells my name, and how important could this Twitter thing be, anyhow? Now I see the error of my ways, and consider myself lucky to not be named Zach Galifianakis (although I’d take his job).

The Right to Bear Bags

I happen to live in a city (Austin) that passed a bag ban, but not without pushback from the American Chemistry Council, the benignly-named lobbying arm of the nation’s chemical manufacturers. The group has a penchant for meddling in local efforts; it also successfully fought California’s attempt to list BPA as toxic.

Here in Austin, the transition went smoothly, and commerce continues as usual. Not that you’d know that from the bloviations of a Texas politician (R, natch) calling for a Shopping Bag Freedom Act. Speaking for myself, I have enough canvas tote bags for a year’s worth of groceries.

More on New York’s unsuccessful efforts to reduce plastic bag usage here.

Comic on Immigrant Activist Danilo Lopez

I’ve been meaning to share a one-page comic I drew recently for Vermont’s Seven Days altweekly, which publishes a cool annual cartoon issue full of stories rendered in comic format. I teamed up with News Editor Andy Bromage to create this piece about a local activist for undocumented farm workers, Danilo Lopez, whom you could justifiably call the Cesar Chavez of Vermont.

Danilo was ordered to self-deport by July 6. Not long after the comic was published, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement granted him a “stay of removal” that postpones his deportation for at least another year. While I doubt that the comic affected the ICE’s decision, I’m right proud of it nonetheless.

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!