The Sorensen Monologues

WWII Poster Project

I wanted to share a cool project I’ve been working on. The National Women’s Law Center has commissioned me to create a series of posters as part of their voter education drive. I’ve had fun learning a thing or two about vintage poster design.

You can share it on Facebook here.

And you can get a free printable version here.

This Week’s Cartoon: Mr. Obama’s Wild Ride

I had a hard time sitting through that debate last week. Rising above the fray through aloof non-engagement does not work when you’re being pelted with dung on live national television. It took me back to the frustrating days of not so long ago, when an overabundance of caution and unwillingness to use the bully pulpit proved disastrous. I thought the stronger rhetoric of the campaign season meant that somebody had finally learned that lesson, but apparently not.

This Week’s Cartoon: The Universal Laws of Ladies in Science

Inside Higher Ed has more on the Yale study:

Female scientists were as likely as male scientists to evaluate the students this way. For instance, the scientists were asked to rate the students’ competence on a 5-point scale. Male faculty rated the male student 4.01 and the female student 3.33. Female scientists rated the male student 4.10 and the female student 3.32.

Even I still catch myself thinking of a stereotypical doctor as a guy with a stethoscope, despite the fact that I’ve had female doctors for my entire adult life. It’s harder to get rid of these biases than we think.

The statistic about the decline of women studying computer science is taken from this NY Times op-ed by Stephanie Coontz.

This Week’s Cartoon: “The Aristocratic Old Grandpa State”

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing smug Republicans toot their success horns while nagging the rest of us to work harder.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to oppose anything that might help American workers get ahead — unions, a robust safety net, minimum wage hikes — and then blame those workers for not earning enough money to pay federal income taxes (never mind all the other taxes they do pay). You can’t have it both ways! You can’t upend people’s lives through corporate takeovers and then call the downsized “irresponsible.” You can’t sow market chaos through deregulation and scoff at the small business owner who can’t survive the downturn. The disconnect is astounding. But such is the power of ideology.

Last Week’s Cartoon: Real-Life Scenes From the DNC

I’ve been on the road for most of September, so I neglected to post this strip from last week. You can read my DNC postmortem on the Austin Chronicle.

I’m in the process of redesigning my site, which will hopefully mean more regular updates in the future. With the current design, I have to edit the HTML manually, which is a real pain while traveling.

This Week’s Cartoon: All the President’s Men

No, this one isn’t about Romney’s video fubars. But I think it makes an important point that is ignored by most media and many voters. Viewing the election as a contest between two people named Obama and Romney is a simplistic approach at best, no matter how delightful Mitt’s personality tics and one-percenter utterances may be. A vote for “Romney” is a vote for sad sack Bush-Cheney neocons seeking a new lease on life, a vote for the Heritage Foundation, a vote for more Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases. Romney’s “character” — if it can be said he has one — has little to do with any of this; people should be talking instead about the cast of characters he’d bring to the White House.

Same goes for Obama: his extended network includes Planned Parenthood, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, more Sotomayors and Kagans, and countless invisible players behind the scenes. I’m not saying every last one of them is perfect, but when you look at the groups as a whole, the difference is stark. Harder to fit on a bumper sticker maybe, but these are the candidates you’re really voting for.

Follow me at the DNC

I’m in Charlotte, where I’ve begun my dual-pronged coverage of the Democratic National Convention for C-VILLE Weekly and the Austin Chronicle. Here are the links for following along:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/authors/jen-sorensen/

http://www.c-ville.com/author/jensorensen/

If you’re in a city other than Austin or Charlottesville, pick one; posts will be more or less the same. I’m hoping to integrate my tweets and photos before too long. Go ahead, leave a comment on either site!

This Week’s Cartoon: Free Speech for Cigarettes

Hmm… so according to this 2-1 appeals court ruling, speech added to cigarette packaging limits speech. I guess the “individual liberties” of li’l old corporate persons like RJ Reynolds outweigh a democratically-elected government’s right to add a message on behalf of the public interest. Never mind that we’re talking about the packaging of a deadly commercial product with a history of being marketed to kids. Actually showing a kid being harmed on the package would interfere with whatever those Marlboros are trying to express.

Via Raw Story:

In a dissent, Judge Judith Rogers said that the regulation ordering the label “does not restrict the information conveyed to consumers, but requires additional information to be conveyed with the aid of graphic images.”

Rogers, who was appointed by former president Bill Clinton, said that tobacco companies had engaged in “decades of deception” over health risks and had no legal basis to complain about “emotional reactions” to graphic warnings.

You may recall that Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the author of the majority opinion, was one of the radical George W. Bush appointees whom the Dems tried to filibuster, until the Gang of 14 came along and opened the floodgates of nutballery. She’s an extreme libertarian who invokes Ayn Rand in speeches to the Federalist Society, and calls government a “leviathan” prone to “crushing everything in its path.” You know the type. She and Paul Ryan would make great drinking buddies.

I’ve been surprised by the number of commenters on Daily Kos who say “Oh, the labeling won’t work anyway.” To which I responded:

Dem Convention Blogging

Some of you may recall my blog coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention for C-VILLE Weekly. We’ve been working on doing something similar this year, possibly in partnership with another altweekly, so I’ll be traveling to Charlotte the week after next. Watch this space for updates!

This Week’s Cartoon: Sneak Preview of the Republican National Convention

I read somewhere recently that not long after Romney’s announcement of his running mate, Google searches for “Paul Ryan” and “shirtless” shot through the roof. Undoubtedly this was due in part to the revelation that Ryan is a devotee of the infomercial workout known as P90X. If only people craved deets on Ryan’s radically-destructive, mathematically-impossible budget like they do glimpses of his abs, we’d all be much better off. Speaking for myself, I can’t even stand to look at the man’s cold, dead eyes. Also: enough about what a brainy wunderkind he is. Ryan is an intellectual in the same way that people well-versed in specious vaccination theories are “intellectuals.”

If you haven’t heard about the Buckyball controversy, you can read more about it here. I don’t have particularly strong feelings either way, though right-wing blowhards apparently do.

This Week’s Cartoon: Olympic Memories

McDonald’s being the official restaurant of the Olympics is a bit like XBox being the official study aid of the National Spelling Bee. But, of course, the biggest crime of this year’s games coverage was the omission of Ray Davies from the U.S. broadcast of the closing ceremony.

This Week’s Cartoon: One Weird Trick

The “one weird trick discovered by a mom” meme has persisted for a while now in the illustrious world of web ads. And it’s not just moms — all sorts of ordinary folks are coming up with strange tips and tricks for our collective benefit. Just a few weeks ago, I spotted a rather paranoid ad that read: “47yo patriot discovers ‘weird’ trick to slash power bill & end Obama’s power monopoly.” (I’ve heard Obama accused of many things, but being an electricity cartel kingpin is a new one.)

I wonder how this trend came to be. Was there some marketing study on the clickability of different phrases, and “weird trick” came out on top? Especially if the weird trick came from moms, dads, patriots, and other salt-of-the-earth folks? The implicit rejection of professional expertise here frankly says a lot about our culture. Don’t need no fancypants scientist telling us how to lose our flab!

In 2011, the Washington Post reported on a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the “tiny belly” ads; they’re the front end of a highly profitable scheme involving a large number of dubious dietary supplement companies. The fact that anyone is seduced into giving their credit card numbers to these people boggles the mind.