The Sorensen Monologues

Illustration Monday

Here’s my first effort at drawing Rick Perry, for the Dallas Observer.

It was actually used as part of a fake t-shirt design (“elephant walking” is a Texas A&M term, I have learned):

Won’t it be refreshing when we no longer have presidents or presidential candidates whose caricatures lend themselves to wearing cowboy hats and waving sixguns around? Unfortunately, I don’t think that will be anytime soon.

This Week’s Cartoon: Red White and Blue Light Special

This one was informed by this recent NYT article about a lovely new bipartisan plan to reduce the deficit. As though we’re going to make up for the Bush tax cuts and trillion-dollar wars by selling off post offices. It’s a market absolutist’s dream come true.

The attack plan shown on the computer screen in the third panel is taken directly from the war room in “Dr. Strangelove.” At least one reader thought I was depicting a military strike on Canada. It does look a bit like Canada, I have to admit. But fear not, northerly neighbors! That general is still fighting the Cold War. You’re safe.

I drew this cartoon at the home of “Troubletown” cartoonist Lloyd Dangle while on a recent trip to the Bay Area for a comic convention. Lloyd, who recently retired his strip, did not seem to envy me one bit as I burned the candle at both ends to make my deadline.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Killer Kleen”

I found out about the scented-laundry-product study last week thanks to a brief article in The Oregonian. To quote the original press release from the professor who led the research:

Analysis of the captured gases found more than 25 volatile organic compounds, including seven hazardous air pollutants, coming out of the vents. Of those, two chemicals – acetaldehyde and benzene – are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as carcinogens, for which the agency has established no safe exposure level…Emissions from the top five brands, they estimate, would constitute about 6 percent of automobiles’ acetaldehyde emissions.

Puts “mountain fresh” scent into a whole new perspective, doesn’t it?

Longtime readers know I violently hate leaf blowers. I still can’t believe most people regard these infernal shrieking monsters as a “normal” part of life. There’s always one blasting away in my neighborhood, destroying the peace and quiet. I’ve noticed that the amount of work being done with them is often minimal or downright imperceptible compared to the public disturbance they cause. I swear, my neighbor just enjoys waving his blower around like a metal detector as he strolls through his perfect grass. And yet we can’t necessarily see the crud they spew into the air, or the sound waves radiating out for blocks, so it’s all good, man.

I lived in rural Virginia for several years, where some people still burned their trash. In case you were thinking of escaping to the country to avoid dryer vents and leaf blowers…

For more on the ultra-plush toilet paper issue, Greenpeace has been on the case. I’m not a TP radical, but I’ve always been of the opinion that super-soft rolls run out too quickly.

PS: A Daily Kos commenter linked to an article about these awesome Japanese toilets. I want one.

This Week’s Cartoon: Ron Paul’s Muffin-care

The more I think about Ron Paul’s solution to the plight of the uninsured, the more baffled I become. So, churches are going to come to the rescue? That would seem to leave an awful lot of non-churchgoers to die, but maybe that’s the point. And what about, as the Beatles put it, all the lonely people? These same politicians calling for communities to pitch in together are the ones pushing the myth of the radically-atomized individual. They are the party of American alienation: inhuman-scale corporate bureaucracies, big-box stores, unchecked sprawl, barricaded McMansions, and oversized vehicles with outside-world-avoiding names like “Enclave.” (I generalize, but only slightly.) These are the people who crush attempts at fostering community through urban planning and the creation of public space. For these ideologues to lecture anyone about neighborliness takes a lot of chutzpah.

Not even Ron Paul’s muffin-based health care plan could help his former campaign manager who died with $400,000 in medical bills. He was reportedly ineligible for health insurance due to a pre-existing condition. (For an eloquent statement on this, and general Republican cruelty regarding health care, I recommend this Daily Kos diary).

A note about the Kickstarter joke in the fourth panel: I had a nagging feeling that I’d seen a tweet about Kickstarter-funded health care somewhere, but a rather lengthy search turned up nothing. In any case, I apologize if I’m not the first person to think of that.

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This Week’s Cartoon: Entitlements 101

So I really did see this billboard over the summer, on I-5 in southern Washington. Anyone who travels between Portland and Seattle with any frequency is aware of the cultural institution known as the “Uncle Sam billboard.” It always has some extreme right-wing slogan next to a likeness of Uncle Sam. Apparently a farmer started it decades ago, and now the fabled sign is maintained by his son. (I neglected to include Uncle Sam when I drew the cartoon; I was so gobsmacked by the sentiment that I forgot all about him. And the internet tells me belatedly that the exact wording was “Should people receiving entitlements be allowed to vote?”, but I’m too tired to fix it now.)

Clearly the sign is the handiwork of an ignoramus, but it touches on something that’s been bothering me for a while. Many Americans don’t understand the term “entitlements.” Anyone hoping to preserve the social safety net should avoid the word, which makes Social Security and Medicare sound like frivolous handouts to undeserving snots. The fact that anti-poverty measures like food stamps are also referred to as entitlement programs only adds to the confusion, not that denying voting rights to poor people is any less reprehensible.

I wouldn’t dismiss this billboard guy as a lone crackpot, either. TPM recently reported on conservative columnist Matthew Vadum, who suggested that registering poor people to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. I smell a meme.

SPX Appearance

I leave tomorrow for the 2011 Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD. I missed the last two, so I’m looking forward to reliving my old Fall ritual again (I used to go every year). If you’re in the area, stop by my table. I’ll be signing books and will probably have some prints on hand as well. I’d tell you the table number, but there might be some reshuffling due to earthquake-related repairs to the hotel, so you’ll just have to find me.

In related news, here’s a Washington City Paper interview with me in advance of the show. Many thanks to the estimable Mike Rhode. Coincident with this week’s cartoon, there’s an ad in rotation on that page with a BIG QR CODE!

This Week’s Cartoon: “Code Dependent”

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this as a media-type person, but I still do not own a smartphone. My rudimentary cellphone has become a perverse point of pride for me. I figure I’ve saved thousands of dollars over the past few years, so why stop now? Plus, I work from home, where there’s plenty o’ internet. Too much, in fact. Oh, I’m sure I’ll get an iPhone eventually… once they’re considered the Atari of mobile technology.

But these QR codes popping up everywhere, readable only by people who own a Secret Decoder Ring, seem just a little, well, exclusionary to those of us who are frugal with our phones. This will almost surely lead to a greater incidence of Cellphone Inferiority Complex.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Zip Homes”

I’m assuming everyone is familiar with Zipcars. I’m currently reading Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut. The chapter about housing contains some telling statistics (bear in mind that the book was published in 2005, before the bubble burst, not that things are oh-so-affordable now).

Between 1995 and 2002, rents in nearly all of the largest metropolitan areas rose astronomically. Median rents in San Francisco ballooned 76 percent; Boston, 62 percent; San Diego, 54 percent

A house purchased in Levittown back in 1952 for $6,700 ($44,647 in today’s dollars) sold for $300,000 in 2003.

Draut goes on to describe a family in San Lorenzo, CA. A young couple can’t afford to buy a home in the same town as their parents, who couldn’t afford to buy their own house if they had to buy it today. When you throw in stagnant incomes, massive unemployment, and austerity fever, it becomes clear that America needs… ZIP HOMES!

A Political Cartoonist’s Worst Nightmare

The political cartooning community was shaken today by news of Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat’s beating by pro-Assad thugs. They broke his hands to stop him from drawing cartoons critical of the President.

This horrifying incident reminds me of an exchange I had earlier this summer when meeting with political cartoonists from the Middle East and North Africa through a State Department program. Naturally, a prominent topic of discussion was the freedom of speech we American cartoonists enjoy. I was on crutches thanks to a skiing accident (I’m mobile now, thank you), and I made a dumb joke, obviously tongue-in-cheek, about how the Obama administration didn’t like one of the cartoons I drew. “Ah, so you are like an Arab cartoonist!” one of the visitors joked back. The whole room laughed, maybe a little too hard. Gotta admire the bravery of the Ali Ferzats of the world.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Big-Spending Bureaucrats”

There’s this persistent idea that government spending is akin to decadent and frivolous consumer spending. People speak of “greedy government bureaucrats” lusting after tax dollars as though they were hedonists seeking their next shopper’s high. As though the mundane work of keeping the streetlights on or preventing sewage treatment tanks from overflowing was like buying a Roomba.

I’m not saying there’s no government waste. The fact that Medicare can’t negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs is a big stupid waste of taxpayer money. So is outsourcing the work of the U.S. military to highly-paid mercenaries. And yet we don’t hear the self-proclaimed deficit hawks screeching about these hardworking-taxpayer-dollar-suckers. Somebody’s buying expensive toys, all right.

This Week’s Cartoon: “The Octangulator”

I didn’t really want to do another cartoon about Obama since I’ve done several lately, but I read a couple things recently that induced much brow-furrowing and teeth-clenching. One was this post by Robert Reich about what he’s heard from White House insiders:

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

Then there was this NYT article:

A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument [for economic stimulus] in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”

Everyone knows that Democrats can balance budgets until the end of time and still get tagged as tax-and-spenders. So this strategist’s solution is to stand like an unblinking cow in the middle of the train tracks and do nothing? For this, he or she actually gets paid?

I tend to catch some flak when I’m critical of Obama, and this week will probably be no exception. I often feel trapped between defenders of bad policy and poor strategy from the Dems, and those who seem to have unrealistic expectations without taking context into account. And by “context,” I mean that the cheese has fallen off the nation’s collective cracker. But we have to try to change that context instead of echoing it, as Obama has done far too much.

This Week’s Cartoon: “GOP Cleans Up Environmental Laws”

While the nation was distracted with debt ceiling shenanigans, House Republicans did something else that went largely and predictably ignored by much of the news media. They quietly slipped 39 anti-environmental riders, many of them eye-poppingly radical, into an appropriations bill. The riders would do things like: prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases for one year, stop coal ash from being treated as hazardous waste, and block the enforcement of new fuel efficiency laws that automakers have actually agreed to. The money quote from Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID): “Many of us think that the overregulation from E.P.A. is at the heart of our stalled economy.” Oh yeah, that’s it. Fortunately, many of these brilliant ideas won’t make it through the Senate, but you never know, now that we live in a hostage-ocracy.

As I first read about this, it occurred to me that Republicans tend to view environmental protections themselves as a form of pollution. If the GOP fought actual pollution with the same vigor they display in fighting pollution laws, America would be clean enough to lick. Don’t think about that too hard.

Oh, and on a somewhat-related note: it takes a lot to get me to LOL, but this item on TPM did it. Tea Partiers have swallowed a Glenn Beck-promoted conspiracy theory that the UN is going to take away their farms through a sustainability program called “Agenda 21.” To quote Beck:

Some people now have begun questioning and standing up to what, on the surface, seems like a harmless initiative just to save the environment. But it is not… once they put their fangs into our communities, they’ll suck all the blood out of it, and we will not be able to survive. Watch out.

(via Media Matters)

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