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Reality Eclipses Satire, no. 87,493
I love this. In my cartoon this week, I suggested an absurd way that Michelle Bachmann might explain her quote that voters should be “armed and dangerous” over the cap-and-trade bill. As I learned today via TPM, she actually did walk that quote back a month later, saying the following:
“I want my people in Minnesota to be the most educated people. I want them to be armed with knowledge, so they can be dangerous to the policies of the left.”
Almost like my comic. Clearly I didn’t go far enough.
This Week’s Cartoon: “Drones Among Us”
I thought about doing a cartoon on Egypt, but at the time, I didn’t really have much to add beyond “Wow.” I will promise you one thing, though: if I do draw a cartoon about Egypt, it won’t involve the Sphinx, hieroglyphics, or King Tut. (I’m afraid to say I just found one depicting the Sphinx crying. Really.)
This week’s installment is something of a follow-up to my previous cartoon about Predator drones, in which I envisioned using them to fight crime in the US the way we use them in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). Thanks to a tweet from a Slowpoke reader, I read this article about small drones being purchased for surveillance by the Miami-Dade police department. I guess I don’t have a problem with a SWAT team sending up a flying beer keg — that’s the nickname for the Honeywell T-Hawk drone, mind you — if they’re about to bust in on a house full of heavily-armed goons. But the thought of patrol by drone does seem a little weird on the face of it — so weird, in fact, the Department of Homeland Security won’t touch it (aside from the drones they use for border patrol, that is).
Photo taken from WIRED, who got it from Honeywell. If you’re really curious/geeky, the Washington Post has a video of this thing flying through the air. Oh, the research I do for you people!
This Week’s Cartoon: “Zero-Sum Speech”
I’m out of town at the moment, so I will have to let this passage from the NYT article summarize the relevant issue for me:
To William Maurer, the lawyer opposing the Arizona mechanism, whenever “a privately financed candidate speaks above a certain amount, the government creates real penalties for them to have engaged in unfettered political expression.” That “speaks” was not a slip, but a reinforcement of the money-equals-speech notion.
The fundamental problem, he said, is “the government turning my speech into the vehicle by which my entire political message is undercut,” because the public funds triggered are a penalty that reduces the impact of the privately financed candidate’s spending and speech. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. made clear in the argument that he, too, sees triggered matching public funds as a limit on the privately financed candidate’s speech.
I am simply incapable of wrapping my mind around this interpretation of the First Amendment. To see the world this way, you literally have to have your brain screwed in backwards.
This week’s cartoon: “Post-Debt Ceiling Ultimatums”
In the midst of all the hand-wringing over deficits, it seems no one is bringing up the simple fact that the deficit will disappear if Congress does NOTHING. The entire debate is a crock of simmering crap, a thinly-veiled excuse for Republicans who don’t give a damn about deficits to gut social programs. It’s straight out of the GOP playbook. Run up massive deficits to starve the beast (see: Reagan, Bush Jr.), then squawk bloody murder when a Democrat is in charge, pinning the blame on them and forcing the Dem to clean up the mess (see: Clinton, Obama, Mark Warner as governor of Virginia). And no matter how irresponsible the Republicans are, or how cautious Dems are budget-wise, the grand narrative never changes. Dems are always characterized as big spenders, Repubs as pillars of fiscal probity. And when Dems point to loopholes like the private jet tax break, the Republicans’ talking point is: “That’s small potatoes. It would hardly make a dent in the deficit.” Well, if it’s no big deal, then why threaten to blow up the whole economy over it? And if minor expenses don’t matter, why threaten to defund NPR over piddling chump change? These people are unserious frauds concerned only with dismantling the New Deal, and the media should treat them as such. Anyone — and any cartoonist — who takes these self-proclaimed “deficit hawks” at face value (especially that smug, dead-eyed, know-nothing doucheswizzle Paul Ryan) is doing a gross disservice to the public and to democracy itself.
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.
The Simpsons Beat Me!
In the comments to last week’s cartoon blog post, reader Nick furnished this screenshot from e Simpsons episode, which bears an eerie resemblance to the first panel to last week’s strip.
Pretty eerie, huh? I have no memory of that Simpsons gag, even though I probably saw that episode at some point. But to give credit where credit is due, I thought I’d post them both here. The placement of the well is especially mind-blowing, but I would add that that’s where it goes, composition-wise.
This Week’s Cartoon: “Starve the Beast”
This cartoon, of course, references Grover Norquist’s famous line about wanting to reduce government to the size where he could drown it in a tub, like some unfortunate critter. One concept anti-government types aren’t too clear on is that waste is hardly unique to the public sector. I’m not saying government programs are necessarily more efficient than privately-run ones (although in the case of health care, public plans are massively more cost-effective). But money out of your pocket is money out of your pocket, whether it’s going to the guv’mint or a corporation.
This Week’s Cartoon: “2012: A Mad Lib Odyssey”
Three years ago around this time, I was asked to draw a comic for C-VILLE Weekly about events in the year ahead. At first it felt like I’d been asked to predict the future, and I thought it would be difficult. But after a bit of mulling, I found I could write an entire two-page comic addressing many of the “big” news stories of 2009 — Obama’s inauguration! The Star Trek reboot! The First Puppy! — before the year even happened. It made me realize just how much news is formulaic. Not to diminish the importance of good journalism; on the contrary! It is the antidote to normalizing fluff.
So I decided to do a mini-version of my “predictive” comic, in a sense. Just remember it in November when you hear some pundit waxing triumphant about the American electoral process, which will most assuredly have sucked in a thousand ways, no matter who won.
This Week’s Cartoon: “Pundit Retraining”
I realize creative destruction happens when technology changes, and to some extent it’s inevitable. (The kind of “creative” destruction Romney practiced at Bain: not so good.) But some people become cheerleaders for economic disruption without the appropriate amount of empathy for affected workers, and that annoys me.
If you think the pundit in the cartoon bears a passing resemblance to Thomas Friedman, I won’t argue with you. Friedman isn’t as empathy-challenged as they come, but he’s pretty bad. He endlessly fantasizes about retraining Americans to be high-tech imagineers, even though our current unemployment woes are broad-based, not structural.
“In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle… Average is over,” he wrote in a recent tone-deaf column that glowingly referred to the above-average workers in China who were roused in the middle of the night to work a 12-hour shift installing iPhone screens. Aside from his apparent lack of concern that such labor conditions totally suck, it’s kind of haughty to imply that the unemployed are suffering from a case of averageness. There are plenty of highly-educated Americans who can’t find jobs — never mind the fact that many jobs out there barely utilize your education. If we are to dismiss the average or subpar, then perhaps Friedman’s column should be the first to go.
This Week’s Cartoon: “The Hoodie: Apparel of Peril”
The hoodie is about as universal as blue jeans these days, transcending practically every youth subculture. Considering that some 99.98% of hoodie-wearers are non-thugs, you’d have to be a clueless Fox News pundit to find the garment gunfire-provokingly scary.
I regret that I could not include the Great Hoodie Wars of the 7th century between the House of the Zip-Front and the House of Pullovers, as I unfortunately did not have not enough room to draw a giant battle scene.
Relevant links, as provided by Daily Kos commenters: NRA begins selling hoodies with a handgun pocket
University of Texas cartoonist draws mind-blowingly racist cartoon about Trayvon Williams
Follow Daily Kos Comics at http://comics.dailykos.com
More Years to Fear
These times are difficult for everyone, but I’ve been thinking lately about how what has happened to America is especially mind-blowing for my generation. The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the defining events of my youth. As a teenager, I had no illusions about the world being perfect, but it seemed unquestionable that democracy had a firm foothold in the West and was more or less on the rise globally. It’s even worse, I think, if you’re a woman who came of age in the ‘90s. How did we enter this weird alternate timeline?
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Classic Cartoon: Nation of Moochers
I’m taking some much-needed time off over the holidays. This is a “classic” from 2014 with some relevance to our current moment. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the minimum wage would be $24 in 2020 had it kept up with productivity growth.
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