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Dirt-y Politics

Commenters on another site where this cartoon appeared accused me of “playing the race card” with this one. I have to try very hard to put myself in the mindset of someone who thinks the Republicans’ sudden interest in changing the way electoral votes are apportioned in certain swing states has absolutely nothing to do with race. This post by Jamelle Bouie in The American Prospect gives a nice rundown of the problem. As Bouie points out, the end result is a gross distortion of the popular vote that privileges the land:

In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of “one person, one vote.” If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state.

Fortunately, it looks like that plan may be fizzling in my old home state of Virginia.

Pride and Prejudice Anniversary Comic

Ever wonder what Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” would look like as a one-page comic? For the novel’s 200th anniversary, NPR Books asked me to create such a thing.

A technical aside: this was the first time I’ve ever had to lay out a comic specifically with mobile device readers in mind. Apparently NPR gets huge amounts of mobile traffic, so they split the comic up into individual panels that rearrange themselves depending on platform/screen size. Pretty interesting, and something Jane Austen likely never imagined would happen to her novel as she wrote it two centuries ago. (For a truly meta experience, check out this Storify of a Twitter conversation about making comics “responsive” between two news design people and myself.)

As a creator of complex female characters, of course, Austen was very much ahead of her time. Two hundred years ago, she was more highly advanced than most Hollywood screenwriters are today.

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:

This Week’s Cartoon: Politics 101 – It’s the System, Stupid

If I only had a dollar for the number of times someone has accused me of hating the rich or wanting to punish success, I’d be a card-carrying member of the 1%. OK, I exaggerate slightly. But it’s simply not true that that’s where I’m coming from, nor is that the motivation behind OWS.

A couple weeks ago, the NYT published an article interviewing several wealthy people who had grumbly things to say about the Occupy movement. The quote that stuck in my mind was one from Adam Katz, the founder and CEO of private jet service Talon Air.

To many, 99 vs. 1 was an artificial distinction that overlooked hard work and moral character. “It shouldn’t be relevant,” said Mr. Katz , who said he both creates jobs and contributes to charitable causes. “I’m not hurting anyone. I’m helping a lot of people.”

It may well be the case that Mr. Katz is a decent person who’s done a lot of good. But I find myself wondering: how does he vote? Does he support politicians who make it harder for ordinary people to be successful like him? Who appoint Supreme Court justices who seem hell-bent on creating plutocracy? Does he have any concern at all about our Gilded Age levels of inequality? Does he support the carried interest tax break that allows Mitt Romney to pay only a 13.9% income tax rate? These policies, and the arrogance, rationalizations, and excessive self-congratulation that lead to them are the things I hate. Not the rich. (Props, by the way, to the Patriotic Millionaires.)

Out of curiosity, I did a little digging about Katz’s political contributions. According to this site, things ain’t lookin’ good.

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!

First They Came For The Tofu Dogs…

As plant-derived meat products gain in popularity, Big Meat is fighting back with labeling laws such as the one passed in Mississippi. Vox has a good summary:

The state now bans plant-based meat providers from using labels like “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products. Such labels are potentially punishable with jail time. Words like “burger” and “hot dog” would be permitted only for products from slaughtered livestock. Proponents claim the law is necessary to avoid confusing consumers — but given that the phrase “veggie burger” hasn’t been especially confusing for consumers this whole time, it certainly seems more like an effort to keep alternatives to meat away from shoppers.

According to this Memphis news station, the state is also banning the terms “meatless meatballs” and “vegan bacon.” I regret that I found this source too late to include any meatball jokes in the cartoon. I especially loved the response from the Mississippi Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner to charges of anti-competitive protectionism of the meat industry:

“That’s hogwash,” said Mississippi Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson. “What prompted this movement is that consumers of Mississippi have been crying out confused about what’s on the shelf. Is this meat? Or is this not meat?”

Yes, he actually used the word “hogwash.” Also, I think he’s insulting the intelligence of Mississippians more than he intends to here. I have a hard time envisioning many people looking at a package labeled “Meatless Veggie Burgers” and crying out in despair “BUT IS IT MEAT???”

I find the right’s obsession with meat culturally fascinating. When it made the news a few months ago that cattle farming is contributing massively to climate change, Fox and other outlets went bonkers with fear-stoking about “the libs wanting to take away your hamburgers.” The alt-right regularly insults lefty men as “soy boys” (never mind the fact that soy protein is excellent for building muscle mass). Meat is so heavily gendered and semiotically rich, there’s so much to unpack!

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This Week’s Cartoon: “The Latest Debt Ceiling Demands”

Ugh, what more can I say. This whole thing reminds me more and more of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine every day. Manufacture a crisis, use the ensuing sense of panic to impose draconian cuts to programs people desperately need, and voila! Utopia at last. Never mind that Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times, and Dubya 7, or that Clinton balanced the budget, or that the vast bulk of our current deficit was formed under Bush. The hypocrisy is simply astounding.

The m&m’s in the first panel are, of course, a reference to Van Halen’s infamous contract rider stipulating that the brown ones be removed. David Lee Roth has explained that the point was not to be a prima donna, but to test to see if stage crews had read the contract carefully. I love this quote:

I came backstage. I found some brown M&M’s, I went into full Shakespearean ‘What is this before me?”… you know, with the skull in one hand… and promptly trashed the dressing room. Dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of fun.”

I decided to make the m&m’s that Republicans object to the green ones, since, you know, they hate anything green.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Welcome to Ball-Mart”

I’m sensing a distinct lack of outrage over the Wal-Mart sex discrimination ruling, probably because it’s more complicated an issue than a politician tweeting boner pics. In a nutshell (er, no pun intended), the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against female employees being able to file a class-action lawsuit, with all three female justices dissenting. Scalia, refusing to see any correlation in the vast statistical and anecdotal evidence, said the myriad women who faced discrimination must confront the retail Goliath individually. Never mind that the top brass at Wal-Mart turned a blind eye to everything. The discriminatory managers were just a few thousand bad apples! Oh, and as Ruben Bolling points out in this week’s “Tom the Dancing Bug” Scalia’s son is on the Wal-Mart legal team.

I recommend this post by Adam Serwer on The American Prospect for more on the ruling. Key grafs:

Not only do you have to prove the “old boy network exists,” but now you have to do it under a higher standard of proof than ever before. Where discrimination operates as unconscious or unacknowledged bias, rather than as a deliberate, concerted effort to bar one particular group of people from advancing, even where the systemic impact is clear, the conservative justices see no evil.

Scalia’s opinion reflects the deeply flawed view that intent is required for discrimination, and that nominally being opposed to discrimination is by itself an effective bulwark against discrimination occuring. As Ginsburg wrote in her partial dissent, “Managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware.”

Or, as this USA Today editorial points out:

Many legal experts say Monday’s decision will make it difficult to bring cases unless there is an overt policy of discrimination. That seldom happens. Companies don’t write out discriminatory policies for the world to see.

What good is outlawing sex discrimination de jure if it cannot be applied de facto? But hey, we saved the world from Anthony Weiner’s pixelated wang.

This Week’s Cartoon: “All Food Recalled”

If this one looks a little familiar, that’s because I drew it during the Great Peanut Butter Scare of ’09. I didn’t need to change a thing in order to use it again.

I’m not recycling it out of laziness, though. I’m having knee surgery on Friday, and trips to the doctor and other knee-related activities have hampered cartoon production. I’ve been avoiding talking about it online because, frankly, I’m tired of thinking about knees (which were designed by a complete idiot, by the way). But I suppose you faithful SlowpokeBlog readers deserve to know.

From the original “All Food Recalled” blog post:

For the second panel, I was trying to think of the grossest things one could possibly find in a food processing factory. What sprang to mind was the time I was in a grocery store in Pennsylvania, and I thought to look at the ingredients on a tin of scrapple. And there I saw it: the word “SNOUTS.” Snouts, I tell you! That’s where they wind up! As you can see, that moment left an indelible impression on me. Seeing as fresh snouts are apparently perfectly edible, I made the snouts in my cartoon rotten and slick with Astroglide, as though employees had been engaging in some very strange kink right next to the conveyor belt.

This Week’s Cartoon: “A Teachable Moment”

Note: This post has been revised from the original in an effort to clarify facts about the Wisconsin budget.

If there’s one thing to understand about the Wisconsin battle, it’s that it’s not really about the budget, but a premeditated and politically-motivated attack on the teachers’ union. The teachers have already ceded to pay cuts — but now Walker is going to start firing them one by one if they don’t give up their bargaining rights forever. Never mind the fact that the Wisconsin budget was left with only a modest shortfall by Walker’s Democratic predecessor. To top it all off, Walker has added an additional $140 million projected shortfall to the next budget with his wealthy donor-friendly tax cuts.

After a commenter pointed out to me that Walker’s budget-busting measures were, according to Politifact,  not part of the current shortfall, it occurred to me that the first panel of the cartoon is misleading.  While I’d probably write it differently now, I still think the larger point — that he purports to care about the deficit while adding to it — is legit. And even if the current modest shortfall is not due to Walker, it’s clear that the Republicans are using the economic downturn to accomplish their long-sought political goals (union busting) even as they add to deficits themselves. [UPDATE UPDATE: some people are now saying Politifact is wrong (it’s a few paragraphs into the post). I give up. Can we just call Walker a douchenozzle and call it a day?]

If you had any lingering doubts that Wisconsin is part of a broader movement to attack workers’ rights,  it’s important that Americans understand that Walker is in tight with the billionaire right-wing activists, the Koch Brothers, whose foundation Americans For Prosperity is picking ideological fights in several states:

The effort to impose limits on public labor unions has been a particular focus in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states with Republican governors, Mr. Phillips said, adding that he expects new proposals to emerge soon in some of those states to limit union power.

Even if Wisconsin teachers manage to preserve their bargaining rights, my feeling is that the bigger picture does not look good. The forces aligned against what few unions remain are just too powerful. In this Gilded Age we live in, moneyed elites have managed to convince millions of ordinary, struggling Americans to reject one of the last means of recourse workers have left. It doesn’t really matter if Scott Walker goes down — they have the ideological vision, and the willingness to take the heat for it. Something weak-kneed Democrats might want learn from.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Violent Spin”

What really drives me nuts in the wake of the Giffords shooting is the chorus of voices — mostly on the right — tut-tutting that “we can’t jump to conclusions.” As though they are the source of caution and reason and all things prudent and high-minded. Well, guess what: Your candidates are anything but. I don’t really care whether Loughner is schizo, or what particular bits of tea party propaganda he swallowed or didn’t. If you don’t find the violent language of the right utterly repugnant, then it’s a sign of how far we’ve drifted away from normalcy in this country.

As any anthropologist will tell you, human behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum; we live in a cultural stew, and by all accounts, that stew is a-bubblin’. Tom Tomorrow linked to a depressing timeline of armed insurrection in America just since 2008. Hint: it’s long.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Hedge Fund Nation”

Only in a nation that is truly ill-informed could Republicans block unemployment aid for millions unless the most fortunate among us get tax cuts, while simultaneously talking out the other side of their mouths about deficits burdening our children. All this while we live in a new Gilded Age of mind-blowing income inequality. It’s almost too absurd to contemplate. But you knew that already. As for my thoughts on the Great Compromise: I think Obama could have used his rhetorical abilities to put the GOP on the defensive. But caution is his middle name (it has officially replaced “Hussein,” in fact), and it’s going to come back and bite him on the butt.

One almost gets the impression from the GOP that something is wrong with you if you’re still doing actual, useful work (or would like to, except for the fact that there are five available workers for every job opening), as opposed to occupying the loftier realms of high finance. So I decided to play around with the idea of everyone becoming a banker. Related cartoon from 2004 (a personal fave): “The Labor Chain“