10/31/05 Cartoon

I have detected a slight misunderstanding with regards to the point I was trying to make with this 'toon. Yes, the character is a parody of Judith Miller, but it wasn't necessarily meant to be exactly like her. Specifically, I have no evidence that she is an abnormally bubbly or animated person (aside from that giant self-satisfied grin she always seems to have on her face), nor do I know if she actually once did restaurant reviews or interviewed celebrities. Mainly, I was attempting to present a satirical critique of some of the decisions she's made as a journalist, which have been, shall we say, "ill-advised."

Rove?

Raw Story is not backing down, and is saying that it is quite possible that Rove will still be indicted next week. The Washington Post agrees that he is still under scrutiny.

Cross your fingers...

Thursday Comic

Powerful Luckovich 'toon on the 2000th military death in Iraq.

IT HAS BEGUN...

Raw Story (yet again, via Cursor) has it:

Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked the grand jury investigating the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson to indict Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, lawyers close to the investigation tell RAW STORY.
Fitzgerald has also asked the jury to indict Libby on a second charge: knowingly outing a covert operative, the lawyers said. They said the prosecutor believes that Libby violated a 1982 law that made it illegal to unmask an undercover CIA agent.

NOW we've got a show...

Cooked Goose?

Lawrence O'Donnell (via Cursor) makes an interesting point about the chances of indictments being issued, should Fitzgerald ask for them:

A typical Washington, D.C. grand jury is about 75% African American. Fitzgerald’s is slightly more than that. This is not the kind of group Karl Rove feels at home with. He has no professional experience trying to appeal to a group like this. He has been so unsuccessful at it that his boss’s job approval rating with African Americans is now 2%, which, factoring in the margin of error, could actually be zero. To make matters statistically and demographically much worse for Rove and Scooter Libby, only 12 of the 23 grand jurors have to agree to indict them.

Monday Comix

Shannon Wheeler has obviously been to downtown Seattle.

Tom Toles on Bush's inner circle.

Friday Comic

Brian McFadden tells the story of another Massachusetts Halloween tradition (the fifth frame gave me a laugh)...

Breakin' th' LAW...

Daily DeLay has a copy of the arrest warrant (via Cursor)...

The World's Top Intellectual

...according to Prospect Magazine, is to no one's surprise, Noam Chomsky. Umberto Eco was second. Coincidentally (or not), I was reading both of them last week while researching cartoon ideas. The "Democra-Bludgeon" is a not-so-veiled reference to Chomsky's quote: "Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state..."

The validity of the poll as a whole was questionable, though. Christopher Hitchens? Paul Wolfowitz?! Howard Zinn and Arundhati Roy had to be "write-ins?" Give me a break...

New Patron

Fighting Words is now running on the Opinion pages of Flak Magazine, an online "noncomprehensive guide to everything." Check it out.

Cheney Resigning?

Atrios points us to the existence of rumors of a Cheney resignation over the Plame investigation, as TalkLeft suggests it was Rove that flipped on Cheney. US News says that this would clear the way for Bush to elevate apparently the last black person in America that still supports him to the Vice Presidency.

Of course, Cheney resigning would be a historic development and I would absolutely be doing backflips, but I have to say that I would miss doing Cheney characters... the guy is such an easy target.

Monday Comix

Shannon Wheeler knows my pain.

Mike Luckovich is on quite a roll.

Weasel-Bot

Ah, Scott-Bot... that "asshole" program of yours will not win you any friends in the press corps:

THOMAS: What does the President mean by "total victory" -- that we will never leave Iraq until we have "total victory"? What does that mean?

McCLELLAN: Free and democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East, because a free and democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a major blow to the ambitions --

THOMAS: If they ask us to leave, then we'll leave?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm trying to respond. A free and democratic Iraq in the heart of the broader Middle East will be a major blow to the ambitions of al Qaeda and their terrorist associates. They want to establish or impose their rule over the broader Middle East -- we saw that in the Zawahiri letter that was released earlier this week by the intelligence community.

THOMAS: They also know we invaded Iraq.

McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, the President recognizes that we are engaged in a global war on terrorism. And when you're engaged in a war, it's not always pleasant, and it's certainly a last resort. But when you engage in a war, you take the fight to the enemy, you go on the offense. And that's exactly what we are doing. We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here. September 11th taught us --

THOMAS: It has nothing to do with -- Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

McCLELLAN: Well, you have a very different view of the war on terrorism, and I'm sure you're opposed to the broader war on terrorism. The President recognizes this requires a comprehensive strategy, and that this is a broad war, that it is not a law enforcement matter.Terry.

TERRY MORAN: On what basis do you say Helen is opposed to the broader war on terrorism?

McCLELLAN: Well, she certainly expressed her concerns about Afghanistan and Iraq and going into those two countries. I think I can go back and pull up her comments over the course of the past couple of years.

MORAN: And speak for her, which is odd.

McCLELLAN: No, I said she may be, because certainly if you look at her comments over the course of the past couple of years, she's expressed her concerns --

THOMAS: I'm opposed to preemptive war, unprovoked preemptive war.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- she's expressed her concerns.

PBF

I've been getting into a new comic: The Perry Bible Fellowship. Actually, it's not new, I was just never able to access it before because of my pathetically slow internet connection. Don't let the name fool you... it's damn funny.

The Right Way to Rebuild...

In researching this week's 'toon, I came across a particularly good article written by Tulane Law Professor David Gelfand:

Recently, The Wall Street Journal chillingly described plans of the "power elite" to rebuild New Orleans "in a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically." Unless we insist upon an inclusive, cooperative, localized approach to the planning of restoration of New Orleans, that narrow power elite will have their way. They will do so by conspiring with the companies that currently feed at the federal government's trough with massive, no-bid contracts for "redevelopment" abroad, and which may already have received some contracts for the "new" New Orleans.

...

(T)he "new" New Orleans should take account of the racial impacts of demolition and reconstruction. A model for this could come from the racial justice movement in the environmental field. Though the movement has typically focused on challenges to the location of undesirable industrial plants in poor and minority neighborhoods, it provides mechanisms for assessing the racial impact of changes - even those deemed "gentrification" by the developers -- on a particular neighborhood.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to take a class from Gelfand when I was there. I could say that about a lot of the professors, though... I wasn't "there" that much.

Reconstruction Screw-Up

Paul Krugman makes the point better than I did in my cartoon, in his column exploring the ways in which the administration will screw up reconstruction in New Orleans:

Since the administration is already nickel-and-diming Katrina’s victims, it’s a good bet that it will do the same with reconstruction - that is, if reconstruction ever gets started. Nobody thinks that reconstruction should already be under way. But what’s striking to me is that there are no visible signs that the administration has even begun developing a plan. No reconstruction czar has been appointed; no commission has been named. There have been no public hearings. And as far as we can tell, nobody is in charge. Last month The New York Times reported that Karl Rove had been placed in charge of post-Katrina reconstruction. But last week Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, denied that Mr. Rove - who has become a lot less visible lately, as speculation swirls about possible indictments in the Plame case - was ever running reconstruction. So who is in charge? “The president,” said Mr. McClellan.

...

I’ve been reading “Off Center,” an important new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, political scientists at Yale and Berkeley respectively. Their goal is to explain how Republicans, who face a generally moderate electorate and have won recent national elections by “the slimmest of margins,” have nonetheless been able to advance a radical rightist agenda. One of their “new rules for radicals” is “Don’t just do something, stand there.” Frontal assaults on popular government programs tend to fail, as Mr. Bush learned in his hapless attempt to sell Social Security privatization. But as Mr. Hacker and Mr. Pierson point out, “sometimes decisions not to act can be a powerful means of reshaping the role of government.”

When I suggested that their natural course of action would be to award giant reconstruction contracts to corporate bigwigs, what I didn't specify was that I think this is due as much to pathetically poor planning as it is to blatant patronage.

My general point was that it should no longer come as a surprise to ANYONE when this administration demonstrates yet again just how incompetent they are with regards to governing.

Monday Comix

A couple good ones from today:

Matt Bors came up with a pretty cool format idea for today's 'toon.

Ted Rall has the Generalissimo tapping into the "Strategic Popularity Reserve."

Luckovich

...via Bartcop:

REVISED: someone pointed out to me that I should probably link directly to Luckovich's 'toon on the AJC site rather than just assuming I have permission to reproduce the image. I should know better. Sorry Mike.

...anyway, it's a funny cartoon.

McNamara

By the way...

The article by Robert McNamara that was my source for the most recent 'toon is here .

And, of course, if you never got a chance to see The Fog of War, go out and rent it immediately. Outstanding.

"The Hammer"

How about a break from Katrina posts? The second indictment of DeLay contains a money-laundering charge that carries a penalty of up to life in prison.

I'll wait for you to stop giggling... OK.

Of course, we've already seen him as a mob boss, a pimp, a pro wrestler, and a child bully, so putting him in an orange jumpsuit for the rest of his life should not be too much of a stretch for the imagination.

10/3 cartoon

This is the 'toon I had done several weeks ago, before the storms came.

I've been getting emails from a friend in New Orleans:

I'm sitting in front of a coffee house, (closed on Magazine and Jefferson) right now that has wireless, so I can go on-line. More people are coming home today looks like. We still have an 8p.m. curfew, water is still not drinkable, but .. The colleges look ok from Saint Charles. It's messy, but I'm sure there was a lot cleaned up before we got home.

The areas of the city that are considered most important to the city's economic elite (i.e. Uptown, Downtown, and the French Quarter) all sound like they got slaps on the wrist, comparatively. I wonder if they'll just go back to business as usual, or if they'll take the crisis as a sign that it's time to finally push for a decent levee system?