Support Your Local Alternative Cartoonist

In a long overdue move, I've included some links (on the right) to blogs of other cartoonists that I frequent. Check 'em out (I'll add more later)...

Also, for you folks in the Seattle area, Fighting Words Comics will have a table in the Artist Alley at Emerald City Comicon April 1 & 2, where I presume I will be pressing the flesh and selling high-quality merchandise (this is my first one of these things, so I'm not too sure how they go). Mark your calendars!

1/30/06 Cartoon

Thanks for your patience...


"Alien Society, #3"... see the previous episodes here and here.

Check out a couple great articles by Robert Parry: "The End of Unalienable Rights" and "Is Bush Stupid - Or is America?" And, see two decent interviews with Noam Chomsky, in the Seattle Weekly and Eat the State.

tomorrow's 'toon...

...is gonna be posted a little late. Sometime Monday afternoon or evening (PST).

Latest from the SBSN...

Lovely woman.

UPS should be proud to have her on their roster.



[What is "SBSN," you ask? See here...]

Ricky, Ricky, Ricky...

Do you think JESUS would scream maniacally at reporters like that?

(via Cursor)

From the Science Department...

Via Huffington Post, scientists have announced the discovery of an icy, rocky world orbiting a distant star that is "the most Earth-like planet" ever detected...



...and next week, Ted Stevens will announce he's drafting legislation to drill the hell out of it.


(rim shot)

Thank God for Molly Ivins...

GREAT column yesterday:

I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to relearn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.

Poetry.

1/23/06 Cartoon

"Scott-Bot: Robot in Disguise"... see more of Scott-Bot here, here, and here. Read about Scott-Bot "playing dumb" about extraordinary rendition of prisoners to Syria in a blog post on ThinkProgress (via Cursor), and see Scott-Bot attack John Murtha here.




GO SEAHAWKS

Battle of the hairdos...

CSM (via Huffington Post) has an interesting juxtaposition of images of the crystalline coifs vying for Tom Delay's job.

Speaking purely as a caricaturist, I gotta go with Roy Blunt... that guy's eyebrows are classic.

War Games

From the Onion -- war is hell. Especially when you run out of Cheetos or your mom makes you hit pause to take out the garbage.

Or when your troops turn on you...

Whores

For this week's 'toon on the Alito hearings, I very nearly did another edition of Media Pimps n' Ho's -- the overall coverage was just atrocious. It is still a distinct possibility for next week's 'toon, though, since CNN has continued their stellar performance with the hiring of conservative nutcake Bill Bennett and professional idiot Glenn Beck.

The goodwill they won back from me due to their coverage of Katrina has almost entirely dissipated.

Alito on Bush v. Gore...

So, while it probably wasn't the most important answer that Alito gave during his confirmation hearings, one of the answers he gave that particularly bothered me was in reference to Bush v. Gore:

KOHL: So, Judge Alito, I'd like to ask you: Was the Supreme Court correct to take this case in the first place?

ALITO: Well, Senator, I think you're probably right, and I hope you're right, that, that sort of issue doesn't come before the Supreme Court again.

Some of the equal protection ground that the majority relied on in Bush v. Gore does involve principles that could come up in future elections and in future cases.

As to that particular case, my answer has to be, I really don't know. I have not studied it in the way I would study a case that comes before me as a judge. And I would have to go through the whole judicial process.

KOHL: That was a huge, huge case.

And I would like to hope and I would bet that you thought about it an awful lot, because you are who you are...

ALITO: Well, there's the issue of whether they should take it and the issue of how it should be decided.

And, Senator, my honest answer is I have not studied it in the way that I would study the issue if it were to come before me as a judge.

And that would require putting out of my mind any personal thoughts that I had on the matter and listening to all of the arguments and reading the briefs and thinking about it in the way that I do when I decide legal issues that are before me as a judge...

The manner in which a judge studies a case, as defined by Alito, sounds to me to also be an apt description of the role of a law professor, which Alito was at Seton Hall. He taught Con Law I & II (both before the Bush v. Gore decision was handed down), and later in '03 and '04 taught courses on terrorism and civil liberties. He also judged several Moot Court competitions.

Now, from this information, I don't know if any of these later activities required a professor with a deep knowledge of the Equal Protection Clause. But, as I recall, the Bush v. Gore decision is a vital part of modern Equal Protection Clause doctrine... I spent at least a month trying to read and understand that freakin' thing, and I don't think I ever did understand it completely. What I do know is that if I, as a hypothetical law student, ever received a poor grade from Professor Alito on anything regarding the Equal Protection Clause from December, 2000 on, I'd be calling the Seton Hall registrar or whoever and demanding a refund of my tuition for those classes.

Of course, my guess is that Alito has indeed studied Bush v. Gore and has very well-defined opinions about this case, and that he was just being evasive here. But his answer was reminiscent of Clarence Thomas' laughable answers on Roe v. Wade during his confirmation hearings in 1991.

1/16/06 Cartoon

"According to Alito!"

More info on this 'toon later...

Asshole

My apologies... "President" Asshole. He says everything is going "great" in New Orleans:

NEW ORLEANS, Jan. 12 - President Bush made his first trip here in three months on Thursday and declared that New Orleans was "a heck of a place to bring your family" and that it had "some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun."

Mr. Bush spent his brief visit in a meeting with political and business leaders on the edge of the Garden District, the grand neighborhood largely untouched by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, and saw little devastation. He did not go into the city's hardest-hit areas or to Jackson Square, where several hundred girls from the Academy of the Sacred Heart staged a protest demanding stronger levees.

Mr. Bush's motorcade did pass some abandoned neighborhoods as it traveled on Interstate 10 into the city.

Maybe if you ventured outside Uptown you'd have noticed that most of the city is still dark at night, you disingenuous prick.

s-s-swweeeet oooiilll.......

Ted Stevens will be bathing in pure crude oil tonight.


Yuck. Grossed myself out a little there.

Worse and worse...

I'll get to the whole thing with Scalito (yeah, I said it) and his weepy wife later, but first...

An NSA whistleblower is saying that the number of Americans under surveillance in Bush's "limited" program could number in the "millions." So for all of you who make little jokes in your emails about the NSA agent reading the message... you better hope you're not a friend of a friend of a friend of a guy who used to go to the same barber as Osama bin Laden.

Freedom is Slavery.

... damn WHIPPERSNAPPERS!!

Sen. Ted Stevens officially qualified as a senile old coot Monday (who is nonetheless #3 on the presidential line of succession, if that doesn't send a chill down your spine...). As the ANWR drilling provision went down to defeat before Congress left for the holidays, Stevens apparently threatened to resign and go home to sit on his porch with a shotgun to keep punks off his lawn. Or maybe he meant he was going to try to do it on the steps of the Capitol building. Anyway, he clarified his comments Monday, saying he wasn't resigning, but that he was just not going to be "friends" with certain people anymore, that he would not "play tennis or swim or do various things with them," and hinted that he was referring specifically to Sen. Maria Cantwell (story via Cursor).

Up until this whole thing, I think many voters in Washington State, including myself, had been pretty unimpressed with Cantwell's first term in office. After seeing her leadership on this issue, I think a lot of us will fight to be at the front of the line to vote to re-elect her in 2006.

1-9-06 Cartoon

"Bush: Above the Law"... see more of international action hero George W. Bush here.

Skanky blonde she-Nazis are sexy...

August Pollak notes that the Young American Foundation has come up with full-size glamour posters of Ann Coulter, which will surely begin showing up on the dorm walls of young Republican wankers everywhere.

'Scuze me for a second....

....(((shiver)))....


If you're able to suppress the gag reflex, you can view the pictures here.

Oh, wait... it's actually this link here. Silly me...

FLOAM

Anybody seen the commercials for this new "toy" for kids? There's something disturbing and insidious about this stuff, but I haven't been able to put my finger on what it is.

The folks at Flak Magazine have taken a shot at what exactly is so diabolical about this product.

I can't wait to see the lawsuits fly when some idiot kid decides to sit down and eat a few tubs of this stuff, "non-toxic" or not. Or perhaps he can put it up his nose...

Good Ol' Dave...

Letterman was uncharacteristically confrontational with O'Reilly last night. Fun to watch.

(via Huffington Post)

Don't Drop the Soap...

Happy trails, Jack Abramoff. You're off to the big house, the slammer, the clink, the icebox, the joint, hoosgow, calaboose, the pokey, the jug, the iron hotel, doing time, up the river...

Any others? Go ahead, it's fun!

1/2/06 Cartoon

"The Drunk Local News!"... see also one of the very first Fighting Words, on the issue of local TV news (my how we've grown...).

Local TV news is a pet peeve of mine, as it is for a lot of us. I HATE local TV news. Some may feel that I'm stating the obvious with this cartoon... but apparently the point still needs to be made because it's still where most people go to get their daily "news," even though it is the same intellectual wasteland that it has been for years. I saw Bill Moyers speak last year, and during the Q & A session he was asked, "what can we do about local TV news?" His answer: "end it."