By the way...

... my own personal secret to weight loss? Reading too much current events. I've been eating a lot healthier lately, and I haven't been able to stomach red meat since I researched for this cartoon a few months ago...

OK, I did buy and eat a Dick's Deluxe a couple weeks ago in a drunken fog, but I felt like crap for the next couple days. Definitely because of the burger...

More on Big Pharma...

I'm getting ready to head to New York next week for MoCCA Art Fest, so no time to do a full-on Moron post this week (other than to give you a link to Bill Moyers' interview with NYT reporter Melody Peterson)...

I do have an anecdote, though. After I posted the cartoon, I came across a commercial for a drug that should, without a doubt, have been included in this week's 'toon. Apparently, one of the side-effects of the weight-loss drug alli is anal leakage... they have this caveat posted on their website:

You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work

Is shitting yourself at work really a reasonable sacrifice for losing a little bit of weight? How the hell does something like this get approved?

Fighting Words: 5/26/08 Cartoon...

"Public Service Announcement: Drug Dealers"...

Bonus art...

Here's a caricature of Arianna Huffington that I did for a recent 'toon, which didn't make it into the final version... just so it sees the light of day, cuz I thought it was decent.

Matt Bors did a good one the other day, too...

More on foreign policy for grown-ups...

I think Obama's response so far to Bush's "appeaser" comment has been right on. He's used a few keywords that I've been dying to hear from the so-called "opposition party" the past few years, blasting such comments as "dishonest" and pointing out that the Bushies turn to fallacies like this because "they can't win a debate on the merits." This stands in contrast to rhetoric used by your Pelosis and Reids and Kerrys and Clintons, which feigns indignation but adopts the other side's terms of the debate (e.g. "I love freedom and hate terror almost as much as you, but I have to disagree on a few points..."). Obama has done a little bit of this, but not to such objectionable levels...

Bush's comments show explicitly just how much disdain he holds for intellectual argumentation. He believes that power and deference are birthrights for someone like him, and that they should be simply handed over (or, on a geopolitical stage, taken by force). Perhaps, if we were simply a bunch of monkeys fighting over a banana, he would be right... the monkey who can look the biggest or screech the loudest will win. But fully-evolved human beings know that in a grown-up world today, and particularly in a nuclear world, argument is everything.

Obama has said that comments like this are the reason why he's running... which I also love to hear, because it's also why I do what I do.

Some snippets for this week's 'toon:

• Juan Cole (my new Facebook buddy):
  

  Senator John McCain, who seeks endorsements from haters of Roman Catholics, is alleging that Hamas has "endorsed" Barack Obama. He darkly suggests that this means something. It is a despicable, dirty campaign trick. Who do you think the Ku Klux Klan will be endorsing? And if the Grand Dragons plump for McCain, does that tell us anything about McCain except that he is pasty faced? You can't logically read off anything at all from an unsolicited endorsement.

  
  
• Jonathan Schell, on the new nuclear world:
  

  That's part of the universalization that was written into the bomb's genetic code. Once a terrorist group has such a weapon, deterrence -- a relic of the Cold War -- is no longer operable. So this supposed solution, which seemed to work, after a fashion, for more than four decades, is now essentially out the window and we're in the market for another solution, which must be geared to this matured form of danger in which the weaponry can pop up anywhere.
  
  ...
  
  What follows, of course, is that a growing list of countries -- at present probably around 50 -- are able to have nuclear weapons if they so decide. What, in turn, follows is that, if those countries are not going to have the bomb, it will only be because they have made a political decision not to have it.
  And what follows no less surely is that this global issue cannot be solved by any means but the political. More specifically, it can't be solved by military force.
  
  ...
  
  I would say that the surefire way of ensuring that Iran will go for the bomb is to attack them. If, the day before, they were ready to stop short of having the bomb, the day after, they'll go for it and they'll get it, too. So, just as people say, there are no good options -- but that's only within the framework of the Bush Doctrine.

  
  
• Scott Ritter on Israel's bombing of Syria last September:
  

  ...the Israeli decision to bomb Syria not only allowed the Syrian effort to be defined as weapons-related (an unproven and unlikely allegation), but by extension reinforced the Israeli (and American) contention that the nuclear activity in Iran was weapons-related as well.
  The international debate that has taken place about the Syrian facility shows how successful the Israeli gambit, in fact, was, since there is virtually no discussion about the fact that Israel violated international law in attacking, without provocation, a sovereign state whose status as a member of the United Nations ostensibly affords it protection from such assault. The American embrace of the Israeli action, and the decision to produce intelligence information about the nature of the bombed facility at this late stage in the game, only reinforces the reality that the United States has turned its back on international law in the form of arms control and non-proliferation agreements.

• Excellent post by Chris Floyd:
  

  As with Iraq, the reality doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. The horrifying, murderous consequences don't matter. What matters is the militarist, elitist agenda of global domination -- in a word, empire -- that has driven America's "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" for decades. Iraq was not an aberration; it was an embodiment of this agenda. And the attack on Iran will be the same.

  
  
  
  

Fighting Words: 5/19/08 Cartoon...

"McCain & Bush's: How to Play Chess!"...

Bonus Goodie...

So the reason I've been scuffling so much on blog posts lately is because I've been busy working my butt off trying to learn how to make movin' cartoons. Here's a little something I did in a class I took... not much yet, but it's a start (more to come soon):





BTW: no Moron post this week, since the 'toon was a repeat!

Fighting Words: 5/12/08 Cartoon...

"Alien Society: Inconvenient Truths"...


So, yeah, a real late Moron post from last week and a "classic" Fighting Words this week might tell you that I've been a bit under the weather the past couple days. Sorry, yo...

Anyways, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

More, More, More on the media and the election...

You may notice that I've been talking about these convergent subjects quite a bit lately... and we're gonna be talking about it a helluva lot more for the next few months. I am fully convinced that the upcoming election HAS to be "high noon" between rational Americans and our moronic media. It's time to put an end to a mainstream media that willingly feeds the delusions of people who believe stories about how Obama is, like, an evil android sent by Hamas to conquer and enslave the American people. This kind of "journalism" needs to be KILLED... killed until it is DEAD, and then killed some more. And nothing kills these people more than being ignored... (hmmm... and yet we must talk about them to get people to ignore them... a paradox).

• If you believe any of the hype about Jeremiah Wright, watch Bill Moyers' recent interview with him... as I say in the cartoon, Wright really doesn't say anything that is incorrect. Even in his more "bombastic moments" in the National Press Club Q & A and the NAACP speech, his arguments are reasonable and firmly based on historical truth. Sure he may have come off like kind of an asshole at times, especially during the Q & A... but this just means he'd make a good newsman, right? Asshole journalism is, after all, the standard these days...
  
  
• Being an asshole seems to be the mark of a good, right-wing Christian leader, too. Seems McCain's good pal Rev. Hagee has retracted his retraction of his totally un-newsworthy comment that New Orleans got what it had coming when Katrina hit.
  
  
• Glen Ford on Obama's "race-neutral" strategy:
  

  In order for his race-neutral strategy to appear sane, Obama must constantly paint a picture of an America that does not exist. This cannot be accomplished without mangling the truth, assaulting the truth-tellers, and misrepresenting America's past and present...
  
  He says the "incompetence was color-blind" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, thereby deracializing all that occurred in New Orleans from the moment the winds died down to this very second. He claims that 1980s Ronald Reagan voters had understandable grievances due to "the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s," in the process cleansing the Reagan victory of any racist content.
  

Fighting Words: 5/5/08 Cartoon...

"Drunk News Network: Decision 2008!"...


Yeah, this cartoon is real late. Not my fault this time, though... it's Steve Jobs' fault. Stupid Mac problems, in other words...

I'm too pissed about it to go into detail. Perhaps I'll do a profanity-laced tirade tomorrow against Apple computers...

More on net neutrality and a bad blogger...

So, after so many months doing "More On" posts after my weekly cartoons, I just realized that I completely forgot to do one this week. I guess that's when you know I'm working extra hard on stuff outside of the weekly 'toon...

I don't have much else to add to this week's 'toon, but here are a couple things:

• A clip from "friend of Fighting Words" David Isen's opening statement during the recent "Freedom 2 Connect" conference:
  

  Our planet is in danger of becoming hostile to life. I'm not talking about the flooding of Miami and New York and Bangladesh. I mean that because of the carbon we humans put in the air, Earth could become Venus, a place where life can't live. So I believe -- and I put this forward as a hypothesis -- I believe that we can use the Internet to conserve more atmospheric carbon than its infrastructure generates. Furthermore, I believe we can use the Internet for global participation that transcends tribalism and nationalism to end war . . . for discussion!

• Prof. Lawrence Lessig on Democracy Now:
  

  ...you can understand how a cable company who’s providing you internet service might think twice before they allow that internet service to become a competitor with HBO or with the other cable things that you have to pay for. So this has been the constant concern. If the owners of the wires get to muck about with the kinds of content that come across the wires, then they might block competition that’s valuable, both because it’s increasing the diversity of content available and also because it’s enabling new kinds of applications to come onto the network.