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Ed Stein Rocky Mountain News Sep 24, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com

Huh?!

Obviously, I've got very little in common with Chuck Asay ideologically, but I've always respected his cartooning style, and it's hard to begrudge another cartoonist his or her own editorial slant...



However, I would like to ask him just what the heck he's trying to say with this cartoon:

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Chuck Asay Creators Syndicate Inc. Sep 5, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com

Damn!

As with Katrina, I was pretty much glued to the television over the weekend watching hurricane coverage. I just realized that DirectTV has been airing coverage by WDSU, which is the local NBC affiliate in N.O. So all this time, I could've been watching people who actually care about giving out substantive information on what is happening to their region, instead of relentlessly forcing the "story" angle down our throats...

Mainly, though, I could've spared myself the pain of watching cringe-worthy anchoring by CNN's Rick Sanchez and MSNBC's Dan Abrams.

Hurricane coverage...

First really shitty moment of the coverage:

CNN just cut off the president of Plaquemines Parish, who is on the scene fighting a levee breach south of New Orleans (with peoples' homes at risk), to go to Laura Bush speaking at the Republican Convention...


Are you kidding me?


...and HOLY SHIT. They just did it again for Cindy McCain!

Evacuation Shocker...

Who would've guessed that the private contractor who played such a huge part in screwing up the Katrina evacuation, a busing company called Landstar Systems, would now fail to fulfill its contract to supply buses for a Gustav evacuation!

And, what an incredible surprise that Landstar is politically connected to the Bush administration! Who could've predicted that such people wouldn't really give a shit about the citizens of New Orleans!

I'm shocked! SHOCKED, I tell you!

Holy Crap!

News... overload...

Too... many... cartoon... ideas....



Of course, the only one of these stories that really matters in the immediate future is Gustav. Whether or not it hits New Orleans directly, NOLA is predicting it will be a Cat 4 before it hits land. Perhaps we could finally all agree that global warming might have something to do with it, considering our shores are getting hit by monster 100-year storms about every 3 years now?

Just a thought...

More on Revisiting Katrina and... uh-oh...

By itself, of course, John McCain's "houses" gaffe is pretty meaningless. It's just another "gotcha" moment that the media loves. I saw a figure somewhere that Theresa Heinz-Kerry is actually worth five times what Cindy McCain is worth... and, as you may recall, we heard a little bit about that one too. What makes this one important is that it reminds (or should remind) everyone about that crazy little thing known as right-wing economic philosophy, of which John McCain is a dutiful follower. You know, that little school of thought that says "greed is good" and dreams of an American plutocracy where 99% of us simply exist to enhance the wealth of the super-rich. And three years later, Katrina is still the issue that exposes Republican economic policy for what it is... a scam.

However, all that really matters at the moment is that there's another hurricane headed into the Gulf with an ominous projected path. Cross your fingers and toes that everybody has learned their lesson... I just saw the embattled Ray Nagin on CNN, who is about to leave the Dem convention to head back to N.O. He didn't blow me away with his optimism...

Articles and stuff for this week's 'toon:

• On Katrina: Oxfam has released a report that "reveals how little progress has been made."
  
  From a NOLA resident:
  

  We normally work a 40-hour workweek, and we go home, and we take a couple of days off, and we go about our business. And that's not the way Katrina has left us all. It was seven days a week, 24 hours a day down here. And people don't understand or appreciate the fact that we're not back. We won't be back for 10 years.

  
  FactCheck.org:
  

  McCain was asked by a New Orleans reporter why he voted twice against an independent commission to investigate the government’s failings before and after Hurricane Katrina, and he incorrectly stated that he had "voted for every investigation." McCain actually voted twice, in 2005 and 2006, to defeat a Democratic amendment that would have set up an independent commission along the lines of the 9/11 Commission. At the time of the second vote, members of both parties were complaining that the White House was refusing requests by Senate investigators for information.

  
  Progressive Media USA:
  

  Friday, September 16, 2005: "Deficit Hawk" McCain was skeptical of federally-funded reconstruction efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, yet he insisted his tax cuts for the wealthy are more important than reducing the deficit.
  ...According to The New Leader, "An objection of a different sort was raised by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, who is pondering a run for the Presidency in 2008. He maintains conservatives want to "do whatever is necessary to address this national disaster." Then he adds: "We also have to be concerned about future generations of Americans. We're going to end up with the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country." [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9/17/05]
  ...During an appearance on ABC's This Week, George Stephanopoulos asked McCain, "If Congress does not give you the spending cuts you say you can get, will you hold off on signing the tax cuts?" McCain said, "No, of course not, because we want to increase people's taxes during a recession?"

  
  What... a... piece... of... shit.
  
  
• On the McCain economic plan: a great column from Paul Krugman.
  
  Also Think Progress:
  

  ...McCain is running a campaign of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. He recently defined rich as earning $5 million or more and doesn’t know how many houses he owns, and at the same time, McCain is proposing a tax policy that primarily benefits the rich. In fact, under his proposal, McCain himself would receive a $300,000 tax cut, while middle class Americans would receive only a few hundred.

• On the more humorous topic of McCain's houses, Matthew Yglesias has a list of some of the many amenities offered at one of McCain's more luxurious Phoenix condos. See also two great YouTube clips here and here.
  

Fighting Words: 8/25/08 Cartoon...

"The Fabulous Lifestyle of John McCain!"...

More on "Wordy" Editorial Cartoons, Bush's Legacy

Recently, it was suggested in the comments section of a popular cartooning blog that modern editorial cartoonists (as differentiated from retro, Jeff MacNelly-style editorial cartoonists) only use a lot of words because they're trying to be "hip." This is interesting to me... all this time, I've been spending all these hours holed up in libraries reading and writing for each cartoon, and it turns out I was just trying to look cool. If this is indeed true, I expect that this week's cartoon will make me the baddest mutherfucka on the planet. I'm talkin' like the Lenny Kravitz of editorial cartooning...

Article tidbits:

• McClatchy shocker:
  

  An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

• Paul Richter:
  

  President Bush's plans to end his term with a strong U.S. military presence in Iraq, and to leave tough decisions about ending the unpopular war to his successor.
  ...
  
  The plans also would allow Bush to live up to his pledge to the defining mission of his presidency, and perhaps to improve his chances for a decent legacy. He can say he left office pursuing a strategy that was having at least some success in suppressing violence, a claim that some historians may view sympathetically.

• Mark Danner:
  

  At the center of our national life stands the master narrative of this bifurcated politics: the Iraq war, fought to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist, brought to a quick and glorious conclusion on a sunlit aircraft carrier deck whose victory celebration almost instantly became a national embarrassment. That was four and a half years ago; the war's ending and indeed its beginning, so clearly defined for that single trembling instant, have long since vanished into contested history.

• Jack Balkin:
  

  [Bush's larger strategy is] to entrench the U.S. presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future, and do what he can to ensure that John McCain becomes President, or failing that, Hillary Clinton as a second best solution. He figures that McCain, and, to a lesser extent Clinton, are most likely to continue aspects of his policies and keep troops in Iraq for some time. The longer that the next president continues his policies-- including warrantless surveillance, his interrogation practices, and his war in Iraq, the longer these features will become normalized and/or the next President's problem.

• Robert Costanza makes an interesting point about the prevailing indicator of our economic health:
  

  An oil spill, for example, increases GDP because someone has to clean it up, but it obviously detracts from well-being. More crime, more sickness, more war, more pollution, more fires, storms and pestilence are all potentially positives for the GDP because they can spur an increase in economic activity.
  
  GDP also ignores activity that may enhance well-being but is outside the market. The unpaid work of parents caring for their children at home doesn't show up in GDP, but if they decide to work outside the home and pay for child care, GDP suddenly increases. And even though $1 in income means a lot more to the poor than to the rich, GDP takes no account of income distribution.
  
  In short, GDP was never intended to be a measure of citizens' welfare -- and it functions poorly as such. Yet it is used as a surrogate appraisal of national well-being in far too many circumstances.
  
  

  
  

Fighting Words: 3/17/08 Cartoon...

"The Pages of History"...

More on Buckley, conservatism, and New Orleans...

Quick post this week, as I'm fighting off what is probably bronchitis:

• Ian Williams on the death of William F. Buckley:
  

  During his overlong life Buckley gilded the fungus by casting a gossamer-thin veil of erudition on the brawling mélange of crude bigotry, racism, self-satisfied ignorance and isolationism that characterised American conservatism until the neocons turned up. It takes more than yachting and harpsichord-playing, more even than sense of humour and a belated admission that Iraq was a big mistake, to weigh the balance in his favour.
  

• Sue Sturgis:
  

  Are the following truly the words of a "Great American" -- of an "extraordinarily good man" with a "warming aura"? They appeared in an unsigned National Review editorial, probably penned and undoubtedly published by Buckley, that ran on Aug. 24, 1957, titled "Why the South Must Prevail":
  
  "The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.
  

• Naomi Klein:
  

  Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.
  
  ...
  
  This is just one particular piece of this whole program. Public hospitals are also being shut down and set to be demolished and destroyed in New Orleans. And they've systematically dismantled the public education system and beginning demolition on many of the schools in New Orleans--that's on the agenda right now--and trying to totally turn that system over to a charter and a voucher system, to privatize and just really go forward with a major experiment, which was initially laid out by the Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative think tanks shortly after the storm. So this is just really the fulfillment of this program.
  
  ...
  
  Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Western-world image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mould belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure and extreme weather.

  
  

Fighting Words: 3/3/08 Cartoon...

"Fuzzy F. Buckley"...

A few previous episodes of "FB & HB":

More on New Orleans, recovery...

Articles for this week's 'toon:

• Bush was back in New Orleans last week, in an obligatory stop to mark the second anniversary of Katrina. And he brought good news to the townsfolk: he says things are "getting better" there! Just like they are in Iraq! (Speaking of which, if Blackwater gets booted out of Iraq, does this mean they'll have to go back to harassing the people of New Orleans for work?)
  
  Of course, the reality on the ground in New Orleans (as in Iraq) is a bit different than it is inside Bush's tiny, tiny brain. Workplace injustice is on the rise. FEMA is suppressing reports of dangerous levels of formaldehyde in their trailers. Federal aid is hopelessly stuck in a morass of bureaucracy, and Mississippi (with their redneck Republican governor) is getting a disproportionate share of the funds. Infrastructure in poor neighborhoods is gone, causing a dramatic rise in the crime rate and overflowing prisons. The overall death rate was up 47% last year. Shit, they've even got killer bees there.
  
  See my previous posts on some other Katrina/New Orleans issues.
  
  
• Pulitzer Prize-winner and former N.O. resident John McQuaid has an excellent series of columns in Mother Jones about the Katrina recovery. In particular, he addresses the moral imperative of a "genuine national commitment" to protecting the entire U.S. coastline, not just New Orleans. He also takes a possibly sarcastic shot at those who suggest that we shouldn't be rebuilding New Orleans at all:
  

  Instead of addressing those questions, though, the national debate has stressed the idiosyncrasies of New Orleans. Some have written that French explorer Bienville made a mistake when, in 1718, he founded New Orleans on the fringe of a low-lying swamp dangerously close to Hurricane Alley. Others take it a step further and say that three centuries has been a good run, but it's time to give up. There's some truth to these statements—New Orleans' location on a low-lying, sinking river delta has indeed put it in a terrible predicament. But the underlying message is that Katrina was a fluke: that New Orleans' problems are unique and its existential concerns mostly irrelevant to the rest of the country. That may be comforting to people outside Louisiana. But it's not realistic.

  
  
• One New Orleans author recently lamented how they're all "Oprah fodder," and how the superficial mainstream media had become a permanent fixture there. Personally, I don't want to be part of the deluge of generic, post-Katrina pop culture... but I also think it's important to keep talking about it. For example, I caught the last 40 minutes of K-Ville the other night... it's obviously a pretty silly show for the most part, but it I guess it was an honest attempt to deal with some of the issues.
  
  Fall is the time of year when I really miss living in New Orleans. While much of the rest of the country is kissing their summers goodbye, it's still beautiful in N.O.: mid-80's, and the humidity is even starting to die down. I haven't been back since the storm... but then, I don't have a taxpayer-funded jet to take me wherever I want to go. I suppose the best I can do is to stick to the issues, and to just try to convey why it's so important to me to begin with.
  

Fighting Words: 9/17/07 Cartoon...

"Trav'lin' with Post-Presidency George W. Bush"...

More on Mercenaries, "Security Contractors"...

Yeah, so I'm guessing that this week's 'toon is about the zillionth "Bush as Darth Vader" parody you've seen, but I've had Star Wars on the brain lately. Partly because of all the 30th anniversary crap on TV, but also because I've been playing the demo for "Lego Star Wars" on my Mac (where you reenact the movies in a world made of Legos). Totally freakin' addictive game... and the little cut-scenes, with the SW characters as stubby little Lego people, are hilarious.

Here's some articles:

• There are currently 100,000 civilian contractors operating in Iraq, which is approaching the number of U.S. soldiers there. The so-called "security contractors" there are operating virtually free of any kind of oversight or accountability, and until recently, were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
  
  Jeremy Scahill is "the man" when it comes to investigating this subject. Check out two articles of his on Iraq, and two articles on the use of Blackwater mercenaries in post-Katrina New Orleans.
  
  Johann Hari also has an excellent column on this topic:
  

  In April 2004, mercenaries working for a private militia named Blackwater were guarding US occupation headquarters in Najaf when a protest by Shia Iraqi civilians began to stir outside. According to the Washington Post and eyewitnesses, Blackwater opened fire on the protesters, unleashing so many rounds so rapidly they had to pause every 15 minutes to allow their gun barrels to cool down. A video of this attack made it on to the Web, where a mercenary can be seen describing the Iraqis they are gunning down as "fuckin' niggers".

  
  He also notes that mercenaries in Iraq have been allowed to use "experimental ammunition" that the military is forbidden from using. The bullets are made from "blended metal" so as to leave wounds that are "untreatable." Nice.


• So we have mass murder by psycho racist mercenaries... anything else?
  
  Check out a previous post and cartoon on war profiteering, inspired by Robert Greenwald's documentary, Iraq For Sale.
  
  See also an AP article on a lawsuit against Blackwater by the families of mercenaries killed in Iraq, which alleges that the men were killed because they were not given proper armor (Blackwater has successfully moved the suit into private arbitration).
  
  Of course, there's the involvement of CACI Int'l in documented cases of torture.
  
  The ACLU is currently suing Boeing, alleging the company has facilitated the shipping of detainees to secret CIA prisons.
  
  And, Zia Mian writes that some contractors have violated laws banning human trafficking in the shipping of laborers to Iraq to do the slop work.
  
  All paid for by you and I, the taxpayers.


• I also previously posted on this column by Chris Hedges, where he argues that the radical Christian Right's infiltration of the military and police "signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign... to dismantle America's open society and build a theocratic state." When I first read this, I was a little skeptical, and I felt he was taking the argument a bit far. No more.
  
  The Founder of Blackwater is a right-wing, Christian conservative named Erik Prince, who is extremely well-connected within the Republican party. Reading Scahill's column on Blackwater's activites in post-K New Orleans, you have to wonder if you're going to be seeing mercenary "security contractors" coming soon to a street near you.

More on New Orleans, Racism, Economics...

Articles and sources for this week's 'toon:

• It's hurricane season again, and the Feds are scrambling to compensate for another winter of half-assing on emergency preparedness in New Orleans. The N.O.A.A. is predicting a whopper of a hurricane season, with a 49% probability of a major storm hitting the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, Sue Sturgis of Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch (an indispensable resource for those still following the situation in New Orleans) reports that "serious weaknesses" have been found in the newly "repaired" levee system, which could cause the system to fail in as little as a Category 2 storm.
  
  See also a previous post on the ongoing debacle involving faulty pumps installed by MWI (owned by J. David Eller, a pal of Jeb Bush's).
  
  
• For more on the federal government's catastrophic failure of leadership, check out an outstanding column by Rebecca Solnit, who points out that it has not "fully sunk in that the city was flooded not by a hurricane but by the failure of levees inadequately build by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers." Greg Palast argues that this is why the White House has tried to stifle the coverage of this aspect of the issue, because once the federal levees go, the whole thing stops being about an "act of God" and becomes their responsibility.
  
  
• Nothing quite captures the federal government's indifference on New Orleans quite like the war spending-slash-hurricane recovery bill they just passed. Let's see... killing brown people in Iraq and Afghanistan: $99.5 billion... doing "whatever it takes" to rebuild a city right here on American soil: $4.1 billion... ethnically cleansing a major metropolitan area and delivering it into the hands of corporate developers: PRICELESS! (Meanwhile, it has been revealed that the Bush administration turned down $800 million in aid offered by other countries after Katrina.)
  
  Is it really about racism? Glen Ford says the disaster has revealed a corporate plan to drive out Black populations and bring about a corporate urban "renaissance" in cities across the country.
  
  For those who think that this kind of racism doesn't exist, I'd suggest you take a look at the amendment proposed by Rep. Jeb Hensarling that would require Katrina victims to perform 20 hours/week of approved "work activities" to receive federal housing aid. Can anybody in their wildest dreams imagine a congressman proposing such an amendment after 9-11? They would be finished forever in professional politics.
  
  I was struck by the power of a particular phrase that Solnit used in her column:

  New Orleans is recovering from... not just physical devastation, but social fissures and racial wounds in a situation that started as a somewhat natural disaster and became a socially constructed catastrophe. Nothing quite like it has happened in American history. (my emphasis)
  

• Yet again, the Daily Show comes up with a joke that I wish I'd thought of:
  

  Stewart then turned to the indictment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), saying, "On the downside, Jefferson faces 235 years in prison. On the upside, now we know what it takes for the federal government to pay some attention to a black man from New Orleans."
  

Fighting Words: 6/4/07 Cartoon

"GWB Tech"...

More on New Orleans, faulty pumps...

Some must-see sites on this week's 'toon:

• Toni McElroy and Kevin Whelan of ACORN point out that the best way to help New Orleans is to finally have a conversation about poverty in America. They and Gulf Coast Reconstruction watch have proposed some shocking common sense ideas to move the rebuilding process forward, like actually sending some money down to the shattered school system and halting the demolition of livable public housing. Perhaps we might even think about hooking a few people up with some health insurance. The New Agenda for the Gulf Coast report also points out that the amount of spending waste in the rebuilding effort could exceed $1 billion this year due to the awarding of low- or no-bid contracts.


• Of course, I suppose these ideas are only common sense if you're not a dead-hearted Republican "bootstrap" jerkweed like Newt Gingrich, who is so utterly consumed with his own white-bread existence and so completely unaware of the effect that poverty and racism have on society that he makes idiot comments like this.


• So, what really got me pissed off to do this cartoon was the AP story last week that 34 brand-new, heavy-duty pumps built by former Jeb Bush business partner J. David Eller's Moving Waters Industries are... you guessed it... faulty! Not only that, but the Army Corps of Engineers installed the pumps even though they knew the equipment would fail during a storm. And, of course, a story like this would not be complete unless MWI was also under investigation on allegations of fraud and misappropriation of taxpayer money... which they are.
  
  See some of the prior links for more information, and Fix the Pumps has some good info on this insane story.


• NOLA.com has a series on Louisiana's disappearing coastline... I'll come back to that in a later 'toon.


• I've been reading Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation... hadn't read this one before (I do vaguely remember reading The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in college). I'll probably come back to this one in a later 'toon, too.
  
  Anyway, he has the strangest idea that "responsibility" is an important qualification for political leadership, and that the only person who should be allowed to "put his hand on the wheel of history" is one who will "do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him."
  
  How odd...

Fighting Words: 3/19/07 Cartoon

"The Day After Yesterday"...

See some more movie themes:

Say what?

This story came out last week, but I haven't seen much outrage over it:

Apparently, back in 2003/2004, the Federal Reserve airlifted gigantic shipments of cold, hard cash to the new "government" of Iraq, amounting to $4 billion and weighing 363 tons.

Fast-forward to the present day, as the ever weather-beaten people of New Orleans stand, mouths-agape, asking "are you fucking kidding me?!" while levee repair money gets shifted around to various projects.

But then, they're just being "ungrateful," right?

Holy crap...