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.

  
  

dog-blogging...

I usually think it's pretty lame when people post pictures of their pets on their blogs.

Except, y'know, when I do it...

Seriously, how freakin' cute is this:

Fighting Words: 4/28/08 Cartoon...

"The Wild, Wild Internet"...

Website changes...

So I've been doing some sprucing up of the old website lately, including adding buttons for "Buy A Print" and "Make A Donation." I'm aware of some little problems on various types of browsers... I'll have to come back to it and iron those out next week.

However, if you see any major problems like the site doesn't come up at all or your computer explodes when you type in the address, let me know. Pretty sure it's not my fault though if your computer explodes...

Hopefully, these changes will hold me over until I can get around to a complete site redesign someday. But probably not... I'll probably continue to tinker with the damn thing.


UPDATE: I just looked at it on a smaller screen, and it's all outta whack... I got some work to do still. So consider it partially under construction at the moment...

Full Disclosure...

My hatred of rednecks is a little skewed right now, as one of 'em is in the process of stealing my hometown basketball team. I have a lot of fond Sonics memories (I still use my '96 Finals gym bag) that are going down the drain thanks to a lying redneck sack of shit named Clay Bennett (again, of course, I'm referring to the redneck owner of the Sonics, not the editorial cartoonist of the same name... the latter is a great guy). But, of course, it's not just Clay-Clay's doing... thanks also go out to Howard Schultz (the dumbass Starbucks CEO who sold the team and now claims he didn't see all this coming), and, of course, David Stern (the toad who is responsible for destroying the NBA).

More on the ABC Debate, our pathetic national media...

This will be a pretty easy Moron post for this week's 'toon:

• Alls ya gotta do is watch the damn thing (or read the transcript), if you haven't already suffered through it. The cartoon mainly came from my longing for a response to these 5th grade-level questions that wasn't softened so it couldn't possibly "offend" someone. Of course, Obama can't come out and say, "well... I DO hate rednecks!" But it would be funny as hell if he could.
  
  After all, it's not like his original comments were actually WRONG in any way, shape, or form... but the amoral halfwits in our national media (in this case, Charles Gibson and George Snuffaluffagus) smelled "controversy" (and ratings) and, predictably, jumped all over it.
  
  Who really gives a shit if rednecks are offended anyway? It's not like they have some kind of national identity established over the course of history as a result of being wronged by the overriding power structure. And, no, I'm not making a generalization about "poor" or "working class" people here... I'm talking about REDNECKS. White Trash. We've been over this before...
  
  Plus, I suppose that, technically, I too could be considered a redneck. So maybe I'm just a self-loathing member of this particular "ethnic group"...
  
  
• Andrew Sullivan:
  

  The loser was ABC News: one of the worst media performances I can remember - petty, shallow, process-obsessed, trivial where substantive, and utterly divorced from the actual issues that Americans want to talk about.
  ...
  
  No questions on the environment, none on terror, none on interrogation, none on torture, none on education, none on spending, none on healthcare, none on Iran ... but four separate questions in the first hour about a lapel-pin, Bitter-gate, Wright-gate and Ayers. I'm all for keeping candidates on their toes. But this was ridiculous.

• Glenn Greenwald:
  

  AMY GOODMAN: George Stephanopoulos, the former Clinton aide—President Clinton—said he had asked fair, tough questions, the kind of questions that would be asked later. What is your response to that, Glenn Greenwald?
  
  GLENN GREENWALD: This is the justification that reporters use repeatedly whenever they focus on insipid, substance-free stories. They pretend that if it were strictly up to them, they of course would focus on the serious substantive matters that the country faces, because they’re politically sophisticated observers. The problem, they say, is that Americans, the sort of heartland voter whom they patronizingly look down upon is interested in these sort of personality-based Drudge-like issues, and therefore they have no choice but to report them, since these are the issues that are going to predominate in our political process.
  
  ...
  
  And these journalists believe that they’re sort of spokespeople for the people in the heartland and speak for them and patronizingly say that they’re interested in these insipid issues and that’s why they’re covered. The reality is there’s no connection between the establishment journalistic class and the people whom they claim to represent, and the reason they cover those issues is because they, the journalists, want to cover them, not because the people want to hear them.

• Paul Waldman:
  

  The Washington journalists themselves are as elite as they come, but they know who the good guys are -- they're the residents of the small towns, whose "values" can't possibly be matched by those who live in cities; they're the people whose lowbrow tastes make them "authentic"; they're the earthy, regular Americans defined by their modest tastes in food, drink, and entertainment. The journalists may not actually know too many of these people, but they know they're there, and they know they're better than the rest of us.
  

  
  

Fighting Words: 4/21/08 Cartoon...

"ABC's Extended Debate Coverage"...

Sound familiar?

From my current reading, a snippet that probably won't make it into my "more on" post... Robert Parry takes us back to the good old days of 1992, back before the Clintons had completely lost their minds:

The Clintons had a different perspective, too, when the insinuations about a person’s lack of patriotism were about Bill Clinton in fall 1992. As that campaign heated up, President George H.W. Bush unleashed his subordinates to dig up whatever dirt they could to impugn Clinton’s loyalty to his country.

Some of Bush’s political appointees rifled through Clinton’s passport file looking for an apocryphal letter from his student days in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his citizenship.

Though no such a letter was ever found, Bush exploited the mystery around Clinton’s passport files to raise questions about Clinton’s 1970 student trips to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, where he allegedly stayed with Communist friends.

With his patriotism challenged, Clinton saw his once-formidable lead shrink. Panic spread through the Clinton campaign. Ironically, one of the nervous Clinton’s aides who contacted congressional Democrats seeking their help in countering the Republican smears was George Stephanopoulos.

Bush's allies also put out another suspicion, that Clinton might have been a KGB “agent of influence.” Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times headlined that allegation on Oct. 5, 1992, a story that attracted President Bush’s personal interest.

“Now there are stories that Clinton … may have gone to Moscow as [a] guest of the KGB,” Bush wrote in his diary that day. [For the fullest account of the 1992 Passportgate case, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

...

Sensing that the loyalty theme was hurting Clinton, President Bush kept stoking the fire. On CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Oct. 7, 1992, Bush suggested anew that there was something sinister about a possible Clinton friend maybe removing the apocryphal renunciation letter from Clinton’s passport file.

...

“I just think it’s wrong. I – that – maybe – they say, ‘well, it was a youthful indiscretion.’ I was 19 or 20 flying off an aircraft carrier and that shaped me to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and – I’m sorry but demonstrating – it’s not a question of patriotism, it’s a question of character and judgment.”

Clinton countered by challenging Bush directly.

“You have questioned my patriotism,” the Democrat shot back. Clinton then unloaded his own zinger: “When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong, and a senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.”

Many observers rated Clinton’s negative comparison of Bush to his father as Bush’s worst moment in the debate. An unsettled Bush didn’t regain the initiative for the remainder of the evening.

More on our Stone-Age dialogue on global warming...

Tidbits for this week's 'toon:

• Saw more of the same old shit on global warming from Captain "Wrong-Way/Right-Way" this morning...
  
  
• E.O. Wilson:
  

  How did such frail creatures come to be a geophysical force and dominate the world? Brains, obviously. Somehow, by a process still not well understood, we mastered fire, invented weaponry, and learned to talk to one another in arbitrarily devised symbolic languages. But in rising to power, beginning with the invention of agriculture a scant 10 millennia ago, we carried along with us the heavy baggage of ancient primate instincts. Today, as a result, we live in Star Wars civilizations ruled by Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

• Renee Schoof on John McCain's environmental policy:
  

  When McCain introduced his latest version of a cap and trade plan in January 2007, he warned: "Just as there is danger in doing too little, there is peril in going too far, too fast, in a way that imposes unsustainable costs on the economy."

• Brad Johnson of GristMill:
  

  Like Bush, McCain’s global warming talk is good — both speaking in generalities about needing to be “good stewards” and get “serious” about climate change.
  Like Bush, Candidate McCain is drenched in ties to Big Oil — McCain’s campaign is run by lobbyists for Saudi Arabia and energy companies, and McCain has repeatedly blocked attempts to roll back subsidies for Big Oil.
  Like Bush, McCain uses China and India as an excuse for inaction — When asked about global warming policy, both Sen. McCain and Bush say that India and China have to participate in a global agreement — ignoring the fact that unlike the United States, both countries are signatories to the Kyoto Protocol. Moreover, the rest of the industrialized world is not making excuses — they’ve set to work.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from his new manifesto on global warming:
  

  The evidence is before our eyes. The practice of borrowing a billion dollars each day to buy foreign oil has caused the American dollar to implode. More than a trillion dollars in annual subsidies to coal and oil producers have beggared a nation that four decades ago owned half the globe’s wealth. Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.

  
  
• Read my previous post on Frontline's Hot Politics.
  

Fighting Words: 4/14/07 Cartoon...

"Neandercons: Ice Age!"...