Animation!

I was showing this around MoCCA over the weekend, but my first animation is up on the site now. It's been a long time coming, mainly cuz I've been trying to get a handle on Flash... now that I'm getting there, I'll definitely be doing more movin' cartoons. I like 'em!


It's an animated version of this cartoon:

More on China & Tibet...

I felt comfortable criticizing Rice and Bush in this week's 'toon, even though Condi made statements this week that were supposedly in support of the Dalai Lama. Her urgings of "restraint" were lukewarm at best, and Dubya says only that he still plans to attend the Olympics. This is about as close as an international incident comes to an absolute wrong for me... the beating and killing of Tibetans (particularly Buddhist monks) cannot be tolerated by the international community. Anything short of a forceful condemnation from our government and a threat to boycott the Olympics is not enough for me.

Tidbits:

• Some links to check out:
  
  The Buddhist Channel, with lots of news and information.
  
  The Opposite End of China, a blog with a lot of leaked photos of the crackdown.
  
  TCHRD, the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
  
  The Unseen Dharamsala, a blog with stories of Tibetan refugees.
  
  Stand With Tibet, a petition to "support the Dalai Lama."
  
  
  
• Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Somini Sengupta:
  

  Mr. Bush has long said the United States and China have “a complex relationship,” and that complexity was on full display this week. While his administration has called for an end to the violence, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, phoned her Chinese counterpart to urge restraint, Mr. Bush himself has remained silent.
  
  

• NYT Editorial:
  

  In its annual human rights report on 190 countries, the State Department conceded that Beijing’s overall performance remained poor. But in what looked like a political payoff to a government whose help America desperately needs on difficult problems, the department dropped China from its list of 10 worst violators.

  
  
• Jeffrey Wasserstrom:
  

  Marx's suggestion that tragedy and farce are closely linked is not completely without relevance in a situation that pits Tibetan desires for independence (or at least cultural autonomy) against Beijing's determination to maintain control (and prevent what it dubs an illegitimate separatist movement).
  Tragedy gave way to farce in August 2007, when without any apparent irony, the Chinese authorities issued an injunction against unauthorized reincarnation. Concerned by various statements the Dalai Llama had made about how his succession might work, the officially atheist Beijing government laid down the law. To become a "living Buddha without governmental approval," the edict read, "is illegal and invalid.

  
  
• Edward Cody:
  

  Many Chinese, including those who had learned of the extent of the violence from foreign reports, seemed to take the censorship as a matter of course. Inured after years of such controls, most Chinese long ago lost any sense of indignation at being deprived of straight news by party censors.

  
  Sorta reminds you of the people who watch cable news over here, does it not?
  

Fighting Words: 3/24/08 Cartoon...

"Human Rights COPS"...

Sorry for the lateness, dear reader... this one turned out to be a lot more artistically complicated than I thought it would be. To make it up to you, here's a bonus link (part of my research for the toon): make your day great and go check out Comedy Central's Reno 911 video clip page. I've watched this show sporadically before, but I'm hooked now. Funny-ass stuff.

More on Authoritarianism in America...

Quick list of articles and random notes for this week's 'toon, as I'm racing a dying battery thanks to yet another power outage. Seems the Pacific Northwest is now getting these "10 year storms" at least once a year now... and it's not even friggin' winter yet.

• On authoritarianism, check out an excellent article on movement conservatism by Paul Krugman, and a 3-part series on conservative authoritarianism by John Dean (not his best-written work ever, but he makes some interesting points).
  
  Also, DNI Mike McConnell has been in the news a bit lately... here he asserts the White House position that any "debate" on the administration's shadowy surveillance programs "will kill Americans."


• Speaking of surveillance, I was all set to link to this article about the Democrats holding firm on NOT giving retroactive immunity to telecom companies that dutifully handed over private information on their customers to the government. That was yesterday, this is today:
  

  At the start of the day, Democrats were confident that the measure would gain approval in the House despite a veto threat from President Bush. But after an afternoon of partisan sniping, Democratic leaders put off that vote because of a competing measure from Republicans that on its face asked lawmakers to declare where they stood on stopping Osama bin Laden from attacking the United States again.
  
  ...Democrats denounced the Republicans’ poison pill on Mr. bin Laden as a cynical political ploy and “a cheap shot.” But Democratic leaders realized that they were at risk of losing the votes of a contingent of more moderate Democrats who did not want to be left vulnerable for voting against a resolution to stop Al Qaeda, officials said.

  
  Holy shit. Add this to the failure to override Bush's veto of the SCHIP bill, and the Democrats are having themselves one hell of a week! (Note to idiot Democrats: I'm being sarcastic, you worthless jerk-offs.)
  
  In case you've missed it, the domestic surveillance issue came to the forefront again earlier this week, thanks to new reports that revealed more details about telecoms' involvement in the programs, including yet another report that these programs were initiated at least 6 months before 9-11.


• On our inegalitarian society, Juan Cole says the Bush/Cheney model can more accurately be described as "Bonapartism," which he says means "the state rules in an authoritarian way and disregards the people, representing itself as the true representative of the business classes. In fact, it serves only a small spectrum of corporate cronies of the ruling elite, disadvantaging almost everyone else."


• On torture and the "moral high ground," a NYT editorial asks a very simple question: Is this really who we are?


• On detainees, the attorney who represented Jose Padilla wonders what would've happened if no one had bothered to fight on his behalf. This leads her to wonder:
  

  After all, if the government does indeed have the authority to hold citizens indefinitely, without formal charges or legal counsel, what good are our Constitutional rights to due process?

  
  Garrett Epps has the story of Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was thrown into a Portland lockup for two weeks and smeared in the press by the FBI, all seemingly based on the simple fact that he is a Muslim convert. Thankfully for the rest of us, he hasn't been wallowing in self-pity since then... he's been fighting the Patriot Act. And he's having some success.
  
  An interesting side-note from Glenn Greenwald on Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey, who apparently has shown a little bit of resistance to the administration on the issue of indefinite detention. Others maintain that Mukasey is not such a great guy.


• On the emergence of new details on the megalomania of Cheney and Addington, brilliant writer Charlie Savage has a new book out on their 30-year quest to turn the presidency into a new American dictatorship.
  
  The new episode of Frontline, which I haven't watched yet, also has some new details on the power-madness of Cheney.

Fighting Words: 10/15/07 Cartoon...

"Safety Instructions"...

More on detainees, torture...

Quick list of articles for this week's 'toon, as I'm getting ready for a trip to San Francisco on Friday for Alternative Press Expo (more on that later).

If only for a diversion from CNN's increasingly bad coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings:

• The cartoon was mostly brought on by reports that perpetual detainee and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla has been tortured to the point where he can no longer assist his attorneys in his defense. George Monbiot reports that "his mind is no longer there," and that he "appears to have been lobotomized: not medically, but socially." Monbiot also makes an excellent point that I've seen echoed elsewhere:
  

  This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical or mental - produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited.

  Every other citizen of this country should be in absolute horror that our own government has done this.


• A funny note on the Wikipedia entry for Padilla that I had never heard before, that Glenn Beck and other right-wing commentators subscribe to a conspiracy theory that Padilla was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, based almost solely on the fact that Padilla sorta looks like a police sketch of an alleged associate of Timothy McVeigh.
  
  It occurs to me that Padilla also bears a striking resemblance to Detroit Tigers' catcher Ivan Rodriguez... last I heard, though, Beck et al. have not implicated Pudge in the Oklahoma City bombing.


• Sidney Blumenthal gives a good summary of Bush's use of torture and his "Quest For Unfettered Power," and Scott Horton writes about the nationalization of "Texas Justice."


• Check out a particularly interesting article by Stephen Soldz on the use of psychologists by the government to assist in interrogations of detainees, and the resulting split between the professions of psychiatry and psychology. He says that the activities at Guantanamo and other detention centers have effectively turned them into "intentional experimental facilities designed to develop and test new behavior manipulation techniques... designed to break people down, to destroy them, whether they are innocent or guilty, whether they have any intelligence value or not. "

Fighting Words: 4/16/07 Cartoon

"The Total Home Interrogator!"...

In honor of St. Patrick's Day...

So the news broke this week that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to being the mastermind behind "everything ever," a story that most media outlets seem to have accepted as absolute fact. I suppose it's possibly true, but considering the fact that the confession came from a Pentagon transcript taken during a secret hearing at Guantanamo (which means, of course, there is "no way to confirm the testimony as the Bush administration has banned reporters and lawyers from proceedings"), in a manner that conveniently takes some of the attention off of Alberto's U.S. attorney scandal and implicitly justifies his stances on torture and secret military tribunals, my immediate reaction is (to quote one of my favorite movies):

(in Irish accent) "I'll believe that one when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet!"

It's not like the Defense Department has used up it's credibility on stuff like this, right?

More on signing statements, executive privilege, and the MCA...

Lotsa great sources for this week's toon, first on signing statements:

• John Dean, Dave Lindorff, and Tim Harper on the more than 750 laws that have been waved away by a president who apparently believes (or, I should say, has been coached to believe, since there is no way he could comprehend such complex legal issues on his own) that the Constitution grants him all the powers of the presidency enumerated in Article II, plus all the ones in Articles I and III that supposedly talk about "Legislative Power" and "Judicial Power."


• Charlie Savage, who broke the story wide open (or would have, if the rest of the mainstream media had bothered to pay any attention) with some excellent reporting in the Boston Globe.


• Edward Lazarus on the general havoc wreaked by the administration on the Constitution, part of a "triple-whammy" where they systematically stamp out civil liberties and executive accountability while dramatically increasing government secrecy.

On executive privilege, or possibly related topics:

• Think Progress with a clip of Cheney on the Stephanopoulos show, saying that neither he nor his little buddy would be appearing before Congress if subpoenaed.


• Michael Dorf and John Dean on the administration's past experiences with executive privilege, mostly dealing with Cheney's Energy Task Force meetings.

And on the Military Commissions Act:

• Two in a series of excellent essays by Joanne Mariner on the Bush administration's attempts to chip away at Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions, or at least their obligation to comply with it via the War Crimes Act.


• Good commentary on the subject from Molly Ivins and Glenn Greenwald, and Nick Turse on the "American Prison Planet," with always disturbing little nuggets like this:
  

  Earlier this year, news broke that Halliburton subsidiary, KBR -- the firm infamous for building prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay and for scandals stemming from work in the Iraq war zone -- received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build detention centers, according to the New York Times, "for an unexpected influx of immigrants" or "new programs that require additional detention space."
  ...
  One Vietnam-era radical, former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, grasped the implications immediately. "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," he said. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

Fighting Words: 11/20/06 Cartoon

"Billy, the Boy Who Knew Too Much #3"... see more of Billy here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE: extremely minor spelling correction made that probably no one would ever have noticed. If you can figure out where the correction is, you win... um... my heartfelt congratulations.

More on Bush's Evolving Iraq Rhetoric...

Fairly straight-forward cartoon this week... check out:

• Thomas A. Ricks and Joe Gandelman on Bush's new call for "benchmarks" on Iraq, a reversal that they suggest is motivated by an upcoming report by James Baker's Iraq Policy Group criticizing the current Iraq War policy.


• Carpetbagger on the shocking revelation that the Bush administration's policy on the Iraq War is ultimately motivated by domestic political concerns, rather than what would be the best way to save the lives of American soldiers. I'm shocked...


• Media Matters on Dan Bartlett's bald-faced claim that "it has never been a 'stay-the-course' strategy" for them.


• Harold Meyerson on Dubya's statement that the "cut-and-run" Democrats are "all over the place" on Iraq. Meyerson notes the irony of Bush attacking the Democrats "for failing to articulate a clear, compelling alternative to his war, though his war created so cosmic a debacle that there were no compelling alternatives."


• Jonathan S. Landay on Cheney's view that water-boarding is a "no-brainer." And nobody knows more about not having a brain than his little buddy...

Stumptown was fun. Sales were a little better than SPX, and it's always nice to (hopefully) gain a few new readers too. I've also learned that comfortable shoes are an absolute necessity at these shows, because my dogs were barking by about noon on Saturday...

Fighting Words: 10/30/06 Cartoon

"Alien Society, #5"... see the previous episodes here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE: Spelling error fixed (oops!)...

More on Hamdan...

Check out some articles on the fascinating backstory to the Hamdan case:

• See especially the NPR story on the representation of Hamdan by Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal and U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift. This is one of those "lawyers on a mission" stories that initially led me to law school, but it also touches on the institutional resistance that probably drove me away from the legal world. Katyal is a 33 year-old lawyer who had never argued a case before the Supreme Court, and who found himself in charge of one of the most important cases in U.S. history on presidential abuse of power. He would end up pouring in thousands of hours on this case, never getting more than 4 hours sleep a night, and spending $40,000 of his own money. Swift is a military defense lawyer who was appointed on the condition that he secure a guilty plea from his client -- a condition that he felt was unethical. He was eventually forced to file a strategic brief that was an implicit warning to his superiors in the chain-of-command that "there would be repercussions if they decided to gag the lawyers" (one of the ballsiest moves I've ever heard of).
  
  Meanwhile, Katyal and Swift would find some support in the corporate legal world from the Seattle firm of Perkins Coie, the firm where I worked as a file clerk for a couple of years after college. I'm proud of Perkins for standing up on this one, especially considering the fact that most big firms "were steering clear of Guantanamo cases for fear of being called unpatriotic."
  
  As it was portrayed in the NPR account, the amount of resistance from the government that the Hamdan team encountered in their entirely righteous quest was, simply put, sickening. It is one of those stories that leaves you wondering how the hell this could be our government. Katyal actually commended the military and the administration for letting them do their jobs, saying that, "in some other country, we might have been shot." I think this is beside the point. The real issue here is a government that has historically claimed absolute dominion over the moral high-ground, and yet is so disturbingly hostile to the basic democratic ideals that they claim to covet (see another article from the Guardian on that particular point).


• John Dean on the incredibly duplicitous behavior of Sens. Kyl and Graham during the case, of which he said, "I have not seen so blatant a ploy, or abuse of power, since Nixon's reign." Apparently, at some point the two Senators filed an amicus brief in support of a government motion to dismiss, which relied heavily on the record of a conversation between the two on the Senate floor that never actually took place. The entire exchange was inserted into the record after the fact, as though it had happened live, which effectively reversed their prior position on an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act.


• Edward Lazarus on the role of government lawyers, which should be more than just being "'whores' who will give intellectual cover to any position, no matter how wrong or unreasonable."


• Articles by Adam Liptak and David E. Sanger, which supplied many of the administration quotes on detainees and torture that were parodied in this week's 'toon.