Fighting Words: 6/30/08 Cartoon...

"Future Viewer: The Impeachment of President Goober Johnson"...

More on Big Oil, drilling...

In case you didn't catch it, the name "Cheney milkshakes" in this week's 'toon was borrowed from the now-infamous final scene of There Will Be Blood... but I'm sure you caught that. You're quite clever...

Tidbits:

• All indications are that offshore drilling (like drilling in ANWR) would not yield any oil for 10 years, and even then would have no significant impact on gas prices. Meanwhile, here's what it'll do to the environment:
  

  ...the back-to-back wallops of Katrina and Hurricane Rita caused 124 spills that released more than 700,000 gallons of petroleum pollution into the environment. Furthermore, the problem of drilling-related pollution is not limited to the aftermath of natural disasters. Offshore oil production also brings with it the risk of spills from tanker accidents, which are devastating to ocean and shore life as well as seaside tourist economies. Then there's the
  chronic pollution from drilling operations. The Rainforest Action Network estimates that over its lifetime one normally operating oil drilling rig will:
  * dump more than 90,000 metric tons of toxic drilling fluid and metal cuttings into the ocean;
  * drill between 50 and 100 wells, each of which will dump as much as 25,000 pounds of toxic metals including lead, chromium and mercury, and potent carcinogens like toluene, benzene, and xylene into the ocean; and
  * pollute the air as much as 7,000 cars driving 50 miles a day.

• Michael Brush:
  

  ExxonMobil... generated $40.6 billion in net income last year and $36.6 billion in free cash flow. What did it do with those riches? It gave $38.4 billion back to shareholders -- $7.4 billion in dividend payments and $31 billion through share buybacks.
  ...
  This means the windfall profits that ExxonMobil gave back to shareholders last year were enough to buy all the households in both California and Pennsylvania gasoline for the entire year. It was enough to give everyone a 27 cents-a-gallon discount on gas nationwide for the whole year.

  
  
• If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to check out an out-freakin'-standing piece by Paul Salopek called "A Tank of Gas, A World of Trouble," which has been sitting in my "stuff-to-read" folder for a while. It traces a tank of gas from the time it's taken out of the ground in a war-torn foreign land, to the "Heartland" gas station where it's pumped by an oblivious soccer-mom into her 10 mpg Hummer. Among the compelling stories are fascinating snippets like this:
  
  

  In some respects, crude really does resemble blood. It scabs on exposure to air. It is organic and viscous. Some companies warm oil to about 90 degrees to make it slip more easily, with less friction, through pipelines. This temperature approximates that of the human body. Cold oil will coagulate. It coats the inner surfaces of the pipes with waxy buildups, much like arterial plaque.

  
  

Jesus...

OK, I can't let this one pass. There are some seriously God-awful "George Carlin at the pearly gates" editorial cartoons coming down the pike today... even a few by cartoonists that I greatly admire. Some of these 'toons are made even more offensive by the fact that they're either borne out of a complete ignorance of Carlin's views on religion, or they simply (and rather ironically) miss the point of his material.

Seriously... is this what we do -- draw the same damn silly pictures over and over that'll recap any piece of news that might occur? Is it the deadlines? Are editors to blame for not giving their cartoonists more time to, perhaps, listen to a few Carlin albums and do a unique and fitting tribute?

GRRRR! Sorry, this particular one just bothered me more than usual...


UPDATE: Cagle has a post on this, along with a few more "Sorry, Mr. Carlin, you can't say those seven words here either" cartoons that I hadn't seen... (say... you guys know that he did other routines aside from the "seven words" bit, right?)...


P.P.S.: For those who may have been aware of Carlin's religious views and did their cartoons as implicit criticisms of Carlin, I offer a personal note: when Tim Russert died, I did a blog post criticizing him for being such a huge cog in the corporate media machine. Then I realized how tacky it would be to dance on the grave of someone who just died, so I put it in my pocket and bit my fucking tongue. Hint, hint...

George

I won't recall my favorite Carlin bit... there's too many to choose from. Let me just say that one of my personal heroes has gone, someone whose life work has helped me define what I'm trying to do with my own work. Not many other people have been able to convey how pissed off they were about the shit going on in the world and still make it so damn funny...

I haven't listened yet, but I'm told the NPR retrospective on his life is outstanding.

Fighting Words: 6/23/08 Cartoon...

"Fuzzy Fetish"...

FISA Bill Vote...

GovTrack has the final vote on H.R. 6304, so you can find all the authoritarianism-enabling Democrats to vote out of office the next time they're up for re-election...

More on Racist Caricatures...

I just got done telling someone that I wasn't going to jump on the bandwagon of criticizing the work of other cartoonists, which is a major topic of discussion in editorial cartooning circles these days. This means, of course, that I'm going to do the exact opposite right now and criticize someone else's work (although it is a criticism of substance, not form)...

One of my main influences for this week's 'toon was a recent editorial cartoon by Jake Fuller:

(click here to view)

Jake Fuller Artizans Jun 13, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com

To be fair, Fuller is surely not the only one to have drawn a caricature like this... I counted at least half a dozen other similar depictions in the last week alone. Also, to my knowledge I have never met Fuller, so it's not a personal beef.

However, cartoons like this still seem to me to be a clear abuse of editorial and artistic license. There is no argument being made... it's nothing more than a crass exploitation of social fears and preconceptions. As has often been noted, there is a staggering ignorance in cartoons like this of the historical similarities with WWII-era racist depictions of Japanese people. I think it's safe to say that caricatures of that nature have now been universally discredited. What's next, Obama in blackface? (Well, maybe that's not out of the realm of possibility...)

Perhaps the most objectionable thing about caricatures like this is how misleading they are, especially considering how many of the Guantanamo detainees have apparently been children who don't have the ability to grow scary-looking beards. Contrast Fuller's vision of what a detainee looks like with this image. It takes a small amount of reading to find out who these people really are, to make sure your cartoon has a basis in solid journalism.

I suppose it's too much to hope for cartoons like this to just go away, but neither should the offending artists hope to avoid criticism when they draw them.

Tidbits:

• Vincent Rossmeier predicts that Michelle Obama will become a focus of attention for the GOP attack machine, if she hasn't already. Quoting a conservative writer on the alleged videotape where she denounces "whitey":
  

  "No tape exists ... This is the '08 version of a really weird conservative urban legend that pops up every four years. The names change, but the basics remain the same: 1) It always involves the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate; 2) it always portrays the wife -- not the candidate -- committing some anti-American, unpatriotic act."

  
  
• The third square of the 'toon was a reference to a recent AP article by Nedra Pickler, which gave an essentially unopposed platform for "fringe Republican operatives" to question Obama's patriotism. It also generated a significant protest from readers:
  

  That kind of media shortcoming has become predictable; reporters love to quote partisan Republicans about how deficient Democrats are. And in the past it would have likely produced angry denunciations online within the liberal blogosphere -- a blog swarm, perhaps...
  But nearly 15,000 letters sent in just a matter of days in response to a single news wire article? That's something else entirely and could mark the dawn of a new era in progressive media activism. The phenomenon has received very little mainstream media attention (journalists probably don't want to encourage this sort of thing), but make no mistake: It was a very big deal.
  

  
  

Fighting Words: 6/16/08 Cartoon...

"Remaining Election Calendar"...


There seems to be a little confusion about what I was trying to say with this one. I'm just trying to satirize the ridiculous caricatures of Barack and Michelle Obama that I'm predicting will emerge by October, as fueled by the Republican attack machine and repeated by our moronic media. And, I was trying to portray the disgust that we should all feel by that point if we've watched the news at all...

Probably just a sucky 'toon... sorry...

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:

Fighting Words: 6/9/08 Cartoon...

"Stuff I'd Rather Do Than Watch That Movie, #5

Airport blogging...

This week's 'toon is obviously gonna be late, since it's Monday morning and I'm about to get on a plane and I've barely started the thing. Probably tomorrow sometime...

Fighting Words: 6/2/08 Cartoon...

"The Scott-Botinator"...


Man, I needed an easy topic for a cartoon this week, and the political cartooning gods hooked me up...

No Moron post this week, as I expect to be pretty busy. I'll try to do a post on the road from NYC.

See the previous appearances of Scott-Bot:

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!