Comic Strip of the Day.com

Timing

Timing is everything in comedy, but Michael Cavna takes it to a surreal level.

Or possibly he doesn't have an option to set up his cartoons to post at a particular time and had to get this up before he knocked off for the weekend.

But I laughed harder today than I would have tomorrow.

 

Though, as Matt Wuerker suggests, maybe only being a day ahead of events is procrastination.

Part of it is the speed with which we communicate. Tuesday will be the anniversary of the 1860 launch of the Pony Express, which famously moved mail from St. Joe, Missouri to Sacramento in only 10 days, which was wonderful for about a year and a half, until the transcontinental telegraph line rendered it obsolete.

Such that, three and a half years later, the news of Lincoln's assassination was in newspapers nationwide the next morning. 

Now, Lincoln was no more dead than he would have been had it taken 10 days or even longer for the news to get to California, but knowing things right away inspires a sense of urgency, even when "right away" meant the next day.

And I would note that church bells began ringing when the news arrived, and that most papers would have a blackboard outside on which they would post bulletins so that people who lived in town got the headlines before the next edition. 

I don't know how much of a spiderweb that first telegraph line was part of, and I'm betting there were people who didn't live in town and didn't get the news for several days.

The question of how much they'd care is spoiled by the magnitude of the war and of Lincoln's part in it, but, aside from that spectacular level of news, for people out in the hinterlands, corn and wheat prices were of more importance than the other things that were being discussed half a continent away in Washington, much less what happened on the other side of the globe.

I saw a comment on a cartoon about gun control this morning from someone who suggested we go back to the Founders' Intent, disband the army and rely on state militias.

Which has as much chance as us disbanding the power grid and going back to candles. And day-old newspapers.

But however quickly the news arrives, people seem to care less about the conflict in Syria than about the competition on "The Voice."

Which bring us to our first ...

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Jeff Danziger)

(Clay Jones)

The joke being in Jones's cartoon, because few people raise the question anymore, much less express horror.

By contrast, Danziger doesn't exaggerate nearly enough, alas, and I really like his depiction of the current war room, which is frighteningly accurate, though it varies slightly from what we've seen in the past.

And he really did call her to congratulate her on her ratings.

To be fair, his predecessor was also aware of pop culture, but pursued it apart from his official duties rather than setting aside "executive time" to watch TV while everyone else was working.

Jones, as usual, accompanies his cartoon with a rant worth reading, but his main point is in his first sentence:  If you have to kiss ass to get a job, you’re most likely going to have to continue sucking up to keep it.

He goes on to point out that, while some wonder whether a physician with virtually no management experience is the right fit for a job that involves untangling the Gordian knot of the nation's second-largest bureaucracy, having said nice things about Trump is qualification enough.

Which brings us back to that bizarre moment in 2005 -- the foolishness of which was enshrined at the time by Henry Payne -- when W proposed putting his personal attorney on the Supreme Court.

Even Bush's staunch Republican allies felt that the utter idiocy of the idea must be quickly slapped down, which is why I refer to it as a "bizarre moment."

Not "a bizarre four years," which is what we appear to be enmeshed in.

 

Juxtaposition #2

(Rob Rogers)

(Clay Bennett)

Going back to both comic timing and the speed of the current news cycle, Clay Bennett's cartoon seems almost an answer to Rob Rogers, the two having been filed just hours apart.

The bullying on the part of the NRA (as well as by rightwing pundits and, no doubt, the Russian Peanut Gallery), has been, as Rogers notes, appalling, but it wasn't clear that it had crossed a line until David Hogg stood up to Laura Ingraham.

Even that was not the critical thing: The kids have stood up to hate and to lies about them ever since they began to push back against policies that allow slaughter in schools.

In recent days, however, they've gained some interesting supporters: When Steven King (R-IA), one of the most hardcore imbeciles in Congress, went after Emma Gonzalez for wearing a Cuban flag on her jacket, he was immediately slapped down by Cuban Americans throughout Florida, including rightwing Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, for not knowing that Cubans wave the flag in opposition to Castro and love of their ancestral homeland.

(As for Gonzalez not being bilingual, the moronic flamebat had opined in December that “Assimilation has become a dirty word to the multiculturalist Left. Assimilation, not diversity, is our American strength.”)

What the dust-up between Hogg and Ingraham has revealed is not simply Hogg's stubborn refusal to be a good little boy and knuckle under, but the growing concern among advertisers about either human decency or the coming demographics of this country, and it doesn't much matter which.

The collapse of advertiser support for Ingraham seems less a response to this particular attack and more an overall sense that her relentless stream of vitriol is not where they should pitch their tents.

The critical point being not that Hogg didn't accept her transparently fake apology, but that 10 advertisers did not.

Money talks, and, for the moment, it sounds hopeful.

 

Humor: Seasonal, treasonal and romantic

Maybe the kind of random nature of Arlo & Janis humor is why it strikes me so often -- ping pong balls in a roomful of mousetraps or something -- but the cost of rabbit happened to be on my mind the other day.

Rabbits are easy to raise, famously prolific and do indeed taste like chicken, but rabbit is considered exotic in the US and is frightfully expensive, even at farmer's markets where you'd think it would be like rhubarb, something that could just go from coop to co-op.

When then-wife and I were considering going back to the land at least to the extent of jobs in town and a small spread in the country, I read in Mother Earth News that rabbits were less prone to disease and sudden unexplained death than chickens, but she was horrified at the idea of eating Thumper, and I suppose that's the issue.

And it's not helpful to point out that rabbits are nearly rodents and that the objection should be that it's like eating rat.

As for cute, anyone who eats lamb should make a concerted effort never to meet one, you'll pardon the expression, in the flesh.

Meanwhile, in that last panel, Janis appears to question his sense of culinary iconography.

Indeed, better a pagan rabbit than a paschal lamb.

Or simply stick to bread and a nice chianti.

 

Now Some More Seasonal Humor

I'm in no hurry to file my taxes, but it's because I owe money, not because, as depicted in Bug Martini and many other strips, I find the process itself particularly burdensome.

Being self-employed does bring in a lot of paperwork, because you have to track your business expenses and fill out forms for your self-employment tax, which is to say, we pay out of pocket not just the FICA sorts of things that people with straight jobs pay but the additional taxes that their employers pay. 

Here's the thing: It's a lot of writing but it's not a lot of thinking, and the answer these days is to get some software and avoid all that filling out of forms.

And not only does technology make that part easy, but the fact that we don't use cash or checks anymore makes tracking expenses easier, too: I have a separate debit card for deductible purchases.

One more thing: My father was always annoyed with people who purposely set their withholding high so they'd get a big refund, calling it an interest-free loan to Uncle Sam. 

I wonder how he'd feel about his self-employed son not making the required quarterly tax payments, because the penalty is less than the appreciation those funds gain in his IRA over the course of a year?

And speaking of clever tax-cheats:

Jimmy Margulies brings the charge home as our stable genius attacks Amazon for ... well, for being owned by the guy who owns the Washington Post, but let's pretend not to know that.

Dear Leader criticizing a tax chiseler is like Joan Rivers mocking someone for having plastic surgery.

It's hard to figure out his point, because Amazon pays property taxes to state and local governments, as well as payroll taxes and whatever they pay when they purchase trucks and robots and fork lifts.

What they don't pay is tax on their own sales, because the seller doesn't pay the sales tax, though, in states where they have a physical presence, their customers do pay it. 

Good thing he didn't mention federal taxes. I doubt he has a major donor that pays those.

And while it can be, and has been, argued that their bulk-rate postage rate is less than it costs the Postal Service to deliver a package, that's an accounting trick: They're not showing up at the window with unsorted, unstamped packages, and it's not as if letter carriers were being diverted from their normal routes.

Whatever Amazon pays is underwriting USPS's existing costs.

And if you're so concerned, how's about you tell your fat cat buddies in Congress to back off the effort to put the Post Office out of business to privatize it for their pals?

Which bring us to his sudden concern for those poor shopkeepers, which indeed is deeply touching. I'm sure he'll be turning down campaign contributions from Wal-Mart, Rite Aid and any other corporate juggernauts that dare to assume that Donald Trump, the People's Hero, approves of their parasitical operations.

Never mind. He's beyond satire. It's enough, as Margulies has done, to simply point out his insane contradictions.

Sadly, the 25th Amendment was written for Wilson's stroke and Eisenhower's heart attack, not for Nixon's talking to presidential portraits.

Though Dear Leader has taken steps to forestall that possible crisis.

Expecting logic and consistency from him is a fool's game, as Ward Sutton points out in a multi-panel delight that you should go read.

 

Recommended without have read it

Michael Cavna has a write-up on a book I immediately ordered from Amazon, and here's why I didn't need more than the names:

In 2013, I went to a convention at the Billy Ireland and wound up having dinner with Eddie Campbell, whom I had seen speak, and his GF, whom I didn't know at all.

We had a fascinating conversation about plotting and character development, and she added a very great deal more than the usual spouse/GF, so I asked her what she did and Eddie burst into laughter:

"You don't know who she is, do you?" he crowed. "She's somebody! She's really somebody!"

I already knew she was brilliant, but knowing that her boyfriend was in such awe of her made me think how fortunate they were to have found each other, because it was clearly mutual.

Cavna's article is excellent, but he had me at "Eddie Campbell and Audrey Niffenegger."

I've read several of their separate works since that evening and can't wait to see them together again.

Here are a few sample pages:

 

Militias, the Census and other jokes

Big Nate knocked me off my chair this morning. I'm finishing up next week's issue today and had two movie reviews that were coming in last night, since the press previews were held in the past 36 hours.

Both arrived, as promised, at the last minute. One said "Sorry it’s a bit long, this movie had a lot going on!" and the other also went over-length, and said, "I had a lot to say!"

One of them was 20 words over the requested 500 word limit. The other was 940 words.

Guess which one said, "... so you’ll probably have to cut it down a bit."

Of course -- the first one.

An editor's lot is not a happy one.

 

First as History, Then as Cartoon

Today's Vintage Thimble Theater, from October, 1931, is wrapping up an arc in which Popeye has defeated the enemy army singlehandedly, because the cowardly army on his side took to the hills.

It ties in nicely with the current yapping about "well-regulated militias" and specifically, with Justice Stevens' op-ed piece pointing out that the Second Amendment is about those actual 18th century militias.

I've cited the Bladensburg Races before, but this comic neatly mirrors the Second Battle of Sackets Harbor, also in the War of 1812.

As the British fleet approached, Gen. Jacob Brown placed his militia at the obvious British entry spot, a narrow, easily defended ankle-deep ford where the island behind which the British clearly planned to land met the shore, then anchored his Albany regulars farther up by the boatyard.

That well-regulated militia lay behind a natural breastwork of earth until the first British boots touched water, whereupon they fired a single volley and then ran into the woods and hid, allowing the British forces to land unopposed.

The regulars took up the fight and acquitted themselves well, but it was a close, hard-fought battle until Brown dispatched a half-dozen dragoons to ride up and down the edge of the woods shouting about the great victory and the retreat of the enemy.

Hearing them, the well-regulated militia burst out of hiding, joyfully streaming down to celebrate their vicarious triumph.

The hard-pressed British mistook them for reinforcements, withdrew to their boats and returned to Kingston. The battle was won.

Immediately after the war, Madison tasked Brown with reorganizing the American army so it no longer had to depend on militias, who had behaved with an equal lack of valor in several other battles.

At which point the Second Amendment became as obsolete as the Third.

 

Cuenta Conmijo

(Kevin Siers)

(Dan Wasserman)

First of all, the Constitution does not say "count the citizens."

We're supposed to count everyone except "Indians not taxed," which is to say, Indians in sovereign nations, while slaves were only counted as 3/5's a person, which -- contrary to the unschooled opinions of young liberals -- was intended to prevent slaveholding states from getting the massive undeserved Congressional representation and tax funding they'd have earned had non-voting slaves been counted as whole persons.

BTW, the Census comes under the Dept of Commerce, so it's none of Jeff Sessions' goddam business what they ask, and his pretense that it is to preserve voting rights is ludicrous given who he is, who he serves and what they've done so far.

Meanwhile, Dan Wasserman is reflecting how people who actually understand the immigrant community know this question will be taken. 

I keep reading that we asked the citizenship question as recently as 1950, but that's another way of saying we stopped asking it after the Red Scare and about the time we passed the Civil Rights Act. 

And so the question is perfectly consistent with Making America Great Again, innit?

But back to those Indians not taxed for a story about how ridiculous the Census was even before we started sliding into fascism:

I was the census reporter for our paper in the 1990 Census, and, as it happened, not only was Akwesasne within our circulation area-- a reserve that, together with Kahnawake and Kanesatake, is the most militant native community north of the Rio Grande -- but so was Ganienkeh, a splinter community whose militancy cranks up to 11.

Shortly before Census Day, a medical helicopter got lost and started circling around looking for a landmark. Someone in Ganienkeh saw an Army chopper flying low overhead, took out his deer rifle and started shooting at it, wounding the doctor on board and severing a hydraulic line, bringing the helicopter to the ground near the compound.

The State Troopers and FBI took offense at this, and there followed an armed standoff for a week and a half, which ended as such things mostly do in Mohawk country with everyone still pissed off but cautiously stepping back.

A year or so later, when the Census numbers had been crunched, I got this chipper press release from the Bureau with figures about Indian population, including the ridiculous story that they had passed the books over the barricades at Ganienkeh and the Mohawk inside had filled them out and passed them back.

I have long advised against lying to the press, because it is not only insulting but makes us wonder what's really up. In this case, the lie was so preposterous that it amused both the newsroom and the Mohawk to whom we went for comment.

But it also made me start poking around.

What I found was a huge undercount of native people across the country, linked to a variety of problems including homelessness in cities and the scattered populations in the Four Corners area.

It was more resigned incredulity than active anger, with my Navajo source joking, "If they get a good count, I wish they'd share it. We have no idea who's out there."

The biggest laugh being that they never had to count heads in Ganienkeh in the first place, those being the most not-taxed Indians on the continent.

And I wouldn't have thought of the story if the nitwits hadn't brought it up.

 

 

Substitutions

Company Man gets top billing today out of sheer luck and good timing. I haven't tried Halo Top, but I picked up a bag of Beanitos the other day.

Beanitos is a bean-based Cheetos knock-off. I was on the road and just wanted something to eat in the car, and I'll say this: If I'd picked up a bag of actual Cheetos, they wouldn't have made it back to the house, but those Beanitos lasted for several days.  

If you asked your parents to pick up some Cheetos, these are what they'd come home with.

Your mother would buy them because they're healthier and your father would buy them because they are different and he was curious.

So I've become my father. Fair enough. He was a good man and today is his birthday, so here's to ya, Dad.

But I'm also still myself and I wanted some goddam Cheetos, not these things which are only "cheesy" in the negative sense.

Meanwhile, if I intended to get curious about Halo Top, Company Man has scratched that itch. But I went online to find out more, and started reading this review that admitted to not being terribly enthusiastic about the stuff, but said that some flavors were better than others.

However, I got about halfway through and the reviewer declared something "Deelish!" and I realized it wasn't a dude, because guys don't talk like Rachel Ray, whose "Nutrish" dog food, I am fully convinced, is formulated for purse-dogs.

Which is okay, except that women spend so much time dieting that they learn to compromise and to settle for things that at least aren't completely disgusting.

And nobody'd ever get married if they didn't (rimshot), but I looked for a review by a guy and found it here.

I'll bet he'd say the same thing about Beanitos if someone paid him to eat them.

Which someone will have to do if they want me to do that again.

There used to be a series of commercials for some coffee -- Folger's, IIRC -- in which people in restaurants were served coffee and then told it was instant, much to their surprise and delight.

Swapping Beanitos for Cheetos, or Halo Top for Haagen Daz, would, I'm sure, be just as convincing.

I can't find it, so here's a better commercial in its place:

 

Now, onto things that actually could kill you

Mike Keefe doesn't pop up in my feed very often, but he makes it count when he does. He's not the first to comment on Dear Leader's reliance on Fox & Friends instead of his briefers, but the way this is set up gives it a swift descent into bathos that made me laugh simply from the drop.

It's elegantly laid out, not simply in the listing of the three branches but with the addition of the homunculus on the White House roof. Nicely done.

And Jeff Boyer comments on Trump's refusal to seek competent -- rather than "famous" -- counsel. It's not so much that he acts as his own counsel as it is that, whatever his lawyers and other advisers tell him, well, they might as well explain it to Mike Pence's rabbit for all the good it does.

Though somebody seems to have gained his ear, perhaps with a pinching thumb rather than the voice of reason, because his Twitter feed has suddenly gone mostly silent and almost totally boring in the past few days, though he did tweet the other day:

Which shows he's still got the magic, given that he's crowing over one day's upswing when the three-month trend looks like this:

Which leaves me wondering whether he's trying to pull a slick one or if his handlers simply kept him from seeing the Dow until it went up for a few hours.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #1

(Matt Wuerker)

(Matt Bors)

The evolution of John Bolton from a major architect of what may be the largest, most destructive blunder in American history, to TV host, and then back to White House advisor, has fascinated a lot of cartoonists because he has a big, goofy mustache.

And, y'know, likes to start wars despite not having served in one when he had the chance.

But the Matts offer some insights here on his value as a colorful distraction, Wuerker in his customary combination of sarcasm and realpolitik and Bors with his usual suspicion that there is a cunning plan at work.

I fall between them -- pretty sure it's less nonsensical than Wuerker's absurdist take but convinced that this collection of chickenhawks and Ayn Rand groupies couldn't conspire to order a pizza.

That's a fine line, but, then again, we've seen an actual evil conspiracy at work and this is nothing like the Cheney Administration. I think we're back to blundering into disaster rather than intentionally leaping into it.

A distinction without a difference when the body bags are coming home.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

(Michael DeAdder)

(Robert Airial)

Fortunately, for my peace of mind as well as for the country's actual fate, there are the kids coming along to save the day, and I'm hoping they can bell the cat in 2018 and expel the cat in 2020 and that we'll all benefit from their energy and dedication.

And I would point out to that Congressional aide in Ariail's cartoon that a lot of these kids are indeed old enough to vote and are organizing registration drives and that, in any case, their grandparents stopped a war and drove a president from office before they were old enough to vote, then capped it off by amending the Constitution so that the government could never again send young people off to die before they had a voice in that government.

And you can deal with their limited, reasonable demands or you can insult them and ignore them and trivialize them and condescend to them and piss them off.

As the man from Fram warned, change the oil filter now or replace the engine later.

 

Where to Get Smarter

Pajama Diaries is one of the strips that I probably feature too often: Either you've figured out that you should be reading it on your own or you never will, and if you've decided you don't like it, you're likely sick of seeing it here. However, Terri Libenson approaches topics that other cartoonists have also addressed with a sort of nuts-and-bolts specificity they don't.

Case in point: This isn't about how much Main-Character Jill is going to miss her kid next year, or how far from home she'll be, but where Amy herself will actually go and how much it matters to her.

It's about Amy, not Jill, and not every cartoonist can step away from her main character like that, or get inside the character enough to have it be about empathy and not her personal response.

And I don't know why she didn't say "Harvard" and "Yale" because it's not like they'd sue her, but I suppose there's no sense in using real schools for the ones you don't go to and then inventing the one you do. 

But I really liked that last panel, because, with crushes or with colleges, you have to focus on the fit, not the ego fulfillment.

And I'm not sure going to the most challenging school you can possibly get into is a very good strategy. For one thing, once you're there, nobody will be impressed you got in, because they will have all gotten in.

The other is that, if you squeeze through rather than waltzing in, you're gonna have to work your ass off just to keep up, and that's no fun. 

One of my "alums" showed up at the workshop for young reporters I had in Denver a few weeks ago; his little sister is a current writer. He is on the verge of college applications and was talking about how he didn't think he could get into MIT, and we talked a little about Cal Tech and Carnegie Mellon, and then one of the dads said, "Mines."

And I said "of course" because the major difference between those other schools and the Colorado School of Mines is that everybody knows the former, but the people in the industry -- who will one day look at your resume -- know the latter.

It's surely no "safety school" and it's easy to flunk out, but, since it's an insider school, you might have a better shot at getting in, since every Brainiac with a technical bent won't be lined up at the door.

Plus, their football stadium is built into the side of a bowl with a fabulous view of the mountains, and not only is the Coors plant just down the street with free tours that include sampling, but Golden is suddenly beginning to host all sorts of little craft breweries. And he'd be an insulated four hours from home but only about an hour and a half drive from fabulous skiing.

Like I said, it's not impossible to flunk out of the place, but you'd have a lot more fun doing it. When my dad was at MIT, he joined a fraternity to get out of the dorms and have a quiet place to study. Eeesh.

And trust me when I tell you that, ten minutes after you're hired, nobody gives a damn where you went to school.

(Granted, it's different if you major in philosophy or political science. Then nobody hires you no matter where you went.)

BTW, Amy's already been accepted at her safety schools, so that's out of the way, though I'm all in favor of kids taking a gap year if they're not sure what they want from college.

We didn't have "gap years" in my day. If you didn't want to go to college after high school, you could take a "Giáp year."

In either case, there's always the chance you won't come back.

 

Now that student days are over

You can still become smarter by going to college and it doesn't need to take four years: Drake University in Des Moines has a display of Ding Darling cartoons, ephemera and events, through the end of May.

Here's a write up from the Des Moines Register that includes audio of him explaining one of his most famous cartoons, the obituary piece above for his fellow conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt. Which, by the way, is evidence that obituary cartoons don't have to suck if you reserve them for people you genuinely cared about.

Here's more about him.  It's frustrating to me, since I used to drive through Des Moines fairly often, so, if you can get there, please do.

 

I am set to be at the University of Minnesota for this, April 20 and 21, and strongly recommend it, even if you can't work in a visit to nearby grandchildren which I'd promised them anyway.

It's a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Hustler/Falwell decision, which is particularly critical when we have a buffoon whose repressive views on press freedom carry more weight than the Rev. Falwell's.

The guest list is full of people whose work you've seen here -- Ann Telnaes, Steve Sack, Pat Bagley, Chip Bok, Mike Peters, Ben Sargent, Steve Breen, Signe Wilkinson, Cullum Rogers, Joel Pett, Jack Ohman, Matt Wuerker -- plus a lot of people who can't draw but who can think and talk real good.

Which is the pleasant way to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are.

(It's free, but you have to register by April 9)

And weekend after next, I'm going to go down to MOCCA, which is taking place April 7 and 8 at the center of the universe and the guest list for which is here. And here. And the exhibitor list for which is here.

I don't expect to see anyone there dressed as Spider Man or a Klingon, which is another reason to attend, and, if I'm wrong about that, the Hudson River is only a nudge or a shove away.

 

You can pass many a class, whether you're dumb or wise ...

 

Random points

Okay, now THAT was a nothingburger!

The only real news was the scene in the parking lot, which was more specific than the general rumblings of "I've been threatened" but, then again, provided no details. It would have been nice if she'd said she told the receptionist at the fitness center "You won't believe what just happened out there."

But apparently she didn't, or Anderson Cooper didn't ask her if she had or it got cut out of the interview.

Anyway, I didn't see much I didn't already know, and 60 Minutes did a more revealing interview with the Clintons over the Gennifer Flowers thing before the 1992 elections and then we all voted for him anyway.

I'm not suggesting a "Whatabout" defense but rather suggesting a "Whogivesadamn?" defense, which is that the people who are willing to believe Stormy didn't learn anything they didn't already know and the people who either don't believe her or don't care will still not believe her or won't care.

Finding out that JFK was a horndog was painful because we'd constructed that whole Camelot thing, but he was dead before it came out and that's no more politically important than finding out that Eisenhower had an affair with his driver in Europe during the war.

And, speaking of JFK, we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, which was a disappointment only in the sense that we already knew Teddy was the family fuckup and all Chappaquiddick proved was that he was a bigger fuckup than we thought, but he was also a brilliant legislator so he kept getting re-elected.

Point being that, if there is anybody who thought Donald Trump was a decent, honorable husband, they probably won't believe Stormy, and there are probably a whole lot more people who don't give a damn, because the Access Hollywood tape was a lot more disturbing and they didn't give a damn about that.

The good news being that I think there were a lot of people who voted for Trump to send a message, to offset Hillary Clinton's predicted electoral mandate, and they sure aren't going to do that again.

But they didn't need Stormy to convince them, either.

Clay Jones was equally unimpressed with the non-revelations, and his rant is worth a read. Like me, he's less astonished by the sex than by the cover story Trump's personal attorney concocted:

What needs to be discovered is if Cohen’s unbelievable explanation is true and he’s really that stupid. If not, we need to find out if he was reimbursed and by who. Was it Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, the Trump Campaign, another party, or another company? Maybe it was the porn fairy.

If Cohen can avoid jail or being disbarred, I know a lot of people who would happily hire an attorney who pays his clients' obligations out of his own pocket.

But apparently Dear Leader did read a book last night.

Or at least he heard about one.

 

Speaking of horndogs

Zapiro has spent the last 20 years illuminating the personal and political shortcomings of South African President Jacob Zuma for the Sunday Times, famously putting a showerhead on his head after Zuma, in a rape case, opined that you could prevent the spread of AIDS by showering after sex.

That's over, his contract abruptly terminated, apparently because he had begun also drawing cartoons for the Daily Maverick, an upstart paper that has made significant strides in establishing itself as reputable and, boy, would it be nice if some American publisher were to emulate it over here.

There's nothing unusual, I suppose, in demanding exclusivity, but if ever a cartoonist had the national standing to break that tradition, it would be Zapiro, and it seems like the Sunday Times is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

Something we don't need to encourage American papers to emulate because they've got it down to a science.

Africartoons ran his farewell cartoon from the Times, and there is also a feature of his best Zuma cartoons on the Maverick, and, while the finer points require a knowledge of South African politics, he's world-class and you'll still get some laughs.

The biggest takeaway being that Zapiro treads a line in that he is not as extravagantly vulgar as a lot of European cartoonists, but mixes his ink with considerably more peri peri than Americans can get away with.

Which I would wish them to emulate except that, given the level of courage in American newspapers, the only thing they'd end up imitating would be that part where he gets fired, and it wouldn't take 20 years.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Gary Varvel)

(Mike Lester)

I don't often agree with Gary Varvel and even less so with Mike Lester, but I admire thoughtful cartooning even when I disagree with the conclusions, so I keep an eye on them.

These are both funny and insightful and suggest that, however firmly talk radio hosts have the rings set in the noses of some conservative cartoonists, they aren't jerking the chains on these guys.

I don't accept Lester's suggestion that the clever Democrats snookered Dear Leader, but the fact remains that he didn't get what he promised the Deplorables they'd have, and Lester illustrates it in a way that makes it impossible not to laff, even if you don't agree with him at all.

And Varvel's slap at Government By Twitter is likewise an unexpected jab at Dear Leader's lack of organizational coherence.

 

Mysteries of the Internet

I don't know what's going on with Soup to Nutz and assume he's not being sent off for drawing cartoons for the Daily Maverick, but yesterday GoComics showed only the color plate and not the black plate with the captions.

It was a pretty good cartoon and I found it elsewhere.

Now they've got a daily from 2009 on the site, black plate only, and no archives.

Enquiring minds want to know.

 

A Big Mooseketeer Starts the Next Generation of Cartoonists

 

Catching Up

The first order of business on this delightfully non-eventful day -- unless you're reading this after Stormy's been on 60 Minutes -- is to offer belated congrats to Clay Bennett for winning the Overseas Press Club's Nast Award, which he did several days ago while I was obsessed with other issues.

The above is a cartoon from his entry packet, but it is hardly out of date, which is not good, since (A) being evergreen shouldn't be the goal of a political cartoonist and (B) we shouldn't have a president who kisses up to Moscow.

Which isn't the frightening part. The frightening part is that we could find out tomorrow that he's deeply in debt to the oligarchs and that the pee tape is real, plus whatever Stormy has to say, and his remark about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue would hold true.

Fox News would explain why it's perfectly okay and the Republicans would block any attempt to remove him from office.

Here's another, and you can see the whole entry packet at his home paper.

And Michael Cavna has a good write-up on it.

Much as I dislike awards, it's always good when a good cartoonist wins one because it increases, though doesn't guarantee, continued employment.

(Pulitzer Prize Winners sometimes do get laid off, because some newspapers are owned by people who don't read, and who, unlike Boss Tweed's illiterate supporters, can't understand them pictures, either.)

 

And I'm giving John Cole my own award for this commentary, not because I care (except in a general good-of-the-nation sense) about Pennsylvania's redistricting decision, but because his Jabberwocky take-off actually scans.

I do not have to give out many such awards.

I suppose there is some logic in the idea that a person who can draw well enough to be a professional cartoonist might not be much of a writer, but most attempts at song and poetry parodies in cartoons make my teeth ache.

Thing is, many cartoonists have wives and they've almost all got editors, goddammit.

One or the other ought to step in and let them know when their doggerel is running around off leash.

Another rare cartoonist who understands scansion is Ann Telnaes and thank god for that because she did an entire book, albeit a short entire book, in verse. 

Moreover, she recently produced this animated commentary on Dear Leader's talent for distraction, based on the classic quatrain:

Little man
So spic and span
Where were you
When the shit hit the fan?

Which admittedly has a little wobble here and there, but it works: It's the scansion equivalent of imperfect rhyme.

 

Also on the literary front, Mr. Fitz got a laff with this, in part because I also hate silly "rules" of grammar and usage, which are generally prescribed by people who could not write their name in the dirt with a stick, and in part because one of the tasks I have as editor is to break down the perfectly sensible paragraphs of my young writers into the single sentences called for by newspaper style.

I don't instruct them on that point because I'd rather they learned to write well. They can learn the "rules" of journalism later.

 

And speaking of my young writers, I went out to Denver earlier this month for a workshop with them, and my boss put out a letter to parents about where we were meeting, in which she said something about the "west side of the building."

My initial reaction when I saw it was similar to Jill's in this Pajama Diaries strip from the other day, but then I remembered it was Denver where the points of the compass are pretty obvious, "west" in particular.

As Horace Greeley said, "Go towards the mountains, young man, and grow up with the country."

Oh, whatEVER.

 

And then there's this Bliss, which made me fear that Gail was taking them out of their polythene envelopes first, but which was also the second "throwing his stuff out on the sidewalk" gag I'd seen in recent days, plus there's currently a "throwing his stuff out on the sidewalk" TV commercial for something or other.

Does this really happen? I'd like to think it only happens in cartoons and sitcoms, but I know that men hit people and women throw things and sometimes the opposite, and maybe this is yet another example of unhinged loss of self-control.

Any of which would be your cue to get the hell out, because you are living with a crazy person, but, for some reason, this particular act of abuse is portrayed as "empowerment."

Same thing with throwing a drink in a man's face, which began, I think, in "Tootsie," where Dustin Hoffman goes up to Jessica Lange in his Michael personna and delivers a line she had told "Dorothy" she wished men would use, whereupon she throws her drink in his face.

Which was a very funny moment illustrating the difference between our fantasies and what we expect in real life, but it was picked up as a "thing" and now is regularly featured as a sign of empowerment.

 

There was a time when assaulting people with food was a sign of being a boorish punk.

 

Anyway, whatever is true or mythic in our personal lives, management incompetence is indeed very real and Cooper's latest adventures in closing a Grumbel's location had me on the floor all week. Start here and go forward.

Finally, one more thought about yesterday: The 1963 March on Washington was in August, and the signing of the Civil Rights Act was the following July, but the Civil Rights Movement itself had gone on far longer and I hope nobody expects yesterday's actions to produce results that quickly.

However, when I would show Mauldin's response to the Civil Right Act to students, I would note that the key words are "I've decided," and that Jim Crow couldn't have stayed there without the Eagle's permission. 

So that part's the same.

Days of Decision

Zits

Baby Blues

Off the Mark

Rhymes With Orange

I've been frustrated lately that political issues seem so compelling and we are at such a flash point that I have not been balancing my coverage of editorial cartoons with the attention that comic strips deserve.

So here are four cartoons from this morning's funny pages.

Apparently, I'm not the only person who feels that this moment requires our attention.

When Richard Nixon announced the Cambodian Incursion in 1970 -- the one that resulted in the Student Strike and accompanying Kent State shootings -- my small department at college held an all-hands meeting to discuss the matter, in order to formulate a response as a group.

The option of continuing classes was based on our classics curriculum and the idea that pursuing an understanding of universal morality was of value, and I remember one professor telling us of a proposed student strike in Germany during World War I.

The students, he told us, had argued that there was a crisis, to which their professor responded, "There is always a crisis. Back to the books!"

It's an interesting point, but it didn't carry the day. We joined the rest of the university in allowing students to accept a Pass/Fail grade based on their current grades.

And, much as I loved that particular professor, the fact is that, while you can always find a crisis if you want one, there are times when a decisive moment is unmistakably thrust upon you and must not be ignored.

Also, Germany lost that war.

Maybe they should have paused to think things over.

 

Side Note: Today's Frazz particularly resonated with me because shortly after my cohort graduated, our university began a slide over to staunch neo-conservatism.

Contrary to Ms. Plainwell's situation, it was not a momentary scandal but a permanent shift, such that, when Father Hesburgh died, they carefully explained that he had secretly hated student activists.

Which we didn't know at the time because he had covered it up so well with intelligent, reasonable liberal policies and actions, concelebrated masses, resigning from the Civil Rights Commission over Nixon's pressure, placing a gay black man on our alumni board and always having the time for us, far beyond 9 to 5.

I haven't given them a dime in decades.

I bring this up because, some day, if we don't stay on top of things, the Powers That Be will attempt to re-write this moment, too.

When that happens, I hope the kids maintain their memories and refuse to go along with the fraud. 

 

The above illustration is by Ann Telnaes and this accompanying article is one of two lengthy pieces among today's links you really should read, a roundup discussion of gun regulations and the issues around them.

Meanwhile, as soon as I wrap this up, I'll be out the door so I can be in Concord for this morning's march at our state capitol.

My granddaughter, who spearheaded the walkout at her middle school last week, turned from negotiating with the school administration to the far easier task of persuading her father to take her and her older sister to DC. 

I'm not making that eight hour drive, but I can certainly travel 60 miles to Concord to help swell the numbers there, particularly in a state that declines to share its background checks with the federal government.

I like Andy Marlette's cartoon and I echo his opinion that the kids are acting in a proud and patriotic tradition.

But this is no time to be "with them in spirit." We need to be with them in person.

And, BTW, hotel rooms being at a premium in DC, the kids will be crashing with a shipmate of my son's from his Navy days, in case you thought this was solely an issue for pacifist lefties.

And my son is a gunowner and takes the girls out to shoot at the range periodically, which they really enjoy.

In case you thought this was solely an issue for people who hate guns.

It's about some guns, definitely, but it's largely about common sense and freedom from fear and the kind of society the kids want to live in.

And today is their deal, but it's also about the kind of society that we, as responsible, caring parents, should want them to live in.

The whole world is watching, and the sane portions would like to see some action.

 

 

Pat Bagley's cartoon makes a good backdrop for your other mandatory reading assignment today, which is an editorial written for the Guardian by the staff of the Eagle, the student newspaper at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High.

It lays out the reforms they want and why they want them, and it does so with a clarity that shows indeed that they've been coached.

That is, they've been taught to think independently and intelligently, and to express themselves coherently, forcefully and logically, and maybe that's something they can restore to a nation that once claimed to value education over indoctrination.

There is nothing tyranny fears more than independent thinking, and it can be lonely when it seems everyone wants to take shelter in the comfort of group thought, bleating "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better" and forgetting that this was not always our motto.

But I have a feeling that, however today goes, these independent, logical, heartbroken, caring kids won't feel lonely, and that, however long it takes, they will feel justified in keeping it up and "shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit."

 

(Peter and Bethany Yarrow, at Newtown, Connecticut, February 2013)

UPDATE:

Chapter MMXVIII: A New Hope

The order in which I read comics in the morning is intentional: I warm up with strips and save the editorial/political stuff mostly for the end, after which I go to Facebook and Twitter to look for cartoons that haven't hit the syndicate sites yet.

So I was impressed with the Bad Reporter posted at GoComics this morning, because, while Don Asmussen often posts funny, timely single panels on Facebook, his three-panel syndicated format requires three really good, really timely pieces in order to stand out.

He met the challenge this morning.

 

Then, when I got to the editorial cartoons, I saw a couple on the ridiculous dust-up between Biden and Trump, and I use the term "ridiculous" because it put cartoonists in the position of commenting on something so absurd that it was a challenge to strike the appropriate tone.

L'il Donnie absolutely did that.

I don't know what Joe Biden was like in high school, but I remember being protective in a way that 17-year-old boys can be. On our Senior Trip to Washington, we had several all-nighters going, when, at about 2 AM, there was a knock on the door. It was one of the girls, going room to room, telling us that Dixie had gone missing.

Many of our female classmates could take care of themselves, but Dixie was quiet, shy, deeply religious and hardly the type to look for adventure. We put down our beers and fanned out through the hotel until we found her in a stairwell talking to one of the security guards.

She'd gotten homesick and gone for a walk, and the guard suggested we all call it a night, my point being that our class ran the gamut from scholars to tough guys, but, had Dixie been in a difficult situation, it wouldn't have mattered which of us came across it first.

I believe Biden.

Meanwhile, I have wondered how an obnoxious jerk like Trump got through boarding school without a broken nose, because I spent several summers at an eight-week summer camp and I understand how bullying works in that world of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Lord Of the Flies."

There are bullies who enforce their will with their fists, but there is another kind who simply bullies because everyone accepts his bluster.

Until somebody doesn't.

There was a kid at camp we called "Sharkey," a notorious bully who focused on younger boys and on guys he knew wouldn't stand up to him. He was in my cabin the summer we were 13, and he ruled the roost, until one day he punched me for one reason or another and I removed what little filter there was between my brain and mouth at that age and lit into him with a torrent of clever, cutting abuse.

At which, to everyone's amazement, Sharkey burst into tears.

His humiliating breakdown signaled the end of Sharkey's reign of terror. In fact, he didn't even come back to camp the next summer.

I wish someone had stood up to L'il Donnie like that back in military school because I'm sure the puffed-up blowhard would have folded like a card table.

Though maybe someone did, and that's part of the revenge he seeks (besides for his parents having given up on him and sent him away in the first place.)

In any case, he knows his trade and he carefully avoids anyone or anything that might put him in his place.

Pity. 

Because I'm sure he'll never see how perfectly David Rowe has captured the situation as it developed over the past 18 hours.

The more you look at the blood, bodies and damage in this devastated hellhole, the more you appreciate Rowe's ability to put things into perspective in a very short time.

As for "Here's Johnny," while Bolton is holding an ax, he didn't need it. The door was opened wide and a major architect of our endless, bloody, pointless Middle Eastern war has been welcomed in.

Up to now, I've figured that, as Trump flew into his final desperate fits, there would be grownups in the White House to wrestle him down and keep him from doing something that might obliterate the nation for good.

However, we may now have to hope someone arises to do for America what -- as shown in this 1991 John Trever cartoon -- Boris Yeltsin did for the Soviet Union ... and then hope not to wind up saying, as the tank commander who stood with Yeltsin says in that 2011 article:

What we have ended up with is what we were fighting against at the time. The population is separating into the extremely poor and the extremely rich. Unfortunately our people have always been very passive except at critical moments.

 

Here's our tank crew:

There have been several cartoons about the student activists who will be descending on Washington tomorrow, but I think Steve Sack best captures the gravity and mature sense of strategy they bring to the moment.

The Children's Crusade that challenged Jim Crow and registered new voters was a smaller, more specifically tasked group, and had leadership from people like James Farmer who had been fighting the battle for a generation or more.

This crew -- counter to the paranoid ravings of delusional talk radio hosts -- is self-directed in a crowd-sourced manner, relying on their own good judgment and on a sense of history that pops up in some odd places, like this tweet.

 

They seem angry, and they ought to be angry at being left to defend themselves in a world of thoughts and prayers, but, when you get past that anger, you find that what they really are is serious and practical.

 

And personable, reasonable and focused: They're not just running around in masks, breaking windows and screaming about capitalism. They have a plan, they have a purpose and, god love'em, they've got a sense of humor:

A Sense of History right down to the midi soundtrack!

(Click here to play)

And another thing ...

The Facebook thing isn't going away, and it's probably less a testament to the harm done than a testament to Facebook's ubiquity and how we all love a pile-on.

Tom the Dancing Bug has a nice roundup of complaints, though I'd argue with him, or at least with them, on the one at the upper right, because I tried paying Facebook to boost CSotD and never saw a blip in hits at the website, though if someone wants to give me a couple of grand to see what a significant payment would do, we could try again.

In terms of the scandal, while I saw many deceptive, divisive memes later attributed to Russian bots, no actual "advertisements" ever got through to me, nor have I seen any reported since.

I assumed the memes were being spread by having other bots like and share, but perhaps they were the ads.

If they were either being "boosted" or directly placed as ads, I wonder what their budgets were?

I wouldn't expect Facebook to keep up with everybody who threw in $60 to boost a personal posting, but $60 won't do squat, and I think they should be able to monitor bigger spenders.

Meanwhile, since there is no problem that doesn't allow people to feel superior, we're seeing articles about how the difference in the election was not Facebook anyway, but television coverage and mostly the amount of attention news programs lavished on Trump's antics.

Which was definitely a factor and was discussed at the time and news organizations should be ashamed of themselves for being played so readily, but wait a damn minute.

Advertising analysts have argued over media mix at least since 1905 when Earnest Elmo Calkins and Ralph Holden's seminal book on the topic, "Modern Advertising," dispensed advice on use of streetcar placards in addition to direct mail, newspapers and magazines.

No competent ad pro has ever advocated no mix at all.

Put bluntly, while those who say, "It wasn't Facebook; it was cable TV," may be vying to look like the smartest guys in the room, the idea that it was one or the other is imbecilic.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #1

(Graeme MacKay)

(Arlo and Janis)

Both cartoonists are right, and I particularly like MacKay's use of "Test Your IQ" because it's sure an opportunity to do just that, though, as noted here yesterday and in the interests of not blaming the victims, the entire data-mining venture is based on already knowing the public's IQ.

Franklin Foer goes farther than I would in his call to regulate the Internet, but I certainly agree with this:

The law protects us from banks that would abuse our ignorance and human weaknesses—and it precludes the commodification of our financial data. When manufacturers of processed food have stuffed their products with terrible ingredients, the government has forced them into transparently revealing the full list of components. After we created transportation systems, the government insisted on speed limits and seat belts. There are loopholes in all of this, but there’s an unassailable consensus that these rules are far better than the alternative. We need to extend our historic model to our new world.

Though I'd allow advertisers to entrap the lascivious nitwits who haven't figured out what Arlo has.

After all, allowing wolves to harvest lame, sick deer improves the overall health of the herd.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

(Mike Lester)

(Jeff Danziger)

Everybody has a theory on this, and, while Lester attributes it to a liberal plot gone awry, Danziger focuses on Bannon and his moneyman, Robert Mercer, with both cartoonists attributing to Zuckerberg a level of intent and knowledge I find, at best, unproven.

Zuckerberg is an indisputed genius, but perhaps in using his engineering skills to create something that fed a human appetite, he simply lucked out over those who created things that didn't match the public appetite, and also above those who recognized the appetite but whose creations failed to feed it.

Intelligence and talent tend to specialize. My brother taught philosophy at the Naval Academy and so faced classes of extremely bright college students, which should have made it easy except that Middies are primarily engineers, not poets, and there were times he might as well have been teaching Plato in the original Greek for all they could absorb of it.

 

If I were a political cartoonist -- which I am not -- I might have depicted Zuckerberg this way, unleashing things that seemed like a really good idea at first and then got totally out of control.

Which doesn't let him off the hook for the damage done, any more than "I didn't see him" lets you off the hook for hitting a pedestrian with your car.

Though these pedestrians seemed awfully eager to run out in front of that car.

 

Speaking of people who are not political cartoonists

Jim Carrey is drawing fire for what may or may not be a cartoon or a caricature of She Who Must Not Be Mocked.

Granted, he's not Hogarth, but come on, folks.

That Washington Post writer is only one purported journalist suddenly gone blind:

The cartoon — believed to be White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — shows a scowling woman, which he referred to as a “so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked.”

People Magazine calls it "a portrait ... that many assume is of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders."

And ABC News described it as "a caricature ... that looks to be inspired by White House press secretary Sarah Sanders."

And Comic Strip of the Day said "Who do you think it is? Whoopie Goldberg? Shirley-fucking-Temple?"

Fortunately for my overall opinion of the human race, this writer from W explains it all in a spirit far more entertaining than (even) I could. Go read that.

But, seriously, if the mainstream media is too frightened of talk radio's troll army to report the obvious, Facebook's issues are small potatoes indeed.

 (This picture of what many think is Dobby is also not a real political cartoon.)