Here We Go Again, Again
I have a question for Jeff Gordinier. Is it weird to get paid to write a book someone else has already written?
Monday, March 31, 2008
Podcast Interview
I was interviewed by the Philadelphia Daily News on Saturday. You can listen to the podcast here.
I was interviewed by the Philadelphia Daily News on Saturday. You can listen to the podcast here.
Cartoon for March 31
If the Founding Fathers could see what a hash we've made of their country, they'd wonder why they bothered.
Reminder: you can buy the original on eBay. Auction ends soon!
If the Founding Fathers could see what a hash we've made of their country, they'd wonder why they bothered.
Reminder: you can buy the original on eBay. Auction ends soon!
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Cartoon for March 29
To see the full artwork for this cartoon, you will need to refer to the print editions of newspapers that publish my work--assuming that there are any with the guts to do so. Due to its almost certainly controversial content, my syndicate declined to post it online.
My editors have always been exceptionally understanding. (They'd have to be!) They respect free speech and give me a lot of freedom. Given the content and the risks involved, I understand why they didn't want to distribute this cartoon. If given the choice, however, I would have sent it out because, well, it's a great cartoon.
Those who want to see it in its full glory should catch me at one of my upcoming public appearances.
To see the full artwork for this cartoon, you will need to refer to the print editions of newspapers that publish my work--assuming that there are any with the guts to do so. Due to its almost certainly controversial content, my syndicate declined to post it online.
My editors have always been exceptionally understanding. (They'd have to be!) They respect free speech and give me a lot of freedom. Given the content and the risks involved, I understand why they didn't want to distribute this cartoon. If given the choice, however, I would have sent it out because, well, it's a great cartoon.
Those who want to see it in its full glory should catch me at one of my upcoming public appearances.
Canny Comment
posted by Susan Stark
Take a good look at the graph above. This represents the New York Times circulation from 1993 to 2006. The article that this graph was printed in did alot of hand-wringing about the cause of this decline, but of course they didn't mention the obvious:
The first decline is at 1994-95. This represents when people started using the Internet for their information.
The second sharp decline begins at 2002, when the NYT started lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There continues to be a steady, continuous decline from there to 2006.
Unfortunately, we don't have stats from 2007-8, but the article states that the Times had to lay people off recently, so it's not getting any better.
This is what happens when you become a Mouthpiece of the State, instead of a newspaper that investigates and reports the truth.
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-3-6/67097.html
posted by Susan Stark
Take a good look at the graph above. This represents the New York Times circulation from 1993 to 2006. The article that this graph was printed in did alot of hand-wringing about the cause of this decline, but of course they didn't mention the obvious:
The first decline is at 1994-95. This represents when people started using the Internet for their information.
The second sharp decline begins at 2002, when the NYT started lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There continues to be a steady, continuous decline from there to 2006.
Unfortunately, we don't have stats from 2007-8, but the article states that the Times had to lay people off recently, so it's not getting any better.
This is what happens when you become a Mouthpiece of the State, instead of a newspaper that investigates and reports the truth.
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-3-6/67097.html
Friday, March 28, 2008
Upcoming NYC Book Signings
I'll be doing a joint book signing, with "Minimum Security" cartoonist Stephanie McMillan twice next month: April 14th and 21st.
The first event will be at Bluestockings on Monday, April 14, at 7 pm:
Idlewild Books
12 W. 19th St.
between Fifth and Sixth Avenues). It will be sponsored by
Revolution Books, which is across the street.
I'll be doing a joint book signing, with "Minimum Security" cartoonist Stephanie McMillan twice next month: April 14th and 21st.
The first event will be at Bluestockings on Monday, April 14, at 7 pm:
$1 to $3 SuggestedThe second event will be Monday, April 21, also at 7 pm:
Resistance Through Ridicule
with Stephanie McMillan and Ted Rall
Kickin' ass and taking names, political cartoonists Ted Rall and Stephanie McMillan show their newest comics and lead a discussion about politics, ecocide, the evil-in-the-system, and resistance. Ted Rall's editorial cartoons are published each week in our nation's papers, and "America Gone Wild" is his newest book. Stephanie McMillan is the creator of the strip "Minimum Security," and co-authored the graphic novel "As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay In Denial" with Derrick Jensen.
Idlewild Books
12 W. 19th St.
between Fifth and Sixth Avenues). It will be sponsored by
Revolution Books, which is across the street.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Ted Rall Artwork on eBay
I've been meaning to do this for a while--as in several years. Now I have! I'm offering a piece of my original artwork for sale on eBay: my cartoon for March 31, 2008.
Starting bid is 99 cents (no reserve), so I'm pretty sure someone will end up owning this thing. Here's what the toon looks like:
I've been meaning to do this for a while--as in several years. Now I have! I'm offering a piece of my original artwork for sale on eBay: my cartoon for March 31, 2008.
Starting bid is 99 cents (no reserve), so I'm pretty sure someone will end up owning this thing. Here's what the toon looks like:
Ted Rall in Philadelphia/Book Offer
I'll be appearing at this Saturday's leftie blogfest EscaCon08. I'll be appearing from 10:30 to 12:00 noon at the "Comedy and Political Critique" panel. In conjunction with the event, you can order signed copies of several of my books at discounted prices (10% off) using the following buttons.
Note: You can order even if you're not attending. I will deactivate this offer in a few weeks.
To buy America Gone Wild, click:
To buy Silk Road to Ruin" click:
To buy Generalissimo El Busho:
To buy Attitude 3:
To buy Wake Up, You're Liberal!:
I'll be appearing at this Saturday's leftie blogfest EscaCon08. I'll be appearing from 10:30 to 12:00 noon at the "Comedy and Political Critique" panel. In conjunction with the event, you can order signed copies of several of my books at discounted prices (10% off) using the following buttons.
Note: You can order even if you're not attending. I will deactivate this offer in a few weeks.
To buy America Gone Wild, click:
To buy Silk Road to Ruin" click:
To buy Generalissimo El Busho:
To buy Attitude 3:
To buy Wake Up, You're Liberal!:
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Cartoon for March 27
Fellow cartoonist Tim Kreider said it first and said it best. I'm paraphrasing here, but he did a cartoon depicting an Aztec ritual human sacrifice. One onlooker remarks to the other, "Yeah, but it's the best system yet conceived." Or something like that.
Anyway, this cartoon is fairly self-explanatory. I hope.
Fellow cartoonist Tim Kreider said it first and said it best. I'm paraphrasing here, but he did a cartoon depicting an Aztec ritual human sacrifice. One onlooker remarks to the other, "Yeah, but it's the best system yet conceived." Or something like that.
Anyway, this cartoon is fairly self-explanatory. I hope.
Wake Up, You're Liberal: Again
I have a question for Eric Alterman. Is it weird to get paid to write a book someone else has already written?
I have a question for Eric Alterman. Is it weird to get paid to write a book someone else has already written?
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: IS CHICAGO BURNING?
Hillary Clinton, Superdelegates, and Playing with Fire
Will there be race riots if Barack Obama is denied the Democratic nomination?
Despite the continuing fallout over his association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Illinois senator has won the most state primaries, the most votes and the most delegates. Polls have him running between one and four percentage points ahead of Clinton. Four centuries after the first blacks came to America in chains, the prospect of seeing one of their own become president is so close that African-Americans can taste it. Will they sit quietly at home and change the channel if white America dashes their hopes?
"One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race," write Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico.com. "Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning."
But what if she does?
Stars, planets and a bunch of asteroids would have to fall into perfect alignment in order for Clinton to win the Democratic nomination. First, she'd need to win a landslide in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. That could happen; a March 23 Quinnipiac poll had her pulling ahead, 53 to 41. She'd need a repeat performance in Indiana. But she's running even with Obama there.
Never mind reality. What if she racks up a string of late-season primary wins?
Two arguments are at the center of the Clinton campaign's last-ditch attempt to seduce the 800 unpledged delegates who will determine the nominee at the Democratic convention. The first plays to the raison d'être of the superdelegates, created in 1982 to steer the nomination away from a leading candidate in case he or she fumbles late in the nomination race, hurting the party's chances of beating the Republican nominee in November.
"[Hillary] has the best chance to defeat John McCain," Bill Clinton says. Why? Because she's vetted. All the dirt has been dug up on her; the GOP won't dredge up anything new. As for Obama, his friendships with Reverend Wright and a Chicago slumlord might represent the mere tip of a toxic Daley Machine sludge pile.
Clinton's second argument is her novel promise to win the "primary popular vote," a phrase no one heard of before. Obama leads by 700,000 out of 26 million votes cast; Hillary says she'll close this gap in Pennsylvania.
"Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote--which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle--and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory," continues the Politico. "An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else."
The Democratic Party probably won't risk alienating its most reliable constituency. Probably.
But what if it does? Left-of-center insiders, mainstream Democrats and street activists alike, are quietly worrying that things could turn ugly. 1968 ugly. Maybe even worse.
"If party insiders fix the nomination against the will of the people--when the entire election is about repudiation of the old politics--it will be an act of monumental political disaster that historians will condemn for generations," Brent Budowsky writes at TheHill.com. Hillary Clinton would have a tough time uniting the Democratic vote against McCain, still coasting on the fumes of his pre-Bush rep as a straight-shooting maverick.
There would certainly be street protests in Denver. "I will, without doubt, march at the convention if there is even a remote chance on the nomination being stolen," promises a typical poster at the liberal blog Daily Kos.
Blogger Al Giordano predicts: "It won't be the chaotic street protest and battle with the cops that occurred in '68: we've learned too much from that. It will be organized, Gandhian in its adherence to discipline and nonviolence, and more massive than anything maybe ever seen in the United States' long history of social movements. If the party leaders choose to destroy democracy by denying the fair-and-square winner the nomination, democracy will then be duty bound to destroy the party...The big news is that, for the first time in decades, a black-white alliance from the street will be possible: Montgomery 1955 meets Seattle 1999 in Denver 2008."
Street protests + rage = ?
No one knows whether angry Obama supporters would turn violent if their man is denied the Democratic nomination. But precedents count. The last time American progressives got worked up about anything was the invasion of Iraq. They marched by the millions. They kept things "Gandhian." But non-violence failed: The media ignored them. And the war dragged on--longer, so far, than World War II.
More recently, on the international front, activists can't ignore events in Tibet, where the passage of time has merely accelerated the oppression of the indigenous population at the hands of Chinese occupation troops. Ultimately, young Tibetans are finding violent resistance to be more effective--and more attractive to television cameras--than the Dalai Lama's corporate-approved militant pacifism. If they keep Chinese cities burning through the summer Olympics, Tibetans could win their independence this year.
As they mull how to vote in the weeks ahead, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic superdelegates she's wooing might want to ask themselves: How much would the U.S. miss a few cities?
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Hillary Clinton, Superdelegates, and Playing with Fire
Will there be race riots if Barack Obama is denied the Democratic nomination?
Despite the continuing fallout over his association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Illinois senator has won the most state primaries, the most votes and the most delegates. Polls have him running between one and four percentage points ahead of Clinton. Four centuries after the first blacks came to America in chains, the prospect of seeing one of their own become president is so close that African-Americans can taste it. Will they sit quietly at home and change the channel if white America dashes their hopes?
"One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race," write Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico.com. "Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning."
But what if she does?
Stars, planets and a bunch of asteroids would have to fall into perfect alignment in order for Clinton to win the Democratic nomination. First, she'd need to win a landslide in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. That could happen; a March 23 Quinnipiac poll had her pulling ahead, 53 to 41. She'd need a repeat performance in Indiana. But she's running even with Obama there.
Never mind reality. What if she racks up a string of late-season primary wins?
Two arguments are at the center of the Clinton campaign's last-ditch attempt to seduce the 800 unpledged delegates who will determine the nominee at the Democratic convention. The first plays to the raison d'être of the superdelegates, created in 1982 to steer the nomination away from a leading candidate in case he or she fumbles late in the nomination race, hurting the party's chances of beating the Republican nominee in November.
"[Hillary] has the best chance to defeat John McCain," Bill Clinton says. Why? Because she's vetted. All the dirt has been dug up on her; the GOP won't dredge up anything new. As for Obama, his friendships with Reverend Wright and a Chicago slumlord might represent the mere tip of a toxic Daley Machine sludge pile.
Clinton's second argument is her novel promise to win the "primary popular vote," a phrase no one heard of before. Obama leads by 700,000 out of 26 million votes cast; Hillary says she'll close this gap in Pennsylvania.
"Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote--which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle--and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory," continues the Politico. "An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else."
The Democratic Party probably won't risk alienating its most reliable constituency. Probably.
But what if it does? Left-of-center insiders, mainstream Democrats and street activists alike, are quietly worrying that things could turn ugly. 1968 ugly. Maybe even worse.
"If party insiders fix the nomination against the will of the people--when the entire election is about repudiation of the old politics--it will be an act of monumental political disaster that historians will condemn for generations," Brent Budowsky writes at TheHill.com. Hillary Clinton would have a tough time uniting the Democratic vote against McCain, still coasting on the fumes of his pre-Bush rep as a straight-shooting maverick.
There would certainly be street protests in Denver. "I will, without doubt, march at the convention if there is even a remote chance on the nomination being stolen," promises a typical poster at the liberal blog Daily Kos.
Blogger Al Giordano predicts: "It won't be the chaotic street protest and battle with the cops that occurred in '68: we've learned too much from that. It will be organized, Gandhian in its adherence to discipline and nonviolence, and more massive than anything maybe ever seen in the United States' long history of social movements. If the party leaders choose to destroy democracy by denying the fair-and-square winner the nomination, democracy will then be duty bound to destroy the party...The big news is that, for the first time in decades, a black-white alliance from the street will be possible: Montgomery 1955 meets Seattle 1999 in Denver 2008."
Street protests + rage = ?
No one knows whether angry Obama supporters would turn violent if their man is denied the Democratic nomination. But precedents count. The last time American progressives got worked up about anything was the invasion of Iraq. They marched by the millions. They kept things "Gandhian." But non-violence failed: The media ignored them. And the war dragged on--longer, so far, than World War II.
More recently, on the international front, activists can't ignore events in Tibet, where the passage of time has merely accelerated the oppression of the indigenous population at the hands of Chinese occupation troops. Ultimately, young Tibetans are finding violent resistance to be more effective--and more attractive to television cameras--than the Dalai Lama's corporate-approved militant pacifism. If they keep Chinese cities burning through the summer Olympics, Tibetans could win their independence this year.
As they mull how to vote in the weeks ahead, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic superdelegates she's wooing might want to ask themselves: How much would the U.S. miss a few cities?
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Cartoon for March 24
Fellow CWA cartoonist Jen Sorensen pointed to a Wired article about how prices are trending downward--prices for our labor, anyway. What we buy always gets more expensive.
This ties in to a discussion among cartoonists and other info-floggers over the future of our business. If content isn't king, information wants to be free and what we do is worthless in the new all online future (ha!), how will we earn a living? At a graphic novel symposium called Splat! held in Manhattan last Saturday, I was on a panel with "Diesel Sweeties" cartoonist Richard Stevens, one of the most successful webcartoonists around. Richard makes his living selling T-shirts and other merchandise, using his free comics as a way to draw readers to his website. He also draws a syndicated version of the strip for daily newspapers. Anyway, he and I disagree about whether others can replicate his success. The way I look at it, most cartoonists can barely come up with new ideas for cartoons. Coming up with T-shirt ideas is a whole other way of thinking, demonstrated by yours truly--I've never come up with a really successful T-shirt design, but I make money from cartoons.
The loss-leader model is being touted for musicians as well. No more will they receive real money for their record deals. Instead, they must tour and sell T-shirts. In the future, we'll all sell T-shirts to subsidize our jobs.
Fellow CWA cartoonist Jen Sorensen pointed to a Wired article about how prices are trending downward--prices for our labor, anyway. What we buy always gets more expensive.
This ties in to a discussion among cartoonists and other info-floggers over the future of our business. If content isn't king, information wants to be free and what we do is worthless in the new all online future (ha!), how will we earn a living? At a graphic novel symposium called Splat! held in Manhattan last Saturday, I was on a panel with "Diesel Sweeties" cartoonist Richard Stevens, one of the most successful webcartoonists around. Richard makes his living selling T-shirts and other merchandise, using his free comics as a way to draw readers to his website. He also draws a syndicated version of the strip for daily newspapers. Anyway, he and I disagree about whether others can replicate his success. The way I look at it, most cartoonists can barely come up with new ideas for cartoons. Coming up with T-shirt ideas is a whole other way of thinking, demonstrated by yours truly--I've never come up with a really successful T-shirt design, but I make money from cartoons.
The loss-leader model is being touted for musicians as well. No more will they receive real money for their record deals. Instead, they must tour and sell T-shirts. In the future, we'll all sell T-shirts to subsidize our jobs.
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Shoutout: Ted Rall Needs a Website Redesign
The person I had in mind to redo this website is totally swamped with other projects and can't do it. Therefore, I am sending this out into the world.
I need someone who can update the 1995-vintage Rall.com site to something cool and modern without losing its simplicity or functionality.
I can't afford much, but this is a paying job. So this would be a good gig for someone who likes to work with a lot of creative freedom and could use a relatively high-profile reference in his or her online portfolio.
If you or someone you know is interested, please email me at chet@rall.com.
The person I had in mind to redo this website is totally swamped with other projects and can't do it. Therefore, I am sending this out into the world.
I need someone who can update the 1995-vintage Rall.com site to something cool and modern without losing its simplicity or functionality.
I can't afford much, but this is a paying job. So this would be a good gig for someone who likes to work with a lot of creative freedom and could use a relatively high-profile reference in his or her online portfolio.
If you or someone you know is interested, please email me at chet@rall.com.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: OBAMA/DUKAKIS 2008
Dem Wimp Throws His Truth-Telling Preacher Under the Bus
If Americans were represented by an animal, it wouldn't be an eagle. It would be a tiny shrew, nervous and paranoid and living in constant terror of being attacked by predators.
Our national prey mentality doesn't have much basis in reality. The last attack on U.S. soil took place two-thirds of a century ago; Hawaii wasn't even a state at the time. Before that, you have to go back to 1846--and we provoked that one. Whatever the historical basis--or lack thereof--for this innate fearfulness, U.S. voters look to their president as a Father Protector figure--someone who, if threatened, will ferociously defend what is now called, stupidly and horribly, das Homeland.
Republican candidates win elections in years when national security is a top concern. In 2004, it didn't matter that John Kerry volunteered for, fought in, and returned with medals from Vietnam. What mattered was that he turned the other cheek to the Swift Boat ads. He held his fire in the debates. If Kerry wasn't willing to stand up for himself, voters reasoned, how would he protect them? Bush may have been a coward during Vietnam, but his "dead or alive" cowboy movie bravado, not to mention starting a couple of wars from scratch, conveyed a comforting, if imbecilic bellicosity. The monosyllabic tough-guy act soothed a savage, terrorized electorate.
Hillary Clinton has figured this out. Her policy actions--voting for war twice, the Patriot Act, keeping silent about torture and Guantánamo--have been engineered to project Republicanesque hawkishness. She dresses butch and talks like a female prick--i.e., bitch. You don't like her. She doesn't want you to. She wants you to think that she's macho enough to deal with Them the next time They pick a fight at three in the morning.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, has already given away a store he doesn't yet own. He's the new century's version of Dukakis.
"I would explicitly reach out to disaffected Republicans and remind them of some of their traditions," Obama told U.S. News & World Report. "Very rarely do you hear me talking about my opponents without giving them some credit for having good intentions and being decent people." "I think I can reach out to Republicans and independents more effectively than any other candidate," he said on "Meet the Press," citing his "ability to focus on getting the job done, as opposed to getting embroiled in ideological arguments." No wonder Republican pundits love him! Not only will he be easier to beat in November--if McCain loses, they'll get the same love from President Obama.
Obama's attempt to transform himself into the living embodiment of girly-man wimpiness led him to throw his own priest under the bus. This latest display of X-Treme wussosity came in response to demands by Rush Limbaugh, The Wall Street Journal and other braying hounds of the right who feigned offense at quotes pulled from his pastor's old sermons. Jeremiah Wright, long-time leader of the Trinity United Church of Christ of Chicago, officiated at Obama's wedding and inspired the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope."
"I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue," Obama said in a statement.
First rule of politics: never apologize. It won't satisfy your critics, and it makes you look weak. If Eliot Spitzer had followed that dictate, he'd still be governor of New York.
First rule of presidential politics: fight for those near and dear to you. Michael Dukakis lost points when he was asked what he'd do if his wife got raped. (Correct answer: "I would kill the rapist.") If a man won't stand up for his own wife--or his own pastor--how can we trust him to fight the terrorists?
Obama's Sister Souljah act may erode his base of support: African-Americans and younger whites, many of whom agree with Reverend Wright's "controversial" homilies.
"Racism is how this country was founded and how it is still run," Wright said. Well, duh. The Journal's editorial page, which still thinks Iraq was the best idea ever, is particularly agitated about…this…this obvious fact. Who could say, with a straight face, that racism wasn't a founding principle of a nation with legalized slavery? Who could argue, after reading countless newspaper headlines announcing the acquittal of white cops for shooting unarmed black men, or while driving through urban slums, that we've put racism behind us?
Murdoch's right-wing rag, noted The New York Times, also criticized Wright for "accusing the United States of importing drugs, exporting guns and training murderers." These things are all true (please reference "Iran-Contra," "U.S. as top arms exporter," and "School of the Americas"). If Obama can't bring himself to speak the truth, he could at least support those who do.
Most damning of all, say Limbaugh et al., was Wright's post-9/11 sermon urging his flock not to yield to the urge "to pay back and kill" or act "holier than thou." His advice proved prescient--wars against Afghanistan and Iraq killed a million innocents, yet none of the criminals of 9/11. It also happened to be quintessentially Christian. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians [true] and black South Africans [true], and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought back to our own front yards," he continued. "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Chalmers Johnson wrote a bestselling book in 2000 about this phenomenon. It's called "Blowback," named after CIA jargon for foreign policies that result in unexpected, negative effects. Johnson wrote that blowback "is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the U.S. government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people."
It is well-established that the radical Islamists who launched the 9/11 attacks were motivated by their contempt for American policy in the Muslim world and their desire to bring the war, as they saw it, to the U.S. Everyone knows that Al Qaeda has its roots in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, which the Reagan Administration funded and armed. Calling 9/11 a case of "chickens coming home to roost" isn't offensive. It's painfully, boringly obvious.
Obama found it necessary to state that "the violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification."
Wright never said otherwise. Most of the victims of September 11th were office workers. They weren't responsible for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Many were opposed to it. As Johnson wrote: "Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable."
People who deny that U.S. foreign policy mishaps provoke long-term consequences are liars. People like them--people like Barack Obama--are laying the foundation for the next 9/11.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Dem Wimp Throws His Truth-Telling Preacher Under the Bus
If Americans were represented by an animal, it wouldn't be an eagle. It would be a tiny shrew, nervous and paranoid and living in constant terror of being attacked by predators.
Our national prey mentality doesn't have much basis in reality. The last attack on U.S. soil took place two-thirds of a century ago; Hawaii wasn't even a state at the time. Before that, you have to go back to 1846--and we provoked that one. Whatever the historical basis--or lack thereof--for this innate fearfulness, U.S. voters look to their president as a Father Protector figure--someone who, if threatened, will ferociously defend what is now called, stupidly and horribly, das Homeland.
Republican candidates win elections in years when national security is a top concern. In 2004, it didn't matter that John Kerry volunteered for, fought in, and returned with medals from Vietnam. What mattered was that he turned the other cheek to the Swift Boat ads. He held his fire in the debates. If Kerry wasn't willing to stand up for himself, voters reasoned, how would he protect them? Bush may have been a coward during Vietnam, but his "dead or alive" cowboy movie bravado, not to mention starting a couple of wars from scratch, conveyed a comforting, if imbecilic bellicosity. The monosyllabic tough-guy act soothed a savage, terrorized electorate.
Hillary Clinton has figured this out. Her policy actions--voting for war twice, the Patriot Act, keeping silent about torture and Guantánamo--have been engineered to project Republicanesque hawkishness. She dresses butch and talks like a female prick--i.e., bitch. You don't like her. She doesn't want you to. She wants you to think that she's macho enough to deal with Them the next time They pick a fight at three in the morning.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, has already given away a store he doesn't yet own. He's the new century's version of Dukakis.
"I would explicitly reach out to disaffected Republicans and remind them of some of their traditions," Obama told U.S. News & World Report. "Very rarely do you hear me talking about my opponents without giving them some credit for having good intentions and being decent people." "I think I can reach out to Republicans and independents more effectively than any other candidate," he said on "Meet the Press," citing his "ability to focus on getting the job done, as opposed to getting embroiled in ideological arguments." No wonder Republican pundits love him! Not only will he be easier to beat in November--if McCain loses, they'll get the same love from President Obama.
Obama's attempt to transform himself into the living embodiment of girly-man wimpiness led him to throw his own priest under the bus. This latest display of X-Treme wussosity came in response to demands by Rush Limbaugh, The Wall Street Journal and other braying hounds of the right who feigned offense at quotes pulled from his pastor's old sermons. Jeremiah Wright, long-time leader of the Trinity United Church of Christ of Chicago, officiated at Obama's wedding and inspired the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope."
"I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue," Obama said in a statement.
First rule of politics: never apologize. It won't satisfy your critics, and it makes you look weak. If Eliot Spitzer had followed that dictate, he'd still be governor of New York.
First rule of presidential politics: fight for those near and dear to you. Michael Dukakis lost points when he was asked what he'd do if his wife got raped. (Correct answer: "I would kill the rapist.") If a man won't stand up for his own wife--or his own pastor--how can we trust him to fight the terrorists?
Obama's Sister Souljah act may erode his base of support: African-Americans and younger whites, many of whom agree with Reverend Wright's "controversial" homilies.
"Racism is how this country was founded and how it is still run," Wright said. Well, duh. The Journal's editorial page, which still thinks Iraq was the best idea ever, is particularly agitated about…this…this obvious fact. Who could say, with a straight face, that racism wasn't a founding principle of a nation with legalized slavery? Who could argue, after reading countless newspaper headlines announcing the acquittal of white cops for shooting unarmed black men, or while driving through urban slums, that we've put racism behind us?
Murdoch's right-wing rag, noted The New York Times, also criticized Wright for "accusing the United States of importing drugs, exporting guns and training murderers." These things are all true (please reference "Iran-Contra," "U.S. as top arms exporter," and "School of the Americas"). If Obama can't bring himself to speak the truth, he could at least support those who do.
Most damning of all, say Limbaugh et al., was Wright's post-9/11 sermon urging his flock not to yield to the urge "to pay back and kill" or act "holier than thou." His advice proved prescient--wars against Afghanistan and Iraq killed a million innocents, yet none of the criminals of 9/11. It also happened to be quintessentially Christian. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians [true] and black South Africans [true], and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought back to our own front yards," he continued. "America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Chalmers Johnson wrote a bestselling book in 2000 about this phenomenon. It's called "Blowback," named after CIA jargon for foreign policies that result in unexpected, negative effects. Johnson wrote that blowback "is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the U.S. government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people."
It is well-established that the radical Islamists who launched the 9/11 attacks were motivated by their contempt for American policy in the Muslim world and their desire to bring the war, as they saw it, to the U.S. Everyone knows that Al Qaeda has its roots in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, which the Reagan Administration funded and armed. Calling 9/11 a case of "chickens coming home to roost" isn't offensive. It's painfully, boringly obvious.
Obama found it necessary to state that "the violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification."
Wright never said otherwise. Most of the victims of September 11th were office workers. They weren't responsible for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Many were opposed to it. As Johnson wrote: "Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable."
People who deny that U.S. foreign policy mishaps provoke long-term consequences are liars. People like them--people like Barack Obama--are laying the foundation for the next 9/11.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Bye, Bye, Bear
I'm walking on sunshine at today's demise of Bear, Stearns & Co. I know, I know—it'll be rough on the economy. And it could be the beginning of the end of other major firms. But it couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of sons of bitches.
I was a hired as a trader/trainee at Bear, Stearns in 1985. I earned the princely sum of $10,000 a year. After taxes, I received $315.02 every two weeks. (My rent was $425, for half of a sixth-floor two-bedroom on a crack-infested street in the Barrio of Manhattan's Manhattan Valley neighborhood. I survived by driving a taxi at night.) Three factoids:
First, if I'd earned $20 less per week, I would have qualified for food stamps. I requested a pay cut from my boss. He said no.
Second, the CEO of Bear Stearns at the time, "Ace" Greenberg (he gave himself the nickname), "earned" $40 million per annum.
Third, when the opening of the New York Stock Exchange moved from 10 am to 9:30, we were told to come to work a half-hour earlier, at 8:30. Did we get a raise? Nope.
I was working there when Bear Stearns went public. Each employee received shares, which opened at, as I recall, about $24 each. Because our allotment was based on our salaries (shouldn't it have been inversely proportional?), I received eight shares. What a joke! I quit shortly thereafter. My next job paid $17,500, which seemed huge by comparison.
I ended up at a Japanese bank with a far more egalitarian payscale. The president earned about $125,000; the lowest paid worker in the fax room got about $20,000. Morale was excellent, the president knew everybody's names, raises of 15% were standard.
Bear Stearns' stock, trading at $170 one year ago, is now worth $2. The company won't be missed, at least not by those of who contributed to its bottom line without receiving fair pay for a day's work.
I'm walking on sunshine at today's demise of Bear, Stearns & Co. I know, I know—it'll be rough on the economy. And it could be the beginning of the end of other major firms. But it couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of sons of bitches.
I was a hired as a trader/trainee at Bear, Stearns in 1985. I earned the princely sum of $10,000 a year. After taxes, I received $315.02 every two weeks. (My rent was $425, for half of a sixth-floor two-bedroom on a crack-infested street in the Barrio of Manhattan's Manhattan Valley neighborhood. I survived by driving a taxi at night.) Three factoids:
First, if I'd earned $20 less per week, I would have qualified for food stamps. I requested a pay cut from my boss. He said no.
Second, the CEO of Bear Stearns at the time, "Ace" Greenberg (he gave himself the nickname), "earned" $40 million per annum.
Third, when the opening of the New York Stock Exchange moved from 10 am to 9:30, we were told to come to work a half-hour earlier, at 8:30. Did we get a raise? Nope.
I was working there when Bear Stearns went public. Each employee received shares, which opened at, as I recall, about $24 each. Because our allotment was based on our salaries (shouldn't it have been inversely proportional?), I received eight shares. What a joke! I quit shortly thereafter. My next job paid $17,500, which seemed huge by comparison.
I ended up at a Japanese bank with a far more egalitarian payscale. The president earned about $125,000; the lowest paid worker in the fax room got about $20,000. Morale was excellent, the president knew everybody's names, raises of 15% were standard.
Bear Stearns' stock, trading at $170 one year ago, is now worth $2. The company won't be missed, at least not by those of who contributed to its bottom line without receiving fair pay for a day's work.
Overheard Hilarity
On the bus on Saturday: a 20-ish blonde talking to her father. "I don't understand what the big deal is," she said, "about Iraq costing a trillion dollars. So what? That's less than the cost of our house!"
The father: "What do you mean?"
Woman, audibly rolling her eyes: "Duh—a trillion. That's a third of a million. Seems like a bargain to me!"
Finally: the silence of the American public explained.
On the bus on Saturday: a 20-ish blonde talking to her father. "I don't understand what the big deal is," she said, "about Iraq costing a trillion dollars. So what? That's less than the cost of our house!"
The father: "What do you mean?"
Woman, audibly rolling her eyes: "Duh—a trillion. That's a third of a million. Seems like a bargain to me!"
Finally: the silence of the American public explained.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Cartoon for March 17
Americans like to keep their options open. We don't torture, Bush Administration officials claim. We just like to have the option available. You know, just in case.
I wonder: Does anyone beside Matt Bors and I wake up every day, wondering what the fuck is wrong with a country that thinks it's perfectly OK to torture people?
Americans like to keep their options open. We don't torture, Bush Administration officials claim. We just like to have the option available. You know, just in case.
I wonder: Does anyone beside Matt Bors and I wake up every day, wondering what the fuck is wrong with a country that thinks it's perfectly OK to torture people?
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Eliot Spitzer (cont.)
posted by Susan Stark
When I wrote my previous blog about prostitution and Eliot Spitzer (Prostitution Should Be Legalized), I wasn't fully aware of everything that Spitzer did wrong, such as the money laundering, etc., because the full revelations of his activities hadn't come out yet. I do not approve of these kinds of activities.
But, still, when it's all said and done, Bush and his gang are guilty of high crimes against humanity (invasion of a country without legitimate cause), and approximately 1 million people have died as a result. And they have squandered more money than we can comprehend. The cost of Bush's war will be estimated to a high of 3 trillion dollars, and I'm sorry, but, that is way too much money to spend so that conservatives can achieve their nebulous feelings of "safety".
The Bush gang gets off the hook, while Eliot goes down for much pettier crimes.
Still, my position that Spitzer should be able to solicit prostitution if he wishes still stands, and that Kristen/Ashley should have to right to provide those services. Period. They are both consenting adults. The only kinds of prostitution that should be illegal are the ones that involve under-age persons, or persons being forced to work against their own will. The former is child molestation, and the latter is slavery.
This is the position that most sex-workers advocate, and it is certainly healthier than the positions taken by neurotic soccer-moms posing as "reformers" and "experts". And that includes the male soccer-moms.
posted by Susan Stark
When I wrote my previous blog about prostitution and Eliot Spitzer (Prostitution Should Be Legalized), I wasn't fully aware of everything that Spitzer did wrong, such as the money laundering, etc., because the full revelations of his activities hadn't come out yet. I do not approve of these kinds of activities.
But, still, when it's all said and done, Bush and his gang are guilty of high crimes against humanity (invasion of a country without legitimate cause), and approximately 1 million people have died as a result. And they have squandered more money than we can comprehend. The cost of Bush's war will be estimated to a high of 3 trillion dollars, and I'm sorry, but, that is way too much money to spend so that conservatives can achieve their nebulous feelings of "safety".
The Bush gang gets off the hook, while Eliot goes down for much pettier crimes.
Still, my position that Spitzer should be able to solicit prostitution if he wishes still stands, and that Kristen/Ashley should have to right to provide those services. Period. They are both consenting adults. The only kinds of prostitution that should be illegal are the ones that involve under-age persons, or persons being forced to work against their own will. The former is child molestation, and the latter is slavery.
This is the position that most sex-workers advocate, and it is certainly healthier than the positions taken by neurotic soccer-moms posing as "reformers" and "experts". And that includes the male soccer-moms.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Cartoon for March 15
A wag in the New York Times pointed out that the current ARM mortgage crisis owes at least as much to predatory borrowing as it does to predatory lending (which is admittedly a huge problem). I own a home now, but I can't help wondering why renters--people who can't afford to buy a home--should pay higher taxes to support those who own? It's already pretty crazy that the Army Corps of Engineers spends millions to shore up beaches to save homes owned by multimillionaires.
A wag in the New York Times pointed out that the current ARM mortgage crisis owes at least as much to predatory borrowing as it does to predatory lending (which is admittedly a huge problem). I own a home now, but I can't help wondering why renters--people who can't afford to buy a home--should pay higher taxes to support those who own? It's already pretty crazy that the Army Corps of Engineers spends millions to shore up beaches to save homes owned by multimillionaires.
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
Prostitution Should Be Legalized
posted by Susan Stark
You can lie the American people into a war, you can spend billions of dollars of taxpayers money on that war, you can kidnap people off the street and ship them to an Air Force base on foreign soil, and get away with it.
But God help you if you pay money for a little booty.
New York governor Eliot Spitzer, I am told, is in hot water over an escort he paid for for $4300.
And my response is: Is that all? The Iraq War costs $275 million a day, and Eliot paid $4300 for three hours.
You do the math.
In New York City, the escorting business, along with gentlemen's clubs and massage parlors, brings in billions of dollars a year. That's alot more than George Bush ever gave to this city.
And if Eliot Spitzer wishes to come to this city and contribute $4300, he should be able to do so without it costing his job. He is a consenting adult, and escort that he paid was a consenting adult. And if that $4300 was taxpayer money, so what? At least he put it into the local economy instead of flushing billions down the toilet in Iraq.
And if anybody else wishes to come to this city (or anywhere else) and pay for an escort, a stripper, or a masseuse, they should be able to do so legally. And anyone who wishes to provide such services should be legally allowed to do so, as long as they're an adult.
We need to get rid of this hypocrisy surrounding prostitution, especially when we live in a world where dropping a cluster bomb on innocent civilians is considered "regrettable".
posted by Susan Stark
You can lie the American people into a war, you can spend billions of dollars of taxpayers money on that war, you can kidnap people off the street and ship them to an Air Force base on foreign soil, and get away with it.
But God help you if you pay money for a little booty.
New York governor Eliot Spitzer, I am told, is in hot water over an escort he paid for for $4300.
And my response is: Is that all? The Iraq War costs $275 million a day, and Eliot paid $4300 for three hours.
You do the math.
In New York City, the escorting business, along with gentlemen's clubs and massage parlors, brings in billions of dollars a year. That's alot more than George Bush ever gave to this city.
And if Eliot Spitzer wishes to come to this city and contribute $4300, he should be able to do so without it costing his job. He is a consenting adult, and escort that he paid was a consenting adult. And if that $4300 was taxpayer money, so what? At least he put it into the local economy instead of flushing billions down the toilet in Iraq.
And if anybody else wishes to come to this city (or anywhere else) and pay for an escort, a stripper, or a masseuse, they should be able to do so legally. And anyone who wishes to provide such services should be legally allowed to do so, as long as they're an adult.
We need to get rid of this hypocrisy surrounding prostitution, especially when we live in a world where dropping a cluster bomb on innocent civilians is considered "regrettable".
THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: ECO-TERRORISM? THERE'S NO SUCH THING
Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims
The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock--more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over--are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?
Several "model houses" at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of "Quinn's Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities" at the edge of Seattle's creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.
Then I laughed. I wasn't alone. Time magazine bemoaned "a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes" among residents of Washington state.
Quinn's Crossing, says its website, was "dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first." In this case, putting Mother Earth "first" led the developers to construct "energy efficient" 4,500-square-feet McMansions. "The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn," reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. "The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area's Cross Valley Water District."
4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a nuclear family of four.
What galled ELF was the developers' attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as ecologically friendly. "The builders heavily promoted the 'built green' concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the 10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours," reported The Los Angeles Times.
Barnett's story asked: "Were the Terrorists Right?" She noted: "An energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large urban apartment."
Right or wrong, they're not terrorists.
The feds say they are. They call Earth Liberation Front, the loose-knit "group" that took responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly before the famous "Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday" memo, the FBI went so far as to list the ELF as a federally designated terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.
Terrorism--you can look it up--involves killing people. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property--property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place--is not.
ELF's goal of "inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment" has inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership, Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski project amounted to $12 million.
ELF members are vandals. They're arsonists. But they aren't terrorists.
ELF demands that its adherents "take all necessary precautions against harming any animal--human and non-human." Although it could happen someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society's grotesque overemphasis on the "right" of property owners to do whatever they want. The word "eco-terrorism" is an insult to the human victims of real terrorism, including those of 9/11.
The closest ELF's critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that fires send crud into the atmosphere. "This is releasing more carbon into the air than they ever would have by building the houses," the listing agent for one of the destroyed "rural cluster development" houses told The New York Times. Newsweek asked: "If their cause is to save the environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?"
Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are builders making houses out of toxins?
Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to 20 Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. "There's a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime," said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up: in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.
"Think of all the resources those fires wasted," moaned Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means--petitions, politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings--are the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the environment. "The development where this latest arson took place, situated atop the area's water supply, has been challenged by other groups, using negotiation and the law," he says approvingly. That's true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn's Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.
Challenged, yes. But not successfully.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims
The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock--more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over--are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?
Several "model houses" at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of "Quinn's Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities" at the edge of Seattle's creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.
Then I laughed. I wasn't alone. Time magazine bemoaned "a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes" among residents of Washington state.
Quinn's Crossing, says its website, was "dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first." In this case, putting Mother Earth "first" led the developers to construct "energy efficient" 4,500-square-feet McMansions. "The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn," reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. "The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area's Cross Valley Water District."
4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a nuclear family of four.
What galled ELF was the developers' attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as ecologically friendly. "The builders heavily promoted the 'built green' concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the 10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours," reported The Los Angeles Times.
Barnett's story asked: "Were the Terrorists Right?" She noted: "An energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large urban apartment."
Right or wrong, they're not terrorists.
The feds say they are. They call Earth Liberation Front, the loose-knit "group" that took responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly before the famous "Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday" memo, the FBI went so far as to list the ELF as a federally designated terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.
Terrorism--you can look it up--involves killing people. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property--property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place--is not.
ELF's goal of "inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment" has inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership, Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski project amounted to $12 million.
ELF members are vandals. They're arsonists. But they aren't terrorists.
ELF demands that its adherents "take all necessary precautions against harming any animal--human and non-human." Although it could happen someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society's grotesque overemphasis on the "right" of property owners to do whatever they want. The word "eco-terrorism" is an insult to the human victims of real terrorism, including those of 9/11.
The closest ELF's critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that fires send crud into the atmosphere. "This is releasing more carbon into the air than they ever would have by building the houses," the listing agent for one of the destroyed "rural cluster development" houses told The New York Times. Newsweek asked: "If their cause is to save the environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?"
Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are builders making houses out of toxins?
Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to 20 Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. "There's a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime," said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up: in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.
"Think of all the resources those fires wasted," moaned Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means--petitions, politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings--are the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the environment. "The development where this latest arson took place, situated atop the area's water supply, has been challenged by other groups, using negotiation and the law," he says approvingly. That's true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn's Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.
Challenged, yes. But not successfully.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Cartoon for March 10
A new blog, badcartoonist.com, has sparked controversy and discussion among editorial cartoons over what constitutes good and bad editorial cartooning. Those of us who draw in modern, post-MacNelly styles don't understand how the brains of retro cartoonists work.
A new blog, badcartoonist.com, has sparked controversy and discussion among editorial cartoons over what constitutes good and bad editorial cartooning. Those of us who draw in modern, post-MacNelly styles don't understand how the brains of retro cartoonists work.
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
America's Best Conservative Cartoonist...
...is Chuck Asay.
I've long admired Asay, an older cartoonist whose multi-panel approach presages modern cartooning and eschews retro styles in other ways as well, because of his mad editorial cartooning chops. His right-wing politics are beside the point. A good cartoonist is a good cartoonist, period.
Check out an interview with him here:
He also says nice things about me:
Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
...is Chuck Asay.
I've long admired Asay, an older cartoonist whose multi-panel approach presages modern cartooning and eschews retro styles in other ways as well, because of his mad editorial cartooning chops. His right-wing politics are beside the point. A good cartoonist is a good cartoonist, period.
Check out an interview with him here:
He also says nice things about me:
I also like and respect Ted Rall. He is a very thoughtful person with incredible gifts. He writes well and is passionate about ideas. We may disagree about ideas from time to time but I can think of no other person who I’d like to be locked up with if we should wind up in jail somewhere.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Ted Rall in News Story About Editorial Cartooning
There's an article containing my quotes about the editorial cartooning profession by Medill Reports:
There's an article containing my quotes about the editorial cartooning profession by Medill Reports:
Rall and many modern political cartoonists have also moved away from the use of symbolism in their work, something that marked nearly all historical editorial cartoons. Typical images included the use of the donkey and the elephant to represent political parties.
“No more labels, no metaphors, no cheesy Uncle Sam’s crying. It’s dumb!” said Rall. “That imagery isn’t popular with readers. They don’t get it, they don’t relate to it.”
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Hillary Clinton 3am Response on Youtube
posted by Susan Stark
I found this response to Hillary's "3am" ad on Youtube:
President Hillary Clinton answers the phone....
HILLARY: Hello?
BUSH: This is your Secretary of Defense, former President Bush. The terrorists may be bulding a doomsday weapon. If we drop our nukes now, millions of people will die, but billions of people could be saved. This is the most important decision in all of human history. What are you going to do?
HILLARY: Oh dear... where's Bill?
BUSH: He's out playing golf.(long pause)
HILLARY: Well, we'll have to wait until he gets back.
What is wrong with this response, besides the obvious sexism in it? It seems that since the end of the Cold War, we have regressed into an appalling lack of knowledge of what happens after a nuclear war. The radiation fallout would kill not just the intended target, but any place the wind would spread it to. And then there is nuclear winter, which would finish off more than the targeted millions. I learned this in high school when I was a teenager in the '80s. What are they teaching kids in class these days? Anything???
The first babies born after the end of the Cold War are now turning 18, and are old enough to vote and start holding political office. How many of them know what happens after a nuclear bomb is dropped? Maybe the teachers today should order from Netflix a coupla movies called The Day After and Threads and show them in class. They scared the pants off of me when I saw them, and they'll scare the pants off of any kid watching it today. Scary, but necessary.
posted by Susan Stark
I found this response to Hillary's "3am" ad on Youtube:
President Hillary Clinton answers the phone....
HILLARY: Hello?
BUSH: This is your Secretary of Defense, former President Bush. The terrorists may be bulding a doomsday weapon. If we drop our nukes now, millions of people will die, but billions of people could be saved. This is the most important decision in all of human history. What are you going to do?
HILLARY: Oh dear... where's Bill?
BUSH: He's out playing golf.(long pause)
HILLARY: Well, we'll have to wait until he gets back.
What is wrong with this response, besides the obvious sexism in it? It seems that since the end of the Cold War, we have regressed into an appalling lack of knowledge of what happens after a nuclear war. The radiation fallout would kill not just the intended target, but any place the wind would spread it to. And then there is nuclear winter, which would finish off more than the targeted millions. I learned this in high school when I was a teenager in the '80s. What are they teaching kids in class these days? Anything???
The first babies born after the end of the Cold War are now turning 18, and are old enough to vote and start holding political office. How many of them know what happens after a nuclear bomb is dropped? Maybe the teachers today should order from Netflix a coupla movies called The Day After and Threads and show them in class. They scared the pants off of me when I saw them, and they'll scare the pants off of any kid watching it today. Scary, but necessary.
Cartoon for March 6
The Clinton campaign rolled out, and the Obama campaign immediately issued a retort to, what looks likely to become one of the iconic television ads of the 2008 race: an image of a red hotline phone ringing at three in the morning in the White House. Many people have parodied this ad, but my take emphasizes the hilarious implication that troublemakers are so inconsiderate as to spark crises while civilized Americans are trying to catch some shut-eye.
The Clinton campaign rolled out, and the Obama campaign immediately issued a retort to, what looks likely to become one of the iconic television ads of the 2008 race: an image of a red hotline phone ringing at three in the morning in the White House. Many people have parodied this ad, but my take emphasizes the hilarious implication that troublemakers are so inconsiderate as to spark crises while civilized Americans are trying to catch some shut-eye.
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: AFGHANISTAN - A WAR WE CAN'T BELIEVE IN
Why Obama's Favorite War is Less Winnable Than Iraq
Five years after the Republicans got us into war against Iraq, Democrats want to double down on a war that's even more unjustifiable and unwinnable--the one against Afghanistan.
By any measure, U.S. troops and their NATO allies are getting their asses kicked in the country that Reagan's CIA station chief for Pakistan called "the graveyard of empires." Afghanistan currently produces a record 93 percent of the world's opium. Suicide bombers are killing more U.S.-aligned troops than ever. Stonings are back. The Taliban and their allies, "defeated" in 2001, control most of the country--and may recapture the capital of Kabul as early as this summer.
"So," asks The New York Times, "has Afghanistan now become a bigger security threat to the United States than Iraq?" Barack Obama's answer is yes. He spent last year parroting the DNC's line that Bush "took his eye off the ball" in Afghanistan when we invaded Iraq. Thankfully, he abandoned that hoary sports metaphor. Iraq, he says now, "distracted us from the fight that needed to be fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. They're the ones who killed 3,000 Americans."
Sorta. But not really.
Osama bin Laden bragged about ordering the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, yet has repeatedly denied a direct role in 9/11. He's probably telling the truth. The hijackers were mostly likely recruited by Islamic Jihad, which is based in Egypt. Saudis, including members of the royal family, financed the strikes against New York and Washington. Pakistani intelligence funded and supervised the camps where some of them trained.
Al Qaeda may have been peripherally involved in 9/11; its leadership certainly knew about the plot ahead of time. They may have fronted some of the expense money. But 9/11 wasn't an Al Qaeda operation per se.
Afghanistan's connection to 9/11 was tertiary. At the moment the first plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center, most of Al Qaeda's camps and fighters were in Pakistan. As CBS News reported on January 29, 2002, Osama bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on 9/11. The Taliban militia, which provided neither men nor money for the attacks, controlled 90 percent of the country.
It has long been an article of faith among Democrats that Afghanistan is the "good war," a righteous campaign that could be won with more money and manpower. But the facts say otherwise. The U.S. Air Force rained more than a million pounds of bombs upon Afghanistan in 2007, mostly on innocent civilians. It's twice as much as was dropped in Iraq--and equally ineffective.
Six years after the U.S. invasion of 2001, according to Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, the U.S./NATO occupation force has surged from 8,000 to 50,000. But the Americans are having no more luck against the Afghans than had the Brits or the Soviet Union. The U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai controls a mere 30 percent of Afghanistan, admits McConnell. (Regional analysts say in truth it is closer to 15 percent.) Most of the country belongs to the charming guys who gave us babes in burqas and exploding Buddhas: the Taliban and likeminded warlords.
"Afghanistan remains a failing state," says a report by General James Jones, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander. "The United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid."
If he becomes president, Obama says he'll "ask more from our European allies" to win in Afghanistan. But he won't get it. As The New York Times puts it: "Why help the United States in Afghanistan, the European logic goes, when America would be able to handle Afghanistan much more easily if its GIs weren't bogged down in Iraq?"
Obama says he would send two more American combat brigades--between 3,000 and 8,000 troops. If 158,000 troops can't subdue Iraq, how can 58,000 do the job in Afghanistan?
They can't.
Afghanistan's population is 19 percent larger than that of Iraq. Its area is 49 percent bigger, with infinitely rougher terrain. Obama's proposed "surgelet" would result in troop strength of less than one sixth of the 400,000 dictated by official U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine for a nation the size of Afghanistan.
Afghans say spring could mark the beginning of the end of the United States' first experiment in post-9/11 regime change. For more than a year, Taliban commanders have controlled the key Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. "On one convoy last year we were 40 vehicles and only 12 got through," Sadat Khan, a 25-year-old truck driver explained to the UK Telegraph as he pointed to "roughly patched bullet holes in the cab of his truck." Cops loyal to Karzai expect to be massacred. "Maybe we will lose 30 per cent of us this spring, maybe 60 per cent," police commander Mohammad Farid told the paper. He'd already been shot.
The Taliban say they'll retake Kabul this year and reestablish the Islamic fundamentalist government led by Mullah Omar. No one knows whether they'll succeed. But they've already begun to strangle the city of Kabul. They're destroying its nascent telecommunications infrastructure, driving out foreign NGOs and businesspeople with terrorist attacks, and cutting off access to the remaining highways. Talibs promise to continue to target NATO troops, betting that Canada and other members of the coalition will pull out under pressure from antiwar voters. Bogged down in Iraq, the U.S. won't be able to send more soldiers to Afghanistan. Karzai's puppet regime won't last long.
If Obama is so eager to keep fighting Bush's wars, he'd be smarter to focus on the more winnable of the two: Iraq.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
Why Obama's Favorite War is Less Winnable Than Iraq
Five years after the Republicans got us into war against Iraq, Democrats want to double down on a war that's even more unjustifiable and unwinnable--the one against Afghanistan.
By any measure, U.S. troops and their NATO allies are getting their asses kicked in the country that Reagan's CIA station chief for Pakistan called "the graveyard of empires." Afghanistan currently produces a record 93 percent of the world's opium. Suicide bombers are killing more U.S.-aligned troops than ever. Stonings are back. The Taliban and their allies, "defeated" in 2001, control most of the country--and may recapture the capital of Kabul as early as this summer.
"So," asks The New York Times, "has Afghanistan now become a bigger security threat to the United States than Iraq?" Barack Obama's answer is yes. He spent last year parroting the DNC's line that Bush "took his eye off the ball" in Afghanistan when we invaded Iraq. Thankfully, he abandoned that hoary sports metaphor. Iraq, he says now, "distracted us from the fight that needed to be fought in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda. They're the ones who killed 3,000 Americans."
Sorta. But not really.
Osama bin Laden bragged about ordering the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, yet has repeatedly denied a direct role in 9/11. He's probably telling the truth. The hijackers were mostly likely recruited by Islamic Jihad, which is based in Egypt. Saudis, including members of the royal family, financed the strikes against New York and Washington. Pakistani intelligence funded and supervised the camps where some of them trained.
Al Qaeda may have been peripherally involved in 9/11; its leadership certainly knew about the plot ahead of time. They may have fronted some of the expense money. But 9/11 wasn't an Al Qaeda operation per se.
Afghanistan's connection to 9/11 was tertiary. At the moment the first plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center, most of Al Qaeda's camps and fighters were in Pakistan. As CBS News reported on January 29, 2002, Osama bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on 9/11. The Taliban militia, which provided neither men nor money for the attacks, controlled 90 percent of the country.
It has long been an article of faith among Democrats that Afghanistan is the "good war," a righteous campaign that could be won with more money and manpower. But the facts say otherwise. The U.S. Air Force rained more than a million pounds of bombs upon Afghanistan in 2007, mostly on innocent civilians. It's twice as much as was dropped in Iraq--and equally ineffective.
Six years after the U.S. invasion of 2001, according to Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, the U.S./NATO occupation force has surged from 8,000 to 50,000. But the Americans are having no more luck against the Afghans than had the Brits or the Soviet Union. The U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai controls a mere 30 percent of Afghanistan, admits McConnell. (Regional analysts say in truth it is closer to 15 percent.) Most of the country belongs to the charming guys who gave us babes in burqas and exploding Buddhas: the Taliban and likeminded warlords.
"Afghanistan remains a failing state," says a report by General James Jones, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander. "The United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid."
If he becomes president, Obama says he'll "ask more from our European allies" to win in Afghanistan. But he won't get it. As The New York Times puts it: "Why help the United States in Afghanistan, the European logic goes, when America would be able to handle Afghanistan much more easily if its GIs weren't bogged down in Iraq?"
Obama says he would send two more American combat brigades--between 3,000 and 8,000 troops. If 158,000 troops can't subdue Iraq, how can 58,000 do the job in Afghanistan?
They can't.
Afghanistan's population is 19 percent larger than that of Iraq. Its area is 49 percent bigger, with infinitely rougher terrain. Obama's proposed "surgelet" would result in troop strength of less than one sixth of the 400,000 dictated by official U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine for a nation the size of Afghanistan.
Afghans say spring could mark the beginning of the end of the United States' first experiment in post-9/11 regime change. For more than a year, Taliban commanders have controlled the key Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. "On one convoy last year we were 40 vehicles and only 12 got through," Sadat Khan, a 25-year-old truck driver explained to the UK Telegraph as he pointed to "roughly patched bullet holes in the cab of his truck." Cops loyal to Karzai expect to be massacred. "Maybe we will lose 30 per cent of us this spring, maybe 60 per cent," police commander Mohammad Farid told the paper. He'd already been shot.
The Taliban say they'll retake Kabul this year and reestablish the Islamic fundamentalist government led by Mullah Omar. No one knows whether they'll succeed. But they've already begun to strangle the city of Kabul. They're destroying its nascent telecommunications infrastructure, driving out foreign NGOs and businesspeople with terrorist attacks, and cutting off access to the remaining highways. Talibs promise to continue to target NATO troops, betting that Canada and other members of the coalition will pull out under pressure from antiwar voters. Bogged down in Iraq, the U.S. won't be able to send more soldiers to Afghanistan. Karzai's puppet regime won't last long.
If Obama is so eager to keep fighting Bush's wars, he'd be smarter to focus on the more winnable of the two: Iraq.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
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