I’d been at the paper — not the above paper, mind you — for about four months when the markets crashed in 1987 and I had to suddenly learn about stocks and bonds and such. Fortunately, I’d just spent three or four years writing about residential real estate and commercial development, so it was more […]
The successful launch of the the Herblock-designed Bill of Rights stamp in 1966 is detailed by Belmont Faries for the Society of Philatic Americans in the S.P.A. Journal V30 #3 of November 1967. The article describes the process of Herbert Block creating the dozens of designs and revisions. Mike Rhode at ComicsDC posts all nine […]
Luckovich uses that word, and I do think it means what he thinks it means. But there are two reasons to quibble with Luckovich’s cartoon, the first being that the Founders had, at best, a relatively select bloc of voters in mind. Voters weren’t specifically “elite” and it’s flat out wrong to suggest that they […]
It’s a pleasant fantasy, to imagine each bizarre, disturbing development coming along in a separate day. If it did, we could brace for it as Katauskas suggests. But, of course, that’s not how a firehose works, though the unbearable daily terror she posits would be an improvement on the flood that actually occurs. As it […]
Despair was on the national menu in October, 1973. Paul Conrad described the state of the presidency in the words White House Counsel John Ehrlichman had used when, as Watergate investigations began, he said that, rather than confirming Patrick Gray as head of the FBI, they should leave him “slowly, slowly twisting in the wind.” […]
Dave Granlund Marc Murphy I’m okaying Granlund and Murphy for the hardhats because, while their cartoons salute his post-presidency Habitat for Humanity work, they do so while praising his other accomplishments, marking his whole life, not just one aspect of it. I won’t, however, feature cartoons that portray him entirely as a carpenter or that […]
As everyone struggles to explain the young man who tried to shoot Trump, I thought of this Tom the Dancing Bug from 1999, when we were trying to figure out Columbine and everybody had a theory. We didn’t actually come to a conclusion, or, at least, not to one that solved the problem, though, as […]
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” — Stephen Dedalus As Doonesbury concluded back in 1971, putting Kent State into the memory hole allowed us to “concentrate on fresher, more recent, tragedies.” But as Senators Hawley and Cotton call for the National Guard to be sent to quell campus protests, it’s […]
Henry Kissinger died last evening, too late in the day for American cartoonists to do more than replay some of their previous commentaries on the man. Steve Brodner‘s cover for Nation was only a few months ago, on Kissinger’s 100th birthday, and his dripping blood frosting offers a Reader’s Digest guide to the doctor’s accomplishments, […]
I laughed at this New Yorker cartoon, though they don’t bother crediting their cartoonists and if you Google “New Yorker cartoonist CAB” you find out how many times they’ve made fun of taxis. It might as well be signed “pigeon” or “Chardonnay.” Whoever drew it, it got a chuckle, but it also got a flinch […]
The tradition is to mark history in round numbers, and 54 years ago is hardly that, but March 31, 1968 was a pretty interesting moment in time and, besides, I have a doctor’s appointment this morning, so had to put something together in advance. So here was a historic moment for the date, and let […]
There have been several cartoons comparing Putin to either Hitler or Stalin, but I like Robert Ariail’s, because it is very simple and yet pinpoints Stalin’s legacy in Ukraine, where he engineered a ghastly, deadly famine in which millions died. All former Soviets remember their losses to the Germans in World War II, but the […]
Happy New Year 1897 There is an old tradition in New Year’s cartoons of looking forward to a more prosperous future, and it goes back at least 125 years to this piece from the Brooklyn Eagle, unsigned but credited to the New York Press, a crosstown paper whose writers, according to Wikipedia, came up […]
(Dr. Macleod) (Jeremy Banx) Two threads in this particular Juxtaposition: The backgrounder is the current dustup in the UK about Boris Johnson locking everyone down and then allowing his own staff to hold a Christmas party last year at 10 Downing Street. It was revealed, apparently, in a wonderfully foolish cock-up when the Prime […]
Jeff Koterba starts us off with a “Yes, but No” take on Michael Flynn’s bizarre declaration that the US is and must be a Christian nation. Yes, the nation was founded on the principle of freedom of (and from) religion: Any fair reading of the Founders, and any literate reading of the Constitution, makes that […]