I don’t know that voters have ever, as a whole, truly understood the issues being laid before them, but Gary Huck is right that it seems we’re in a period of militant, hostile ignorance we haven’t seen since the short-but-nasty rise of the Know-Nothings. It’s hard to know what to do about it, and not […]
Steve Brodner offers an affectionate portrait and tribute to his friend and mentor, Lewis Lapham, a legendary editor at Harper’s who died last week at 89, an age at which one is permitted to die but which gave him a good, long opportunity to influence the world, though, as Brodner’s words indicate, he still left […]
Randall Munroe imagines himself in the Olympics in today’s xkcd, and I notice that the funniest places he’d expect to find an unqualified amateur are in the sports in which style is the deciding factor. Which evokes a 1959 Peanuts that has always been close to my heart and which, apart from my extensive history […]
There have been times when emigrating to Australia seemed like a good idea, but it doesn’t take a lot of reflection to recognize the futility. After all, Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach in 1957 and Stanley Kramer turned it into a movie in 1959 in which Australians waited for death to arrive in a […]
Peter Steiner sums it all up. Thank you for coming and don’t forget to tip your waitress. But, no, I’ve never been known to avoid elaboration, and there’s a lot more to be said, even if you shouldn’t say it in Louisiana. Or Texas or Arizona or in any of a number of other places […]
Brewster Rockit (Tribune) gets to lead off for a second day in a row, having shifted from the informational back to the absurd. As noted, I stayed home rather than driving the four hours to my old digs in the Adirondacks, and I missed both totality and a good party, but we had a nice […]
Letting Dave Whamond lead off, despite a couple of hesitations. One is about the connection between the shooting and football, but my main quibble is with “How could this happen?” because, come on, who’s surprised anymore? Which is his point, so he should have reworked it. He does make up for it with the looks […]
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, […]
Brazilian cartoonist Amorim (Cartoon Movement) leads us off today with a reasonable critique of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza, where Israel’s response to the horrific Hamas attacks has combined air attacks on suspected terrorist sites with warnings to civilians to evacuate an already crowded area, while food, water, fuel and electricity have been cut […]
Zapiro speaks for a large number of cartoonists as they struggle to find something that is both fair and penetrating to say about the bloodbath going on in Israel and Gaza, with the additional burden of knowing that anything of any substance will — intentionally or not — be misinterpreted by a portion of your […]
Is this a political cartoon? Steve Brodner thinks so, and said so, at the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists convention in San Francisco this past weekend. Picasso’s painting is considered Great Art, but he was reacting to the bombing of Guernica and he was certainly expressing his take on the horror. The fact that he […]
Patrick Blower cites the new Civil War, in which a divided country rages around a vestige of the old Civil War. As noted here before, it was much easier when we had a geographical division based, for the most part, on a single, definable issue. Even then, there were as many quarrels over why we […]
We’ll start our discussion of priorities here, as Steve Brodner poses the question. Others have chided people for chortling over drowning billionaires, and that is a fair objection, but it’s also a bit of a red herring, at least in Brodner’s view. We ought not to chortle over anyone’s death, and, while it’s fair to […]
Steve Breen (Creators) seems to have the best take on what just happened: A crisis was averted, and both sides can take some kudos for having swallowed a bit of pride for the common good, but, then again, the matter has only been set aside and not permanently addressed. As noted here yesterday, the media […]
Wednesday’s CNN Town Hall wasn’t quite as transformative as Chip Bok (Creators) paints it, but it certainly demonstrated the media shakeup in progress. But note the “How could you?” look on Fox’s face and the “Dear Lord” look on CNN’s. Rightwingers have been excoriating Fox for its recent failure to promote Dear Leader incessantly, faithfully […]