The news that Matt Bors is quitting political cartooning (though he will continue to work as a comics editor and cartoon in other formats) is a sad statement about the state of editorial journalism. In his mid-30s, a great draftsman who has received some of the profession’s top prizes, including a Pulitzer finalistship, Bors represented a possible future for American political cartooning. The fact that he decided drawing political cartoons was no longer worth his time — it’s not hard to guess that, like the rest of us, he watched his cartooning paycheck dwindle away to almost nothing — reflects poorly on the hundreds of editors at newspapers, magazines and websites who, day after day, choose not to run political cartoons at all, much less hire a staff political cartoonist to add to their stables of writers. Many of these editors are going to wake up someday, realize that editorial cartooning is dead and gone, and wonder what happened. They…

A recent State Department report on human rights abuses by China is remarkable for how almost every item is something that the United States does. I’m adding my specifics in [brackets]: “Arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government [drone assassinations, hit jobs like bin Laden]; forced disappearances by the government [Gitmo, domestic policing in which suspects don’t get phone calls or lawyers]; torture by the government [still “legal” when done by the CIA at Gitmo and black sites]; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions [every American jail and prison] . . . political prisoners [Chelsea Manning, 1960s radicals, Julian Assange, etc.]; politically motivated reprisal against individuals outside the country [yours truly by LAPD/LA Times, every leftist too] . . . arbitrary interference with privacy [NSA]; pervasive and intrusive technical surveillance and monitoring [Snowden told us all about it]; serious restrictions on free expression [crushing BLM and OWS], the press, and the internet [communications act, including physical attacks on and…