Generalissimo El Busho Signs on as a Ted Rall Sponsor

Sharp-eyed readers of this website have noticed ads for a certain squinty-eyed dictator over the page for my columns. “For God’s sake, man!” one correspondent wrote. “Children read your column!”

First, an explanation: The banner ads on the Cartoon and Column pages are placed and solicited by uComics, a subsidiary of Universal Press Syndicate, my distribution agency. In exchange for maintaining an extensive archive of my work, they collect the revenue from those ads. I don’t have control over the ad content, nor do I get any money directly. Those banner ads are, however, the only way I can maintain archives that go back several years. Server space is expensive, and I have neither the technical nor the financial resources to do the job myself. The down side, such as it is, is the weird occasional contradiction of ads for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which I have advocated military attacks upon, and Bush, who merits prosecution and impeachment as a usurping warmonger, running on my website.

This arrangement will likely continue, unless someone steps forward with a sizable sum of money with which I could launch a full-scale redesign from the site’s current 1995-style format and purchase some server space somewhere. Since that’s probably not going to happen, these quirks will probably reoccur from time to time.