I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Residents of Santa Rosa, California expressed skepticism Thursday about a sheriff’s deputy’s decision to shoot dead a popular 13-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun that looked like an assault rifle.
Exclusively at Medium! Check it out. It’s worth taking a few extra seconds out of your day to click over there.
This is a long form hybrid of cartoons and columns, written with a freedom of style and humor that I don’t normally normally get to do anywhere else. That’s because medium.com is committed to commissioning work by artists and writers for real, reasonable pay rates. So if you support this model, please show it by checking it out and passing it around on social networks.
This piece reacts to the fact that the NSA is finally going to get reined in. Not because they did wholesale spying on the American people, or on foreigners, or on foreign leaders, but specifically on the personal cell phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Spying on hundreds of millions of people? That’s just business as usual. Spying on an important leader of a country that is supposedly a US ally? That’s just rude.
The good news is, now us ordinary Americans can escape the prying eyes of the NSA. All we have to do is…
Well, check out my piece.
Cartoonist Ted Rall: Obamacare Is President’s ‘Katrina Movement’
Newsmax
By Bill Hoffmann
(interview with Steve Malzberg)
October 28, 2013
This cartoon is for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
A Pennsylvania state legislator, made aware that the state does not ban eating cats and dogs, has proposed a bill banning that apparently less-than-widespread practice.
Check out the following passage from an article in Time magazine about the backlash against the American use of drones:
A slew of reports over the last two weeks detailing cases of U.S. armed drones killing civilians signaled a new wave of outrage over the unregulated use of drones by the U.S. There was one report from the United Nations, another from Human Rights Watch, and one from Amnesty International. The uproar—and the sense that Washington has done little to make more transparent its use of drones—is culminating in a debate Friday at the UN.
The italics are mine. Notice that section. Interesting spin, and you keep hearing it over and over, sometimes in the context of other classified programs such as the NSA’s domestic spying.
The people that I know aren’t interested in seeing the drone program become more transparent. The people I know who are concerned about drones, and I suspect this is true about most of other people who care about the issue, aren’t interested in greater transparency. We want the program to stop. We want the US to stop murdering people without any cause whatsoever. Transparency? That would be nice, but it really misses the point.
Here is my column exclusively for ANew Domain.net. Europe is pissed off at the NSA, but being American means never having to say you’re sorry.
What appears to actually be true, and exactly true to the extent that Clapper hasn’t said boo about it, is that the NSA tapped into the personal communications of the world’s heads of state, including close U.S. allies like German Chancellor Angela “Austerity R Us” Merkel, former President Felipe Calderón of Mexico and at least 35 other world leaders. NSA spies listened to Merkel’s private cell phone calls and read Calderón’s email. The 35-plus randoms, collected from eager-to-please U.S. government employees including State Department diplomats, appear to be personal phone taps. Yep, it’s another Snowden document.
With frenemies like the U.S., who needs terrorists?
How Obama’s Stupidity Might Get Us Real Healthcare
When it comes to Obamacare, Democrats have every reason to accuse the House Republicans of bad faith. Still, yesterday’s Congressional grilling of the private contractors hired to build the healthcare.gov federal marketplace serves as a reminder that editorial writers’ endless calls for bipartisan cooperation should never be heeded. We need adversarial politics; for that, the more polarization the better. If not for those pissy Republicans, who would get to the bottom of the disastrous October 1st rollout of the Affordable Care Act? Not the secrecy-obsessed Obama, who makes Nixon look like a paragon of transparency. Not his make-any-lame excuse Democrats.
Tea Party types love conspiracies. Obama is a Kenyan socialist. (So where’s the socialism?) 9/11 was an inside job. (But not a good one.) But sometimes conspiracies turn out to be true — even if they’re weren’t planned that way.
The latest dastardly plot circulating among Tea Partiers is that the Obamaites deliberately screwed up the ACA websites to pave the way for their true agenda: socializing healthcare. (I use the plural because most of the online state marketplaces, developed based on consultations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, are just as buggy and crashy as the federal one.)
Sarah Palin articulates this — hey, there are four words you don’t usually see at the same time — in an October 20th blog post:
“Obamacare in its current corporatist form isn’t meant to last. It’s meant to push us towards full socialized medicine with a single-payer system.”
“The broken websites and botched Obamacare rollout help push things to that inevitable conclusion by causing frustration and confusion that only the government can ‘fix,'” writes Palin.
She continues with a logical fallacy: Obama is smart, smart people don’t make dumb mistakes, therefore any “mistakes” they make are intentional.
“In fact,” Palin argues, “these unusable Obamacare websites make a reasonable person wonder how this administration could have made such a colossal bungle of the rollout when they are, after all, the same savvy experts who had the most sophisticated and precise campaign websites ever built. They could pinpoint voters down to a city block, but they messed up a website that cost the government over $200 million more than it cost Apple to develop the first iPhone. Purposeful?”
The problem with this reasoning (which echoes 9/11 Truther theories that the Bush Administration couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to let hijacked planes fly around the U.S. for nearly two hours) is that Obama and his team aren’t really smart. They’re calm.
It’s not the same.
If Team Obama had been plotting Canadian-style socialized medicine all along, they wouldn’t have floated all those dumb “heckuva job, Barry”-style excuses that turned healthcare.gov into the president’s Katrina moment:
No, Governor Palin, the truth behind the ACA mess is that Obama and his gang of golfing buddies are idiots.
OK, so there was evildoing. For example, as Forbes reported: “HHS bureaucrats knew [forcing the uninsured to create an account and enter detailed personal information before you can start shopping] would make the website run more slowly. But they were more afraid that letting people see the underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans would scare people away… Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions…This political objective — masking the true underlying cost of Obamacare’s insurance plans — far outweighed the operational objective of making the federal website work properly.”
There was corruption too. UnitedHealth Group, which as one of the nation’s biggest insurers stands to make billions from the ACA, was a key contractor for the federal website.
Mostly, though, there was idiocy. Secondarily, in execution. End-to-end testing began in late September. For an October 1st rollout. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s right: secondarily.
Primarily, Obama and the Democrats were idiots to think that the ACA’s bastard hybrid of public and private could function properly — certainly not on “a project of such immense complexity. The federal exchange must communicate with other contractors and with databases of numerous federal agencies and more than 170 insurance carriers.”
Look at what happened to the Postal Service: neither beast nor fowl, the uncomfortable marriage of for-profit business and Congressionally mandated payouts has pushed an otherwise viable organization to the brink of collapse.
ACA was created in response to skyrocketing healthcare costs — a problem directly attributable to the big insurance companies, which are raping patients and doctors with extortionist rates in order to accumulate obscene profits. The common sense solution? Cut out the insurers; put them out of business. Nationalize hospitals and private clinics. Turn doctors and nurses into federal employees. Obama built the ACA to increase the big insurers’ profits even more. Thus, for example, no federal price controls on the plans to be sold through the government websites. It comes as no surprise, but sad confirmation that we were right, that insurance company stocks have soared since the passage of the ACA.
Now, with a little luck, we’re looking at the possible realization of Sarah Palin’s nightmare scenario:
“With Obamacare we have crappier health care (fewer choices, fewer doctors, and an IPAB rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats, aka the ol’ ‘death panel’ that has been admitted to existing in Obamacare), but it is very expensive for the individual American…Americans, if you’re faced with a 300% increase (or even a 65% increase like my family) in your health care premiums for crappier coverage, doesn’t ‘free’ socialized medicine all of a sudden sound appealing? And that’s how Americans will be led down the primrose path to a single-payer system. People will be frustrated, worn out, and broke under this new government burden. Many will end up concluding they’ll settle for — then demand — full socialized medicine because they’ll see how the unworkable Obamacare will break our health care system (where, presently, no one is turned away from emergency rooms and we have many public and private safety nets for people in need), along with busting our personal bank accounts.”
I never thought I’d say this, but: From Sarah Palin’s lips to God’s ears.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: After the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, California began an ambitious effort to map faults across the state. Over the next two decades, officials published 534 maps of active earthquake faults. New construction was prohibited on top of these fissures because previous quakes showed that buildings could be torn apart during violent shaking. But the mapping campaign has slowed to a crawl â with many dangerous faults still undocumented. Since 1991, only 23 have been drawn. Because of budget cuts, none were completed between 2004 and 2011, according to records reviewed by The Times. State officials said there are still about 300 maps to draw and even more to revise â including some in heavily populated areas of Southern California. That represents about 2,000 miles of faults statewide.
Exclusive to ANewDomain.net: My Cartoon-Column essay about the ridiculous legal logic used to justify NSA spying:
From a 1979 Supreme Court ruling: “It is doubtful that telephone users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone numbers to the telephone company and that the company has facilities for recording this information and does in fact record it for various legitimate business purposes.”
I was interviewed by RT Moscow yesterday about revelations that the U.S. has been spying on its “close” allies, including France:
I think that as long as the NSA is around they’re going to be gathering an ever-increasing amount of information. The film ‘The Lives of Others’ about the East German Stasi was quite popular in art houses here in the United States. And everybody here keeps saying that East Germans would love to have had this level of intrusion into people’s personal lives. It is going to get worse and worse.
