I draw a weekly editorial cartoon for The Los Angeles Times. With a little luck—and a bigger budget for hiring—this might turn into a staff cartooning job where I’d be doing work about Los Angeles and California throughout the week. If you’re an LA Times reader and you’d like to see me do more work for them, please let them know!
Here is this week’s offering: California Fish and Game President Daniel W. Richards shot and ate a mountain lion in Idaho, where it’s legal. Where will he go next?
Isn’t Matt Bors‘ cover design lovely?
“The Book of Obama: How We Got From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt” comes out May 22nd and will be followed by a national book tour, so if you want me to come speak in your city now is a great time to get in touch.
“The Book of Obama” walks us through the rise of the former Illinois Senator and how he set up such high expectations that, when they were dashed, it finally freed us from the illusions that had sustained the American public all our lives. Reluctant midwife of the Tea Party and Occupy movements, Obama exposed the fact that the problem under Bush wasn’t one of personality. The problem, we see now, is the system itself.
“The Book of Obama” draws upon some material from my column, adds a ton of new material, and reprints roughly 60 cartoons from the Obama years.
You can pre-order it corporate/cheap-style through Amazon or reserve a custom, signed copy for a little more through yours truly.
I’m about to order my new iMac (thank you thank you thank you). Now I need a scanner.
Anyone know what the best flatbed scanner is for the new Mac OS 10.7? I love my old HP ScanJet 7400c but the drivers won’t be supported on this.
A $100 scanner won’t do the job. I have one of those for my laptop and it’s great for travel but doesn’t deliver the high-quality resolution needed for graphic arts on a regular basis. Of course cheap is great, but the buzzword here is: quality. Also if possible one that is bigger (at least 8/5×14, or 11×17 would be awesome) to facilitate scanning of larger comics.
During the computer fundraiser several of you suggested that I introduce the option to make ongoing (recurring) donations since that is easier for many people. Great idea! So now there are two options.
You can, if you are so moved, kick in money one time. Or you can set it up so that you get billed monthly (or annually).
Or you can read my stuff for free until one day you come here and get a 404 error.
Not his words. Nor his publicly-stated political opinions (which, I have excellent reason to believe, are purely for marketing purposes).
Calls for economic censorship are dangerous. Whether they’re from the Right against the Left (as when various right-wing pundits called for me to be fired, jailed or shot after 9/11), or from the Left against the Right (as in the current calls for Limbaugh to be fired for calling a Georgetown Law student a “slut” and a “prostitute”).
You know where I stand on Limbaugh. And where he stands on me. We despise one another. And I doubt he would defend my right to speak, or even live. But whatever.
When you call for censorship you open up your own partisans to similar calls in the future. Hard as this might be to fathom, my politics are just as objectionable to right-wingers as Limbaugh’s remarks are to those of us on the Left. Call for Limbaugh to be canned and you make it more likely that I’ll be canned for saying or drawing something that pisses them off. You just don’t want to go there.
Don’t like Limbaugh? Ignore him. Or declaim him as the fucked-up sexist shithead blowhard that he is. Calling for his sponsors to drop him is just a lazy substitute for a powerful counterargument.
P.S. Spare me the idiotic comments that only governments can censor. The dictionary says otherwise.
As you can see by a look at the thermometer in the sidebar over yonder, my computer fundraiser was successful! Thank you to everyone who contributed. Not only does this make it possible to purchase much-needed equipment that allows me to keep producing cartoons in a timely manner—I’ll order my iMac next week and post a photo of it on my desk within a few weeks—it also reminds me that there are people who care about political and social commentary (even if too few editors do).
If you contributed I am emailing you today. If you don’t hear from me by, say, tonight, please email me through the contact form here on the blog (swish your mouse around the tabs, you’ll find it).
I draw a weekly editorial cartoon for The Los Angeles Times. With a little luck—and a bigger budget for hiring—this might turn into a staff cartooning job where I’d be doing work about Los Angeles and California throughout the week.
Here is this week’s offering: A University of Illinois study finds that Los Angeles is the second-most corrupt region in the United States.
Bankrupt and Corrupt, U.S. Can’t/Won’t Address Issues We Care About
Millions of Americans won’t vote this November. “Voter participation in the U.S. remains consistently below corresponding levels in most other western democracies,” the International Business Times reported last year. “In countries like Italy, Belgium, Austria and Australia, more than 90 percent of the voting public cast ballots at election time.”
They—the corporate politicians and their media mouthpieces—call it apathy. Obama advisor David Axelrod blamed it for the Iraq War. “There was apathy in 2000, and Al Gore lost that election to George W. Bush by 300 votes, and as a result we wound up in Iraq,” he told the Harvard Crimson. That’s crap. People don’t boycott elections because they don’t care. They are alienated.
We don’t care about two-party electoral politics because two-party electoral politics don’t care about us.
What are Americans most worried about this election season? The same thing we’ve been most worried about for years: the economy. You name the poll: local or national, liberals or conservatives doesn’t matter. Tens of millions of people are unemployed. People who still have jobs live in terror of layoffs. Real inflation is out of control but salaries are frozen or falling. (The fact that we have to specify “real” says a lot about the gap between life out here “on the ground” and over there “inside the Beltway.”)
We’re being ground down. Demoralized. Bankrupted. And they don’t care. Not only do they not care, they don’t notice.
The Fed and the White House are colluding in their quadrennial tradition of ginning up a pseudo-boomlet to support the incumbent. Thus the latest Dow bubble and phony 8.3 percent unemployment rate, which count people who have given up looking for work as “employed.”
Everyone knows the recovery is fiction. Who are you going to believe—the talking heads or your lying, overdrawn, second-mortage line of credit? According to the latest Gallup tracking poll, which actually asks actual people how they’re actually doing in the actual world, 9.1 percent of Americans are unemployed and 19.0 percent are underemployed. When 28.1 percent of Americans are broke, that affects everyone, including the richest 1% trying to sell goods and services.
People expect their “representative” democracy to represent their interests. To address their problems. And solve them.
No wonder why we’re so apathetic. Our “leaders” hardly talk about the economy.
Santorum is more worried about how easy it is to get sex than how hard it is to find work.
Romney thinks it’s 1992 and that he’s Ross Perot, the businessman who promised to run America like a corporation. As though it wasn’t already. As if that wasn’t the problem.
Obama imagines that we didn’t notice that he only started asking Congress to work on the economy after Congress fell under the control of the other party. We’re slow. We’re not deranged.
Our dying political system is unwilling and unable to address joblessness and the widening class divide because our misery isn’t an aberration. It’s an inherent manifestation of corporate capitalism. Ordinary Americans understand this. Half the citizens of this “conservative” country already prefer socialism or communism, according to a Gallup poll conducted in December—watch that go up—yet the political class dares not question the Crappy Economic System That Must Not Be Named.
Since they can’t take on the real issues the elites are reduced to the politics of distraction.
Kids and death.
Those are the D-grade “issues” the powers that be are using this week in order to avoid talking about the atrocious economy.
Federal regulators announced on February 27th that all cars manufactured after 2014 must feature rearview cameras that allow drivers to see what is behind them. The National Highway Traffic Administration says that “95 to 112 deaths and as many as 8,374 injuries could be eliminated each year by eliminating the wide blind spot behind a vehicle,” reported The New York Times. The estimated cost of the devices is $2.7 billion per year.
“In terms of absolute numbers of lives saved, it certainly isn’t the highest,” admitted Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety. “But in terms of emotional tragedy, backover deaths are some of the worst imaginable. When you have a parent that kills a child in an accident that’s utterly avoidable, they don’t ever forget it.”
No doubt. I can imagine. By all means, put in those cameras.
But there’s something screwy about a political culture that slaps this trivial story on the front page of the biggest newspaper in the country and makes it a Congressional priority while the elephants in the room go unaddressed. Every year 17,000 Americans die in slip and fall accidents—151 times the rate from backover car accidents. Maybe we should install cameras on the backs of our heads.
Yo, moron journalists and politicos: Jobs! We care about jobs!
If you idiots must obsess over cars, why aren’t you pushing through radical improvements in fuel efficiency, like requiring that every car made after 2014 be either electric or a hybrid? Autos are a major cause of air pollution, which triggers asthma attacks, which kill at least 5000 people annually in the U.S.
It’s not just about the kiddie-poos. The establishments is still wallowing in Bush’s hoary post-9/11 death cult.
The day after its hold-the-presses car-cameras scoop the Times was back with another page-one heartstopper:
“The mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware disposed of body parts of some victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by burning them and dumping the ashes in a landfill,” began the story. The victims were killed on Flight 93, which crashed in western Pennsylvania.
Gross? No doubt. Inappropriate? Unquestionably. Important? Hell no.
The worst thing that could ever happened to the people to whom those body parts belonged occurred before. They were dead. Murdered. What went down after that was comparatively trivial.
Not to stir up the Truthers (with whom I disagree), but a more appropriate front-page story would ask: “More Than 11 Years After 9/11, Why Hasn’t There Been an Independent Investigation?”
Here’s what we’ve come to: Get killed on Flight 93 and no one bothers to find out what really happened to you. Have your remains disposed of in a culturally insensitive manner and it’s a scandal.
What if Flight 93 had landed safely? Some passengers would gotten laid off. Some would have been foreclosed upon. And the government wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass about them.
Why don’t people vote?
A better question is: Why do people vote?
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
Yesterday, $50 came in. Almost there!
Added bonus: Whoever pushes me over $2500 gets a copy of any of my books of their choice (if I have it in stock).
My fundraiser to get enough money to buy an iMac is now at $1870 out of $2500 needed. Thanks everyone!
I’ve received a few comments and emails from people who wonder if, I can’t figure out how to make a living anymore doing cartoons and columns, I shouldn’t just quit. It’s a valid question. I’ve asked it myself. I would ask it of others.
And I don’t have a good answer.
All I can say is that there are a lot of things that seem to require donations from the public in order to go on: poetry, a lot of art, NPR. These are all things that people seem to want. If they didn’t; there wouldn’t be any donations, right?
Until recently cartooning and writing was a difficult living, but a living nonetheless. Now they’re not. But people obviously still seem to want them. So the way I look at it is: I’m giving you, my readers, the option of keeping me doing this. If you don’t want to or can’t contribute to the cause, then obviously I will fail and try to go back into banking or maybe find a professorship at a college or become an Afghan warlord. That’s the free market. If I succeed, then maybe we’re showing that there’s a market for this sort of thing.
An obscure webcartoonist recently raised $1.2 million through Kickstarter. It was just a gift from his fans, a thank you for his work, since all he really needed was $2,000 or $3,000 to reprint an old book (he asked for $25,000). He didn’t even draw a single new cartoon for that $1.2 million.
If people don’t kick in for left-wing editorial cartooning but do kick in for comix about role-playing games, guess what kind of cartooning will be left online?
So I guess I do have an answer after all.
