Biographical Info

Jim from Costa Rica asks:

I thought this paragraph from your Slate biography was both funny and intriguing:

In 1984, Rall was expelled from Columbia Engineering for disciplinary and academic reasons. He gave up drawing cartoons during the mid-’80s, instead devoting himself to his work as a trader/trainee at Bear Stearns brokerage firm and a loan officer at the Industrial Bank of Japan. He moonlighted as a telemarketer and taxi driver.

My question is why is this most wonderfully ironic passage not included on your website?

I haven’t worked for Slate in years (but I would if they were interested in having me back!), so they’re using an outdated form of my bio. I remain unashamed of my past as a college dropout/expellee. It should also be noted that I eventually graduated from Columbia, with honors in history.

Today’s Email from a Real Republican Voter

Courtesy of Rader:

i would first like to say that i fully support the first amendment, and i support your expressing your opinion. however, i must know, where on EARTH do you come up with the things you express? the negatives towards our presidential administration are unprecedented, wild, and i fail to find anything anywhere to corroborate what you say. do you use sources along with actual news and events or do you just randomly imagine the president screws things up and attempt to make lame jokes about it? please regard my first amendment to also say what i like. on that note i would like to say that you disgust me. thank you for your time.

I love my country and its president,

Well, I like Al Gore even if I don’t love him exactly. Still, it’s always good to hear from guys like Rader. Right-wingers have become pretty quiet lately; even the death threats have dried up as of late now that every single utterance of the post-9/11 era has turned out to be dead wrong.

Martial Law? It’s Already here

Russ writes:

You’re about 4 years late – we’ve been living under martial law since passage of Patriot Act.
In fact some Constitutional scholars hold that suspension of habeas corpus equates with martial law.
The Patriot Act effectively provides for this, allowing President to declare ANYONE an ‘enemy combatant’ who can be held incommuicado indefinitely.
“The martial law concept in the U.S. is closely tied with the Writ of habeas corpus, which is in essence the right to a hearing on lawful imprisonment, or more broadly, the supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary. The ability to suspend habeas corpus is often equated with martial law. Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states, “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law#United_States_of_America… Okay, Wikipedia isn’t scholarly source, but it’s probably accurate.)

Russ makes an excellent point. Moreover, Bush signed a secret executive order granting him the write to execute anyone, including American citizens, he declares to be an “enemy combattant.”

Bloggers Can’t Make up Their Minds

A blog called bloggledygook references me as someone who puts down people who voted for Bush:

Those lefty bloggers can now sit back and sneer I-told-you-sos and in true Ted Rall fashion, portray Bush voters as stupid and sinister all at the same time.

Well, far be it from me to shy away from the characterization someone who doesn’t read much of my work has for me. So yes, I’ll fess up: Anyone who voted for Bush is a Goddamned fucking idiot. Fuck them. Why progressives should suck up to such morons instead of ridiculing them as they well deserve–which, incidentally, might remind them to think more carefully the next time they exercise their franchise–is beyond me.

On the other hand, Bernard Weiner lists me as a “journalistic hero” for standing up to the Bush regime’s attempt to loot the treasury while destroying American democracy and personal freedom.

Oh, well. Back to the Bush voter-bashing cartoons for this week.

UK Independent: Bush Claims God Told Him to Murder 100,000 People

Courtesy of Ken:

I am a devoted fan of your work and when I read this article I thought “Wow , this is great! Almost as good as something Ted Rall would come up with”. Only its for real. I’ve read some snippets of Bush getting messages from God, but nothing this well documented.
If you haven’t read it already please do check it out.
From: The Independent on line.
Bush: God told me to invade Iraq
President ‘revealed reasons for war in private meeting’
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 07 October 2005
….. Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.”…
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article317805.ece

What is going on at The Times? Readers ask me all the time, as if I know because they used to run my work, but hell if I know. The Week-in-Review section has become a clone of Newsweek’s famously dismal gags-about-the news (yes, gag me) Perspectives section. To read either would be to miss the fact that editorial cartooning is currently in its golden age. Sadly you have to read the alternative weeklies, and the ATTITUDE compilations, to know. And the Web, of course. You sure as hell won’t find anything but donkeys, elephants, labels and all manner of stupidity in the Times.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Times’ Sunday Magazine has introduced a section called “The Funny Pages” which includes a one-page serialized graphic novel by, incredibly–the dead worst graphic novelist in America, Chris Ware.

Ware, best known for his Jimmy Corrigan GN of a few years ago, is a fine draughtsman who works wonders as illustration’s answer to Death Cab for Cutie. Sadly, he also fancies himself a cartoonist, i.e. an artist who works with words and ideas as well as pictures. That’s tough to do when you’re fairly stupid (read his interviews to see what I mean), aggressively out of touch with the world (no crime, unless you’re trying to be a cartoonist) and have had nothing of interest happen to you. His artwork has managed to seduce enough fans and editors (at the Times magazine, for instance) that they’ve managed to ignore Ware’s FEMA-like incompetence as a cartoonist, some to the extent that they call him one of the (cough) best cartoonists working today.

Of course, many of the same folks think George W. Bush is the best president we’ve ever had, so there you go.

The Tillman Link

The Nation has a piece on Pat Tillman, as referenced by Don:

You’ve probably read the articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Nation (see http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/zirin) on Pat Tillman’s opposition to Bush’s Iraq war and his fondness for Noam Chomsky, revelations that have Ann Coulter spewing chunks, but I’d be interested in getting your take on the matter.

Harriet Miers’ Experience

FOR Fred notes:

I saw a stat recently that sed nearly half of the supreme court justices throughout history (including Renquist) were not judges before taking the bench. I’ve even heard rumors that Bill Clinton is sniffing around for an appointment under the next democratic admin (and lets hope its the NEXT admin).
I’m not sure about this lady myself, but her lack of judicial experience is hardly unprecedented. Just proves my point that most folks in poltics (regardless, in this case, of right or left alignment) will reach for the nearest bat to pummel their opponent and worry about the hypocracy later (if at all.)

Lies, lies and damned statistics. It is true that many, indeed half of justices who served on the Supreme Court, did not work as judges previously. That doesn’t tell the whole story, however. Most of these non-judge justices served during the 19th century. Indeed, the trend during the 20th century has led to increasing experience requirements to serve on the highest court in the country, mirroring a general requirement in the employment sector towards increasing credentials: today’s BA is yesterday’s high school diploma, etc. Moreover, most of the justices cited as “inexperienced” by pro-Miers Republicans did have fairly impressive credentials. These included former senators and, in William Rehnquist’s case, a sitting deputy attorney general.

Miers’ experience doesn’t come close to the kind of resume justices have been expected to possess during the past few decades.

That said, the conservative revolt against Miers is a little strange. So Bush lied about guaranteeing an anti-Roe justice (even though seems about as pro-life as you can get short of having shot an abortion doctor herself). You didn’t seem to mind his lies when they worked towards your benefit–the tax cuts helping the economy, WMDs in Iraq, capturing Osama dead or alive, etc. Buy a rabid dog and eventually he’ll bite you too.

Soviet Calculators

Check out this cool shit:

http://rk86.com/frolov/calcolle.htm

Another reason Reagan sucks-not that he really killed the USSR, but the fact that he even WANTED to.

Pat Tillman Redux

A lot of people have been contacting me concerning the piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Pat Tillman. (For those who have been hiding under a rock, Tillman was the former NFL football player who gave up a multi-million dollar contract to enlist in the army in 2002. He served two tours of duty, the first in the invasion of Iraq and the second in Afghanistan, where he was killed in a “friendly fire” incident the Pentagon tried to cover up.) According to the Chron, Tillman was far from the right-wing poster child the right–and the left, including me–took him to be. He regarded the Iraq war (although not the Afghan invasion) as illegal and read a lot of Chomsky.

“I don’t believe it,” Ann Coulter said in reaction to the revelation that the premier indicutee into the Bush Administration’s Post-9/11 Death Cult was a leftie. I admit it–I’m surprised too. Like Coulter, Bush, et al., I too bought the cartoon image: chiseled features, proud to wear the uniform, football player. We were all wrong, as it turns out.

Of course, I know that there are progressives in the military. Some have written books about their experiences. And I receive email from a lot of them. But they are, by and large, the exception. Tillman, said to have signed up in reaction to 9/11, seemed to fit neatly into the usual soldier = mook paradigm.

Except, according to his mother Mary as quoted in the Chron piece, he wasn’t. Which only adds to the confusion for me. Why would someone familiar with Chomsky, whose work is dedicated to the prospect that government and especially the military, lies as routinely as they breathe, agree to sign their life away with a blank check to an unscrupulous unelected gooney bird like George W. Bush? For that matter, how could someone who read The Nation and other left-of-center publications, fail to understand that the invasion of Afghanistan was every bit as unjustitiable and as much of a distraction from a real war on terrorism, as the looting of Iraq?

I wish all this stuff had come to light immediately after Tillman’s death–hell, immediately after his enlistment. It would have saved countless lives, both of American servicemen who joined the military after being inspired by him and the Iraqis and Afghans they and their comrades dispatched in the name of the World Trade Center. But it’s too late for that. As for me, this episode serves as an important reminder that you can’t always judge a book by its red, white and blue cover. And it redoubles the tragedy of his death, since it sounds like we lost one hell of an interesting human being in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.