Shoutout
To the guy who’s been waiting for the super rare hardback copy of that book: It has finally arrived. Please send your money, but email me first so I know that you got this.
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NYC Save the Date
I’ll be signing books twice the same week at two different stores in New York City.
Tuesday, September 28, 7:30 pm
Ted Rall Signing for GENERALISSIMO EL BUSHO and WAKE UP! YOU’RE LIBERAL at
at
Barnes & Noble Greenwich Village
Avenue of the Americas at West 8th Street
Manhattan
Thursday, September 30, time TBA
Signing for ATTITUDE 2: THE NEW SUBVERSIVE ALTERNATIVE CARTOONISTS
edited by Ted Rall
Meet David Rees, Emily S. Flake, Mikhaela B. Reid, Neil Swaab, Ted Rall and other cartoonists
at
Kim’s Mediapolis
Broadway between 113th and 114th Streets
Manhattan
I hope to meet you at one of these gigs!
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Some Warblogger Has Been Busy
Lately I have received several inquiries along the following lines:
you got references showing 1) that the 9/11 hijackers were all members of egyptian islamic jihad 2) that bin laden was in pak when the US invaded afghanistan 3) that at the time, there was a bigger al qaeda presence in pak? not that i don’t believe you, but i want to be able to give better substantiation than “ted rall said it.” thanks.
As per my email rules, I don’t supply links to information that is readily available. By “readily available,” I mean going to Google and running a simple search on “hijackers” and “Islamic Jihad.” Which, if you do, gets you enough references to the first questiion make your head spin.
As for numbers two and three, why can’t people learn to use Google?
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Cassandra?
A watchful FOR sends the following, which I post without comment:
This is from a 1999 article you wrote. Scary
Penny-ante bigotries (flashback: anti-Ayatollah bumper stickers) and antipathy toward the press are this decade’s early-warning signs that we may be heading once again into an ’80s-style rollback of basic civil liberties, spectacular tax giveaways to a tiny coterie of superrich and economically ruinous policies of wage stagnation and repression of workers. And don’t forget: Reagan’s trickle-down economics was a disaster for the middle class. It’s almost as if, after five or six years of incredible economic growth, right-wing, flag-waving, Bible-pounding twits would rather see their own portfolios evaporate than watch poor people and minorities begin to enjoy the American dream.
Nothing lasts forever, but good things invariably get murdered.
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In Anticipation
It’s entirely possible that today’s cartoon won’t elicit more than the usual shrug and turn of the page. On the other hand, experience teaches that right-wingers freak out whenever you attack their sacred cows–and the gaudier the golden cow, the angrier they become when you point out that it’s nothing more than a lump of yellow metal.
By way of explanation for anyone who may have missed it, last week’s Republican National Convention featured a Tuesday-night September 11, 2001 commemoration wherein widows of the fallen were paraded out under blue tinted lights to urge implicitly and explicitly that America (in Rudy Giuliani’s words) owes it to the victims of 9/11 to vote the straight Republican ticket. As delegates whooped “yeahs” worthy of a football game, these horrible people pimped their dead husbands to score votes for a GOP that has nothing whatsoever to bring their killers to justice while increasing funding to the countries that played a role in the attacks. They actually compared the supposed actions* of the passengers of United Flight 93–“doing something”–to “doing something” this November, i.e., voting for Bush.
It doesn’t matter that some of the dead may have been Republicans. 9/11 should have never been used for partisan politics and it needs to stop now.
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*Western Pennsylvania newspapers and TV stations report that debris was found eight miles away from the crash site, indicating that the flight was either shot down by the Air Force or suffered a catastrophic explosion. As much as we would all like it to be true, the fact that the US government has never publicly released the flight data recorder or voice cockpit recorders from United 93 sheds further doubt on the Drinkcart of Death theory.
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Book Signing Schedule Coming Together
The schedule for my appearances is shaping up. Here’s what we have so far, more details later. If you live in an area where I’m not appearing, this may be because your local daily or alternative weekly newspaper doesn’t carry my work. I’ve discovered that, without a paper to build an audience and to support the signing when it takes place, turnout tends to be dismal.
The obvious way to remedy this is to convince your paper to start carrying my cartoons and/or columns. Failing that, a book signing event can be made financially viable if a local group (typically a university) offers me airfare and an honorarium to speak in town.
Anyway, here it is:
9/28 – NYC
9/30 – NYC
10/20-10/30″
Seattle
Olympia, WA
San Juan Island, WA
Portland, OR
Berkeley
San Francisco
Los Angeles
It would be great to set something up in Santa Cruz, San Diego and/or Phoenix. If you’d like to help do that, please email me at chet@rall.com
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RNC Miscellany
Security is one thing, intimidation another.On the C train on my way downtown to the Air America appearance this morning, the subway doors opened up at 34th Street-Pennsylvania Station to an unusual sight: large cops in riot gear, smacking their billy clubs into their open palms at each door of every car. Hmm. Maybe it’s better to get off at 23rd Street.
The gruesome parade of 9/11 widows at last night’s RNC deserves comment. Americans should “do something,” one of them said. Though she harkened to the United 93 passengers who supposedly rebelled against the hijackers–still zero proof to that tale, of course–she meant we should all “do something”–vote Republican this fall. The politization of 9/11 continued with Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre assertion that we owe it to the victims to vote for Bush.
Ed Koch’s endorsement of the Bush-Cheney ticket retroactively belied his pleas, supposedly as a Democrat, to New Yorkers of liberal stripe to “make nice” to the Republican delegates. One is as one votes, and Ed Koch is as much of a Democrat as Michael Bloomberg is a Republican. Thanks, Ed, for finally outting yourself.
As the cameras scanned the sea of Caucasian faces across the convention hall, I was struck by something I’d never noticed before. Republicans, or at least Republican delegates, have no sparkle in their eyes. Like sharks, sheep and other braindead species, GOP adherents have a blank stare. Odd, and a little scary.
