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SYNDICATED COLUMN: If This Is The End of the U.S….

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Ted Rall

…Will Anyone Come To Our Funeral?

Before I left for Afghanistan, the producer for my talk radio show asked me to return with a souvenir. “Bring me back an MRE [“Meal Ready to Eat”],” he requested. It was the fall of 2001, a few months into the U.S. invasion, and news accounts said Afghan skies were dark with millions of MREs dropped by U.S. warplanes to the starving masses.

I never saw an MRE. Neither did any of the Afghans I talked to. As far as we could tell, the only stuff that American planes dropped on Afghanistan were bombs. Scattered in the rubble one could find the shards of said explosives, the well-known names of the defense contractors visible in black-stenciled English. Bombs: America’s biggest export. Food: not so much.

I’m torn over what The Washington Post has so cavalierly dubbed “the economic apocalypse.” When I was 21, I prayed for this. The United States of America was the world’s biggest arms manufacturer and distributor, its filthiest polluter, the number-one defender of dictators and enemy of democracy, and earth’s most insidious purveyor of laissez faire, to-hell-with-you capitalism. It still is. But now I’m 45. I’m vested.

I have equity, a retirement plan, a car. CDs and DVDs and gadgets to play them on. Lots of books. I have jobs–several of them, irony of ironies, that involve criticizing this rotten, corrupt and broken system. Events my younger self would have welcomed–multinational corporations laid low, billionaires reduced to penury, business-sucking Republicans forced by the failure of capitalism to pay lip service to the need for government regulation, the U.S. bankrupted into slashing its aggressive military–now scare the hell out of me. What if I can’t make my mortgage? What if we disintegrate like the Soviet Union? What if I turn the valve and water doesn’t come out? Middle-Aged Ted doesn’t want to lose his stuff.

Or his friends. Some of them would die if they couldn’t get their meds anymore.

Young Ted pipes up.

“What about the Afghans those Made-in-USA bombs blew up?” Young Ted asks. “Wouldn’t they have been better off if Thomas Jefferson and his drinking buddies had never thought up the United States of America?”

“I’m middle-aged,” snaps Middle-Aged Ted, “not senile. I know my Howard Zinn.”

If the U.S. vanished from history, a couple million Vietnamese (and their kids and grandkids) would still be around. As would a million Iraqis and maybe a hundred thousand Afghans. The polar ice cap, melting so fast that nothing can save it, might still have stood a chance if the U.S., which produces 22 percent of greenhouse gases (440 percent more than its fair share) had never been.

Americans aren’t just cruel and inconsiderate to the rest of the world. They treat each other like crap, too.

As New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman points out, the last three decades have seen a “narrow oligarchy” arise in the Land of the Free to Die on the Street. “Income at the 99.9th percentile [over $400,000 a year] rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile [over $6 million a year] rose 497 percent,” wrote Krugman. Most people saw their income shrink.

This is the rancid economic model–no unions, no safety net, no healthcare–the U.S. wants other countries to copy.

It’s too late to save Bangladesh, polar bears, Moammar Khaddafi’s young daughter, the 290 people on Iran Air Flight 655, or the men we tortured to death at Gitmo. But there’s still the future to consider. If the U.S. government collapses and the markets implode and our consumer culture crashes, and Americans become too poor to invade other countries and drop bombs and impose murderous trade embargos, and we can’t overconsume and pollute like we used to–well, there’s no telling how many species might be saved from extinction. Thousands, probably more like millions, of people who otherwise would have been killed in some pointless future U.S. war of aggression will live instead of die.

Young Ted has a point. “You’re worried about your new LG flat screen,” he sneers, “but you should be thinking about all those Iranians Bush or McCain or Obama is gonna blow up to keep the electricity on and that HDTV picture crisp and clear.”

Middle-Aged Ted looks at Young Ted. “Make sure you hang on to that Dead Kennedys concert T,” he advises him. “It’ll be worth some serious coin on eBay someday. And how come you’re so skinny? All you eat is pizza.”

“Don’t change the subject, old man,” he shoots back. “The glory of Rome relies on the screams of the crucified in Judea. Oppression and injustice aren’t hypocritical deviations from American principles. They fuel the entire system.”

“Easy for you to say,” I–um, Middle-Aged Ted–replies. “I remember being 21. I didn’t have anything to lose. I was a college dropout, drowning in debt. Our apartment got robbed so often that, by the end, they were coming back for the lightbulbs. You made $620 a month and paid $425 in rent. Of course economic collapse didn’t scare you. ‘Mad Max’ would have been an improvement.”

For the first time, a look of sympathy crosses my svelte doppelganger’s face. “Admit it, Middle-Aged Ted,” he says. “You’re scared you’ll end up like those Afghans–dirty and poor and, sooner rather than later, dead from a bomb dropped by one of the many countries we worked so hard to piss off. You’re so scared that you’re afraid to cheer when the biggest force for evil in the world is teetering on the edge of oblivion.”

You got me, kid. I admit it.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Ted Rall in The Washington Post

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Ted Rall

Today’s Washington Post has an interview with me. I love the writer and he did a great job deleting my ums and ers, but phone interviews always make me sound even stupider than I really am.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Mad Money

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Ted Rall

A Broke America Can’t Afford Wars, Tax Cuts

Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one “someone” has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government.

The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion.

Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money?

There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can’t afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they’re sacred cows.

When you think about it, it’s sheer madness. The city marshal is at the door, brandishing a shotgun, ready to evict you and your family for nonpayment of rent. But while your kids are screaming in terror, you’re at the computer, wasting thousands on online gambling. You could pay off your landlord instead. You could make the marshal go away. All you have to do is stop. But you keep on keeping on. Click, click. More money squandered.

What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell is wrong with us?

In 2007 the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the final cost of our biggest national compulsion, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, could total $2.4 trillion, or $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country. That’s twice as much as the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined. It’s also two-thirds the cost of World War II. Yet no one–not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the media, not even the left–insists that we get out.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I’ve studied World War II. World War II was a worthwhile war, one that freed millions from tyranny and set the stage for the U.S. to dominate he global economy and become the wealthiest nation in history. Iraq and Afghanistan? They’re no World War II. As wars go, they’re not as worthwhile as the invasion of Grenada.

“The CBO estimates assume that 75,000 troops will remain in both countries through 2017, including roughly 50,000 in Iraq,” reported USA Today. If anything, that’s a low-ball estimate. More than a half century after the fighting ceased, we still have 37,000 troops in one tiny country, South Korea. And both McCain and Obama promise to send more troops to Afghanistan. That means more taxpayer money.

Nearly two out of three Americans think invading Iraq–where the lion’s share of war funding is being spent–was a mistake. The Afghan resistance is kicking our butts. Both wars have been a complete, total waste of money, effort and lives. As surely as the sun will rise in the east, we will lose both. At a total cost of at least $2.4 trillion. Ridiculous.

$2.4 trillion is nearly twice the $1.3 trillion it would take to save every home in danger of foreclosure. That would keep many banks afloat, and act as the biggest economic stimulus in history. Can anyone sane tell us why we shouldn’t bring our troops back home? Can anyone justify wasting $2.4 trillion at a time when the U.S. economy is staring into the abyss of total collapse?

The other national obsession is the tax cuts Bush pushed through in 2001 and 2003. “The surplus is not the government’s money,” Bush said at the time, apparently unaware that the economy was already in a recession. “The surplus is the people’s money.” Remember surpluses? Such a Clintonian word. Anyway, Democrats in Congress–still in full-on wuss mode following 9/11–went along with Bush’s tax cuts. But, bless their wimpy little heads, they did manage to extract a concession: In 2011, tax rates would revert to what they’d been in 2001.

Believe a Republican once, shame on you. Believe a Republican twice, what were you thinking? Now so-called conservatives are complaining that “the largest tax increase in history” will occur in 2011 if Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to expire.

Making the Bush tax cuts permanent would codify the most regressive tax change in history. “After-tax income would increase by more than six percent for households in the top one percent of the nation’s income distribution, two percent for households in the middle 60 percent, and only 0.3 percent for households in the bottom 20 percent,” found a Brookings Institution study.

Making the rich richer will cost the Treasury an arm, a leg, and the better part of a torso.

“Combined with a minimal but necessary fix to the government’s Alternative Minimum Tax, making the tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues by almost $1.8 trillion over 10 years–and that’s in addition to the $1.7 trillion of revenue losses already locked into law.”

$1.8 trillion. Again, allow me to remind you: $1.3 trillion is the amount we need to stave off imminent financial catastrophe.

That sound you hear is the door breaking down. The marshal is coming down the hall. Get off the computer. Fix the problem. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let the tax cuts expire.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

The Morning After

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Ted Rall

Actually, the evening after. After the election, that is.

I’ll be joining Lizz Winstead and other pundits to discuss the bloody aftermath at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of whatever’s left of Manhattan. Info, including advance ticket purchase, is below:

“We Have a Winner”
Wednesday, November 5
8:00 PM
92nd Street Y
New York NY
Moderated by “The Daily Show” co-creator and acclaimed political humorist Lizz Winstead, “We Have a Winner” will take a look back, forward (and sideways) at the Presidential Election and State of the Union with some of the most insightful and hilarious political minds today – with Roseanne Barr, Monica Crowley, Robert A. George, Baratunde Thurston and Ted Rall.
Click here to buy tickets.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bush, Congress Party Like It’s 1929

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Ted Rall

Save People, Not Bankers

Seat belt laws embolden drivers to drive faster, causing a net loss of life. It’s the law of unintended consequences, also known as the Peltzman effect: the safer you feel, the more risk you take.

Sam Peltzman, the economist after whom said effect is named, says that government bailouts like the Bush Administration’s $700 billion attempt to stave off economic collapse are no more effective than “pouring money down a rat hole.” Moral hazard–rewarding reckless people and companies while allowing responsible ones to fail (hello, Lehman Brothers) may avert one economic crisis while planting the seeds of a worse one down the road.

“In the long run,” says Peltzman, “you’re just laying the groundwork for more because you’re giving people an incentive to take too much risk, where a big part of the risk gets laid off on the taxpayer.”

I don’t think much of the laissez faire, magic-of-the-marketplace, let-’em-eat-flat-screens school of Darwinian economics flogged by the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman once reigned supreme and Peltzman is a professor emeritus. But I think he has a point here–with a twist. Government intervention is appropriate and necessary during tough economic times. But not if you bail out corporations.

The 1979 Chrysler bailout is a perfect example. Jimmy Carter’s $1.2 billion loan sent an unwholesome message to Detroit: don’t change a thing. If you get into trouble, the government will rescue you. The Big Three kept selling gas guzzlers. Nimble foreign automakers that spent the 1980s and 1990s developing hybrid technology are crushing them now.

More recently, the government bailed out the airlines after 9/11, notably by limiting negligence lawsuits by relatives of victims. It’s hardly a coincidence that the major carriers haven’t done much to improve security. Similarly, it’s hard to see how U.S. taxpayers will benefit by lending my former employer Bear, Stearns $29 billion to facilitate its sale to JPMorganChase. Bear’s corporate culture, reeking of the testosterone-drenched arrogance of its seven-figure-salaried executives, led it to fib about the worth of the collateralized debt obligations that supposedly guaranteed the payment of its subprime mortgage hedge funds. When traders learned the truth, confidence in the firm collapsed, sealing its fate.

Or would have, if the feds hadn’t come along. Letting Bear go under might have prompted caution among future wannabe Masters of the Universe. If capitalism survives this debacle, we’ll see more like it as a result.

Democrats are asking for some laudable amendments to Bush’s plan. They want to give bankruptcy court judges the power to reduce monthly mortgage payments, cap executive salaries, and increase Congressional oversight of the financial services companies involved. Good ideas, but none go far enough. Besides, they’d expire at the end of 2009. Does anyone think the economy will be booming by then?

At least four million people–nine percent of all homeowners–have fallen behind on their payments or are in foreclosure. And 6.5 million more could go down the tubes next year. “People with poor credit have been defaulting on mortgage payment in large numbers for more than a year,” says Douglas McIntyre, an editor at 247wallst.com. “Now the problem has moved to homeowners with reasonably good credit.”

Each family that loses their house creates a ripple effect. Empty homes lower their neighbors’ property values. Some dispossessed workers, unable to find a new place near their jobs, become unemployed. Savings are wiped out. Forced to move, parents pull children out of school, disrupting their education in ways that will hurt them and society decades from now. Banks are burdened with the costs of maintaining property they don’t want until they can unload it at a reduced price–further depressing real estate prices. Society, even renters, has an interest in preventing foreclosures.

The unpredictable nature of the current real estate price plunge has created another set of problems. Tobin Harshaw of The New York Times sums up a complicated mess as nicely as anyone I’ve read: “There are a whole bunch of mortgage-backed securities, the value of which is not known, because nobody knows what the default rates on the underlying mortgages are likely to be.” Investors can’t set prices, much less invest, without reliable information. So credit markets have seized up.

Americans are peering into the abyss, a.k.a. the End of Everything As We Know It. So whom are we counting upon to save the day? The same Bushist dead enders and Congressional layabouts who let Osama bin Laden live and New Orleans die.

So yeah, we’re toast. But let’s talk about what should be done:

1. Declare a Bank Holiday. As FDR did in 1933, Bush should shut down the financial system–banks, stock and currency exchanges–for a week or so to avoid panic selling, cool down market volatility, and give Congress time to craft carefully considered legislation rather than the spend-a-thon slapped together over the last Black Weekend. It bodes ill that liberals and conservatives alike have so little faith in the plan. Take some time; get it right.

2. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. The current mortgage meltdown couldn’t have happened without Senator Phil Gramm, now a key economic advisor to John McCain. In 1999 Gramm led the repeal of the Depression-era legislation that had separated commercial from investment banks, allowing Citigroup and other companies to sell mortgage-backed securities that blurred the line between Main Street and Wall Street. Let the financiers handle derivatives, structured investment vehicles, and other arcane financial instruments. Banking should return to its dull, staid roots as a business that pays interest on deposits and collects interest on loans without imperiling those deposits.

3. Bail out homeowners, not lenders. Stop doling out hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars, to a few banks and issue the cash to the disaggregated tens of millions of Americans who will spend the money and stimulate the economy instead. Which brings us to…

4. Abolish predatory interest rates. Millions of people in danger of losing their homes would not be in trouble if their banks weren’t charging usurious interest rates. Every primary homeowner should be automatically refinanced to a floating 30-year mortgage, with the interest rate set at 1/4 percent point above the fed funds borrowing rate. Similarly, all consumer credit card debt should be refinanced to prime plus 1/4. The same goes for student loans. Secondary and vacation homes don’t qualify. Unemployed homeowners can apply for hardship deferrals, allowing them to skip mortgage payments until they find a job. Payday loans ought to fall under similar guidelines. In Utah, the average interest rate on payday loans is 521 percent! Of course, reforms will cut deeply into lenders’ earnings. Many banks would be at risk of going under, which is why…

5. Banks that fail should be nationalized. As should investment banks and any other institution that needs federal taxpayer money to avoid failure. If we the people fund ’em, we the people own ’em. If and when the economy recovers, the Treasury collects the spoils and cuts our taxes.

6. Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, and slash defense spending. Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, tells USA Today the government may have to cover $1.4 trillion in bad mortgage debt. That’s a lot of money, but I have good news: we can get it. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq would cost at least $2.4 trillion through the next decade–even more if Obama or McCain keep their pledges to send more troops to Afghanistan next year. Cutting our losses and cutting the $515 billion a year Defense Department appropriations budget would help finance the clean-up of the mortgage meltdown.

(C) 2008 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

Ted Rall Gets Animated

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Ted Rall

Here it is–my first animated editorial cartoon: “President Obama’s First Day.” It is also available at YouTube.

I wrote, drew and designed the characters for “President Obama’s First Day,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek look at liberal Democrats’ fantasies of how an Obama Administration would instantly change things for the better.

The animation was done by David Essman (see biography below).

There are some great Flash-based edittoons out there, but they take a different approach than I do. I see each animated cartoon as a skit, as a mini TV show. I hope people enjoy watching ‘Obama’s First Day’ as much as David and I enjoyed making it.

I plan to continue releasing Web-based animated cartoons.

Bios, for those who care:

Ted Rall, 45, is President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. A nationally-syndicated editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, Rall’s cartoons have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek and more than 200 other publications. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1996, and twice won first place in the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.

David Essman is a 22 year old animator, currently studying at The
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films have been screened
across the country at film festivals including San Francisco Shorts,
Animation Block Party, and the St. Louis International Film Festival.

Welcome to New York, Sarah Palin.

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Ted Rall

posted by Susan Stark

I just read the morning paper on my way to work. It appears that Sarah Palin is going to visit my fair city. She will have her hair done, and dine at many fine restaurants here.

In honor of her visit, I would like to recommend two venues that she simply cannot miss.

One is the Museum of Natural History. There, she will see and wonder in awe at a stunning display of evolution at work. Roughly a million schoolchildren visit the museum each year, and they benefit from it tremendously.

The second venue takes place during the night. I highly recommend Ms. Palin attend a Session of Exhibitionism. There, she will watch people having sex without pregnancy as a consequence of such activity. It will truly be an eye-opening experience for her.

Many of the young women and men who perform at exhibition shows are putting themselves through college, and could benefit from her support.

Have a great time, Sarah!

Tick, Tock

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Ted Rall

Watch this space…my first animated cartoon comes out tomorrow!

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Good, the Bad and the Editor

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Ted Rall

Why Political Cartoons Matter More Than Ever

I could not help but notice the editorial cartoon,” complains a Canadian newspaper reader, “which in my opinion was not funny or satirical at all–in the past, the purpose of an editorial cartoon.” An editor at the Houston Chronicle disagrees. “The point of satire is not to be funny,” he argues. “The point is to be critical.”

Who’s right? Both. Neither. Who knows? And that’s the problem.

For some reason my colleagues have made me President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), the organization for professional political cartoonists. (I suspect cartoonists’ predilection for hard drinking had something to do with it.) Kidding aside, I’m honored. And scared.

As I’ve written before, daily newspapers–the biggest source of income for cartoonists–are in crisis. Bottom lines dependent on ad revenue, decimated by the migration of advertising money to the impecunious Web, are now getting killed by the recession. Layoffs and buyouts of reporters and other news staffers are at pandemic levels. As circulations have declined, cartoonists have paid a heavy price. At the beginning of the 20th century, most U.S. newspapers had a full-time staff editorial cartoonist, possibly 2,000 or more. In 1980, after many cities had lost all but one or two of their papers, there were about 280. Now there are fewer than 100–six lost their jobs in the last several months.

Alternative weekly papers print political cartoons but pay nominal reprint fees, not real salaries. The Internet doesn’t pay at all.

The professional political cartoonist–the man or woman who spends their life living and breathing politics, history and sociology and devotes their career to distilling new ways of thinking about the world with a drawing, could become extinct.

Ironically, this is the golden age of political cartooning. Never has the form been blessed by so many talented artists drawing in such a dazzling variety of visual styles. And never have so many Americans wanted to read them. So why are they in trouble?

The nativist Thomas Nast pioneered modern editorial cartooning 150 years ago, in Harper’s Weekly. Today Nast’s heirs publish their work in the surviving daily and weekly newspapers, hundreds of free weeklies, a few major magazines and on countless websites. That doesn’t include comic strips with political content like “Doonesbury” and “Prickly City” or genres such as politically-minded graphic novels, animated Web cartoons, or The New Yorker covers.

No American can escape elementary school without being taught about political cartoons. We clip them out, paste them up and read them in history textbooks. But few of us understand what they’re for, what constitutes a good one, or why they matter.

Most people agree about what makes a great movie. You need a good script, great actors, smart direction, sharp editing, etc. Quality standards are widely accepted, so it’s unusual for a truly awful film to win an Oscar or a great one to bomb.

But there’s no such consensus about cartoons. That, even more than the dismal economic outlook for newspapers, is why it’s getting harder for editorial cartoonists to make a living. It doesn’t matter that editorial cartoons are read by more Americans than ever, or that they’ve never been better, if people don’t understand their purpose.

Most readers, for example, assume that an editorial cartoon reflects the editorial viewpoint of the newspaper where it appears. Until roughly 50 years ago, this was often true. No more. Like a columnist, a staff cartoonist’s views are his or her own. Mike Ramirez, a conservative, worked until 2006 for the Los Angeles Times, which is liberal. The Washington Post‘s editorial board is dominated by neoconservatives; Post cartoonist Tom Toles is liberal.

Is a good political cartoon funny or trenchant? Allegorical (labels and symbols like the Democratic donkey and Uncle Sam) or influenced by comic strips (linear and narrative)? Wordy or wordless? Fair or partisan? No one agrees. Editors and cartoonists argue about these questions all the time, never getting closer to consensus.

Among cartoonists, there’s one area of agreement: negativity. We love it.

“I don’t draw cartoons that support anything,” says editorial cartoonist Daryl Cagle, who also runs an online compendium by his colleagues. “I just criticize. Supportive cartoons are lousy cartoons.” But editors love them.

Quality standards for editorial cartooning remain maddeningly elusive. The most widely reproduced cartoons are those reprinted in Time and Newsweek; among cartoonists and their fans, they are considered the worst the profession has to offer. Respected “cartoonists’ cartoonists” labor in unremunerated obscurity; some of the most successful figures in the profession, millionaires with multiple Pulitzers on their resumes, are reviled as hacks.

During the 2006 Danish cartoon controversy, The New York Times unwittingly revealed a couple of common editorial errors about political cartoons: that they shouldn’t offend and that they’re the same as prose, but with pictures. Executive editor Bill Keller decided not to print the Mohammed cartoons next to news stories about them. “On the one hand, we have abundant evidence that a significant number of people–some of them our readers–consider these cartoons deeply offensive and inflammatory,” Keller explained. “On the other hand,” he continued, “we feel we can quite adequately convey the nature of the cartoons by describing them.”

Most cartoonists don’t try to offend anyone. But controversy isn’t something they avoid. Cartoons aren’t and shouldn’t be fair or considerate. Picking on an editorial cartoonist for offending someone is like criticizing a boxer for breaking the other guy’s nose. It happens. And anyone who thinks there’s no difference between seeing a cartoon and reading about it is out to lunch.

As long as there are politicians to insult, political cartoons will be around in some form. Obscene pictures depicting the municipal officials of Pompeii decorate the ruined resort town’s walls. It’s a fair bet that Paleolithic humans used cave paintings to mock pompous tribal leaders. If present trends continue, however, the art will be deprofessionalized.

Imagine a world without professional journalists–only bloggers. The news would lose its credibility and thus its relevance. The results would be the same if newspapers ran editorial cartoons by amateurs. In California last year, the Vallejo Times-Herald invited its readers: “Are you better at drawing than writing? Now’s your chance to show your stuff to the world, with a Cartoon to the Editor.” But its pitch revealed the editors’ cluelessness; if anything, the writing/idea of a cartoon is more important than the artwork. Moreover, people who draw cartoons on the side can’t provide the contextual consistency needed to establish credibility with readers.

If newspapers are to have a future, they need to attract younger readers. The latest attempt to find out how comes in the form of a study by Northwestern University’s Media Management Center. One major recommendation is to add “alternative storytelling like graphics.” “Humor is a powerful tool, one that ‘The Daily Show,’ Slate, Politico, etc. use well and it compliments their brand,” adds Andrew Satter, an online video producer for Congressional Quarterly. “We have to own engaging explanatory multimedia journalism.”

Speaking of graphics and humor, editorial cartoons are the most read–often the only read–feature on a newspaper’s opinion page. Slate and the Politico both place a big emphasis on cartoons. It’s paying off. Papers out to increase circulation should be hiring professional cartoonists.

(C) 2008 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

McCain on Meds?: Let’s Find Out

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Ted Rall

In May the McCain campaign revealed that the Republican presidential candidate is taking a variety of medications. This isn’t surprising; many elderly Americans do.

But there’s definitely more than eight years separating 2000’s Straight Talk Express–the glad-handing, shoot-from-the-hip aging flyboy who liked to shoot the shit with the journos in the back of the bus–and today’s carefully calibrated, creepy-smiling control freak. And I think I know what that something is: antidepressants.

Zoloft? Prozac? Who knows? What’s obvious is that McCain’s personality has flattened. Anyone who knows someone who has gone on antidepressants knows what I’m talking about.

If McCain is taking one of these meds, which are known for serious psychological side effects in some people, the American people deserve to know now. Toward that end, I renew my offer to contribute $10,000 to McCain’s presidential campaign (the previous offer expired when he and his toadies were unable to back up his assertion that the U.S. had been created as a Christian nation). All he has to do is take a comprehensive drug test administered by a qualified neutral party in order to determine what, if anything, he is on. In order to qualify for the $10,000 said test should be administered, and its results released, prior to October 1, 2008.

Maybe spending eight years licking Bush’s bunghole has transformed the quick-witted, hot-tempered McCain of 2000 into the Stepford Wives robot before us today. But $10,000 says it’s more than that.

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