SlowpokeBlog

I've long gotten a kick out of the Republicans' attempts to sell the idea of "personal accounts" to the people. It's like they're saying, "Look! Our plan lets you USE YOUR OWN MONEY to pay for that appendectomy. Isn't that EXCITING!? Ownership society! WOO!" It's like they're trying to sell you your own pants. It's such an obviously bad deal that it's hilarious. To me, anyway.

As you may have noticed, I'm playing around with the positioning of the "Slowpoke" title this week. With the open text at the top, I thought the cartoon looked a little cluttered with the logo in its usual spot, so I decided to copy a layout maneuver I saw in the Funny Times. If you look at this month's issue, you'll see one of my cartoons on the back cover with the title rotated like this. I assume they did it for space reasons, but thought it looked kind of cool. Feel free to drop me a line and let me know if you find it: a) charmingly rakish, or b) upsetting and disorienting, or c) whatever, man.

Bush spoke to us in tired, simplistic platitudes as though we are children. Jim Webb's eloquent rebuttal spoke to us as grownups.

In previous SOTU's, Bush tended to have the clear (if ludicrously wrong) message, and the Democrats' response tended to be somewhat stiff and full of vague catchphrases like "We CAN do better!" But this time around, Webb -- to use his own line -- showed Bush the way. Props to the Dems for choosing him.

As a cartoonist, when you hear there are plans to build a $500 million presidential library for George W. -- the most expensive presidential library in history -- well, it's a subject that's hard to pass up. For more background on the library, I highly recommend Bill Berkowitz's essay, "Dubya's Half-Billion Tower of Babel." Apparently the Bushies want the library to house a new neocon think tank called the (gag!) Institute for Democracy. A perfect Orwellian end to an Orwellian administration. Apparently purging blacks from voter rolls, fighting a vote recount in the closest presidential election in history, making up slanderous tales about your Vietnam veteran opponent, and operating in unprecedented secrecy -- not to mention ignoring the will of the voters and advisers about Iraq -- all makes for good democracy. Here, here.

Interestingly, SMU's School of Theology wrote a letter to the Board of Trustees deprecating the proposed Bush library. It begins: "We count ourselves among those who would regret to see SMU enshrine attitudes and actions widely deemed as ethically egregious..." That's the SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY, BABY! Obviously a hotbed of disgruntled Chomskyites. (The department's full name is the Perkins School of Theology, a coincidence I appreciate. Read the Berkowitz article for their full statement. It's great.)

My apologies for the slightly-inscrutable print in this cartoon. When I'm drawing a one-panel strip like this, I routinely underestimate how much room I'll need, which means I wind up drawing the cartoon far too large and shrinking everything down in Photoshop so it will fit. I will try to exercise better forethought in the future.

Normally I'm hesitant to pass along generic Bush humor circulating around the internet, but this video is actually fairly entertaining. More because of the German guy than anything Bush does.

When Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as the first woman Speaker of the House, the general tone of the news media was a very normalizing "Wow, isn't that great?", as if it proved what an egalitarian society we've become. While I'm happy to see a sister ready to assume global domination when Bush and Cheney choke on their cream puffs, my overall reaction was that we should've been reading about this in books about 19th-century history. Had I been a producer in charge of news programming, I would have aired a two-hour long, in-depth report on what exactly took us 231 years (or 218 if you prefer the date of April 1, 1789, on which the House formally began work and first achieved a quorum).

At the same time, there's been a lot of chatter lately about new gizmos, software, etc. Our technology makes us feel like hot stuff, like we're more advanced than everyone else. Yet there are many ways in which we lag behind. Not that I'm saying women aren't horribly oppressed in other nations (I'm sure some yahoo will grossly misinterpret this cartoon and suggest I try moving to Saudi Arabia) -- but I do find it curious that a number of other countries have elected female top dogs, Jamaica apparently being the most recent. Check out this timeline.

Since I don't have cable television, I rarely watch Fox News, or any cable news for that matter. But whenever I am subjected to Fox, it almost always manages to exceed my worst expectations -- and let me tell you, my expectations are extremely low. The other night I happened upon the first episode of Sean Hannity's new show, Hannity's America, at the moment he was declaring Sean Penn this week's "Enemy of the State." Yes, they're now branding people enemies of the state. (YouTube video here.) Mr. Slowpoke and I were like, "Whoa! Did he just say...?"

The graphic for the segment consists of a montage of unsavory dictators like Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Hugo Chavez paired with Hollywood stars like Barbra Streisand, Michael Moore, and Alec Baldwin, all weirdly wearing the same black suit. At what point does the average Fox viewer say to himself or herself, "Hmm... that's a little creepy"? Last I heard, criticizing the government was a little freedom we enjoy here in the U.S. Perhaps Hannity would feel more comfortable in China where they use tanks to dispatch with such "enemies"?

(In addition to urging impeachment of the Bushies, Penn had called Hannity "a whore to the cause of his pimps - Murdoch and Ailes", which may explain Penn's new designation.)

I wrote this cartoon during Coors' "Guys Night Out" ad campaign a few years ago, which irritated me more and more each time I saw it. I can't remember the details, but it involved a bunch of jocks escaping the "feminizing" aspects of culture and carousing about like boars, and the only women in sight were of the bimbo variety. While I have no real objection to carousing like a boar -- we all need to do it sometimes -- the subtext was something like, "women are the anti-fun, except for that wang dang sweet poontang." Also, I like beer. So why not market to me, too? Not that I will ever willingly purchase Pete Coors' right-wing think tank-funding pisswater in a million years. But still.

David Sirota has a good post about New Year's Eve coverage in the Mountain time zone, in which I'm also currently stationed. Not only is there no live coverage of the countdown, but the only option for probably millions across the West is to watch a rerun of the ball dropping in Times Square on CNN... and they don't even bother to remove the "LIVE" declaration at the top of the screen.

Oddly, Sirota got an interview with Angela Jolie on CNN instead of the ball-drop rerun, which makes me wonder if his CNN was being beamed in from the Central time zone. But the point is the same. Such coverage only reinforces resentment of the East Coast, and lends credence to the meme of "East Coast elites."

I actually wrote about this last year, but it deserves another mention.

Keen readers will recognize this one as a "classic" Slowpoke, albeit newly gussied up with color. To not let one's brain occasionally aerate goes against the fundamentals of Slowpokedom. I've been avoiding the news somewhat, instead plowing my way through a pile of books I've been wanting to read for a while. I recommend David Brock's totally juicy Blinded by the Right, about being a journalistic hit man for the Clinton haters back in the '90s. The hypocrisy and depravity will surprise even the most jaded among you.

I guess it's a new year, isn't it? In the past I've tended to be sentimental about the year's end, but now that we're waist-deep in the '00s, the date doesn't seem so signifcant to me anymore. I will say 2006 was a great year for Slowpoke, as I added several papers. Thanks for reading, and for all the email, and best wishes for a happy '07.