california politics are like high school cliques

Dems vs the Taxpayer Caucus – RUMBLE!

Oh, I do like the slapfights in California politics. Wisconsin is in it to win; we’re in it to flex our muscle, even without the Governator.

The Taxpayer Caucus is the newest clique. Tony Strickland,  a State Senator who started the caucus, so probably isn’t biased at all, writes about it in the Ventura County Star.

California’s taxes are some of the highest in the nation. We have the highest sales taxes. Our corporate income tax is the highest west of the Mississippi. Our personal income taxes are the third-highest in the nation.

Sadly, all true. The sales tax, especially, puts a little sad face on me. :(

The governor wants to put tax increases — which would amount to more than $50 billion over five years — to a vote of the people in June. I think the people should be given a choice on taxes, but they should be given all the choices. If the governor wants to put tax increases on the ballot, then he needs to put an equal or higher tax cut on the ballot, as well. This is the only way voters will truly have their voices heard.

Read  the Star link further to see who would get the juicy tax cut.

Cartoon Caption: IF CALIFORNIA WAS STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL. Current cool kids (the Dems). Feel-good Principal Jerry Brown (he could kick you out, but he won’t) Lunchroom Lady Lockyer (California Treasurer). And the newest clique: The Taxpayer Caucus.

Interpretation: I know political cartoons can be confusing, especially to those not in the state. Or, maybe those in the state. (Most people in California know very little about how the state is actually run.) In this case, The Taxpayer Caucus recently started in California as a way for the GOP (Republicans) to stop Jerry Brown from pushing through his tax ideas. Brown wants to raise taxes, to lower the California budget, but he needs permission from other politicians to put in on the ballot for June.

The GOP says, wait a minute: if you’re going to make a proposal to raise taxes, we want some changes in return. So they started a new club: The Taxpayer Caucus.

I found this game very amusing, and drew it as a high school, with various people jockeying for positions! (Not saying Bill Lockyer, the Treasurer, necessarily wears dresses, however…)

Coming up soon: the 5 Rogue Republicans who are bucking the party line to meet secretly with Jerry Brown: they will probably be ostracized and get Slushies thrown at them.

More cartoons:

1. When Republicans turn into rogue elephants.
2. Yahoo! News Editorial Cartoon on food stamps.

I had to wade through a lot of elephants saying no to Obama (for Supreme Court nominees), and a lot of  Tea Party ridiculers, and of course Sarah Palin haters, before I found these gems. (I think Glenn McCoy and I may be the only cartoonists who even attempt to shed light on the liberal wussy left.)

I’ll start off today with a cartoonist who is firmly conservative, however: Lisa Benson from Gocomics.com.

Lisa Benson of Gocomics

Lisa is very local – lives somewhat to the North of LA, and is the cartoonist for a California paper. She usually attacks Obama, rather than political issues in general, as is true in this cartoon. For instance, one (like me) might target the evil bombing countries, but she prefers to blame the President! I picked this cartoon because the Nuclear Summit was in the news this week, and Obama’s facial expression and casual whistle as he walks away made me smile!

I guess I’m not always the best critic, because at first I thought she was saying Obama did a good job! But since the bomb is National Security, I guess not. Still, good cartoon (even though I don’t agree with the point of view) and she draws a credible Obama. Some other cartoonists might want to practice him, since he’ll be around for a while. :)

Mike Luckovich of Gocomics.com

I picked almost all captionless cartoons this week. I prefer words, in general – no Wordless Wednesday for me! Also, I’m not a fan of black scratchy pen scrawls in online cartoons. Perhaps it looks better in the paper, which usually pays the bigger cartoonists like Mike Luckovich, so I see why they don’t want to change their style.  But nowadays, most people will see it online.

However, I couldn’t resist this one  of the Pope sweeping the pedophile scandals under the rug! (Why, they look like little children’s heads, disembodied from the horrible rapes from the offending priests… I have a dark soul.) And the Pope is obviously drawn with Uncle Fester of The Addams Family in mind! (from cartoonist Charles Addams, great New Yorker cartoonist.) 

Wordless, and it works, Mike Luckovich of Gocomics.com!

I’m making notes on a couple of the Catholic Church scandal cartoons I’ve come across, as the passivity and negligence and lack of responsibility unfold. (My own cartoon on the priest rapes (Sorry, no link now. Uclick threw away 2 years of my cartoons on Slate, Gocomics and Yahoo News when they kicked me out of Gocomics.) is here.) As of a year or so ago, the population of Los Angleles makes the former minorities (mostly Hispanic) now a majority. So, yeah, Catholicism would be the main religion here. How do they go to church and not ask questions now?!

Here’s a lighthearted cartoon from David Fitzsimmons  of Political Cartoons, about the Supreme Court nominee process.

David Fitzsimmons of politicalcartoons.com

Unlike most of the other cartoons I found, David has made the process into a game of basketball for Obama, and the elephants are part of the game, not the evil enemy. There are some famous basketball games in LA that go on for years! I think it’s mostly people in the industry and scriptwriters. “We’re not just rich cliques, we’re homeboys!”

It’s all a game, people.

I’m a fan of Fitzsimmons for the limited palettes he often uses – that is, limiting the colors in his cartoons to 2 or 3 colors. In this case, it’s a little bit more than 3, but still in the same palette area. The swirls on the wall don’t really make sense, but that’s what makes them fun!

I can only choose 3 cartoons for the Times, but this is a hearty Honorable Mention I wanted to include this week.

Steve Greenberg of politicalcartoons.com

Steve Greenberg is another local cartoonist of Political Cartoons, who lives just outside of Los Angeles, and a friend as well. (He came to my booksigning, didn’t he?!)

I don’t agree with the concept – we all get pollution, rich and poor – but the soft neutral coloring here, even though the cartoon is about toxic chemicals, won my heart! The LA Times deserves the pretty, even though they ignore it in their artwork. And pollution of any kind is something we in California, and in SoCal particularly, can NEVER EVER forget.

Thanks again to all the talented clever cartoonists I was able to include this week, and good luck for next weeks’ picks for the LA Times Opinion section!

Remember, if you want me to consider your work, the guidelines are here. And if one of your cartoons is chosen and you want me to link to your blog or site, just let me know.

My own cartoons this week:

No sex for war - C. Thomas

Comments on Lysistrata here. (Sorry, no link now. )

Dwarves  in a coal mine cartoon. (Sorry, no link now. )

Are really good brownies considered a medical miracle?

Comments on pot brownies here. (No)

Medical Marijuana requires munchies.

Captions for blind Google: The rich get richer, and the poor get their byproducts. Basketball game for the Supreme Court. National Security and nuclear warhead with Obama. The Pope sweeps messy pedophile priests under the rug.

No related posts.

As happened last week, as I start going through the week’s cartoons I always start thinking – there aren’t enough good cartoons here. Uh-oh. And by the end I’ve picked more than I can use, and I feel very happy that there are so many great, entertaining cartoons out there! In spite of the economy, the foolish newspapers who have let their Editorial Cartoonist go, or use less cartoons than ever (LA Times, I’m looking at you), cartoonists are like crocuses, popping up even in the snow. Very proud to be part of the gang.

Ahmadinejad the Cat nuclear energy cartoon - Christo Komanitski from Cagle Cartoons

It’s funny, I don’t like foreign movies at all, but I do like some of the international cartoonists very much. Look: I’ve never seen an editorial cartoon that is completely wordless! You could use this for Wordless Wednesday! No labels, perfect.

This cartoon is not only quite charming, in a French 1950′s textbook way -  it explains a complicated, sensitive international news item in a way everyone can appreciate. I can’t speak for the cartoonist, but I read this as Ahmadinejad waiting for scraps to fall from the table of the bombs Obama and Netanyahu? are dismantling.

In Los Angeles, we’re of two minds about cats: we pass laws that they can’t be declawed, but also don’t want feral cats to just die…Anyway, I think it’s usually a dog who waits for scraps from the master’s table, and this looks more like a monkey, but the point is clear. Thanks, Christo!

Joel Pett death coal cartoon from Gocomics.com

I thought news teams did a great job this week investigating the Massey scandal of ignoring safety violations in the coal mining disaster in West Virginia. I read one story where one of the men who died, Josh Napper,  had a premonition the weekend before the disaster and wrote letters to his family – perhaps stimulated by gas leaks so bad the day before that the miners got out of work early. UGH to this disgusting company! And I’ll have my own cartoon on coal mining up tomorrow on Slate and Yahoo.

Joel of Gocomics lives in Kentucky, and I think they have a lot of mining there, too. (I don’t know the area that well, just as I’m sure Joel doesn’t know a lot about California, although he chooses cartoons for the LA Times.) Interesting that he didn’t dis the mine owners responsible…just pointed out that mining is dangerous, almost like the deaths are the fault of the meanie coal!!  The little button reads Friend of Coal;the text is a little small, and this is a problem online, and I ignore lots of cartoons because of this – hello, learn your medium, guys.

But Joel did a great job with the menace of the death skull, and the whole idea, so kudos, Joel.

Dana Summers cartoon on immigration from GoComics

Dana Summers has a loose, easy style that I always like. This is the only cartoon of all the ones I reviewed that made me laugh! It’s okay to laugh, even when you’re reading the LA Times. How much of the news this year has been about health care?  Too too much. On to the next White House problem. And, uh, yeah, immigration is always the problem hiding in the corner, in California. Great work, Dana.

Honorable Mention goes to Randy Bish at Cagle Cartoons.

Randy Bish on paying taxes cartoon at Cagle Cartoons

UGH, tax week.

I didn’t read this in the paper, I heard it on talk radio from Tim Conway Junior: that almost half of all Americans don’t pay tax!!! I thought I misheard it. I couldn’t believe it. And filling out forms is the worst part, I think.  I still haven’t finished doing taxes! Too many little receipts floating around and Schedule C is the pits.

Randy’s style and big lettering is certainly ideal for online cartoons! I like the funny little outline around each figure, and even around the orange juice!

Thanks to everyone for participating, and remember to send me one cartoon each week if you think I might not find your cartoons elsewhere. An explanation of this roundup is here.

My own cartoons this week:

Massey coal mine is run by a dwarf. (Sorry, no links now. Uclick threw away 2 years of my cartoons on Slate, Gocomics and Yahoo News when they kicked me out of Gocomics.)

Earthquake cartoon.

Easter bunny and the Tea party cartoon. No.

Cartoon captions for Mr. Google: Who do we see about switching sides? About half of Americans pay no federal income tax.

Death figurehead is friend of coal mining.

Can we please move on from health care? Si. Immigration.

Silent cartoon: Ahmadinejad the Cat sits at the feet of Obama, another important man, and the nuclear bombs.

Joel’s picks for this weeks cartoon are over here (no, they’re not) – I think. The LA Times has always had a problem linking cartoons, even when I was in there every week.

More cartoons:

1. Editorial cartoons for the Los Angeles Times Opinion section.
2. Obama, pedophile priests, political Cartoons for April, 2010.

They do have 3 cartoons on Sunday, however, here and in the paper (tiny). But they’re edited by Joel Pett, a cartoonist in Lexington, KY. Lexington, really?? As far as I know, Joel has never lived here, and is Lexington in any way similar to Los Angeles? Well, they both begin with L, I guess. Anyway, Joel only chooses cartoonists in his particular cartoon group, which leaves out 15 or 20 of the top editorial cartoonists in the country.

I’m the only New Yorker cartoonist who also does editorial cartoons, so I have a good background in both. As an award-winning cartoonist and editor, and since I’ve been a cartoonist for the LA Times for 6 years, and, maybe, most importantly, actually live IN Los Angeles, I decided it’s time I stepped up to do the job myself. :)  Now, let’s pick today’s winners!

Tony Auth is a great cartoonist. I picked this one for several reasons: he was first out of the gate on this issue,  on the new coastal oil drilling Obama just approved. (boo, hiss, even though I don’t have all the environmental facts yet. Just because I don’t trust Obama.) It seems to be pretty common that editorial cartoonists will pick a name or word and then decorate it like an insane calligrapher. But he did a good job here, and the oil spatters are truly dramatic, spilling over the name itself.

People from other states (like Kentucky) might not realize that in LA oil rigs are common. Not out to sea, but they have baby ones like 12 feet tall in people’s backyards! They call them grasshoppers or some insect, and they are SO CUTE bobbing up and down. I hate driving to the airport, but I take the long way just to watch them.  I love industrial things. (more cartoons below.)

Next, I chose Marshall Ramsey‘s cartoon of an Easter egg hunt, and the big golden egg of Jobs hiding behind the tree! Very amusing! Good spring colors.

I have rarely, if ever seen this style of cartoon in the LA Times, and of course they don’t have color – even online. They rarely have holidays, either. But it’s time to shake things up there, and use cartoons people are AMUSED by – especially when they appear on a holiday, don’t you think?

Also, unemployment is much higher here  in Cali than almost any other state. Staggering.

I also picked this one by Michael Ramirez, the last fulltime opinion cartoonist for the Times. He actually lives here in SoCal. Did anything happen with Israel this week in the news? I don’t know. I don’t know that much about middle east issues. But I assume Michael does. Sometimes cartoons are used to instruct, or point something out to us, and the Times deserves an international cartoon. I like the design and rhythm in this.

Runner up is Walt Handelsman, below, both because I like the message, and I really like jigsaw puzzles. (I just saw some in Costco for like $17. Yowza.) Obama has a lot of work in front of him, but you know, life is more fun when you look at it as a game.

More on why I’m doing this: I edited a Barnes & Noble calendar and 2 books, and I was recently invited to be a judge for a national cartoon contest, so this is a piece of cake. I’ll edit the cartoons for the LA Times, thanks, and post my selections right here! I’ll pick from Gocomics.com and from Politicalcartoons.com, neither of which Joel covers; but if you are a cartoonist in another venue, and would like to be considered for my weekly roundup, by all means submit your best cartoon of the week (only one per week, please) to me at my email on my Contact page.

Also, Joel often picks his own cartoons for the roundups. I won’t be doing that. You can see my California cartoons, most of which appear in the Sunday LA Daily News in print, here or in CalWatchdog, and my Slate cartoons are both here and in Yahoo.

Thanks for playing, everyone, and more next week!

And let me know what you think of my choices!

My own cartoons this week: (Sorry, no links now. Uclick threw away 2 years of my cartoons on Slate, Gocomics and Yahoo News when they kicked me out of Gocomics.)

Bad priest cartoon.

Canary cartoon.

Evil health insurance cartoon.

No related posts.

Maybe I was wrong. And maybe cartoonists can help. I’ve never read editorial cartoons until about a year ago, so I had no experience to draw upon. But cartoonists leaped right into the fray, even as corpses sailed across the tv. In one sense, I guess it was brave of them(the cartoonists.) Here are some cartoons that worked, and some that didn’t. (Cartoons are after the jump.)

I originally read this story in AP, but it’s disappeared now. From Fox News:

All told, some 132 people have been pulled alive from beneath collapsed buildings by international search and rescue teams, she said.

Experts say the chance of saving trapped people begins diminishing after 72 hours. One mother still missing her children said it’s too soon to give up.

“Maybe there’s a chance they’re still alive,” said Nicole Abraham, 33, wiping away tears as she spoke of hearing the cries of her children — ages 4, 6 and 15 — for the first two days after the quake.

Oh, no worry! The entire report was copied from the AP and pasted on Puff Post as if the reporters were working for them.

Only a small number of funerals have been held since the 7.0-magnitude quake struck, with most people buried anonymously and without ceremony in mass graves on the outskirts of the city. An estimated 200,000 people died, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission. The United Nations said Saturday the government had preliminarily confirmed 111,481 bodies, but that figure does not account for corpses buried by relatives.

The LA Times has word from yet another survivor found 11 days after the quake:

He told of passing out in the rubble, dreaming at times that he could hear his mother crying. The furniture in his room had collapsed around him in such a way that it created a small space for him amid the ruins of the house. He had no food. When he got desperately thirsty, he drank his urine.

Also Friday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, though doctors said her condition was critical.

People, don’t give up looking for survivors!!! Especially now that we have Chile with the same problem. I don’t think it’s the rescuers that give up, however, it’s the government. But miracles happen, they happen every day – (thanks to Denny on Gray’s Anatomy – I miss him so much).

I saw a lot of cartoons use this idea of the name of the country with a lot of cracks in it – get it? – the earthquake. I thought the first one was very clever – I never would have thought of it. After a few of them..But remember, most readers see just the one, in their own paper, and think their cartoonist is very clever, and don’t know that a dozen other cartoonists are doing the same concept. You can learn from the Internet, not just imitate, so let’s hope the identical ideas are just coincidence.

I thought this one by Gary Markstein from gocomics.com was better than the other similar ones I saw.

Jeff Parker from cagle.com has an easy, clear style, which I always like, but I picked this one because I was impressed with how quiet and yet effective the idea was, and it’s how most of us get through the day – thinking about something horrific, and then finally acting on it. (I picked this out yesterday, but to my great surprise, Jeff and Steve Kelley (both editorial cartoonists, and Steve is one of my favorite op-ed cartoonists – I have one of his books!) just started a new comic strip today, which isn’t political at all! More on that later.)

I am not into scratchy black and white drawing styles from the 19th century, sorry – and they look their worst online. But I thought John Deering from gocomics.com did this difficult idea well – that both the buried Haitians and the UN were having problems with no seeming help.

Mike Luckovich from cagle.com did a nice visual here. Maybe this is a cliche, or a classic concept, the hourglass, but it’s new to me, and I thought the imagery of the bodies falling to their death was powerful. Sad.

Signe Wilkinson at gocomics. com is one of my top 3 political cartoonists! Great style, color, ideas, and she hardly ever misses, which may be the most amazing part of all!

Small World by Tom Briscoe from gocomics.com is 2nd only to Ted Rall in popularity in Gocomics. I just noticed that recently, after a year in there myself. I’ve only seen Small World once or twice, but why the subscribers…? This just seems weak to me.

I’m a sucker for a good graphic! The hands outstretched is a popular motif, as you can see even from my little collection here, but the bold colors and stylistic font and careful placement of elements make this my favorite. Thanks, Deng Coy Miel from cagle.com !

Thanks to all the cartoonists, and especially to Gocomics.com and politicalcartoons.com that offer some of the best cartoonists in the world, 24-7.

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