Osama bin Laden cartoon of thank you letter to Pakistan

First Osama bin Laden cartoon

I was in shock for the first couple of days – I guess we all were – but the main question that nagged at me,  was why the sneak attack without Pakistan’s permission, and how could he possibly live there, in a bustling city, for so long, without anyone noticing? I can honestly tell you that I would have been on the phone to my Councilman, Tom LaBonge, within days of that house built and mysterious people moving in. So I did this cartoon right away, because I don’t like lying countries.

On the radio Wayne Resnick pointed out that the US is being very circumspect about both exclaiming that there is something suspicious about the whole thing, and yet on all the Sunday news shows, they denied that they have any evidence that Pakistan knew Osama was living there. Can’t wait til more facts are in on THAT one.

Interpretation of cartoon

Cartoon caption: Found in [Osama's] compound: some pressed violets, a machine gun, an old-fashioned photo of Osama bin Laden, and a thank you letter on creamy thick ecru stationary, reading: Dear Pakistan, I just wanted to thank you for giving me a home the past few years! Thanks for putting me up…and for putting up with me! I know I can be a handful, but you have always been a gracious host. You rock! Sincerely, your friend and America’s enemy, Osama bin Lad...and the note ends there, with some scattered drops of blood. We can only imagine what scenario took place there, and why the note ended so abruptly.

Since we kept hearing how the Osama team didn’t let electronics in the house, I wanted to use an old fashioned setup. Victorians were big on pressed flowers! And maybe Osama had picked some to give to Pakistan with the note. And I used an old-fashioned Kodak snapshot, from the 50′s or 60′s, as his picture.

Thank you notes are out of fashion now, but always appreciated.

Osama home videos

Also, I finally saw the Osama bin Laden home videos. Unlike the dog video, they were lame, as I expected. Time says:

But one video screened by the Pentagon offers a starkly different portrait of the infamous recluse. The seemingly candid video (above) shows Osama bin Laden sitting on the floor of his compound, watching satellite television. He holds the remote in his hand as he flips through the news networks to analyze the media’s coverage of him, a vain action he was said to engage in often…

Who writes this crap? Vain? Try living in Los Angeles, with actors everywhere you go. (but I love ‘em anyway!) And like everyone reading this doesn’t look themselves up in Google or post pictures of themselves in Facebook! Gah!

But it is not bin Laden’s vanity that has surprised so many web viewers, but rather his physical appearance. He appears frail and unkempt, with a beard that’s gray overall.

I’ve read this description in other sources, too. He doesn’t look frail to me, he looks cold. And, surprise, in Mideast countries they sit on the floor a lot, and they wear blankets and shawls all the time. It’s not enough that we killed the man – now the media wants to keep stirring the pot by saying silly slurs.

Image via Wikipedia - Osama is an author! He wrote this book!

The only thing I see wrong in the video is that the plugs are in a weird place on the wall, and the TV is much too small. Get a life.

More cartoons:

1. Obama found a horse head in his bed.
2. Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo’s purse.

He’s dead, as it turns out. I heard the news oh boy on Wayne Resnick, KFI. I always try to catch him each week, but this time I only listened about half an hour before I realized all the TV stations might run the President’s announcement, too, and so they did.

I’m glad they caught that SOB, but at the same time, I honestly don’t feel glee knowing that the Navy Seals set it up like an assassination. I mean, what do you call it when they target someone in particular and shoot to kill? That’s not war, it’s like illegal capital punishment.

And now we find out all the facts, like hiding behind one of his wives, and his being armed, are false. Some kind of mess there, for sure. Daily Caller talks about some of these conflicting accounts.

My first reaction to the announcement of his assassination, in spite of my personal problems swirling around me now, was to make a joke about it on Facebook, and turns out a lot of people liked it. So I’ve turned it into a cartoon. (cartoon after the break)

Osama cartoon about how his death affects single women - is he good marriage material?

Notes on art: one of the best ways to start experimenting in art is to have something happen by mistake. In this case, I just swooshed a bunch of color on the floor, thinking about the pine floor of a bar. Then I used a purply wound color for the background area. I also colored the TV a pale blue in other versions, but didn’t have time to do it here. (I’m going to try this cartoon out in Psychology Today tomorrow. They’re a rather conservative crowd (not in politics, in humor), so I’m not sure how this cartoon will go over there!)

Cartoon caption: Girls Night Out, with 3 women at a bar. One says, Okay, but let’s be honest, girls. Now there’s also one less available man around. Behind them is a TV with the news of Osama’s death.

Ann Coulter says her dog knows more about Arabs than Obama does. I thought she was going to say, knew more about how Osama died – like dogs have better noses, etc.

Image via Wikipedia- a Navy Seal posing

Speaking of Psychology Today, this writer says when we misspeak and say Obama, when we mean to say Osama, that’s meaningless. I’m not so sure. I’ve been doing it myself, and hear announcers say it, too.  Well, at least no one is talking about his birth certificate this week.

More cartoons:

1. The official Osama bin Laden cartoon.
2. Navy sonar is like unsolicited sales calls to whales.

Just Kidding again! I wanted to see if you were paying attention. So not true. He read the Communist Manifesto and was a Liberal. But lefties can’t get their fingers to stop pointing at Sarah Palin for Every. Single. Event.

Sarah is innocent. Okay, Sarah, you did make one mistake: Don’t draw guns or crosshairs on top of anyone. Also, ever since you started your TV show and proved that hunting is a sport for you, I would never vote for you now. Yes, I’m that against hunting. but I’m hoping you’ll come around on that issue Sarah. Guns, okay, killing animals for fun, not okay.

But the media has gone straight from the shootings, to Sarah as a cause. Amazing how non-logical that is. According to Mediaite:

“However unfair the link is,” said [Geraldo] Rivera, “I think that this event affects Sarah Palin’s at least short term political future.” He then offered his prediction that, tomorrow, Palin’s name will (still) be tied to the media’s flurry of reports on the shooting, facing “criticism and scrutiny” for a perceived link to alleged gunman Jared Loughner.

Newsbusters is not exactly a neutral news organization – they’re a conservative group – but maybe they’re necessary in our liberal media world. They point out this ridiculous politicization of the tragedy, by seeking everything Republican to blame. They had a great tweet from Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas:

who tweeted, “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin

OMG! Needless to say, now we all know the boy shot them on his own, with no help from anyone else, and no indication that he even knew who Sarah Palin is.

This cartoon took me about 5 hours, I’m embarrassed to say. I had to figure out how to do the jigsaw puzzle thing, what clues to include, etc. I rearranged the puzzle pieces for Slate, to make a more pleasing arrangement for teh nutballs over there.

Cartoon Caption: FIND OUT WHO’S TO BLAME! (for the killing of 6 people with Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson.) You know who (Hitler), Jared Loughlin, Sarah Palin, talk radio, Fox News, Ayn Rand‘s book, We, the Living, a semi-automatic gun, a crosshairs, or an editorial cartoon by D. Barstow or any other cartoonist? Cartoon is cut out in shape of jigsaw puzzle. Oh, and the missing glove is here, too. :)
Other sites:

• Sarah Palin, The Real Victim In Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Shooting (queerty.com)
• Barbara Walters Feels Bad For Sarah Palin (thehollywoodgossip.com)

More cartoons:

1. Mark E. Kelly, your wife called.
2. What would Sarah Palin do? What will she do?

Paul Conrad, whose fiercely confrontational editorial cartoons made him one of the leading political provocateurs of the second half of the 20th century and who helped push the Los Angeles Times to national prominence, has died. He was 86.

“When it comes to editorial cartooning, I am unabashedly biased: Paul Conrad was simply the best ever,” Times Editor Russ Stanton said Saturday.

He was great, that’s for sure. He won an amazing 3 Pulitzers. He was an exceptionally wonderful cartoonist, and I can’t imagine why the liberal loving Times let him go – he never got a venue as good as that again. Of course, Russ Stanton wasn’t editor when Paul Conrad was the cartoonist there, and none have been hired under your watch, Russ. So your experience is like, nil. (Side note: The LA Times is 4th biggest in circulation, but has fewer editorial cartoons than at least the 100 biggest papers in the country!)

Conrad was on Gocomics with me in Editorial cartoons – quite impressive and inspirational to me. I don’t look at the other cartoons all that much, but when I was doing my LA Times cartoons roundups here a few weeks ago he had one that caught my eye:

paul conrad cartoon of Obama as Nixon

I just checked, and Conrad is no longer on Gocomics – I don’t know whether they dropped it when he died, or whether Tribune dropped them, but I believe this is the last cartoon they used of his, so I’m glad I saved it.

Love the inky messiness. I know that’s Nixon’s famous victory? gesture, but I don’t know why Obama is doing it. Maybe it  hooked up to a news item a while ago.

I met Conrad a few times, as we were both in the Impolitic gallery in Santa Monica, CA. I wasn’t doing political cartoons at the time, but of course I knew his work – one of the few editorial cartoonists I ever read, with his bold, yet minimal drawings and wry humor. He was sort of egotistical and not very friendly at the parties; so, not a people person, at least at parties. He always had a crowd around him, however.

Paul Conrad via LA Times via Huntington Library ITVS

Paul at work. He kept drawing even during the parties (which were pretty damn great).

Your work was stand-out, Paul. Good job.

More cartoons:

1. Complete list of all Political Cartoons through 2011!
2. Giving out vaccines for Halloween.

John-Jones nutty putty cave

More than 50 people tried to help him for over a day.

The 6-foot-tall, 190-pound Jones got stuck with his head at an angle below his feet about 9 p.m. Tuesday in an L-shaped area of the cave known as “Bob’s Push.” The area is only about 18 inches wide and 10 inches high.

I literally shuddered at those numbers. Oh my gah. My worst nightmare.

At one point, they had moved him roughly 12 feet out of the tight crevice, far enough to give him some food and water. But he slipped back into the space when an anchor in the cave roof that supported the pulley system failed,

Spencer Jones said his family is “remarkably strong,” but is struggling to make sense of what happened.

I think I know.

I remember reading about a totally different death in the LA Times in 2006 that was disturbing on several counts. A family reported a woman was missing – Mariesa Weber, a 38 year old woman who lived with her mom and sister. Well, that’s strange to begin with. Anyway, from Fox News:

Weber, 38, returned home Oct. 28 and greeted her mother, then wasn’t seen again. Her family thought she had been kidnapped and contacted authorities. Family members scoured her room for clues but found nothing, though they did notice a strange smell.

Her family believes Weber, who was 5-foot-3 and barely 100 pounds, may have fallen headfirst into the space.

On Nov. 9, Weber’s sister went into her bedroom and looked behind a bookcase, where she saw the woman’s foot. Using a flashlight the family saw Weber was wedged upside-down behind the unit.

Um, yeah, I guess. How could someone possibly fall BEHIND a bookcase?

There’s a disgusting description of the girl’s body in St Petersburg Times, of all places!, and many comments from people who were as confused as I was. One comment:

one good thing, they werent looking for a lost wallet or keys

Also, (I crossed out the delicate parts below.)

This is a VERY interesting story. I’m actually glad you published the details (rubbery foot, xxxxx face, mouth open in a xxxxxx, etc) because (unlike everyone else) I’m interested in details. I’m not going to lie and get all “noble” and say it’s bad.

Okay, we won’t call you “noble.”

I still didn’t understand what happened to that woman,  until I did some research. I think it’s positional asphyxia, which occurs when the position of someone’s body prevents them from breathing. Apparently you can’t breathe when you’re upside down for a few hours, although they always hold babies and magicians upside down, so I don’t know. Anyway, poor Mr. Jones was at least at an angle, if not entirely upside down. Maybe it’s your heart or your lungs that can’t work that way.

Here‘s another example: a plumber fell into a manhole head first. It’s really very shocking.

*Oh,  God, horrible update! They are going to close the cave and LEAVE HIS BODY IN THERE. From ABC4:

Utah County Sheriff’s Department says the body of a spelunker who became stuck and died in Nutty Putty Cave will be left there. The cave will also be permanently closed and sealed off.

It’s a state park, which is now closed to everyone! It’s a poor dead lad, and they’ll never know exactly how he died, or give him a funeral! Ugh.

More cartoons:

1. Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo’s purse.
2. Mary Jo and Teddy, sitting in a tree…

Photo of bridge with new guard rail from Wikipedia.

Some attribute it to John Kennedy, but I read that the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, said this to Eunice Kennedy, who passed away just a few weeks before Ted. That would certainly explain Eunice Kennedy’s, and some of the other Kennedys’ good works. In any case, maybe the real ending of that quote for the Kennedys is ” …much is forgiven.” At least in our suck-up courts, who have never turned down a rich family, in spite of suspicious death, rape, and more.

Daryl Cagle had a good post on Ted Kennedy, along with his cartoon about the health plan. (He also discusses how to draw a warthog there.) The comments kind of skewed over (towards the dramatic drowning), as is normal in a healthy blog, and when I pointed out my own investigation of the Chappaquidick accident, Daryl wrote there:

Hi Donna,
Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…..k_incident
Your comments don’t jive with the Chappaquiddick facts as I know them …  

My reply to him:

Daryl, it would never occur to me to take the Wiki version as a real investigation. I love how they call  it the “Chappaquidick incident” as a euphemism for the “Mary Jo death and drowning with Ted Kennedy somehow involved,” however!
The timeline they have is seriously fouled up in Wiki. How could you believe that after Ted and his buds tried to jump in the water and save Mary Jo, in the early morning hours, he decided to go for a swim – across a treacherous riptide channel in the middle of the night!!

The tide and current is so strong that even the next day, when the water was only 6′ deep, the Sheriff still couldn’t open the door. My brother just told me that those doors had vacuum door locks that work under water. But the current was too strong. And yet Ted K just swam across?

And this was the whole point that made me investigate further: Kopechne told no one that she was leaving with Kennedy, and left her purse and hotel key at the party. HELLO. This is not a normal woman. No purse, and no key for her hotel room? Right. The blood in her face was a new detail for me, but I guess that could have been just the accident. Still, more mystery.

Purse photo from: purse people.

Another commenter wrote:

Yeah, I don’t know Donna, that’s borderline conspiracy theory stuff to me. To change the players in the car like that after a full inquest was done and those at the party testified as to who was still at the house, etc…too much of a stretch for me.

More plausible, methinks, is that Mary Jo was enamored of Teddy and the Kennedy family as a whole and entertained a bit of an attraction to him even though he was married (her family claimed that politics “was her life” and she had spent all those years working only for Kennedy’s and adored them; her short stint on McGoverns campaign was an unhappy one and she was said to have stated that it just wasn’t the same without Bobby). Even though she was said to be a nice girl who rarely even drank, I think there was probably a flirty thing going on between them that night and they decided to go for a ride, make-out session, whatever. This would account for why she didn’t carry her purse or her hotel key -they weren’t actually leaving for the night – just for a good ol snog in the car. This makes sense because supposedly right around the time this accident actually happened, Officer Look saw this black car with 2 people in it pulled over in the cemetery and he thought it strange (they just about positively confirmed by the license, make and model, that it was Teddy’s car). So the officer pulled over himself and started to walk towards them to ask if they needed help (I guess his generation never heard of young couples going “parking” in a car at night). When the occupants of the car spotted him, they quickly sped off out of the cemetery and right “onto Dyke road”. I believe the accident happened within minutes of this incident because the place where they were spotted in the cemetery, was literally right up the road (less than a mile?) from where they went off. Because Teddy was a married man and a senator and thus could not afford to be caught in an intimate situation with another woman, I have a hunch that he was frazzled and worried that the officer might hop in his car and pursue them and recognize him. This coupled with the alcohol he had consumed, probably caused him to be going a little too fast on a road he was completely unfamiliar with. In the short span of speeding out of the cemetery and off down Dyke road, by the time he realized he was dead-ending into a narrow bridge, it was just too late and he ran right into the water beside the bridge.

As for his delay in reporting it all, yeah, I’d say,”Houston, we have a problem”. He was married, he was a Senator and he knew he wanted to run for President – no doubt he was completely panicked. That said, 2 of his friends testified at the inquest that after several diving attempts by himself, he came and got them and they went back and took turns diving for her but they could not find her to get her out. I’m sure it was very hard without proper equipment, to go down and get in thru a window, find a body, pull it out of the car and get back up in time to take your next breath – all in the pitch dark – and while you’re intoxicated. It is highly unlikely that this woman lived down there in an air bubble for 4 hours, like someone stated earlier…even 2 or 1 hour is ridiculsou. If she had been given even 25 minutes more of life I think she would have held her breath for small moments and ventured out to feel for the openings/windows in the car, knowing her luck would not last forever. As for the blood on her face and dress – that windshield is pretty badly bashed in. Since he broke at the last minute and the car suddenly went down nose first and then flipped over, I’d say she most definitely hit the windshield. As for her being in the back seat from any way other than her body just landing there after the car flopped over and settled, I suppose that it could be possible that after they were spotted by the officer, she might have agreed to hide in the back seat just in case the officer did follow and stop them. Still, she could have just landed there from the impact.

And that’s my 2 cents on Chappaquiddick.

Car in water photo from: writewingpolitics.

He is restating some of the facts I discovered earlier, and his theory is the usual one: Ted Kennedy was fooling around, got drunk, and Mary Jo died in the accident.

Okay, but that doesn’t explain the purse mixup. Rosemary Keogh’s purse WAS found in the car, and Mary Jo had none! What is with all these women losing their purses? Unless…Rosemary was escaping for her life out the window. Both Time and the NY Times confirmed Rosemary’s purse was in the car. Why did they ignore this HUGE clue?! Look, I found a pic of Rosemary Keough with her purse at the funeral! http://www.life.com/image/50396374 (Life won’t let me copy the picture.)

Rosemary, come on, what really happened that night?

More cartoons:

1. Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo’s purse.
2. Have you ever tried to wipe oil off your soul?

I know Ted only slightly, from a gallery in Santa Monica  that we were both in, Impolitic, that had rather fantastic parties. (Hi, Josh!) We also share the same publishers (NBM and Andrews McMeel), although my books there are about chocolate, and true love cartoons, and  unfortunately he dropped the ball on those topics. (America Gone Wild: Cartoons by Ted Rall and The Year of Loving Dangerously). We’re also both in Slate and Gocomics.

But we had similar cartoons this weekend, both about murder by the state (capital punishment), although we were attracted to different stories. I am disgusted and appalled by states that still believe that they get to play God and decide when someone dies. On PURPOSE. This includes California, my current state. In the incident last week, Ohio did its damndest to kill Mr. Romell Broom for allegedly killing and raping a 14 year old girl. They couldn’t find a vein to torture him with their lethal drugs, which suffocate you and stop your heart. (Why didn’t they try waterboarding?) CNN points out that Ohio has had a few problems in this area before.

The  LA Times had a good article about the attempted execution, saying the Ohio asshat officials wouldn’t allow him to talk to his attorney as it stretched out to 2 hours and 20 minutes, and that he started to cry, covering his face, after an hour. They also said he flinched when they inserted a shunt in his leg. Can you imagine that?!

Weisberg said California is a prime example of a state that retains a death penalty in theory yet rarely conducts executions despite having the nation’s biggest death row, with 685 condemned prisoners.

In California, executions have been on hold since early 2006: Lethal injections have failed to fully anesthetize inmates in six of the 13 executions conducted in the state since capital punishment resumed in 1976.

I think at this point, everyone would agree that it is cruel and unusual punishment in his case. Well, maybe not Ohio. I always liked them before. Not so much now.

Ted’s cartoon after the jump. 

Ted Rall is talking about a problem in Texas, a love affair between the lawyer and judge!

There are lots of comments there, so I’ll let you figure this out by reading them. I only interpret my own cartoons, thanks. :) But at least we both mentioned Texas.

Caption on my cartoon: Mr. Romell (got the name wrong, should be Broom) was bad, children. So, Ohio tried to killhim for 2 hours, until he finally wept. But don’t worry, they’ll kill him DEAD next time!” “Texas does it better.” I don’t know why I decided to do this in the classroom, but how spooky the condemned man looks with his head raised! I’m sure it terrified the children!

Except for the bratty one in the corner.

More cartoons:

1. An odd couple of cartoonists.
2. California is the place you ought to be – maybe.

I’ve always been curious about the Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne drowning, so of course that’s where my mind went last night when I read about his death.

What? Is that bad, or is that normal!? I’ve only been following the news closely this last year, remember; it’s like a crash course of the history of the world. Excuse me when I don’t know everything about every politician in the White House. I read that he did a lot of good with health care, and did some other great things, too.  CNN seems to have a balanced story about him here, including all his positives, which are legion; they are also honest enough to at least mention Chappaquidick (unlike the spurious writeup the LA Times did on him last month, with not.one.mention of the drowning. And the Times website STILL totally sucks, after their new “updo”, as it won’t show me that link now)  Anyway, back to the mystery.

So last night I spent a couple of hours reading all the links I could find on what really happened  with Teddy and the tragic story of Mary Jo. Briefly, there was a party of a bunch of married men and single women who had worked on the Robert Kennedy campaign. This isn’t necessarily scurrilous, as Wash DC has the highest number of single women – read the stats.

Edward Kennedy was going to drive Mary Jo home from the party, drank too much, and the car tipped over, upside down, into the pond. He got out, presumably through the open window on the driver’s side, but poor Mary Jo drowned. He reported the incident the next morning, about 9 hours later. The obvious explanation is that he was drunk, didn’t want the police to test him, and so he delayed reporting it until after he had talked with his lawyer, etc. But there were a lot of questions raised in the many sites I read: Was she pregnant? Why did he delay? Why was he seen at this time in dry clothes? Did he really try to save her, as he claimed, and was he then able to swim the channel, as he claimed,  back to town?  

Here are some facts which have recently come to light, or were in books about the tragic incident:

* The water was only 7′ deep. I am a poor swimmer, so even that shallow sounds scary to me, but we’re not talking deep here.

* Mary Jo was found in the back seat of the car.

* They never did an autopsy on Mary Jo Kopechne! Apparently her parents didn’t allow it or permit it – but isn’t that the law in an unexplained death? Maybe not back then. Her parents did get a new house soon afterwards, however… Not that they didn’t deserve to get paid for the death of their daughter. Just…suspicious.

* Mary Jo’s purse was not in the car, but another woman’s handbag, belonging to Rosemary Keough, was found in there. Okay, antenna at full alert now. Full disclosure: I collect purses, and have an entire bureau of beaded, plastic, 50′s and all sorts of beautiful handbags. I also know quite a lot about them, can date them, and I notice this first on a woman. NO WOMAN would mistake her purse for someone else’s or go anywhere, especially home from a party, without a purse in her hand!

* One account says all the windows were blown out – another says just the driver’s was down. In this photo of the car, from the same article – thank you, Chief Arena – we can see that the driver’s window was down or gone. Senator Kennedy said he can’t remember how he got out, but the door is closed here, so I guess it was the window.

* Mary Jo was found in a pocket of air at the floor of the car. (Remember, the car was upside down.) The police chief called John N. Farrar, a scuba diver with the Edgartown Rescue Squad, when the crime was reported, 9 hours later, and his summary was that she survived for at least 25 minutes in that air, and could have been saved if the accident had been reported immediately. Some accounts had her living for hours, but that doesn’t sound realistic. Still…what a shocking horrible way to die.

* Deputy Sheriff Look got off work at midnight and actually saw the car tooling around, hours after Kennedy said the accident happened. He thought the people were lost and actually got out of his car to go back to them, but they sped away. He saw 2 people in the front seat.

I found a great analysis and a very possible answer to the puzzle in a Cape Cod paper: Cape Cod Today.  It’s titled something like the anniversary of Mary Jo Kopechne’s death. I really don’t know what the point is of making an anniversary of a death, but in any case, the author, Mary Wentworth, did a lot of great research. I got several of my newfound facts from her.

Her theory is that Mary Jo was just asleep in the back seat, and Senator Kennedy and Rosemary Keough were going to go skinny-dipping. They didn’t know Mary Jo was in the back. Kennedy crashed the car, the 2 in front got out, and since they didn’t know Mary Jo was in the car at all, they didn’t try to save her. Her theory is that this is why Ted Kennedy delayed so long in reporting it – because why just report a car that went into the drink? (Hey, they’re rich, remember?)

It’s not clear when they found out Mary Jo was missing, or even suspected she was in the car. (Why suspect someone fell asleep in the back of a car anyway? Did people do that a lot back then? You can see the car is huge, but still…Say, I wonder how tall she was. I’m 5’8″ and no way would I do that unless I had room.) And the reason Ted Kennedy’s story is so weak is that they made it up at the very last minute when they found she had died (although how they knew she was in the car…hmm, unless they looked underwater.)

Here are some of the points from the article:

The accident at Chappaquiddick has cast a long shadow over Kennedy’s political life, crippling his quest, for example, for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980.

Many questions about this case have never been satisfactorily resolved. At what time did Kennedy actually leave the party? Was his turn on to Dyke Road a mistake as he claimed in his statement to the police and in his television address to the nation? Or was it intentional? After the accident, why didn’t he seek help from people in nearby cottages? If he had been, in fact, too traumatized to ask for assistance as he claimed in his television talk, why didn’t his friends immediately contact authorities when they were told of the accident? The lack of credible explanations to these questions touched off speculation that the truth about Mary Jo’s death was more shocking than Kennedy’s statements about it.

Kennedy maintained in his statement to the police (NYT 7/26/69) as well as in his address to the nation (NYT 7/26/69) that he and Kopechne left the party at 11:15 p.m. to catch the ferry to Edgartown before its last scheduled crossing at midnight. This claim is not plausible for several reasons. If Mary Jo had decided to return to her motel in Edgartown she did so without bothering to retrieve her purse from the cottage or ask her roommate for the keys to their room. When she stretched out on the back seat of the Olds, however, she had no need for these items because she was not going anywhere. Or so she thought (DHG 4/14/1980). [DB- have to disagree. Do women really just toss their purses somewhere at a party? Like coats? I don't think so. She would have had her purse with her.]

Kennedy maintains that he does not know how he got out but a possible exit for him and his companion, most likely Rosemary Keough since it was her purse that was later found in the car, would have been the almost completely withdrawn window on the driver’s side. Then, too, a door could have been pushed open when enough water had gushed into the car to match the inside pressure with the outside (NYT 7/26/79).

Putting on his equipment on the way to the scene, Farrar quickly entered the water and saw Mary Jo Kopechne’s feet through the rear window of the overturned automobile. He swam around to the right side window and found her with her head cocked back and pressed up into the foot well with her hands gripping the edge of the rear seat. He thought that the position of her body indicated that she had found an air bubble in her struggle to stay alive. Even though the car was upside down with the open windows allowing the seawater to rush through, it was possible, he thought, for an air lock to form. Air bubbles that emanated from the car when it was hauled out and the lack of water in the trunk were further indications of an air lock. Farrar felt that it would have been extremely difficult for Mary Jo to extricate herself from this situation without help (NYT 7/22/69, USN & WR 11/3/69).

Read the rest here. I’d love to hear what your conclusion is!

This certainly is an interesting theory, but it comes out of nowhere, and I have questions. Yet the Case of the Wrong Purses is the strongest evidence for me that this could be true, and that there was another woman in the car. There are some interesting, and some very stupid comments at the link. But one local says 2 lifeguards tried to swim across the channel at the same time, same tide, as TK claimed he swam that night, and couldn’t do it. That doesn’t surprise me at all. Those Cape Cod ponds look placid, but they have rip tides and currents that are very strong. I remember getting pulled in a scary way while I rowed a rowboat around one of the ponds, and I never rowed that far from the cottage again.

I wonder if Mary Jo could swim? Remember, it was pitch black, but wouldn’t the car headlights still be on? The doors would have been too heavy for her to open against the water pressure on that old car, but so sad she couldn’t find that open window. If Rosemary was in the car, did she just follow Teddy out the window? And wouldn’t Mary Jo have woken up if she was sleeping, or passed out, and screamed as they crashed? Or was it more of a splash?

I know the Cape. The Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port was too big, that much I remember. My grandparents had a house on the Cape year round, so I spent part of every summer there. But we would drive miles and miles past the Kennedy place because they were so selfish they controlled the entire area, the road, the beaches. Which it’s illegal to block off, btw.  The Boston Globe has a nice little suck-up story about the compound today, but doesn’t say how big it is:

But the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who for decades has been the glue that held the family together, closes a chapter of a storybook Camelot tale that has flourished at the end of Marchant Avenue.

Much of the Kennedy compound will probably be turned over to a national nonprofit group, possibly to be opened up as a museum or retreat center.

The National Park Service (why do they care about the private property owned by the Kennedys?) says it’s 6 acres. Anyway, they have no legal right to block off all their beaches, etc, and yet they do. Disgusting.

Cartoon caption: Charon tells Ted Kennedy she’s looking for him…at the river Styx. Charon: She’s waiting for you, Ted…Your sister, Eunice. For those who need a little nudge to their mythology trivia: I did my research on this, so the names check out!

I’m not sure Mr. Kennedy is as guilty as I thought before. Sure, she still died, but IF it happened the way the writer suggests above, it was much more of an accident. So I certainly didn’t want to send him to hell – and I’m not that judgmental, anyway. Charon is king of the underworld, NOT hell. Hades is not hell. It is just where souls go when they have passed on. He requires payment for the trip across the river Styx to the undead, and that is why pennies were placed over people’s eyes – to pay him for the journey.

However, even though it’s not hell, it certainly sounds unpleasant. I don’t know why the Greeks didn’t make it a happier place. I hope Mr. Kennedy is okay.

About the drawing: Cheron is like a lobster fisherman! He has waders, but his hands are bones… The Kennedys have weird mouths. Not sure I got that right. The figures here don’t look directly at each other, like 19th or 18th century paintings. That’s okay. And, of course, my little joke is that the woman waiting for him isn’t Mary Jo,; many commenters and haters on the websites I visited said things like She’ll get you, you’ll get yours, Ted. But I switched it to his sister, Eunice Shriver, who passed away just last month.  RIP, everyone.

More cartoons:

1. Mary Jo and Teddy, sitting in a tree…
2. The Pope speaks with an Alien tongue.

Sure, I’m curious why he died. But NO, I never thought he was funny. Not the animals, the plastic surgery, the kids. Nor is his death funny. I’m sad a talented performer died so young.. What about Farrah Fawcett, or Ed McMahon, or the strange, sad confluence of the 3? NO. Not funny, either. All equally sad.

My job as an editorial cartoonist is to comment or reflect on the news, not make instant flower bouquets, or practice sanctimonious phrases. But… is death funny?

Actually, this is the first time a well-known figure has died since I started doing cartoons for Slate in February, so I wasn’t sure just how to approach it.   I rarely read other editorial cartoonists cartoons(, but I read a lot of silly comments by Daryl Cagle and Ted Rall and other political cartoonists, on Facebook and Twitter, wondering aloud how far they could go with Michael Jackson’s peccadilloes. And then there was the Jeff Goldblum hoax on Twitter. Maybe death just makes people stupid.

Anyway, I sure didn’t want Michael Jackson’s death to steal the spotlight from the lovely Farrah Fawcett, and the, um, advertorial Ed McMahon! I mean they all deserve a dignified goodbye. Each is special. So I included all 3 of them, and picked a graveyard – always a favorite backdrop for me – and you can see the cartoon above. The first cartoon. Because I chickened out. All it took was seeing those weeping, obsessive fans in Hollywood, and all the reverential tributes in the media, and I wondered if I was being disrespectful. (all this agonizing and second-guessing usually takes part in the middle of the night, when friends are asleep, so I can’t get any feedback.)

So I redid it for Slate, below:

Michael Jackson, King of Pop, Farrah Fawcett Majors, Queen of Hair, and Ed McMahon, Jester of Johnny. Gravestones. ©D. Barstow 2009

But this time I asked people on Facebook, which is the better cartoon? They liked the first one. And I think I do, too. Sometimes death can use a little humor. I think these stars would have smiled, too. But what do you think? Which cartoon would you rather read with your coffee, or would you rather do Sudoko?

PS. Joe Heller is one of my fave editorial cartoonists and did a great cartoon on MJ. (Do you think he drew all of these views by hand, or was it Photoshop magic?!)

*Just found this post  on how to draw cartoons about death or people who have passed on, by Steve Greenberg:

The problems are either doing a cliché — usually something involving St. Peter and the Pearly Gates, and there have been a zillion of these — or doing cartoons similar to what other cartoonists might be doing for the next day.

Some tributes work, too. Read the whole thing for insight from an experienced cartoonist.

More cartoons:

1. Who paid for Michael Jackson’s flamboyant funeral?
2. Sarah Palin resigns as governor, but the cartoons keep on coming.

"I'm thinking about putting my face on our new product line, like Paul Newman does...would that turn you on?" ©D.Barstow 2009

I heart Paul Newman! Not so much for his movies, although he was great – but for entering my own life by doing movies on location, where I found him in person.

I was dating the special effects guy on one film, and I remember he had to build a special sweat hut so Paul could sweat off all the beer he drank each day and still look trim for the film. (What, no Paul Newman beer? I think I saw a beer in his hand most of the time.) Another time, I was with some friends who went to a car race in Pennsylvania, and there he was, glowing on the track. He did have that star sparkle, and good for him.

He passed away this year, shortly before I started doing cartoons for Slate. You have to realize, I never even read editorial cartoons until the last year. Not ever.  So I was suprised and pleased that they also do cartoons about holidays (not just war holidays, like Memorial Day, but Easter, too) and also note when interesting or important people pass away. I would surely have done one for Paul, but this is the only cartoon I did about him, a couple of years ago. It’s typical New Yorker, although it wasn’t IN the New Yorker, of course.

Design note: I picked the colors out in about 10 seconds, and LOVE them!

Here’s to you, Mr. Newman.

More cartoons:

1. Paul Conrad, cartoonist extraordinaire, died this week.
2. Wordless Wednesday: Not ready for primetime Slate cartoon.