An alert reader notified me that Yahoo! News Comics no longer has a link for me. The list of editorial cartoons is at the bottom – my name is usually…
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More popular political cartoons for your enjoyment.
Caption: Jury convicts Ingmar Guandique, illegal immigrant and MS-13 gang member, of murdering Chandra Levy.
Mike Lester has a super-casual style, quite the opposite of old time editorial cartoons! This take on the Chandra Levy trial is a pretty straightforward idea, but I included it because I agreed with it. :) For one thing, I love trials and murders, and the Opinion pages rarely cover them. More importantly, this cartoon is about the media, which totally ignores important details in stories they cover, if they think it might “taint” the piece.
I remember when I first moved to Los Angeles, I was confused when the LA Times never reported the complete story about criminals or crimes. Was it an illegal alien or gang who did the deed? Wasn’t that, alone, enough to arrest someone? Never! Even when they were indicted, important info about the bad people was kept out of the papers. Mike points out here that Ingmar Guandique, the killer was indeed here illegally (and was already guilty of other crimes).
Chandra lost her life, Gary Condit lost his career. Yet the media, by and large, lets criminals keep their secrets and whitewashes the facts.
Caption of Obama and Nancy Pelosi looking at Obamacare: We should have spent more time on the birth announcement.
I laughed out loud at this cartoon by Eric Allie on Obamacare! Something about the octopus in the baby carriage…He includes recognizable sketches of Obama and Pelosi staring at their little darling, too! There’s an Uncle Sam running in the corner, a rather tired old symbol, but his bug eyes and running legs are amusing. (Secret PS: I admire Eric for not drawing all 8 legs on the octopus (sorry, no link now, explained below), as I did. He’s carefree!)
Each week I think, I’m just going to limit it to the three best opinion cartoons this time, but I always find myself adding a couple of others – so I’m going to divide this roundup into a 2-parter.
I was shocked this week, SHOCKED to have an editor at a major book publisher tell me that they don’t publish many books of political cartoons “because they’re too hard to understand, and people feel like their brains hurt.” As I’ve written before, I never read political cartoons myself until a couple of years ago, so I feel their pain, but still…a smart, sexy editor can’t understand a cartoon?!
I can’t explain her mental state, but one problem I had was that I just didn’t follow the news enough to understand the cartoons- and another problem was the cartoonists themselves – messy, scrawling, ink scratching, with symbols and name tags and not a bit of humor, either. But they’re online and colorful now, and if you think of political cartoons as little puzzles, or mind games, you’ll have ever so much more fun with them!
I’m starting this week’s roundup with a cartoon by Dario Castillejos, on WikiLeaks. I like a lot of the foreign cartoonists, for both style and concept – they usually don’t have much dialogue, so they really work on their drawings! Uncle Sam is a rather tired symbol – I’ve never used it, nor been tempted to, in 2 years of doing cartoons – but this drawing of Uncle Sam as a scarecrow is pretty amusing! Oh, look, Mr. Crow has torn out his eye. Gulp. I like this grisly approach, maybe because it reminds me of Scarecrows, a truly scary good movie that I recommend.
Little later than I wanted, but still a good scoop.
The LA Press Club has some pretty good speakers, but I was looking forward to the one on talk radio for weeks, and it didn’t disappoint!
KFI’s John Kobylt, half of the John and Ken show, Talkers magazine publisher Michael Harrison and KPCC/LA Times journalist and radio host Patt Morrison will be among the participants of a high-powered panel discussing the state of talk radio in L.A. and the nation, presented by the Los Angeles Press Club, Thurs., Oct. 28, at the Steve Allen Theater.
According to Talkers magazine publisher Michael Harrison, who coined the term “talk media” and defined it years ago in preparation for this new era, “Talk media is collectively the most accurate bellwether of American public opinion in the mass media today.”
Radio veteran Bill Moran will moderate by tossing such queries as “What is the impact of Talk Radio on the mid-term elections?” and “Is a strong news department relevant or even necessary to the content of Talk Radio?” And there are many other probing questions he will be challenging participants to answer. Two of those being put on the firing line include top talk show program directors Robin Bertolucci of Clear Channel and KABC’s Jack Silver.
I happened to sit next to Bill Moran at another event and knew he would be a good moderator. He told a couple of us beforehand that he was going to ask John Kobylt why John and Ken had such a strange position on Prop 23 (set up by oil
Ooh, poor Meg Whitman. It doesn’t look good for her now. Not because of the loathsome disloyal maid, but I guess people just don’t like Meg enough. Personally, I didn’t…
I’ve never been attracted to drugs. Okay, I may have tried a couple of things in college, but BOR-ING.
Still, I have thought we should legalize marijuana forever. WTH, why is tobacco so good for you, yet pot isn’t? They both smell hideous, and they’re both addictive, but let people have what they want and let’s get rid of the drug dealers, petty arrests, etc.
Prop 19 is California’s attempt to do this. However, as happens way too often, the big fat government had to stick their nose in our business and like Supernanny, give us a Stern Warning. From the Wapost:
Attorney General Eric Holder is warning that the federal government will not look the other way, as it has with medical marijuana, if voters next month make California the first state to legalize pot.
The comments in a letter to ex-federal drug enforcement chiefs were the attorney general’s most direct statement yet against Proposition 19 and set up another showdown with California over marijuana if the measure passes.
With Prop 19 leading in the polls, the letter also raised questions about the extent to which federal drug agents would go into communities across the state to catch small-time users and dealers, or whether they even had the resources to do it.
The Post says approval is high. But the LA Times says they found likely voters opposing the measure 51% to 39%.
But supporters of the initiative have not raised enough money to run the television advertisements needed to reach voters across the state.
Gah, get it together, guys. This ineffective campaigning doesn’t say anything positive about the smokers, does it.