I missed the 60 Minutes interview the LA Times is talking about here. (Is that show still on the air?)

Discussing in strikingly personal terms his order to escalate the war in Afghanistan, President Obama said Sunday that sending 30,000 new combat troops was the hardest decision of his presidency so far.

Can you understand now why I get so annoyed with the Times? WTH, “strikingly personal”??? Because he said he felt bad talking to the cadets? Geez, what a revelation.

First go round of this cartoon concept.

It goes on:

Critics have said his plan is confusing and contradictory because although it calls for the new deployment, it also sets a July 2011 date to start withdrawing troops.

I don’t know about contradictory, but I’ve found that the best way to broadcast your intentions, leak your war plans, and help out the enemy is to put the details on Twitter, Mr. President.

(another version of the cartoon is after the jump)

CNN says:

In his speech Tuesday, Obama said his strategy had three objectives:

• Deny al Qaeda a safe haven

• Reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow Afghanistan’s government

• Strengthen Afghanistan’s security forces and government

I hope it works out that way. This is a DayPlanner type strategy, isn’t it.

Does this cartoon make more sense? This is the one up on Slate now, but I think I prefer the first one.

Cartoon caption: RAW MEAT. One way to make military decisions. OR Is this the sign that made Obama order 30,000 more troops?

This seemed like such an obvious cartoon idea to me that I had to rush to draw it right away, for fear some other cartoonist would have the same idea, and beat me to it!! This happens to me a lot. As it turns out, other cartoonists don’t seem to think the way I do. There have been a couple of times when I suspected they copied me – will write about this in the future.

But for this event, I’m the only cartoonist who decided that word games was the obvious corollary to declaring war! Yes, RAW on the truck in big red letters transposed easily in Obama’s office, as he sat contemplating in the Oval Office, to WAR. And as war often has casualties :(, that leaves…dead meat, or raw meat laying on the battlefield.

What is really really strange about this is that after I had written, drawn and posted it on Slate, someone pointed out that meat spelled backwards was almost team; ie, which made it read (backwards) War Team.

I didn’t even think about this, but this happens a lot with cartoons, or my cartoons. Like alchemists turning lead into gold, you have the idea, add the drawing, and then things happen. If you’re lucky.

More cartoons:

1. Turn in your red meat! Guns are okay, too.
2. I’m going to the Royal Wedding in a pumpkin.

Since I just started doing op-ed cartoons in February for Slate, I wasn’t sure how to approach this holiday, and what type of editorial cartoon would be respectful yet also cheerful! What do vets do? I don’t know any, except my father. Surely not all of them are decrepit, as so often they are drawn in cartoons. I hate parades. Do I draw another cemetery? I don’t even know what clothes they wear.

Fortunately, Daryl Cagle, who owns and operates Cagle Cartoons, put up a slew of cartoons about Veterans Day last week, so I could at least see what guys had done in past years. Here’s what I decided: better alive than dead, and they wear green with a lot of medals. (fallen soldiers is more Memorial Day.)

The war dog was my own idea, too. Here’s more on War Dogs. (It’s a very messy and unorganized site, but I guess dogs are like that, too. It’s the woof that counts.)

The cartoon: What all Vets want to hear most: GOOD JOB!

I added the colored frame to the 2nd version, and also a star to the dog’s chest belt, to prove he was in the military, too. I couldn’t find any examples of what real military dogs wear, but hope this gives him creds. (He’s also wearing veteran dog tags, but they’re hard to see.)

Happy Veterans Day to all brave men, women, and dogs!

More cartoons:

1. Cartoons on WikiLeaks, vets, and the Pope!

tasers as torture cartoon, 5th amendment cartoon

Nancy Pelosi seems so far away now, doesn’t she? There was a story that didn’t last long. Or tptb buried it! Yet it was just last month…

I’m sure she did know about the CIA tortures in Guantanamo Bay. Politico says she did. She was probably only given a few details, and didn’t quite understand it: no one is proud of torture, even, or maybe especially, the armed services. Many decision-makers just believe it has to be done. I’ve read that it’s not an efficient way to get confessions,  but I’m quite sure I would squeal about anything in the world after about 1 minute of it. Maybe less.

News reports say only 3 of the Gitmo detainees were actually waterboarded, which everyone agrees is the worst kind of torture. One of these guys claimed responsibility for beheading Daniel Pearl – and nothing is more heinous than beheading someone, in my kingdom. But US News & World Report says:

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, has claimed responsibility for beheading Pearl, but it recently came to light that the al Qaeda operative was waterboarded more than 180 times in 30 days. This has left some of Pearl’s colleagues skeptical of the confession.

Um, me, too, now.   This is certainly going overboard. Who’s telling the truth?

I’ve written before that I hate torture more than murder. Still, I do think that as a LAST RESORT it MIGHT be necessary to save many many more lives. Just seems like common telephone marketers and “people persons” like bomb squad talkers, could do a better job at getting people to talk, doesn’t it?

But let’s jump to our legal torture, Tasers. Police in the US have been using Tasers for what, 8 years? Reading the news, it appears that most, if not all major cities use it. Electrocuting our own people. I remember the first (and only, thank God) time I saw it, on the news, when California Highway Patrol used it to subdue one of those very dangerous people, freeway joyriders, who drive at 40 mph on the freeway, helicopters circling, until they run out of gas. When I saw the officer (using that word loosely) shoot the driver, and saw his body twitching and convulsing for a good minute, obviously in excruciating pain, I burst into tears, and immediately called the LAPD to complain.

Some police have been tasered themselves, as a way for the department to inure themselves to the violence they were about to affect on others. They describe it as unbelievable, excruciating pain that first makes you rigid, as all muscles contract and then release, over and over.

When my first book was published I had a couple of headaches that were nerve based, from my neck, and sent me to the emergency room. It felt like an electric cattle prod is applied to your spine and I screamed and wept because of the jabbing pain. I’m sure the taser pain is much worse, but most of the time, no one remembers it.  They black out because of it, but observers can see them writhe and scream. Short-term memory loss – how convenient for the Taser company.

But beyond pain, how about DYING? Amnesty International has been keeping track of Taser deaths, but I see many more just reading the LA Times than they actually count at AI. In fact, I’ve been cutting out articles for a folder on this, and it’s quite full. People die frequently from getting Tasered. By our own police, to us.

This is a rather gentle cartoon, about a horrifying torture device. The Taser Company itself has a quaint explanation of how they got the name:

The name stems from an acronym created by the original inventor of TASER technology, John H. “Jack” Cover, former chief scientist of North American Aerospace’s Apollo Moon Landing Program. Jack’s favorite book character is Tom Swift of the Tom Swift Series, authored by Victor Appleton in 1910-1941. One of the books, TOM SWIFT AND HIS ELECTRIC RIFLE, inspired Jack to create the acronym TASER.

They have a picture on the home page of a mom and child who will buy one together, all family-like. That sounds like a winning combination.

Youtube of 72 year old grandmother being tasered. USA Today has an article from 2004 that says Seattle police used Tasers 500 times that year. CREEPY.  The UN Committee Against Torture condemns Tasers as being torture.

So do I.

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"So...the Navy will continue to use sonar, but we can pick any beach in the world. To die on." ©D.Barstow

I first read about this last fall. From the Christian Science Monitor:

In a 6-3 ruling on Wednesday, the high court criticized a federal judge in California for imposing restrictions that the majority justices said jeopardized national security in an effort to protect the environment.

MFA sonars send intense pulses of noise through the water that can disrupt or injure marine mammals nearby. Scientists say it can trigger fatal mass strandings under certain circumstances.

Joel Reynolds, a senior NRDC attorney, said the high court left in place undisputed portions of the federal judge’s order concerning Navy training. As a result, the Navy must continue to abide by a 12-mile coastal buffer zone and must continue to avoid the Catalina Basin, an area with a high concentration of marine mammals.

Check out this killer whale video to actually see whales in Puget Sound reacting to Navy sonar.  Umm, how much proof are they waiting for?

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it. The Navy has the proof, they’re just making a judgment call (no puns, thanks.) that they have to keep making the same sonar sounds over and over, like 3 year olds playing with their toys.   I’ve noticed some scientists are like this, too, unfortunately; they base science on a hypothesis, with a provable result, and then spend years doing the SAME tests over and over. That sounds like a video game to me.

Anyway, I see very few editorial cartoons about natural history or science or even technology, and I don’t know why. Do they know something I don’t? Maybe. So I do some, because the world outside of the White House is important, too, but I space them out!  Cbc news agrees with me, and reports on 3 dolphins trapped in ice that locals rescued.

However, human activity that causes a lot of underwater noise might also play a role when the animals are near the edge of the ice, Murison said.

“They may panic and end up in an area where the ice can close in on them,” she said.

The article says more than 40 whales are beached in Nova Scotia each year.  Australia has had more than 400 whales beached this year, although they did save some. From timesonline:

Mark Simmonds, of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society and an expert on cetacean strandings, said that two species coming ashore together was enough to arouse suspicions of a human factor, including the use of sonar by the military.

When I did this cartoon a week ago, 55 whales had just been stranded in South Africa. They didn’t try to save these whales, like most civilized countries; they just shot them. Even though this is a rather simple cartoon in theory, I still had to do research on what whales look like! Real whales don’t look anything like cartoon whales, as it turns out, but I also didn’t want them to look like dolphins. I hope I made my point anyway.

*An update in the opinion page of the Monitor by a real whale guy: he asserts that sonar has been proved to directly kill whales. Sad.

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