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.

Cover of National Velvet with Liz Taylor

Why did she die at a fairly young age, 79? I looked it up in several sources, and it was congestive heart failure. That can slow you down. As I understand it, your heart becomes this squishy thing, not like a strong muscle, so your blood kind of swishes around, instead of squirting properly all over. Your legs are what the medical profession calls a “second heart.” That is, when you walk, they push the blood back up to your heart that gravity has let fall down to your feet. So, it’s healthy to walk. And not so healthy that she was in a wheelchair the last few years.

Turns out I’ve hardly seen any of her movies. Mostly, I admire her for being outspoken, and for appearing in public without much (any?) plastic surgery. You have no idea how hard it is for older women in Hollywood. Hell, even a good number of the girls on The Bachelor have had things done, even at 25! (although it’s mostly boob jobs.)

My Elizabeth Taylor filmography:

Jane Eyre – I think I saw it. I read the book, great girls book.

National Velvet - Yes, read the book (all the horse books I could find) and saw the movie. There may have been some tears.

Little Women – probably. I saw one version, and liked it a lot. Who was she, Jo? And I read the book several times.

Image via Wikipedia - Elizabeth Taylor taking off her shoe

Ivanhoe – I think I had to see it in high school. But I might be getting it mixed up with the Ivanhoe Reservoir I see every day.

Cleopatra – Yes. I remember thinking she didn’t look that beautiful to me. She and Richard B. had some chemistry, though.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – I hate this play. It was originally a play, then a movie. A married couple battle it out, and they’re not as clever as they think they are, but they sure are mean. It makes you squirm. If you saw the Emmy- nominated episode of The Office where Michael and Jan give a dinner party (the only dinner party) — like that.

A Little Night Music – I love this movie! Saw it as a play, too. It’s kind of like Glee for theater-goers, romantics, and sophisticates.

Cartoon after the jump. 

national velvet horse mourns elizabeth taylor's passing

Not what you expected for Ms Taylor’s eulogy?

Rob Tornoe, a talented cartoonist out of NJ,  posted on Facebook:
Who’s going to draw the first political cartoon of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra being carried to the pearly gates?

Which was funny because so many cartoonists will do/have done that. It looks weird to me to have editorial cartoonists draw heaven, just like gag cartoonists do, but I think death is hard to do well.

Daryl Cagle has several blogs, which is very confusing, but I managed to find his collection of Elizabeth Taylor cartoons. I’m not going to name the cartoonists, because there are 3 or 4 of the most hideous portraits I’ve ever seen there, and 4 have the SAME drawing of just her eyes! Poor Liz. You can make up your own mind whether Gocomics (which has most of the same people) is any better.

Interpretation of Elizabeth Taylor cartoon

Cartoon caption: National Velvet, the horse speaks to us about how he misses Liz Taylor. (title) IF NATIONAL VELVET WAS LIKE MR. ED I m-i-i-s-s L-i-i-z! Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011.

National Velvet was one of her first movies, when she was just a teen, so I just went with it. I titled it 2 ways: the one above, and also, IF NATIONAL VELVET COULD TALK. I wasn’t sure if most readers would know about Mr. Ed, an old TV show which is still on TV in syndication, and also spawned some fun comic books.  In any case, Mr. Ed, the name of the horse, only talked with his owner Wilbur, so no one else knew he could talk. From the theme song:

A horse is a horse, of course, of course, And no one can talk to a horse of course. That is, of course, unless the horse, is the famous Mister Ed.

Funny set up, but I can’t remember what else happened! Mr. Ed talked with a loud whinny, of course, so I tried to write his words like that.

And that’s my Liz Taylor take.

My latest cartoon for Psychology Today: How to Write a Personals Ad for Love.

More cartoons:

1. Wordless Wednesday: Not ready for primetime Slate cartoon.
2. The White Rabbit Cancels the Tea Party.

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.

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.

More cartoons:

1. Who doesn’t hate AIG?
2. Ted Rall scolds Time Magazine for their Top 10 cartoons.

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…

But not with health insurance. It’s like a utility, or going to the dentist, or even car insurance, if you like your car at all. You have to have it, but do you have to feel screwed?

And the whole concept is like a Ponzi scheme: they could never pay out everyone’s claim at one time. They hide how much they make off everyone’s fear – they invest all that money in Swiss banks, I think, so it’s like a river of gold flowing in to them. It’s like imaginary money, and if you didn’t get sick or go to the doc – which is good, if you didn’t – you don’t get rewarded for staying healthy. They take and take and take. Your premiums still go up every farking year, paying for all the losers who have bad genes or don’t take care of themselves. UGH.  

I have Kaiser, which is rated very highly (for an HMO) and yet the things I know about it would make your hair spin. They lie and lie, they ignore health problems, they don’t tell anyone about deals they give low income people, or they do, like this year, and they cancel the plan THE SAME DAY THEY PROMISED IT WOULD START.  They LOST my lab test. I’ll give the details when I’m not so upset.

Who was it who started chatter about the death panels, Sarah Palin? Oh, Sarah. You know I like you. But that…is almost as absurd as this cartoon.

Cartoon caption: “Well, it looks like the public option was killed. Score another for the black-hearted insurance industry.” The vulture: “So long as they don’t lose the death panels.”

Well, I did get to draw a vulture for this cartoon! That’s the silver lining here. The colors came out good, too. And this would fit in just fine in my very special morbid file. Yes, I have one.

More cartoons:

1. I’m the first blogger to write fan fiction about Obama.
2. Who doesn’t hate AIG?

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.