Let's begin with this week's Daryl Cagle toon round-up.
p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Bill Schorr, Larry Wright, Jeff Parker, John Trever, John Darkow, Jimmy Margulies, Jerry Holbert, Steve Sack, Adam Zyglis, Milt Priggee, John Cole, Steve Breen, Bill Day, and Monte Wolverton,
p3 MVP Award: Mike Keefe.
p3 Legion of Merit: Rob Roberts.
p3 Legion of Honor: Steve Benson.
A lot of cartoons out there this week were about how terrible it is to be running a deficit, and how the government must tighten its belt during a recession, because that's what families do. This is absolutely wrong, as metaphor and as economic policy. A huge chunk of our current deficit is the result of the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the Medicare prescription bill, all of which were passed on the Bush watch and all of which were unfunded. Most of the rest of the deficit is the result of the recession and will recede once the recession does. Meanwhile, spending is the only way to get out of the recession.
That's just so you know it's not all beer and skittles around here at the p3 Sunday morning toons. It's beer and skittles and sound macroeconomic policy.
Still, it's been a rare topic since instituting the toon review that has so many cartoonists so wrong in so nearly the same way so suddenly. Rather than simply let some of my favorite toonists go dark this week, I'm going to herd the ones who are buying the GOP talking points about the deficit into one group and let them honk and blow their horns. Take it away, Daryl Cagle.
Pat Bagley. Michael Ramirez. and Jeff Stahler.
p3 World Toon Review: Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland), Stephane Peray (Thailand), Cam Cardow, (Canada) and Alexander Zudin (Russia).
It's an Ann Telnaes two-fer this week: the one place where no one mentiones "belt-tightening", and Obama's inner Wile E. Coyote.
"Spending Cuts Ho!" Now we're talkin'! Mark Fiore, on the other hand, gets the deficit problem. (Alert for the irony-challenged; you may not understand why this is humorous.)
Snip! With the second appearance today of scissors being handed in from out of frame (go figure; it's unrelated to the first), NYTimes illustrator and p3 favorite Barry Blitt captures the fundamental wrong-headedness of DADT for Frank Rich's column this morning.
Poof! "Thank you, Howard Zinn," says the "K" Chronicles.
Here's a funny thing: If you're an actual flesh-and-blood person, 50 million of you can simply up and die every year and the government will dither. But if your personhood is nothing more than a legal fiction, well, that's a different story.
Portland homeboy Jack Ohman reduces "bipartisanship" to its ABCs.
"There'll be jobs for everyone, if we get out and vote!" "Hell-Bent for Election" (1944) has several asterisks by its name in the record book: It's a "two-reeler," when most theatrical animated shorts were one 7-minute reel each. It's directed by Chuck Jones (moonlighting from Warner Bros.) for UPA (best known today, if at all, for "Gerald McBoing-Boing" and the "Mister Magoo" series). And it contains song lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, who, five years earlier, wrote the book for "The Wizard of Oz." It was paid for by the United Auto Workers to help get out the vote for FDR in the 1944 election. Part I is is an allegory about FDR versus GOP nominee Thomas Dewey--filled with references to 1942-1944 politics that you may need Wikipedia to track, and unafraid to link political disagreements to treason in a couple of spots. Part II imagines the post-war world awaiting Americans if they "get out and vote" in 1944--and it's a laundry list of government-sponsored programs (many of which we now take for granted) that would make the Obama of Tea Partiers' most feverish dreams of socialism look like Scrooge McDuck.
Part I:
Part II:
p3 Bonus Toon: With the passage of Measures 66 and 67 in the rear-view mirror, Jesse Springer asks the next question:
Remember to bookmark:
Slate's political cartoon for the day.
And Time's cartoons of the week.
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