Sunday morning toons: Special "Fish and Chips" edition

[Updated below.]

It's been quite a week: Despite, or maybe because of, the back-stage politics, the possibility of genuine health care reform continued to inch forward. The industrial powers met at the G8 summit to figure out what they're going to do about climate change. The legacy of Robert McNamara got a re-examination. The Senate Democrats now number sixty--sort of. Another Republican sex-scandal jumped to the next level. And Honduras continued to put the pieces together after a military coup--or it wasn't a coup, depending on who you ask.

Alas, those stories were like stars in the daytime: They're still there, but you can't see them for the twin suns of the Jackson memorial and Palin resignation spectacles. Still, Daryl Cagle's toon round-up covers it all this week. Put on your Ray-Bans and let's get started.

p3 Picks of the Week:

Mike Luckovich, Nate Beeler, R. J. Matson, John Trever, Matt Davies, and Jeff Koterba.

p3 "Aaaugh! My Eyes! My Eyes! I'm Blind!" Award: Scott Statis.

p3 Gold Medal (with black armband): David Fitzsimmons.

How can we miss you when you won't go away? That's the question asked by Larry Wright, Monte Wolverton, Jimmy Margulies, Adam Zyglis, Nate Beeler, Vic Harville, and Taylor Jones.

p3 Best of Show: J. D. Crowe.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: J. D. Crowe (award shared with Jesse Springer, below).

[Update: In a fabulous last-minute entry, Barry Blitt splits the "Best Adaptation" award with Crowe and Springer.]

What with all the celebrity memorials, celebrity resignations, and celebrity sex scandals, American political toonists weren't exactly zeroed in on the G8 Summit this week, but it got noticed in the p3 World Toon Review: Vince O'Farrell (Australia), Paresh Nath (India), LAZ, (Cuba) and Cameron Cardow (Canada).


Has TV news coverage been good this week? Ann Telnaes thinks it's been . . . well, see for yourself.

What the heck--it's time for a Telnaes Two-fer


Walt Handlesman considers the plight of the Woodstock Generation.


p3 Guest Toon: Newt Gingrich has long believed in the political power of language; now Mark Slackmeyer and Rick Redfern get to the bottom of his latest ploy.


We have a wide and varied circle of correspondents here at p3, but even we don't often get emails that begin, "Wonder Woman needs your help . . . and so do I." But when it happens, we're ready to answer the call. A friend participating in the New Organizing Institute's Bootcamp training program in Washington, D.C. filled me in: A centerpiece of the program pitted the participants against each other in teams, in a simulated campaign for the Mayor of DC that will be won by getting the most online votes from real people for their fantasy candidate--in my friend's case, the "fantasy candidate" (his words, not mine) is in fact Wonder Woman. In the interest of the Fairness Doctrine (which doesn't exist, but neither, technically does Wonder Woman), I should mention that the entire slate of "candidates," all DC comic characters (get it?), is available here. The results: Wonder Woman by a nose, with Atom a close second and Green Lantern third. Congratulations, Josh!


Feline Inherits Fortune! Cat In Fish And Chips! Pointless tormenting and class consciousness come together in the 1944 Tom & Jerry short "Million Dollar Cat," directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (a generation before they first gave the world the phrase "And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!").

The Stuff You Gotta Watch gives a nice accounting (scroll down; it's there) of "Million Dollar Cat" as an example of how ideas were borrowed back and forth and refined by the different studios, including Hanna-Barbera (MGM), Fritz Freling (Warner Bros.) and Tex Avery (both studios at one time or another).


p3 Bonus Toon: Jesse Springer shares the p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium this week. The good news: Recent studies show that Northwest forests have the potential to sequester vast amounts of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. The bad news: Only if they aren't cut down . (Click to enlarge.)

Saturday tunes: "I bless the rains down in Africa"

My playlists don't include a genre category for "Slovenian a capella jazz" (or "80's studio rock," for that matter), but after getting pointed to this version--it's way, way beyond anything you could call a "cover"--of an early Toto hit by Perpetuum Jazzile, I may need to regroup.

The first two minutes of this must be fabulous to hear in live performance.

(Hat tip to James the Elder and Kim Komando.)

The unforgiving minute

Paraphrasing a classic one-liner about former Senator Al D'Amato and ethics, being called flagrant hypocrite by Arlen Specter is like being called ugly by a frog.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter called his fellow Democrat, Rep. Joe Sestak, a "flagrant hypocrite" and accused his rival of registering as a Democrat "just in time to run for Congress."

Sestak has said that he will challenge Specter, who has the backing of President Obama and party leaders, for the Democratic Senate nomination next year. Specter, a longtime Republican, switched his party registration to Democrat this year.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute

Hard to believe that this idea didn't work:

Starting a newspaper filled with material from blogs seemed audacious — as did the idea of starting any kind of newspaper in 2009. But Joshua Karp did just that in January. In the end, it didn’t work out. [...]

Mr. Karp started The Printed Blog to try out a new solution to the problem facing all publications: readers are going online, but advertisers still pay more to appear in print.

His idea was to take free articles and pictures from blogs, with their permission, and print them on 11-by-17-inch pieces of paper. Then he sold ads to local businesses and distributed the papers at train stations in Chicago and San Francisco.

The word inside the industry is that the audacious Karp, unshaken by this setback, is already seeking investors for his next project: Blockbuster Movies on Etch-a-Sketch.

Minute's up.

Another Drinking Liberally two-fer this week (plus a special guest)

The Portland and Portland Metro/West DL chapters both meet this week, featuring socializing and discussion with the Finest Minds of Our Generation^[TM].

Both chapters are meeting at a new location:

Portland Drinking Liberally meets at the Lucky Lab Brew Hall at 19th and NW Quimby (map), Thursday night at 7pm. (DL-PDX meets the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of every month.)

Portland Metro-West Drinking Liberally meets at Ringo's, 12300 SW Broadway St, (just east of Hall Blvd). map), Thursday night at 7pm. (DL-PDX M-W meets the 2nd Tuesday every month.)

Mark your calendars! Next Monday, July 13th, special guest Justin Krebs is coming to Portland. Justin is co-founder and Executive Director of Living Liberally, DL's umbrella organization (and one of the mad geniuses behind the political parody site haarm.org--Healthy Americans Against Reforming Medicine).

Justin will be passing through town on his way back to NYC, so we're going to treat him with a special Drinking Liberally get-together that evening at 7.00pm at the Lucky Lab Beer Hall at the Lucky Lab Beer Hall at 19th and Quimby in NW Portland.

And I know that's a bit of a drive on a weeknight for DL'ers in Vancouver, Salem, and St. Helen, but Justin's a great guy--and he has stories to tell. Don't pass up your chance to meet him!

And if you appreciate Living Liberally promoting progressive action through social interaction--including keeping the whole Drinking Liberally network up and running--consider sending them a little love via Tipping Liberally.

Join the Drinking Liberally gang this week (and Monday the 13th) for drinks and political conversation.

And remember: DL encourages everyone to drink, and vote, responsibly.

(Cross-posted at Loaded Orygun.)

Eight months later

(H/t to Anne.)

The unforgiving minute

If it weren't for the folks--including friends of mine--who live in California and have to live with the consequences of a booby-prize governor and a breathtakingly dysfunctional system of government, I'm not sure I'd know who to root for here:

A group of the biggest U.S. banks said they would stop accepting California's IOUs on Friday, adding pressure on the state to close its $26.3 billion annual budget gap. [...]

The group of banks included Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., among others. The banks had previously committed to accepting state IOUs as payment. California plans to issue more than $3 billion of IOUs in July.

But Californians can thank their lucky stars that they don't have the unjust burden of those vehicle registration fees that former Governor Gray Davis wanted to restore.

Minute's up.

The Bush era: A pop quiz

Two of these items belong together; one doesn't. Which one doesn't belong?


Circa 1958:

1983:

2009:

[W]hen the library for George W. Bush opens in 2013 on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, visitors will most likely get to see one of his most treasured items: Saddam Hussein’s pistol.

The gun, a 9 millimeter Glock 18C, was found in the spider hole where the Iraqi leader was captured in December 2003 by Delta Force soldiers, four of whom later presented the pistol to Mr. Bush. Among the thousands of gifts Mr. Bush received as president, the gun became a favorite, a reminder of the pinnacle moment of the Iraq war, according to friends and long-time associates.[…]

Mark Langdale, the president of the George W. Bush Foundation, said the library would use items to highlight 25 of Mr. Bush’s presidential decisions. “The gun is an interesting artifact, and it tells you that the United States captured Saddam Hussein and disarmed him literally,” Mr. Langdale said.

Wait--my mistake. All three belong together.

The p3 guest limericks

This morning's Oregon news limericks, as written by me, read by quizmaster TJ of Loaded Orygun, and answered (usually) by Carl, Christine,and Paul on the KPOJ 620AM Morning Show, are posted at LO.

Unfortunately, so careful and precise was our planning that we didn't end up with any "lost limericks" left over this week to use here, so we're proud to present instead these fugacious tributes to the weekend demise of the governor of Alaska, written by guest limericist and long-time p3 correspondent Barbara (who's probably already updated her résumé--she's just that good):

The Palin announcement is curious,
The reasons suspiciously spurious,
Her ethics aren’t trusted,
Her budget is busted,
I think she just quit ‘cause she’s furious.


The Palin report sparked a chorus
Of pundits who asked “What’s before us?”
Will she mount a campaign,
Make talk shows her domain?
Or perhaps she’ll just watch Russia for us.

Robert McNamara: "An American tragedy, our tragedy."

In one of the very first posts on p3, I compared former Defense Secretary McNamara to the title character in Graham Green's urtext of Vietnam fiction The Quiet American, whom the narrator described as "a leper without a bell."

McNamara, perhaps because his sense of American rightness remained tone-deaf to the end, died over Independence Day weekend.

But, as Will Bunch observes:

The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy -- because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed "best and brightest" in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, our policy-makers knew nothing or cared little about the long history and convoluted ethnic and religious politics of Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no plan for the proper military follow-up to a period of "shock and awe" bombing. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we totally misjudged the "nationalism" of the people who lived there and how they would react to a long American occupation. And perhaps most importantly, In Iraq, as in Vietnam, there was no real "public debate" as we marched headlong and foolishly into the 2003 -- with way too many "unexamined assumptions," "unasked questions," and "readily dismissed alternatives."

I didn't have much sympathy for McNamara's suffering; I grew up at the wrong time for that. But, as Bunch suggests, perhaps it was his penance to live so long, so aware of the consequences of the evil he'd helped set in motion even if he remained unable to grasp the fundamental cause of his error.

If that's the way it works, I suppose we have no choice but to wish a long, healthy, and lucid life to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, George W. Bush, et al.

But I'm not that optimistic.

Sunday morning toons: Special "Do you know what 'Land of the Free' means?" edition

Sarah Palin's abrupt, bizarre resignation Friday caught everyone--including the news media, the GOP leadership, her staff, and political cartoonists--flatfooted, so we'll have to wait until next week (at which point another shoe, or several, may have dropped) for proper coverage of that.

But fate has not been unkind to the cartoonists this week: The Schwarzenegger-led financial implosion of California, a string of celebrity deaths, the long-awaited Franken Senate victory, the sentencing of Bernie Madoff, the return of Governor Sanford, and--almost overlooked in all the hubbub--the actual, real, no-kidding beginning of redeployment of American troops out of Iraqi cities. (It's a start.) And it's all in Daryl Cagle's toon round-up this week.

And let's kick it off patriot-style, with a salute to Independence Day from Marshall Ramsey, Bob Englehart, John Cole, John Darkow, Jeff Stahler, and Bill Day.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckavich, John Darkow, David Fitzsimmons, Michael Ramirez, Steve Sack, Henry Payne, Dana Summers, Larry Wright, and Mike Lane.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium David Horsey.

The p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Convergence goes to Nate Beeler, Jeff Stahler, Scott Santis, Chip Bok, and Jeff Koterba,

p3 World Toon Review: Patrick Chapatte (Switzerland), Sergei Tunin (Russia), Frederick Deligne (France), and Guy Badeaux (Canada).


To help everyone have a safe and enjoyable 4th of July, Ann Telnaes reminds us of the three important rules: (1) Place on ground. (2) Light fuse. (3)--and this is the really important one--run away!


p3 Guest Toon: Tom Tomorrow asks: Does any of this seem familiar to you, too? A little déjà vu? Hm? Anything?


Protecting Our Endangered Toonists: Cartoonist Bob Eckstein describes the demise of his cartooning career, including his artistic breakthrough after attempting to draw with his opposite hand, how it feels to be the last cartoon published in a magazine before it goes under, having his work used without permission on a restaurant placemat in Hazleton PA and knowing the only justice he may ever get is a free dinner the next time he's in Hazleton PA, and how Mickey Mantle's death cost him his big chance.

(Thanks to John Sherffius for permission to use his "Signature Loss" image. Click to enlarge.)


Will the revolution be Twittered? Portland homeboy Jack Ohman thinks it might.


"The land of the free"--do you know what that means? I thought so." A young Porky Pig gets a tutorial in American history from a rather disturbing-looking Uncle Sam in this unusual Merrie Melodies short, animated by Chuck Jones, which premiered on July 1, 1939. Best not to get too fussy about the missing details--like "under God," or Alaska and Hawaii (all of which would come later), or who we were taking up arms against in 1776, or what happened to the people who were already on the land during the great "westward expansion," or the unpleasantness because of which Lincoln was called upon to deliver that famous speech.

p3 Bonus Toon: The legislature managed to finish its work in time for the holiday weekend, and now Jesse Springer just hopes the celebration doesn't get washed out.