Sunday morning toons: Notice to patrons

1. Effective immediately, if you're Roman Catholic and you use social media, you're no longer the Holy Father's flock. You're his tweeps.

2. Effective immediately, all funeral dirges will be played in 5/4 time.

3. There are 16 shopping days until Christmas.

4. There are 12 days left until the long-ago prophesied end of the world. Take whatever action, regarding #3, above, that seems appropriate.

5. If there is a war on Christmas, Christmas is winning. (Props to Mike Luckovich, below.)

6. Effective immediately, all news coverage of war, famine, economic collapse, and similar second-tier topics yeild to coverage of the Kate and William pregnancy.

7. Effective January 1, 2013, the junior senator from South Carolina will be just as much of a right-wing obstructionist whackjob as ever; he'll just be doing it for six or seven times his old salary as a Senator.

8. Effective immediately, if you're a disabled American veteran, the Senate Republicans don't even want to know you.

9. Effective immediately, the Tea Party will replace the Democratic Party as the group that can't make it through an election cycle without holding a circular firing squad.

All this and more, on today's p3 toon review.

Today's toons were selected by means of a multi-scale profiling instrument that determines who's been naughty and who's been nice, with an average 96.2% accuracy rate, from the week's pages at GoComics, McClatchyDC.com, Slate, Time, About.com, Daryl Cagle, and other fine sources.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Bob Englehart, Tom Toles, Jeff Danziger, Bill Day, Nate Beeler, Mike Keefe, Matt Wuerker, Jen Sorenson, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Kevin Siers.

p3 Legion of Extreme Merit: Pat Bagley.

p3 Papal Bull of Harmonic Toon Convergence: Rob Rogers and Lee Judge.

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Petar Pismestrovic (Austria), Deng Coy Miel (Singapore), and Ingrid Rice (Canada),


As Ann Telnaes sees it, the GOP's problem is less of a cliff, and more of a bog.


Mark Fiore shares that timeless (or is it endless?) holiday classic: The Twelve Days of Cliffmas.


Taiwan's Next Media Animation gives the NMA treatment to the third NHL lockout in 20 years.


And I thought the whole matter was settled with the invention of Underoos. As it turns out, there is quite an argument going on out there about Superman's underpants (actually, if they really were “underpants,” we wouldn't be having this discussion). This is probably the most thoughtful treatment of the topic I've seen. (The author is pro-underpants, by the way.)


Tom Tomorrow's Sparky the penguin and Chuckles the sensible woodchuck discuss one of my long-time convictions:Bad metaphors make bad policy.


Keith Knight explains what bacon and tequila have in common.


Tom the Dancing Bug presents a face-off between a dubious super-hero and the least evil-seeming nemesis ever known.


Red Meat's Ted Johnson and his son are making a list and checking it twice.


The Spinach Overture (1935) was directed by Dave Fleischer and animated by Seymour Kneitel and Roland Crandal, with uncredited voice work by Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, and Gus Wickie, and uncredited arrangement and incidental music by Sammy Timberg (most of the music is fractured classical or traditional). Note that, in the height of the depression, the only office building in town that managed to stay occupied was the one that (like the legendary Brill Building) rented performance space to musicians. Otherwise, it all seems pretty straight-forward to me: Concertmaster Bluto and his orchestra are much better than Popeye's by any objective measure. Bluto humiliates him, Popeye's “friends” abandon him, then Popeye discovers jazz through the ingestion of a green, leafy substance he keeps in a stash, and everything's cool after that.

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here. 

The p3 Big Oregon Toon Block:

Jack Ohman (still grandfathered in at this feature even though he took his buyout at the Oregonian and now works for the Sacramento Bee) celebrates that quintessential, even Capra-esque American moment when a citizen comes to talk things over with his elected representative.

Matt Bors dials the Metaphor Abuse Hotline, and not a moment too soon.

Jesse Springer notes Oregon's cutting-edge advances in recycling: Fifty-five minutes after an inmate was released from the Lane County jail because budget cuts decreased jail capacity, he was arrested for robbing a bank. (Note: Of course he was arrested! He's dressed like one of the Penguin's henchmen on the old “Batman” TV series.)

Test your toon-captioning superpowers at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Bad metaphors make bad economic policy: Part 2

(Updated below.) 

Remember: If you don't think about language, it will do your thinking for you.

Krugman today argues that the administration's newest buzzword, competitiveness, might be good politics but signals poor economic policy.

Along the way, he neatly disposes of the argument-by-metaphor that America (and, by extension, all large entities, including universities, hospitals, you name it) should be thought of as being like a corporation -- and hence run that way:

But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?

Well, actually, to defeat the purpose of a rhetorical question by answering it, the tiny sliver of the population making out like bandits off those profits think it's really pretty amazingly great. Which ought to tell us a lot about who's got the most invested in this lame metaphor.

(Part 1 of "Bad metaphors make bad economic policy" is here.)

Update: Robert Reich says pretty much the same thing about "competitiveness" (emphasis added):

Word has it that the President will be emphasizing “improving American competitiveness” in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night. As I’ve noted, the term is meaningless — but it’s politically useful. CEOs and many conservatives think it means improving the profitability of American companies. Liberals and labor unions think it means increasing export jobs.

Neither touches at the heart of the matter.

Sunday morning toons: Special "Bad Metaphors Make Bad Economic Policy" edition

What kind of week has it been? Obama bearded the GOP lions in their den; Toyota gets some bad brakes; the military inched closer to ditching DADT, while the Maverick went the other direction; the Tea Partiers convened, and America waits to see the abortion issue finally adjudicated at the highest level.

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:





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And Time's cartoons of the week.