Eight years ago in p3: The second Alaska gold rush

Sarah Palin made her first p3 appearance on Sunday Morning Toons, August 31, 2008.

Sensing immediately, like nearly everyone on earth who wasn't John McCain or Bill Kristol, that she would become comedy gold, I used the post to launch my "the governor, not the Python" gag, which I continued to milk for the duration of that electoral season, and to mock the utterly mockworthy Joe Lieberman, who had the unenviable experience of being Palin's beard until the announcement of McCain's choice.

In which two two celebrities of dubious achievement go for their Heisenberg moment

Two people, emotionally, morally, and intellectually unequipped for the gangsta life they've found themselves tossed into, but knowing they liked it just the same:

Exhibit 1:

George Zimmerman threatened to kill a driver during a road rage incident in Lake Mary and later showed up at the man's workplace, according to police.

The road rage incident happened Tuesday, Lake Mary police told Local 6, but the other driver declined to press charges, so Zimmerman was not arrested.

Police said the man, whose name was not released, called police after a truck pulled up next to him and the driver yelled, "Why are you pointing a finger at me?"

The man pulled into the Circle K at 4410 W. Lake Mary Blvd. to call 911, according to police, who added that driver followed him into the parking lot but took off before police arrived.

Police spokeswoman Bianca Gillett said the man recognized the truck driver as Zimmerman. The man said Zimmerman, who was carrying a gun, asked, "Do you know who I am?" before saying, "I'll (f***ing) kill you."

Exhibit 2:

The report of Sarah Palin's involvement in the second confrontation was based on a single anonymous source who spoke to Coyne. The source said the former Alaska governor was "nearly crawling on top of people" during the second melee in an attempt to get into the mix, all while screaming and shouting profanities.

Thompson told "Good Morning America" the ex-governor was yelling "Do you know who I am?" during the commotion, but he stopped short of saying she became physically involved in the fight.

(Emphasis added.)

Okay, kids, huddle up. This is how it's done: 

Impeachment? Paste this in your hat

For the next time someone tells you that all this "impeachment" talk is really a reverse-psych instigated by the Obama White House, cynically trying to wrong-foot the gullible but innocent Republicans in and out of Congress for political and fund-raising gain (but I repeat myself).

You probably knew some or most of this, but here it is, all in one place. Follow David Weigel's links at the site:

On Tuesday, after the conference meeting, Speaker John Boehner told reporters that “impeachment” was “a scam started by the Democrats at the White House.”

It wasn’t. If impeachment is a scam, it was started on the right, early in the Obama presidency. Some of its early adherents believed in it; some thought they were merely responding to the passions of constituents; some, obviously, wanted to raise money. At the start of this summer, the conservative book-publishing industry churned out two new tomes about why Republicans needed to start an impeachment conversation, to stop pretending that it was crazy to accuse the president of high crimes and realize that it was consistent with the rest of the party’s arguments. Republicans mostly refused to listen.

Then, on July 8 of this year, came Sarah Palin. Her PAC (this is important—see above, re: fundraising) placed an op-ed at Breitbart.com, announcing that the time had come for the I-word. For inexplicable reasons, Palin can still shift a news cycle; in a lucky synchronicity, the Senate campaign of Iowa Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley chose July 8 to release a tape of his opponent calling for impeachment.

Nothing will stop a movement quite like the other party noticing it. “Should Obama be impeached?” had been a slam-dunk kook-spotting question for years.

Like the House GOP's Impeachment Lite lawsuit against Obama, officially launched today, the only cause for delay was the tedious business of deciding what he would be found guilty of.

Fun fact: Former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, who was starting the paperwork calling for Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1997, making him first out of the gate by months, hoped to stage a political comeback this year – perhaps sensing that the time was right for someone with his impeach-for-whatever-reason street cred – but he got his ass whupped in the GOP primary by Tea Party candidate Barry Loudermilk. Sorry, Mr. Barr; but there'll be no resting on your laurels. The new GOP slogan is Who have you impeached for us lately?


Weigel's Salon article about the frantic efforts by Republican leadership to distance themselves from all the talk – but not the underlying intent – of Tea-Party fueled impeachment fantasies, is going on the p3 Readings list.

Quote of the day: You used to be big!

Sarah Palin is still big, it’s the venues she appears at that got smaller

- Tbogg, discussing the general downward spiral of the one-time governor and VP candidate's public appearances in the direction of supermarket openings and warming up for the garage band at Saturday Farmers' Markets.

The unforgiving minute: Wait – so "Darkwing Duck" is something different?

I got rid of cable TV some years ago.

It was partly because I was getting more of my programming online. Partly because AMC (which used to stand for American Movie Classics) was relying pretty heavily on "Smokey and the Bandit" marathons to pad out the weekends. Partly because A&E (which used to stand for Arts & Entertainment) hadn't been programming much in the way of arts or entertainment in quite a while. Partly because SyFy (which used to be called the SciFi Channel) stopped showing the new Doctor Who, letting it go to BBC America.

Which is why, for the last several years, although I saw a lot of mention of "Duck Dynasty," I had no idea – blissfully ignorant – about what it was. I think I supposed it was an animated series of some kind. Something on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, or maybe – if we're lucky – on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. There's where I was wrong.

Now, only somewhat against my will, I have a little better bead on the whole thing. It's not a cartoon series starring anthropomorphic animals. It's something even more dramatically removed from the world we live in: It's one of those tightly scripted, carefully edited, high-concept freak shows that go by the shrieking misnomer "reality TV."

And apparently one of the "stars" gave an interview in which he let things get a little too "real," provoking an utterly predictable backlash and allowing him to spend some time drawing a check for riding out the free-media gravy train of passive-aggressive political victimhood while Sarah Palin binds his wounds with crushed leaves of sedra, oil of the kernel of the apricot, and infusion of bitter orange blossom.

Which is a long way of saying I can dig out my "Ren & Stimpy" collection and safely go back to paying "DD" no attention.

Minute's up.

A quantum of umbrage: Stars and Bars and Vets

We here at p3 have a rule about the confederate flag, whether as a banner, bumper sticker, t-shirt, or tattoo. We used to find it disgusting and pathetic. We still do, but now we defend its display on two grounds. First, because First Amendment defense of expression is most needed when the ideas expressed are the most ugly. Second, the confederate flag serves a kind of public health warning, like a Hazmat sign: Danger – toxic environment ahead.

Which brings us to the appearance of the Stars 'n' Bars in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in connection with the Tea Party's demonstration over the weekend, to grift on the government shutdown of the WWII memorial, the cause of which was the rump Republican radicals in the House who, you know, shut down the government. The whole stampede – pretty much the sole creation of Fox News, who denies it, which indicates it's true – is the product of people pretending to care about WWII veterans while doing their best to shut down every government service to WWII veterans.

Why WWII veterans (who, incidentally, went to war to defend the country that the Confederacy waged war on under the Stars and Bars) don't recognize that someone's pissing on their leg and calling it rain is another story.

P.S. Memo to Tom Hanks: Where are you when it comes to defending the right to a decent and comfortable living for the dwindling number of WWII vets, rather than promoting a vanity project on the Mall?

The p3 poetry corner: Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered
by Clive James

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book—
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and the banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretence,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots—
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
'My boobs will give everyone hours of fun'.

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error—
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

The unforgiving minute: Excerpt from the GOP SAT Exam Prep Guide:

Identify the next element in this series:

Mitch Daniels, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Chris Christie, Herman Cain, ____________.

[Hint: No credit will be awarded for the answer "Mitt Romney."]

Minute's up.

The exquisite pain of the First Amendment

Scott Lemieux reminds us of a long-standing p3 maxim: If defending free speech doesn't hurt, at least a little bit, you're probably not doing it right:

To its substantial credit, in an 8-1 ruling today the Court held that the civil suit against Fred Phelps violated the First Amendment. It’s hard to celebrate any victory for Phelps and his band of bigots, but that’s the point — you don’t need the First Amendment to defend popular speakers.

Thus is actual free speech in America distinguished from what Sarah Palin thinks it should be, which is speech that is free from ever being subjected to criticism. I'm as astonished as anyone that the same court that declared contract-based corporations to have the same free-speech rights as carbon-based citizens actually got this one right, but there's no denying they did.

(Bonus quote from Lemieux:

You’d think that ["Strip Search Sammy" Alito's lone dissent in] this case would kill of his wholly unearned reputation for moderation, but it seems as durable as Newt Gingrich’s wholly unearned reputation as an intellectual.

Heh.)

Quote of the day: Proportion

Nancy Goldstein, at The Nation's group blog, on why ABC News might be less eager to find ideological connections behind the backpack bomb discovered at the Seattle MLK parade than the reports of death threats to Sarah Palin:

After all, what's a backpack filled with shrapnel aimed at an MLK Day crowd and confirmed by an FBI agent as an instance of domestic terrorism, compared to a Palin aide's hearsay?

(The post also has well-deserved praise for David Neiwert: "In the wake of Tucson, Neiwert has led a virtual master class in how to respond to far-right aggression, denial and evasion.")

Why it's not your fault that you're not impressed by the "Mama Grizzlies" ad

Let's talk for a moment about that feeling of disconnect between you and the mainstream news media that you sometimes experience.

You know the feeling I mean: You watch something that has the media agog. Simply agog. It could be the real-life struggles of the latest "American Idol" finalists. It could be Lady Gaga. It could be LeBron James.

Or it could be a new political ad featuring Sarah Palin proudly proclaiming the newest fictive "It" demo in American politics: "mama grizzlies."

And you find yourself wondering, Wait. Why am I supposed to care about this, again?

You're raised on the media. You're hip. You're worldly. You're fashionably jaded without being unpleasant to talk to at dinner parties. You know all about the up-front, a percentage of the gate, and having legs in the secondary markets. And yet, sometimes when you watch pointless stuff like this seeming to catch fire in a heartbeat, you feel that tiny little soul-check: Is it somehow my fault that everyone seems to think this matters . . . except me?

At No More Mister Nice Blog, Steve's on it. Long story short: Probably not your fault.

Principle #1: The media people assume that you're naturally interested in whatever they're interested in.

The important thing is that the mainstream media thinks the ad has broad-based appeal. This means that the ad has broad-based appeal to the mainstream media itself. The MSM always projects its beliefs outward onto the rest of us -- when MSM folks like something, they tell us we like it. They think they're reporting our favorable reaction, when in fact they're reporting their own.

Principle #2: The media people aren't really interested in whatever you're actually interested in; they're just interested in whatever they're interested in.

What impresses them about the ["mama grizzlies"] ad by has nothing to do with policy positions or whether Palin would actually be competent as president of the United States. What they're impressed by is her perceived mastery of messaging. They care about media products, and she created a slick one. That means it barely matters whether she's extreme or ill-informed or petulant and childish. She gives good visuals, so she is now a Serious Person.

And there you have it: This explains not only why the "mama grizzlies" ad by Palin's PAC -- an ad which doesn't seem to be about much other than itself -- appears to be of interest to everyone, but also that vague fluorescent-light-background-hum of guilt you experience when you realize that it isn't really of interest to you at all, and that it doesn't really even seem to make much sense.

The unforgiving minute: Unemployment and the GOP

I just figured out why the Republican party has recently shown  such hostility to the unemployed (they've never been pals, of course, but lately it's seemed above and beyond, even for the GOP):


Remember, the GOP tends to draw its main presidential contenders from the ranks of the (elite) unemployed: the Palins, the Romneys, the Santorums, etc.

It's really a supply-side issue: If the Republican party were to acknowledge the true extent of unemployment in America right now, the number of potential Republican contenders for 2012 would almost immediately become completely unmanageable.

And, on the flip side, if the economy were ever to recover to the point where even the structurally unemployed -- those people who've been out of work for so long their skill-sets are hopelessly outdated, the people who have become the most difficult to integrate back into the labor force in some meaningful, useful way -- had a chance of finding a job again, Newt Gingrich might find himself under pressure to actually work for a living.

Unthinkable.

Minute's up.

Quote of the day: Losing Indiana the hard way

Charles Pierce on the fallout from John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate:

[. . . ] her innate clownishness had made her (and him) such a laughing stock that the Republican ticket lost in places like Indiana to a black man whose middle name was "Hussein"

Verily.

The unforgiving minute

Tolstoy was right: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way:

Joe the Plumber (aka Samuel J.Wurzelbacher) headlined state Representative Sam Rohrer’s Mobilize for Liberty event in Harrisburg today [...]

Wurzelbacher touched on several different points during his speech, and many of them were surprising. He said he doesn’t support Sarah Palin anymore. Why? Because she’s backing John McCain’s re-election effort. “John McCain is no public servant,” he told the room, calling the 2008 Republican nominee a career politician.

I pointed out he’d just be plain old Sam Wurzelbacher of Ohio — Joe the Plumber wouldn’t exist – without McCain. His response was blunt. “I don’t owe him s—. He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it.”

Minute's up.

This is going to make the Spring Faculty/Student mixer a little awkward

Looks like the Dean of the Washington Press Corps has developed a little May-December crush on the coach of the women's basketball team.

Broder was clearly worth every penny of his buy-out a couple of years ago.

Talking to the hand

I think the whole Palin-writing-on-her-palm business isn't worth anyone's bother. People do that all the time. I've done it sometimes. I call it my "palm organizer." I like to think that joke never grows old, though it probably does.

If you're on the left and you want to be appalled by Palin's performance at the Tea Party Convention and subsequent Q & A, there's ample reason, but there's not much need for Palmgate (may I be the first?) to be part of it. Why focus on notes on her palm as an indicator of the shallowness of her ideas, or her general unfitness for office, when you've got over 45 minutes of her speech right there? Why get worked up over something that might arguably symbolize the problem, when you've got the actual problem right before your eyes?

And frankly, after watching one of her poorer performances at the podium last night--rushed punchlines, flubbed lines, strange pauses--if inking some notes in her hand would have improved her game, I'd have been happy to loan her my favorite Sharpie. I taught public speaking for more years than I care to remember, let alone admit, and as far as mnemonic aids go, it's whatever gets you through the night. And different people have different tricks. Letterman uses blue 4" x 6" cards just to get through the Top 10 list every night, and I don't remember the last time anyone called him out for that on my Twitter home page.

Some have guessed that her crib notes were proof that her Q&A questions were known to her in advance. Let's suppose it's true, that she wasn't just looking for her political lifeline. The words written on her hand were:

Energy
Tax
Lift American Spirits

As the title for the next blockbuster inspirational memoir, there could be something there.

But it's hard to imagine she'd need a crib sheet for those, no matter what you think of her. I'd guess that by now she sees them whenever she closes her eyes, burned into her retinas like flashbulbs. But if she does need them written there--perhaps the way a professor of mine used to print the mini-prayer "JMJ" at the top of his spelling homework as a lad back in Catholic school--so what?

Focus, people: You've got her totally-mistaken ideas about the federal deficit. You've got her out-loud musing attacking Iran. You've got the evidence she's part of an effort by the GOP to co-opt the Tea Party movement rather than let it run off-leash. And those things are all right there for the viewing; no need to scour YouTube freeze-frames.

Talk to what she actually said. Not to the hand.

(Image via.)

Sunday morning toons: Special "Forgot to Subtitle It" edition

[Update: Missing Betty Boop is back!]

Is it a new rule that Obama gets heckled every time he speaks to Congress? Are Americans starting to notice congressional GOP intransigence? Is there anything left that corporations don't own? Will Sarah Palin end up giving her $100K speech to an empty auditorium where the national Tea Party convention was originally scheduled?

And what's the one development here in America this week that seems to be shaking the world?

The answers are here, starting with this week's Daryl Cagle's toon round-up.

p3 Picks of the Week: Mike Luckovich, Nate Beeler, R. J. Matson, R. J. Matson, Larry Wright, Milt Priggee, Pat Bagley, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: John Trevor.

p3 "Exporting Democracy" Award: Jimmy Margulies.

p3 "Money Changes Everything" Award: Steve Sack.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Adam Zyglis.

Meanwhile, see if you can detect the subtle pattern in this week's p3 World Toon Review: Patrick Chappatte (Switzerland), Paresh Nath (India), Martyn Turner, (Ireland) and Cam Cardow (Canada).


Ann Telnaes suspects that some soapboxes are more equal than others.


Mark Fiore describes the State of the Union Address he'd like to see. I particularly like the idea of National Irony Day.


Can Supreme Court Justices still utter the phrase "framers' intent" without giggling? The answer, says Chan Lowe, could blow you away.


Ever find yourself wondering why "The Family Circus" just isn't very interesting? The Comics Curmudgeon has a thought: You could be reading it out of sequence.


Portland homeboy Jack Ohman notes that what you learned in your high school civics book may be void where prohibited.

Laughs: It comes somewhere between Giggles and Hysterics: "Ha! Ha! Ha!" is a 1934 Betty Boop toon directed by Dave Fleischer that paired her with another popular Fleischer Studios character, Koko the Clown (whose popularity didn't endure like our Betty's). There are several claims online that the film was at some point banned--the plot involves a trip to the dentist where everyone's overcome by laughing gas--although it's hard to picture that as a ban-worthy offense, then or now, and I haven't been able to document anything of the sort. (Given that a Popeye cartoon from 1946, "Rodeo Romeo," showing Popeye and Bluto bombed out of their gourds on "locoweed," got regular TV play up into the 1960s, laughing gas seems like it deserves a ticket at most, not the death penalty. And of course there the whole Betty and cocaine thing.) The fumes soon spread over the city, resulting in a hallucinatory mix of animation and live-action footage--the typewriter and mailboxes seem like they're straight out of David Cronenberg.

p3 Bonus Toon: Following the pulling-away victories of Measures 66 and 67 this week, Jesse Springer sends along this message of appreciation, "from the 97% of us who won't be affected by the tax increase to the other 3%:"




Remember to bookmark:

Slate's political cartoon for the day.

And Time's cartoons of the week.

Opening sentences: Conservative prose of the future

[Updated below.]


Item 1:

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog meditates on an ugly, ugly possibility: Jonah "Doughy Pantload" Goldberg, legacy conservative blogger and author of the incoherent-from-the-title-onward Liberal Fascism, just landed a $1 million advance to write a book whose opening sentence might be something very close to this:

One of the most important points of this column over the years -- other than my belly, my dog, fair Jessica, my need for a raise, the fact that I have the upper-body strength of an eight-year-old girl and the lung capacity of a Polish whoopee cushion -- is my aversion to cliched thinking.

Even worse, that $1 million advance isn't from Republican vanity publisher Regnery. It's from the same publishing house that gives the world The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Candide. (True, publishing is a business where, even on the best of days, the high-minded and the low-brow have to sit elbow-to-elbow at the lunch counter, but surely there's some limit to this sort of thing.)


Item 2:

Strictly speaking, this is about sentences, but not necessarily opening sentences. Slate recently marked the publication of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue (which I had, to my horror, for weeks been confusing with "Going Commando") by inviting its readers to submit sentences to its Write Like Sarah Palin Contest. The results can be found here.

Many of the finalists resort to the same formula that has overtaken the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, to its detriment, in recent years. They are over-long, studded with slightly odd but concrete references, leading up to a teeth-rattling non sequitur in the last phrase. And they don't sound much like Palin. unless every slightly-dotty run-on utterance sounds the same to you. Still there are some funny moments in which you can almost hear Palin's one-in-a-million voice. Worth a click.


Item 3:

Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with first sentences or conservatives. (You got a problem with that?) The American Book Review has compiled their list of 100 best last lines from novels. (Fittingly, it's in pdf format--you don't make it to the last sentence of a novel without at least a little suffering.) The choices and rankings are second-guessed in the comments at Tbogg and Yglesias, among many other places.

No such list is complete if it doesn't include this:

"Yes," he said, and shivered. "Well, send her in."

I know, it's two sentences, but they bent the rules for Joyce, so they can certainly do it for Hammett. Although, as one of Tbogg's commenters suggested, ABR's list carries the whiff of literary snobbery, which likely didn't work to Hammett's advantage.


[Update: Item 4 (via Batocchio):

Moving somewhat back toward our opening theme again, here's the ABR's 100 best first lines from novels. On the whole, this list was less surprising, less delightful, and more baffling for me than their 100 last lines list, above. I suspect many these items made the list not because they were "best first lines," but rather because they were the first lines of a book someone on the nominating committee found especially memorable. Re-reading the opening line kick-started all the feelings that the book still offered up. By that criterion, my list might well begin with this:

I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.

Make of that what you will.]

"A good point guard, here's what she does."

As Vanity Fair notes, "If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago."

Harsh, but true. So, out of some mixture of professional courtesy, literary indignation, and morbid curiosity, VF's literary editor, with an assist from the copy and research departments, set out to make the thing presentable. (Click to enlarge.)

I should emphasize: No one ordered them to go on this mission; they all volunteered. Editors award their highest honors for that.

The finished product is obviously superior, although I think they occasionally got a little carried away. They fixed a few idiomatic or regional constructions that probably didn't need fixing and are, arguably, even part of the "down-home" authenticity that many originally found attractive, or at least intriguing, about Palin. I wouldn't go so far as to dignify her tin ear for modifiers and auxiliary verbs by equating it with Lincoln's signature Old Testament cadences, or Kennedy's love of parallelism and antithesis, but they do go a long way toward making Sarah the easily recognized brand she is. (Ask Tina Fey.)

Of course, that's a point about which editors can disagree in good faith. And in any case I sympathize with her ghost editors; when the main part of a job involves swinging a 7-pound sledge hammer, it can take a few moments for muscle memory to catch up once it's time to use a scalpel for the fine work.

But that small reservation is related to a larger, more consequential one: By tightening up the self-indulgent rambling, connecting the non sequiturs, healing the afflicted grammar and syntax, fixing the ambiguities, and correcting errors of fact, VF's team hasn't merely lost much of Palin's voice. They've produced a document in which little or no trace of the original animating consciousness behind the speech remains. I suppose one could argue that, in worst-case scenarios, that is the most important function of the speech writer/editor. The persona who might have given that speech, as edited, could have had a much better chance in national politics.

(Hat tip to Marianne.)

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.)