Cartoon #234: “Rings Around Uranus”

The New York Times reported today that President Bush allowed the National Security Agency to intercept much more domestic communications data than he previously admitted to. Duh. The NSA has long been intercepting all worldwide electronic communications. All U.S. communications are routinely passed through the NSA’s supercomputers sifted with “trip words/phrases”.

This has, of course, been illegal since 1978. But the U.S. government has used a loophole to snoop on every citizen. Through secret reciprocal agreements with certain allies, like Great Britain, the U.S. intercepts their communications and shares it with their intelligence agencies, and they intercept ours and share it with our intelligence agencies. After 9/11, their has been no need to hide behind this “snoophole”.

In “other” news this week, astronomers discovered two new rings around the planet Uranus. The NSA’s ability to listen to all worldwide telecommunications is nothing compared to the National Reconnaissance Office’s use of space telescopes for spying on everyone. But that discussion remains taboo.

Cartoon #233: “Iraq Election”

Cartoon #232: “Domestic Spying”

Here’s the deal. The U.S. is not at war. How do I know? Look at any seal of the United States, or any seal of any federal agency. It is also on the back of a one dollar bill. Look at the eagle’s head. While the head has been facing the same side as the eagle’s talons holding the olive branch (symbol for peace), the U.S. has been in peacetime. When the U.S. was last at war, the eagle’s head faced the other way, toward the talons holding the arrows (symbol for war). The last time any seals of the U.S. depicted wartime was in 1945.

The claim that the U.S. has been at war since 2001 is a lie. If, like lots of United Statesans, you believe this lie, you now know the truth. Only citizens of the U.S., through direct action by their representatives in congress, can go to war. Now you know.

Moreover, President Bush has been using this lie to justify the uprecedented, dictatorial power of illegally spying on you. The National Security Agency is complicit in this conspiracy. The NSA obeyed an illegal order from the president in peacetime. These are high crimes. Felonies. Violations of the fourth amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Impeachable offenses.

Do your duty.

Cartoon #231: “Calvin & Hobbes Anniversary”

Thought Bubble #30

We are all slaves of the germ line.

Cartoon #230: “War on Christmas”

Jesus was Jewish. He never celebrated anything like ‘Christmas.’ In biblical times, birth dates were not remembered, and birth anniversaries were not observed.

What would a Jewish contemporary of Jesus, who was the same age as Jesus, have said if you had asked him when he was born? After wondering about your sanity for asking such a question, he might tell you the year of his birth — if he knew even that much. That year would be 3761 by his calendar.

If you wished him a happy Hanukkah (or Feast of Dedication as he knew the holiday), he would know exactly what you meant. Hanukkah is a celebration of his people’s real victory in their own real ‘war on Judaism’ waged by the Syrians.

If you think there is a ‘war’ against Christmas in the U.S., just try ignoring it. If you are right, it should be easy to avoid Christmas gifts, Christmas decorations, Christmas music, Christmas TV specials, Christmas ballets, Christmas plays, Christmas pagents, Christmas concerts, Christmas parades, Christmas services, Christmas cards, Christmas foods, Christmas advertising, Christmas greetings, Christmas movies, Christmas magazines, Christmas books, Christmas parties, Christmas bonuses, and Christmas vacations.

If you are correct, you will not see, or hear, or touch, or smell, or think about any of these Christmas experiences. On December 26th, or later, it will occur to you that Christmas passed without your noticing it. Think you can do that? If so, you are wrong. You won’t succeed. Now ask yourself: If Christmas can’t even be ignored, how can there be any kind of clear and present danger threatening to kill it?

So what is all this hoopla and humbuggery about a so-called “war on Christmas?” It is a fabrication of the religious right in the U.S. It is more fear mongering to raise money for neo-conservative political causes. It’s as nonsensical as the false accusation about a conspiracy to use Spongebob Squarepants to turn heterosexual kids into homosexual adults. It is as nutty as a fruitcake.

Support Your Local Cartoonist!

Today is Black Ink Monday, the first ever theme cartoon day by editorial cartoonists to protest the downsizing of staff editorial cartoonist jobs.

Among the threats to jobs of political and editorial cartoonists is the “dulling down” or outright avoidance of strong opinions and editorials by news organizations — and none are stronger than political cartoons.

The strange attitude that a news organization’s op-ed page should be everything to every reader — or nonexistent, as with most TV and radio web sites — is wrong-headed. Publishers who do not want to offend anyone, out of fear that someone might cancel a subscription, or choose not to subscribe, place a gag on minority opinions (no pun intended).

In fact, this long-time trend is the cause of, not the solution to declining profits in the news business. Controversy sells, dullness doesn’t. Just ask the top publicists in Hollywood.

Blaming financial woes on new media gimmicks and technologies doesn’t hold water either. The ‘new’ always wears off, and consumers continue their search for stimulating content.

Politicians do have the power to hurt publishers who ridicule them (see any good history about the press in Nazi Germany). But giving in to bullies is even more wrong-headed.

To learn more about the protest, and see Black Ink Monday cartoons by other cartoonists, visit The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists Web site.

Thought Bubble #29

What we haven’t yet come to grips with in the United States is that Robert F. Kennedy was our country’s last hope.

Thought Bubble #28

Here’s a feature film comedy remake idea starring today’s top comedy actors: “The Terrorists Are Coming, the Terrorists Are Coming!”

Thought Bubble #27

It’s not what you do. It’s what else you do.

Cartoon #224: “Gulf of Tonkin”

A National Security Agency analysis of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents was declassified this week, four years after it was written in 2001. It proves conclusively that there was no attack on U.S. ships on August 4, 1964, as reported and leaked to the media. President Lyndon Johnson used the false reports of the alleged attack to justify escallating U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Some of us did not have to wait for declassification. Here in Pflugerville, Texas, we needed only ask the comptroller of the school district, Gerrell Moore. Former NSA officer Moore was the senior intelligence official aboard the U.S.S. Maddox during the Tonkin Gulf incidents. He has told anyone who would listen from day one that the second attack never happened. He was even interviewed for decades about it by mainstream news organizations like Newsweek. Nobody ever published his statements.

Those of us who have been paying attention to modern U.S. history have long known that there is nothing new about the so-called “War on Terror,” and that the slippery slope toward neo-fascism (or corporatism if you prefer) did not start on 9/11.

Cartoon #223: “Tom Delay’s Redistricting Map”

Almost two years after it was written, a secret memo, dated December 12, 2003, was turned over to the Washington Post regarding the Texas redistricting map rammed through the state legislature by Tom DeLay. The 73-page memo detailed an opinion by the voting rights section of the Department of Justice that the map violated the Voting Rights Act. The memo was never seen by the three-judge panel that ruled the map was legal in 2003. At the time the memo surfaced, the case was pending for review by the U.S. Supreme Court. The court’s decision came on June 28, 2006. The state legislature’s redistricting plan did indeed violate the Voting Rights Act in the case of House District 23, represented by Republican Henry Bonilla.

For those of you who followed my cartoons on this subject two years ago, you may recognize this as similar to my 2003 cartoon, “GOP Redistricting Map for Texas.” Tom DeLay’s name was not a national household word back then, and the image becomes more prophetic as we learn more about the corruption behind the Texas redistricting fiasco of 2003.

Cartoon #222: “Exit Strategy”

President Bush said he disagrees with those who are calling for a timeline for the withdrawl of U.S. troops from Iraq. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel raised the question: If Iraqis can discuss a date, why can’t we?

Bush uses the same default exit strategy used in Vietnam from 1964 through the end of that undeclared war. The majority of U.S. citizens, however, want a strategy that brings home all of our troops alive, and whole mentally and physically.

Meanwhile, you can spell “Exit Strategy” by lining up about 116 flag-draped caskets.

Cartoon #221: “White House Pardons”

Bush’s critics called for him to promise not to pardon Scooter Libby. Libby faces a 30-year prison sentence if found guilty of perjury. U.S. Presidents can and do pardon convicted criminals near the end of their terms in office. But this year, Bush may opt for grouping Libby and others in with his annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon.

Cartoon #220: “Proposition 2”

The KKK scheduled a rally on November 5, 2005 in Austin, Texas in support of Proposition 2, an ammendment to the Texas Constitution banning same-sex marriage. Because the Vatican also supports such anti-gay laws, those twin agendas must be filed under “Strange Bedfellows.”

The following letter was published in the Austin American-Statesman October 30, 2005:

What side are you on?
The fact the the Ku Klux Klan has allied itself with the Christian agenda in support of the vote for Proposition 2 speaks a mouth full. How proud all the folks who support this nonsense proposition must feel now to have the KKK on its side!
—Forrestt Eubanks, Austin

Thought Bubble #26

HAL 9000 was a Nazi.

Cartoon #219: “Alito Nomination”

President Bush made his third nomination to the Supreme Court, after the withdrawl of his second appointment, Harriet Miers. Chief Justice John Roberts was his first nominee.

Bush’s choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, his close friend and legal counsel, Harriet Ellan Miers, raised too much protest from his extreme right-wing base. They accused him of betraying them by not choosing a known, right-wing ideologue. Former failed Supreme Court nominee, right-wing ideologue Robert Bork publicly stated that Miers was a disaster on every level. They are using the litmus test of blind opposition to Roe v. Wade.

So Bush gave them what they wanted. Bush’s public propaganda for each nomination said none of this, of course. His stated reasons for the nominations now sound crazy. Soon after the Alito nomination, one democratic congressman called the judge “a wacko.” Beware of Alito.

Cartoon #218: “Rosa Parks”

“The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”

—John F. Kennedy,
Radio and Television Speech to the American People on Civil Rights,
The White House
June 11, 1963

“Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.”

—Rosa Parks

Cartoon #217: “Scooter Indictment”

Well beyond Halloween 2005, the criminals in the Bush administration will live in a fear of a monster they created.

After a two-year investigation, Chicago-based Federal Prosecuter Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby on October 28, 2005. According to the indictment, Libby was the first person to reveal the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame outside the government to a reporter. Libby then lied about that crime under oath, and repeatedly.

Libby also served as Cheney’s top national security aide, and as national security advisor to the president. He was charged with five counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby immediately resigned his White House positions.

Indictments against other Bush administration officials were expected, but Fitzgerald decided to charge only Libby for now, and seat a new a new grand jury to continue his investigation. Grand juries serve for 18 months, with a six-month extension. The only other person mentioned by Fitzgerald in connection with the investigation was a senior official in the White House referred to by Fitzgerald only as “Official A”.

The Associated Press reported that “Official A” is Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Bush’s chief advisor. Before the Libby indictiment, both he and Rove were advised by Fitzgerald that they were in extreme legal jeopardy. News reports prior to the indictment also revealed that Rove’s attorney advised Fitzgerald to reconsider going forward with an indictment of his client now. Whatever the lawyer said to him, Fitzgerald apparently was persuaded.

Fitzgerald said at his press conference, however, that Rove was not being indicted “today.”

Cartoon #216: “DeLay’s Mug Shot”

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had his first appearance in court today in Austin, Texas. Yesterday he surrendered to a warrant for his arrest near his home in Houston. He was fingerprinted and his mug shot was taken. DeLay was allowed to keep his coat and tie on, and smile for the camera. The old question made popular by Esquire Magazine soon surfaced: Why is this man smiling? Given DeLay’s attempt to have Judge Bob Perkins recused from his case for being a donor to MoveOn-dot-org, and for making a small donation to the John Kerry campaign last year, this cartoon may be accurate.