Cartoonists With Attitude

Post what you like, as you like it. Self-linking makes me giggle like a small baby.

This video might not be SFW:

1. A buncha links on “triggering” and “calling out”
2. Sex, Gender, and Toilet Signs. A discussion of gender in bathroom signs. This is awesome, partly for the discussion, and partly for the enormous variety of signs that the blogger has collected and categorized.
3. Who are the girls who need to bypass parental notification laws by going to a judge? It’s explained here, in painful and lengthy detail. This blogger really knows what she’s talking about; well worth reading.
4. “Charles Darwin … imagined a world in which organisms battled for supremacy and only the fittest survived. But new research identifies the availability of “living space”, rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution.” Interesting idea.
5. Great point: But thinking of “choice” as the opposite of “discrimination,” as Brad Peck of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did in his blog post about the pay gap, is wrong. Discrimination and opportunity shape choice, and as long as women see an unfairly matched, uphill battle in every election, they’re unlikely to jump in willingly unless they have an unusual amount of resources or support.
6. Gov. Barbour Implicitly Criticizes GOP’s Tough Talk On Immigration
7. “The talented Ukrainian artist Vladislav Erko has created an absolutely amazing deck of playing cards based on authentic traditional Ukrainian costumes.”
8. Riz Khan on Afghan Women: “One thing that Riz Khan’s program brought to light is that the damage done to women’s rights is not just a result of Taliban rule nor is it just a result of occupation. The problems have preceded both the Taliban’s rule and U.S. occupation and thus cannot be expected to be solved in just nine years of occupation.”
9. The Argument For Getting Rid Of The Home Mortgage Deduction. Interestingly, what everyone says — that this deduction was created in order to encourage home ownership — isn’t true.
10. Female Impersonator reviews The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I really liked it, and would argue that it is a feminist novel (although not a perfect feminist work, but what is?).
11. “South Sudan is planning to literally re-build its city centers from scratch…into the shape of… safari animals.” No, really. It’s worth clicking through to see the proposed city plans.
12. Note to White House: It’s ugly out there. The base actually matters. Do something. Fast. Although really, I think it’s too late. I’d be delighted to be wrong, but I think the Democrats are going to get creamed in two months.
13. The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray
14. Republican Candidate Michael Stopa’s Anti-Atheist Bigotry Ignored.
15. I need a (non-copyrighted) drink
16. Quote: “Really? No ‘more horrible person [can] be imagined’ than Alice Walker? Maybe if your imagination really, really sucks.”
17. The economy is going to keep on sucking for a long, long time.
18. Prostitution on CraigsList: the US and Singapore
19. Ted Rall, of all people, argues that our mission in Afghanistan is doing some good.
20. MLK’s Movement Was More Interested in Justice Than Harmony. There are also some really nice photos in this post.
21. The Death Dealer — Rebecca Dart’s kitteny take on the famous Frazetta painting.
22. I really like this 1916 photo of a mother and her son, a marine. Not sure why.
23. You think your hospital experience was bad? This man’s was worse.
24. Eunomia (one of the best foreign policy blogs out there — and I’m saying this about a conservative blog!) discusses and defends Feisal Abdul Rauf’s most controversial statements.
25. (Yet Another Reason) Why immigration could help America
26. Paul Krugman: This Is Not a Recovery
27. The Ethos of an Advocate in an Adversarial Model of Democratic Discourse: “Indeed, I worry that the whole premise of a “contest of advocates” model is that there is someone sitting in the jury box, someone being convinced. But the more we sort into ideological tribes, the smaller the pool from which one might draw such a jury.”
28. Should Retirement Be Nasty, Brutish, and Shorter?
29. This cartoon cracked me up.
30. A record backlog in immigration courts
31. Propaganda Posters of World War Two. Includes some anti-American posters the Axis countries created!
32. On fatphobia, thin privilege, and “eat a sandwich!”
33. Below: An image from The LowBrow Tarot Card Project

Just checking in to let you know that I still exist. Sketchbook pages will slow down as I turn my focus over to syndicated cartoons and some longer pieces in the next few weeks and months. The trip is nearing the end and it won’t be long until I’m back in Portland, where I’m actually looking forward to the rain (and beer).

Click here.

You've heard plenty of Tales of True Romance… 

Iran is a threat because Washington says so. Certainly, WaPo accepts the charge at face value:

Iran’s ambitions, which have cast a long shadow over the greater Middle East, may serve as a common bond keeping a frail peace process intact despite threats that have arisen even before the negotiations open Thursday at the State Department.

Iran’s nuclear program and spreading political influence through a swath of Sunni Arab countries have alarmed the region’s kings and elected autocrats for years.

ONOZ! Not the kings and autocrats!

As the clock ticks down…

Blue wire? Or red wire? Which one do I cut–BOOM!

…on predominantly Shiite Iran’s nuclear program, though, it becomes more urgent for Israel and its Arab neighbors to achieve peace and face together the shared threat to their security and political stability.

The dynamic brings an “enemy of my enemy” calculation to this round of talks, binding the Jewish state’s security interests to those of its Sunni Arab neighbors more tightly than in the past.

You don’t have to be an Iranian citizen to recognize that Iran is run by scary assholes. But could not the same be said by any other citizen in the Middle East, Israel included? And, ya know, it’s funny — just yesterday the President Who Cannot Be Doubted (except in the most ludicrous ways) announced the withdrawal of combat forces from a Middle Eastern country that some nation run by a religious zealot invaded illegally, destabilized, set up a torture prison, divvied up winnings to corporate pals, and threw into civil war. You’d think that might have some influence on the political climate of the region.

But let us not re-litigate the past. Let us move forward to a bright new tomorrow. “Turn the page,” as it was recently said.

Netanyahu will need Obama’s support if he decides to undertake a military strike against Iran, either before or after he carries it out. His willingness to stick with peace talks, which Obama has called a priority, would win him goodwill in what has so far been a stormy relationship between the two men.

All in good faith, then.

[Crossposted on "TADA" and on "Alas"]

Felix Salmon writes:

Never mind the stimulus vs austerity debate: here’s something that both sides should be able to get behind. It’s a simple legislative fix which increases tax revenues without raising taxes; which increases the demand for housing; which increases the economy’s productive capacity; and which boosts wages for American workers. It’s about as Pareto-optimal as legislation gets. So let’s open the borders, and encourage much more immigration into the US!

Salmon links to this report from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Giovanni Peri, the author of the report, compared states with high levels of immigration to states with low levels of immigration, a sort of “natural experiment.”

For example, in California, one worker in three was foreign born in 2008, while in West Virginia the comparable proportion was only one in 100. By exploiting variations in the inflows of immigrants across states at 10-year intervals from 1960 to 2000, and annually from 1994 to 2008, we are able to estimate the short-run (one to two years), medium-run (four years), and long-run (seven to ten years) impact of immigrants on output, income, and employment.

Peri found that immigration is strongly beneficial:

First, there is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run. Data on U.S.-born worker employment imply small effects, with estimates never statistically different from zero. The impact on hours per worker is similar. We observe insignificant effects in the short run and a small but significant positive effect in the long run. At the same time, immigration reduces somewhat the skill intensity of workers in the short and long run because immigrants have a slightly lower average education level than U.S.-born workers.

Second, the positive long-run effect on income per U.S.-born worker accrues over some time. In the short run, small insignificant effects are observed. Over the long run, however, a net inflow of immigrants equal to 1% of employment increases income per worker by 0.6% to 0.9%. This implies that total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker. That equals an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker in constant 2005 dollars. Such a gain equals 20% to 25% of the total real increase in average yearly income per worker registered in the United States between 1990 and 2007.

Basically, the US employment market is not a zero sum game. When immigrants come to the US to work, that benefits them (which is a strong reason, in and of itself, to favor opening the borders), but it also benefits us.

It’s also worth remembering that “life without competition with low-skilled non-Americans” is not an option on the menu. American workers will experience the downside of competition even if every single undocumented immigrant was somehow magically deported. But if those undocumented immigrants aren’t in the US, then Americans receive far less of the benefits. As the Economist blog wrote a couple of years ago:

Another possibility is that immigration also increases labour demand. This becomes especially important when we remember two other things. First, the one point upon which everyone can agree in this debate is that immigration substantially increases the productivity and earnings of the immigrants themselves. Secondly, we need to ask how the importation of low-skilled workers is different from the importation of goods produced by low-skilled workers abroad. Absent immigration, Mr Borjas would argue, wages would be higher in America and lower in trading nations. As such, price competition for tradeable goods would press down native worker wages.

Why is that important? Well, for one thing, it suggests that it’s difficult to separate cross-border flows of workers from goods. For another, when comparing outcomes, we need to remember that immigrants are still around whether they immigrate or not. In other words, immigrants might lower the wages of domestic workers, but immigrant consumption demand is much higher when they work on the American side of the border. If they do not immigrate, they’ll still be competing with native workers via imports of cheap products, but they’ll also be buying far fewer American goods, because they’ll be a lot poorer. It’s still difficult to know how things play out in the end, but one shouldn’t pretend that the proper comparison is a domestic labour market with immigrants versus one without.

Notably, even George Borjas — the best-known (and almost the only) economist arguing against immigration — calculates that in the long run, immigration has no effect on US worker’s wages overall (he predicts that immigration lowers the wages of high-school dropouts by nearly 5%, but raises the wages of other Americans, including those with only a high school degree). And Borjas reached his results not through empirical examination of what’s actually happened in the real world, but through an abstract calculation in which he considered only the downside of immigration, but didn’t account for the economic benefits at all.

So the worst-case scenario from Borjas is 1) Not all that bad (some workers gain, others lose, but overall there’s no difference), and 2) based on the dubious assumption that immigration provides no economic benefits to native workers. On the best-case scenario, we have strong benefits for everyone, immigrants and natives alike. And let’s not forget, fighting “illegal immigration” is expensive.

For that reason, it just makes sense to favor open borders (for all immigrants, I’d argue, except violent criminals) and immediate amnesty for all undocumented immigrants.

Further reading: The immigration category at the Ambrosini Critique. And the immigration category at Cardiff de Alejo Garcia. And the study from the Federal Reserve of SF, which is really pretty readable.

On the road yet again. I’ve hardly had time to catch my breath. San Diego Comic Con, a trip to the Gulf Coast (including New Orleans, Alabama, and Mississippi), and now a drive to Santa Fe. San Diego was pure comic biz with barely a pause in Berkeley to see old friends. The Gulf was the start of a potential project about the recent spill (www.pdx2gulfcoast.com), and coming to Santa Fe is some biz and some pleasure.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44447091@N08/4943920239/

Had a nice signing at the True Believers comic shop in Santa Fe. Great folk there.

The composer of the TMCM opera (Daniel Crafts) lives in Albuquerque and we met up with some opera folk with the potential to stage the opera again.

Next week the NY’er runs another cartoon of mine. I’ve been drawing my weekly submissions while on the road. This one still needs some tweaking but I like the idea of a dog in glasses. More and more hipsters seem to be wearing glasses they don’t need.