Cartoonists With Attitude

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Kucinich switched his position on health care reform in the days since I drew this. He is still irrelevant. He’s a fine progressive, but yelling about peace and single payer doesn’t make the legislative sausage. (It makes for good cartoons and blog posts, though.)

On the other hand, there’s Obama, who’s willing to compromise his positions every time a Republican lets out an entitled, vaguely racist queef in his direction. The concessions that dude has made in the name of bipartisanship are too numerous and depressing to list.

Unfortunately, this sad sack of a president who can’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag is the best chance liberals have at getting anything done at least until 2016. It is my hope that passing Health Care Reform will finally get a doctor to help Obama’s testicles descend.

I’m tired of pointing it out, but anyone opposed to HCR because of costs and deficits is a fucking hypocrite pandering to mouth breathers. We’re talking orders of magnitude less than the cost of each of the two wars we’re currently waging for reasons who-the-fuck-knows. That’s not even including the cost-reducing impacts of the bill. You can complain about earmarks and entitlements all you want, but you probably shouldn’t be blowing the gun of a $6.5 million Abrams tank while you’re doing it.

Next Week: Metric System Resistance

My most totally awesome comic ever.

T-Rexes… on SATURN!!

Bart Stupak, the current leading ally of organizations who love harassing people on a daily basis, suddenly discovers being harassed on a daily basis is wrong.

The Hill reports that “Leading a revolt against President Barack Obama’s healthcare legislation over abortion has been a “living hell” for Rep. Bart Stupak.”

The telephone lines in his Washington and district offices have been “jammed” and he’s gotten more than 1,500 faxes and countless e-mails — most of which he says don’t come from his constituents.

The fight has taken a toll on his wife, who has disconnected the phone in their home to avoid harassment.

“All the phones are unplugged at our house — tired of the obscene calls and threats. She won’t watch TV,” Stupak said during an hourlong interview with The Hill in his Rayburn office. “People saying they’re going to spit on you and all this. That’s just not fun.”

Welcome, Mr. Stupak, to the daily life of reproductive health providers, who are subject to such harassment every day courtesy of your friends at Focus on the Family, National Right to Life, and the USCCB.

Amen. Wake me when Bart Stupak suddenly thinks women don’t deserve that kind of treatment either.

This is cool. chuck Harrison did this unsolicited art and entered it into this paul frank contest. Check it out. Vote if you’re so inclined (would be appreciated though).
http://www.paulfrank.com/art_attack/rate/entry/204

Earlier this eve I was in an indy movie made by a guy from my local video store. Turns out I’m a terrible actor. We had to do a dozen takes of the scene where a pass is rebuffed with a slap from my daughter.

Jihadi Jane has thrown a wrench in our racist conception of what a terrorist looks like. White women are the new threat and as a cartoonist - their favorite target -I’m particularly worried. I’m a single guy in white-ass Portland so I’m going to start being extra careful around the ladies. Cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad rile up jihadists more than carpet bombing a village of innocents. They never let it go. I haven’t forgotten this e-mail.

If you enjoy the third cartoon for the week and have some spare change, throw it in the tip jar on the right. I’m trying to make them happen as often as time and inspiration and money allow.

Monday: Keep Boston Safe!

Here are some caricatures I drew recently. The Dark One…

and Mitch McConnell

Putting my e-mail address at the bottom of my Glenn Beck cartoon has prompted more readers than usual to write in with both positive and negative reactions, but so far no dice on the life-extension technology.

The CBO has released their analysis of the Senate HCR bill combined with the “sidecar” reconciliation bill. You can read the CBO analysis here (pdf file), but the most important numbers are:

Reduce deficits: $138 billion in the first ten years. ($1.2 trillion in the second decade, although that’s not a precise number at all, just an estimate).
Costs: $940 billion in the first ten years.
Money spent making private insurance more affordable (with subsidies): $466 billion in ten years.
Money spent expanding Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP): $434 billion in ten years.
Money spent on small employer credit (making it more affordable for small employers to offer health insurance to their employees): $40 billion in ten years.

Currently uninsured Americans who will be insured: 32 million. (And the remaining uninsured people will in effect be getting low-cost catastrophic health care insurance, in exchange for the penalty they pay.)

So where does the money come from? $17 billion (over ten years) from people who refuse to buy insurance paying a penalty; $52 billion (over ten years) from businesses who choose to pay a penalty rather than provide coverage for employees; $32 billion (over ten years) from the “excise tax” on the most expensive insurance plans; I-can’t-find-the-number-but-it’ll-be-tens-of-billions-over-a-decade from extending the payroll tax to some currently untaxed income; and nearly 500 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid.

Democrats are also claiming that the bill “extends Medicare’s solvency by at least 9 years.” As far as I can judge, that’s not true; the savings are being spent on Health Care Reform, not on extending Medicare’s solvency. (This is the “double-counting” that Representative Ryan - and the CBO - have been talking about.)

It’s going to be a very close vote in the House (although Kucinich, surprisingly, is now going to vote for the bill).

So this bill will raise some taxes, and finds a lot of savings in current Medicare and Medicaid programs. In return, it extends health insurance coverage to millions of Americans, makes Medicaid and CHIP available to millions of currently non-covered Americans, and heavily regulates what insurance companies can do (so that abusive crap like this stops happening).

If you support this bill, please call your representative in the House and let them know.

Sorry, meant to post this a little while ago! What a nice surprise that such a well-made film by such a talented director actually won–I was really nervous it was going to be “Avatar” (or way worse yet, “The Blind Side”).

Drawn for Women’s eNews (temporary link here).

Click it to read the whole thing.

The little pig’s troubles continue.

Three great whites and a hammerhead. After all the shark book reading I do for my son, you’d think I’d know more species. But these two have always been iconic to me, thanks to Jaws, of course, and the weirdness that is the hammerhead.

From SharkDiving.us