In today’s cartoon, Nikko worries about his investments. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:
The more you click on my cartoons at comics.com during 2007, the better the chances they’ll appear in daily city papers in 2008. If you like Minimum Security, please see a new cartoon each weekday!
Some fake game shows. Now I’m going to enjoy the weather.
Next Week: Stanley Slobniak: Travel Agent
Bay Windows (my longest-run newspaper comics home!) has an excellent interview with my good buddy and fellow Cartoonist With Attitude Ted Rall about why he disagrees with the HRC campaign to get Ann Coulter’s column dropped over her use of the word “faggot” in a recent speech. (Remember: Ted despises Coulter and even considered suing her for lies she told about him in a previous speech. But he has also been the target of successful right-wing campaigns flooding editors with fake “I’m going to cancel my subscription unless you drop that evil Ted Rall” letters).
Short (and late) list of articles for this week’s ‘toon, since it’s a topic that has been rapidly evolving:
And yeah, I know… the caricature of Alberto in this week’s ‘toon is just about the worst one I’ve ever done. I’ll work on it… but check out a better one that I did of him as Alberto the Torture Turtle.
On a good note, in researching Alberto’s “cop persona” for the ‘toon, I ran across a great ’80’s TV show that I had totally forgotten about: Sledge Hammer. It was a Police Squad!-like satire of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, with David Rasche as an over-the-top, hard-as-nails cop who liked to shoot first and ask questions later. I remember specifically the opening sequence with a “near-sensual” panning over Sledge’s .44 Magnum as it rested on top of a satin pillow. What a great show that was…
Follow-Up Interview Re: Coulter Censorship
The excellent New England-based LGBT newspaper Bay Windows has a follow-up interview with me about the campaign by some gay organizations to get Ann Coulter’s column cancelled by newspapers. I oppose censoring Coulter because opposing censorship is always the right thing to do, even–especially–when the person being considered is unappealing. Sadly, the First Amendment is the least popular part of the Constitution–everyone is in favor of speech they agree with.
Heads up, folks: NPR is going to livecast Ted Leo’s concert in D.C. tonight at 9:30 PM EST on their website.
No need to thank me; I’ll be at the actual show. So there.
Stopping the Genocide in Sudan seems futile. The U.N. is useless and Bush can’t be bothered by it. Even if Democrats take the White House two years from now they aren’t likely to commit Americans troops to another country. So we all just sit around while everyone dies…and I make silly ironic shirts about it that do nothing.
Bringing about awareness of what’s going on in Darfur is good, but I think the money would be better spent if everyone pooled resources and bought Sudanese villagers a few dozen crates of AK-47s and rocket launchers to protect themselves with. Cause nobody else is going to do it.
I’m surprised with all the talk about Fred Thompson considering a run for the White House, this slight complication hasn’t been brought up until now:
If Fred Thompson, the one-time Tennessee senator better known to most Americans as district attorney Arthur Branch on “Law & Order,” runs for president, some of his fans may be in for a letdown. Television stations are expected to drop reruns of the show temporarily if he makes a real-life bid for the White House.
Federal campaign law requires broadcasters to give all candidates equal time on the airwaves. That rule applies to entertainment programs like “Law & Order,” meaning stations which run the show would be required to give other GOP candidates a like amount of prime time television exposure.
It’s an FCC guideline, so technically it doesn’t apply to cable networks that do multi-hour reruns, but given that most of the networks are at least partially-owned by network companies (Time-Warner owns TNT; GE owns both USA and NBC) they almost always adhere to the same rules to avoid controversy.
In other words, once Thompson’s name appears on a state ballot, any episode of Law & Order with Thompson in it goes away. Not only is that a huge blow to network revenues and fan base, it sort of diminishes a huge factor of Thompson’s electoral advantages: visibility as a character on a popular TV show.
The upshot, of course, is that by the same inference, Thompson’s entrance into the race would also ban any airings of the classic films Baby’s Day Out and Aces: Iron Eagle III. And I think we all know how horrific that would be.
My goodness, I don’t know what I was thinking but I did three this week (four if you count one for Lambda Legal that will be up soon)! Yikes! Here we go: 
This cartoon was inspired by the recent re-firing of longtime Largo, Florida City Manager Steve Stanton after Stanton announced he planned to transition to life as a woman and change his name to Susan. (I only say “he” because Stanton is, as I understand it, still using that pronoun for now.) I say “re-firing” because the Largo City Commission held a hearing after its initial discriminatory decision to fire Stanton, and made the same bad decision again despite testimony in his favor.
Stanton’s firing is far from unusual, so I decided to make the cartoon about anti-transgender workplace discrimination in general, rather than focus on that case. I’m not sure how many people realize that in most places in this country, employers are legally permitted to fire transgender and gay employees on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation. We need a national ENDA (employment non-discrimination act) and now!
I haven’t seen the new documentary “Maxed Out” yet, but I did just read a terrifying must-read investigative series in the Boston Globe, “Debtor’s Hell: Preying on Red-Ink America”, that takes a close look at unscrupulous debt collection practices.
Finally, it came out in the New York Times last week that the NYPD spent tons of time and money placing spies in non-violent peace groups around the country before the 2004 RNC. The cartoon was inspired by this bit:
Marco Ceglie, who performs as Monet Oliver dePlace in Billionaires for Bush, said he had suspected that the group was under surveillance by federal agents — not necessarily police officers — during weekly meetings in a downtown loft and at events around the country in the summer of 2004.“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ? Mr. Ceglie said. “Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot confirm or deny.’ ?
P.S. Join my weekly mailing list by sending a blank message to newtoons-subscribe@mikhaela.net!
In today’s cartoon, Kranti has no idea. Click on the fragment below for the full cartoon at comics.com:
The more you click on my cartoons at comics.com during 2007, the better the chances they’ll appear in daily city papers in 2008. If you like Minimum Security, please see a new cartoon each weekday!
