Cartoonists With Attitude

OK, I give up... I'm in. I buy it.

Every meat-eater has a few vegetarian friends who claim that the main reason other people should be like them is simply because mass-produced meat cannot be trusted. They're right, of course. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at this point... Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was published in 1906. Like a lot of people, though, I've been resistant, even though I should know better. I'll argue that it's OK to eat Big Macs occasionally because, like, we're all part of the food chain and stuff. What can I tell you... I'm weak. As Vincent Vega would say, steak tastes good, man. Hamburgers taste good. No more, though... I don't trust faceless corporations to prepare my food. I'll be doing some serious reflection on where stuff comes from before I put in into my body.

...there's no beef in Jack Daniels, right?

Article tidbits for this week's 'toon:

• If you haven't seen the Humane Society video that led to the largest beef recall in U.S. history, here you go (prepare your stomach before proceeding).
  
  Kathy Benz:
  

  The video shows Hallmark Meat Packing Co. workers administering repeated electric shocks to downed cows -- animals that are too sick, weak or otherwise unable to stand on their own. Workers are seen kicking cows, jabbing them near their eyes, ramming them with a forklift and shooting high-intensity water up their noses in an effort to force them to their feet for slaughter.

  
  
• Mark Bittman:
  

  ...an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

  
  More:
  

  Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.
  
  Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat� claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.

  
  
• Katharine Mieszkowski:
  

  [Epidemiologist Devra] Davis argues that again and again, from tobacco to benzene to asbestos, the profit motive has trumped concerns about public health, delaying, sometimes for decades, the containment of avoidable hazards. And, as in the current scientific "debate" about global warming, the legitimate need for ongoing scientific research about many possible carcinogens has been exploited by industry to promote the idea that there's really no need to worry.

  
  
• Will Dunham:
  

  France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.
  
  If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year...
  

  
  
• Michael Pollan:
  

  The food industry wants to cook for you, shop for you, they want to do everything but digest for you and if they could figure out a way to do that profitably, they would. It's all about making money. They need to convince you that you can't do this stuff on your own...
  
  The fact is we've had 50 years of letting corporations cook our meals, and it appears now that they were not doing a very good job of it. The food they're cooking is making people sick.
  

  
  
• Jamey Lionette:
  

  Supermarkets are part of mainstream America's identity. Working-class people have little choice but to shop at conventional supermarkets. Middle-class people can shop at places like Whole Foods and appease their consciences with the notion that that food is safer and tastier than conventional supermarket food. And those of the flat earth society -- middle- and upper-class people who do not believe that their climate is changing, that a global market is a bad thing, or that our food systems are in trouble -- favor the conventional supermarket. However, both conventional and progressive supermarkets operate on the same model: mass-produced foods, made cheaply, and sold at cheap prices.

  
  
• C.W.A. colleague Stephanie McMillan:
  

  The global economy is a machine with one objective: to extract wealth from the earth and the labor of the poor, convert it to money, and transfer it to the hands of the rich.
  
  

  
  

Is this NSFW?

From Fark via Comics Curmudgeon.

It's about 9:50 and I'm turning the debate off. I personally think Barack Obama should just get up and walk off the stage so he can leave Hillary Clinton to whine about how everyone's being unfair to her while Tim Russert and Brian Williams do everything in their power to prove it.

Not my teeth — Rachel Nabors’ teeth. Rachel, winner of a Kim Yale award, specializes in girl-friendly comics (not that I think she’s trying — she’s just a naturally girl-friendly person), and her mouth is going kablooey.

Rachel writes:

My surgery and braces will cost between $15,000 and $25,000 dollars. At the encouragement of others, I have set up a special PayPal account that will be used exclusively to pay for the costs of surgery and follow-up care. Leigh Dragoon has kindly agreed to audit. We are hoping to give away shirts with $25+ donations, so please specify your shirt size in men’s or women’s. Also, if you donate $100+, I’m going to send you an art card to a say super-big thank you.

More details and the donate button at the link:

Dahlia Lithwick on America's growing tolerance of torture:

Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions—it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank. That's the road we're headed down with water-boarding. We've gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it. We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it's becoming legal. How convenient.

I must say, I find the concept of a seed vault on a far-flung Norwegian island north of the Arctic Circle extremely cool. It even looks cool. You can learn all about the vault, which officially opens today, on its official site (warning: photo downloads there are 20+ MB; thumbnail below taken from the site). Given Carl Sagan's rough calculation that humans are pretty likely to destroy themselves, I don't think the seed vault is all that far-fetched.

The "film nerd" in the third panel is my friend Justin, who makes a brief appearance in the upcoming Starship Troopers 3, and who keeps threatening to start his own blog any day now.

Senator Hillary Clinton scores a point in the LGBT column for her public appearance (albeit via satellite transmission) with openly lesbian icon Ellen Degeneres on the campaign trail. As Scott Shrake reports, the crowd was pretty openly gay, too.

Good for Clinton. Some may scoff that Ellen is the most mainstream-friendly gay icon, not exactly a challenge to hetero-normative ideology, but I think Clinton runs two big risks here. First, Democrats have been pretty quiet about queer issues since conventional wisdom blamed "gay marriage" for motivating Christian Conservatives and other homophobes to tip the balance for George Bush over John Kerry in 2004. So for once Clinton is defying conventional wisdom by bringing Ellen, who made pop culture history by coming out of the closet on her show and attempted to address queer issues in its last season, into her campaign. This is very different from appearing on Ellen's talk show, where Barack Obama showed up last Fall to show off his dance moves (Ellen and dance are also closely linked concepts these days, for better or worse.) Ellen's campaign appearance is Clinton's answer to Oprah's Obama advocacy.

The second risk is for Clinton, personally. The Right has made no qualms in making lesbian jokes about her, and even contending that she is in fact a closeted lesbian herself. In a sane world, questions about a candidate's sexuality would be dismissed as irrelevant or idle gossip - or even better, we would happily have an out-and-proud lesbian President. But in this world, photos of Clinton palling with an openly gay public figure run risks of inflaming irrational fears and biases among voters similar to those provoked by, say, a photo of Obama in a turban. (FTR - no, I don't think the Clinton campaign spread it around, but it's not like they are above that sort of thing.) In other words, Ellen's appearance on Clinton's campaign trail offers the Right wing attack machine plenty of fodder.

Like I said, good for Clinton. She didn't let that scare her. Perhaps she and her staffers ran a cost-benefit analysis (Shrake thinks Ellen appeals to a youth vote.) But I like to think that maybe, just this once, Clinton threw caution to the wind and said, "Fuck 'em."

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for Obama to crawl out of the deficit column where he landed thanks to that whole McClurkin thing.

TED RALL COLUMN: HOPE YOU CAN'T VOTE FOR

Ralph Nader Appeals to Disenfranchised Liberals

"What," editorializes U.S. News & World Report, "does Ralph Nader bring to the political dialogue this year? Answer: nothing except for his own inflated ego." Dimestore psychoanalysis was the standard reaction to Nader's third third-party presidential bid. "An ego-driven spoiler," the Des Moines Register called him. "He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work," jabbed Barack Obama.

You see, other politicians who seek the presidency are like the Dalai Lama, humble and self-effacing. Obama and Hillary? Two sweeties. Not an ounce of ego between them.

Even our former colonial masters put in their two pence. Nader's "egotism and cult of left-wing purity has been an utter disaster for the values he affects to espouse," railed the UK Independent. Nader's values would fare better, apparently, were he to shut up and keep them to himself.

Is Ralph really a spoiler? To answer "yes," you have to buy three assumptions:
First, that the two-party system is written in stone. But it's not. There's nothing in the Constitution about two parties, or about parties at all. (The Founding Fathers were dismayed when parties emerged around 1800.) Besides, the Democratic-Republican stranglehold ill serves a diverse population of 300 million. Because parliamentary democracies offer voters a wide selection of parties representing almost every conceivable ideology, voter turnout in Europe typically exceeds 80 percent. In the U.S., most registered voters stay home.

Assumption two: voters ought to vote strategically, i.e., for the lesser of two evils. Even for those who accept this curiously alienating concept, however, evil often comes in pairs. Most citizens think the U.S. has lost more than it has gained under NAFTA; neither Obama nor McCain want to repeal it. Most people want the U.S. out of Iraq; both men have repeatedly voted to prolong the war. How shall anti-NAFTA, antiwar voters divine which will prove least anathematic as president? Should they resort to a ouija board?

The third leg of the Nader=Spoiler tripod relies on a belief that opinions espoused by a small minority of a population are inherently worthless. But, as anyone who has successfully gambled on a business can attest, today's fringe thinking becomes tomorrow's conventional wisdom. After 9/11, nine percent of Americans thought George W. Bush was a lousy president. Seventy-two percent feel that way now. America's greatest political achievements--emancipation, women's suffrage, the 40-hour work week--were first espoused by tiny voting blocs led by figures on the political fringe.

But that's not why Ralph says he's running. His platform seeks to promote causes that are popular with an overwhelming majority of American voters, yet have been sidelined by the two major parties and their allies in the media.

Fifty-five percent of Americans believe that Bush deserves to be impeached, according to a November 2007 American Research Center poll. (Considering Iraq, Guantánamo, domestic surveillance and torture alone, it's surprising the number isn't higher.) But "impeachment is off the table," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced as the Democrats recaptured Congress in 2006, and they haven't mentioned it since. America's pro-impeachment majority obviously can't expect Republicans to prosecute their own guy. Aside from most voters, only Ralph Nader wants impeachment proceedings against the "criminal recidivist regime of George Bush and Dick Cheney."

So who are the fringe weirdoes: the out-of-touch media elite, or the guy who agrees with most of the people?

The two remaining major Democratic presidential contenders think that repeatedly name-checking John Edwards is sufficient to draw votes from his liberal Democratic supporters. But liberals "don't like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama--for them, he sold out even before he was bought in," the Independent mocks. Only Nader offers "left-wing purity."

And what's wrong with that?

While McCain, Obama and Clinton repeatedly vote for funding the Iraq War, at the same time calling for expanding the war against Afghanistan--a doomed effort that was lost years ago--Nader wants to slash defense spending, the number-one cause of our skyrocketing federal deficit.

Americans favor "socialized medicine" (43 to 38 percent, says the February 14th Harris poll); only Nader agrees with them. Nader would repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, which destroyed labor unions; the other candidates haven't said squat about the single biggest reason real wages are shrinking.

What's wrong with that, say Democratic Party officials, is that Nader's first run attracted 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000. Nader drew support from liberals who didn't think Al Gore had enough "left-wing purity."

"This time I hope it doesn't hurt anyone," said Hillary. Nader "prevented Al Gore from being the 'greenest' president we could have had."

Maybe the Dems and their pundit pals ought to get their story straight. If Nader's "left-wing purity" is so fringe and wacky, how can he hurt them?

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

The New York Times, horserace style, on donuts:

Among the Republicans, John McCain trailed Mitt Romney — $923.70 to $992.91 — in Dunkin’ Donuts bills, but spent $116.79 on Krispy Kremes in Reno, Nev., to put him ahead. Ron Paul’s doughnut bills totaled $108.07. Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign didn’t itemize doughnuts, but listed a $5,100 bill at Bouchon Bakery in Las Vegas.