Archive for February, 2009

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Gregory House Is Part Of A Pattern

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 by Barry Deutsch

From Petpluto at Art at the Auction:

House is problematic in the way above, but also for the reason articulated by MaggieElizabeth, a poster at Television Without Pity:

Ninety percent of the time, the woman gets to be the normal one.
Sure, she’s competent, she’s tough, and she’s strong — but she’s ordinary, and all the while she’s surrounded by weird and unpredictable male characters with funny, charismatic personalities.

House is the eccentric; he’s the genius, he’s the mastermind, he’s the guy who does not conform to society’s standards and doesn’t have to because he’s so damn brilliant. Cuddy may have been the youngest Chief of Medicine around, but she is still nothing special when compared to Gregory House. This isn’t House’s problem, not really. I’m not advocating a world in which men are always the normal ones and women get to be the weird, charismatic unpredictable ones. Just like the problem with a movie isn’t that it in particular can’t pass the Bechdel Test, but that most don’t. The problem isn’t that Star Wars in particular doesn’t have two women discussing something other than men; the problem is that a significant portion of the films made don’t. The problem isn’t that House is a surly misanthrope genius, but that there are a bevy of male characters in House’s shoes and very few women. The problem with the genius man or the man with incredible gifts is that there is no counterbalance. The Pie Maker on Pushing Daisies with his power to wake the dead; Chuck from Chuck having the incredible ability to see and remember hundreds of data-encrypted pictures; House; Walter Bishop; the guy on The Mentalist; the guy on Lie to Me; the guy on The Eleventh Hour; the guy on Journeyman. The women who are on these shows are sometimes capable, sometimes not, but almost always ordinary as well.

Petpluto acknowledges some exceptions (Buffy, Starbuck, etc) but adds:

But these shows (most of which are off the air) don’t carry enough weight to strike a proper counterbalance to the overall spectrum of shows where the opposite is true. And that is the issue with most of these problems. On their own, a show with stronger male characters, or smarter male characters, is not inherently problematic. But when most shows employ that narrative, it becomes more so.

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

Jindal/Palin 2012!

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 by Kevin Moore

Or the other way around. I don’t care. We cartoonists need these goofballs to remain in the spotlight. Toss in a Huckabee and you got yourself a stew! A stew of hilarious morons.

Oh! I almost forgot. The real reason for this post is to alert you that the Arrested Development movie is a go!

If you don’t know how those two paragraphs are related, then you must be hopped up on Forget-Me-Nows.

Posted in Big Fat Whale, Politics | Comment

How To Save Print

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 by Matt Bors

Hearst, Zell, Murdoch, Scaife, Sulzberger–Here it is. Behold my completely serious, entirely workable, fail proof plan for saving newspapers. Free papers should go this route as well. Why deny yourself the revenue stream?

Looks like I’m not a moment too soon. The SF Chronicle might go on the block. Either someone’s going to buy it or the kids in the local school district will be be getting some more computers. There’s no reason why my idea won’t save it.

Please Recycle.

Posted in Idiot Box | Comment

Shorter Bobby Jindal

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 by Jen Sorensen

Because the Bush administration fubared the response to Hurricane Katrina, government can’t do anything right.

Related cartoon: Government Haters

Posted in Slowpoke | Comment

Obama Speech Analysis

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 by Jen Sorensen

Zing!

Posted in Slowpoke | Comment

Sketches

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 by Matt Bors

Pretty good speech. Lots of “Yes We Can” type motivation in there. We never quit. We keep going. We’ll get through. I was so amped I started working while he was still talking!

Work for me is drawing funny pictures so I felt I was doing my part to help the country. I would have drawn more but it’s kind of a visually boring event.

I like how everyone stood and clapped when Obama said we should end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas. I never knew Republicans supported that. I assume that law will get 100 votes then.


Obama really brought the thunder down on slacker dropouts, pulling the ol’ Patriot card. It was his “with us or with the terrorists” moment. You don’t spell America with an F, kids. Although “Freedom” does start with one so never mind.


I needed an excuse to draw McCain again. He looks pretty bad without the makeup he caked on during the campaign. Now he’s just a crotchety old gasbag shaking his fist about the price of Obama’s copters.

Posted in Idiot Box | Comment

Some parents complain that disabled TV host “scares children”

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 by Barry Deutsch

From The Independent:

Disparaging comments by adults about a children’s presenter have led to an angry backlash in support of Cerrie Burnell, the 29-year-old CBeebies host who was born missing the lower section of her right arm. One man said that he would stop his daughter from watching the BBC children’s channel because Burnell would give his child nightmares.

Parents even called the broadcaster to complain…  some of the vitriolic comments on the “Grown Up” section of the channel’s website were so nasty that they had to be removed.

“Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?” wrote one adult on the CBeebies website. Other adults claimed that their children were asking difficult questions as a result.

Children asking questions! Horrible, horrible! It must be stopped!

There is some good news here: Many other parents have Burnell’s back.

…other parents and carers labelled the remarks as disgraceful, writing in support of Burnell and setting up a “fight disability prejudice” page on the social networking site Facebook. [...]
Burnell, who described her first television presenting role as a “dream job”, has also appeared in EastEnders and Holby City and has been feted for performances in the theatre while also worked as a teaching assistant at a special needs school in London. She also has a four-year-old child. “I think the negative comments from those few parents are indicative of a wider problem of disabled representation in the media as a whole, which is why it’s so important for there to be more disabled role models in every area of the media,” she said in response yesterday. [...]

“In some way it is a pretty sad commentary on the way society is now and that both parents and children see few examples of disabled people. The sooner children are exposed to disability in mainstream education the better,” said Mark Shrimpton at Radar, the UK’s largest disability campaigning organisation.

Even if a child is disturbed by seeing Burnell’s arm, so what? It’s up to the parents to explain to the child that all people are different — not up to the BBC to fire their host so that parents are spared having to parent their children.

That said, I think we know the core issue here isn’t frightened children — it’s prejudiced adults. As one disabled child care worker said in the comments to the article, “I found the children, once they’d asked about my arm, quickly moved on and became more helpful and considerate of my disability… Some of the adults I have encountered however have been downright rude.”

Thanks to Elkins for pointing this out to me. Elkins also recommends reading the comments at The Independent, “both for outrage and reassurance,” and adds that “The original comments on the CBeebies forums have all now been deleted. I guess that makes sense on a forum that little kids might read, but it’s somewhat of a disappointment.”

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

Gay Cooties, ONOZ!

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 by Kevin Moore

Jim Brown at OneNewsNow, a conservo-christian news portal, reports that some folks recently connected with Senator John McCain’s presidential bid are going to speak before a group of Log Cabin Republicans.

So that sound you hear? Not a car alarm going off. It’s Gideon’s trumpet calling the armies of God to assemble on the Day of Judgment. Or perhaps the desperate screams of religious rightists watching their influence on the GOP slowly fade away.

“I’m afraid that some Republicans are going to think, ‘Hey, we have to go pro-gay and try to be hip to get the youth vote,’” suggests [Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality]. “Look, the kind of youth who are going to be the long-term heroes in the Republican Party are going to be the principled youth of today and the principled youth don’t want us to play around or go half-way on homosexuality, or just fight gay marriage and not anything else.” [emphasis mine]

Right on, Pete kids today want you to go ALL THE WAY. Woooo-hoo! Get yer gay on! Yee-haw!

Ahem. Anyhoo, LaBarbera or “Babs” seems to think that even just talking to Teh Gayz will get nasty gay germs all over the Republican party and soil it before the eyes of that loving, compassionate Father to all his children except the ones he wants to burn in Hell for eternity. Reaching out to gays and lesbians in the GOP tent or in Republican families only spreads the contagion:

“They believe that they’re showing love for their family member by promoting homosexuality and embracing homosexuality and that’s just not the case,” the Christian activist emphasizes. “Homosexuality is a sin whether your sister or brother or son is engaged in it. We want to hope that those people will come out of that lifestyle because it’s wrong.”

This is pretty close to stamping one’s foot and shouting, “No fair!” And it is unfair, Babs. You were raised to believe all sorts of hateful, stupid things, and the people around you are starting to grow up and out of their own poisonous upbringing; but you bought into the nostalgia of a simplistic vision of the past, one that never acknowledged just how complex, variegated, and interesting the real world is. Now you are clinging to it with every last knuckle. Excuse us while we step on your fingers and let your sorry ass plummet to the abyss. Happy landings!

Originally published at mooreroom.

Posted in In Contempt | Comment

“Merry Christmas” and crosses are “Judeo-Christian”

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 by Barry Deutsch

Dennis Prager, in an essay about how evil the left is, writes:

The same holds true for the greatest character-building institution in American life: Judeo-Christian religions. Once again, the left knows how to destroy. Everywhere possible the left works to inhibit religious institutions and values — from substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” to removing the tiny cross from the Los Angeles County Seal to arguing that religious people must not bring their values into the political arena.

Because nothing is more “Judeo” than saying “Merry Christmas” and putting a cross on all documents carrying a government seal. How included I feel!

* * *

The implication that non-Judeo-Christians are lest likly to successfully build character is also lovely. (Although perhaps by “greatest” he meant “largest,” not “most effective.”)

The rest of his essay is nonsense, as well. In a discussion of California’s economic crisis, Prager claims that “California’s Democratic legislature has been more or less able to do whatever it wants with California.” But that’s not true; California law lets voters pass unfunded mandates through ballot measures, and gives the Republican minority in the legislature an effective veto of tax increases. The problem is structural.

Prager also spends a great deal of time blaming the left for the Boy Scout’s troubles. Apparently the Scout organization itself isn’t at all responsible for the predictable consequences of its own decisions.

Curtsy: Dissenting Justice. (He also claims that the Boy Scouts biggest problem isn’t anti-homophobia activism, but liability lawsuits from parents of injured kids. That seems odd to me, if that’s so; don’t parents have to sign waivers when their boys join up? Do you know anything about that aspect of things, Ron?)

Posted in Ampersand | Comment

Well Put

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 by Matt Bors

I was poking around the internet reading about Alan Keyes because, well, he’s hilarious and I came upon a quote he made after losing both the Republican and Constitution Party nominations for president in the 2008 election.

“It seems that the pattern of my political career…I have experienced this pattern on several occasions in the course of my political life, where people invite me in, and then they kill me, they invite me in, and then they kill me, they invite me in and then they kill me…I kind of represent, in political terms, the abortion.”

Posted in Idiot Box | Comment

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