Breaking The Marriage Barrier
Although she’s 23 and still slightly awed by her acceptance into the fraternity of editorial cartoonists, I really like the work of Mikhaela Reid. Because gay marriage becomes officially legal today in Massachusetts, and because her location (and her gig at the Boston Phoenix) puts her at “ground zero”...
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“Type A” And The Gang Ruining America
If you did a psychosociological analysis of what’s wrong with the Bush Administration, some factors that would come up would include rigid obsessiveness, a corporate (versus democratic) approach to governance, and a primitive male ideal of dominance and physical force. Another way to look at the Bush team, both...
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Monty Python Sends Its Best To The F.C.C.
I understand my agenda is primarily visual, but I couldn’t help extending into the aural realm… at least this one time. Eric Idle has a little musical number on the Monty Python website entitled “The FCC Song.” It’s as simultaneously sweet and nasty as Python usually is (although I...
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But Would Rumsfeld Be Going Down If There Had Been No Pictures?
Apparently, Sy Hersh’s latest bombshell shows Rumsfeld approved coercive treatment of Iraqi prisoners. However, would it have made any difference if pictures had never come out? In a twisted bit of logic, Rumsfeld made the point in his own defense before the Armed Services Committee meeting last week, intimating...
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Free Speech
When Smoking Gun released this “home movie” clip of President Bush at a wedding party in 1992, the story line had to do with alcohol. Of course, the fact that Bush teases his friends for not drinking, and looks like he’s having a beer, is noteworthy because of the...
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I’ll See Your ‘Prisoner On A Leash,’ And I’ll Raise You ‘One Beheading’
If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I’ve been taken with Newsmap, a utility that provides a pictorial snapshot of the Google News aggregator, As you can imagine, the map has been dominated by stories about the Abu Ghraib pictures for a week now. With the Berg...
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One Man’s Idea Of A Good Time
So Limbaugh thinks the torture of Iraqi prisoners was just a few people “having a good time?” Here is the Media Matters tv spot calling the so-called commentator on the carpet. It’s clean and to the point. Windows media format MPEG-4 (higher quality) (This image is the work of...
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Dick, We’re Not In Analog, Anymore!
In a wonderful opinion piece in Monday’s NYTimes entitled “Tourists and Torturers,” Luc Sante discusses the meaning of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In contrast to the conventional buzz comparing them to My Lai, Sante sees them as trophy shots, more comparable to pictures of early 20th century lynchings. (By...
Continue ReadingDick, We’re Not In Analog, Anymore!
In a wonderful opinion piece in Monday’s NYTimes entitled “Tourists and Torturers,” Luc Sante discusses the meaning of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In contrast to the conventional buzz comparing them to My Lai, Sante sees them as trophy shots, more comparable to pictures of early 20th century lynchings. (By...
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“Sexing Up” The War: Chapter 2
In the lead-up to the Iraqi war, British analysts asserted that the WMD intelligence used to sell the invasion had been “sexed up.” If the phrase had metaphorical impact at the time, I’m sure no one imagined that it would turn out to have a literal significance down the...
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Giving It Back To Big Brother
As of May 2002, Soho had 59 privately owned surveillance cameras, 7 residential cameras, 2 police cameras and 2 federal cameras. The abuses that led from the Bush Administration’s military intelligence agenda in Iraq (as well as domestic abuses spawned by the Patriot Act) are shedding new light on...
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You Want A Peace Of Me?
In the mini-clip, “Bush For Peace,” by Sarah Christman and Jen Simmons (bios), the President comes up with a brilliant new approach to foreign relations. (Click on tv above, or click here.)
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Plane To See
The headline of Frank Rich’s NYT article last week about the new Broadway play, Assassins, was titled: “At Last, 9/11 Has It’s Own Musical.” Apparently, the “war” on terrorism has given the play an intensity and tension that it never had before. If you’re not familiar with it, the...
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Latest BAGnews Cartoon: The Buck Stops Here …Or Here …Or Maybe Over There
What Al Queda PDB? What memo about prison abuse? (I guess Paul O’Neill’s accusation about Bush being disengaged is looking pretty good right now.) send this cartoon to a friend!
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The Murder of Political Illustration …and the “Bushanos”
It's particularly dead on given the way the television family has begun to deteriorate just as the Administration's prospects have turned south.
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Rattling The Chains Of Command
I wasn’t thinking of running another Newsmap snapshot so soon. This afternoon, however, I was curious about how “big” the Abu Ghraib story was playing the day before Rumsfeld’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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In Bed With Ahmed
When I read the other day that Salem Chalabi, Ahmed’s nephew, was put in charge of prosecuting Saddam Hussein, I thought about how the Chalabi family exploits power (while avoiding scandal) as masterfully as the Bush clan does. In an earlier cartoon, I sung Chalabi praises for his ability...
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Taking Up Arms
Words that typically come to mind in describing Fernando Botero’s painting would be “nostalgic,” “whimsical,” even “sweet.” In a significant departure, however, his more recent work reflects the violence that has been a fact of live in his native Columbia for a long time. In an otherwise calmer world,...
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