mooreroom

Click the image to see the full cartoon.

And the full explanation for it.

Tags: incontempt, judge arthur cooperman, sean bell, racism, police state

Man, if I were Hillary Clinton - currently riding high on a 10 point margin of victory in Pennsylvania - I would find a way to remove the tongue from my husband’s mouth. Because I (Hillary Clinton, that is) can’t really enjoy my hard-won win without Mr. Megaphone saying dumb crap like, say, accusing black Democrats of “playing the race card” on him and driving the black vote toward Barack Obama. Ya see, they totally took his comparison of Obama’s victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s the wrong way. He wasn’t making a racially charged, dismissive and douchebaggy comment; he was just answering a question. And, best of all, this was part of the Obama plan aaallll alooonngg!

Hat tip to Aisha Music.

UPDATE: Now The Master Equivocator is refusing to acknowledge he ever said anything about a “race card.” Dude, it’s on audio! WE CAN HEAR YOU! This is why the right wing thinks you’re on drugs, because you refuse to look reality in the face or take any responsibility for your words and actions. Man! That guy is a piece of work.

Click the image to see the full scale cartoon.

By now everyone is familiar with the idiotic questions ABCNooziz Georges Gibson and Stephanopoulos asked of both Senators Obama and Clinton during last week’s debate. But I focus on Stephanopoulos, because he seems to have a knack for asking Obama utterly moronic questions.

For instance, the question about Obama’s “cool style” comes from a one-on-one interview back in May, 2007.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You have a very cool style when you’re doing those town meetings, when you’re out on the campaign trail. And I wonder, how much of that is tied to your race?
OBAMA: That’s interesting.

Following that interview Charlton McIlwain and Stephen Maynard Caliendo co-blog their dismay:

We LOVE the response. “It’s interesting,” which means, “what the hell is THAT supposed to mean?! All black people are ‘cool?’”

Lastly, Think Progress has the audio clip making the Hannity-Stephanopoulos connection.

HANNITY: There are two questions that I don’t think anybody has asked Barack Obama, and I don’t know if this is going to be on your list tomorrow. One is – the only time he’s ever been asked about his association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the Weather Underground who on 9/11 of all days in the New York Times was saying “I don’t regret setting bombs. I don’t think we did enough.” When asked about it by the Politico, David Axelrod said that they have a friendly relationship, and that they had done a number of speeches together and that they sat on a board together. Is that a question you might ask?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I’m taking notes right now.

Click the image above to see the full cartoon.

From the NY Times:

Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought.

Ain’t karma a drag?

Click image to see full cartoon.

Click the image above to see the full cartoon.

So the Shiny Librarian gets me hip to infodoodads, which means I learn about all kindsa nifty sites, widgets and whatnot to play with, including silobreaker, a news and information gathering portal that will replace whatever love I have for googlenews, especially because it offers this addictive little toy: News Trends.

News Trends is a search engine that graphs media attention trends on a given subject. For fun, I thought I would compare media coverage for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan over the past 12 months. I’m cynical. I think Spears and Lohan will trounce Obama and Clinton. After all, neither Clinton nor Obama have flashed their genitals at paparazzi, at least not in the time period in which this data has been gathered.

I am wrong.

Well, wrong about media attention, not genitalia exposure. It turns out the media finds Obama and Clinton far more interesting than Spears and Lohan. I realize I am setting the bar pretty low, but I am happily surprised.

What’s really cool about silobreaker in general and this graph generating tool in particular is that it offers some handy research tools students can use for class projects. No, the shit ain’t peer-reviewed, and you might want to issue the usual caveats about research methodology (for instance, the developers claim to use “relational analysis” but do not explain how that is actually designed in their search algorithms.) But I think it’s a good introduction to research for beginners, a way to get them thinking about information, how to display it visually, and how to manipulate it. It may also stimulate them to draw unusual connections. Or, as in my case, subvert a priori assumptions.

The NY Times Arts & Leisure section has a wonderful profile of Al Jaffee, the cartoonist behind MAD Magazine’s long-running “fold-in” gag and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” series.

Among the many great MAD cartoonists, the most influential for me as a young, budding toonster were Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker, George Woodbridge, and Jaffee. Drucker had spot-on caricatures, and Woodbridge had such a biting style. But Jaffee and Aragones drew what I considered proper “cartoons” by proper “cartoonists”: they wrote and drew their own stuff in a less realistic, more funny style. And they hit on a wide variety of subjects, from current events, politics, fashion and pop culture, to more sinister aspects of modern American society. I love this fold-out as described in the NY Times profile:

July 1968: “What is the one thing most school dropouts are sure to become?” A picture of teenagers at an employment center folds into a piece of artillery with a kid stuffed in it, and the answer: “Cannon fodder.”

Jesus, that’s brilliant. Bitter, angry, caustic - yet funny. It’s something I aspire to with every In Contempt strip I draw. Glad to see Jaffee continues to put out his stuff, despite cancer and advanced age, with a technique I am still too timid to take up: water color and gouache.  Photoshop has made things too damn easy.

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Hat tip from my friend Patrick.