Governor Brownback

Looks like a done deal unless Parkinson changes his mind and runs after all, which I'm betting he'll do. Here's hoping. Brownback's sanctimoniousness would be even more tiresome in the governor's office.

Choke time!

It's been a long long time since The Crowsons played the Artichoke. This Saturday we'll return with a bunch of brand new songs and a bunch of brand ole songs as well. Karen and I have been playing there since around 1989 or so. In fact, way before that, she was the first person to ever perform live music at The Artichoke.

It's a great bar that somehow has always managed to straddle the line between small-and-intimate and fun-and-party-down. Pat and Molly Audley have a lot to do with that. The place reflects their personalities. The sandwiches are always mighty tasty. We'll do our best to make the music that way too, but I'm making no promises. Come see us if you can from 8 until 11 or so. 

Happy Fathers Day

This one was really fun to draw. Sort of channelled my original cartoonist inspriation, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, inventor of Rat Fink. 

That time of the month

It's been 10 years now that Karen and I have been playing at Watermark once a month. My, oh,my,how the time does fly. We love our Watermark gig and the many friends we've made there. Thanks to all of you who have made that atmosphere so homey and comfortable. Here's to 10 more years!

Dots the way it goes sometimes

Especially now that I'm only drawing once a week for the paper, I'm attracted to the idea of combining two issues on occassion. It' a little iffy sometimes to do this. Readers might think I'm trying to connect dots that aren't there and look for underlying meanings where they're not really intended. 

But when I read of Sedgwick County Commissioner Kelly Parks' making a hubbub about getting rid of the pause in the Pledge of Allegiance before the phrase "under God," and at the same time Mayor Carl Brewer inserted a pause in our discussion about the Vietnam Memorial, I guess I couldn't help connecting a fictional dot or two.

Okay. Not the most profound toon I ever drew. Just a little joshing around.

The loss of a courageous man

Up

Just caught the movie, in great 3-d, yesterday. Pixar has the touch. More than any of their other efforts to date, I think this one is almost for grown-ups. I'd call it a grown-up film with enough visual interest and gags to entertain children as well. The older I get, the sappier I get and I found myself trying to discreetly brush a tear or two away from beneath my 3-d glasses, underwhich were my real glasses, underwhich were my misty eyes. 

Playing catch up

Here are some of the cartoons I've done for The Eagle since they hired me back as a Sunday-only tooner. 

A cartoon

Then suddenly it dawned on me: I'm a cartoonist with a blog. I should put my cartoons on that blog. Not rocket science. Not even firecracker science. So, duh, I shall.

This is the last toon I produced for Wichita Magazine back in April. I managed to close them down after only 4 months of their hiring me. At the time I drew this I had no idea all of us at the magazine would be getting our pink slips after that issue. Not saying I'm a prophet or anything. Maybe just a minor sage...

As the pink slippage continues.

Editorial cartooning is back, baby!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sean Hannity's Liberty Tree
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I love it! Maybe editorial cartooning is a shrinking field in the print media. But Sean Hannity is blazing new trails for the profession! Check out his editorial cartoon. It's an exercise in trite and antiquated metaphor, but how sweet it is to see that Sean realizes the effectiveness of this art. I wish he'd carried it farther and talked about how Fox News and he in particular are the smelly sack of manure that fertilizes his "Liberty Tree." Oh, well. Can't have everything.

NY Times' Timothy Egan column on Limbaugh

Fears of a Clown
Once upon a time, you could drive to the most remote reaches of the United States and escape Rush Limbaugh. But from the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico to the Badlands of South Dakota, where only the delicious twang of a country tune or the high-pitched pleadings of a lone lunatic came over the AM dial, there is now the Mighty El Rushbo.

As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I used to find Limbaugh to be an obnoxious but entertaining companion, his eruptions more reliable than Old Faithful. But now that Limbaugh has become something else — the face of the Republican Party, by a White House that has played him brilliantly — he has been transformed into car-wreck-quality spectacle, at once scary and sad.

Behold:

The sweaty, swollen man in the black, half-buttoned shirt who ranted for nearly 90 minutes Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He reiterated his desire to see the president of his country fail. He misstated the Constitution’s intent while accusing President Obama of “bastardizing” the document. He made fun of one man’s service in Vietnam, to laughter.

David Letterman compared him to an Eastern European gangster. But he looked more like a bouncer at a strip club who spent all his tips on one bad outfit. And for the Republican Party, Limbaugh has become very much a vice.

Smarter Republicans know he is not good for them. As the conservative writer David Frum said recently, “If you’re a talk radio host and you have five million who listen and there are 50 million who hate you, you make a nice living. If you’re a Republican party, you’re marginalized.”

Polling has found Limbaugh, a self-described prescription-drug addict who sees America from a private jet, to be nearly as unpopular as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who damned America in the way that Limbaugh has now damned the nation’s newly elected leader. But Republicans just can’t quit him. So even poor Michael Steele, the nominal head of the Republican Party who dared to criticize him, had to grovel and crawl back to the feet of Limbaugh.

Some expected more mettle from Steele. After all, this rare African-American Republican won his post after defeating a candidate who submitted the parody song from Limbaugh’s show: “Barack the Magic Negro.”

Race is an obsession with Limbaugh, one of the threads I noticed on those long drives on country roads.

When Colin Powell endorsed Obama during the campaign, Limbaugh said it was entirely because of race. After the election, Powell said the way for the party, which has been his home, to regain its footing was to say the Republican Party must stop “shouting at the world.”

In 2003, Limbaugh said quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted a black to succeed. Over the next six years, McNabb threw for nearly 150 touchdowns and went to a Super Bowl.

And Limbaugh launched the current battle when he said of Obama: “We are being told that … we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.”

Translation: submit sexually to a black man because “someone” is telling us all to. Who? Which leaders of the Democratic Party have made such a claim? Which opinion-makers? But therein lies the main tactic of Limbaugh, an old demagogue technique: create a straw man, then tear it down. The latest example was Saturday, when Limbaugh presented himself as the defender of capitalism, liberty and unfettered free markets. Obama, he has said since, is waging a “war on capitalism.”

There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.

Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.

And, of course, let us never forget that the bailouts of banks and insurance companies were initiated by the Republican president Limbaugh defended for eight years.

Of late, Limbaugh has wondered why he has trouble with women. His base is white, male, Republican — people the party has to stop pandering to if it hopes to govern soon.

It’s little wonder that the thrice-married Limbaugh, who uses “femi-Nazi,” “info-babe” and “PMSNBC” (Get it? The network is full of women suffering pre-menstrual cramps, ha-ha), among his monikers for women, can’t get a date with that demographic.

For Democrats, this is all going to plan. It was James Carville and associates who first cooked up associating Limbaugh with the opposition, as Politico reported. Then on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Limbaugh was the “voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”

Limbaugh played his role, ever the fool. A brave Republican could have challenged him, could have had a “have you no shame” moment with him, giving the party some other identity, some spine. Instead, they caved — from Steele, to the leaders in the House, Eric Cantor and Mike Pence, to Gov. Bobby Jindal, who would be ridiculed by Limbaugh for his real first name, Piyush, were he a Democrat.

You could almost hear their teeth clattering in fear of the all-powerful talk radio wacko, the denier of global warming, the man who said Bill Clinton’s economic policies would fail just before an unprecedented run of prosperity.

But Limbaugh has a fear of his own. If people see him purely as an “entertainer,” as Steele suggested, he will be exposed for what he is: a clown with a very large audience.

Didja ever think of that? Hmmm? Well, DIDJA???

From the amazing Richard Thompson, drawer of Richard's Poor Almanac in The Washington Post, and of the very delightful Cul De Sac comic strip, come these thought provoking insights about an industry near and dear to your heart and mine.

If the legislature can recycle the coal plant issue then I guess I can recycle old cartoons

Earl Scruggs jamming with The Byrds

From the 1969 tv special, "Earl Scruggs With Family and Friends." There's a cement pond in the background. It's so great to see Earl playing with Clarence White. White was the greatest bluegrass guitarist that ever lived in my humble opinion. But he had to make a living so he played country/rock with The Byrds. There would be no Tony Rice without Clarence. What an innovator he was. Did I spell innovator right?

Clarence is the short guy with the beard and the "puffy shirt." He doesn't get to stretch much on this clip but you can hear him using the "string bender" which he invented (along with Gene Parsons) near the end of You Ain't Going Nowhere. He was killed in 1973 by a drunk driver as he was loading his equipment up after a gig. What a loss.

We are what we eat, God help us

From Pat Oliphant, probably the greatest editorial cartoonist that ever lived.

A little late but here it is anyway

Since cartooning is my thing, I probably should post about this controversy. I should've jumped on this days ago when it first came to light. Now I see that Dave has it on his blog over at Dave's Fiction Warehouse and he's not even a cartoonist! I'm so dang lazy. In fact, I'm so lazy that I'm just going to copy Dave's posting and put it up here on my blog. Not just because I'm lazy. Also because he's a much better writer than I am.

Here's what Dave said:
So for three days running, a top story on all the news sites was the chimpanzee who ran amok and tore off somebody's face, and was then shot for his trouble. It was eclipsed only by the ongoing story about the federal stimulus package and its myriad shortcomings. So you'd think that when a cartoonist attempted to play off both headlines, the result would be polite yuks at best, bored shrugs at worst.

Then again, this is America, where Al Sharpton remains at large and the only thing we have more of than bad debt is sweet, sweet outrage. Sharpton was among the professionally aggrieved who looked at the cartoon Wednesday and perceived in it the specter of racism. The president of the National Association of Black Journalists, evidently unaware of the 24/7 coverage of the rogue chimp, saw a direct racial caricature of President Obama. A New York state senator saw a tacit endorsement of assassination and fond nod to the days of lynching. And those were the more moderate interpretations.

Look, I know I'm not black and therefore my opinion on this worth exactly nothing. But here's what I see: a cartoonist suggesting, none too subtly, that the stimulus bill is so imperfect it might as well have been authored by a crazed lesser primate. I don't need to point out that the authors include both houses of Congress as well as the president. As political criticism and satire, it's perfectly legitimate. Other presidents have fared much worse, and Obama probably will too.

Remember those Dutch cartoons about Muhammad, and how so many Muslims the world over went so laughably berserk? By rampaging over a caricature, they became caricatures themselves. It's probably too late for Sharpton, but the others tearing out their hair over a dumb cartoon should give that some thought.

(End of Dave quote)
Here's the comment which I posted on his blog:

"Dumb cartoon" is right. The old cartoonists' tradition of taking two unrelated news stories and tying them together can sometimes work, and God knows I've done it too many times to count (and it only sometimes worked for me). But this is just a dumb misfire. You don't use monkey images in cartoons about African-Americans. The wounds from decades of intentionally insulting racist "jokes" are too deep and, unfortunately, too fresh. Context matters and this cartoonist is guilty of overlooking that fact. He'd have to be crazy to have meant it as a racist attack. I think it was just a dumb stab at meeting a deadline. Now he's stuck with a gigantic sideshow that completely overshadows his original point. That is dumb because it's self-defeating

And I don't blame anyone for being outraged about a cartoon. Graphic images are powerful and this controversy is more proof of it. I just wish certain newspapers understood that when it comes time for layoffs!

What think you, gentle reader?

Topeka looks after us

They won't rest until they've shoved coal down your lungs