Cartoons from the weekend

Here is my weekend update of editorial cartoons. It's kind of strange but I didn't do a memorial day cartoon this year. I'm not sure why, I guess I figured there would be be enough of them around this week anyway.

Instead we have cartoon on development practices in Tampa.
The governor's opposition to a new and improved beer tax. Which seems like a no-brainer to me considering how minuscule our current beer tax is, and how expensive the excessive consumption of beer is for our state' s legal system (i.e. prison, jails, cops and prosecuters who deal with drunks and drunken driving).

And good ol' Brett Favre and the festival celebrating my favorite grilled sausage.
One additional note on the beer tax. From my understanding the tax is based on the volume of the beer rather than on the cost of the beer. This means that if the beer tax increase is 8 bucks a barrel, a $100 barrel of Natural Light would be $108 and experience and 8% increase in price, while a $200 barrel of Capital Brewery's Island Wheat would be $208 and experience a 4% increase in price.

At first this seems a little regressive, but I think it's good considering that more people are likely to rapidly pound cheap beer. It's this binging that then becomes an expensive problem for the legal system, and it should be taxed accordingly.

Smoking Ban

This is not the world's most provocative editorial cartoon but I thought it was decent gag.

The story of the state wide smoking ban has had an intriguing arc. The fact that the governor signed a bill banning smoking in all restaurant and bars this week was not as big of deal as I expected it to be. I thought there would be a little more clawing and protesting on the part of smokers and tavern owners, but the opposition has been minimal.

Several years ago when the ban first proposed there were some pretty nasty debates about health vs. people's individual freedoms. I don't know if there was less resistance this year because Republicans got trounced in the election, or if there was simply less coverage of the debate, because the newspaper industry is ailing. I hope it is the former. I guess with the overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses, many assumed the ban was a foregone conclusion, and since it has been discussed for several years, people have gotten used to the idea.

Cartoons from last week

Below are the cartoons I drew last week.


I thought this was pretty good but I wonder if it's a little obscure for the average reader.

This is a silly gag but it's still really funny.
A brewers cartoon, I rarely do these but it was a slow news week in Wisconsin.


Brett Favre is always good for a cartoon, and it looks like it could be yet another summer full of Brett.

Big Tent

I really thought I hit at least a double with this cartoon.

This really captures how I feel about the GOP. Rush Limbaugh and the other blowhards on the radio, as well as the bible thumpers have made the party unpalatable. I personally agree with much of the what the GOP stood for, personal responsible, individual freedom and free-market solution to societies problems. But I can't tolerate the intolerance that the party spews nowadays, and I think many "old school" republicans feel the same way.

As a side note, yes, the guy labeled "far right" does look like Rush Limbaugh, but I didn't label him as such, because he doens't need me feeding his ego, and the nutjobs like Sean Hannity and Glen Beck are just as bad (but not as recognizable).

Here's the rough draft:

Let's pass an ordinance

I thought this was a pretty good cartoon. The Madison city council seems to think they can pass a law to solve any problem facing the city.

I think the caricatures of the alders turned out pretty good too. I don't bother labeling the alders in cartoons unless I'm specifically making fun of that person, mostly because the general public doesn't recognize these people anyway.

I try to do the caricatures as an added benefit to insiders who pay attention to the council. The alders pictured are (from right to left) Mike Verveer, Marsha Rummel, Satya Rhodes-Conway, and Brian Solomon.

Barack Obama destroyer of Mass Media

The coolest hippest most tech-savvy president in the history of our great nation is trying to undermine the free press, and hasten it's demise. Now I'm not talking about what happened during his first press conference when he took questions from Huffington post, and snubbed the New York Times and the Washington Post.

No, what the president has done now is much more subtle and much more dangerous, and what's worse it's masquerading as good government.

You can go to a website, www.recovery.gov, and find detailed and relatively objective information about how stimulus dollars are being spent. The problem is this website wasn't put together by a group of investigative reporters or even some government watchdog group. It was launched by the Obama administration in the name of open government.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm glad this administration (at least in its infancy) is more open than the previous one. But I worry that the youth movement that propelled Obama to the White House and continues to adore him, will start to believe that the job of unveiling government information belongs to the government and not to journalists and the media.

And this is very dangerous for the sake of our democracy.

We function because we have a free press that monitors what government is doing. But I'm worried that Ipod generation, of which I am now a member, might start thinking that protecting newspapers and the good journalism they produce is no longer important because 1) everything you need to know is on Twitter and 2) our savior Obama is completely open and honest.

It's one thing to have faith in your government. It's another to actually believe what they are telling you.

Maybe Obama really is the greatest president this side of Abe Lincoln and will continue to run his administration in an open manner, launching new websites airing his own dirty laundry at every opportunity.

But even if he does, there no reason to think the next guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will do the same, and then, I know I'll miss a good newspaper.

Cartoon Update

I'm like the worst blogger in the world. Here are the editorial cartoons that I've done in the last week or so.