I had roughed out a bunch of sketches of General Petraeus yesterday, but criticizing him at this stage seemed disingenuous. He’s just doing what he’s told by his civilian superior(s). Even if he thought it was a foolish mistake to go into Iraq, it is not his place to do anything but the job in front of him as best he can (until of course he retires and writes the requisite tell-all book, well after the damage has been done…) I kept seeing this whole mess as ultimately Bush’s problem. Hence the cartoon above.

Every so often, I’ll make myself useful here at the paper and do a quick little illustration for our editorial page when a column needs some, er, spicing up.
This one ran on Sunday’s edit page and accompanied an opinion piece on the inequity in local property tax levies due to the lack of across-the-board reassessments. An important, if somewhat dry subject that called out for something interesting visually…

Congressional hearings on oil company profits were held yesterday, during which oil co. CEOs were raked across the coals by politicians for a) making bucket loads of profit, b) taking advantage of the idiotically generous tax breaks available to them, and C) not ploughing enough of their profits back into green energy research.

The oil companies are for-profit mercenary operations. Why would anyone expect them to do anything more benevolent than simply making money? We are all hurting from high oil prices, but it’s our fault for being so damn reliant on the black stuff in the first place. We are all capable of actively excluding ourselves from the oilfest. But instead we yell at greedy suits for being greedy suits, while we consume vast amounts of their product.