Sorry…Couldn’t resist referencing the “other” Palin in the headline.

This VP pick is going to get debated to death. At first glance, the choice of Sarah Palin as Veep looks to be a stroke of progressive genius on the part of the McCain camp. But then one must remember: This is the McCain camp. They just spent the summer hammering away at a 40-something Presidential candidate who was “too young and had no foreign policy experience.” Sarah Palin was least qualified of McCain’s running mate candidates to be President, so it appears they are cynically calculating that a woman will attract the legions of miffed Hillary Clinton supporters. Palin is an avid outdoorswoman and lifetime NRA member, which is cool, (in Alaska, if you’re not either of those, you probably will need to relocate) and which may or may not have some appeal to Hilllary’s minions. But where the nails screech across the Hillarian policy chalkboard are Palin’s staunch red-meat republican anti-choice, anti-conservation, anti-theory of evolution beliefs. She really is the antithesis of what Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career working toward. In conversations with my conservative friends they were likening McCain’s pick to George HW Bush’s out-of-left field pick of Dan Quayle in ‘88. But I think it looks more Like McCain picked Dick Cheney in a skirt, which could be a tad problematic when wooing Democratic women.

Ugh…I just drew a mental picture of Dick Cheney in a skirt. I have to go locate some Pepto-Bismol.

First of all – Aren’t you impressed I didn’t add to the national pile of Denver convention cartoons?

This cartoon was inspired initially by the latest census results which show the chasm between the wealthy and everyone else getting unsurprisingly wider. Add to that fun fact the reality that food costs didn’t just recently inflate. They exploded.
About a year ago, my average family grocery bill was approximately $150 – Now it’s $250. Anyone else notice that? By my scientifically precise calculations, every item has gone up a dollar. For the wealthiest, bolstered additionally by generous tax cuts and aggressive business non-regulation, it’s not really an issue. But for most normal families that has to be causing some pain. And I can’t fathom how hard it’s hitting the poorest members of our communities.
My political GPS points all over the place on this one, but I blame an oft overlooked White House dollar policy, where the laws of unintended consequences are at work once again. A weak dollar policy was encouraged and implemented very specifically to make US manufacturing exports stronger. To be fair to The White House, that is indeed a noble cause. Problem is they forgot that economics doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and the global price of a barrel of oil is tied to the dollar. And, uh, you know the rest. How could something so simple be the root cause of so much pain? Don’t forget that a squirrel allegedly set in motion the complete shutdown of the Northeastern US electrical grid in ‘03…

Oh Well. You know what they say. A receding tide leaves all boats that aren’t deep water yachts leaning sideways in smelly mud.

After attending both Democrat and Republican conventions in 2000 and ‘04, I decided not to go this time. The past few week’s media universe orbited around the Olympic Bird’s Nest in Beijing and now the celestial center is a political fish bowl. Political Conventions have their place, and are wonderful for getting true-believers whipped into a corporate-sponsored frenzy and for parties to hone their predictable messages for the fall. But my experience as a cartoonist covering them was frankly not as much fun as it might sound.
At any convention site, once you have worked your way through the outer mazes and inner barriers of security armies, the first thing you do as a cartoonist is think about penciling the requisite “security cartoon.” Already the focus becomes too inward. What do my readers care about security at a political convention? You are in a confusing, concrete and steel encircled otherworld, choking with duct-taped-to-the-floor cables. It is a world that feeds on itself for microscopic slivers of “news” and “analysis” which are beamed out with frenzied urgency to shrugging viewers. Doesn’t matter what city you’re in, you get stuck in a climate-less, halogen-splashed, mall-like environment where time has no meaning. The senses are assaulted by the drone of ten thousand journalists working feverishly behind blue privacy curtains and the smell of freshly laid temporary carpet mixed with the vague scent of personal pizzas and half-full cups of coffee. And everywhere you look there are hundreds of plasma screens showing you the important and interesting “late breaking!” stuff you are missing elsewhere in the convention hall. It doesn’t bother me that the conventions are scripted. That is to be expected. But I am bothered by the sense of entrapment, which for me is creatively stultifying. When you are there, you have to get out of the bubble if you want to get any decent work done.
Some cartoonists thrive on the atmosphere, and do some of their best work in that environment. My friends Walt Handelsman, Rob Rogers, Tom Tomorrow and KAL are providing some great stuff from Denver. (I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed…) However, it is with great relief that I reside comfortably here in the real world – believing I can give you far better cartoon views of the convention forests so long as I’m not one of the trees.

Hillary pleaded with her disgruntled followers in Denver to vote for Obama and not McCain in the fall, as McCain is the antithesis of everything she has worked toward and stands for – While Obama is of course, pretty much on the same political page.

I still can’t believe her supporters actually needed to be told that. More Scalias on the Supreme Court, anyone?

I actually had this thing lurking in my sketchbook from Friday, but was working on an illustration for something else, and didn’t have time to ink it until Monday. Drawing a bunch of glass houses was a bit of a challenge from a page design perspective. But I’m relatively happy with the finished product.

Here’s one for my dear local readers!

For the uninitiated, there’s a guy who really, really, really wants to build a tunnel between The sound shore area of Westchester county and Long Island and is paying a little over a million bucks to study the viability of it. Apparently it would make traveling to Long Island a quick and painless exercise, as it would remove the NYC dogleg you have to take to get there. There are all manner of reasons why people are skeptical of this project, the most compelling of which being how many people really want to to get to Long Island quickly?

Oh. I almost forgot: Tarrytown and Nyack are the municipalities on the Hudson River connected by the overused, perennially-in-need-of-replacing Tappan Zee Bridge. And they are nowhere near the Long Island Sound. Ba-da-boom.

Hmmm. Explaining the punchline of a local cartoon to out-of-towners is a real bore isn’t it? I apologize to you all.

On another note, before he texts his supporters…Anyone here want to guess who Obama will announce as his running mate? I think he’ll go with Hillary. Anyone else on his short list will be a snooze – For a cartoonist.

I’m kind of riffing off yesterday’s blog post with this cartoon. If John McCain can shamelessly exploit the oil issue, then dammit…So can I!

I saw a bumper sticker on a leviathanic Mercedes SUV the other day that carefully explained to the driver following behind: “drill here, drill now, lower gas prices,” which is what the drone-bot that has been cleverly substituted for John McCain by his presidential campaign is programmed to say repeatedly.
Russia has the eighth largest oil reserves which, according to learned oil wonks, dwarfs the native US supply. We have 3% of the world’s oil – but we use 30% – So the McCain bumper sticker energy policy is ignoring the math. But who’s counting. There’s an election to be finagled. Never mind new oil wells, what the McCain camp is really interested in tapping is your emotions.

Anyway, that’s a roundabout way of saying that unfortunately Russia has more oil than any of the NATO countries, (and waaaay more gas and coal) so sadly, they have the financial wherewithal to invade neighboring countries. Sort of like Saddam Hussein did, back in his glory days. We have learned in recent history that there is a distinct correlation between large oil reserves and badly behaved leaders (though there are a few notable exceptions…)
Just think. Knowing that we don’t have enough oil here to get the job done, the sooner we figure out how to reduce our oil consumption, the quicker we advance the cause of representational democracy by putting the dictators and tin pot leaders out of business.
That Mercedes SUV driver can get started right away by procuring a Mini Cooper to paste her “drill here, drill now, lower gas prices” bumper sticker on.