It is a gross understatement to say Obama has bitten off a lot for us all to chew – maybe too much. But the loyal opposition looks weak, hypocritical and comical at this point. NOW they’re interested in reining in wasteful spending? Heck, even David Brooks described them as nihilists.

Why is it that property taxes are tied to property values, except when those values go down? Property taxes are a big issue in Westchester (and the NE in general) as they are often higher than many homeowners’ federal income taxes. Westchester has a byzantine system for calculating who owes what and the State of NY has started pushing for mandatory periodic reevaluations to try to wrestle the system into having some semblance of fairness. Many people are opposed however, simply because they see it as an opportunity for municipalities to raise their taxes further – Which is not just idle paranoia in these parts.

I’m sort of rebutting my previous cartoon here. Nationalizing the banks sounds bad, but we’re doing it already, we just haven’t slapped the big scary US Govt. label on them yet. And as I said before, how can the public sector make a worse foul up of banks than the private sector has?
(Um, okay…Don’t answer that. It was rhetorical.)

This week’s edition of “stomach churning market-drop” was apparently exacerbated by banks’ worries that they would be nationalized as part of the bailout. Senators Schumer and Dodd seemed to believe we had no choice. The Obama administration said they had no plans to do it. And bankers ran around screaming. Seems like a semantic worry to me. Nonetheless, we had to put aside the currently instinctual response of “if the bankers don’t like it, it must be good” and assume that nationalizing banks would be bad (hence the above cartoon.) Though I still can’t comprehend the idea that somehow there are entities that could do a worse job of running them than the current crop.

The NY POST has issued an “I’m-sorry-you-misinterpreted-and-were-therefore-offended-by-this-cartoon” semi-apology, so thought I’d give you a further update. A couple posts ago I was critical of their cartoonist, Sean Delonas’s cartoons, particularly “the chimp” cartoon in question, which as you know has now taken on a media life of its own. I also said I had never met him. Sean emailed me to say that we were in fact in art school together(!) and had met once. He very politely inferred that he didn’t like what I had written: “ Sorry you don’t like my cartoons. I don’t see a lot of your cartoons, but the ones that I do see I really like. As far as politics, I work for a tabloid. We’re geared more towards entertainment and sensationalism than most papers.”
He and I had additional email exchanges that he asked me to keep off the record, so I will respect his wishes. Suffice to say that even though he swore up and down to me that he didn’t intend for the cartoon to have any racial overtones, things have gotten very hot for him indeed.

I still can’t defend the cartoon, but as Joe Biden Said in one of the VP debates, it’s safer to question a person’s ideas rather than their motives. Still, I personally try to be as surgically precise as possible with my cartoons simply because there is a Rorschach Test element to a loosely conceived cartoon, wherein people can insert interpretations that the cartoonist might never have dreamed of. There’s nothing worse than taking responsibility for nasty unintended consequences. It’s happened to most cartoonists, including me, so I know.

There’s a lot of grumbling from the people who feel they were smart about their finances and aren’t overextended with their mortgages. Seems the mortgage bailout goes to (surprise) people who got themselves in trouble.

It’s easy to bristle over this one (I’m a conservative, 30 yr fixed guy myself..) but there is good reason to hold our noses and hope this works. Basically – other than from a purely empathetic standpoint – the more people we keep in their homes, paying their mortgage, the better it is for the economy/housing market/your job security. Like it or not, if all the people who are in trouble are left to fall, we all go down with them.

Sean Delonas is the cartoonist for the NY Post. I should say, though I love to read cartoons, I’ve never really paid much attention to his because they mostly employ xenophobic, back-of-the-classroom humor and a rudimentary grasp of politics. Unsurprisingly, Sean published this cartoon today which pokes fun at the news story about the woman in Stamford, CT who was horrifically mauled by her friend’s pet chimpanzee and also makes a lame joke about the stimulus bill being written by a monkey. People all over the web are going nuts about Delonas’s (perhaps inadvertent) simian allusion to President Obama.

Even though the cartooning world is small, I’ve never met Sean, so I have no idea what type of person he is in real life (most cartoonists are quite likable…Their cartoons tend to be a form of creative alter ego) but his cartooning persona is awfully churlish. I have zero problem with controversial ideas (it does go with the cartooning territory) but I am unimpressed by racism and I would have steered clear of making fun of a news story in which someone, y’know, had their face chewed off.

The only thing I find amusing about the cartoon is the fact its author is casting aspersions on someone else’s intelligence.

Governor Paterson is catching some heat for giving his aides’ hefty pay raises. I’m sure they deserve them. But so did a lot of the state workers who are being asked to take pay cuts, or worse. As Saturday Night Live has gracelessly demonstrated, when it comes to humor and criticism, the governor’s sight-impairment is off-limits. His tone-deafness, however, is fair game.

I actually didn’t mean to pick on Congressional Republicans again today…I had several so-so ideas on the drawing board last night regarding the auto bailout, and State finances…But this one worked best. And I do think they are on the wrong side of this particular issue. So it was “bombs away” as they say.