Okay…I realize that I am saying nothing we don’t already know here. And I didn’t even manage to avoid using that lowest form of wit – The pun. But somehow the confluence of creative events in my head failed to prevent me from indulging my most juvenile of inner smirks, and I went ahead and inked it.

I started yesterday with high expectations. I was sure I could add something salient, creative and intelligent to the Swine Flu discussion. I went through many sketches/thoughts/ideas until, suddenly, it was 4:30PM and the best I had was the cartoon above, which is to be honest, so-so in my opinion. I’ll let you into a little professional secret though..I consider almost all my cartoons to be so-so. The notion that “today will be different” is what keeps me coming back to my drawing board.

So with that, I will now return to my drawing board. Today will be different.

Lottery jackpot-sized bonuses on Wall Street (the indisputable root of the short-term profit mentality that kicked off the recession) look to be back on track for ‘09. If you are willing to overlook the massive pile of rescue cash we shoveled into bank coffers, the bank numbers look pretty good so far. Of course those who calculate their bonuses based on the mere act of moving money around – and diligently skimming their personal share – are absolutely willing to overlook the origin (and purpose) of the money. As far as they are concerned, they did a great job. Vroom, vroom!

The President and congress are about to hammer through some welcome legislation designed to curb the worst of the predatory credit card companies. Of course the CC Co.s are kicking and screaming about messing with the free market which is not entirely unjustified, seeing as it takes both an unscrupulous lender and an irresponsible borrower to tango. But nobody in their right mind would want to stand in the way of stopping deliberately predatory billing cycle changes, hair trigger late fees, fees to PAY your bill(!) and of course, criminally high interest rates triggered when you get caught by any of these devious – and carefully set – traps. I mean WHO in Washington could be so out of touch with the electorate to want to get in the way of stopping that…? Can you think of anyone??

The Comptroller of NY State (currently Tom DiNapoli) has always been, bizarrely, the lone proprietor of the massive NY State pension fund (currently worth around $122 billion) with no oversight, no board. Nothing.
And well, we all know what happens to vast unprotected pots of money that are just sitting around. The potential for kickbacks to politically connected middlemen for simply guiding those funds into private investment firms’ hands always seemed, well, huge. Now NY AG Andrew Cuomo is confirming our suspicions and has found that the previous comptroller – Alan Hevesi – (who was run out of office anyway for misusing taxpayer money to ferry his wife around…) was not exactly the most scrupulous of watchdogs.
The Comptroller’s office is now asking Gov. Paterson for some permanent pension fund middleman rules and oversight. It took an investigation by the AG, but hey, a step in the right direction.

I think it’s wonderful that Dick Cheney refuses to go away. The degree of fun I had drawing this should be against the law.

Torture is wrong in all its forms. And if losing everything you’ve worked toward because you fell sick and can’t afford decent health insurance isn’t government sanctioned torture, I’m not sure what is.

On a technical note…There should be a question mark after the “don’t we.” But “don’t we?” just ruined the punchline, so I elected to expunge the offending punctuationary weirdness before going to press. So all you disgruntled English teachers out there standing ready to correct me…Back off. Okay? I know what I did. And I also know there’s no such word as “punctuationary.” Damn English teachers.

I am always hoping for a surprise, underdog win in the cartooning category. My good friend Steve Breen was this year’s winner. It was his second Pulitzer, so he’s not exactly an underdog, but it was a surprise – So congrats Steve!
I was also happy to see the excellent (and indespensible) PolitiFact (founded by another friend, Bill Adair) win for national reporting. A first for a website. One day soon that will be the norm, though. Congratulations to you and your reporting staff Bill!

I’m back after a nice relaxing week off, during which I cursed my utter lack of prescience in planning to be off during a week in which right-wingers were out in force wearing silly wigs, costumes and hats with teabags duct taped to their brims. I accidentally bore witness to one of these “Tea Parties” and saw many signs displaying spectacular displays of mental agility. One of my favorites read something like “cut taxes, not defense spending.” The participants appeared to be protesting – strangely – the continuation of Bush’s deficit spending and bank-bailout policies. It’s not insane to assume that most of the protesters don’t make over 250k a year. I wonder if they even know (or care) that they are all getting a tax cut this year.

Ahhh. It’s good to be back.

I railed against this in my scribbles aimed at the previous administration, but I don’t care which president is doing it. The Obama administration insists on defending warrantless wiretaps even though they are an illegal, extra-Constitutional activity. The Obama White House is also continuing in the Bush tradition of citing risk to state secrets as a reason to foot-drag on allowing war prisoners the rit of habeus corpus. Gitmo is supposed to close but we have an equally strange legal black hole operating in Bagram, Iraq. These prisoners are all bad guys, the refrain goes. How is anyone supposed to know, if no charges are filed? Trust? The Government? Are you nuts?