Many apologies, friends – All my cartoons have been embargoed this week due to a lack of space on our editorial page. The editorial board has been writing candidate endorsements, and well, I can’t take it anymore. So here’s a sneak peek at tomorrow’s deeply ironic cartoon for my close inner circle of blog readers. I would’ve thrown Joe Lieberman in there but I drew it right before he said he wouldn’t support anything that remotely resembled a reasonable effort to repair the ludicrous farce we currently call a health provision system. Oh, and here’s My source for the 72% number to show I didn’t just pull it from that intimate place that people seem to pull much of their self-affirming information these days…

For the heaving masses of my blog readers that might not be aware of a big local issue – There was a recent fair housing settlement reached by the Feds with Westchester County, considered by many to be an important marker post in the post civil-rights act era. Surface racial tolerance is fairly advanced around here, but communities are nonetheless segregated racially. Many point to the segregation running along economic lines rather than racial, which is an issue raised in a recent debate between County Executive Andrew Spano and his challenger Rob Astorino. Astorino spoke negatively about the settlement (which called for the building of 750 affordable housing units in non-diverse areas) in terms of “economics” and “zoning” – and saying the opposition he represented was not about “race.” Andy Spano then raised hackles by calling him a “racist” for using codewords. Spano is the one whose integration policies the feds felt needed to be rectified, so he can’t lay claim to any moral high ground, but his point is not empty political rhetoric however. Like those who oppose affirmative action, many people get caught up in the economic arguments, but cruelly and deliberately ignore the historical reasons as to why our African American communities are still struggling to catch up. Sadly, the fact that we are even having this discussion shows there is still a long way to go before we reside in a post-racial society.

I saw a flood of balloon boy cartoons with the mylar spaceship balloon thingy used as an easy metaphor – labeled “health reform” or a series of other fill-in-the-blank issues. I gave it some thought and chose instead to comment on something actually related to the bizarre event itself.

I’m posting this as my erstwhile friend and cartoonist-in-arms, Matt Bors, called me Saturday night and asked if I could scribble a caricature of myself for his cartoon. He also fearlessly hit up our mutual friends Ted Rall, Jack Ohman and Joel Pett and managed to draw a cartoon about the object of cartoonists’ most vociferous grumbling and hand-wringing. I thought it was a good idea, and felt the cartoon came out well, despite my obvious attempt to sabotage it.