Your Political Cartoon Of The Moment

R.J. Matson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Your Political Cartoon Of The Moment

From the Lexington Herald-Leader's Joel Pett:

Your Political Cartoon Of The Moment

Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courier:



But remember, the GOP has a jobs plan. Somewhere.

Your Political Cartoon Of The Moment

The Miami Herald's Jim Morin on Moosemania Historical Revision Bus Tour 2011:



Ain't that the damn truth.

Your Political Cartoon Of The Moment

Gary McCoy provides some needed perspective:

Last Call

Denver Post editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe took home this year's Pulitzer, and he should have won just off this one here:




Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader here in Kentucky was a finalist in the competition too, and of his entries, I liked this one best.

Hug a cartoonist, folks. Lord knows we need them.

A Loaded Question

I see people asking about Jared Lee Loughner's politics, his state of mental well-being, his philosophy on life, his history growing up as child, his words and his Youtube videos, but the question I don't see people ask is "How did Jared Lee Loughner get a handgun with an extended magazine?"  Politico finds that Congress doesn't want to ask that question either.  The NRA has all but won the issue completely, saying that any discussion of gun control laws would not be appropriate:

The message is clear, and it’s one that most lawmakers seem to have absorbed: Not only is access to guns irrelevant to this discussion; bringing it up would be downright insensitive.

USA Today's Joel Pett sums it up:





Can't even consider how Loughner got a handgun, and extended magazine or two, and ammo.   Congress is only tinkering around the margins at best.

The signal piece of gun legislation to come out of the Arizona shooting looks to be a bill that Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) plans to bring up as soon as this week. It would ban the manufacture and sale of high-capacity magazines such as the one Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s would-be assassin, Jared Lee Loughner, attached to his Glock 19, allowing him to fire off 33 bullets without reloading, rather than the 10 or so in a typical clip.

“The only reason to have 33 bullets loaded in a handgun is to kill a lot of people very quickly,” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who plans to introduce McCarthy’s legislation in the Senate, said in a statement. “These high-capacity clips simply should not be on the market.”

But McCarthy and Lautenberg are up against a political consensus that has only hardened in recent years as Democrats made inroads into Republican territory largely on their ability to neutralize the gun issue. Some of their red-state victories were with pro-gun candidates such as Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Virginia Sen. Jim Webb.

“The battle over gun control is over in the sense that it’s decided that you’re allowed to have guns in this country,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, a pro-gun Democrat elected governor of Vermont with the endorsement of the NRA, told POLITICO in an interview.

What needs to be reopened, he said, is a debate on “common sense” measures such as whether people can buy weapons without background checks at gun shows, where and how firearms can be carried, and bans on certain types of weaponry.

He pointed to recent initiatives, such as New Hampshire’s party-line vote to allow guns to be carried in the halls of the state Legislature, as extreme measures that may provoke a backlash. “I come from a hunting state. Vermonters are very practical,” he said. “Last time I checked, there were no deer in the New Hampshire statehouse.”

Gun-control advocates hope that, because one of its own has become a victim, Congress will see things differently. But with a new, solidly pro-gun Republican majority in the House and a Senate stocked with red-state Democrats up for reelection, there are few indications of widespread conversion on the issue. 

And so it goes.  Not even a law banning extended magazines has any chance of passage, even after the attempted assassination of a Congresswoman and six dead around her.   It's a question that won't even be asked anymore as we wonder why and how this tragedy occurred.

Not even one of Saturday's heroes will be heeded.

This evening on the Situation Room, Blitzer had on retired Army Colonel Bill Badger, in order to tell the story of his part in the takedown of Jared Loughner.  I can't find any video of it, but Badger's composure and recall of detail in retelling the story makes the segment worthwhile on its own.  As the interview is wrapping up, the Colonel makes use of his brief moment of fame to actually try and make something good come out of this travesty:

BLITZER: Colonel, do you own or carry a gun? 

BADGER: No.

I have got a 21-year-old son. And when he was born, my wife made me get rid of .38. I had one up until that time.

But, you know, if I could say something right now, that something is drastically wrong with what's going on in our United States right now. And when an individual is turned down to get into the military and then can be -- is able to go out and buy a .9-millimeter Glock pistol, and he had one of the -- or his clips were the extended clips that were limited to law enforcement only, and, you know, that -- or somebody has to put a stop to that.

But we won't even ask.

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

Because of course, Progressives are just like Teabaggers, and are just as much a fringe burden to the political process, clearly. I don't know which group that idea would offend more, the progressives or the Teabaggers.

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

The Miami Herald's Jim Morin:



Steve M. has more on this as he dissects the meaning behind BP CEO Tony Hayward's op-ed in...you guessed it...the WSJ.

This would fit perfectly with several ideas the right is at great pains to push: that government is toxic and shouldn't be in charge of anything (yes, everyone's demanding government intervention now, even right-wingers, but that has to change soon), that Obama is inept, that all Obama is destroying capitalism by accident or design (see Bobby Jindal complaining about expected job losses as a result of the Obama administration's ban on offshore drilling), and that quite possibly even the administration's failure to force an end to the crisis was part of a sinister conspiracy to block drilling and force cap-and-trade on an unsuspecting public.

They tried the same thing with health care reform.  Remember "Keep your government hands out of my Medicare, Obama"?  It's the definition of Obama Derangement Syndrome:  no matter what happens, the bad parts are always, always, always Barack Obama's fault.

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

From Daryl Cagle:

Last Call

When Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal op-ed page just isn't wingnutty enough for your business news needs, there's Investor's Business Daily's editorials.  Phyliss Schlafly, George F. Will, Michael Gerson, Larry Kudlow (and that's just this week), plus their idea of a "liberal" to balance all that out is...E.J. Dionne.

The best part by far however is cartoonist Mike Ramirez.


Clearly, The WSJ isn't fair and balanced enough for these guys.

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

Joe Heller. More, as always, at Cagle Cartoons.

Political Cartoon Of The Decade

Jen Sorenson's Slowpoke is as usual, right on the money.

Ace Decade

Well, time to get to the end of the year/end of the decade stuff this week, so I suggest starting off with Daryl Cagle's decade in political cartoons review.  My fav:




Come to think of it, that "Unfinished Bush Business" tag pretty much sums up the entire friggin' decade, doesn't it?

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

From Cagle Politcal Cartoon Index

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

From the WaPo's Tom Toles, via Ezra Klein:

And yeah, that's about the entirety of it.

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

From Joel Pett, at the Lexington Herald -Leader.

And boy, does this very much describe the NKY.

Political Cartoon Of The Moment

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Larry Wright - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

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Matt Bors, Cagle Cartoons

The Constitution: Also approved by one out of one Zandars.

Cartoon Of The Moment

Gobble gobble gobble!