DarylCagle.comEvery Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.
So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.
Yesterday, the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania announced that due to ongoing budget problems and the threat of bankruptcy, all of Scranton’s 398 city workers — including cops and firefighters — will be paid minimum wage effective immediately.
I asked John Cole, the staff cartoonist for the Scranton Times-Tribune (whom I syndicate though Cagle Cartoons), what his thoughts were on the news:
Ask 10 Scrantonians who and/or what is to blame for their city’s seemingly inexorable slide into insolvency and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. OK, maybe seven. Or even five. Whatever the number, they’ll all be right to one degree or another. Scranton’s cash crunch has been years in the making and — in my opinion, at least — is the product of four forces: An eroded and aging tax base; Pennsylvania’s system of tiny, autonomous municipalities; expensive public-safety union contracts, and a fractious and parochial political culture.
The first three ingredients in that recipe would be manageable if the fourth weren’t so completely dysfunctional. The current mess is largely due to a power struggle between Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty and a veto-proof “super-majority” on the city council that’s led by Council President Janet Evans. Doherty has been trying without success for years to rein in union labor costs through a state-backed recovery plan; the unions in turn have fought back furiously with the help of local pols like Evans. The result has been a back-and-forth stalemate of sorts, with the courts occasionally stepping in to make matters worse.
Here are seven cartoons drawn by Cole dating back to November 2010, tracing the arc of Scranton’s decline:
President Obama is calling for a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 a year. Don’t expect the President to be able to sway Republicans in Congress, who continue to argue that the Bush tax cuts should be extended for everyone, including higher earners.
Here are what a handful of our cartoonists think about the Bush tax cuts…
The House Republicans have scheduled a meaningless vote on Wednesday to vent their anger at Obamacare, yet again. I thought I would draw a giant GOP elephant pooping in a pop-top Capitol toilet. It seemed appropriate.
I worried a bit about how to draw the Capitol as a pop-top toilet, particularly when the Capitol dome would need to be the toilet and the elephant would obscure much of the building. My solution was to pay little regard to the rules of perspective and just go with it – if people don’t get that the Capitol dome is hinged to the back of the toilet tank, well, it’s close enough.
I’ve gotten away from posting my sketches here and I’ve had a couple of requests to do it again, so here’s the rough pencil sketch.
Here is the finished line art. This is how most people will see the drawing in the newspapers that still typically print the editorial pages in black and white.
And here it is in color. Newspaper editors don’t like cartoons with potty themes; I’m not sure how much this one will be reprinted.
Terry Mosher (who goes by the pen name Aislin) is the long-time staff cartoonist at the Montreal Gazette (I syndicate his cartoons through the U.S. through Cagle Cartoons).
In a new video, Aislin takes us through the history and importance of political cartoons in Quebec and Canada. He is putting together a collection of cartoons for an exhibition of cartoons as part of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists 2012 convention in Montreal.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bRt4uZkcnQ]
Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.
So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.
It’s funny what one ruling will do to a man’s reputation. For Chief Justice John Roberts (view all our cartoons about Roberts here), siding with the more liberal members of the Supreme Court on Obamacare suddently turned the conservative judge into the devil as far as many Republicans are concerned…
Meanwhile, Democrats suddenly forgot about their previous criticisms over Roberts and a conservative court run amok, and began praising the Chief Justice as a modern day Earl Warren…
I was reminded of this dichotomy looking back at some old cartoons from my archive. Here’s one I drew about Roberts donating his time to help a gay rights case…
On the flip side, here’s a cartoon I drew about his vague views on abortion, compared to his wife’s public commitment to the antiabortion movement…
