March 12, 2021
David Rowe points out Biden’s success in forcing through his stimulus with the help of a successful vaccine rollout.
As noted in his marginal tip-of-the-hat, it’s a take on
W.A. Rogers’ cartoon about Roosevelt, which leaves me wondering if Rowe thinks it’s all such a good thing after all, since the original Big Stick cartoon was about TR’s gunboat diplomacy, with which he assisted Panama in becoming independent from Colombia in order to ram through the US-controlled canal.
TR did a lot of really good things, but most people today shudder over the canal thingie.
Less is more, and
John Deering (Creators) has, IMHO, the best take on Andrew Cuomo because he isn’t dancing on the political grave or even pushing Cuomo into it.
Nor is he going on about the statistics on nursing home deaths, a scandal that wouldn’t have disappeared but would likely have been more of a campaign issue than a cause for beheading.
Where people die is a fraught statistic, starting with things as simple as the fact that you’re more apt to die of certain things at a major medical center than at a small local hospital, because, when the folks at the little hospital realize they can’t help you, they transport you to the med center which can’t help you either but you’re still alive when you get there.
Over in the Economist,
Kal Kallaugher wonders if Europe will ever trust us again, given that she’s got reasons not to.
I’m leading with it because yesterday I promised to look into the missile strike against a launch base in Syria, admitting that, given my feelings about our having abandoned our Kurdish allies, I had some expectations in the matter.
An analyst interviewed on the BBC that morning noted that the target was an Iraqi group and suggested it was a departure from the Trump policy of blaming everything on Iran and signaled a softening related to our desire to rebuild the Iran nuclear treaty.
The Fitz introduction:
Next Saturday begins the glorious weekend of the 2021 Tucson Virtual Festival of Books. The lineup of authors is amazing. Imagine enjoying every moment of TFOB with your feet up. I had the pleasure to interview one of my heroes, a Tucson Festival of Books Crowd Cast Guest, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, digitally on the rounds promoting “Dbury@50: The Complete Digital Doonesbury”. I was cool. I didn’t gush. I should have asked him about his middle name, Beekman, but instead we talked about cartooning. Here’s our conversation…
With 24 fully formed complex fictional humans in your head, and then some, do you ever worry about your sanity?
Gary Markstein (Creators). He keeps up his partnership with Tony Rubino at their daily strip, “
Daddy’s Home” consistently, but posts his own political commentary so rarely that I’m sometimes tempted to drop him from my GoComics lineup.
However, it’s paid off this time around, because he posted this one January 12, only six days after the attempted coup, and so it sat there for more than a month, until just now, when congressional hearings transformed it and made it current.
Thing is, I passed it over when it was fresh because I thought it was too obvious. We all knew there were massive, huge, universal indicators, not about precisely what would happen Jan 6, but, certainly, that all hell was about the break loose in DC.