media

Winter Reading Pile

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I hope your holidays were relaxing enough to get you rested for the long slog through the rest of winter and the years to come. I’m still avoiding drawing you-know-who to pace myself for what’s coming, but even with my limited news consumption over the holidays, I’m already suffering from Elon/Trump burnout.

I’m not going to tune out of the news like many people have wisely done since the election, and I’m sure I’ll be drawing those shitheads a lot, but I can’t do another four years of “GET A LOAD OF THIS BOZO!” every week. It obviously had no effect the last time I did it, so why subject myself to that again?

That’s the long way of saying I want to try different approaches this time around. I’m not yet sure what that’ll look like, but let’s find out!

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Schmaltzmark Channel Holiday Specials

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The late Thanksgiving has made this holiday season shorter than usual (if you’re not a freak who puts the tree up the day after Halloween), so here are some holiday goofs before I have to really start thinking about next year.

I’ve never watched one of the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas schlockfests, but Netflix put out something called Hot Frosty where a sexy snow sculpture comes to life (?) and I figure I should practice writing that kind of stuff for when editorial cartoonists make it to the next FBI director’s most wanted list.

Now to enjoy one sip of the eggnog I bought then immediately remember why it’s not a regular staple in our fridge.

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Election Anxiety Remedies

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With less than a week to go until votes are finally counted, people’s election madness has reached a fever pitch. A lot of people have channeled that energy into productive uses, but the one’s who haven’t can’t stop clogging our timelines with increasingly panicked posts.

While there’s still a few days to get out the vote with phone banks and canvassing, ballot curing is a process I didn’t know much about until recently. 33 states allow voters whose ballots were rejected to correct issues over various timeframes. Getting in touch with those voters and helping them through that process requires lots of volunteers.

There are several organizations that do this, but one I’ve found that lets us slobs in non-swing states easily volunteer can be found here.

Hopefully there will be a decisive winner by next week’s cartoon, but I’m sure there will be plenty of coup attempts and other shenanigans going on for months to come.

Stay sane, everyone!

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Newspaper Nit Picker Fact-Checks This Comic

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This week the columnists whose whole schtick is “fact-checking” contorted themselves into knots trying to find as many untruths and straight-up lies in this week’s DNC as last month’s RNC. They went so far to claim things he actually did in his first term don’t count because he’s said he’ll be different in a second one.

It would be gullible if they weren’t so obviously trying to smooth over his many disqualifications in order to keep this a horse race.

I focused on Glenn Kessler as the avatar of this whole genre of goofy “fact checkers” who use silly icons and graphics to add some razzle-dazzle to what’ve become essentially opinion columns. There are countless real fact checkers who do the thankless job of verifying the details in actual reporting. But all these bozos do is tediously parse language and figures of speech to grease the wheels of false equivalence.

Trump and his courts are still a very real threat, but you can tell the public is bored of his antics and was itching to move on. Unfortunately, the media is not.

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Leaked Emails from the Trump Campaign!

This entry was posted in comics and tagged 2024 election AG Sulzberger Donald Trump JD Vance Kevin Sorbo media New York Times Roger Stone on by
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Someone or some government agency successfully phished the Trump campaign and obtained its emails. They then contacted several media outlets about leaking them, but all refused citing “ethics in political journalism” or some other horseshit.

They famously didn’t do this in 2016, when it was Hillary Clinton’s emails. Back then, everything was published on Wikileaks first, so they had the veneer of covering important documents that were “already out there” despite the illegal provenance. This doesn’t explain why the NYTimes spent months breathlessly covering even the most benign of those emails in the hopes of generating a scandal, or at least a quantity of coverage that implied there was one.

As the polls look worse for Trump, the media will work harder to prop him up. Not necessarily for ideological means, but because a close race is good for readership and advertiser numbers.

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This is a wordy comic, and I’ve had trouble getting alt-text to work with it. Here’s the full transcript:

(panel 1 – Title in the style of the Trump/Vance logo.)
Leaked Emails from the Trump Campaign
(panel 2 – An email from Roger Stone.)
Subject: HACKED!
From: Roger Stone roger@weirdheads.biz
Hey man,
I clicked a link for Nixon nudes (for research purposes only), but it turned out to be a phishing attack.
Just a heads up.
Whoops,
Rog
(panel 3 – An email from Kevin Sorbo.)
Subject: RNC SPEAKING SLOT?
From: Kevin Sorbo K.Sorbs@dlist-divas.geocities.org
Mr. President,
Why didn’t I get a spot at the convention? I was more famous than Hulk Hogan for a few minutes in the ’90s.
No worries though! If you want, I can post a really racist tweet about your new opponent. Let me know.
Kevin
(panel 4 – An email from Steven Cheung.)
Subject: EPSTEIN’S PLANE
From: Steven Cheung Cheung@donaldjtrump.com
Boss,
We’ve leased Epstein’s plane while yours is in for repairs. I don’t anticipate any bad press from this.
Steven
P.S. Because you’ve stiffed so many contractors, none will agree to get the Dershowitz stains out.
(panel 5 – An email from J.D. Vance.)
Subject: WRONG RALLY LOCATION?
From: JD Vance pigboy@donaldjtrump.com
Dear Sir,
No one’s here and there wasn’t any advance work done. Please send me the correct location and I’ll hop on a bus A.S.A.P.
JD
(panel 6 – An email from A.G. Sulzberger.)
Subject: ALL GOOD
From: A.G. Sulzberger nepobaby@nytimes.com
President Trump,
Don’t worry. We’re not going to make a whole thing about your emails because we want you to win.
Maggie says hi.
Dash

Summer Movie Duds

This entry was posted in comics and tagged astrology Chris Pratt Joan Quigley media movies Reagan Richard Dreyfuss Ronald Reagan on by
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Apparently this year’s Memorial Day weekend movies were busts compared to last year’s. I’ll definitely check out Furiosa and the latest Apes as soon as they reach my living room cinema, which will probably be before this summer’s even close to being over.

The studios are trying to blame the strikes, but the problems were already there before the picket lines halted production. There are always these boom and bust cycles with movies, but studios used to weather them with diversified releases. Now it’s going on a quarter century of the same genre stuff or some nostalgia revival.

Now that the unofficial start of summer has passed, I had to get a Jaws reference in, and Richard Dreyfuss being a dick at a screening was a good excuse. I know the narrative reasons why Quint had to be eaten, but it was fun drawing Bruce chewing the shit out of Hooper instead.

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Nostalgia Movie Marathon

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It’s summer blockbuster season already, and even I saw Dune Part 2 in a theater; my first time in one since before the pandemic. Most of the trailers were variations on existing properties. More than the usual beating intellectual properties to death, there’s a trend of maudlin revivals that take themselves way too seriously. If it’s not in one already, the next Ghostbusters movie will reveal Slimer (AKA Onionhead) has a tragic backstory that it’s the ghost of a child who died from a famine and that’s why it loves hot dogs so much.

There are lots of good movies still being made, but this is the season for garbage. I like garbage too! But not as much as I love to complain.

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NBC’s Pundit Search

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NBC hired former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel for a few minutes before rescinding the offer after employees and viewers voiced their disgust with having a coup-enabler on TV to lie about another election. The problem they and every other news outlet has is that there are no more mainstream Republicans who oppose doing another coup.

So they either have to point this out, or pretend the guy who’s been at the top of the Republican ticket for nearly a decade now is some weird aberration, instead of the standard-bearer of America’s fascist party. Presenting the fiction probably makes selling ads a lot easier.

Only a little more than six months for NBC and the rest of the media to figure out that both-sides-ing fascism won’t save them.

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