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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
Plus: Read Mother Jones' coverage of the Pakistan floods here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama's repeated assertions that the country is central to American security. Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness.
Don't think we haven't been here before. In the late 1990s, the American mass media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda. In 2002, it slavishly parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way for a senseless war. No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability the Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here pays much attention, it will already be too late.
This article first appeared on the ProPublica website.
The US Army honors soldiers wounded or killed in combat with the Purple Heart, a powerful symbol designed to recognize their sacrifice and service.
Yet Army commanders have routinely denied Purple Hearts to soldiers who have sustained concussions in Iraq, despite regulations that make such wounds eligible for the medal, an investigation by NPR and ProPublica has found.
Soldiers have had to battle for months and sometimes years to prove that these wounds, also called mild traumatic brain injuries, merit the honor, our reporting showed. Commanders turned down some soldiers despite well-documented blast wounds that wrenched their minds, altered their lives and wracked their families.
The Army twice denied a Purple Heart for Sgt. Nathan Scheller, though the aftereffects from two roadside explosions in Iraq have left him with lasting cognitive problems, according to the Army's own records.
Kenneth Feinberg is used to tough jobs. But his latest task—determining how to dole out the $20 billion BP is putting up to compensate victims of the Gulf oil disaster—might be his most difficult yet.
Feinberg makes his living as a go-to guy for excruciating decisions. The 64-year-old lawyer, a Massachusetts native now in DC, has been tapped to mediate some of the most contentious settlements in recent memory. He handled compensation for Vietnam vets affected by Agent Orange, dispensed $7 billion to 9/11 survivors and relatives through the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, and administrated the fund established in the wake of the April 2007 Virginia Tech shootings. More recently, he was called upon to determine executive pay for bankers bailed out by US taxpayers.
Yet perhaps even more than with Feinberg's past jobs, the Gulf spill is punctuated by question marks. How extensive is the true damage? How long will it last? Who qualifies for payments, and how do they prove it?
What do you get when you mix thousands of tea partiers with tens of thousands of black families on the National Mall? We'll find out on September 11.
While the planning wasn't intentional, tea partiers and Glenn Beck groupies will get a chance to really make good on their protestations that their ranks aren't polluted by racists. That's because conservative activists, some affiliated with Beck's 912 Project, have organized a big march and rally on the Mall on the very same day, and in virtually the same place, as the National Black Family Reunion. Started 25 years ago by civil rights icon Dorothy Height, the reunion was created to showcase the strengths of the black family. In the past, it has drawn as many as 250,000 people over two or three days. This year, the event will be a one-day "mega-fest" on the Mall between 7th and 14th Streets NW.
Blocks from where Al Sharpton will be leading the prayer breakfast kicking off the reunion, Unite in Action (an umbrella group for some 40 tea party, 912, and other "patriot" organizations) plans to occupy the Mall between 3rd and 4th Streets NW. From there, activists will march down Constitution Avenue to the Washington Monument, essentially sandwiching the Black Family Reunion. Given tea partiers' propensity to show up at rallies with offensive anti-Obama signage, the set-up has all the makings of a powder keg.
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan's "The Transformer," an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post "sometime in 2011." The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates's views, they read: "He favors substantial increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in America's global military presence."
Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded name, might still call "foreign policy." Remind me: When was the last time you heard anyone use that phrase—part of a superannuated world in which "diplomats" and "diplomacy" were considered important—in a meaningful way? These days "foreign policy" and "global policy" are increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least across what used to be called "the Greater Middle East," where what's at stake is neither war nor peace, but that "military presence."
Paul Conrad, who we lost this weekend, was an idol to me and all caricaturists and cartoonists who wondered at the power of ink on paper as a force in the world. I slotted in here his rendering of Nixon as Richard III, a favorite of mine. Conrad's lines were simple but contained great energy and unraveled anger. He, Bill Mauldin, and Herblock were the big three cartoonists who went into battle in America's clearest moments of truth. Media played an important role; it was fact-based then. All three men had the power of major-circulation dailies behind them. There isn't an equivalent today. LBJ and Nixon had as much to fear from the cartoonists as they did from the great editorial and column writers of the day: Vietnam, Watergate, and Jim Crow America were clear and vitally important targets. Conrad did us proud, and he inspired this artist, among many others. Below is the Los Angeles Times remembrance by his friend, Tim Rutten, and the complete documentary on Paul by Barbara Multer and Jeffrey Abelson. Happy to present it here. Remembering Conrad today, and always.
Paul Conrad was powerful, inspiring—and a friend
By Tim Rutten
He never lost his sense of outrage.
My friend Paul Conrad, who died Saturday at 86, was the premier editorial cartoonist of his generation and, for many years, this newspaper's most visible public face. Outrage informed his journalism and animated his art. He woke up each morning angry about some new injustice and allowed sleep to overtake him each night only so that he could get up mad the next day and do it all again.
He was always and everywhere on the side of decency and ordinary men and women. His targets were the self-satisfied powerful, those indifferent to or antagonistic to our common good, and they included presidents—as in these cartoons—as well as governors, mayors, popes and corporate executives. Among his proudest accomplishments was making Richard Nixon's enemies list.
Conrad had the strength to speak out so forcefully—through his incomparable drawings—because he was, in Yeats' phrase, a "rooted man." His values were rooted in the New Deal's politics of remedy, in the social gospel of his Catholic faith, and in the experience of the family he treasured beyond all else. The astonishing thing about his three Pulitzer Prizes was that he won them in three decades that were among the most tumultuous in modern American history. His willingness to engage our common condition, intensely and personally, was a hallmark of his work.
For those of us who came of age on the Times in the 1970s, he was an inspiration. Those of us who worked with him got up each morning hoping we'd live up to his example and knowing we'd fall short.
Below, an illustrator's take on Rick Santorum's Google problem. Read all about Santorum's campaign issues here, or watch a related slideshow of magazine illustration outtakes.
When the Justice Department's report on the so-called torture memos was released in February, the agency's internal watchdog noted that the five-year inquiry "had not been routine" and included the intriguing detail that a trove of key documents had been destroyed. These included almost all of Justice Department official John Yoo's emails. The report noted that investigators for the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility had been informed that these records "had been deleted and were not recoverable." Without the emails of one of the primary authors of the memos, the OPR could only cobble together a partial picture of how Bush administration lawyers had crafted a legal rationale for the use of torture. "Given the difficulty OPR experienced in obtaining information over the past five years," the report said, "it remains possible that additional information eventually will surface."
Months later John Yoo's emails have surfaced—some of them, at least. But these are probably not the records the OPR gumshoes were after. So the mystery of the missing Yoo emails remains.
In response to a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department has produced 900-plus pages of email records, and it says it has identified but is withholding an additional 147 documents for as-yet unspecified reasons. This might sound like a lot, but given that Yoo's tenure as a top political appointee in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel spanned almost two years, from July 2001 to May 2003, the emails account for what would be less than week's worth of email traffic for most routine email user. Though the OPR noted that the supposedly destroyed records included "relevant documents" to its investigation, nothing of the sort was included in the files Justice handed to CREW. These emails are remarkable if only because they are so mundane—and because virtually none of them have anything to do with Yoo's official Justice Department work. If the messages are at all representative of Yoo's stint there, they suggest that the bulk of his time was devoted to arranging speaking engagements, authoring journal articles, and, as CREW put it in a release, "expanding his credentials" for his return to academia.
See a related slideshow of Santorum illustration outtakes here, or watch related Santorum animations here and here.
Rick Santorum would very much like to be president. For the past few years, he has been diligently appearing at the sorts of conservative events—the Values Voters Summit, the Conservative Political Action Conference—where aspiring Republican candidates are expected to show up. But before he starts printing "Santorum 2012" bumper stickers, there's one issue the former GOP senator and his strategists need to address. You see, Santorum has what you might call a Google problem. For voters who decide to look him up online, one of the top three search results is usually the site SpreadingSantorum.com, which explains that Santorum's last name is a sexual neologism for "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex."
Santorum's problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the "definition of marriage" has never included "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who's gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to "memorialize the scandal." The winner came up with the "frothy mixture" idea, Savage launched a website, and a meme was born. Even though mainstream news outlets would never link to it, Savage's site rose in the Google rankings, thanks in part to bloggers who posted Santorum-related news on the site or linked to it from their blogs. Eventually it eclipsed Santorum's own campaign site in search results; some observers even suggested it may have contributed to Santorum's crushing 18-point defeat in his 2006 campaign against Bob Casey.