Thomas Nast helped bring down the crooks at Tammany Hall with cartoons. Boss Tweed, the chief antagonist of Nast, crook and leader of the Tammany Gang, understood that Nast’s drawings could do him in better than just hard hitting reporting — the pictures were clear to people who couldn’t read.
But a cartoon has to get to an audience to have an effect.
Here’s a cartoon below, a comment on the security wall being built in Israel, that got very little circulation in the west at Christmas time. Can you imagine the impact had this drawing run in newspapers in Europe, the U.S., and Canada?
It’s a mashup of a famous oil painting* related to the Christian Nativity, from a London-based artist who goes by the name Banksy. (Warning: Banksy pulls no punches; views shown are quite strong, often very funny, always provocative, generally safe for work unless you work for an authoritarian like Dick Cheney who wants no counter opinions.)
Banksy's modern nativity -- does he ever bother to copyright his stuff, or would he rather you broadcast it?
* At least I thought so in 2008. I can’t find the painting now. Anybody recognize a work underneath Banksy’s re-imagining? Let us know in comments, eh?
Zero Visibility, a warning sign - photo by Old Jules, perhaps
Bill Cosby once asked if anyone else had the same chill of fear he gets when the lights start to go down at the theater: Are the lights getting dim, or are you going blind?
Is there zero visibility, or are our eyes shut tightly? Can the candidates see what it takes to get us out of this olio, this olla podrida of messes, or is there too much fog, or are they just not looking? Worse, is it dark AND they are not looking?
What say you?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Robert F. Kennedy speech at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, March 18, 1968 - Photo by George Silk, Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images
RFK said this in 1968. In a speech I heard today it was quoted and it stirred me.
Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP — if we judge the United States of America by that — that GNP counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Kennedy delivered these words in an address at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, on March 18, 1968.
Okay, I’m giving up trying to figure out the Republican race, and Republicans.
Once upon a time you could count on getting the ear of Republicans with a wave of the U.S. flag, a reference to patriotism, and an appeal to time-honored values, like telling the truth.
But no more.
In the last round of the Debate-That-Never-Ends, Mitt Romney in essence called Rick Perry a liar. Romney even offered to give Perry $10,000 if Perry could prove the smear he’d just made on Romney.
Perry, knowing he’d been caught red-handed in a lie, refused to take the offer.
For free, Romney showed Perry to be a liar. And Romney gets the heat?
Just to confuse things further, Republicans aren’t voting for Perry, either.
Literacy test, hell. We need a sanity test for these guys — the Republican voters included. Republicans are close to reason only in the dictionary, and even there they are not on the same page.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Got a lovely email from my Senator, Mark Kirk. Back when he was a House member, he was actually a moderate. No more. His latest missive is a beautiful work of obfuscation. He sent me this poll question…
U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois - Washington Post image
As your Senator, should I…
___ Stand with my fellow Republicans in protecting social security
___ Break ranks and support the President in raiding the Social Security Trust Fund in order to try yet another stimulus to create jobs
Isn’t that just lovely? And you can bet – in another week or so – he will be on the Senate floor announcing the results of this survey. The very notion that Republicans want to protect Social Security is like saying the Colonel wants to protect chickens. I let him know that, for all the good it will do.
Will Sen. Kirk actually make the bizarre claim that Democrats want to raid Social Security for unemployment benefits? Would he post such a claim on his website?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Impressive. Schneider explains, to Australian “skeptics,” how CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, why that’s bad, what the urban heat island effect is and why it does not negate temperature measures that show global warming. He savages the argument about CO2’s “logarithmic” absorption characteristics negating scientists’ findings.
Peter Sinclair comes through with a good explanation of the history of concern about global warming — how the warming trend was discovered.
It wasn’t scientists trying to get government grants. It was the U.S. Air Force, trying to beat the commies and keep America safe for democracy and, ironically, safe for dissent from such applications of science.
9,996
Real history couldn’t be published as fiction, which is one way we can tell real history from the stuff that gets made up. In the story told in this video, note carefully the serendipity of figuring out the CO2 issues: Who could invent a story about warfare leading to the discovery of global warming? As with the coincidence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both dying on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, no editor of fiction would accept it as believable.
Meeting in Durban, South Africa, government officials from many nations worked to find solutions to human causation of destructive climate change, in the framework of proposed treaties under United Nations aegis.
Negotiators at the COP17 Climate Conference in Durban work late into the night to reach agreement on a roadmap to a legally binding deal, 10 December 2011. UKDECC photo and caption
Did anyone expect good reports out of these meetings?
From the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, we get this press release, dated Sunday, December 11, 2011:
Road open to new global legal climate treaty
Global agreement achieved on a roadmap to a legally binding deal
Second commitment period of Kyoto Protocol to be agreed next year
Green Climate Fund to be set up
The UN climate talks in South Africa have been heralded a success after a climate change deal was struck in the early hours of Sunday morning.194 parties have spent the past two weeks in Durban discussing how to cut emissions to limit global temperature rise to below two degrees to avoid dangerous climate change.
In a major realignment of support, well over 120 countries formed a coalition behind the EU’s high ambition proposal of a roadmap to a global legally binding deal to curb emissions. African states together with the least developed countries such as Bangladesh and Gambia, and small island states vulnerable to rising sea levels, like the Maldives, joined with the EU to put forward a timetable which would see the world negotiate a new agreement by 2015 at the latest.
The talks resulted in a decision to adopt the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol next year in return for a roadmap to a global legal agreement covering all parties for the first time. Negotiations will begin on the agreement early next year.
Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said:
“This is a significant step forward in curbing emissions to tackle global climate change. For the first time we’ve seen major economies, normally cautious, commit to take the action demanded by the science.
“The EU’s proposal for the roadmap was at the core of the negotiations and the UK played a central role in galvanising support. This outcome shows the UNFCCC system really works and can produce results. It also shows how a united EU can achieve results on the world stage and deliver in the UK’s best interests.
“There are still many details to be hammered out, but we now need to start negotiating the new legal agreement as soon as possible and there are still many details to be hammered out.”
Also the conference agreed to get the Green Climate Fund up and running, this will help deliver financial support to developing countries to reduce emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Notes to editors:
Further details on the Durban climate talks can be found at: www.unfccc.int
Call me skeptical that this report is completely accurate, but as I refuse to be “skeptical” of the reality that the Earth warms, call me hopeful, too. It’s an agreement to keep talking.
Perry imagines a “war on religion,” based on his bigoted, anti-liberty views and some gross disinformation about what the rules are for kids praying in school.
What are the odds that, if elected, Perry would say, “Oops, I was wrong; I won’t do what that ad suggests?”
Perry’s offensive and erroneous text:
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.
As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.
Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.
I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.
I’ll take Barney Frank over Rick Perry any day. Barney Frank is twice the man Rick Perry is, especially in standing up for the Constitution and freedom for all Americans.
I’ll take Barbara Jordan over Rick Perry. She was twice the person Rick Perry is. It seems to me that Perry plays with fire when he makes an ad that targets genuine Texas heroes like Jordan.
Is Perry going negative just because he’s losing, or is it really going to be that dirty a campaign? This man shouldn’t be governor of Texas, and he has no business running for president.
Christmas at the White House with the Obamas takes on a particularly merry glow of the better spirits of the season.
"WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 30: The official White House Christmas tree, the centerpiece of the Blue Room, is on display during the first viewing of the 2011 White House Christmas decorations November 30, 2011 in Washington, DC. Honoring Blue Star families, the 18-foot 6-inch balsam fir tree is decorated with framed military medals and handmade holiday cards created by military children living on installations around the world. The theme, 'Shine, Give, Share,' runs throught the White House with a 400-pound White House Gingerbread House and 37 Christmas trees." Getty Images
How that must frost people who blindly and often stupidly oppose the president.
37 Christmas trees in the Executive Mansion, reflecting the Obama Christmas theme, “Shine, Give, Share”
Two trees honoring veterans and military service, one Gold Star tree, one Blue Star tree, to promote awareness of the meaning of the blue and gold star traditions
Two trees honoring veterans and military service, one Gold Star tree, one Blue Star tree, to promote awareness of the meaning of the blue and gold star traditions
Lots of kids — receptions for children of servicemen have provided a parade of cheeriness
Bo, the dog, stars in a variety of ways, including a recyclable replica of the dog made from trash bags
85,000 holiday visitors
Entertainment for 12,000 volunteers, Congressmen, staff, Secret Service, and others
The 2011 White House holiday guidebook distributed to visitors, created by eight students from the Corcoran College of Art and Design (the Corcoran Gallery is just around the corner)
Christopher Monckton, Orly Taitz, Bill O’Reilly and John Boehner will deny, or lament, all of it. If living well is the best revenge, celebrating the holidays well comes close to the best rebuttal of the hoaxes.
The first thing I gleaned from this little tutorial will probably not surprise you: There really is a textbook way to fix our current mess. Short-term stimulus works to help an economy recover from a recession. Some kinds of stimulus pay off more quickly than others. Once the economic heart is pumping again, we need to get our deficits under control. The way to do that is a balance of spending cuts, increased tax revenues and entitlement reforms. There is room to argue about the proportions and the timing, and small differences can produce large consequences, but the basic formula is not only common sense, it is mainstream economic science, tested many times in the real world.
So what’s the problem? Why is our system so fundamentally stuck? Partly it’s a colossal, bipartisan lack of the political courage required to tell people what they sort of know but don’t want to hear. Partly it’s a Republican Party that, for its own cynical reasons, wants no deal with this president. Partly it’s moneyed, focused lobbies that swarm in defense of specific advantages written into the law; there is no comparable lobby for compromise, let alone sacrifice.
Is reasoned discourse such that much a lost art in America today? Keller extends his point to cover several areas of discussion — President Obama’s birthplace, global warming and what to do about it, vaccines, etc. He could as easily have added whether Rachel Carson murdered more people than Mao Zedong, cures for our education woes, and the designated hitter rule.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man has value; but in the land of the knee-walking turkeys the one-eyed man is just one more roost to crap on.
What is a rational person to do?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Christmas gets underway at the White House, with a special guest appearance by Bo, the dog:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
One long-standing American Christmas tradition is the Christmas hoax about the president. Probably the most famous, if not the first, was H. L. Mencken’s column in December 1917, in which he claimed Millard Fillmore a failure as president, whose only achievement was putting the first bathtub in the Executive Mansion — all of it make up, whole cloth fiction.
Since the election of Barack Obama we’ve seen claims that Obama had banned Christmas trees, claims that Obama required only Marxist and communist ornaments, and other wild stories that only a fool, a victim of lobotomy, a Bill O’Reilly fan or Michelle Bachmann would believe after the second cup of coffee in the morning.
What will the hoax claims be this year? ABC posted this raw footage of the delivery of the Christmas tree, but that alone will not inoculate us from a Yule-tide hoax.
What atrocious inventions will the Obama-haters send our way this year? If it’s a claim that there’s no tree, you know better already. You’ve seen the video.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 