Free Republic

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Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall recently made the news for penning yet another crass cartoon, this one denigrating Pat Tillman, the football star turned soldier recently killed in Afghanistan. Rall painted Tillman as a racist, bloodthirsty idiot who was just another cog in the "El Busho" war machine. MSNBC.com decided to pull the cartoon because it "did not meet MSNBC.com standards of fairness and taste." Blogger Andrew Sullivan called for a protest campaign against Rall and yesterday offered this enlightening Rall quote: "The word 'hero' has been bandied about a lot to refer to anyone killed in Afghanistan or Iraq....

Item did not meet MSNBC standards of fairness and taste MSNBC.com pulled a cartoon by syndicated political cartoonist Ted Rall on Monday. Rall’s cartoon, distributed widely by United Press Syndicate to scores of newspapers and Web sites, concerned the late Pat Tillman, the NFL player who quit football to join the Army. Tillman was killed last month in Afghanistan.

<p>The scene: a corner table at John's Grill on a recent damp day. Media folk kibbitz over crustaceans while two cartoonists have a chance for a little one-on-one, a rare treat because they are separated by a great distance.</p> <p>Besides questions being answered, pens are drawn and characters rendered to illustrate, literally, various points. Berkeley Breathed is difficult to corner, even when sitting in a corner. But in this cartoonist-to-cartoonist chat -- one of the few, and very infrequent, interviews he's giving -- he gives us a small peek inside one humorist's psyche as we celebrate his return to the Sunday comics pages after an 8-year hiatus.</p>

Did Johnny Hart -- the beloved creator of "B.C." and one of the most widely read cartoonists on Earth -- sneak a vulgar defamation of Islam into the comics pages last week? The question was raised yesterday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based civil rights group, in an e-mail to its membership. Hart and his syndicate say no -- that a simple, straightforward joke is being misconstrued. That may well be true, but the 73-year-old cartoonist's history of evangelizing his Christian beliefs through his comic cavemen have left many people doubtful. The cartoon, which appeared Nov. 10...

If children read anything in the newspapers anymore, it's still the Sunday comics section -- that inviting spread of colored cartoon art, that staple of Silly Putty advertising. One of the industry's best-known cartoonists is Garry Trudeau, the envelope-pushing baby boomer creator of "Doonesbury." He's now delivered controversy again with his signature. He sent to his syndicate a Sunday strip with a new topic: masturbation. "There's a new study that suggests regular masturbation prevents prostate cancer," says one of the strip's characters, the oh-so-relevant Reverend Scot Sloan. A few panels later, slacker Zonker arrives to announce "self-dating prevents cancer." Trudeau...

Nobody bites at auction for Doonesbury comic strips PORTLAND - Remember those Doonesbury comic strips that made fun of Portland's school funding problems? On Friday, supporters of Measure 26-48 were ready to auction off three more of Gary Trudeau's original strips. All the proceeds were meant to help out the Portland School District. There was only one problem - no one made a bid. However, that did not stop the measure's supporters from pushing their message about the upcoming election. "Anybody in Multnomah County can go and drop their ballot off. We need to have people do that. This...

The second-to-last line of this past Sunday's "Doonesbury" has to be read to be believed and even then I fear readers will accuse me of making it up: "You are all jingoistic self-regarding conquer-monkeys!" The full eight panel cartoon was a mini sermon -- in French -- chiding American readers for the weeks-old controversy over "freedom" fries. I hereby nominate it as the worst single cartoon in the history of the strip. Admittedly, the last few months have offered a lot of competition; it's been almost a race to the bottom. There was the preachy strip in which the Rev....

he British poet Philip Larkin, asked why he voted Conservative, replied that he believed the Left to stand for “dishonesty, idleness, and treason.” It seems to me that Larkin omitted one key component of the lefty mind-set: snobbery.The essence of the modern Left, from Lenin to the Clintons, is a contempt for ordinary people — for their blindness to their own interests, for their inability to see that society needs radically reorganizing, for their reluctance to let themselves be shoveled around like truckloads of concrete in order to accomplish that reorganization, for their degraded tastes in everything from food...

On Easter of all days, Gary Trudeau uses his Doonesbury cartoon to insult Christians in general, and George Bush's faith in particular. How quick the liberals are to condemn someone else's faith and belief system, but just let a Christian say anything negative about another's belief system and how quick they are to invoke an injunction against "judgementalism."You can read the cartoon for yourself at the following link CLICK HERE for cartoon

It is said, "The truth will set you free." From my experience, and those of my opinion-sharing Latino colleagues, the truth just gets a lot of people mad at you. Take, for example, the recent usage of the popular character "Hello Kitty" by political satirist Lalo Alcaraz in his nationally syndicated comic strip La Cucaracha. Aside from drawing Kitty with a decidedly Latino twist, a sombrero planted behind the ever-present bow, it was the text in the cartoon that animated discussion. As with most of his work, Alcaraz's blunt assessment of life in the United States for Latinos and Latino...

Please excuse this vanity post. I did a search for "B.C", Johnny Hart, and nothing came up. Today's comic strip in the Sunday Santa Barbara News-Press is beautiful. I'm surprised it wasn't censored by this liberal rag. Johnny Hart is a great fan of our President.

A Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist is under fire from Muslims for his depiction of a Middle Eastern-looking man behind the steering wheel of a nuclear-bomb laden truck under the headline, "What would Muhammad drive?" The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim World League are demanding an apology from Doug Marlette's syndicator, Tribune Media Services, and from his employer, the Tallahassee Democrat. Cartoon by Doug Marlette, used with permission The cartoon shows a Ryder rental truck like the one used by convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. In a phone interview, Marlette told WorldNetDaily he would not apologize, though he...