cliche

Saturday October 3, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday October 3, 2020

Doug Ford should take a serious shot at himself

Doug and the people. He’s for the people, he says, but so’s everyone, en principe. Now it’s at a point where he should take time off from hectoring the people about their own failures and yell at himself.

Young Doug Ford: The Series

He’s good at it. He went after the thousand yahoos who attended a car rally in Ancaster: “If they had brains they’d be dangerous.” Those types are “a few fries short of a Happy Meal.” They’re clichés, but not typical Ford ones — they hover above his usual arsenal. At such moments, his vocabulary glows.

The problem? He puts blame for the mess we’re back into, on individuals: student partiers, car ralliers. But the difference between them and him is they didn’t have the capacity to alleviate or screw up the lives of a whole province.

The students and car guys should yell back: Stop screaming at us and fix the damn testing system! Why weren’t you ready for the fall surge you knew was coming? There’s no excuse for standing in line for hours, then being sent home untested. He doesn’t take responsibility. Instead, he waxes Trumpian: our record is “fabulous,” “like you’ve never seen before,” others ask how I did it.

September 18, 2020

(I firmly believe that one duty of a “people’s” leader is not making citzens’ lives more miserable than need be. That includes wretched crowding on transit or airlines, grinding daily commutes — and ingeniously humiliating test lines.)

Why didn’t he mandate smaller classes, as we watch the schools grind predictably to a mass closing, instead of dicking around with more nurses and custodians? Sending teachers into those packed classrooms is sadistic. What about kids who go home, transmit the virus to parents and in the worst cases may have to spend the rest of their lives feeling guilty for it?

Long-term care homes are again the main source of this second wave, since Ford has done “nothing” for them (as the Globe and Mail said) since the first round.

What is he doing? Step one was tell us to get flu shots, which aren’t even available yet. Next was getting pharmacies to test. Huntsville didn’t have a test centre until its MPP called Doug and he conscripted Shoppers. I like the “on call” shtick, but it’s redolent of Russian serfs feeling if only the Czar knew, he’d fix it. Please, just acknowledge the difference between individual and political roles.

Still, compared to the U.S., they’re all there with their masks on at briefings, daintily distancing as they angle to the mic — though there’s always a moment when Doug says he relies on the advice of his chief medical officer. We deserve medals for not expiring each time he blurts that out. He did an impressive turnaround when this began. He’s managed to piss it all away since then. (Rick Salutin – Toronto Star) 

 

Tuesday September 29, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday September 29, 2020

Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

October 4, 2016

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

March 26, 2019

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

June 2, 2020

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia. (Continued: New York Times) 

 

October 31, 2007

Arguably, editorial cartoonists exploit Halloween more than any other holiday period of the year. (With a close second place going to Christmas — whose ho ho ho themes will be showing up in cartoons as soon as the flames of Jack ‘O Lanterns burn out.

The problem is the limitations imposed on cartoons with holiday themes like Halloween. Daryl Cagle’s cartoon site has a refreshing gallery of Halloween themed cartoon which does not have even one example the overplayed. line of costume kids lined up with the oddball at the end.

From me this year, I just recycled an old one I did from 3 years ago:

August 13, 2007


A colourized version of the original drawn July 12, 2002

The Globe and Mail writes in a tongue in cheek editorial today on the death of a cartoon cliche thanks to some recent paleontological findings conflicting with long established theories of evolution. It must be the silly summer season when Canada’s national newspaper opines about anthropology, even more so when it’s suggested cartoonists will lose an over used cliche of a fish evolving through different stages of simian characteristics until it ends up resembling a human.

Will Science eventually destroy every cliche device known to cartoonists? Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Here are a couple of my own evolution cliche cartoons


The above one’s from March 5, 1998


This one’s from December 5, 2001.