A Gallup poll shows former President Bush’s ratings have improved. 
Category: politics
NSA and metadata
Where to start? It seems like new developments about domestic spying are coming every hour. Before we get ahead of ourselves, here’s a good AP piece which will give you some background about how we got to this point. Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian broke the story and revealed the identity of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden while Barton Gellman & Laura Poitrus of The Washington Post had the breaking story of the metadata mining program, “PRISM”. Here’s the link to my take on metadata gathering.
You’re being followed
The NSA is collecting millions of Americans’ phone records and following their Internet behavior. The Obama Administration and some members of Congress are defending this latest civil rights intrusion as legal and essential in keeping us safe. I’m beginning to think Obama is Dick Cheney’s love child…
Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary
For almost 2 months in 1989 tens of thousands of protesters led by university students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The protests were triggered by the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party General Secretary who was forced to resign for his positions on reforming the party . The students were also demonstrating against corruption in the government, for workers’ rights, and for freedom of speech and the press. On June 3, 1989 the Chinese government ordered martial law and cracked down on the protesters in Tiananmen Square, killing an unknown amount (estimates range from the hundreds to thousands). Here’s an article about some survivors from yesterday’s Washington Post.
At the time I was living and working in Los Angeles. I can still remember sitting at my drawing desk at home when the news started broadcasting those horrifying images from Beijing. 
Associated Press
Big month for SCOTUS
June is going to be a busy month for the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices will be issuing decisions on affirmative action, same-sex marriage, voting rights, and gene patents over the next few weeks. Be sure to regularly check SCOTUSblog; they’ll be live-blogging this morning on the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.
*I’ll be doing live sketches for the Washington Post the week of the same-sex marriage decisions.
Veterans and suicide
According to a report by the Department of Veterans Affairs, 22 veterans commit suicide every day. In this article from the Huffington Post, more active-duty U.S. soldiers have died from suicide than from combat in 2012. Researchers at the National Center for Veterans Studies in Salt Lake City report that Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) might be the cause of the increased suicide rates.
I remember back in the early days of the Iraq War how some members of the Bush Administration were positive the war would cost under 50 billion. Of course everyone knows we’ve exceeded that estimate but what we don’t know yet is how much needs to be spent on veterans and their injuries, especially from the unprecedented numbers of traumatic brain injuries during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. 
Senator McConnell, defender of Free $peech
The Senate minority leader has a column in the Washington Post today where he describes himself as “…a longtime defender of the First Amendment”. I did manage to avoid spraying the keyboard with my morning cup of coffee. The only free speech Mitch McConnell has ever been concerned with is the campaign contribution kind.
Sketches and stuff
Here’s the thumbnails from my sketchbook and the final poses for the current animation at The Washington Post. 
The Cicadas are coming
There’s no particular reason for posting this sketch; was just watching Sen. Mitch McConnell on Meet the Press and thought he looked like a cicada.
IRS targeted tea party groups
As if the Benghazi story wasn’t enough to keep Congress in hearings until 2016, we have the Justice Department seizing AP phone records and the IRS targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. The targeting of any group or individual based on ideology is outrageous and goes against everything our First Amendment stands for. However, it would have been nice if the same people who are criticizing today would have been as vocal after 9-11 and during the Iraq War. I don’t remember Senator Mitch McConnell taking to the Senate floor to defend anti-war protesters or denounce then Attorney General John Ashcroft. I also don’t recall McConnell challenging former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer for what he said in response to Bill Maher’s comments about 9-11 or defending the Dixie Chicks when they were widely criticized for their comments about President Bush.
Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker
Look who wandered into Lexington, Virginia:
Actually, Bob Mankoff was in town to speak at Washington and Lee University about humor and cartooning. Brett Koth (creator of Diamond Lil) and I had talked to a W&L class earlier and then joined Bob and his host, Prof Julie Woodzincka, for lunch. Bob told some great stories about cartoons which never were printed in The New Yorker. I had just been talking about cartooning, censorship, and “drawing the line” with students in Julie’s class so it was interesting to hear what The New Yorker would and wouldn’t accept in a cartoon.
Mission Accomplished
It’s the 10th anniversary of the infamous George W Bush’s photo op. 