You’ve been with us ten years now.

But after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centers, Americans feared our still-unknown assailants far more than we feared the implications of unchecked executive power. We could not get the lid off that particular petri dish fast enough. Less than a week after 11 September 2001, Congress passed the Authorisation for Use of Military Force, which grants the president unlimited power to use force against anyone in the world – any nation, organisation, person, associated forces and so forth that the president determines was, in any way, involved in 9/11. Military Order #1, passed two months later, authorised the president to direct the capture of any non-citizen anywhere in the world allegedly involved in international terrorism, and detain that person indefinitely without access to the remedy of habeas corpus. (In another example of the deterioration of Americans’ rights post-9/11, that power can now be applied to citizens as well.)

Was catching up with my friend Derf’s blog, and noticed a couple of items of interest to people who are interested in items such as these. If you will.

The Hook in Charlottesville, VA, a plucky little weekly that featured my strip since its start-up ten years ago, decided to devote its shrinking budget to a local cartoon. Can’t argue with that editorial decision, although these things very seldom work out. The local cartoon usually isn’t all that great and, even if it is, the cartoonist soon tires of working for the pittance one lone weekly pays. It’s why those of us who forged careers in the weekly press syndicated in the first place, because these papers all pay shit. But if you multiply shit pay by 50, then it becomes a living wage. The Hook was a refreshingly comix-friendly paper right from the start. It competed with an older, rival weekly and managed to carve out a readership in a nasty newspaper war. The Hook, unlike its rival, ran lots of comix. Its success and that fact are not unrelated. But what’s done is done and I wish them the best.

The DC City Paper also dumped all its comix at the end of 2011, a scant nine months after their much-ballyhoed return to the pages of the paper on a gorgeous comix page anchored by The City. The DC City Paper was once one of the great weeklies. Owned by the Chicago Reader, it often surpassed its revered parent in quality and staff. And it was chock full of comix. In 2007, the aging hippie owners cashed out and sold both papers to the Creative Loafing media company, which quickly went bankrupt, thanks to overpaying for the new papers … In 2009, Creative Loafing’s largest creditor, the Atayala hedge fund, seized all the papers. Things stabilized somewhat after that, but clearly Atayala, worth in excess of $1 billion, is losing interest in a failing, small potatoes industry. So once again the comix are gone from DC City Paper, this time likely for good.

Totally agree with the point about syndication vs. the local cartoonist — I have rarely if ever seen that one work out, though unfortunately the syndicated cartoonist is rarely brought back after the inevitable burnout of the local person. And sorry to hear that the DC paper has already given up on comics once again. I never managed to break into that paper myself, but was glad to see them devoting an entire page to the art form.

Looking forward to Derf’s new graphic novel, the story of his teenage acquaintance Jeffrey Dahmer. Seriously.

… usually don’t repeat things here that I’ve tweeted, but I’ll make an exception for this: dumping comics is the alt-weekly version of “austerity” — killing the cheapest AND most popular part of your paper.

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We needed a new couch last summer, and wanted something that would last a little bit longer than the disposable Ikea stuff we’d been living with for years. Our old L-shaped Ikea couch had been relegated to my studio after it collapsed, the cause of which became obvious as I dismantled it for repair — a key structural point where the two parts of the couch meet, allegedly designed to support the full weight of actual human beings, was entirely supported by, wait for it, a couple of wood staples. I kid you not.

So I found myself in unfamiliar territory, the world of furniture stores, where hungry-eyed salespeople attach themselves to you as you walk through the door, and where fake cardboard tv sets are frozen on news screens whose crawl announces that “the economy is doing GREAT!” (Wish I’d thought to snap a picture of that one.) And the one thing that stood out was how goddamn BIG all the furniture seemed. Comically, oversized big, as if designed for some wacky comedy sketch in which adults are playing the roles of small children.

The New York Times yesterday confirmed what I’d already observed: this is, in fact, an actual trend. The article suggests it was a response to the (pre-crash) rise of McMansions, but I can’t help but suspect that it’s also a response to the increasing girth of Americans themselves.

… adding, my point here is not to mock anyone for their weight, it is that in super-sized America, unhealthy weight levels have become entirely normalized, and I don’t think that’s a positive development. But I’ve edited this post slightly to remove a potentially insensitive comment, to which a reader justifiably objected.

So this happened:

Thanksgiving weekend saw a rash of burglaries in Burlington’s Old North End. Among the victims was Ben Hardy, a Seven Days freelance music critic, who returned from a ten-day vacation last week to find his house had been broken into and burglarized.

The thieves got away with a veritable studio’s worth of musical items, including five guitars, two amps, a sound system and a turntable, as well as some clothing. But they also made off with something invaluable and irreplaceable: A Fender Telecaster signed by the members of Pearl Jam, given to Hardy’s late older brother, Joshua, when he was a teenager.

In 1991, when he was 16, Joshua Hardy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The following year, he was granted a wish by the Make-A-Wish Foundation to meet his favorite Seattle grunge bands …unquestionably, the highlight of the trip was receiving the signed Tele from Pearl Jam. Joshua Hardy died a few months later.

But wait, it gets suckier. The guitar was recovered, but the thieves had sanded off the signatures — presumably to make it less recognizable.

So this is how the band responded when they heard about it:

Just before heading home to Durham, N.H., for Christmas, Hardy was surprised with an unexpected delivery. “FedEx delivered a new guitar,” he said. “In a note Pearl Jam said they’ve been following the story and this is what they decided to do. It’s an amazing gesture of goodwill. It exceeds expectations … They went above and beyond.”

Ben and Josh’s mom, Donna Hardy, said, “It’s a blessing for our family to have all this happen. This is our Christmas story. Pearl Jam is amazing and to think that they remembered Josh after all these years is incredible.”

I know Ed a lot better than I know the rest of the band, but I’ve dealt with all of them enough to know that they’re genuinely decent guys. This is just one more example of that.

I’ll be on Kelly Carlin’s podcast live tonight at 8pm ET on SMODcast.com (downloadable starting Friday). Tune in, you never know what the hell I might start ranting about. Bonus cool: Kelly is George’s daughter.

Updated: can be downloaded here.

The Herblock Foundation has issued a whitepaper (pdf). Haven’t had time to read through it all, but I think the overall answer is “depressing.” Though having spent the last year creating and overseeing an entirely new, paying comics section at Daily Kos, trying in effect to rewrite the online paradigm that cartoonists are paid in “exposure,” I might have had a few thoughts on the subject, had I been asked.

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December 21, 2011
Year in Review One

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December 28, 2011
Year in Review Two

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Very best wishes to all of you, for whatever holidays you celebrate and/or wage war on. Or just have a great weekend, as the case may be.

Or not.

I had a friend once, who fell for that street hustle in which the mark is left holding what he believes to be a brick of cash wrapped in newspaper, in exchange for which he has given the con man something of value as “temporary” collateral — in my friend’s case a camera. When the newspaper is unwrapped, of course, it turns out to be … carefully wrapped, currency-sized strips of newspaper.

The Politifact “Lie of the Year” is something like that. What the Ryan plan proposed handing you would have been called Medicare, and you might even have believed that it was — until you unwrapped it and found that you’d been left holding an entirely worthless package.

You can cut up old newspapers and bundle them up and tell the mark that they’re cash. But that doesn’t make them legal tender. And the Ryan plan, though still using the name “Medicare,” would not have been Medicare.