Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
July 14, 2013

Last week, a West Michigan lawmaker proposed legislation for a 2014 ballot proposal to eliminate state income tax. You can click here for the particulars, but it really doesn’t get more thought-out than what I wrote. This sort of deep cynicism can only be met with even deeper sarcasm.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
July 7, 2013

So last month a Michigan House Representative, Lisa Lyons, made an unfortunate comment during a debate on school reform. I guess we should give her points for attempting to bring something new and witty to the standard politicking  but what came out was “Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.” Yeah, that wasn’t good. Naturally, some people were offended and parsed the words to be offended as they could possibly be. Naturally, Lyons apologized by way of saying she was offended that people were offended and that, my friends, is what is really offensive. And so it spun. There was a “point/counterpoint” article in the MLive newspapers on this. It was really difficult to read with both sides going to great length about the finer points of pigs, hogs, and swine-related metaphors, and very little about the actual issue, which was… wait, what was the issue? Exactly. So instead of me weighing in on the school reform issue, I thought I’d sooth myself with the only positive I could take from it.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
June 30, 2013

I don’t typically do cartoons on the same subject two weeks in a row. But the Michigan Senate heading for vacation without choosing to vote on providing Medicaid to Michigan’s working poor seemed to have the right level of audacity. And I did take a different approach. Whereas last week’s cartoon has an academic and somewhat more traditional angle to demonstrate the consequences, this week’s is specific and realistic. More of a punch to the gut. I’m hoping some of our Michigan senators got to read it, and it made their vacations slightly less enjoyable.

Side note for myself: Next time I try to draw coffee pots, I should, I don’t know, maybe practice a little. Yeesh, the ones I drew are bad….

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
June 23, 2013

You can go here and here for the full backstory on this on, but the basics are that Republican leadership in the Michigan Senate refused to vote on legislation that would approve providing health insurance through Medicaid to about 300,000 now uninsured folks in Michigan. There were enough votes to pass it, but the leadership wanted a majority of the GOP senators to support it (because, you know, being strict constitutionalists, that’s how it works). Whatever the real reason (ideological purity, pettiness, fear, large collective stick in their bottoms about Obamacare), they decided to do nothing and go on their two month summer vacation. “We have to study it some more.” Uh-huh. And now, Michigan citizens who work and pay taxes but don’t have jobs that provide insurance and cannot afford to pay for their own, continue to exercise and hope it keeps them healthy.

If you call yourself a Michigander (or even a Michiganian, which isn’t nearly as fun), you have got to read this book. “Teardown” is by Gordon Young, a classmate of my sister’s at Flint Powers. Gordie is a writer who lives in San Francisco and of the author of the FlintExpats blog. He is a wonderfully skilled storyteller who does a beautiful job of capturing what it is like to be from Michigan, and specifically Flint. That odd sense of pride and disappointment — of having survived and grateful to be gone, yet still finding yourself caring and still connected to the community. It’s really a terrific summer read — hilarious, melancholy, hopeful.

Gordie is coming to Michigan this week for a book tour. Here’s a link to his site. There are also links there for places to go to buy the book. Make a point of coming out to see him. I plan to be at his Wednesday, June 26th visit to Barnes and Noble at Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids (6:30-7:30PM). Hope to see you there!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
June 16, 2013

“Seconds tick like boulders whenever you don’t call”
from the song “Greener” by Tally Hall

I love that lyric. I’m not sure exactly what it means — I’m pretty sure it’s saying that life feels heavy and time passes impossibly slowly whenever the guy singing hasn’t talked with his significant other recently. Maybe. Mostly I don’t want or need to know. The more I try to break it down, the less it strikes me.

So, too, with this week’s cartoon, I’m not exactly sure the point I am trying to make. Having the guy deadpan, “Immigrants are gay?” seemed really funny to me. It has something to do with the stereotype of gays moving into and restoring urban areas. I just got done reading the book “Teardown” by Gordon Young about Flint, Michigan and the general theme of the challenges of urban renewal. (See the next blog post for more info on that.) And the has been quite a bit in the news lately about immigration reform and the benefits of immigrants moving into and bringing new life to urban areas. And I think there’s something in there about the similarities and contrasts of these two general groups. I tried like crazy for a couple of hours to rework the cartoon to make more of a direct point. But that only seemed to kill what I found appealing about it. So here it is. Hope it struck you.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
June 11, 2013

Last week gas prices in Michigan spiked to the second highest in the nation (after Hawaii, which is a bunch of islands with no pipelines). Why did this happen? Was it the changeover of formulas and additives for the summer driving season? Was it production issues at nearby refineries? Was it crude oil pricing instability brought on by some Iranian sneezing? Was it Big Oil squeezing out a bit more profit to demonstrate their authority over us? Was it Obamacare? Was it Obama not caring? Was it Obama colluding with Big Oil to sell Hawaii to the Iranians?

For the Michigan tourism industry, it doesn’t matter how it happened — the fact remains that there’s an obnoxious, smelly guy with an Ohio State-colored belly shirt and banana hammock floating in its pool….

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
June 2, 2013

Not much to add here, really. At the Mackinac Policy Conference last week, there was much talk about improvements to public education, including guest speakers Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee. It struck me — in ten years when the Democratic president proposes an overhaul to the public education system that includes vouchers and charter schools, it will be interesting to see how exactly Republicans turn on their ideas and decide it had always been lousy, stinkin’ socialism.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
May 26, 2013

This may appear only to be a swipe at Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette (and it is a swipe), but there’s more to it. Mr. Schuette’s reflexive partisan politics seems to me to be ill-suited for a position where he supposedly the legal representative for all Michiganders. So when he went wading into national politics on the recent IRS shenanigans, I felt the need to call shenanigans on him. Actually my first thought was to draw him smooching up to a giant poster in his office of former attorney general and eventual governor and national political pundit Jennifer Granholm (“Oh my darling! We know being attorney general is only a stepping stone to better things!), but it felt kinda creepy, and how many people even remember Jennifer Granholm at this point?

But frankly what I was doing with this weeks cartoon was poking fun at myself. I, too, long at times to sink my teeth into some juicy national topic like the IRS scandal or international topic like Benghazi. But, alas, I am paid to draw about Michigan, and tempting as it is to create some sort of tortured connection between the Arab/Israeli conflict and, say, our wet spring bringing a bumper crop of mosquitos this year (yeah, there is no connection), I should be satisfied with what I have to draw about. So thank you, Bill Schuette! Please keep doing stupid things in Michigan as long as you can until you graduate to a bigger stage!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
May 19, 2013

Next week, my daughter Natalina will be graduating from Grandville High School with an excellent public education that has engaged her, challenged her, and prepared her for college and beyond. It has been an extraordinary return on value. The system has served her and her classmates well. A few weeks ago, the Buena Vista school district shut down and ended the school year early for some 400 students. The state and local school board dithered till last week and now have figured a stop-gap way to allow school to complete the year. The system has not served those students well.

Of course there are all whole host of social, political, and economic reasons for why all this is. Which is to say, there is no simple solution to “fixing” Michigan’s public education system. But maybe the first step is admitting that it is difficult and going from there.