Toon: Americans Go Splurge-Crazy With Their Stimulus Checks!

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Of course, I'm lactose intolerant and I don't own a car--so I'm buying an extra quart of rice milk!

But seriously--these stimulus checks are such a joke, especially the idea that we should spend them on crap we don't need, like fancy appliances or big-screen TVs. Considering rising food and gas prices and the housing crisis and rising unemployment and health care costs and stagnant wages, the amount of debts so many Americans are in, that one-time check is going to evaporate real fast.

A one-time stimulus check worth $600-$1,200 isn't going to do much for folks facing foreclosure--it probably won't cover even one missed mortgage payment. Though with the average American family in something like $9,000 worth of credit card debt, it could be a nice start towards becoming debt-free.

I'm planning to give some as-yet-undetermined portion of mine to a deserving charity (probably one helping with the global food crisis, like Oxfam America). The rest will go to savings or the hungry open maw that is the cost of attending cartooning conventions.

Toon: City Bike Safety Essentials

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Riding bikes in Manhattan (or Brooklyn) for that matter is too damn dangerous, because cars just don't respect bikes, whether in or out of lanes. In a city trying to go green, bikes should take priority. I pretty much stick to riding my bike to Prospect Park (so I can ride around within the park) because I'm just too damn scared. Sigh...

Toon: Primary Fever

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More like Primary Fatigue. Really, all I do want to talk about is Battlestar Galactica. I don't want to hear any more of Hillary trying to prove what a bomb-hungry hawk she is, or Obama going out of his way to sing the praises of bipartisanship (otherwise known as "letting Republicans have their way"). Nor do I want to hear anything any more of those gazillion weird racist smears and internet rumors going around about him. And I especially do NOT care about flag pins.

Kevin Moore has "Snappy Answers to Stephanopoulos Questions"

Fellow Cartoonist With Attitude Kevin Moore sums up the worst of the latest debate in this awesome cartoon.

Toon: Give Me Convenience (and Give Me Debt)!

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This cartoon was inspired by a column my dad sent me about RFID emitters being developed for cellphones. Obviously there are security and privacy issues involved when your credit card or bank account number is being broadcast from your phone, but that's not the point of this piece.

The real thing that pissed me off is the idea that somehow BUYING USELESS OVERPRICED CRAP is so damn DIFFICULT that we need to make it even EASIER to part people from their hard-earned cash.

If anything, it's way too EASY to spend, spend, spend. The statistic I generally hear is that the average American has no savings at all and is $9,000 in credit card debt. We might as well have flying telepathic products that reach into our pockets and grab our credit cards, the way we're surrounded by advertising and flooded with deceptive and manipulative marketing and pitches and credit card offers.

Why do we want to make it so easy for retailers to take our money in exchange for useless crap that clogs up our lives? Features like "one-click shopping" and magical cell phones are not conveniences--they're tickets to a life as an overspent American.

Masheka and I keep our debit cards (and the one credit card that we haven't shredded) in a neat little "Wallet Buddy" sleeve that I downloaded as a PDF from the Center for a New American Dream. The sleeve has a list of things to stop and think about before you buy anything, and makes you pause before buying.

P.S. The cartoon title is a Dead Kennedys reference, for all you 80s political punk rock fans out there.

Why draw cartoons: A letter

My pal Warren Bernard had this very kind thing to say regarding my "Why Draw Alternative Political Cartoons?" post:

MR,

Hey, well, I was disappointed in your list of reasons to keep doing cartoons. You missed three reasons that should be at the top of the list:

1. Disappointing all your fans if you stop.
2. You would cause my moral compass to point to supporting McCain, listening to Limbaugh and joining the American Enterprise Institute.
3. If you stop, it would mean The Man has gotten to you. You cannot let the sexist barriers he has set up to prevent women from becoming political cartoonists stop you.

Oh, please spare me that dastardly Right Wing fate and continue cranking out those cartoons. I really do not wanna be a Republican...

Here is virtual hug of lefty support,

Me

Toon: A Few Reasons Why (We Need a Transgender Rights Bill)

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We need it NOW. Or yesterday, preferably.

Toon: The Joys of Tax Time!

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As you may recall, Masheka and I got married last year. So, as a married male/female couple, we had the experience of filing our taxes jointly this year, which made it much easier to account for our cartooning deductions and calculate everything and definitely saved us a heap of change.

But of course our bigoted laws don't allow same-sex couples (or domestic partners of any gender) to file joint returns or get all the benefits and protections that come with that legal status--even for couples married in Masschuestts who get those protections and benefits at the state level.

As a side note, I just felt like randomly drawing a really tiny kitten into this cartoon because kittens are fun to draw, much more fun to draw than politicians.

Toon: More Nasty Text Messages (from the mayor of Detroit)

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This is a local Detroit cartoon about embattled mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick refuses to step down even after he's been criminally charged conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury and misconduct. 14,000 text messages revealed that he didn't just have an affair with his chief of staff Christine Beatty--he paid his friends overtime as bodyguards to help him cover up said affair, and when whistleblowers tried to stop the madness, he had them demoted/fired and lied about it and they sued for $9 million...

Seriously, just go Google it or check out this excellent and very balanced editorial in the Metro Times or see this timeline. Trust me, it's messed up. And he WAS very fond of LOL LOL talk, as his messages reveal.

Toon: The brighter side of the mortgage crisis!

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Another from the recent archives. I have complex feelings on this one--on the one hand, it totally sucks that the government rushes to bail out Bear Stearns, but keeps dithering on whether to do anything real to help homeowners about to lose their homes.

And yes, I know many of those lenders were predatory and mispresented loan terms and targeted subprime loans with horrible rates to low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. And that waves of foreclosed homes cause problems for everyone, not just the foreclosees themselves.

BUT. To be fair, I think Ted has a good point in his cartoon on the subject, too. The mortgage crisis isn't just a result of predatory lending, it's also partly a result of "buy now, pay later" consumerism gone wild--people buying over-sized houses they can't afford on tiny downpayments or taking out second mortgages to buy crap they don't need.

Why does America fetishize home-ownership and home owners so much? Why are home owners seen as superior to renters? Why is it the American Dream to take on a crazy pile of debt on a house with a room for every possible activity? Etc.

Update: I'm a little nervous that this post could be misconstrued as some Libertarian-esque personal responsibility rant about how "responsible" taxpayers shouldn't have to pay to bail out "irresponsible" homeowners. It's not.

I believe everyone deserves access to affordable housing and that homeownership or apartment-ownership (at reasonable interest rates) can be a great thing. I certainly hope to own an apartment someday. So let me be clear that my argument is not with the idea of giving homeowners relief from ridiculously high interest rates or helping people stay in their homes.

My argument is with the distorted, unsustainable sick consumerist idea of the "American Dream" that so much media coverage of housing-related issues is tied up in. The idea that every family should have a giant energy-sucking free-standing house with a giant watered lawn and a pool and 3,000 square feet to rattle around in and fill up with unnecessary overpriced (or even discount-priced) crap they don't have time to use or maintain. It's environmentally unsustainable and personally unsustainable and a disgusting waste of resources considering how many in this world have so little.

So yes, many people are losing their homes because of predatory lenders and disgustingly high interest rates. And I am 100% for building a safety net and setting up regulations to protect those borrowers and penalize those lenders. But there are also some upper-middle-class folks who took out second mortgages to buy fancy boats or a new car or otherwise keep up with some imaginary Joneses, and in cases like that, I can't say I'm too sympathetic.

Toon: Shedding Tears for Spitzer

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From a few weeks ago. This cartoon is really a critique of myself. My initial reaction to the Spitzer sex scandal was to poo-poo it and hope he'd survive it. I had a big political crush on the Sheriff of Wall Street, and loved seeing him take down slimy corporate criminals. I also loved that he was such a strong pusher of marriage equality that he even put forth his own bill on the subject. And I was sad to see him lose so much political capital for his courageous pushing of driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants.

It was the loss of political capital that did him in, of course, instead of letting him survive Bill Clinton style.

But really, all that good aside, dude was a bigtime hypocrite, prosecuting some sex worker rings at the same time he patronized others.

Sigh.

Toon: Our Sexy President

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Obama's great on LGBT rights in general (and even speaks out specifically about gender identity and discrimination against transgender people), but he really sucks when it comes to marriage equality. Same with Hillary. Yes, I'm catching up and posting my cartoons from the last month or so.

Toon: Future Stimulus Packages

This is one of those kitchen sink cartoons where I took a bunch of stuff that always pisses me off and wrapped it into a critique of a new thing that pisses me off. That new thing is the mass delusion behind the stimulus package: that giving a few hundred dollars in rebates to every taxpayer at one time—and encouraging them to go out and shop with it—will somehow magically Fix the Economy.

A few hundred dollars doesn't mean squat when you're about to lose your house because you've been conned into a subprime mortgage. A few hundred dollars doesn't mean squat when you don't have a job. Maybe you can buy food and heat for a month or two, but what about the next month? Also, the last thing most Americans need to do with their money is spend it--most need to pay off debt with it.

As for those other things that piss me off, here are some notes about the four other stupid quick fix stimulus packages:

1. The Education Rebate. Remember Bush's horrible SOTU address last year, when he spent half his speech randomly singing the praises of those awful bogus "Baby Einstein" videos? If Bush is so misguided as to ignore the research that says no child under two should spend ANY time in front of any type of television or computer screen, I figured he might be deluded into thinking that one Baby Einstein DVD per student of any age could solve our educational crisis.

   By the way, I thought about somehow trying to explain or indicate why this girl was a high school dropout, but then I thought it was beside the point. Maybe she went to a crappy school and fell through the cracks. Maybe she got pregnant and didn't get the support she needed to stay in school. Maybe she had such horrible underfunded overcrowded schools since she was young that she never developed a love of learning. Who knows?

2. The Hunger Healer. This is real, actually. Back during the initial stages of the Afghan war, the U.S. tried to assuage/offset any small guilt about dropping all those bright yellow cluster bombs on civilians by dropping bright yellow packages of food along with the bombs. Food that looked like bombs, often burst or spoiled on landing, led children into minefields, and made many Afghans very sick. And yes, each packet contained PB&J. Which is fine if you know what that is and how to eat it and you don't have peanut allergies. Here are some quotes from a Boston Globe piece ("Afghan Food Drops Found to Do Little Good") about the backlash to this ill-conceived faux-humanitarian effort:

   The Bush administration's much publicized food ration airdrop in northern Afghanistan - hailed by the Pentagon as a way to feed starving residents while winning their loyalty - achieved neither goal in many targeted areas, military experts, aid workers, and a report by retired US special forces officers now conclude.

   ...The bright yellow plastic-wrapped meals ruptured upon impact because they were dropped from too high an altitude and spoiled, endangering the Afghans who ate them, the report by the retired officers said.

   Moreover, the meals often were collected by local warlords and sold for a profit at Afghan markets and seldom reached hungry families, according to aid workers. In other cases, Afghans were lured by the bright packages into minefields or confused them with cluster bombs of the same color.

3. The Nature Stimulator. CFL bulbs are great. They're all I have in my house, and they sure do save a little bit of energy. But promoting the false idea that every American making one TINY change is somehow going to be enough to stave off global disaster is ridiculous. Sure we should all do our part--but we need much more drastic and widespread change as a society to make a real difference. We need real regulations on corporate polluters and real tough emissions standards and smaller more efficient vehicles and better public transport and a whole lot more than just a CFL bulb in every house. Etc.
4. The Peace Patch. This is just in reference to all those Iraqis who were supposed to love their U.S. liberators. It's kind of hard to love the people who shot your innocent husband for driving slightly too fast past a checkpoint you just set up at random.

As always, I'm just full of cheer. Sigh...

Toon: Casualties of Super Tuesday

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Loosely based on my own experience yesterday, except in New York we have those cool oldschool mechanical voting machines with levers.

For the first time in my life, I had no idea what would happen once I stepped in the voting booth. I pushed aside the curtain and stared at all the little levers. I ran my fingers over the Kucinich and Edwards levers with a little sigh of regret, frowned at the Clinton and Obama levers for a few moments, took a deep breath and pulled the Obama switch.

Why Mr. Barack "bipartisanship" (eeek!) Obama? In the end I figured I might as well vote for the guy who MIGHT maybe possibly have voted against the war if he had the chance, rather than the woman who definitely voted for it. Hillary has blood on her hands, and I just couldn't support her, superior health plan or not.

I didn't even have the satisfaction of feeling that either of them was a sure thing to end the reign of GOP terror and wingnuttery we've been under for the past eight years.

Democracy shouldn't be so depressing.

P.S. I am indeed registered as a Democrat (you have to be one or the other to vote in the primaries in NYC). But I'm far too left-wing to truly identify with that spineless middle-of-the-road party. So technically, if I HAD fainted, it would have been fair for a poll worker to say "Democrat down!"

The Sky is Always Falling: Ampersand Cartoon on Nativism

Amp takes a look at Lou Dobbs types throughout time in "Immigrants are Ruining the Economy!".

President Huckabee

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How much do those two words together scare you? I'm really sick of the media ignoring what a Falwell-loving Darwin-hating fundamentalist Huckabee is just because he gets photographed playing guitars and wants the Rolling Stones to play at his inauguration. Blech. Here's the quote from the NYT magazine piece that inspired this cartoon:

Huckabee ordered soup and a sandwich without drama or comment and began talking about rock ’n’ roll. This is his regular warm-up gambit with reporters of a certain age, meant to convey that he is a cool guy for a Baptist preacher. Naturally I fell for it, and asked who he would like to play at his inaugural. ‘‘I’ve got to start with the Stones,’’ Huckabee said.

This cartoon is part of a long drawn-out series, by the way... See also: "President Giuliani: The Early Years." Now I've got to do one on McCain (and maybe one on Clinton).

How was YOUR holiday?

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Meant to post this right after the New Year. I'm a cheerful one, huh?

The New Green Hummer

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Seriously, GM actually unveiled a new "green" HUMMER at the Detroit auto show. But a little ethanol usage does not an environmentally friendly monster SUV make. We've got to rethink transportation on a much deeper level than that.

Warm & Fuzzy Holiday Moment #153

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Feel the ex-gay love. This was from December, of course.

Firm Resolve (New Year's Resolutions)

Firm Resolve (New Year's Resolutions)
Originally uploaded by M1khaela

Fun fact: This is the first time I've published a political cartoon featuring me and Masheka.

And in case you're wondering why I'm fantasizing about alien lizard queens eating the president, Ted Rall recently introduced me to the wonderful 80s science fiction miniseries V, about fascist man-eating lizards who do just that. I highly recommend it.

Oh, and I haven't ever actually broken the TV, though I have given it many satisfactory verbal tongue-lashings.

New Toon: Crafty Racists

Noose Incidents
Originally uploaded by M1khaela

Another cartoon from December.

I haven't actually observed any such exchanges in person, but there were plenty of wacko online blog commenters whose first reaction to a noose incident is always to claim that the victim faked it for publicity. By the way, were you aware of just HOW many noose incidents there have been lately? And how many were in NYC? Crazy.

I'm sure they'd argue that Emmett Till beat himself to death for the attention, too. Jerks.

New Toon: Mitt vs. Mike in Extreme Godmania Smackdown!

Mitt vs. Mike in Extreme Godmania Smackdown!
Originally uploaded by M1khaela

It's "Rowdy" Mitt Romney vs. Mike "The Minister" Huckabee!

This is a cartoon from December I hadn't gotten around to posting. Are you as scared of these dudes as I am?

Masheka's 2007 Movie Hell in Review

Just in time for the New Year, Masheka reminisces about 2007's move monstrosities.

Toon: A Tale of Two Romneys—and Two Punchlines!

There's nothing harder than a punchline—or a final panel. Even the strongest setup can fall flat without a strong ending, and no cartoonist succeeds every time. And even when you THINK you've got a good punchline, you're often wrong. Here's my first stab at a cartoon about Mitt Romney's big turnaround on gay rights:

In case you're not aware, Mitt Romney may be the MOST virulently antigay candidate for President (with close competition from Mike Huckabee)... but back in the day (i.e. five years ago), he used to campaign in GAY BARS. He won the endorsement of the Log Cabin Republicans of Massachusetts in 2002 for promising to never oppose marriage equality. (He's also the most anti-abortion candidate in the race, even though he promised Massachusetts he was prochoice.)

Masheka and cartoon editor extraordinaire Ted (Rall) both thought the punchline fell flat in that first cartoon. So I cogitated a bit and realized that a cartoon referring to science fiction needed more action, more adventure—and more time-traveling Mitt Romneys spanking baby Mick Huckabees!

So, what's your take? Which cartoon is funnier?

Masheka Toon: Rejected Sidekicks and Henchmen

Masheka sez:

Behold my latest cartoon in the latest issue of UVC Magazine, The Urban Voice in Comics. It's all flipped because, I dunno, sometimes I like to make ya work for it.

Egg Rescue Squad: Defending the Rights of Microscopic Americans Everywhere!

Inspired by a proposed law in Colorado giving Constitutional rights to human eggs.

Totally Safe American Toys!

Totally Safe American Toys!

See this Nation article for more on toxic toys...

Transgender Day of Remembrance 2007

Transgender Day of Remembrance 2007 Cartoon

November 20 is an annual day for remembering those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. See http://www.gender.org/remember for more information.

Toon: Your Yucky Body: Why You Need a Mommy Job!

Your Yucky Body: Why You Need a Mommy Job!

Get thee to a plastic surgeon, you tragic post-pregnancy ladies, you!

And yes, I know, I know--I need to be posting here more often. I promise to catch up all the archives. I draw 1-3 cartoons every week, but what with the wedding and a recent trip to Mexico, turning them into the newspaper is all I've been managing.

New Toon: Bush's Bedside Manner

Bush's Bedside Manner
Originally uploaded by M1khaela.

Is this guy for real? Does he really think kicking 4-6 million kids off of health insurance (and onto the "hope my kids don't get sick" plan) is a winning move? So, so puzzling...

New Toon: News Break

News Break
Originally uploaded by M1khaela.

We honeymooned in Provincetown on Cape Cod, and this cartoon is only half-true. I actually made it the whole time without reading a newspaper, and my mom refused to give me any news over the phone.

Your Yucky Body: Disgusting Diet Trends

Your Yucky Body: Disgusting Diet Trends
Originally uploaded by M1khaela.

Partly inspired by the disgusting facts about the weirdly popular diet drug Alli, but partly by a personal experience. A few years ago I had a horrible case of pneumonia that left me bed-ridden and barely able to breathe for three miserable weeks. When I returned to the world of the living, sickly and weak, I got all these compliments for losing weight (“you look so HEALTHY!” "what diet are you on?") when I had never been MORE unhealthy in my life. Skinny does NOT equal healthy.

New Toon: New York vs. Boston, the other rivalry

Forget Yankees vs. Red Sox: let's fight over who's more pro-gay!

Whenever New Yorkers ask me where I'm from, and I say "Massachusetts," many say something like "Oh, so you're a RED SOX fan" in the tone reserved for statements like "Oh, SO YOU'VE GOT A TERMINAL ILLNESS." Thing is, I'm not an anything fan. The only sports news items that even tangentially impinged on my world in recent memory were the homophobic comments of basketball player Tim Hardaway, the awesome activisim of newly out gay basketball player John Amaechi, and the coming out story of openly transsexual sportswriter Christine Daniels.

Still, this cartoon has been rattling around in my head for a while and finally decided to rattle its way out.

Come on, New York, step up your pro-LGBT game! Don't let jerks like New York Republican State Senate leader Joe Bruno squash marriage equality! It is Pride month, after all.

Cheryl Lynn on "Black Hair, Comics and You"

Cheryl Lynn of Digital Femme (and The Ormes Society) has a detailed and handy cartoonist's guide to black women's hairstyles, from relaxed hair to braids and twists and afros and dreadlocks. Here's her intro:

If you have been sent here, the likelihood is that someone asked you to draw a black woman at one point and you completely screwed it up. I kid! I kid! Seriously though, I'm here to help. Together, you and I will go through some of the most popular hairstyles for black women. Never again will you have leagues of black women giving you the side-eye and bitching you out in blogs. Ready? Let's go!

Hopefully some of the mainstream comic book artists who have been annoying her lately will read her tutorial and wise up.

Spotlight on Astrid Lydia Johannsen: Perfectionist Cartoonist Claims I Inspired Her to Start Graphic Novel

Panels from an episode of "Absolutely True Tales of Lesbian" Drama in which Aziza tries to defend Astrid from a transphobic woman... click to see full comic on Lydia's site.

Do I ever have the warm fuzzies! I first discovered the cartoons of Astrid Lydia Johannsen back in 2003, when she was drawing AstroGirlX2, a comic about her coffee-drinking transsexual lipstick lesbian drag king cartoon alter-ego, Astrid. I was sad when she took a hiatus from drawing (apparently she was busy studying Unix and religion in Oregon) and much cheered when she began posting her current strip, "Absolutely True Tales of Lesbian Drama."

Lydia is an amazingly talented illustrator and cartoonist whose lush color vector drawings inspire fits of jealous rage. But she has a problem common to many artists: insane perfectionism. I was getting really sick of her posting beautiful drawings and then commenting that they looked like crap, so I electronically browbeat her into entering Lambda Legal's Life Without Fair Courts Contest--in which she was named one of five finalists!

Well, now Lydia says being a finalist has given her a boot in the ass to start her graphic novel! But she says she's still worried about perfectionism, to which I say, hogwash! Go show Lydia some love by leaving nice comments in her blog. Tell her perfectionism is silly--you just have to draw your cartoons, and not worry if they're perfect, cause you can always draw another cartoon tomorrow.

New Toon: Alberto Gonzales's Civil Rights Lite: Taking the "Justice" Out of Justice Department!

Taste the new "Justice" Department's Civil Rights Division Lite! Now with 99% less: hate crimes prosecution, voting rights enforcement and police brutality investigations! Super-Action-Packed with Loyal Bushies, Wiretapping and Religious Extremists! It's a Yum-Tastic Justice Department makeover!

The Bush administration has laid waste to the Justice Department on a large scale, as the scandals over the replacement of high-performing federal prosecutors with "loyal Bushies" and that whole warrantless wiretapping nastiness have shown.

The Bush makeover of the Civil Rights Division is similarly extreme. The pre-Bush Justice Department Civil Rights Division was founded in 1957. The Division protected voting rights and enforced anti-discrimination laws, with a particular focus on discrimination based on race and national origin. From the Division website:

The Division enforces the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended through 1992; the Equal Credit Opportunity Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act; the National Voter Registration Act; the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act; the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act; and additional civil rights provisions contained in other laws and regulations. These laws prohibit discrimination in education, employment, credit, housing, public accommodations and facilities, voting, and certain federally funded and conducted programs.

Or do they? Under Bush and Gonzales, Justice has shifting funding, focus and resources to more Dubyafied priorities. As the New York Times reported this week ("Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission"):

In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Read the whole article, but here are some particular horrors:

DISCRIMINATION

The old Civil Rights Division (Civil Rights Clasic, if you will) fought discrimination in hiring. The Civil Rights Lite Division defends the right of religious groups like the Salvation Army to discriminate (see "Charity Cites Bush Help in Fight Against Hiring Gays" and "Court OKs Religious Hiring Bias by Federally Backed Charities").

HATE CRIMES

Civil Rights Classic lent federal enforcement weight to the prosecution of hate crimes cases: KKK attacks, lynchings, and more. Civil Rights Lite has diverted that funding to a pet cause of the Christian Right. Again from the NYT, the Civil Rites Lite Division is...

Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

Certainly trafficking cases deserve funding--but not at the expense of victims of racism, hate crimes and police brutality. Trafficking cases used to and should be handled elsewhere.

VOTING RIGHTS

Civil Rights Classic defended the voting rights of people of color. Civil Rites Lite suppresses the voting rights people of color through new voter ID requirements and baseless "voter fraud" case--and has even pursued its first claim of voter intimidation against white people. As John Nichols writes in The Nation ("Curing the Rot at Justice"):

The Brennan Center for Justice and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have uncovered evidence of what they describe as "a much broader strategy on the part of the Administration to use federal agencies charged with protecting voting rights to promote voter suppression and influence election rules so as to gain partisan advantage in battleground states." There is now a compelling case that the White House used the Justice Department's Civil Rights and Criminal divisions and the Election Assistance Commission to create a false perception of widespread voter fraud to justify initiatives--stringent voter identification laws, crackdowns on voter registration drives and pre-election purges of eligible voters from the rolls--designed to disenfranchise the poor, minorities, students and seniors.

The New York Times reports on this as well. Civil Rights Lite is:

Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.

Trouble is, only the federal government has the resources to deal with these voting dilution cases. Oh well--it's not like black voters get disenfranchised anymore, right? Too bad, but they've got a new kind of case to focus on:

The civil rights division also brought the first case ever on behalf of white voters, alleging in 2005 that a black political leader in Noxubee County, Miss., was intimidating whites at the polls.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM TRUMPS ALL OTHER FREEDOMS

But back to the Salvation Army. If you visit the Justice Department website, you'll read very little about racist discrimination and the ongoing disenfranchisement of voters of color. Instead, you read about this exciting "special initiative" from Alberto "Geneva Conventions Are Quaint" Gonzales, "The First Freedom Project":

Religious liberty is often referred to as the "First Freedom" because the Framers placed it first in the Bill of Rights. Yet it is not merely first in order: it is a fundamental freedom on which so many of our other freedoms rest.

Forget freedom of speech, forget freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and most especially freedom from unreasonable search and seizure: the first and most important freedom is the freedom of religious organizations to receive government funding for firing gay people.

Some of the other evidence of Civil Rights Lite cited by the New York Times:

Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

Conservative religious groups who love the taste of Civil Rights Lite say that the weight of the federal government is no longer ne