David Baldinger - Cartoonist & Photographer

On Daryl Cagle’s Professional Cartoon Index , there are several pages of editorial cartoons honoring the miners who tragically died in the Jan. 2, 2005 mine explosion. Most are done with respect but there are several that I find kind of tasteless. I can ignore the standard “entering Heaven” clichés but I don’t think there should be any humor involved. I really hate the one by Bob Gorrell . It is the second to last on this page. The drawing is great. he subject is awful. It depicts Death pushing a coal cart full of skulls. I would hate to be a family member of one of those miners and come across that one. I can’t imagine what Gorrell must have been thinking. There are a couple of others there as well that, while not making light of the event, don’t really seem to take it very seriously. Of course, I am not privileged and worthy enough to be represented on Cagle’s site so, above you can find my drawing for the People’s Weekly World Jan. 14, 2005 edition.

I don’t know how I missed this back in November but, apparently, the Washington DC City Paper did an “exposé” of the clandestine meetings of the Frederick Douglas Club of the CPUSA at the NEA cafeteria. I haven’t been able to read the entire article but the short excerpts are hilarious. I guess the great patriot Bob Novak picked up on it and made reference to the meetings as an obvious attempt to red bait the NEA. According to the NEA , their cafeteria is open to the public and is not screened. Since the right of free assembly is one of those pesky constitutional rights, Novak found it all rather nefarious. As I tracked the flow of the story around the Internet, the news seemed to appear on mostly wingnut and homes school blogs. The wingnuts found it all proof that the evil commies were secretly still planning to interrupt their lifestyle of greed and selfishness. You know, those foul concepts like health care for all, a living wage and various other un-American activities. Th...