Friday Funday: Mickey Mousing Around

This has not exactly been a quiet week in the newsmedia. It began with the first teacher's strike in 25 years in Chicago. Then Mitt Romney decided to pour gas on the political fires flaring up in the Middle East. Finally, after far too long on the sidelines, the Fed got off its collective backside and began to help kick the economy back into gear. With all the drama, we're incredibly glad to be getting out of town for the weekend - and we hope you have a chance to join us.

For more years than we can easily remember, when mid-September hits, as many of our staff members as possible pack up our gear and head to The Middle of Nowhere, Missouri - better known to many cartoonists as Marceline, Missouri, the site of the annual Disney Hometown Toonfest.

For those Daily Felltoon readers who may be unaware, the real source of Disney magic is not in Southern California or Central Florida, no matter how many millions the House of Mouse has spent to convince you otherwise.

The real-life place where Walt Disney got so much of his inspiration for the many worlds he drew, wrote about, and created is in the Midwest, in the small town of Marceline, Missouri - the town where Walt Disney grew up.

As some of the Disney Hometown Toonfest's oldest sponsors, we're proud that once again Paul Fell Cartoons and the North Central Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) can help promote this great event. If you're anywhere in the Midwest this weekend, we highly recommend you take the scenic drive, and join us.

This year's crop of professional cartoonists and presenters includes a rogue's gallery of some of our closest friends and chapter members.

Paul Coker Jr., one of the original "Mad" magazine staffers and an illustrator for Rankin-Bass for many years, will be giving an amazing presentation. So will legendary animator, cartoonist - and North Central Chapter member - Kelly McNutt, just off a recent trip to the beach.

Freelance illustrator and cartoonist Buck Jones, who's worked for everyone from Allied Insurance to Team Red Bull will also be giving a symposium on his more than twenty years of great work. Finally, Chris Payne, better known to many as C.F. Payne, legendary illustrator for Time, Readers Digest, The Atlantic Monthly and many more publications, will round out the headlining artists.

For us, Toonfest is more than just a great time to get together with other professionals in the cartooning and illustrations part of the media business.

Sure - there will be parades, contests and events for both adults and kids, and a cartooning gallery with work from some of the nation's best cartoonists. But that's just the stuff on the schedule.

It's also a way to celebrate the coming of autumn, a chance to catch up with old friends, meet some new ones, and see the work of great cartoonists we're proud to share our broader media field with.

We know things in world news haven't exactly been slow lately, and chances are good that things in your corner of the known universe haven't exactly been slow either. Still, if you have a chance this weekend, get away somewhere like Marceline, where you can push away your worries and hang out with some cartoonists - even for just a day.

We can guarantee; it'll help you draw a whole new perspective on life.

Cleanup Job For A Statesman

To say that there has been a tsunami of information this week about the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and the American embassy in Cairo, Egypt would be the understatement of the year.

In an area of the world that's already volatile, these two events would have been bad enough on their own.

What made the situation worse was a series of events, including a crude anti-Muslim video, the rantings of insane right-wing Florida preacher Terry Jones, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaging in some saber-rattling towards Iran - and the opportunistic, incoherent, and desperate attempt by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his allies to turn this horrific event into a political opportunity.

In other words, a tsunami of diplomatic disaster.

At other times in the past - for example, four years ago this week when the economy began its massive self-immolation under the Bush Administration - wise presidential candidates have attempted a two-part strategy when faced with similar disasters.

At first, in front of the media, they release simple statements and may make some small comments of support, while attempting to leave politics mostly out of their public actions. Behind the scenes, those candidates work feverishly towards a solution to the crisis with those currently in power, even if they are from the opposing party.

Mitt Romney, however, decided to use a very different strategy. He decided he was going to attack President Obama as incompetent on foreign policy - even though Romney and his campaign didn't have all the facts on the situation in either Libya or Egypt.

The consensus opinion on the actions of Mr. Romney and his campaign by experienced politicians, political journalists, and foreign policy experts is that Mitt Romney and his advisors made a complete and total disaster out of what might have been a positive opportunity for them.

As journalist Ben Smith noted, comments like “bungle," "utter disaster," "not ready for prime time," "not presidential," and "Lehman moment” flowed freely from some of the most well-known foreign policy experts. And those were just the comments coming from Republicans.

Even Mark Salter, a longtime aide to Arizona Sen. John McCain, said that Romney's "rush to condemn Obama" was "as tortured in its reasoning as it is unseemly in its timing." In effect, the only high-profile Republicans standing with Mr. Romney at the end of the day were Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Reince Priebus, and Rush Limbaugh - not exactly the best the GOP has to offer.

The entire time Mitt Romney was washing out, President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, the State Department, the U.S. military, and many others under the President's direction were calmly handling the situation.

The deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans seem to have been handled with great respect, along with the deaths of Libyans who attempted to help U.S. Foreign Service Staff in Benghazi. Apologies were taken from both the President of Egypt and the Deputy Prime Minister of Libya. Military resources were shifted into place, to remove and protect the remaining Americans in both Libya and Egypt.

In short, the Obama administration began cleaning up the situation like statesmen and stateswomen, while Mitt Romney and his team failed a critical leadership test.

Fifty-four days until the 2012 election...

Facts, Truth, And Other Things Not On Fox

In the face of the Middle East meltdown, and the diplomatic mess between Israel and the U.S., and more than a few conspiracy nuts on 9/11, one of the key elements we console ourselves daily with is our consistent effort to always work from a factual basis. Like many political wonks, we tend to love facts and statistics, especially in the form of charts and graphs.

They're often like cartoons, but less funny.

There are moments though, when paranoid conspiracy nuts and crazy commenters get us to wonder: How badly can Fox "News", talk radio, and the rest of the right-wing propaganda machine really brainwash their devoted followers?

According to the latest chart from the Pew Research Center, enough to affect the economy we all live in together.

The Pew study was done to find out what kind of economic news most Americans were hearing, and to see if it matched the factual data, that is, that our economy continues to slowly improve. Looking at the general public, nearly 60% of Americans said they're hearing a mix of good and bad news about the economy. That statistic didn't surprise us, since most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, tend to take in news and information from multiple media sources, with different biases.

What was surprising was that 60% of Republicans said the news they hear about the economy is mostly bad.

We know from multiple different media studies that a majority of Republicans watch  Fox "News" almost exclusively for what they consider as information these days - though calling Fox anything but a propaganda network is intellectually dishonest. Fox's most recent massive visual lie came on Tuesday when they attempted to equate the U-3 measure of employment with the U-6 measure of employment, on a poorly made chart.

As Steve Benen, Zachary Pleat, and others pointed out, the factually honest statics weren't hard to find.

That wasn't the only place Fox failed on Tuesday.

When talking about the teachers strike in Chicago, multiple Fox commentators made claims to the effect that most Chicagoans support the city, instead of the teachers. In a news article published midday Tuesday by the Chicago Sun-Times, the newspaper cites a legitimate poll taken Monday that confirms 47% of Chicagoans support the teachers, while only 39% oppose them.

Should part of the goal of a society that has multiple 24/7 media outlets be to have the most well-educated and well-informed populace in history? If so, considering Fox a legitimate media outlet for news is completely at odds with that goal.

If we're lucky, maybe right-wing talkers like Limbaugh and Ingraham will be right for once, as they claimed on their shows this week that if Mitt Romney loses in November, the Republican party and the right wing will have to shut down.

They could be right.

After all, as President Clinton said recently, the right wingers can't always be wrong. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.