Political Cartoons

With the decline in the popularity of print media, I worry about the future of one very important element of the daily newspaper: political cartoons. In this longest of presidential campaigns there have been some hysterical political cartoons, but I don’t know that anyone is looking at them.

Part of the problem is that the cartoonists are, with the rest of the world, trying to figure out how to make money on the web. My goal for this blog was to list 10 really funny recent political cartoons. It is very difficult to navigate cartoonist web sites because they want you to look at their work, but then again they don’t want you stealing it ad they’d really rather you look where it’s being syndicated because that’s how they get paid.

I don’t know the answer. But it’s probably not making it difficult to see the cartoons.

The political cartoon has an awesome history, dating back to the 1500s when soon to be Protestants were insulting the pope. The tradition continued through to the 13 colonies who used political cartoons as a means of protesting the British king.

Some of these cartoons go against my political leanings, but they are still funny. One is offensive.

Also, if you’ve seen a good political cartoon lately, share the link with us.

And if you want to sign up for a daily political cartoon, this seems to be the place to do so: http://list.cagle.com/

I am purposely not telling you what they are about because I think it's more fun to just be surprised by the cartoon. It has a bigger effect.

1.
http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/H/P/2/haunted-white-house.jpg


2. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-edcart-multimediagallery,0,5944816.cartoongallery?index=chi-081030bennett-cartoon

3. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-081030ramirez-cartoon,0,6633218.cartoon


4.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-081024anderson-cartoon,0,3649633.cartoon

5. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-081024granlund-cartoon,0,958057.cartoon

6. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-081024ramirez-cartoon,0,1713420.cartoon

7.
http://cagle.com/caglecards/main.asp?image=/news/OJJailed/images/bish.jpg

8. http://statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?template=zoom&Site=J0&Date=20081022&Category=OPINION&ArtNo=81021051&Ref=AR&Profile=1048

9.
http://www.comics.com/comics/rudypark/archive/images/rudypark2008111111601.gif

10.
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoons/KeefeM/2008/KeefeM20081016_low.jpg

and this is my all time favorite, introduced to me by the folks at Facing History and Ourselves.

http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/pluralism/street%20calculus.pdf