A Gallup poll shows former President Bush’s ratings have improved. 
Category: society
NSA and metadata
Where to start? It seems like new developments about domestic spying are coming every hour. Before we get ahead of ourselves, here’s a good AP piece which will give you some background about how we got to this point. Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian broke the story and revealed the identity of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden while Barton Gellman & Laura Poitrus of The Washington Post had the breaking story of the metadata mining program, “PRISM”. Here’s the link to my take on metadata gathering.
Six Chix sunday strips
In 2000, King Features launched Six Chix, a daily comic strip created by six women. I was one of the original “Chix” and my designated day was Thursday. The color Sunday strip was rotated between all the cartoonists. I was a bit ambivalent about the whole thing; while I enjoyed the opportunity to create cartoons which weren’t purely editorial, the gimmick of a strip by six women set my teeth on edge. There wasn’t a reason why any of the Six Chix contributors shouldn’t have been offered a strip on their own; can you imagine syndicates even approaching male cartoonists with this idea? 
Big month for SCOTUS
June is going to be a busy month for the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices will be issuing decisions on affirmative action, same-sex marriage, voting rights, and gene patents over the next few weeks. Be sure to regularly check SCOTUSblog; they’ll be live-blogging this morning on the affirmative action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.
*I’ll be doing live sketches for the Washington Post the week of the same-sex marriage decisions.
Veterans and suicide
According to a report by the Department of Veterans Affairs, 22 veterans commit suicide every day. In this article from the Huffington Post, more active-duty U.S. soldiers have died from suicide than from combat in 2012. Researchers at the National Center for Veterans Studies in Salt Lake City report that Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) might be the cause of the increased suicide rates.
I remember back in the early days of the Iraq War how some members of the Bush Administration were positive the war would cost under 50 billion. Of course everyone knows we’ve exceeded that estimate but what we don’t know yet is how much needs to be spent on veterans and their injuries, especially from the unprecedented numbers of traumatic brain injuries during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. 
The Cicadas are coming
There’s no particular reason for posting this sketch; was just watching Sen. Mitch McConnell on Meet the Press and thought he looked like a cicada.