Check out our Labor Day cartoon slideshow. 

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Clint Eastwood’s awkward prime-time GOP convention speech last night seems to have completely upstaged Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Last night, Eastwood interviewed and scolded an empty chair where an imaginary Barack Obama said (here’s the video, if you somehow missed it).

Here are the initial reactions from a handful of our cartoonists. Expect to see many more…

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Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.

So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.

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Are the lovable geniuses at Apple suddenly becoming litigious bullies? Check out our new Apple vs Samsung cartoon slideshow! 

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Columnist Jason Stanford weighs in on the GOP's "We Built This" Convention...

This week the Republican National Convention began the third movement in the symphony of the 2012 presidential election. And instead of the careful minuet we've come to expect from Republicans, we got a scherzo, a quick-paced comedy. 

What, you thought they were serious? Republicans established their satirical theme in the preamble to their platform that included this bit of metaphor abuse: "Providence has put us at the fork in the road, and we must answer the question: If not us, who? If not now, when?"

That's exactly the question I ask my wife when we're lost and come to a fork in the road. Not "Left or right?" or "Does Siri have any more bright ideas?" but, "If not us, who? If not now, when?" 

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It should have been obvious that Republicans weren't taking this seriously when they picked "We built it" as their opening-night theme and asked the Republican nominee for Delaware lieutenant governor Sher Valenzuela to speak in prime time. Never mind that she teaches women business owners how to get government contracts. Never mind that the Republicans' vice presidential nominee used Social Security benefits to pay for college when his dad died. Never mind that Ann "We once had to eat tuna" Romney got a $77,000 tax break for her dancing horse. 

The "We built it" slogan is its own bit of black comedy, based on a cruel misreading of one of Barack Obama's rare moments of ineloquence. What he was trying to say was that no matter how much success you have achieved in life, you didn't create the Internet, build the roads, or establish a public school system that created an infrastructure for your opportunity. It takes a village.

But Republicans never miss an opportunity to feel aggrieved. Boycotting Chick-fil-A somehow limited free speech. Rush Limbaugh accused the National Hurricane Center of skewing their forecast of Isaac's path to interfere with the convention. And saying we're all in this together obviously negates individual achievement. That's how Republicans ended up singing arias to Ayn Rand while kicking Ron Paul delegates out of a publicly financed convention hall while Romney partied with $1 million donors on a yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands.

Their nominee is polling at 0 percent among black voters, so Republicans manifested this particular inner demon by inviting former Democratic congressman Artur Davis to criticize Obama for divisiveness while delegates pelted a black camerawoman with peanuts, calling her an "animal" and taunting, "This is how we feed the animals."

Romney's losing to Obama among Hispanics by 40 points, for Pete's sake, so when it came to scheduling speakers on Tuesday, Republicans pretended that they were down with the brown. One of the Hispanic speakers was Texas' own Republican Senate nominee Ted Cruz, whom I'm working against. Cruz stepped in a puddle on his way to a joke when he said, "You know, we have so many things to be thankful for, so many blessings. Including, even, we can be thankful for Hurricane Isaac. If nothing else, it kept Joe Biden away." 

Amid this symphony of human arrogance, a counter-melody emerged when Hurricane Isaac blew ashore. The main players in Tampa celebrated their Potemkin convention while the lowlanders along the Gulf Coast hunkered down and prayed the levees would hold.

We've seen this show before. We had a president once—not that they'll utter his name in Tampa—who came to that fork in the road and said, "Why not me?" Taxes fell, and so did the levees. We lost 1,836 Americans in the floods because we forgot it was our job to form a more perfect union, provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. 

I think I like this remake better than the original. When Republican chairman Reince Priebus predicted, "This will be an inspiring three days," he probably wasn't talking about the triumph of working together for the greater good that we saw in the path of Hurricane Isaac. The $14.5 billion, 133-mile ring of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps that the Army Corps of Engineers built to protect New Orleans? 

You built that.

Jason Stanford is a columnist for Cagle Cartoons Inc. Read more of Stanford's columns here.  

Our cartoonists weigh in on Hurricane Isaac, which is slamming New Orleans and the Gulf Coast:

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It makes sense that a cartoonist’s first thought when trying to memorialize the life of Neil Armstrong would be those iconic footprints he left on the moon (even though in most photos, it’s really Buzz Aldrin’s footprint).

When five or more cartoonists draw the same gag, we refer to it as a “Cartoon Yahtzee.” There is a basic rule of thumb to go by, “if one other guy drew it, he’s a plagiarist; if five other guys drew it, they’re hacks; if a dozen other guys drew it, they are honoring a tradition”.

I thought we might get another “Cartoon Yahtzee” with cartoonists drawing the flag on the moon at half staff. So far, I’ve only seen a couple examples of those.

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My latest cartoon. Expect to hear a lot of squawking through November...

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Here's our new Republican National Convention cartoon slideshow.  Check it out!

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Check out our new Lance Armstrong Doping Legacy cartoons slideshow! 

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In South Africa, the country has been gripped by an deadly incident last week that has been dubbed the “Hill of Horror.” Police shot and killed 34 striking miners in the deadliest security incident since apartheid ended in 1994.

This story has largely gone unnoticed in the U.S., where the news has been dominated by Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin. So I thought I’d turn to Jeremy Nell (who goes by the pen name “Jerm”), a South African cartoonist I syndicate nationally through Cagle Cartoons, to describe the event and showcase some of his cartoons.

Jerm writes:

To tell you exactly what happened is a tricky. This is why there is an official investigation ordered by the president.

In short, unionised workers at the Lonmin platinum mine, in the north west of the country, engaged in very aggressive strike action over wages. Temperatures escalated and the standoff between the miners and police ended in tragedy, with some armed miners (wielding sticks, pangas and guns) attacking the police who then fired live ammunition into the crowd. (The question of “who fired first” is being investigated.) On Thursday, 34 miners were killed (and another 10 were killed on the days leading up to it), and nearly 80 were injured. Furthermore, 2 police officers and 2 security guards were killed.

My cartoon, that followed, is really just one of disappointment in my fellow South Africans. Instead of pointing fingers, I felt it necessary to reflect on the freedoms for which Nelson Mandela fought. What happened at Lonmin is one of the bloodiest moments in South Africa’s post-apartheid history. Actually, I think it is.

Looking at the photos and footage, one would be forgiven for thinking that South Africans are still oppressed.

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My second cartoon wonders about the type of language South Africans throw around. With anti-apartheid songs like “Kill The Boer”; with the president singing songs such as “Umshini Wami [bring me my machine gun]“; with politicians telling cops to “shoot to kill”; and with “kill for Zuma” rhetoric (Jacob Zuma is South Africa’s president) being vomited out of Julius Malema’s mouth, is it any wonder that many South Africans are filled with hate?

Perhaps we should look inside ourselves and think about the words we say and the songs we sing.

Speaking of former ANC Youth League president, Julius Malema, I opted for a slightly more lighthearted approach after he grabbed the opportunity to selfishly address the Lonmin miners and fire them up (as he typically does) by blaming the police (and mine bosses and Jacob Zuma and anyone else who slots into his populist strategy).

The phrase “tjatjarag” is homegrown and difficult to explain. Urban Dictionary defines it as “ To be over-eager and excitable in an annoying manner.” (which is kind of on the money).

If you want to follow more of Jerm’s South Africa cartoons, bookmark his blog.

 

Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.

So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.

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Check our our new slideshow called, The Middle Class.  

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Ever since the GOP failed to force Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin out of his Missouri Senate race, pregnant elephants have been popping up in our cartoons. The first is mine, which I drew after Akin essentially told Mitt Romney to focus on his own campaign instead of sticking his nose into Akin's...

Nate Beeler of the Columbus Dispatch also went with a pregnant elephant, chosing to use words from Akin's quote that if a woman was legitimately raped, "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down"...

David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star drew on the far right-wing of the Republican party, who stand opposed to abortion even in the case of potential harm to the mother...

John Cole of the Scranton Times-Tribune decided to dive right into an X-Ray of the whole situation. If he weren't such a talented cartoonist, he could have been a doctor...

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With a trillion-dollar deficit for the fourth straight year, our cartoonists weigh in on Obama's Budget Deficit.

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