Top of the Ticket

With the Golden Globes on Sunday, we have entered the heart of the awards season. The Grammys are coming up and, at the end of February, the big one: the Academy Awards. With so much attention aimed at so many stars, how will the country’s biggest political prima donna be able to resist a grab for the spotlight?

For more than half a year, Donald Trump has demonstrated the power of celebrity.

The armed militants who have taken over a national wildlife refuge in southeast Oregon need to study their country’s earliest history. They justify their actions with a bogus interpretation of American law rooted in ideas born in the Reconstruction-era South that essentially denies the authority of the federal government to do much of anything.

Between the horrible bookends of the terrorist attack against the French cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo in January and the late-in-the-year jihadist strikes on innocent Parisians and on a holiday party in San Bernardino, there was not much to redeem 2015 in the news. The presidential campaign provided many hours of comic relief, but that is not the same as hope and inspiration.

Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the elusive leader of Islamic State’s nascent caliphate, has issued a new threat, saying that Israel has come into the sights of his terrorist horde. Although this news should be alarming to Israelis, it is more evidence that the outsize ambitions of ISIS far exceed the group’s capabilities.

Baghdadi wants to take on the world and there is no way he can win.

What happens when one political cartoon invades another? My new animation gives an answer to that question.

On Jan. 5, I published a cartoon of a young girl singing a revised version of "America the Beautiful." On Nov. 20, I offered up a cartoon of an older man wedged inside a silo of brick walls.

At Christmastime, the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem is predictably invoked by cartoonists, pundits and pastors in commentaries about immigrants, refugees and the homeless. A nitpicker, though, will point out that Mary and Joseph were not homeless; they had a house, employment and family in Nazareth.