The Official Site of Editorial Cartoonist Ann Telnaes
With the latest developments on Syria and red lines, you might have missed a member of Congress calling for a reporter to be prosecuted for doing his job. Appearing on CNN, Rep. Peter King said that journalists who reported the leaks of the NSA’s surveillance program should be prosecuted. Later on Fox News he singled out the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, claiming that Greenwald would release the names of CIA operatives. Greg Sargent has Greenwald’s response here.
A Gallup poll shows former President Bush’s ratings have improved. 
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.
The NSA is collecting millions of Americans’ phone records and following their Internet behavior. The Obama Administration and some members of Congress are defending this latest civil rights intrusion as legal and essential in keeping us safe. I’m beginning to think Obama is Dick Cheney’s love child…
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? 
For almost 2 months in 1989 tens of thousands of protesters led by university students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The protests were triggered by the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party General Secretary who was forced to resign for his positions on reforming the party . The students were also demonstrating against corruption in the government, for workers’ rights, and for freedom of speech and the press. On June 3, 1989 the Chinese government ordered martial law and cracked down on the protesters in Tiananmen Square, killing an unknown amount (estimates range from the hundreds to thousands). Here’s an article about some survivors from yesterday’s Washington Post.
At the time I was living and working in Los Angeles. I can still remember sitting at my drawing desk at home when the news started broadcasting those horrifying images from Beijing. 
Associated Press
