For a second straight week, the tainted water travesty flows from Flint taps onto editorial pages nationwide.
Six earlier opinion cartoons are in our first roundup last Wednesday. These eight new ones appeared in recent days as the lead poisoning crisis in Michigan's seventh-largest city (99,763 people in 2013) remains on front pages, magazine covers and network newscasts.
Some artists poke the governor, some focus on what's seen as economic injustice and some deliver graphic symbols needing no text.
Also new is an animated video by Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Fiore of San Francscio. His minute-and-a-half "Austerity Man" commentary is accompanied by this blog post at Fiore's website:
Now that Michigan governor, Rick Snyder, is getting credit for saying he’s really super-dooper sorry about poisoning thousands of children in Flint with lead, let’s not forget how he did it. In his zeal to be a fiscally conservative budget turnaround artist, Snyder and his crew played fast and loose with science, safety and even democracy.
Step one to making those painful budget cuts was eliminating any accountability to the voters. If the person enacting austerity budgets could be punished at the ballot box, most likely he or she wouldn’t have made the Wise and Necessary Cuts. Enter Rick Snyder’s “emergency managers,” who took over control from people like, um, mayors and city councils.
Step two is to cut budgets, everywhere and in every way possible. If money is spent on, say, additives in the water that will prevent pipes from corroding and releasing lead into the city’s water supply thereby putting thousands of children at risk of brain damage, so be it, we must save $100 a day. (Yes, for a mere $100 a day, Flint could have very well avoided poisoning an entire populace with toxics.) But spending money is bad, right?