The year 2012 in political cartoons
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By The Bakersfield Californian
Election years are always rich with possibilities for editorial cartoonists: They've got a new lineup of faces, mannerisms and quirks to parody in the least flattering way possible.
Newt Gingrich often came off looking like a scheming hobbit, Mitt Romney like a sickly Ward Cleaver. Barack Obama's lips and ears seemed to grow in contrast to past years, as cartoonists became more comfortable with the landmine-rich challenge of portraying a black president without crossing certain lines. They crossed them anyway.
But there was plenty of other fodder, some of it tragic, from Newtown to Superstorm Sandy to Penn State. The best of the nation's cartoonists were able to segue from satire and well-deserved mockery to heartfelt pain and shared grief as the circumstances demanded.
One basic truth about political cartoons remained intact: Cartoons that lampooned the idiocy of people or institutions on the other side of the ideological fence were always funny, and cartoons lampooning things dear to the observer's heart were not. Some of the most outraged readers we encountered were people offended by political cartoons. That speaks to the strength and limitations of this unique medium: Boiling down oftentimes-complicated subjects to a single panel with a single caption requires a deft touch -- or an unnecessarily brutal haymaker, depending on one's point of view.
Newspaper political cartoons have been around since before this country's founding. At left are some of the best from 2012.
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The family of David Silva announced Friday it has filed its long-expected federal civil rights claims against the Kern County Sheriff’s Office, six sheriff’s deputies and a sergeant, two California Highway Patrol officers, the county and the state alleging excessive police force killed him.
He’s Dr. Merle Haggard now. The bad-boy hero of the rebel strain of music that put Bakersfield on America’s cultural map half a century ago did something Friday he hadn’t done since he was 9: He sat still in school.
SACRAMENTO -- The California High-Speed Rail Authority won approval Thursday from a federal railroad oversight board to start construction this summer on the first leg of what would be the nation's first bullet train.
A 25-year-old man who died in Kern County sheriff’s custody Monday night had two plastic baggies with illegal drugs stuffed in his throat, the department reported.
A Bakersfield attorney’s rocky marriage, marked by a divorce suit and a history of loud, public arguments, reportedly erupted into violence early Wednesday morning when police say he turned a gun on his wife and fired.
A woman found dead in a southeast Bakersfield garage Tuesday was identified Friday as 18-year-old Mia Ramirez of Bakersfield.
After a search that lasted much of Tuesday afternoon, the Kern County Sheriff’s Office arrested a man on suspicion of homicide in connection with the discovery of a woman’s body in a southeast Bakersfield garage.
Bakersfield DUI attorney Mark Joseph Madrigali pleaded not guilty to three felonies in Kern County Superior Court Friday in connection with the shooting of his wife.