“The world is kind of deserting Israel right now,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) remarked after meeting with members of the pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “So they’re worried about that.”

Their concern is warranted. Less than six months after Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people with brutality that sparked widespread sympathy as well as material support for the Jewish state, polls show popular opinion in the U.S. and internationally has turned against Israel at unprecedented levels. The United Nations secretary-general is angry, the International Court of Justice is giving serious consideration to the charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and even President Joe Biden — a self-described Zionist who has repeatedly visited Israel and rushed to send it weapons after Oct. 7 — has warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that continuing his ground offensive into Rafah, the last relatively intact city left in Gaza, would cross his “red line.”

Israelis and their supporters are confused. Why is Israel rapidly sliding into pariah status now?

Netanyahu has forgotten that Israel is a U.S. vassal state. They don’t call the shots. We do. Bibi nonetheless has insolently rejected Biden’s ultimatum.

Israelis’ cluelessness is understandable. They’ve been oppressing the Palestinians for decades. They’ve ignored U.N. resolutions requiring that they stop occupying Arab territory, they’ve sent nearly a million religious fanatics to colonize the West Bank, and they’ve run the only apartheid state in the world following the end of that system in South Africa — yet nothing bad has ever happened to them. America kept sending them billions of dollars a year, arming them with high-tech weapons and intelligence, and ran interference for them at the U.N. whenever the world tried to hold them accountable for human rights abuses. Why should the good times come to an end?

The answer, of course, is twofold. The systemic decimation of Gaza, caught in high-definition videos on social media in an act of ethnic cleansing obviously intended to be succeeded by annexation, is even more extreme than Israel’s previous crimes. Israel’s war against the innocent civilians of Gaza is the feather that broke the world’s patience and indifference — a one-ton feather.

That the world would turn away from Israel was easy to see coming tens of thousands of dead Gazans ago.

For everyone but the Israelis, that is.

Israelis are not stupid people. How did they fail to anticipate that they would soon be shunned and despised for what most of the world sees as a grotesque and opportunistic overreaction to Oct. 7? As a nation created by the U.N., no other country depends as much upon international goodwill for its survival.

Israel, you’ll notice if you visit, is along with North Korea and the United States one of the most insular countries on earth. Whereas most of the world and its news coverage is omnivorously internationalist, and floods in Myanmar or a coup in Central America make the top of the news, Israel, like the U.S., obsesses over its own domestic affairs to the exclusion of all else except events that impact it directly — and it does so from an unabashedly nationalist viewpoint.

Like the U.S., Israel is a melting pot of immigrants where assimilation is expected to include learning the national language. Unlike us, who have been blessed with seeing our mother tongue spread as the 20th and 21st centuries’ lingua franca, more than 90% of Israelis read and speak one of the most globally useless languages anywhere, an artificially revived form of long-dead Hebrew. Curious Americans looking for viewpoints outside the mainstream-media echo chamber can access the BBC, CBC and Al Jazeera English for foreign coverage in English. Israelis looking for alternative news and opinions in Hebrew have no options.

Founded in large part by Holocaust survivors and veterans of numerous wars, and beleaguered by countless terrorist attacks, Israel is understandably obsessed with security. But security is a two-edged sword. When you keep other people out, you yourself remain inside. And you are deprived of the insights and different ways of looking at things that people get when they interact with others and opinions that differ from their own.

It’s also not very effective. Israel, a self-declared safe haven for global Jewry, is by far the most dangerous country for Jewish people.

Consider, for example, the massive “smart” high-tech security walls Israel built to keep out residents of the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. They were remarkably effective (until Oct. 7) at segregating populations that Israelis have come to view as dangerous, if not as inherent enemies. At the same time, Israelis now have no day-to-day interaction with their Arab neighbors. They don’t do business together, they don’t make friends, they don’t date, they don’t talk, they can’t get each other. Walling off Gaza is such an extreme act that it cuts off Israel from the Mediterranean Sea; no country interested in its internal security or military strategy voluntarily relinquishes access to the sea. Even the Arab Israelis who comprise 20% of Israel’s population have found themselves discriminated against, isolated and alienated within their own country.

It’s the height of irony. It’s not just the people of Gaza who live in a giant open-air concentration camp. Survivors of Germany’s camps have built their own prison camp — for themselves — and it’s the biggest, most effective one of them all.

No wonder Israelis can’t relate to the rest of the planet. They’ve been living on the inside so long they don’t see the real world anymore. Colonialism, a distinctly 19th and early 20th century project, is an anachronism. Apartheid, too. Israelis don’t see that opposing the war against Gaza isn’t the same as anti-Zionism, which itself isn’t the same as antisemitism. They don’t understand that, these days, even if you don’t care about the people you are killing to steal their land, you have to pretend you do (e.g., Biden’s parachute drops of food into the same place his bombs are killing the starving locals).

A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 75% of Jewish Israelis think the country should ignore pressure from the U.S. to wind down the war in Gaza. A Gallup poll showed 65% oppose an independent Palestinian state. “It isn’t fashionable to trust Palestinians, any Palestinians,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert observes. That’s how white South Africans felt about Blacks during apartheid. Now, of course, they’re fine. So it would be in a unified post-apartheid Palestine.

Now the highest-ranking Jewish politician in the U.S., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has formally issued a Biden-approved verbal demand for regime change in Israel, saying Israel should call new elections, which polls indicate Netanyahu might lose.

Yet Netanyahu persists. “No international pressure will stop Israel,” the prime minister says, pledging to attack Rafah despite Biden’s warning.

“Isolated, cloistered, militaristic and more unhinged than ever, Israel is becoming the North Korea of the Middle East,” Uri Misgav writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Israelis need to tear down their paranoia-grounded security walls, not just to liberate the Palestinians — though that is way overdue! — but to free themselves.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

Liberals believe a compromise that gets us closer to a goal is better than no progress at all. But compromise can lead to the dead end of dilution and a false sense of resolution.

The early 20th-century progressive and presidential candidate Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette argued that politics played into different a psychological dynamic. “In legislation no bread is often better than half a loaf,” he observed. “Half a loaf, as a rule, dulls the appetite, and destroys the keenness of interest in attaining the full loaf.”

Nothing in recent history demonstrates La Follette’s viewpoint more clearly than the evolution of the health care debate. When Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008, health care — particularly its expense — was such a big worry for American voters that the ruling classes came to view the problem as a crisis. The system was expensive, dysfunctional and despised. Despite an economy reeling from the Great Recession, the new president quickly moved to address the issue by pushing for passage of his 2009 Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, and even a divided Congress went along.

Obamacare was a classic political compromise of the variety that moderates adore: it made nobody happy. The health care industry — though their concerns soon proved to have been wildly unfounded — worried about losing some of their precious profits. Patient advocates preferred a European-style, fully socialized system in which doctors and nurses are government employees to the ACA, a market-based system originally conceived by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Figuring that the ACA would move the center of gravity closer to socialized medicine, leftists supported it despite their reservations.

By most accounts, the ACA has failed to fix the problems it was supposed to address. In many American counties (health plans are designed by county), the government “marketplace” has just one or two plans to “choose” from. The only high-income nation without universal health coverage, the U.S. spends more by far on health care, both per person and as a share of GDP, than other countries. Yet we still have the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable and treatable conditions, the highest infant mortality, the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions, and an obesity rate nearly twice the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average. Premiums are high but copays are low, so we see physicians less often than patients in most other countries. A whopping 650,000 Americans go bankrupt each year due to health care bills, accounting for 60% of all personal bankruptcies. Americans are extremely dissatisfied with the cost and access to health care.

A decade and a half later, health care ranks near the bottom on the hierarchy of policy priorities articulated by voters. How can this be?

La Follette’s dictum at work! The half-loaf of ACA dulled the appetite, creating the illusion that the health care problem had either been resolved — an opinion common among those with employer-supplied health insurance and/or those who live in one of the big cities where the online marketplace has competition — or had been as fixed as is reasonable to expect from the current system. As a result, there is no indication that politicians of either party are inclined to propose a legislative improvement anytime soon.

Nevertheless, the need is acute. People want affordable health care (even if they despair of ever getting it). Affordable — no, free — health care is a basic human right. Without it, after all, people quite literally drop dead.

According to a 2020 estimate by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan — the most thoroughly thought-out, frictionless plan on the drawing board that salvages as much from the existing network as possible — would cost about $3 trillion per year. However, a Yale study concluded the government would save about half a trillion each year “by improving access to preventive care, reducing administrative overhead, and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices.” Working net cost: $2.5 trillion per annum.

Medicare for All would replace our current, highly wasteful system. “We’re already paying as taxpayers for universal basic automatic coverage, we’re just not getting it,” economist Amy Finkelstein says. “We might as well formalize and fund that commitment upfront.” She points to the fact that the federal government currently pays $1.8 trillion a year for Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ services and other government-funded health care costs — all of which would vanish after they were replaced by a holistic Medicare for All scheme. Third-party programs, which are often government funded, and public health programs eat up an additional $600 billion per year.

Medicare for All would also save the lives of the 45,000 Americans who die annually due to lack of insurance. The IRS would collect an additional $1 billion a year in tax revenues as a result.

So the net cost of treating everyone who needs medical care is about $100 billion per year, which is just over 2% of the $4.5 trillion we’re currently wasting on wars and other things that make our lives worse.

Most analyses of Medicare for All focus on how it would save patients money. Even if they had to pay higher taxes, this is indeed true. For liberals, such an improvement might be a triumph worth celebrating. The Left, however, must be as ambitious as possible, even under the bourgeois electoral democracy currently in place pending the revolution for which we are waiting and ought to be working for. Health care, a basic human need every bit as essential to life as food and clean water, should be provided by the government gratis. The good news is we can afford it. What we require to enact a real, first-world health care system is for the Left to come to power.

Next: A college education is a right. So is the choice not to attend college yet still be considered for a job.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

Homelessness is the single most powerful indictment of capitalism, the embodiment of human disposability, the ultimate expression of callous cruelty. In this nation where one out of 16 rental homes is vacant at any given time, one in 600 Americans (550,000) sleeps outside. An additional 3.7 million people, the so-called hidden homeless — one out of 90 of our sons, our daughters, our brothers, our sisters, our fathers, our mothers — are doubled up in other people’s homes because they can’t afford their own place.

“You look out the window of the White House and see the ragged and pathetic figures huddled over the steam grates of the Ellipse,” former President George H.W. Bush told an audience of insurance agents in 1989, calling homelessness “a national shame. … It’s an affront to the American dream.”

He was right, of course. He promised to do better. Yet because not even a president can change an economic system, nothing has improved. Only the Left can fix it.

Of the many ways America fails its citizens, its failure/refusal to ensure everyone has somewhere warm and safe to sleep at night is the starkest reflection of what passes for a social compact: Unless you are lucky enough not to be born into poverty, and lucky enough to avoid succumbing to addiction or some other dysfunction, and lucky enough not to suffer from a debilitating physical or mental illness, and lucky enough to have the charm, education and experience an employer happens to need, and are lucky enough that the economy is not contracting at that time, sooner rather than later you may find yourself sleeping on the street or a subway platform or on a park bench or a steam grate across the street from the White House.

Such a society cannot credibly claim to believe every life is precious. It cannot criticize the way other societies handle their affairs. It has zero moral standing whatsoever.

Chronic homelessness creates problems that impact housed people as well. Responding to calls about public drinking and trespassing diverts police from dealing with serious crimes. Areas with a high homeless population suffer significantly reduced property values, which lowers assessments and hurts municipal budgets. Because homelessness is associated with chronic health conditions, mental illness and substance abuse disorders, homeless people’s frequent visits to emergency rooms — where they account for a third of all patients — cost hospitals an average of $18,500 per year per person, unreimbursed because they are uninsured. Those expenses are passed on to the rest of us. Mentally ill people are 35 times more likely to commit a crime if they are homeless, compared to the mentally ill domiciled; they are also much more likely to become victims.

Homelessness is expensive. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that one chronically homeless American costs the taxpayer an average of $35,000 per year. That comes to about $20 billion for Americans now living outside.

Catching a glimpse of a miserable attempting to shelter outdoors also has an insidious downward effect on wages and living standards for us, the housed. It reminds you: This could happen to you. Better, then, not to risk asking for a raise.

Cynical Marxists have suggested this may be a feature, rather than a bug, of the current system. Fear of falling is a powerful motivating force.

The answer to the present state of homelessness is “re-housing.” We give homes — not shelters — to the people who need them. If they don’t have money for rent, give them stipends. Most cities keep doing what doesn’t work: dangerous shelters that are only open overnight and deny people for drinking, using drugs or acting out.

This is exactly wrong.

Real homes, not shelters, help people get off drugs and alcohol because people abuse substances to numb the misery of their situation. As it happens we have plenty of real homes sitting empty: 15 million are vacant. Some 550,000 of them, beginning with abandoned units and those that have remained without a tenant for a long time, should be seized under eminent domain.

Rapid rehousing can and should be mandatory; no one should be allowed the “freedom” to succumb to the elements. Rehousing should be done free of traditional preconditions like employment, income, absence of criminal record or sobriety. Each person’s individual needs, whether they be addressed by physical rehabilitation, job or language training, psychological therapy or other services, should be carried out by a team of social workers and other experts. Housing first, The New York Times reported in 2022, rests on a reality-based approach: “When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.”

Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, moved 25,000 people directly into apartments and houses between 2011 and 2022, reducing its homeless population by 63%. Denver, another housing-first city, saw arrests of homeless people drop 95% and dependence on government cash-benefit programs fall by 80% after housing-first took hold.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, “supportive housing” costs an average of $12,800 per person per year. That comes to $7 billion for the outdoor homeless population, or $55 billion if you also include the hidden homeless.

The higher figure is 1.2% of the $4.5 trillion a year the U.S. is currently wasting on wars and other garbage. And after you subtract the $20 billion a year we’re currently spending on policing and hospitalization, it’s 0.8%.

Next: how to guarantee everyone the right to free, high-quality health care.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

Wages high enough to cover basic expenses are only the beginning of the Left’s struggle to eliminate economic insecurity.

We must also fight for workers’ rights on the job, as well as a robust and sturdy social safety net to protect people when they find themselves out of work. Americans suffer the worst worker benefits of major developed countries; we are tied with Botswana, Iran, Mexico and Pakistan. Our safety net also comes in dead last.

For as long as anyone can remember, the balance of power between labor and management has been radically tilted in favor of capital. While nine out of 10 workers are not organized, employers not only form cartels to set prices for labor, they enjoy outsize influence in Washington and state capitals through campaign contributions to politicians.

Globalization has exacerbated this imbalance; an apparel company like Nike may manufacture goods in low-wage, anti-union countries like Vietnam or Indonesia and ship them to high-income/high-price markets like Europe or the United States on container ships whose expenses are subsidized by taxpayers of the latter. As much as an ambitious worker might be willing to abandon their family and native culture to move to a higher-wage place like Norway or Qatar, it is nearly impossible to obtain the necessary working permits, much less citizenship. Capital is fluid; labor is stationary.

The Left seeks to level the playing field between labor and management.

U.S. labor laws are “at will,” meaning you can be fired for any reason other than discrimination because of your race, sex, sexual orientation or other legally protected class. At-will is a license for companies to overhire during booms and impose mass layoffs when the economy cools down, as we saw tech companies do after the COVID-19 pandemic. It enables bosses to vote themselves a raise at the same time they lay off workers, many of whom disrupted their lives to take those jobs, lost other opportunities and have no responsibility for poor management decisions.

At-will must go. An employer who wants to get rid of an employee should have to prove to the Department of Labor either that the move is required due to the company’s finances — and then only after upper management have absorbed pay cuts and stockholders lose their dividends — or that the employee did something wrong, in which case they should be entitled to a hearing before an impartial court system established to litigate labor-management disputes before a jury.

Workers’ power relies chiefly on the right and ability to withhold labor after contract negotiations break down. Therefore, every American worker in an enterprise with 10 or more employees ought to be legally guaranteed the right to join a union — even if they are the only member of their company’s workforce who wants to sign a union card. Existing laws prohibiting employer retaliation against union organizers and members, which are weak and rarely enforced, must be strengthened so that it is nearly impossible to fire someone for standing up for higher wages and working conditions. Needless to say, state “right to work” laws allowing workers in union shops to withhold union dues while receiving negotiated benefits should be eliminated.

Laws like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which ban solidarity strikes and strikes by the military and other public-sector workers and have been expanded by courts and presidential executive orders to include “essential” workers like coal miners and rail workers, go far beyond regulations in other developed nations and must be abolished. If firefighters and postal workers, for example, are truly essential to the functioning of the nation, they should be remunerated accordingly. In the case of exceptional categories of workers deemed essential in matters of life and death, which should be highly limited, the loss of the right to strike should be compensated by guaranteed raises pegged to the inflation rate.

U.S. workers are divided into arbitrary classifications designed to allow corporations to treat them like dirt. I work at least 40 hours a week as a cartoonist and columnist yet my syndicate misclassifies me as an “independent contractor.” Same for Uber and Lyft drivers, though there’s nothing independent about a job which specifies everything about your tasks down to the model of car you must drive, though you pay for it yourself.

The system is random and arbitrary. When I lost my W-2 job as a syndicate executive, I qualified for unemployment even though I had only worked half-weeks. If my syndicate cans me as a cartoonist and writer, I do not.

For the Left, all work is work, all work has value and all workers must be protected. The “independent contractor” loophole should be closed. A 20-hour-a-week job should come with at least half medical benefits. A third of U.S. citizens are self-employed; they should qualify for unemployment benefits when work dries up, just like people who work for other people.

And work will dry up. Because boom-and-bust cycles are intrinsic to capitalism, until the Revolution comes the Left should agitate for a safety net that reflects this reality. Jobless benefits should be far more generous than they are now. They should expire when you find a new job, not after the six-month limit set by most state legislatures. By way of comparison, countries like Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Spain provide up to 24 months of unemployment payments. Iceland gives 30.

As we’ve seen with robotics and are seeing with artificial intelligence, disruptive technologies destroy entire lines of business at once, rendering hard-earned education and experience worthless overnight. The heartland has plunged into despair and drug addiction after decades of deindustrialization fueled by pro-globalization policies. Surely we could use the lost productivity of these millions of fellow citizens who have filed for federal disability checks because they have no hope of ever being gainfully employed! Those willing to take classes to be retrained for positions that will be needed in the near future must currently bear all or most of the cost themselves. Retraining programs should be gratis, and the government should pay a living stipend so people can focus on their studies.

The ultimate manifestation of economic insecurity, the abject poverty that leads to homelessness, hunger and death, ought to be impossible in the wealthiest country in history. Even if they “want” to do so, the Left should not allow people to sleep outside, for the freedom to die in the cold is no freedom whatsoever.

Next: how to abolish homelessness.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.

When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns — the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they’re employed, low wages — consistently come in first, so much so that they can’t imagine saving for the future. General economic issues like poverty, hunger and homelessness come in next. In a capitalist country with decades of rising income inequality and a modest safety net, these findings come as little surprise.

The rent is too damn high; buying a house gets more and more out of reach. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, expenses rise faster than salaries, and bosses, who can fire you at will even if you’ve been working hard and following the rules, have absolute power in a country where 10% of workers belong to a union. No wonder we’re worried sick.

Economic insecurity is America’s biggest political issue. Yet neither of the major parties campaigns on it. At most, they’ll refer to it obliquely, as when nativists call for reduced immigration — sometimes they argue that new arrivals take away jobs from the native-born.

Many of the other things that keep people up at night are partly or fully grounded in economic insecurity. Crime and violence are more pervasive in poor neighborhoods; courts are better-staffed and more efficient in wealthy areas. Patients worry about being able to afford to see a doctor and pay for medications at least as much as they do about the quality of health care. Racial tensions dissipate in places and periods of prosperity.

The failure of bourgeois electoral democracy to address the nation’s biggest political issue, economic insecurity, is tailor-made for the agenda of the Left, which historically has been grounded in Marxist class analysis.

Naturally, the ultimate goal of Leftists is the overthrow of capitalism, which centers inequality and monopoly as inevitable at best and laudable at worst, with a socialism that provides equal access to the basic necessities of life and equal opportunity to achieve more. But revolution is not like a cake; there is no recipe to follow. All the conditions must be ripe and, frustratingly to the revolutionist, the determination that those conditions exist can only be affirmed after the fact of success.

One predicate for revolution is a well-organized grassroots movement. There are few better ways to build such a structure than to consistently and relentlessly agitate for improvement in people’s economic living conditions — which are, after all, their biggest problem — in elections, street demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, sabotage and other militant actions centered around a Left program that demands improvements in wages, benefits and government safety-net programs.

Never has the public been more predisposed to the argument that government ought to intercede on behalf of those who are having trouble making ends meet, or fear that unemployment might put them into such a position. People’s buying power has been ravaged by inflation, corporations are again turning the screws after a brief period of liberalization driven by the post-pandemic labor shortage, and it has been 60 years since a major party proposed a federal anti-poverty program (Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society).

Some bourgeois political analysts, particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, identify the vacuum in the dialogue space of economic injustice. But neither party can meaningfully address issues like poverty and homelessness for one simple reason: They are capitalist parties. Whatever room existed for the reformist impulse vanished after the postwar period yielded to the beginning of America’s late-capitalist decline. Admitting that capitalism leaves millions behind is unthinkable, let alone developing legislative attempts to fix the problem.

We, the Left, have the signature issue of economic justice all to ourselves, provided that we do not obsess over identity politics to the exclusion of class divisions.

Wages come first.

A day’s work should pay enough to pay for rent, a car and other necessities. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1970, it would currently be $30 an hour. The average worker is twice as productive as 1970, so make that $60. For a full-time worker, that’s $120,000 a year. But 1970 wasn’t a perfect time for workers. We deserve and demand better. The Left should think of $60 an hour as the bare minimum necessary to live decently in the United States, and push for more for skilled labor.

Think that’s unrealistic? If so, you’ve been corrupted by capitalistic propaganda that devalues labor. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are still struggling to raise the federal minimum from $7.25 to $15.00 — that’s what passes for progressive! What a joke! The bosses themselves consider $60 an hour to be the real minimum wage to subsist in the world we live in today; in New York, where I live, you can’t qualify for a rental apartment unless your annual salary is 40 times the monthly rent. You need $120,000 to be considered for a $3,000-per-month apartment; good luck finding anything for less than that. It’s not that landlords want to discriminate against working-class tenants. They’ve learned from experience that people who earn less than $120,000 are far likelier to fall behind on the rent until they have to be evicted, costing building owners and managers money.

Be reasonable. Demand the impossible: $60-an-hour minimum wage.

Next: The Left’s program for economic security.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.