305
Well, I am down to 305. My goal has been to get below 300 and I am almost there.
After that, 25 pound increments. 275, 250, etc. Ultimately I want to be under 200 pounds. For a tall person like me I will be very lean but that’s what I want. Never been lean before so I think it will be an interesting challenge to see if I get there.
So far so good. That last 5 pounds I hope to lose by next week. I already look way better than I did two months ago. I have come a long way.
323
I am down to 323 pounds today after starting my diet plan of cutting out junk food and sugar and eating smaller portions. I am amazed that in 2 months I lost over 40 pounds. Yeah, I know 323 is a lot of weight and I have a long way to go but a couple years ago I was around 375 and at my worst over 400 so I am making good progress.
But its really coming off now since I started eating better and going for walks. I am not craving foods or anything. And I don’t feel that hungry usually. I eat something in the morning and maybe sometimes for lunch, then a light dinner. I keep my portions minimal and try to stay away from fattening foods.
I feel much better and my clothes are really starting to hang on me. 
At Batton’s New Studio
Yesterday Batton Lash had a open house at his new studio. He’s in the foreground with some champagne in his hand. That’s me sitting down. Photo taken by Jackie Estrada.
Crazy Times
If anyone wondered why I am doing these cartoons, the answer is fairly complicated. It isn’t because I hate the president. I don’t hate anyone. And besides, I believe it’s poor writing to criticize someone, or create a villain, without trying to understand where they’re coming from. Everyone is living a private drama. It’s good to try to understand others. That’s why I talked to everyone who emailed me. All the hate mail people. All the death threat people who didn’t use a fake email account. I believe in trying to be reasonable even if other people weren’t (I’ll admit I was a little snarky with some of them, but you try getting a ton of hatemail in 48 hours and see how you handle it).
That said, one of the main reasons I decided to take President Obama on is I am creeped out by group think. Always have been. When I was in High School, religious cults were everywhere trying to seduce people into going to their retreats so they could brainwash them. I had an experience with a couple of groups. I would talk to them, listen to their philosophy and they could tell from the questions I asked and the way I responded to them, I was a waste of their time. Because I generally see through BS. I am also not a follower.
So when Barack Obama ran for president, I became more turned off the more popular he became. The cult of personality is a very dangerous and creepy phenomena. Barack Obama’s cult attracted many zombie eyed followers who hung on his every word, even though he had never done anything important besides getting elected to higher office. And each time he got elected, would run for a even higher position before he finished his first term. He seemed only interested in ladder climbing. Not accomplishing things.
When he got elected he disappointed many of those followers. He didn’t do most of what he promised. He lied to their faces. I figured by now people would see him for what he is, but there are still plenty of hold outs as I discovered this week. People who defended him without even listening to our arguments came on here or contact us, saying some of the most extreme stuff you can imagine. They believed what the hacks said about us without question. It was sad. Fortunately, many people came to our defense. Many of our colleagues in comics did as well. But too often they would preface their email with something like this “I REALLY don’t agree with the comic, I think its terrible. But I defend your right to do it.”
OK, but honestly, I know from previous discussions, it wasn’t the art or the writing they hated as much as the actual message the cartoon had. Batton and I were always being playful and both of us are very easy going people. We’re not mean. We try to be friendly with everyone. So it was a shock to have our work attacked the way that it was. We thought the stuff we did was pretty mild. But it seems it hit a nerve with those cult of O people, big time.
And that is what disturbs me about the left. They are mostly followers. Not leaders. They mainly believe and do what they’re told. Because in lefty land you MUST do as your told or there may be trouble. That’s partially why so many people who supported us had to say “I hate what you do, but…” because their friends may be watching and they didn’t want to catch flak.
We live in a climate where many people are afraid to speak their minds for fear of persecution. That really offends me. So I do what I do as a response to that. I will not be cowed.
I’ve always abhorred group think. I’ve been put off by ideologies. But we now live in the crazy times where it’s a kind of civil war or opposing beliefs. And people who are somewhere in the middle like Batton and myself have to stand our ground against a seething madness sweeping the land. I hope many of you who come to this site have read my response, listened to the audio of the radio show I did and understand that we were the victims here. We’re not the hate mongers.
To those of you who came here angry but talked to me like an adult, thank you.
Cartoonists Unite! Fight the Haters!
Here’s a post I just did for Big Hollywood where I take metro-sexual mediocrity Lawrence O’Donnell to school. I’m tired of the politically correct fascists and their hypocritical BS. Game on!
Our Second Response to the Press
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When Batton Lash and I decided to take on the Obama Administration with our strip 16 months ago, few people were willing to mock the president. Yet we both saw that this president was at times foolish, mendacious, clueless and vain. Perfect fodder for a political cartoon.
Batton and I are not so much conservatives as libertarians. We’re believers in small government because, as I outline in my political thesis, it’s the only workable form. President Obama is very much a big government fan. He has tripled the debt and deficits in his first year in office. His new budget would add another three trillion. These are things we don’t like about him. We also don’t like the lies. Which seem to be second nature to the man.
So last Sunday we turned in what we thought was a very mild cartoon mocking the first lady’s over reach of her powers. And I decided to show her eating hamburgers like Wimpy from the old Popeye cartoons to mock the fact that she tends to scold other people’s eating habits, yet every time we read about what they’re eating at the White House, it’s extreme. And to throw in a gag we used before, the President is shown eating hardly anything. Because, let’s face it, she is bigger than he is. Her arms are thicker than his legs. But no one was suggesting she was fat. No one was commenting on her race. It’s merely funny to show them in contrast to one another.
The cartoon did not get a lot of comments at first. I figured it was rather mild. I would try to be funnier next time. Little did I expect the firestorm that followed a few days later.
The propaganda wing of the Democrat party known as Media Matters for America, who is out to destroy all critics of this administration, ran an article saying the cartoon attacked the first lady’s weight and gave out our emails, encouraging people to send us hate mail. Like pigs to the trough the mainstream press jumped on the story. Yesterday morning I got up and saw it mentioned on several websites like Salon. The NY Daily News wanted to interview us. And it was on the local TV news. We started getting inundated with hate mail. But the worst was yet to come.
The Daily News article came out and basically said we were mocking her weight, which wasn’t true at all. We posted our full response on the Big Sites and my blog. Most of the emails and comments we received during the day were about us allegedly mocking her weight. And I had to set people straight over and over again. Some of them accused us of racism. Which is just the left’s way of telling you to shut up. One e-mailer suggested our cartoon was going to inspire teen suicides because we were supposedly mocking body issues.
But then they died down. As evening came, I got a message that MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was taking us to task, calling us mentally disturbed racists. He showed our pictures. He gave out where we lived. Told people to go after us. Even mentioned Batton’s wife who had nothing to do with the cartoon. I had to wait for the video clip to be uploaded and what I saw was jaw dropping. Aside from the patently absurd characterization of the strip where he calls it “racist” and claims (without showing the art) that it depicts the president as a half-human, half animal creature, it was the most hysterical, over-the-top tirade since, well…since Keith Olbermann did his nightly carny act.
Frankly, I was surprised that Lawrence O’Donnell made such an epic fool of himself, that he would open himself and his company to such legal liability. Not only did he lie about what we were doing, he told people where we lived and to attack us! Is this a professional show? Is he a professional news commentator? Not hardly. He should be fired. What he did was tantamount to a call for violence.
Aside from being a shill for the worst administration in American history, his actions were blatant fascist. Calling for the heads of two critics of the administration. It’s a bit like the Muslim’s reaction to that Everyone Draw Mohammed Day cartoon that Molly Norris did. The Muslim fanatics called for her death, despite the cartoon being utterly tame. So now we have fanatical followers of MSNBC (all 1000 of them) sending one death threat after another. They were coming in every other second.
“you are a racist and you you should be shot.” “Will hope you get what’s coming.” “I hope black people kill your ass.” “You are gong to die, fatso!” “FUCK YOU BITCH!!DIE SOON!HEART FAILURE!!” etc. Half of them were from emails that bounced back.
Lefty friends of ours on Facebook came to our defense. Which we’re thankful for. Yes, Batton and I have plenty of friends on the left. We are not haters or ideologues. Nor are we racists. We’re merely critics of this administration. I call myself a classical liberal because that’s what I am. And liberals should question everything. Why should this administration get a pass? Because he’s black? Isn’t that racist?
To all the people who called this strip racist, I say the same thing. You are seeing what you want to see. If you see her as fat in the cartoon, that’s in your mind. So is the racism. It says a lot more about the critics, like O’Donnell, than it does about the cartoon when they see something that isn’t there. There’s a name for people who see race in everything. They’re called racists.
Neither Batton nor I care what race the first couple is. We care about their competence. We care about their over reach of power. We feel like condemning those things we don’t agree with or like. And we don’t appreciate being called Racist just because we disagree with the administration’s policies.
The left keeps saying we need more civility. Is this how they show it? I got news for you people, this nonsense only makes me want to push back 10 times harder. All you did was give us free promotion and made us more famous. If this little cartoon was as boring and untalented as you said, no one would have cared. Instead, it drove some of you mad.
We exposed your dark sides. We got you to reveal to the world what kind of hate that festers in your souls. You see racism where there is none. Calling white people racist without evidence is racist. You attacked me because of my weight, which reveals your own bigotry. Projection is all you’ve got. Attacking someone you don’t even know and calling them something with no evidence is what fanatics and lunatics do.
You’re the monsters you scream about. It’s time you started acting like liberals and question the people who’ve lied to you.
Hud in 1993
Heres’ a picture Hank Kanalz uploaded to Facebook of me, Gary Daniels (an actor who played Hardcase) and Chris Ulm from the early days of Malibu’s Ultraverse. 
52
Today was my birthday. And I decided several weeks ago that if I want to write novels, I better get off my butt. I have always wanted to be a novelist. I got into comics because I love the medium and I knew people. But novels were really where I wanted to be. But I never got too far with finishing a novel because I didn’t feel ready for it.
I felt I needed more to say and as the years have past, I have certainly honed my observational writing.
My novel isn’t exactly political, but it has some political elements to it. It’s actually a super-hero story, except I am approaching super-heroes in my own unique way. It’s the kind of superhero story I have wanted to do for years, but it would take a maxi-series to do it properly.
My friend Val Mayerik did this illustration of one of the main characters.
I have no idea how long it will take me to finish the first volume, but I see it as a series of books covering as long as a decade. More on this later.
