Tomorrow's news, today!

I even detect, I think, a sense of exasperation in your cartoons as though it's all so obvious to you what's wrong.

Before, I felt like I was writing about a lot of stuff that I didn't expect a lot of people to be following -- for instance, the ins and outs of the Clinton healthcare plan which was widely smeared as socialized medicine when in fact it was the furthest thing from socialized medicine. The perception was that he was going up against the insurance industry when in fact he had written it with the five largest insurers ... Whereas now the things that are wrong are not that complicated.

You also often criticize the media, and usually it's the television media, but it made me curious where you get your information from in order to write your cartoons. Who do you trust?

Well, um, from the television media? [Laughs.] No, I spend a lot of time reading papers and reading the papers online and watching the news. It's not a binary either/or situation. I've met hardcore left-wing activists who say they simply can't watch the mainstream media. "I only read Z magazine!" And I say, "Well, then you have absolutely no idea what's going on in the world." The information is there, you just have to get it from a lot of different sources, and you have to have some basic understanding of how the world works to decode the ways in which it is presented and come up with your own composite portrait of the world.

The blogs, I have to say, are very helpful because you have a whole army of unpaid researchers digging up all these wonderful nuggets of information.

Any of them that you really like?

Atrios' site, Daily Kos, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo -- they all have silly names. Then again, I'm Tom Tomorrow so I can't exactly say anything about that. A lot of the sites are the radical center expressing its voice. They seem pretty much to be centrist Democrats but with an anger that you haven't seen from centrist Democrats in years. That's a wonderful and healthy development. A lot of my problem with the Democratic Party over the last few years has been the fact that there doesn't seem to be one.

Do you think they represent or could be the first stages of some kind of shift?

I'm specifically talking about these Web sites. I don't mean to imply that the Democratic Party is doing anything -- they have been taking a nap for a very long time and now it's sort of stretching and rubbing its eyes and clearing its throat. That's a good sign because it's better than being unconscious. But there's still a way to go.

How do you balance humor and message?

Well, you have certain lines that you're not going to cross. If I'm going to offend someone I want it to be for the right reason. I don't want to offend them out of some perceived callousness or disrespect for the dead. Ultimately in these times, the dead hover over every cartoon that you do, whether it's Sept. 11 or the war in Iraq. So there are topics that I personally try to handle with a delicate touch.

Sometimes I'll do one that I think is laugh-out-loud funny, and I may be wrong, who knows. But then the week after that one that's sort of serious. The one I have up today is about how all the stories in favor of the war keep getting rewritten, and it's not a funny cartoon at all. I think it's a wry cartoon. It is not only my job to make you laugh out loud; if that were my only purpose in life I would walk around on the street tickling people. But, for example with this cartoon, there were all these stories that kept getting amended, and one hadn't been mentioned for a while -- the looting of the Iraqi museum. The initial reports wildly overstated the damage and then the secondary set of reports wildly understated it. And that was the point at which Andrew Sullivan wrote a column in Salon suggesting that all the liberals who had harped on the wildly overstated damage owed the world an apology. Now it turns out Sullivan wildly understated the damage, though I don't know if he has issued the world an apology for his mistake. I don't believe he has.

Next page: Rare moments of cheerfulness?