A cartoon printed in the New York Post on Wednesday has everyone in a hissy.

Check it: The toon depicts two police officers—one shooting down a wild monkey and the other saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” And blood. A lot of blood.

Say…wha?

Some think the cartoon is criticizing the stimulus package that President Obama signed into law earlier this week. (In other words, it’s so bad, a monkey may as well have written it.) Others think the cartoon is directly comparing Obama to an untamed monkey on the loose. Which is why the bang, bang bloodbath is…So. Not. Okay.

The Post defends the Sam Delonas cartoon and issued a statement explaining that the toon has nothing to do with race or Obama.  Rather, it’s a jab at the contents of the stimulus package by comparing them to the pet chimp that mauled a woman in Connecticut on Tuesday. The 200-pound animal was later shot and killed by police after it attacked someone else.

Get it? Stimulus package. Rabid chimp. They’re practically interchangeable, no? No? …No?!

Benjamin Todd Jealous, the president and CEO of the NAACP, issued a statement:

“NAACP continues to fight for a country where America’s promise can be realized for all and where racism is just a tragic memory.  We are saddened that the New York Post chose to create a symbol that is so divisive, insensitive and antithetical to that goal.  The NY Post must do better.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton had some say too:

“The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that ‘Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.’

Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?”

As for the White House, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said:

“I have not seen the cartoon, but I don’t think it’s altogether newsworthy that I don’t spend a lot of time reading the New York Post.”

Zing!

The editor of The Post, Col Allen, (finally!) issued an “apology” Wednesday evening:

“Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: ‘They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,’ one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.”

Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor's Business Daily for Jan. 12, 2009

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may seem old news, but it’s entering a new phase, argues Jonathan Schanzer, deputy executive director of the Jewish Policy Center. Mark Hemingway of National Review Online discusses Schanzer’s new book, Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine, and relays Schanzer’s argument that the mainstream media have oversimplified the conflict by underestimating the internal divisions in Palestine. After all, Fatah and Hamas aren’t allies. Israel’s current struggle is with Gaza alone.

President George W. Bush held his final press conference yesterday morning. Fox News commentators and guests offer analysis.

And here Bush gets a little more personal with Fox’s Brit Hume. The president explains why he is so calm and content as he prepares to leave office, and tells Hume that he’s even planning to write a book that will explain and defend some of the most controversial decisions he made while in office.

Is it a new New Deal or not, and does it even matter? President-elect Barack Obama’s record-smashing stimulus plan will likely top $1 trillion when it’s finally approved. Jonah Goldberg writes over at NRO’s The Corner blog that only liberals are comparing this strategy with FDR’s New Deal and adds that conservatives feel the comparison is moot. But Pat Buchanan would apparently disagree. In an editorial for Investor’s Business Daily, Buchanan argues not only that Obama seems to be channeling Roosevelt, but that massive spending is more likely to get us into trouble than to bail us out of it. In a separate IBD editorial, Lawrence Kudlow sees a more conservative tinge to Obama’s plan, drawing a parallel to Reagan’s tax-cut plan. Big government, limited government, or something in between? Obama keeps us guessing.

Google searches are speeding climate change (but then, isn’t everybody?). A physicist is trying to publish his findings on the amount of energy consumed by Google’s data centers every time you try to run a search (the energy used boiling water for a cup of tea equals two searches). William Teach responds sarcastically at Right Wing News, suggesting that the global warming “Believers” log off and stop using the Internet. Teach writes that he did 15 Google searches after reading the article, just for fun.

Eco-warriors: stop procreating, humans hurt the planet. Feminists: stop procreating, it’s sexist. Cassy Fiano writes on her blog and on Right Wing News that the newest argument in favor of the extinction of mankind is that sexual reproduction is a sexist, culturally oppressive holdover from a less civilized time, more or less. She goes on to excoriate modern feminism as it drifts toward something like Stalinism. But hey, sex without reproduction would be really fun for about, say, one generation.

Always a rebel, Mickey Rourke’s Hollywood comeback doesn’t preclude careless comments—you know, supporting Bush. It’s unpopular in Hollywood to defend the outgoing president, writes Andrew Breitbart of Big Hollywood, but having just won the best actor Golden Globe award for his performance in The Wrestler, Rourke did just that. Bush was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Rourke said, and the situation after 9/11 would have been near impossible for any conceivable leader. Breitbart suggests that Rourke’s peer-slash-rival Sean Penn had a much inferior and less ballsy dalliance into politics when he publicly supported Fidel Castro’s regime, and writes that any “no friend of Sean Penn is a friend of mine.”