Shameless Movie Tie-in

There's a new movie about Pancho Villa coming out tomorrow, so to celebrate, here's a November, 1916 editorial cartoon by Sidney Joseph Greene of the New York Evening Telegram.

The tiny figure fleeing Villa's recrudescence (now there's a word you never see in the papers any more) is labeled T.R., which I'm quite certain means that it's Teddy Roosevelt. Apparently, Mr. Greene felt that the former president didn't care to share the front page with the likes of the Mexican guerrilla. I'm not sure why Mr. Roosevelt is particularly relevant to the story. The historical record of Teddy Roosevelt during this period has him more concerned with urging war with Germany than supporting Gen. Pershing's pursuit of the Villistas.

Maybe it had something to do with their mustaches.

Update: It seems that the new Andy Garcia movie is not about Pancho Villa after all, but about an uprising of Catholics against the Mexican government in the 1920's. I have no cartoons about that to share. I'd never even heard of it.

QToon: Don't Fence Me In

You've probably seen the video of Maiden, North Carolina Baptist preacher Charles Worley telling his flock about his final solution to the homosexual problem:

"Build a great big, large fence — 50 or 100 miles long - and put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals - and have that fence electrified so they can't get out. Feed 'em. And you know in a few years, they'll die out. You know why? They can't reproduce."

You may also have seen Anderson Cooper's interview with Providence Road churchgoer Stacey Pritchard defending that sermon, and news reports that Worley's congregation rose up and started singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" to him the following Sunday.

Okay, okay, they just applauded. But Godwin's Law notwithstanding, it's damn near impossible to avoid the sheer Naziness of the idea of putting people behind electrified fences and watching them die off.

You see, I would never deign to suggest any such treatment of the upstanding heterosexuals of Providence Road Baptist Church of Maiden, North Carolina.

They'd surely keep on reproducing until they ran out of room to stand and electrocuted the lot of themselves.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Remember the service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice so that you could enjoy your Memorial Day holiday.

Or this girl will roll her eyes at you.

Qtoon: Patrick Henry They Ain't

In Virginia, the nomination of prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland to a judgeship fell short in the state legislature due to "Rule 69":

Thorne-Begland needed not just a majority of the votes cast, but a majority of the possible votes cast. Ten delegates cast "abstention" votes, and 26 delegates cast no vote at all.

Thorne-Begland’s confirmation ran into turbulence when the socially conservative Family Foundation emailed alerts on May 11 to legislators and followers that an openly gay man had been nominated for the Richmond General District Court. Thorne-Begland had spoken out for gay rights, the statement warned: “The question is, will his personal agenda take precedent over Virginia law and the Constitution?”

Opposition to Thorne-Begland's appointment -- by the Old Dominion's Republican governor -- hinged completely on the fact that he is not ashamed to be gay and in a loving family relationship -- anathema to the Christian Righteous. From a Washington Post editorial:

Twenty years ago, as a Navy lieutenant, he denounced the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on national television, an event that triggered his honorable discharge. He also served on the board of Equality Virginia, a gay advocacy group, and, with his domestic partner, is raising 7-year-old twins. ... 

Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, ... -- known in Richmond as "Sideshow Bob" -- said that, as a gay man living with a domestic partner, Mr. Thorne-Begland had a lifestyle that would impede him from upholding Virginia's constitution, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. As if the nominee's sexual orientation would cripple his ability to preside over traffic cases and misdemeanors. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

First impressions to the contrary, the Q Syndicate cartoon will take a break from presidential politics this week.

WisToon: Fudging the Numbers

What do you do when you push union-busting laws through the statehouse with a promise that 250,000 new jobs will result, and instead your state leads the nation in job losses?

Why, you change the numbers, of course. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages is still being calculated, but the Walker campaign, er, administration released what appear to be more optimistic numbers than the traditional employment figures from the U.S. Labor Department a month ahead of schedule:

On the eve of the release of the latest official numbers on job creation -- or, in Wisconsin's sad case, job losses -- Walker suddenly announced he had found a new set of data that shows his policies are working. ... he did this one day before official numbers -- which unlike Walker's figures have been reviewed and verified for accuracy -- were to be released.

The reasons for the difference are complicated and wonky -- you can wade through the economic explanations and charts here --  but the reasons for rushing the release of this more favorable set of numbers are obvious: they would otherwise come out after the June 5 recall election. The Walker campaign (and his superPAC supporters) had TV commercials produced and airing before the ink on the Department of Workforce Development release was dry.

Considering that the Walker campaign and the Obama reelection campaign share the same "Forward" slogan, the Cap Times editorial poses an interesting question: how would Mitt Romney and his Crossroads for Growth swiftboating pals respond if the Obama White House tried to sweeten their economic record with the same sort of fudgery?

WisToon: Dubya Double Dose

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate May 18, 2012 EditorialCartoonists.com

Back in January of last year, documentarian Brad Lichtenstein caught another rare moment of candor from Darth Snotwalker which has just come to light. The video shows Walker literally kissing up to $510,000 donor Diane Hendricks, owner of a cement company, who asks him what he plans to do to bust Wisconsin's remaining unions:

Hendricks: "Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions-- "
Walker: "Oh, yeah."
Hendricks: "- and become a right-to-work? What can we do to help you?"
Walker: "Well, we're going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. So for us, the base we get for that is the fact that we've got - budgetarily we can't afford not to. If we have collective bargaining agreements in place, there's no way not only the state but local governments can balance things out. . . . That opens the door once we do that."

We've already seen the "Divide and Conquer" strategy here in Wisconsin. In his so-called "Budget Repair Bill," Walker exempted the fire and police unions, who had supported his 2010 run for governor, from the forced depression of wages and benefits and imposition of new union recertification requirements. His supporters in the Chamber of Commerce produced television ads which basically said, "We screwed workers at Harley Davidson and Merchant Marine and elsewhere, so screwing teachers and other public employees is only fair!"

"Right to Work" is a euphemism for union-busting, and has more with removing the right to bargain than creating any right to work. Call it a right to work at Third World levels of compensation and safety standards.

Now that the "Divide and Conquer" video has gone public, Walker disavows any intention of pushing through a "Right to Work" bill. But his lips are moving when he says that, so you can be pretty sure he's lying.

QToon: Absolutely Comfortable

There was certainly no question what I would draw this week's cartoon about. Sure, there was the Washington Post story about Mitt Romney's having once pinned a gay (as it turned out) fellow student to the ground and cut off his golden locks, but I had just drawn a Romney cartoon last week -- and besides, this Clay Bennett cartoon says everything that needs to be said about those high school hijinx.

The only real complication was that with President Obama's ABC interview on marriage equality hitting the news last Tuesday afternoon, by the time I got around to drawing my little weekly cartoon, all the other cartoonists (and late night comedians) around the country had taken all the good ideas. And a lot of the lame ones, too, if we're being totally honest here.

I had six different cartoons sketched out on good bristol board Sunday night (the cartoon is due at Q Syndicate on Monday morning) before I finally decided which one was worth inking. While the final cartoon succumbs to the liberal fault of being too wordy to be witty, rest assured that the rejected cartoons were no better.

Oh, I suppose I could have drawn a cartoon about Bristol Palin. But she's such a poor spokesperson for marriage, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Who could possibly improve on Eric Mapa's tweet: "Bristol Palin's just jealous because I'm actually married to the father of my baby"?

This Week's Sneak Peek

The tough part about making a caricature of Vice President Joe Biden is making his teeth so much brighter than the rest of the cartoon.

Today was pay up or give up the trial day for Photoshop; and while I was expecting some sticker shock, I wasn't expecting that my only option was to pay $600 a year to rent the program on the cloud. Can I download and install it? Nope. Cloud rental is $49.99 per month, and fork over your e-mail and tell us again what your date of birth is.

Let's see: I had my old Photoshop program for what, six or seven years, so if I rented some pretend real estate in the cloud for the new one for that length of time, we're talking as much as $4,200 for, what, freeing up some space on my hard drive?

Cartooning in Real Time

(click here to view)

Joel Pett Lexington Herald-LeaderMay 10, 2012 EditorialCartoonists.com

President Obama's interview for today's Good Morning America in which he came out in favor of marriage equality for both same-sex and dual-sex couples caught more than one editorial cartoonist off guard. Here's how the Lexington Herald Leader's Joel Pett handled it:

Here's how it played out in a conversation I was having on Facebook yesterday afternoon (names have been smudged to protect the friendship):

The 2009 cartoon I had linked to, incidentally, was this one drawn when the Obama administration had filed a brief defending the "Defense of Marriage" Act in the courts.

And some people still don't believe in evolution!

QToon: Romney's Gay Ex-Spokesman

You might have missed the resignation of Mitt Romney foreign policy spokesman Ric Grenell last week. Grenell, who had served at the U.N. under John Bolton as the Bush administration's Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy, was named as the Romney campaign's foreign policy spokesman at the end of April. His appointment was greeted with howls of protest from the Religiositous Right because he is openly gay; his partner of nine years is Matthew Lashey, a media and entertainment company executive.

The American Family Association's Bryan Fischer attacked Romney for associating with a "sex-obsessed homosexual." Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins chimed in as well, and Matthew Franck mused in the National Review that Grenell's commitment to same-sex marriage would trump his loyalty to the Republican party: “Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?”

With the Romney campaign cowering in the corner, and telling Grenell to keep quiet, Grenell withdrew on May 1.

Mention has been made in the press of dozens of misogynistic tweets Grenell had made, and quickly scrubbed after the Romney campaign had named him spokesman, but it is generally agreed that they played no role in his resignation. I can only assume they would only have forced his resignation if he were a Democrat.

No Sneak Peek This Week

This week's cartoon is so basic that there's probably no little corner of it that I could post here without giving the whole cartoon away. Except maybe the large white space in the upper left corner.

So instead of This Week's Sneak Peek, here's a return visit to a cartoon about the last time the Vice President went vogue on Meet the Press.

Overworked Uncle Sam

I ran across this cartoon by Charles Lewis "Bart" Bartholomew for the April 9, 1898 Minneapolis Journal the other day:

Overworked.

Uncle Sam to the cartoonists of the country–Don't you think, boys, you could give me a day off? I begin to feel as if I had been worked overtime by you fellows of late.

Despite some early cartoons lampooning the eagerness to go to war of Randolph Hearst and company, Bart was by this time regularly drawing jingoistic cartoons lauding America's taking up arms to aid "Starving Cuba" and questioning the intentions of Spanish diplomatic attempts to head off the war. So Bart – standing with his back to us next to his signature gopher, or chipmunk, or whatever that animal is supposed to be – was drawing Uncle Sam (or crowing bald eagles) nearly every day.

The tall cartoonist just to Bart's right must be the Minneapolis Tribune's Rowland Claude Bowman, who usually included in his cartoons that dog between his legs.

Other cartoonists in the cartoon are identified with their respective newspapers. From left to right: The Chicago Record, ?, New York Journal (standing), New York Herald (seated), Examiner San Francisco (standing), Chicago Inter Ocean (crouching), and World. Sorry, I just can't read that second fellow.

I can postulate names for the New Yorkers in this cartoon. Homer Davenport was cartoonist for the New York Journal. William A. Rogers was cartoonist for the New York Herald. The cartoonists for the (New York) World included Richard Outcault (in a self-caricature on page 71 of Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop's American Political Cartoons, Outcault has dark shaggy hair, glasses, and an upturned moustache) and Walt McDougall.

Q Toon: N. Carolina's Amendment One

Returning to the 21st Century for a moment, let's turn our attention to the Tarheel State. Next Tuesday, voters go to the polls to vote on amending their state constitution to make sure that future generations never repeal the law defining marriage as a special right for heterosexual couples.

The tide may be turning against these constitutional amendments -- too late for most of the country, to be sure -- but it's hard to imagine this sort of referendum failing anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, even with the announced opposition of a number of North Carolina clergy members.

Or with the support of people like this:

Chad Nance, a Winston-Salem freelance journalist who is currently active in electoral campaigning, says poll workers outside the early voting site at the Forsyth County Government Center in downtown Winston-Salem reported to him that the wife of NC Sen. Peter Brunstetter remarked today that her husband sponsored legislation to put the marriage amendment on the primary ballot “to protect the Caucasian race.”
Nance said he recorded a conversation with the woman, whose name is Jodie Brunstetter, on video, and that she confirmed that she used the term “Caucasian” in a discussion about the marriage amendment, but insisted that otherwise her comments had been taken out of context by other poll workers. ...
He said Brunstetter reluctantly acknowledged that she had used the term “Caucasian” and then repeated the statement previously attributed to her, but substituted the pronoun “we” for “Caucasian. Nance said Brunstetter insisted there was nothing racial about her remarks, but could not explain why she used the term “Caucasian.” 

And this:

 Sean Harris, the Senior Pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC, giving his congregation a "special dispensation" to beat their children if they think they might be falling outside of gender norms:

 "So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, “Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,” you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.
Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting to Butch you reign her in. And you say, “Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.”
You say, “Can I take charge like that as a parent?”
Yeah, you can. You are authorized. I just gave you a special dispensation this morning to do that."

 And, to nobody's surprise, this:

A Cabarrus County teenager posted a video on YouTube that has attracted the attention of deputies and Amendment One opponents...They believe the 17-year-old Jonathan Wiles took [a lawn sign against Amendment One] from an intersection and set it up in his backyard where he recorded himself firing several shots at it. The video was later posted to YouTube [and has since been taken down].
Before firing the shots, Wiles talked about his strong support of the marriage amendment, saying, “Somebody decided it would be a good idea to put this sign by my house. They ought to know not to put stuff like that near my house.”

More Mr. Globehead

Here's another example of a Mr. Globehead editorial cartoon. This one's from The Philadelphia Inquirer in reaction to the conviction of Captain Dreyfus by a French court at Rennes. The verdict Judge Globehead is handing forth reads "The whole world disapproves of the verdict at Rennes." Regrettably, I can't read either the cartoonist's signature or the folded paper on the floor.

Public Opinion of New York, the magazine in whose September 11, 1899 edition it appears, occasionally includes the name of the cartoonist along with a description of the cartoons it prints. Their crediting of the cartoonist isn't consistent; the cartoonist is never named when the cartoon illustrates an article, and only once in a while in their periodic "Current Cartoons" round-up. (By the end of 1899, the magazine seems to have given up on the often superfluous accompanying descriptions of the "Current Cartoons." But they obviously appreciated editorial cartoons; in 1902, they started illustrating the cover of their semiannual bound editions with them.) I'm still looking for any instance in which the magazine names the Inquirer's cartoonist.

The cartoon at right is from the Minneapolis Times in September, 1901. R.C. Bowman was the cartoonist for the Minneapolis Tribune, and Charles Lewis "Bart" Bartholomew (see a book of his 1899 cartoons here) was the cartoonist for the Minneapolis Journal, but I don't know who the cartoonist for the Minneapolis Times was. "Dove Lotion" is about all I'm able to make out in this one, which apparently references the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion. If that boil is to represent Cuba, it is inflamed to the point that surgery may be called for.

These examples of Mr. Globehead don't push his advent any earlier than our previously posted cartoons, so the hunt continues.