Rain falls on the just and the unjust, as the Good Book says; but there's always some holy roller assuring us that the rain was intended for the unjust all along. It's just that God has crappy aim.
The crack about Hurricane Harvey pummeling Houston because of its lesbian mayor (who left office last year) came from Ghostface look-alike Ann Coulter, who was, no doubt, merely making a desperate effort to tweet something —anything— more outrageous than Donald Trump does.
But her tweet that former Mayor Annise Parker was a more credible explanation for Hurricane Harvey than climate change provides the launching pad for this week's cartoon.
I woke up the morning after drawing this cartoon to find that nearly every other editorial cartoonist on the AAEC site had drawn cartoons about hurricanes and climate change, but it's important to note that the destruction we've witnessed from Harvey and Irma cannot be blamed on one factor alone. Nick Anderson penned an excellent long-form cartoon for the Texas Tribune on unfettered development contributing to flooding in and around Houston, and while 600 trillion gallons of water is going to wreak havoc on the best of ecosystems, I highly recommend Anderson's well-researched opus.
Houston isn't the only place where developers regard the wetlands in particular and the environment generally as a nuisance getting in the way of their profits. Here in Wisconsin, the Republican governor and his Republican-run legislature are greasing the skids for the building of a huge Foxxcon plant, legislating that any legal challenges from environmentalists must go straight to the Republican-run State Supreme Court for judgment. Since Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce has successfully packed that court with their paid stooges, the outcome of any environmental lawsuit is a foregone conclusion in favor of whatever degradation Foxxcon might have wrought.
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Incidentally, I have no idea where Hurricane Jose plans to go. I had been checking storm predictions on windy.com daily as Florida braced for Irma's assault, and the precise tracks predicted for the two hurricanes changed from day to day. The site originally had Irma blustering up Florida's east coast and crashing into the U.S. again where Georgia meets South Carolina, but it moved her path westward a little bit each day. As of this morning, windy.com has Jose brushing against North Carolina's outer banks, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, but mostly staying out to sea.
I think the good citizens of the landlocked state of Vermont may rest easy. Until the snows fall, anyway.
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Tune in again tomorrow for a bonus cartoon on another topic about which all the other members of the AAEC site have already picked the bones clean.
I was enjoying this cartoon until I got to the reference to "prayer models" at which point I moved beyond enjoyment into a kind of liberal-weather-nerd ecstasy.
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