Q Toon: Stumped Speechless

Here at last is my cartoon response to Fox Noise's cattle call in Milwaukee last week of eight of the Republican candidates hoping against hope that something, anything, will force Corrupt Donald Trump to drop out of the presidential race.

At the moment, even though Trump is facing four separate felony trials going into the election, for everything from paying off a porn star to trying to subvert an election to sending a lynch mob into the halls of Congress, that seems like a long shot. Trump does not know the meaning of defeat.

Or truth, or integrity, or perfect, or democracy, or Constitution, or Corinthians.

My cartoon, of course, is riffing on Bret Baier's asking the candidates to raise their hands if they would support Trump as the nominee of their party even if he were convicted in one of those trials. Depending on whom you ask, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson was the only candidate who kept his hands down. 

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been most vocal of any of the eight in proclaiming that Trump is unqualified to be President again; but he sort of halfway raised a hand. Perhaps he was asking recognition to speak.

The other six definitely raised their hands: Tech Bro Vivek Ramaswami right away; Florida Governor Ron DesAntis after checking what the candidates to his right and left were doing.

It was a trick question anyway. Each candidate, in order for permission to be on stage at all, had to first sign a promise to support the Republican presidential nominee, whoever that trumps out to be.

Meanwhile, the only thing more universal among Republicans than slavish loyalty to Donald P0115809 Trump is their fear and loathing of transgender Americans. The candidates pledged to continue their party's assault on transgender student athletes especially:

"If you’re able-bodied in America, you work. If you take out a loan, you pay it back. If you commit a violent crime, you got to jail. And if God made you a man, you play sports against men." — Sen. Tim Scott, closing statement.

“[T]here’s a lot of crazy woke things happening in schools ... biological boys don’t belong in the locker rooms of any of our girls.”— former Gov. Nikki Haley, in response to a question

“I’m saying in North Dakota, we made a priority of protecting women’s sports and we’ve done that in our state." —Gov. Doug Borgum (who vetoed one anti-trans athlete bill in North Dakota but signed two others)

"There are only two genders." — Vivek Ramaswamy

I think we have finally found here one thing that might just possibly shake Republicans' unquestioning devotion to Trump — as absurdly incredible as his declaring himself a transgender student athlete would be.

But then, he does seem to think that he's 6'3" and 215 pounds.

And he does have the vocabulary of a third grader.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Last night, I was leafing through some of my recent cartoons hunting up ones in which some of the characters in this week's cartoon will appear, and I discovered that I was incorrect in stating that I have not drawn Donald P01135809 in a cartoon since January 21, 2021.

Well, mostly incorrect. It's not really him in the cartoon.

It was a pillow with the face from that Trump balloon.

You remember that balloon... it was well over 6'3"; but filled with hot air, it just might have weighed in at 215 lbs.

Kurze Kerze

Today's Graphical History Tour returns to Germany, August, 1923, when the government of a guy you've never heard of fell and was replaced by the government of a guy you've completely forgotten.

"Das Neue Licht" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderatsch, Berlin, August 26, 1923

Well, if you've been paying attention to these blog posts, you have heard of German Reichkanzler Wilhelm Cano, who resigned on August 12, 1923 after 264 days in office. A businessman, not a politician, Cano's administration oversaw disastrous hyperinflation, widespread food shortages, French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr valley, and a breakdown of  reparations negotiations over French insistence that Cano first bring a halt to Germans' active and passive resistance to that occupation.

Having thus soured on the businessman's leadership (why does anyone still think that skill set translates well?), President Friedrich Ebert tapped politician Gustav Ernst Stresemann to form a new coalition cabinet. 

"Die Große Koalition" by Karl Arnold, Simplicissimus, Sept. 3, 1923

Contrary to what the red bride in Karl Arnold's cartoon suggests, Stresemann's "grand coalition" included no communists. The left was represented in Stresemann's cabinet by Ebert's Social Democratic Party. 

"It's Strange Where Some Folks Go to Avoid the Heat" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 18, 1923

Cartoonists (and politicians) in the U.S. were similarly convinced that the threat in Germany was from communists. But in fact, Streseman's German People's Party (DVP) was somewhat right of center at the time, eventually tending toward more and more conservative positions as the decade came to an end.

Communists did, however, seize power in Lübeck in August, and fought against government militia in Saxony. Martial law was declared in Hamburg when striking shipyard workers rioted. 

"Het Aanbod van de Duitse Industriëlen" by Albert Hahn [Dijkman] Jr. in de Notenkraker, Amsterdam, August, 1923

And in September, Time magazine reported a riot in Munich "because retailers of beer tried to keep the price down by increasing the froth."

"Deutsches Orchester" by Oskar Theuer in Ulk, Berlin, Aug. 31, 1923

That was not the Beerhall Putsch you may remember from history class (where permitted by law). The putsch would come in November, followed later that month by the fall of the Stresemann government.

And yet, by introducing the Rentemark to stabilize German currency, and negotiating French withdrawal from the Ruhr, Stresemann's is considered one of the more successful Weimar administrations.

"The Trials of a Cartoonist"

"The Trials of a Cartoonist" by J.T. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Aug. 24, 1923

 Just something I came across on its 100th anniversary yesterday.

Q Toon: It's Rom-Complicated

Red, White, and Royal Blue is a movie adaptation of a book by Casey McQuiston streaming this month on amazon Prime. The romantic comedy stars Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galatzine as, respectively, the son of an American President and the second-in-line to the British throne, who initially can't stand each other. But they are thrown together by the protocol / damage control teams of the White House and Buckingham Palace after they accidentally destroy the seven-meter-tall cake at the wedding of Prince Henry's older brother.

And, of course, they end up falling in love with each other.

I haven't read the book, but I've seen the movie, and oodles of social media click-bait about it. LGBTQ media seem to be much more impressed with it than any straight media I've read. The thing LGBTQ media seem most impressed by, however, is that First Son Alex and Prince Henry are shown making out in the missionary position, which I guess straight people didn't know was a thing before. (The scene earned RW&RB an R rating, even though it's much tamer than much of what you'll see in heterosexual rom-coms. No butts or genitalia. Or grunting and groaning, for that matter.)

I'm not giving away the plot with that, by the way. A big difference between this rom-com and the standard heterosexual ones is that it's less about Will They Or Won't They than it is about Wait Till This Gets Out.

As with any rom-com, a certain suspension of belief is required. It's hard to imagine how the two could carry on their intercontinental love affair as long as they do without it showing up in the British tabloids. And a Democratic President —even one from Texas— letting her son convince her reelection team to focus on the Lone Star State to the apparent exclusion of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and several other swing states? Really?

And some things in the film are overly precious. Not only is the American President a woman, so is the British Prime Minister, who is Black and Caribbean to boot. Also, there is always someone with a Pride Flag in the paltry crowds at Alex's campaign appearances, even before he comes out as bisexual to his parents. I suppose that suggests that 10% of voters just have very good gaydar.

Naturally, fans are hoping for a sequel; the entertainment industry being what it is, if the movie is deemed successful, amazon won't leave well enough alone. In that case, a sequel about impeachment proceedings might not be any more far-fetched than anything in the original.

In any case, I would fully expect the sequel to include yet another wedding cake disaster.

Toon: The Heels of Justice Grind Slowly

In two and two-thirds years, I have still not drawn the sore loser of the last presidential election since the day he scuttled out of office with his planeload of purloined papers.

Not that I'm making any promises, mind you.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I considered drawing something I imagined candidates might say at the Republican also-rans' debate in Milwaukee on Wednesday. But I decided to wait to find out what they actually do say.

Unless I tune in to Tucker's Trumpterview instead to find out whether Carlson swallows or spits.

Flights of Fantasy

Refreshing my memory about one of the cartoons in last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I came across a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons doodles I had drawn 40 years ago this month.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 8, 1983

The previous year, I had written a much-too-long article for the ill-fated Kenosha Tribune about GenCon, the annual August convention of fantasy gamers hosted by TSR Inc. Originally held in the company's hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (hence its name), the convention moved to the more spacious University of Wisconsin at Parkside just outside of Kenosha from 1978 to 1984.

In 1983, I stuck to drawings, GenCon having included an art show in that year's convention. GenCon was held August 18 and 19, 1983.

I had a hard time finding the original of this pen-and-ink drawing, until I remembered that in spite of the stiffness of the characters, I liked it enough to have it framed and hanging it in my old apartment.

"Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream," August, 1983

Sure enough, there it was, somewhat yellowed from its years on a wall, still in a frame on a basement shelf of odds and ends from my apartment that have never found a home in our house. 

I'm fairly certain that I don't have the original drawings for the D&D creatures in the Ranger clipping at the top of this post, however. I do have some similar sketches for the GenCon recap in a Ranger the next September; but if I ever got the kobold, grimlock, and white dragon drawings back from the Ranger, I probably slipped them into my AD&D manuals that got soaked after our basement flooded several years ago.

For someone who hates drawing buildings, I certainly included quite a bit of architecture in "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream."

"Attack of the Corbinards"

I dispensed quickly with the task of drawing any architecture in "Attack of the Corbinards," in which Hitchcock gets medieval. It could probably have benefited on a cinematic level from a more populated battlefield. 

None of these drawings were stored with the others; this one shared a folder with some charcoal drawings and wound up with some charcoal smudges on it (removed with Photoshop).

But I believe it was included in the 1983 art display. It doesn't have a title on the back, but it does have my signature and the numbering of the exhibit organizers there. The signature on the front of these, by the way, is a quondam runification of my name.

Further technical arcana: the siren and "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream" were drawn on bristol board, whereas "Attack of the Corbinards" was drawn on plain old typing paper. It also wasn't printed in the Ranger, so now it's a Bergetoons exclusive.

Q Toon: Hard Time

A new law in the southeast Asian country of Malaysia criminalizes not just the import and sale of a certain rainbow-themed sportswatch, but the wearing of one as well. The penalty, for resident citizens and tourists alike, is up to three years in prison and a fine of 20,000 ringgit (about $4,375, £3,425 ).

Malaysia, a Ron DesAntis wet dream of a country, just held national elections last Saturday in which a coalition of Malay-Muslim political parties accused Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of not being draconian enough in his persecution of LGBTQ+ communities and friends.

“The Malaysian government is committed to preventing the spread of elements that are harmful or may be harmful to morals,” the [Interior] ministry said in a statement.

It said the watches “may harm … the interests of the nation by promoting, supporting and normalising the LGBTQ+ movement that is not accepted by the general public”.

A ministry official told Agence France-Presse in May that 172 watches worth $14,000 (£10,960) were seized in raids because they bore the “LGBTQ” acronym and had six colours instead of the seven in a rainbow.

Swatch is suing Malaysia over the confiscated timepieces; in a statement, CEO Nick Hayek wrote:

“We strongly contest that our collection of watches using rainbow colors and having a message of peace and love could be harmful for whomever. On the contrary, Swatch always promotes a positive message of joy in life. This is nothing political. We wonder how the Malaysian government will confiscate the many beautiful natural rainbows that show up in the skies above Malaysia.”

In the pictures I've seen of these watches, they are available in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple; there is a small rainbow flag on the strap loop. You'd have to have all six on your arm before it was obvious to passers-by that you were making a pro-LGBTQ+ rights statement. 

On a scale of 0 to The 1975, wearing one such watch has to rank no higher than the mid double digits.

This Week's Sneak Peek

It’s always Hammer Time somewhere…
 

Drawn During Dog Days

It has been a couple of months since I've featured my own cartoons in these weekly Graphical History Tours, so it's about time to rummage through my archives in search of my favorite August cartoons from years ending in three.

The summer pickings in some years are meager, so all of these have appeared here before.

UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 8, 1983

As it happens, I drew several cartoons in August of 1983 in spite of not having a place ready to publish them. But I really liked this one, so I submitted it when the student paper at University of Wisconsin-Parkside resumed publication in September.

August, 1993

I drew this cartoon for the University of Milwaukee student newspaper, the Post, in August of 1993. I had just returned home from having attended a church secretaries' convention in Minnesota during widespread disastrous flooding of the upper Mississippi River and its tributaries that summer. The bus from Minneapolis to St. Peter was diverted so often by washed-out roads that I ended up missing a TV reporter waiting to interview the only male secretary signed up to attend the convention.

Perhaps that missed interview was still on my mind as I started my cartoon, based on the timeworn criticism of people who rebuild in disaster zones.

Unfortunately, the Post didn't publish any issues that August, so the cartoon has only appeared on your humble scribbler's blog.

I suppose the latest home of the poor fellow starring in the cartoon might be on Maui. But really, with climate change, he'd be in danger living just about anywhere in the world.

You gotta wonder why we keep rebuilding on this planet.

Business Journal, Aug. 22, 2003

Moving on to lighter fare: The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee had its editorial nose out of joint over a gloomy article in the New York Times about Milwaukee, which the Times characterized as being a decaying, crime-ridden small city with third-rate sports teams and no future.

The problem with criticizing the Times's assessment, however, is that crime and urban decay have indeed been significant problems for Milwaukee. The halcyon days of its Socialist mayors was followed by the Freeway Era, when superhighways bulldozed their ways through vibrant neighborhoods and promoted the flight of the Middle Class, high-paying jobs, and their accompanying tax base into the suburbs.

Milwaukee has since done a lot to revitalize its downtown, converting old factories and warehouses into attractive apartment and commercial buildings. But it still suffers from outstate hostility, exemplified by former Governor Tommy "Stick It To 'Em" Thompson, Scott Walker's Act 10, and this year's wrangling over state aid.

The four Racing Sausage mascots pictured in the cartoon, Italian, Polish, Hot Dog, and Bratwurst, have since been joined by Sr. Chorizo, reflecting most of the predominant ethnic groups in Milwaukee. (Is there any encased ground meat that could represent the Black community?)

While you can find Norwegians everywhere in the state of Wisconsin, we haven't been prominent — or assertive — enough to rate our own festival on the Summerfest grounds, and certainly not our own racing sausage.

I think I should have had the reporter ask "Which one of youse is the lutefisk," though.

Q Syndicate, August, 2013

I had been sending colorized cartoons to Q Syndicate for a year by August of 2013, but I decided that this reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho had to be in grayscale only.

The news story behind the cartoon was the ruling of the California Supreme Court rejecting an appeal by the antigay interest group ProtectMarriage. ProtectMarriage wanted the court to overturn an appeal court judge's ruling that the so-called Definition of Marriage Amendment passed by Proposition 8 in 2008 was unconstitutional.

Much as I dislike drawing buildings, I remain mostly pleased with how this cartoon turned out.

✍

I have to apologize here for a post consisting entirely of rerun material. (I can't even blame the writers' strike.)

But in fact-checking this post, I did run across some stuff that I have not posted before. I'm still hunting through my archives for the original artwork, and hope to have new reminiscences here next Saturday.

Q Toon: Moatalitarianism

The thinking that went into this week's cartoon involved not just Texas Governor Greg Abbott's razor wire flotilla in the Rio Grande, but also Anne Applebaum's article from The Atlantic about how having complete power of all the branches of government in a state is never enough for today's Republicans.

Her column on Republican totalitarianism discusses the Tennessee legislature's ejection of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson for having the temerity to bring a megaphone to the statehouse — a move made because Republicans routinely shut off Democrats' microphones. Republicans there have divided Nashville among three majority-rural congressional districts, thus depriving the citizens of the state's largest city of any true representation in Congress.

Seeking to prevent passage of a state constitutional amendment by popular vote protecting abortion rights, Ohio Republicans put a measure on the ballot this past Tuesday requiring popular constitutional amendments to pass by a 60% supermajority. The legislature didn't pick that percentage at random: polling shows abortion rights are supported by 58% of the Ohio electorate. If support had polled at 62%, Republicans would have required passage by a 2/3 supermajority.

Republicans had to act fast to get this "Issue 1" onto a special August 8 ballot; the abortion rights amendment comes up for popular vote in November.

Republican supermajority lawmakers couldn't get their 60% voter approval idea onto the state's May primary ballot, so in February they came up with a new plan — an August special election.

There was just one problem: Republicans had voted to eliminate most August special elections in a law they passed in December. [Ohio Secretary of State Frank] LaRose, who testified in support of that law, said it shouldn't be an issue.

And to keep amendment referenda Republicans don't like from getting onto future ballots in the first place, "Issue 1" would have required citizen groups to get voter signatures in each of Ohio's 88 counties, up from 44 required previously.

Happily, Ohio voters rejected Issue 1 — albeit by a majority that would have been insufficient to repeal the 60% threshold if it had already been in effect. 

In Florida, several school districts announced that they would no longer offer Advanced Placement Psychology courses for college-bound high school students, thanks to repressive legislation by Gov. Ron DesAntis and his minions in his state legislature.

These decisions came after the College Board, which administers the Advanced Placement program, announced that the state had “effectively banned” AP Psychology because state legislation, commonly referred to as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, doesn’t permit instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity, which the College Board considers essential for completing the course.

Florida officials have countered that AP Psychology hasn’t been banned, but rather that the College Board is playing politics by telling school districts they can’t offer the course unless it’s taught in full.

Well, if there's anything Republicans love these days, it's censoring educational materials. Especially if they can keep LGBTQ+ people out of sight, and therefore out of impressionable teenage minds. We'll tell you what you can teach, the totalitarian Republicans say to those meddlesome academics. Just teach our Officially Approved curriculum!

In a similar vein, Arkansas Republicans passed a law under which librarians and booksellers could be criminally charged for providing "harmful materials" to minors. A U.S. District Court Judge has temporarily suspended that law, but it's flabbergasting to realize that they find nothing wrong with providing guns to minors, but are scared spitless at the prospect of a kid finding Heather Has Two Mommies on a bookshelf.

In "red" states around the country, legislatures' attacks on transgender citizens have included requiring state-issued ID's to identify everyone by the gender assigned to them at birth. This is sure to hamper transgender voting every time a poll worker is handed an identification card that doesn't appear to match the person handing it to them.

Which will have the added bonus (as Republicans see it) of slowing down those long voter lines in urban areas where many Democrats live. If they only disenfranchise transgender people, that's a win for them. Bogging down those urban polling places is just gravy.

If they make voting enough of a hassle, they might not even need that 60% threshold business anyway.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Somewhat of a mess-up at the church where I'm the musician yesterday. 

Our pastor was on vacation, and the guest pastor wanted to change the Hymn of the Day from what I had originally picked, to go along with an alternate Gospel reading he wanted to preach on. So I had replaced in the overhead projection PowerPoint the hymn I had chosen with the one the guest preacher wanted.

Or so I thought. I had mistaken the hymn he wanted with a hymn the congregation knows well. The hymn he wanted was one the congregation has never sung. And in spite of being in 4/4 time, there is an inexplicable 3/4 measure second from the end of each verse, guaranteed to trip everybody up. Including the lead musician.

Saturday night, my husband and I came home from a family gathering to find a message from the president of the congregation on our land line phone. The guest pastor had come down ill, and there was no second-string guest pastor to fill in.

Then, when I came in on Sunday morning, the computer that runs the PowerPoint wanted to spend half an hour installing an update to the operating system, leaving me very little time to adjust the PowerPoint to match what we worship leaders decided upon. Furthermore, I had forgotten my glasses at home, so I couldn't read what was on the PowerPoint slides as I attempted to move them around.

What's more, the title of the guest pastor's choice of hymn was in the bulletin, but over the score of the hymn I had originally chosen. I had no slides for my choice of the hymn, but I decided that it was better to have the congregation sing the hymn they know rather than the one they didn't. Besides, I couldn't lead the singing if I couldn't read the words.

Meanwhile, the tech guys were having problems getting the live feed to Facebook — a mix-up copying a key code, then the signal deciding to buffer during the service — but at least that was not up to me to worry about.

And to top things off, midway through the service, I noticed that the Sending Song in the bulletin was not the one I had chosen for this week; it was the one I'd chosen for the service two weeks earlier. Oh, well: it was too late to get that hymn into the PowerPoint. We sang the hymn in the bulletin, and I'm sure nobody was the wiser.

(Psst — don't tell them!)

The World Facing Coolidge

100 years ago this week, the United States was mourning the death of one president and wondering what to expect from its new one.

"His Heritage" by Harold Talburt for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Aug. 7, 1923

People may have known that as Governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge had called in the National Guard to put down a strike by police in Boston, but he never made much news as Vice President. He was, however, the first Veep to attend cabinet meetings, so he wasn't coming into office unaware of what lay ahead. Nor was he apt to make significant changes to administration policy, as a few Vice Presidents in his position had done before him.

So what was going on in the world and the nation in 1923?

"The Beneficent Despot" by Max Beerbaum, by June 23 1923

This Max Beerbaum cartoon depicts Italy's King Vittorio Emanuele III commending Fascist Prime Minister Benito Mussolini to British monarch George V. The cartoon comes from a display that accompanied Beerbaum on a tour of the U.S. in the spring of 1923.

Although Beerbaum was not among them, Mussolini had his supporters in both Great Britain and the U.S. They included the Chicago Tribune, William Randolph Hearst, and U.S. Ambassador to Italy Richard W. Child, who were impressed with Mussolini's anti-Bolshevik policies. Child would report home with approval that results of Mussolini's first year in power “have been excellent, and during the last twelve months there has not been a single strike in the whole of Italy.”

A law passed by the Italian parliament in June with the intent of consolidating Fascist rule provided that the party gaining the largest share of the votes in the next year's elections – even if it won only 25% of the votes – would gain two-thirds of the seats in parliament.

"Hakenkreuz und Sowjetstern" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, August 12, 1923

Meanwhile, in Germany, as the text above Werner Hahmann's cartoon explained, "A lively exchange of opinions [took] place between Nationalists and Communists about their common points of agreement."

"The Old Passive Cow" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Aug. 17, 1923

1923 came to be known in Germany as the Year of Crises. Citizens living under French and Belgian occupation in the Ruhr valley continued resistance with workers' strikes and industrial sabotage. German Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno was replaced with Gustav Streseman on August 13.

"One Place Where a Dollar Buys More'n Enough" by Dorman Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Aug. 1, 1923

Dorman Smith's depiction of German hyperinflation was not far off-base. Germans did indeed have to transport their rapidly depreciating currency by cart just to buy basic necessities. The cost of a loaf of bread, .25 Reichsmark in 1918, had risen to 700 Reichsmarks January of 1923, only to soar past 1,200 RM in May, 100,000 in July, two million in September, 670 million in October, and 80 billion in November.

"Waiting for the Signal Bell" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Aug. 18, 1923

Closer to home, Coolidge would continue moves begun by the Harding Administration to extend official recognition to the regime of Álvaro Obregón in Mexico. That Pancho Villa had been killed in a government-set-up ambush in July helped foster the impression in Washington that political stability was replacing the Mexican Revolutionary Era. Full recognition came soon after Mexico and the U.S. signed the Bucareli Treaty in August, spelling out the rights of the Mexican government and U.S. oil companies.

I doubt, however, that Mexican people or politicians would have agreed with cartoonist Elmer Bushnell's sign alleging that Mexico's "huge tracts of territory need colonists." They wouldn't have gone so far as to set up floating razor wire in the Rio Grande to keep American and Canadian capitalists out, though.

"Looks As If Some of the Boys..." by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, June 16 1923

Domestically, the change of administration made little difference to Coolidge's fellow Republicans who opposed U.S. joining the League of Nations. Coolidge believed that staying out of the League was a settled issue, although he did support U.S. participating in a World Court.

"Wiping His Feet on It" by Rollin Kirby in New York Evening World, ca. June 10, 1923

The terrorist lynching of Black Americans by the Ku Klux Klan and its open flouting of the law would continue throughout the Coolidge presidency. The decade saw Klan influence at its peak, particularly at the 1924 Democratic National Convention.

"High Finance" by Hal Coffman for International Feature Service, Aug. 9, 1923

Coolidge would be blessed with a booming economy, but there were those who cautioned that soaring stock market gains would not be sustainable. Cartoonists such as Hal Coffman who had been preaching thriftiness and a solid work ethic foresaw hard times ahead.

The decision by the small investor atop the stack that "After this, I better put my money in a savings bank" would, sadly, not be much help when the tide indeed went out.

Q Toon: Earmarks the Spot

I've been waiting a long time for a reason to feature my home state Congressman Mark Pocan in a cartoon, and here it is.

Pocan has represented the Madison area in Congress ever since Tammy Baldwin gave up the seat to run for the Senate in 2012. Openly gay throughout his political career and currently the Chair of the House Equality Caucus, he took it personally last month when House Republicans on the Appropriations Committee singled out three LGBTQ+-related projects — "earmarks" — to cut from this year's budget.

Tensions boiled over Tuesday after Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) introduced an amendment to the annual funding bill covering the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development to eliminate $3.62 million in funding for three LGBTQ community centers in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

The amendment, which Cole said Tuesday would crack down on “problematic” spending, also prohibits federal funds from being used to fly LGBTQ Pride flags outside government buildings.

It passed Tuesday in a 32-26 vote along party lines.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus and one of 12 openly LGBTQ members of Congress, called the proposal “an embarrassment.”

“This amendment brings this committee to a new low,” Pocan said Tuesday during a markup of the bill. “The fact that you would take away members’ earmarks simply because they refer to the LGBTQ+ community is insane.”

“If you were to take away earmarks because they went to the NAACP or the Urban League, you would rightfully so be called racist bigots,” Pocan said. “But when you do it to the LGBT community, it’s another frickin’ day in Congress.”

I used Pocan's language on Twitter (or Xchan, or whatever it's called now) in my cartoon; he must have had second thoughts about more colorful language. I'm kind of sorry that I didn't keep the "frickin'" in there, though.

As it is, Republicans demanded that Pocan's comments and those of two other Democrats on the committee be taken down, and silenced any further statements he may have wanted to make.

But before that happened, Rep. Pocan pointed out to his Republican colleagues that

"The pride flags that you're so passionate about cost somewhere between, if you look on line, $25 and $40. We are micromanaging, pedantically, dealing with this budget at such a small level, in order to make certain people in your base happy, and in your caucus happy, who have built a brand around hate. So, in doing so, you are doing the silliness of determining whether $25 flags come out of the Appropriations budget."

If the Senate is forced to spend time debating the savings to the nation's budget by prohibiting pride flags at federal facilities, perhaps they could save us even more by prohibiting the Alabama state flag as well.

Take that, Senator Tuberville.