Q Toon: None Taken

The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a pair of cases over transgender student athletes' rights in Idaho and West Virginia. The two states are among several Republican-run states with blanket bans prohibiting transgender youth from participating in school athletics.

That the present Republican majority will rule against the two girls is sadly a foregone conclusion; the only suspense is whether their ruling will be so broad as to prevent transgender students from athletic activities anywhere, or so narrow as to apply only to Idaho and West Virginia.

The primary concern of the majority justices appears to be how the lawyers arguing on behalf of the two athletes want to define what a female is and whether laws prohibiting gender discrimination apply to that definition. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are predictably hostile to non-cisgender, non-heterosexual plaintiffs, but former girls’ basketball coach Brett Kavanaugh took a moment to offer sympathy to transgender student athletes. That sympathy, however, is countered by his sympathy for hypothetical cisgender student athletes who don't make the team:

“I hate–hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. I hate that,” Kavanaugh said. “But … it’s kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teams. And someone who tries out and makes it, who is a transgender girl, will bump from the starting lineup, from playing time, from the team, from the all league, and those things matter to people big time, will bump someone else.”

“We have to recognize on both sides the zero-sum. It’s not like, ‘Oh, just add another person to the team.’ That’s not how sports works. ... Someone else is going to get disadvantaged.”

It’s a shame that there isn’t enough room on a team’s bench for everybody who was promised a seat.

MLK Day's Sneak Peek

On this Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2026, it's worth remembering the words of the prophet:

"We shall have to repent in this generation, not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." — quoted in Concise Dictionary of Religious Quotations, W. Neil, ed.

Uncle Samicus Curiae Mundi

The Graphical History Tour returns to January of 1926, and a moment when it appeared that Uncle Sam was ready to break out of his isolationist sulk.

"Down Comes That Fence" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 29, 1926

On January 27, 1926, the U.S. Senate voted 76 to 17 in favor of joining the World Court, a proposal that had been waiting for Senate approval since the Harding administration. The World Court was established in 1921 as a peacekeeping arm of the League of Nations to provide an alternative to war for settling international disputes.

"On the Threshold" by Ed Gale in Los Angeles Times, Jan. 31, 1926

Senate approval came with reservations. Conditions stipulated in the Senate bill included requiring all World Court proceedings to be public, and that the U.S. should be a party to all cases having any effect on U.S. interests.

"Everything to Lose—Nothing to Gain" by Wm. A. Rogers in Washington Post, Jan. 27, 1926

William Hanny's cartoon at the top of today's post notwithstanding, opposition to U.S. participation in the World Court remained. William Rogers depicted the Court's other members outnumbering the U.S. in unified opposition. Only Uncle Sam has any chips on this poker table (they spell out "Monroe Doctrine" and "Independence").

"The Devil's Dish" by T.E. Powers for Star newspapers, ca. Jan. 26, 1926

Opposition by the "irreconcilables" crossed party lines: there were Republicans and Democrats against anything to do with the late Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, whereas the Coolidge administration was in favor of joining the World Court.

T.E. Powers, drawing for Democrat-affiliated Hearst newspapers, discounted the Court as a warmed-over stew of intrigue, revenge, jealousy, and hate.

"Got Him At Last" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Star, Jan. 28, 1926

Drawing from a Canadian vantage point, Sam Hunter saw the Senate bringing a reluctant Uncle Sam at long last to justice.

"All Aboard" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 28, 1926

But this Senate vote was not ratification of the treaty the U.S. had signed in Geneva. Those five reservations the Senate insisted upon were never resolved.

"Bitter Bitter Enders" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Jan. 31, 1926

In 1930, President Herbert Hoover would ask the Senate to ratify the Geneva treaty, only to have his request all but ignored. The Senate finally took up a ratification vote in 1935, during Franklin Roosevelt's first term as President. The vote in favor, 52 to 36, fell short of the two-thirds majority required.

The World Court was dissolved, along with other functions of the League of Nations, in 1945, and its duties turned over to the newly established International Court of Justice. The U.S. has been a member of the ICJ from the beginning, at least up to the present Lawless Trump Regime.

✍

Uncle Sam appears in six of today's seven editorial cartoons. Come back next week, when the Graphical History Tour follows up on a reader's question about another American symbol.

Q Toon: Besmirching Her Good Name

Watching Homeland Security Secretary Cosplay Kristi Noem's press announcement defending her ICE agent killing a woman in Minneapolis as she attempted to drive away from him — and her and Border Czar Tom Homan's appearances on the Sunday morning news programs — I couldn't get over the cognitive dissonance between their talking point that people need to cool their "overheated rhetoric," and all the overheated rhetoric making up the rest of their talking points.

We've all seen the videos of what really happened, but Noem, Homan, and the rest of the Lawless Trump Regime continue to push a fantasy narrative in which the shooting victim, Renee Macklin Good, was a radical left-wing domestic terrorist who charged her minivan directly at ICE agent Jonathan Ross with intent to kill.

Vice President J.D. Vance has argued that Ross shot Good because he had been struck once before by a vehicle driven by a suspect. But that only demonstrates that Ross uses the foolhardy but common border patrol tactic of getting in front of a moving vehicle in order to justify shooting at its driver.

You may wonder why I have drawn for the LGBTQ+ press a cartoon about this story, or why I inserted "with her lesbian co-conspirator" in the first panel.

Initial reporting stated that the youngest of Renee Macklin Good's children, a six-year-old boy, has been left without parents (his father having died in 2023). Most media and other editorial cartoonists have accepted that as fact, but Advocate and other LGBTQ+ publications, followed by local newsmedia and NPR, have reported that the woman with Renee Good when she was shot was her wife, Becca Good.

I certainly feel terrible for the boy, but at least he still has a step-mother. I hope that she and the boy's grandparents (who, I gather, are not Minnesotans) can remain on amicable terms while working out custody and visitation rights, so as not to make his tragedy even worse than it already is.

Out-of-state politicians and the mainstream media had been glossing over Renee and Becca's relationship, even though Becca was right there when Ross murdered her wife. Trump called Becca Good her wife’s “friend"; even John Stewart called Renee “a single woman” on Monday night’s Daily Show.

On the other hand, the Lawless Trump Regime's ironically-called Department of Justice has reportedly launched a criminal investigation of Renee Good's widow, which has prompted six federal prosecutors in Minnesota to resign in protest. (They include the lead prosecutor in that Minnesota day care fraud case Republicans would much rather talk about.)

Matt Sepic, Minnesota Public Radio: "In a statement, Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche says, quote, 'There is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation.' The DOJ says ICE has its own internal investigation underway that runs parallel to, quote, 'any FBI investigation.' But the same source we mentioned earlier, who's not authorized to speak on the record, tells me that this is untrue and that there is no internal ICE investigation of the shooting."

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey posted on social media that, "The people pushing to prosecute Renee's widow are monsters"; Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) added, "The family and loved ones of Renee Good deserve justice, not political attacks."

Sadly, justice is not a priority of the Lawless Trump Regime, and political attacks are.

This Week's Sneak Peek

There's an LGBTQ+ angle to last week's big story (no, not the Golden Globes), so I get to be the last editorial cartoonist to publish Kosplay Kristi Noem and her Big Stetson Hat.

I'll have more on this later this week. In the meantime, Happy Tjugondag Knut Eve!

January ’Sixes

This week's Graphical History Tour opens on a somber note, as we come to January, 1986, and one of those moments where anybody alive them remembers where they were and what they were doing.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 6, 1986

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded at "throttle up," just over a minute after launch. All aboard were killed, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, chosen to be the first civilian passenger to fly into space. 

In five years, space shuttle flights had almost become routine, but because of McAuliffe's presence on the crew, millions of schoolchildren across the country were watching the liftoff. It was carried live on all the TV networks. 

We all knew the liftoff was not supposed to look like this. Everyone looked on in stunned silence, hoping against all reason to see the shuttle emerge from the fireball.

But no escape measures available to the crew; ejection seats and full pressure suits used in the first four space shuttle test flights had been removed before operational flights began in 1981. It's highly improbable that they would have been helpful in the event of an explosion, anyway.

A Presidential Commission attributed the explosion to a faulty O-ring made of material vulnerable to changes in temperature (there had been freezing temperatures in Florida overnight). Shuttle flights were suspended until September 29, 1988, after the implementation of new safety measures and stricter design standards.

1996

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 25, 1996

We’re now in an even-numbered year, so here’s fair warning that upcoming Graphical History Tours are going to include some presidential election cartoons. Fair warning also that it’s January, and someone is getting ready to harangue a joint session of Congress live on all the TV networks.

President Bill Clinton was all set to run for reelection in January of 1996. While there was a crowded Republican field heading into the year, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole was the odds-on favorite. 

Multi-millionaire Steve Forbes, Jr., with a fortune at his disposal and a signature issue of replacing the current income tax system with a simple “flat tax” for everybody, had emerged as Dole’s closest rival.

2006 

for Q Syndicate, January, 2006

I have to tell you, when I was thumbing through my cartoons from January of 2006 to decide which one to post today, I had absolutely no recollection of what television show this cartoon was about.

The series might have been an attempt to update “Touched by an Angel” (1994-2003), or to make a faith-based “Harvey”; obviously, it never caught on. 

It was apparently one of the uncounted eminently forgettable January replacement series that come and go like Frosty the Snowman. Facebook Memories just reminded me of another such failed series, “¡Bob!”, a vehicle for Rob Schneider and Cheech Marin. I’m wondering if either of them remember it. I’ll bet you don’t.

2016

for Q Syndicate, January, 2016

Here's a cartoon about a spate of "religious liberty" laws, pushed by Republicans to legalize discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons — special rights for straights.

What I love about this cartoon is how easy winter scenes are to draw. Especially when the object is to set the cartoon in the middle of the most desolate nowhere imaginable. I may have spent more time thinking up the cartoon than drawing it, even considering all that lettering of the dialogue.

Well, here's where the Graphical History Tour ends today. Safe travels, drive carefully, remember to steer into a skid, and always remember to carry a blanket and maybe an extra jacket in the car.

Q Toon: The Sun Will Come Out, Ed Murrow

I had to draw this week's cartoon Sunday night, without knowing what the CBS Evening News set behind Tony Dokoupil took was going to look like, or what clothing choices he was going to make. But I did have this mission statement from the successor to Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Scott Pelley, Norah O'Donnell, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois:

“On too many stories, the press has missed the story,” he said. “And it’s not just us. It’s all of legacy media. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates, and not the average American. Or, we put too much weight in the analysis of academics, or elites, and not enough on you.”

It seems to be the consensus of media consultant types that news viewers are fed up with what people who know what they are talking about have to say about news events. Rather, viewers want to hear what Average Joe Schmoes think. The local NBC affiliate where I live has been promoting itself with the same promise to eschew expertise in favor of whatever some random person who just heard about something five seconds ago has to say about it.

Dokoupil moved to the evening news anchor post from CBS's morning news program, where he had shared hosting duties with Gayle King and retired football player Nate Burleson. As Katie Couric could have told him, the switch from soft and happy morning news to the let's-get-serious evening desk is gonna be greeted with a lot of wariness and skepticism.

Swinging into your corn flakes, from CBS Mornings promo

So how's it going at Dokoupil's new job? He started his evening anchor stint two days ahead of time on Saturday to interview Pete Hegseth, who identifies as Secretary of War, about the U.S. military strike on Venezuela and kidnapping of President & Mrs. Nicolás Maduro. He lobbed a bunch of softball questions at Hegseth, allowing him to repeat his assigned talking points over and over unchallenged.

Although I'm still waiting to hear someone ask anyone from the Lawless Trump Regime why, if Congress was kept in the dark over our Venezuelan adventure out of concern that there might be a leak, Pete "Open Signal" Hegseth was included in the planning.

(Trump, by the way, has told reporters that oil company executives were kept informed of our invasion before and after the fact. I suspect that could have had something to do with the $436,000 bet somebody won on the Polymarket on-line gambling site by predicting that Maduro would be ousted by January 31. Or maybe that was just some Average Joe Schmoe included in Secy. Hegseth's group chat by mistake.)

Getting back to Dokoupil, there have been one or two technical glitches this week. But more importantly, viewers are waiting to see whether he will participate in Paramount's Bari Weisswashing of Trump regime news coverage by the network.

His leading off a segment on the fifth anniversary of Trump's attempted January 6 coup (the one at the U.S. Capitol, not the one in Venezuela) with cowardly both-sidesism and following up with weird cuddling up to Secretary of State Marco Rubio the other day are not exactly encouraging.

Good night, and good luck.

This Year's First Sneak Peek

A truism of the editorial cartooning biz is that there's no new news during the Christmas holidays.

That fails to take into account that we now have an impetuous, mercurial, president who demands constant adulation, considers himself accountable to no one, and yet is desperate to distract attention from his close friendship with a perv who shared his predilection for girls "on the young side."

My challenge is to figure out how the latest outburst, tantrum, or outrage is of particular interest to the LGBTQ+ community. Tune in later this week to find out how that went this time around.

...In with the Old

In keeping with the turn to a fresh calendar this week, Our Graphical History Tour moves on to a New Year: 1926

"The Cut-in Dance" by Fred G. Cooper in Life, New York, Dec. 31, 1925

Judging from most cartoonists of the time, Americans entered 1926 with a carefree optimism for the future that we who dwell in it can only envy.

"Yes, Sir, He's Our Baby" by J.T. Alley in Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn., Jan. 1, 1926

As with every other holiday that year, editorial cartoonists celebrated the nation's apparent prosperity. Senate Republican leader Charles Curtis promised the Washington Times,

"Our nation greets the New Year healthy and prosperous with the benefits of a kindly Providence scattered far and wide. The outlook for the next twelve months is particularly encouraging, with all signs pointing to a continuing prosperity for all alike. The present wave of prosperity, in which all the people are sharing, will last throughout the year."

Senator Curtis would be Vice President when the wave of prosperity washed out in 1929.

"The Morning After" by Jim Ring in Washington [DC] Times, Jan. 1, 1926

In the meantime, Jim Ring depicted Father Time ditching the robe and scythe in favor of an apron and broom, the better to sweep away the bad habits of 1925.

"The New Broom" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 1, 1926

According to Grover Page, that was more appropriately the New Year Baby's job.

"The Skeptic" by H.T. Webster for New York World Pub. Co., Jan. 1, 1926

Harold Webster's New Year Kid was not about to settle for the post of janitor. The little man was already out of diapers and ready to take over as Operations Manager.

"I Wish Old Man '25 Had Left a Clean Desk" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, Jan. 1, 1926

Would sitting down at Mr. Globehead’s desk bring the kid back down to size?

We have covered some of the tasks in Morris’s cartoon before: from coal mine strikes and lockouts, to French wartime debts, to colonial wars in Morocco and Iraq, to worldwide disarmament, to crime and Prohibition in the U.S., to whether to join the World Court.

But we haven’t mentioned the Tacna-Arica Situation, a border disagreement between Peru and Chile that would be settled by the Lima Agreement of 1929. So now you know.

"With Best Wishes for a Happy New Year" by J. Conagher in Life, New York, Dec. 31, 1925

J. (or F.?) Conagher's cartoon has little to do with the new year save for its caption. Rather, it's a complaint against the social reformers who brought about Prohibition and were pressing for further laws against smoking, restricting content of movies, and so forth.

And while we're on the topic of unresolved problems carrying over into the new year, Leslie Rogers had a specific issue:

"A Satisfactory Year for Him" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Jan. 2, 1926

There had been 12 Black Americans lynched in 1925 by the Chicago Defender's count. A Rogers cartoon about the most recent, of Lindsey Coleman in Clarksdale, Mississippi, appeared in our Graphical History Tour just before Christmas.

"Low and Order at Last" by Fred B. Watson in Afro-American, Jan. 2, 1926

A jury had found Coleman, a Black veteran of World War I, innocent of the axe murder of plantation store manager Grover Nicholas, brother of one of the men who then seized Coleman as he was leaving the courthouse. They dragged him into their car, drove him out of town, and shot him 26 times.

Tom Nicholas, J.T. Trayham, H.S. Blockley and G.O. Kane were arrested and charged with Coleman's murder. But while it must have come as a disappointment to Fred Watson, it should come as no surprise to students of history today that the charges against the four were dropped before the case was ever brought to trial.

As for Grover Nicholas's murder, two Black men, Ray Ford Leonard and John Fisher were found guilty on the testimony, later recanted, of Albert Hobbs. Another alleged party to the crime, Smith Bunns, died in jail, supposedly from an epileptic fall, within hours of his arrest.

"Happy New Year" by Orville P. Williams in New York Evening Journal (?), Jan. 1, 1926

White editorial cartoonist O.P. Williams offered his readers a cartoon encouraging tolerance in the new year. I've posted a number of his cartoons against the Ku Klux Klan, so I'll give him credit for as much sincerity on the issue as I'll give President Coolidge, who may have inspired this cartoon.

Toward the end of his December 8, 1925 annual message to Congress, Coolidge had this to say about racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance in the U.S.:

"Our country has many elements in its population, many different modes of thinking and living, all of which are striving in their own way to be loyal to the high ideals worthy of the crown of American citizenship. It is fundamental of our institutions that they seek to guarantee to all our inhabitants the right to live their own lives under the protection of the public law. This does not include any license to injure others materially, physically, morally, to Incite revolution, or to violate the established customs which have long bad the sanction of enlightened society.

"But it does mean the full right to liberty and equality before the law without distinction of race or creed. This condition can not be granted to others, or enjoyed by ourselves, except by the application of the principle of broadest tolerance. Bigotry is only another name for slavery. It reduces to serfdom not only those against whom it is directed, but also those who seek to apply it. An enlarged freedom can only be secured by the application of the golden rule. No other utterance ever presented such a practical rule of life."

"Speeding the Transient" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 1, 1926

On that note, I'm afraid it's time to slide along ourselves. Thanks for coming along on this sweep through history!

Out with the News...

I started taking photographs of each year's newspaper headlines way back at the end of 1973 as a way of making bookmarks in my photo albums. Lately, with fewer newspapers being published, and some of the remaining ones reserving the front page for local stories, I've had to resort to pasting together screen grabs — which at least makes available those world headlines that U.S. papers relegate to page 6B.

That said, here's my collage for 2025:

Wishing you all better news in 2026,

―Paul