Sundays in the Park with Adolf

Retiring Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has vowed to stay out of the Republican primary to succeed him.

So have the most prominent politicians who could have run.

Wisconsin State Assembly Majority Leader Robin Vos and former Republican Party National Chairman Reince Priebus were the only potential candidates with name recognition outside their own respective bailiwicks, but withdrew from consideration in the first couple days after Ryan announced his retirement. State Senators David Craig, Van Wangaard, and Steve Nass and Assembly members Amy Laudenbeck and Tyler August also took themselves out of the running.

So far, the only announced Republican candidate is Paul Nehlen*. Nehlen had announced his candidacy well before Ryan withdrew his; Nehlen had challenged Ryan in 2016, representing the Breitbart/Steve Bannon/Ann Coulter wing of the party. He was endorsed by Phyllis Schlaffly, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, and Gun Rights PAC that year. Donald Trump had toyed with the prospect of endorsing Nehlen in retaliation for Ryan's reluctance to support Trump's presidential campaign, but ultimately made nice with the Speaker of the House, who trounced Nehlen in the 2016 primary by a 6-to-1 margin.

Newspapers in Wisconsin's First CD were calling on Nehlen to quit the 2018 race because of his execrable racist views, even before Ryan pulled out. He was banned from Twitter in February after posting an image of Prince Harry's biracial fiancée Meghan Markle that was photoshopped to make her look like prehistoric Cheddar Man. A few days before that, he had posted a list of his critics, their phone numbers, e-mails and Twitter handles, adding, “Of those 81 people, 74 are Jews, while only 7 are non-Jews,” sparking a neo-Nazi flame war against them.

In another anti-Semitic tweet, Nehlen posted “Poop, incest, and pedophilia. Why are those common themes repeated so often with Jews?” But he's an equal opportunity bigot. He has told listeners of fellow Nazi David Duke's podcast that he'd like to see Trump's Ugly Wall equipped with “armed machine gun turrets every 300 yards. And you can automate those. Anyone who approaches that barrier will be treated as an enemy combatant. Man, woman or child.”

Rest assured, however, that Nehlen will not remain unchallenged for his party's nomination.

Bryan Steil, a former Ryan staffer currently serving on the board of regents of the University of Wisconsin, and State Rep. Samantha Kerkman are still weighing their options. Lack of name recognition at this date shouldn't hurt either one; very few residents had heard of Paul Ryan before he first ran for Congress in 1998, but he had the strong backing of the national GOP. Redistricting in 2000 and 2010 coupled with exurban sprawl out of Chicago has made the 1st CD increasingly Republican, so whoever wins the August primary may still have an advantage over the Democratic nominee even in this "blue wave" year.
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* Update: There's some guy named Nick Polce who also announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination last fall. All I know about him is that he's an Army Green Beret veteran (2002-2014) recently moved to Lake Geneva who checks all the far right-wing boxes and describes himself as part of the "freedom movement."

Q Toon: WeatherProphecy with Lauryl Sulfate

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.

Q Toon: Lost

GOProud has vanished. The ultra-conservative gay Republican group was to Log Cabin Republicans what the Tea Partisans are to Establishment Republicans -- hardline, doctrinaire, and bitchy.

They outed a Rick Perry pollster in December 2011; they endorsed Mitt Romney, who opposed same-sex marriage; they got into social-media fights with all comers; and they called conservative activist Cleta Mitchell a “bigot,” not especially helpful considering she was on a board that would decide whether they could sponsor the Conservative Political Action Conference, a longtime GOProud goal.

The group split away from the Log Cabineers, who had failed to issue knee-jerk endorsements of Republican candidates who actively opposed gay rights. GOProud's legislative agenda for 2011 was virtually indistinguishable from that of other conservative Republican groups; only its opposition to a federal antigay marriage amendment separated it from the Family Research Council. Even the "Defending Our Community" section of their platform referred to opposition to gun control.

I've had second thoughts about sending this cartoon to Q Syndicate rather than the one about marriage equality in Wisconsin posted here on Tuesday. The Wisconsin cartoon has gotten a lot of positive response in spite of my concern that few readers outside of Wisconsin would recognize that it was based on the seal on the Wisconsin state flag.

But I worry that while readers may pick up the reference to the search for a missing airplane in this week's cartoon, they won't have any awareness of GOProud. GOProud may have seen themselves as Dorothy Parker, but in the end, they were Baby Jane Hudson.

Q Toon: That's Entertainment

This week's cartoon takes us back a few years. And away from the usual preoccupation with LGBT issues of marriage equality, gays in the military, etc.

In Mr. Limbaugh's latest attempt at an apology for calling Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute whose sexual activities he would like to see posted on YouTube, he claimed to have accidentally departed from lofty conservative standards and become as bad as those lefty liberals:

 "This is the mistake I made: In fighting them on this issue last week, I became like them. Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge, against everything that I know to be right and wrong, I descended to their level when I used those two words to describe Sandra Fluke. That was my error. I became like them."

Conscientious conservatives must be relieved to know that Mr. Limbaugh was in no way emulating the elevated likes of Ann Coulter, or Andrew Breitbart of sainted memory. Nope, it was only a momentary lapse into liberalism. Liberanazilism, even. Sexually demeaning personal attacks are so unlike him!

Columnist Molly Ivins reported (Arizona Republic 10/17/1993) this incident from Limbaugh's TV show—"Here is a Limbaugh joke: Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?" And he puts up a picture of [13-year-old] Chelsea Clinton.

"Some of these babes, I'm telling you, like the sexual harassment crowd. They're out there protesting what they actually wish would happen to them sometimes." [Reported by Media Matters, 4/26/04]

One may at least take solace in the fact that Mr. Limbaugh is merely an entertainer, as many in the conservative movement have pointed out, and not a leader whom Republican politicians cross at their peril.

Blanche Is Not Hungry Today

When my Better Half saw this cartoon, his first thought was that this was a reference to Streetcar Named Desire, so I guess I have to explain that Blanche is not Blanche DuBois. Or Blanche Devereaux. Blanche Lincoln, Blanche Calloway, or Blanche Barlow.

I had hoped that the eyebrows, the shoulders and the bird would help identify her as Blanche Hudson.

It doesn't help that the person on the left is an amalgamation of two completely different people and ends up looking like neither. I had tried sketching her with Ann Coulter's hair and Bette Davis' eyes, but I decided I needed to have Baby Jane Hudson's hair to have any hope of anyone recognizing the movie connection.

I suppose I needed to have her singing "I'm Writing a Letter to Reagan."

At any rate, the subject of the cartoon concerns the flap in right-wing circles over Ann Coulter's scheduled feature appearance at GOProud's "Homocon" conference, where she is billed as "the right wing Judy Garland."

"The publication of emails exchanged between Ann Coulter and the editor of anti-gay site WorldNetDaily regarding Coulter having been dropped as a keynote speaker at a WND event has sparked Coulter’s ire. The right-wing icon launched into WND editor Joseph Farah, calling him a "swine," and suggesting that the content of the fringe-right site is selected as a matter of publicity seeking.

"The roots of the disagreement between Coulter and the fringe news site began with Coulter accepting an invitation to speak at the first "Homocon," an event hosted by right-wing gay group GoProud. Once WND got wind of the upcoming appearance, they struck Coulter off their list of speakers for an event ["The Taking America Back National Conference"] scheduled to take place in Miami."