Q Toon: W-hoops

Perhaps if I had followed basketball more closely, I would remember who Royce White and Enes Kantor were; they retired from the NBA a couple years ago. 

Apparently, life outside of the limelight has been lonely for them, because they have decided to enlist in the Republican Culture War against transgender athletes by claiming to be transgender themselves as a ruse to qualify for the WNBA draft. Royce's pretense of being transgender has extended only as far as donning a blonde wig for a podcast; Kantor hasn't even committed to that much.

It can't be for the money. WNBA players, even the league's stars, make considerably less than their NBA counterparts. That's why they end up taking summer jobs overseas at the risk of becoming an international hostage, as happened to Brittney Griner.

White's and Kantor's purported reason for their ploy is that they are protesting that WNBA rules lack a definition of what a woman is and isn't. Never mind that there are no transgender women in the WNBA today, nor has any transgender woman beside these two fakers declared any intention of entering the WNBA draft. 

The sole exception has been Layshia Clarendon, a non-binary/trans woman who played on seven WNBA teams from 2013 to 2024. As I said, I don't follow basketball all that closely, but I think if there were any transgender basketballer coming up through the college system or making international waves in Croatia, I think I would have heard about it.

On the outside chance that White and Kantor are sincere in their concern for the integrity of women's basketball, trans athlete Karleigh Webb has suggested four approaches for the WNBA to "shut down the circus," as she puts it:

1. Ignore the two and refuse to draft them, then tough out the ginned-up outrage from right-wing agitators.
2. Require trans athletes to prove they have been on feminizing hormone replacement therapy for at least one year before becoming eligible to play.
3. Await the findings, expected next year, from the gender eligibility committee of FIBA, the international basketball governing association.
4. "Once the WNBA Finals end, owners, coaches and the players’ union, along with researchers and trans athletes well-versed in these policies, should come together and build an evidence-driven, basketball-specific eligibility policy. The objective shouldn’t be to balance inclusion against fairness, as though one must necessarily come at the expense of the other. The objective should be to align inclusion, competitive integrity, fairness and safety."

The ringleaders of the circus aren't likely to be assuaged by any of these suggestions. They have a vested interest in keeping the circus up and running. 

But you have to start somewhere.

fin

2022 in Review

My Saturday History Tour and year-end retrospective collide today (often a risk you take when looking behind you). So here's a collage of a few of my favorite cartoons from 2022:

(I would have liked to include this week's cartoon, too. But I felt I needed to limit myself to six cartoons.)

Here also is my annual snapshot of the year's biggest headlines.

I've been taking these front-page headline photos for 50 years now, and I don't know how much longer this habit will be possible. Many newspapers have surrendered blaring headlines about national and international news to the immediacy of the internet. The local newspaper here is still likely to give prominent placement to news of the end of U.S. involvement in a long war, or a vice presidential resignation; but for the most part, front page coverage is reserved for local features.

Even the regional papers (e.g.: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Chicago Tribune) tend to highlight features of local and state interest over, say, a congressional hearing, or a coup in South America. National papers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reserve huge bold headlines for singularly monumental events — but on the other hand, I have a much better camera now. No way would you have been able to read the Boris Johnson headline if I were still taking pictures with my Kodak Instamatic.

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P.S.: Had I waited until tomorrow to post this, I might have been able to add a newspaper headline about Pope Benedict's death this morning. Well, perhaps. Tomorrow's local newspapers had probably been put to bed Friday night.

It's All Connected Somehow

Thursday morning, news broke  the Biden administration had secured the release from Russian prison of Olympic medalist and WNBA star Brittney Griner. As you surely know, last February, Griner had been arrested at a Moscow area airport arriving with a tiny amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, for which she was sentenced to nine years in a labor camp.

Given Russia's invasion of Ukraine very shortly after Griner's arrest, relations between the U.S. and Russia have been at their lowest point since what, the Vietnam War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Berlin airlift? The only two things President Biden had to offer in exchange for freeing Griner were looking the other way as Russia pummeled Ukraine, and/or handing over a Russian arms merchant convicted in U.S. courts in 2011 for his role in supplying weaponry to various revolutionary and terrorist groups around the world.

Biden traded the latter for Griner, and quickly Monday morning quarterbacks (power forwards?) here lambasted the administration for not also securing the freedom of Paul Whelan, a Marine imprisoned by Russia since 2018 on accusations of being a U.S. spy. 

Lost in the criticism of President Biden for not winning Whelan's freedom is the fact that his administration at least tried to include Whelan in the deal, whereas there was no indication that Donald Trump, who happened to be president in 2018, ever gave one bit of thought to Whelan before last Thursday.

He has, of course, had plenty to say about him since, taking some time away from his obsession with the idea that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him. At the moment, his story is that it was stolen by Twitter, because it didn't cooperate with right-wingers' efforts to whip up a scandal around Biden's son Hunter. 

You may recall that the New York Post published an exposé concerning a laptop containing compromising material Hunter Biden had supposedly left at a repair shop and never picked up.

The compromising information dealt with Hunter trading on his father's name in business (Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka must be shocked, shocked!), his drug use, and, we are now told, dick pics. If Papa Biden wasn't eager for this stuff to be spread across the internets, and if the folks then in charge of running Twitter thought it was tawdry, sketchy bullcrap, the incoming Republican majority in the House plans to make every effort to make daily headlines of this stuff from the moment the 118th Congress arrives in D.C.

Struggling to make the Hunter Biden laptop story seem relevant to anything going on today, the Republican conspiracy manufacturing mill is grinding away at full speed. Congressboob James Comer (R-KY) postulated on the GOP propaganda channel that there was somehow a direct link between Hunter and (did you ever imagine that I'd ever get back to the topic of today's cartoon?) Brittney Griner's release:

 “[W]e fear that this administration’s compromised because of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden have received from Russia and China. You look at just what happened yesterday. This bizarre prisoner swap that clearly was in the benefit of Russia, is another example of why we need to investigate to see if, in fact, this administration is compromised.”

You may rest assured that the Republican Truther squad will not rest until they have found how Hunter Biden fast-tracked the trademarking of Ivanka Trump-Kushner's couture line in China, authorized Don Jr. and Eric's tax cheating at the Trump Organization, and masterminded the fraud at the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

All part of a plot to cover up Barack Obama's birthplace in Kenya.

Q Toon: Mistakes Were Made

A Russian judge denied WNBA star Brittney Griner's appeal of her drug trafficking conviction last week. Arriving in the country to play on a Russian women's basketball team, Griner was arrested at a Moscow area airport in January with a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, something she claimed to have had for medical purposes and had forgotten to leave at home.

Days after her arrest, Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, incurring the condemnation of the Biden administration and the U.S.'s principal allies. Instead of expelling Griner from the country, Russia held her in jail for months until her trial, which ended with a guilty verdict and a sentence of nine years at a labor camp. 

Since then, America has tried quiet diplomacy to get Griner free. We offered to trade a Russian arms merchant for her and another jailed American. We sent Bill Richardson. We even sent Dennis Rodman.

I mean, c'mon, man!

One thing we absolutely should not be sending any more are WNBA players to beef up Russian basketball teams.

It's difficult to imagine anyone desperate enough to go, anyway.

Q Toon: Nothing But Nyet

 

The Russian trial of Brittney Griner is now in the sentencing stage. The Olympian and WNBA star faces a possible ten years in prison for having arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in January with a cannabis vape cartridge in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charge and delivered an abject apology in court.

In the first days after Griner's arrest, the Biden administration was largely silent on her plight, and her wife publicly urged everyone to keep quiet in order to let the State Department work behind the scenes. Since then, Cherelle Griner, the WNBA, and the LGBTQ+ community have begun to speak out, more and more forcibly.

The State Department is publicly advocating for Griner's return to the U.S., proposing a prisoner swap of Brittney Griner and a retired marine convicted of spying, Paul Whelan, for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer currently serving time in a U.S. prison.

Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages.

Rumoured to speak six languages, Bout developed a decades-long career by acquiring Soviet military transport planes and filling them with various weapons that were left behind after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Since then, Bout has supplied weapons to conflicts around the world including Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen.

For decades, governments and rebels fought each other with weapons that Bout sold to either side.

In 2008, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after he was caught on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was convicted in a New York court in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

A third American, history teacher Marc Fogel, sentenced in Russia last year for having half an ounce of marijuana on him, has not so far been mentioned as part of any prisoner swap. If only we had another Russian "Merchant of Death" in Leavenworth or Florence ADMAX to sweeten the deal...

Putin's foreign ministry (and his foreign minions) have so far shown no interest in the Biden administration's proposal. Either Putin is waiting until the trial is officially over, or, following the example of the Iran hostage crisis, until the next administration is sworn into office.

Q Toon: From the Highest Court

 

The trial Olympic athlete and WNBA star Brittney Griner, accused of having cannabis oil in a vape cartridge when she arrived at the Moscow airport last winter, is set to begin sometime in the next few weeks. She was seen arriving for a pre-trial hearing last week, and a letter from her to President Biden asking for him to intervene on her behalf became public this week.

Clearly, she doesn't have much confidence in the Russian judicial system letting her return home any time soon.

My cartoon lawyer for her presents a gloomier picture for Mrs. Griner than the Russian legal system theoretically affords. She will, in fact, have an opportunity to address the court at the beginning of her trial and again before the judge, lay assessors, and/or jury decide on a verdict.* 

On the other hand, she is obviously being used as a political pawn toward the release of a Russian citizen convicted in the U.S. ten years ago of illegal arms dealing. Arms dealing vs. a trace of THC oil... yeah, sure, that's an even trade.

You can ask Alexei Navalny how fair the Russian judicial system is. (Well, no, you probably can't.) Russia having become under Vladimir Putin a highly autocratic state, even if Mrs. Griner should get a fair trial and either acquittal or sent home with a fine, authorities may not be done with her. Consider this:

The shakiness of the presumption of innocence in Russian criminal trials is reflected by the fact that acquittals are almost nonexistent. They occurred in only 0.36 percent of all cases in 1998. During the perestroika years the Soviet public was shocked by many stories of innocent people having been convicted due to coerced or tortured confessions and this was one reason why reforms were pushed, among them, that of returning to trial by jury. Indeed, juries have acquitted substantially more than nonjury courts, anywhere from 18–22 percent of the time. A disturbing development has been the refusal of law enforcement organs to accept acquittals. For instance, in November 1999 in Moscow, officers of the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB, entered a courtroom in camouflage uniforms and black masks and re-arrested two defendants who had been acquitted at trial by a military court. Such occurrences are not rare.

And that's before Mr. Putin became President.

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I'm gradually making adjustments to my fictional lawyer for Mrs. Griner (first appearing here), including reversing the N's and R's in his dialogue balloons — realizing, of course, that they are not the Cyrillic equivalent of Roman N's and R's.

Check back on Saturday for some further thoughts on How To Draw A Russian.

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*Update: Brittney Griner has entered a guilty plea, according to this morning's news reports. That does not necessarily mean that the trial skips ahead to sentencing; the prosecution is still allowed to present its case.

Q Toon: Yachta, Yachta, Yachta

Brittney Griner's trial has been delayed by another month, so I have taken the occasion to draw a reminder, amid all the war, gun violence, and baby formula shortages, that the WNBA star and Olympic medalist is still in a Russian prison. She has missed the May 6 opening of the WNBA season, and given how the Russian judicial system operates, stands to miss several more seasons.

Griner has been awaiting trial since February, accused of having a vape canister with hashish oil in her carry-on luggage when she arrived at the Moscow airport. When not playing for the Phoenix Mercury, has played on a Russian Premier League women's basketball team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, since 2014. (WNBA players are not paid as handsomely as their NBA counterparts, so many of them play for European teams in the off-season.)

Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department began dealing with her case through its Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, labeling her case as one of "wrongful" detention. The designation means that we are no longer patiently waiting for her legal case to play out in court.

Russian media have suggested that their government might offer a prisoner swap of Griner for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, held since 2012 in U.S. Penitentiary, Marion, in Illinois. If that sounds like an uneven trade, it is; but the U.S. isn't currently holding any Russian Olympians in our prison system.

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What is a Russian lawyer supposed to look like in a cartoon these days?

There was a time when one would just draw a scarfaced apparatchik in an ushanka and pin-striped suit. While that image would still work if the character were a member of the politburo or Russian FSB, it seems to me that a Russian defense attorney would be someone at the beginning of his or her career, perhaps juggling a couple dozen clients at once.

Like the Miranda Rights attorney you get in the U.S. if you cannot afford one.

Those of us in the Entertainment Biz typically let you, the Entertained, know a character is a foreigner by tossing in a word or two from the foreign language into the dialogue — sí, señorita; non, monsieur; jawohl, mein Herr — no matter how fluent in English the character is otherwise. Alas, the lawyer in today's cartoon had no reason to say дa or нет, and it turns out that there is no Russian translation of "Ms." (Russian, moreover, simply transliterates Mr., Mrs., and Miss from English.)

I suppose I could have printed his dialogue with backwards И's and Я's — except that Ms. Griner's name includes both an N and two R's, and doing so would have been equally confusing.

You might, however, try reading his dialogue with a Boris And Natasha accent.

Q Toon: Free Brittney

I freely confess that I struggled coming up with anything to draw about Brittney Griner, the WNBA star and Olympic medalist who has gotten caught up in the international standoff between Putin's Russia and the rest of the world.

On February 17, one week before Putin's invasion of Ukraine but well after his troops were poised at the border, Russian police arrested Griner at Sheremetyevo airport, reportedly having found a vape cartridge and hashish oil in her luggage. Whether there is anything to the charges or if they were completely trumped up, none of us in the cheap seats may ever know.

Her wife has pleaded with everyone to honor their privacy, which also limits what one might say in a cartoon. Nor has her plight worsened to the level of so many citizens of Ukraine; a representative of the American embassy has been able to visit Griner in detention and reports that she is in good health and spirits.

As an American, a lesbian, and a black woman, Griner faces an uphill climb getting a fair trial in Russia. Instead of an American-style legal system in which a prosecutor presents one side of the case and the defense presents the other, in a Russian court, an investigator appointed by the government presents a case file that determines what can and cannot be argued in court. Her defense is free to conduct its own investigation, but concepts such as an impartial jury of one's peers and a right against self-incrimination simply do not exist.

If found guilty, Griner could face up to ten years in prison, or even in a labor camp.

Griner did not come to Russia as a tourist:

Ms Griner had a second job, and that was why she had flown to Russia — to play for EuroLeague team UMMC Ekaterinburg, where she had worked since 2014 during the US off-season.

Roughly half of WNBA players compete overseas in the off-season. For most, it's a way to augment their domestic income: WNBA players receive roughly five times more in Russia than they do in the US.

"If she were Steph Curry or LeBron James, she wouldn't be over there at all because she'd be making enough money," [sports journalist Tamryn] Spruill said. 

After Griner's detention and arrest, I'm fairly sure that any remaining WNBA players moonlighting on Russian basketball teams are seriously reconsidering whether any salary is worth being set up to be a pawn in geopolitical brinksmanship.