Q Toon: An Aaron Judgment

In an episode of a podcast called "Look Into It" hosted by conspiracy fabulist Eddie Bravo, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in cahoots with the Center for Disease Control and the federal government, was responsible for exacerbating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980's and repeated their strategy with COVID-19.

I don't care to link to the February 23 podcast itself, which is behind a paywall anyway; but this little germ from the three-hour episode escaped the lab last week and went viral on Xitter:

"The blueprint was created in the '80's: create a pandemic, you know, with a virus that's goin' wild. Right? Only — he was given — Fauci was given, like, over $350 million dollars to research this, come up with drug that was new or repurposed to handle the AIDS pandemic, and all they came up with was AZT. And if you do any smidge of research — and I know, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not an immunologist, whatever the fuck — I can read, though, right? — right — I can look things up and I can learn just like any normal person, you know, I can do my own research, which is so vilified, you know, to even question authority — but that was the game plan back then: create an environment where only one thing works. Back then, AZT. Now, rembisivir, remdesivir, until we get a vaccine. Which, by the way, Anthony Fauci had stake in rembirvi vaccine."

Rodgers was repeating false claims by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that the CDC suppressed all sorts of supposed cures in order that favored yet fatal medical treatments would hold a monopoly on the HIV/AIDS/COVID market. These claims have been debunked by PolitiFact (and if you're into doing your own research, there are dozens of sources cited at the end of that post).

Dan Wilson, senior associate scientist at Janssen and host of the YouTube show “Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson,” said Kennedy’s retelling of the AZT history was “dead wrong.”

Kennedy and Rodgers were “repeating a form of HIV/AIDS denialism, where antiretroviral drugs are said to be ineffective against progression of the virus,” Wilson said. In reality, he said, AZT “was the first time that doctors could do something to help people who (were) wasting away and dying painful deaths.”

Now, I'm all in favor of doing one's own research. It's incumbent upon any responsible editorial cartoonist to check into the veracity of things before whipping off a cartoon about whatever one just heard from a talking head on TV or read in some piece of Xeet on Xitter.

But one must be aware that the internet is programmed to give you confirmation bias. If you google "aliens built pyramids," you will get hundreds of links to articles positing that aliens built the pyramids. (Well, of course they did. Having spent decades traveling light years to visit the only flat planet in the universe, what else were they to do?)

But returning to the topic at hand: As a devoted Green Bay Packers fan, I'm saddened to see Aaron Rodgers follow the Brett Favre playbook of going to the Jets only to becoming a huge embarrassment to everyone who ever rooted for him. The guy is, or at least has been, a bright, intelligent fellow; remember how he whipped Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary's and astronaut Mark Kelly's butts on Jeopardy! in spite of getting the Final Jeopardy clue about Harley Davidson wrong? You can't credit that to clicker reflexes alone!

That was nine years ago, however; and perhaps it's true that he has been knocked to the turf a couple times since then.

But over his years with the NFL, he has gotten pretty full of himself. In his last years with the Packers, he didn't deign to pre-season practice with the rest of the team, meaning that new receivers and running backs spent half a season getting used to his habits and rhythms. And it showed.

Please, Lord, let Jordan Love model himself after Bart Starr instead.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Instead of the usual edit snipped from the coming Thursday's cartoon, here is a cartoon I drew for Q Syndicate in November of 1998.

 

Relax!

 It may be roughing the quarterback to pile on when he's down, but....

I don't think there are too many people out there to whom I need to explain this news item: Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers was pulled from Sunday's football game after testing positive for COVID-19. This after teammates Davante Adams, Allen Lazard, and Malik Taylor were placed on the "reserve/COVID-19" list in October.

You can't keep 6' (2m) distance between players in American football, so the National Football League has devised supposedly strict protocols to keep COVID-19 from spreading like wildfire among them; and it now appears that Rodgers has been flouting those protocols. Asked at a press conference last summer whether he had been vaccinated against the coronavirus, Rodgers claimed "Yeah, I'm immunized" — a weasel word nobody caught at the time.

Rodgers now claims that he couldn't take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines because his doctors told him he was allergic to some ingredient in them, and that he (like many others once a Michigan woman died from a rare complication after receiving the J&J vaccine last April) didn't trust the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Rodgers is within his rights under NFL protocols not to get vaccinated, for whatever reason he fancies, but those protocols require unvaccinated players to wear a mask at press conferences and on the sideline at games, to travel separately from the rest of the team, and not to mingle socially with more than three fellow NFL team members at a time.

Rodgers has violated just about every one of those rules.

Rodgers went on Pat McAfee's podcast to complain that he's the unfair victim of a cancel culture woke mob that refused to get vaccinated when Donald Trump was president. (I don't remember things that way, unless we're talking about Trump's recommendations to ingest bleach and shine light up our butts.) Rodgers explained that he is under the expert medical care of former Surgeon General Joe Rogan and has been declared completely free of horse worms.

Rodgers's robust popularity in Packerland has been sacked in its own end zone since all of this came out; a Madison medical clinic has dropped Rodgers as its commercial spokesjock, and, judging from the ads on Sunday's game, Jake from State Farm appears to be pivoting away from offering a Rodgers Rate, too.

I can't speak for the hit on Rodgers's popularity within the sizeable base of anti-vaxxer Trump l'oeilists in Packerland, of course.

I suspect that those people are convinced that the Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs yesterday.

Bigly.

WisconsInStep Cartoons

Paul "Dear Ruthie" Masterson writes about LGBTQ+ issues for the Milwaukee monthly Shepherd Express. In his October column on LGBTQ History Month, he reported on the efforts to preserve LGBTQ+ history in Wisconsin, including photographs and publications.

So, in the interest of doing my part to keep the past alive, I'm posting a handful of Wisconsin-LGBTQ-issue cartoons I drew for InStep News in the latter half of the 1990's.

in InStep News, Sept. 18-Oct. 1, 1996

This cartoon about Wisconsin's Democratic senior Senator and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act wasn't the first one I had printed in InStep, but with it, my cartoons became a regular feature.  

InStep was one of two rival LGBTQ+ newspapers published in Milwaukee in those days. InStep and Wisconsin Light published on alternating weeks, the former in magazine format, the latter as a tabloid, both on newsprint. (InStep converted to tabloid format with the May 29, 1997 Pride issue.)

in InStep News, Jan. 22-Feb. 7, 1997

This cartoon got a fair amount of reaction; a representative of AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, ARCW (now Vivent Health), wrote a letter to InStep to correct what she called the cartoon's "serious misinterpretation." 

Distribution by the state of Wisconsin of federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS funds had been cut from nine independent agencies that year to five, a major portion going to the ARCW. I don't think I can claim credit for subsequent Wisconsin's re-examination of its allocation of Ryan White funds, which ARCW participated in and fully supported.

I've told this story before, but I got the idea for this cartoon from my first night sleeping over with the man who is now my better half. I was the one hogging the blankets by morning.

March 20-April 2, 1997

The face of Republicans' Wisconsin iteration of a "Defense of Marriage Act" was that of State Rep. Lorraine Serrati (R-Spread Eagle, yes, that's a real place), who sponsored AB 104 to prohibit Wisconsin from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states. Although the federal DOMA was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton a year earlier, a court ruling in Hawai'i raised the possibility that same-sex marriage might become legal in the Aloha State.

May 1-15, 1997

It didn't, but AB 104's opponents, led by Assembly Reps. Tammy Baldwin (D-Madison, now U.S. Senator) and Barbara Notestein (D-Milwaukee), charged that Ms. Serrati's bill was divisive and redundant, in that the Wisconsin Constitution already defined marriage as between a "husband" and a "wife," and futile in that the Democratic majority in the State Senate was unlikely to bring the issue to a vote.

Democrats also viewed it as a cynical attempt by Republicans to expand their narrow majority in the Assembly; Rep. Baldwin told In Step, "What my colleagues fear is the 30-second radio or TV ad in their next election campaign, which proclaims that they support ho-mo-sex-u-al marriage." 

in InStep, March 19-April 1, 1998

Serrati was hardly alone in pushing antigay legislation. State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Rep. Stephen Nass (R-Whitewater, now a state Senator) were among thirteen legislators behind Assembly and Senate bills to deny health insurance coverage to domestic partners of state and local government employees. The bills came in response to the Madison school district offering domestic partnership ("DP") benefits.

Again, the Democratic majority in the state Senate weren't interested in passing that legislation along to Governor Thompson. On the other hand, two of the bills' co-sponsors, Fitzgerald and Glenn Grothman, are now U.S. Congresslugs.

in InStep, June 12-26, 1997

After first pledging to the Wisconsin gay Republicans group that he would not discriminate against lesbians and gays in hiring his congressional staff, Congresswyrm Mark Neumann (R-WI1) completely backtracked when asked about it at a Christian Coalition meeting in La Crosse. "If someone walks in to me and says, 'I'm a gay person, I want a job in your office,' I would say that's inappropriate and they wouldn't be hired because that would mean they are promoting their agenda."

The other people in my cartoon are real Wisconsin persons. Scott Evertz, on the left, was head of the Log Cabin of Wisconsin; he would later be George W. Bush's Director of the White House Office of AIDS Policy for about a year. 

On the right, Rev. Ralph Ovadal of Wisconsin Christians United, was and is an extreme right-wing pastor; his church in Monroe is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. In addition to LGBTQ+ rights, he actively opposes nude beaches, women's reproductive rights, modern Bible translations, and the Roman Catholic Church.

in Q·Voice, September, 1997

In 1995, Jorge Cabal, life and business partner of InStep publisher William Attewell, launched Q·Voice, a feature magazine; this was months before they bought InStep from its founder, Ron Geiman. Q·Voice was published separately from InStep for a time, but within three years was folded back into it as an insert, then as an integrated section within the newspaper. 

I drew this caricature of  John Norquist for Q·Voice as a full-page illustration for an interview of then Mayor of Milwaukee. Time magazine had recently run its own glowing profile of Mr. Norquist, so I referenced that in the illustration.

✍

In the spring of 1998, David Bianco, then publisher of Q Syndicate, contacted me interested in syndicating my cartoons nationally, an opportunity I was happy to accept. It came with the stipulation that my LGBTQ+ cartoons would be exclusively for Q Syndicate (a provision that never caused conflict with my concurrent cartooning for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee).

Bianco promptly withheld my cartoons from InStep, charging that Attewell was behind in paying for Q Syndicate features.

From my standpoint, that could hardly have come at a worse time. Immensely popular Green Bay Packers star defensive end Reggie White had just gobsmacked Wisconsin politicians by attacking LGBTQ+ people in a rambling hour-long speech to a joint session of the legislatures.

As reported by William Attewell & Keith Clark:

"We have allowed sin to run rampant in our nation, and because we have, that is why our nation is in the condition that it is in," White told the legislators, saying that homosexuality was "one of the biggest sins."

White told the Wisconsin lawmakers that "homosexuality is a decision, not a race," and should not be protected under civil rights legislation the way race and ethnic minorities are.

How could I possibly not draw about that? And not have my cartoon seen anywhere in Packer Land?

in InStep, April 16-30, 1998

The issue between InStep and Q Syndicate was resolved within a few weeks, and what came out of it all was that InStep was grandfathered as an exception to the syndicate's LGBTQ+ content exclusivity clause. "Things to Do Today" would be my last editorial cartoon drawn specifically for InStep, although I did draw them a couple Pridefest Issue cover illustrations after this.

The only other time I sent InStep a local-issue editorial cartoon before the paper folded in 2003 was in July of 1999. Actually, it only involved changing a bit of the dialogue in a cartoon drawn for Q Syndicate. The cartoon was about Milwaukee's Common Council approving a registry for same-sex couples; but where the rest of the country read "the religious right," my special version for InStep had the name of a local person.

in InStep, July 29-August 11, 1999

(The other version of the cartoon is here.)

This Week's Sneak Peek

I am completely distraught by Packers Coach Matt LeFleur's decisions to go for a 2-point conversion when he should have let Mason Crosby kick, and to send Mason Crosby out to kick a field goal when only a touchdown would save the game.

So this week's cartoon is kind of dark.

February Festivities

So you have a cartoon due for February 2 and you've got no ideas and there's nothing in the news to inspire you and your bristol board is as white and pristine as the newfallen snow. So you look at the calendar and see, Oh, Goody! February 2 is Presentation of Our Lord! I'm saved!

No, of course it's Ground Hog Day, that wonderful festival when we all suddenly care what the weather is in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for some reason (and how to spell it). I live in Wisconsin, where we're in for six more weeks of winter at the very least whether some overgrown rat sees its shadow or has the sense to stay in its burrow.

What's the ground hog got to do with it, anyway? Those Punxsutawney bastards don't have to drag the critter out of its box to figure out whether it's sunny or overcast.

But it's a holiday, even if it's rather one-dimensional, and you can always drag some inspiration for a hackneyed cartoon from it. Sadly, unlike Christmas, there's only one movie about Notorious GHD, and we've all drawn some version of this cartoon.

So perhaps you shouldn't discount Presentation of Our Lord Day so quickly. In Mexico, it's Candelaria, and time to take the yuletide decorations down. They celebrate forty days of Christmas, which is why having a live evergreen in the house and singing that partridge in a pear tree song have never caught on there.

Fortunately, February is chock full of holidays, unlike, say, August. With Valentines Day on the fourteenth, you have the quadrennial cartoons of presidential aspirants wooing the heart of the Republican elephant or Democratic donkey.

Or, if your governor's name is Tommy Thompson, you can pursue another Valentines Day theme.

Did you know that the Jewish equivalent of Valentines Day is Tu B'Av in August? Save that factoid for those late summer news doldrums!

Returning to February: Presidents' Day will come just in time so that the renewal of Trump's government shut-down can start on a day when the government was going to shut down anyway.

Just so you readers from around the world know, we don't celebrate all the presidents on Presidents' Day. Most Americans wouldn't know James Polk from Calvin Coolidge, and we'd be at each others' throats if someone tried to make the day about any president since JFK.

No, the day is all about Honest Abe Lincoln and Even More Honest George Washington, either of whom supplies our cartoonists with a smörgåsbord of clichés.

Finally, I'm not forgetting the most important February holiday of all: Superbowl Big Game Sunday. (Until I cough up the dough to be named Official Cartoonist of the NFL, I gotta be careful about infringement of that trademark.)

The story behind this cartoon is that when I was drawing for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, editors Gary Miller, Mark Kass, or Steve Jagler would email me the topic (and usually the entire copy) of the coming issue's editorial so that I could draw a cartoon to accompany it. But this particular week, and they emailed me that the editorial board hadn't decided what the editorial should say; for a change, they were giving me carte blanche to draw about whatever I wanted (but taking into consideration that the Beej readership was very different from my audience at the UW-Milwaukee Post).

With the Green Bay Packers heading for The Big Game, however, there was precious little else being covered by Wisconsin news media. Packers cheerleading was the only memorable part of Tommy Thompson's State of the State message, fercryinoutloud.

I don't remember the editorial having been about managed stock funds, either.

Well, that's all for this edition of Sciuridaeback Saturday. It's time to take down the Christmas tree. We can't leave it up until Mardi Gras like we did last year.

Mardi Gras isn't until March.

Hard Heart of Dixie

The fight against marriage equality goes on:

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey is expected to sign a bill this week ensuring that adoption agencies in her state can discriminate against same-sex couples. The rationale for HB24, according to its chief Senate sponsor, Sen. Bill Hightower (R-Mobile), is that if they're required to consider same-sex couples just like anyone else, adoption agencies would rather shut down. “The need for adoption is so high," Hightower explained. "We need to have every avenue available.”

Much better, as Alabama Republicans see it, to lock potential adoptive parents out of the system. The law doesn't specifically name LGBT parents as its target of discrimination, so one can easily imagine the possibility of a wider issue:

“It’s hard to see this as anything but animus toward LGBT families, but the bill could have a greater effect than that,” said Randall Marshall, the Legal Director for ACLU Alabama. “Agencies could turn away qualified families for countless other reasons that have no relevance to their ability to provide a safe loving home. A Catholic or Jewish agency could turn away Evangelical or Protestant families. A family could be turned away because they don’t attend church regularly.”

The Daily Show has been airing a series of reports in an effort to understand Alabama, which happens to have the lowest viewership of The Daily Show in the country; and in Monday's report, State Rep Patricia Todd, the state legislature's one and only openly gay member, noted that her state was the only one in Dixie not to have passed antigay legislation while she has been in office. She now has to sing a different tune.

“I’m tired of being in a country where I’m not welcome,” Rep. Patricia Todd, a Birmingham Democrat, told Rep. Rich Wingo, the Tuscaloosa Republican who sponsored the bill. “And to deal with institutions that know nothing about me but make a judgment that I’m a bad person because I am gay.”

Lest you think that Alabama is out in front on this issue, South Dakota, Michigan, North Dakota, and Virginia have all passed similar laws, and have been proposed in several other states as well. Discriminating against LGBT Americans has been and continues to be a legislative priority for Republicans everywhere.

Title Town, 1962

From the Wisconsin State Journal on January 1, 1962, comes this snapshot of the NFL championship game in the pre-Superbowl era:

NFL's Payoff Richest Ever
Green Bay (UPI) -- The payoff for each player in Sunday's National Football League title game was the richest ever.
Each member of the winning Green Bay Packers received $5,195.44, and each member of the losing New York Giants got $3,339.99.
The total take was $1,013,792, with $300,000 trimmed from the top for the NFL Player Benefit Fund before the proceeds were divided.
A slice of $42,333.25 was set aside for the winner of the Detroit-Philadelphia second-place game in Miami next Saturday.

The second-place teams got a trip to Miami, while the first-place contenders slogged it out on New Year's Eve in Green Bay?