Toon: Icing the Vote

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was asked on Face the Nation over the weekend whether he had plans to send ICE thugs to polling places in Democratic-leaning areas, where they were likely to deter some citizens from voting. 

He hedged on what his department's plans are, and offered talking points about making sure non-citizens weren't voting (an infinitessimal problem) so that only approved citizens get to exercise their constitutional rights.

As we have seen over and over again under the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™, ICE frequently abducts citizens and legal residents as well as undocumented aliens, quickly spiriting them far away from family and legal representation, making no attempt to notify their loved ones what has happened to them. Even having proof of citizenship is of no avail if one's skin happens to be the wrong color.

The deterrent effect of ICE thugs at the polls, especially on people targeted by the present regime's ethnic cleansing policy, cannot be discounted.

Add to that the Republican playbook of shouting unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud any time an election doesn't go the way Republicans like, plus the Trumpsters' unconstitutional demands to states to turn over their voter rolls and equipment, and I worry that as soon as polls close, ICE agents will be seizing voting machines and ballots before anyone has a chance to stop them. 

From razing the East Wing to renaming the Kennedy Center to countless examples of graft and fraud to stealing box upon box upon box of classified papers off to Mar-a-lago, it's the way the Trump regime works.

Saturday Selfies

It's time once again for the Graphical History Tour  to venture down into the deep recesses of your friendly tour guide's basement to rummage through some April cartoons decades old.

Starting with—

1986

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., April 28, 1986

Just five years after a mentally deranged person attempted to assassinate the President of the United States, Congress, with the full support of that assassination target, decided it was time to relax gun controls. 

The so-called Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to redefine "gun dealer," excluding those making occasional sales or repairs, and legalized interstate sales of firearms provided that seller and buyer meet in person.

Another provision of the Act prohibited "the establishment of any system of registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions."

On the other hand, it did add penalties for the use of armor-piercing bullets during the commission of a crime involving illegal drugs.

1996

Gun rights in this country depend to some extent on one's socio-economic status.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 18, 1996

Nowadays, the Citizen's Militia types even get presidential pardons and Justice Department pressure on judges to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions for trying to overthrow the U.S. government.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, April 22, 1996

Speaking of eternal constants, consider the plight of poor, cursed Lebanon. Once considered the Paris of the Middle East, capital Beirut was ripped apart by a sectarian religious war in the 1970's and pummeling by its neighbor to the south, Israel.

The main difference between then and now is that Shimon Peres appeared to have genuine regret at the death and destruction, whereas the Netanyahu government seems to revel in it. Targeting ambulances, schools, journalists, and hospitals all seems entirely intentional now.

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where this cartoon was printed, has long had Islamic and Jewish student groups very vocal about matters involving Israel, Palestine, and their neighbors. I might have expected some blowback over this cartoon, but the next issue's letter to the editor from the Israel Activist Center defending Israel's actions made no mention of my cartoon. 

Nor did the counter-response from the President of the Collective Union of Arab Students a week later. And with that, the school year ended, and any further salvos in the conversation went up on some long forgotten BBS.

2006

for Q Syndicate, April, 2006

Donald Trump, Eric Swalwell, and Tony Gonzales most certainly did not invent sex scandals. One such scandal, quickly forgotten among the parade, involved sexting of underage girls by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle.

55-year-old Doyle, believing he was sexting with a girl of 14, was caught in an on-line sting by the Polk County, Florida, Sheriffs Department. Charged with sending the fictitious girl sexually explicit photos and movie clips, Doyle had even given her his name, that he worked for DHS, and his office and governmental cell phone numbers.

This embarrassment came on top of the department's woefully inadequate response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and the revelation that someone at DHS had disposed of an envelope of suspicious white powder out an office window. (There had been a few incidents of envelopes being mailed to news anchors and Democratic politicians made to appear as though they contained a toxic chemical.)

Going for a Three Stooges reference here was complicated by the fact that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff bore no resemblance to Larry, Moe, or Curly. I do think that I got his caricature down in this, the one and only time I ever put him (or Brian Doyle, for that matter) in a cartoon.

2016

for Q Syndicate, April, 2016

I haven't set a cartoon in a diner in a long time, which is too bad. I like the setting, with its possibilities for slightly altering the point of view. 

In the years before I started colorizing my cartoons, the second or third panel would have probably shown this couple in silhouette. It keeps the cartoon from being too static, since the characters aren't actually moving around doing things.

The situation also allows for this sort of twist ending in a way that, say, talking heads on Fox Noise might not.

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.

Q Toon: Tattoo Tale

We return to the thrilling saga of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max this week. As you will no doubt recall, Leo got swept up in an Ignoring Constitution Extralegally raid while volunteering at a local food pantry back in February and Max's efforts to find out where he is incarcerated have so far been thwarted.

I've finally had to give Leo a last name, since the faceless ICE agent in the cartoon wouldn't be friends on a first-name basis. I considered giving Leo a last name like Blue (or Teal, as in Stop the Teal), but decided to name him after the author of American democracy (not to mention Sally Hemming's kids).. Max now has initials; I suppose it might be fair to give him the last name of a conservative philosopher such as Burke, now that it has to start with B.

We'll see.

I'm going to have to come up with some reason why Leo does not end up getting on a plane to El Salvador's notorious CECOT concentration camp, insofar as ending up there is supposedly being sentenced to slave labor and death. Rather than head toward a tragic end to this tale, I would rather get Leo home at some point to argue with Max about other policies of the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime.

I did have a plan when I started this story line, but various real-world news events along the way keep making the original denouement problematic.

So I can't rule out having Max wake up to see Leo stepping out of the shower because it was all a dream.

Q Toon: Where in the World

I introduced Max and Leo as a way of commenting on the deep political divide between the Trump cultists and the rest of us: an odd couple in a relationship who stay together in spite of their profound disagreements.

Had Republicans lost the 2024 election, Max and Leo would still be bickering over fiscal policy or, I dunno, white males being shut out of Kamala Harris's cabinet. But instead, we have been forced to endure the Criminal Trump Regime. It hasn't even been 100 days yet, and there are black vans of Trump's Gestapo disappearing civilians on suspicion of having unauthorized tattoos and opinions.

I figured I could comment on that by having Leo mistakenly caught up in an anti-immigrant sweep. Eventually, I'd have the courts step in, or someone in charge would realize ICE's mistake, and Leo and Max would be reunited, once I had figured out how to make a point with it.

Yet now it turns out that the Criminal Trump Regime doesn't care what the courts rule, or who gets swept up because of whatever mistake made by his minions. They've discovered a fellow tyrant down in El Salvador who's got a tropical gulag where they can ship their victims en masse, where nobody is afforded due process whatsoever. Instead, they are stripped naked, shaved, and put on display crammed together like sardines for Kristi Noem's Zoom background.

One of the real people trapped in this dystopian nightmare from hell is a man named Kilmar Albrego García. He had come here years ago from El Salvador to flee from the MS-13 gang there; a judge here had ruled that if the U.S. government wanted to deport him, it was forbidden to send him to El Salvador. 

ICE knew this, and decided it didn't care about the rule of law. Up and down the chain of command, they decided to just follow orders. The Department of Homeland Security acknowledges that García was the victim of an "administrative error." The Supreme Court has told the Criminal Trump Regime to "facilitate" García's return.

The Criminal Trump Regime's response is to pretend that it can't do a damn thing to rectify its administrative error. They invited El Salvador's self-described "coolest dictator" Nayib Bukele to the White House to claim that he's helpless to bring an innocent man home to his wife and children. After all, if he freed one innocent man, he'd have to free every innocent man, wouldn't he?

LGBTQ+ media have taken interest in Andry Hernandez Romero, a Salvadoran hairdresser and make-up stylist seeking asylum in the U.S. because he is gay and was facing persecution in Venezuela who was deported to the Salvadoran Sağmalcılar. Chicago media have been reporting on the case of Yeison Rodrigo Jaimes-Rincon, whose partner only found out he had been kidnapped to CECOT when she saw him behind bars there on television. 

And there are dozens, if not hundreds of others in their predicament whom you have never heard of.

There is a reason why we all know the tragic story of Anne Frank; only if you pass through a Holocaust museum will you learn of any other individuals among the six million others slaughtered by the Nazis' extermination machine. Nor was Alexei Navalny alone. 

There are photographs of a fraction of the victims of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh, yet they all remain anonymous to most of us. Ditto the victims of Stalin's purges, the Rwandan massacres, the deliberate slaughter of Palestinians...

It can be easy to resign oneself to the idea that it's too hard to care about what happens to uncounted foreigners. 

Until it happens to somebody you know.

In that disgusting Oval Office performance by Trump and Bukele, the tyrant occupying our White House promised that it certainly will. Trump wants to abduct enough U.S. citizens off to El Salvador that Bukele will need to build "about five more" CECOTs to hold them all.

Oh, sure: our Felon-in-chief said that he only wants to suspend the Constitution when it comes to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of worst of the worst.

You'll just have to overlook the occasional administrative error.

Q Toon: Desperately Seeking Leo

Max probably doesn't get a lot of sympathy wearing that cap into a government office.

Plotting out the dialogue for this week's cartoon, I immediately realized that Max and Leo do not have last names; the government worker here should have addressed Max as Mr. Whatever-his-last-name-is rather than by his first name. Unless they already knew each other, I suppose.

In any event, Max is getting a taste of the chaos he voted for, courtesy of the Deepstate Oligarchy's Generalissimo Elon. Musk is bringing the same reckless management style to government that he brought to Twitter: fire everybody and find out.

The resulting chaos is not a bug but a feature. Musk shares with his fellow South African expatriate  billionaire Peter Thiel a contempt for minorities, the working class. Their stated target may be bureaucracy, but it is in fact democracy itself.

That is no exaggeration or hyperbole. In Thiel's own words, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

The New York Times reported on the Paypal mogul last October:

As the internet blossomed, Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the new right — aimed at deposing the cabal of liberal elites running the country. Yarvin saw democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their dictator phobia.” ...

Substacker "Just Plain Kris" ties Musk into Thiel's Make Apartheid Great Again movement:  

Elon Musk, while not a formal part of the neo-reactionary movement, has been linked to its ideas through his actions and statements. Musk’s political philosophy reflects a skepticism of democratic institutions and a preference for corporate-style governance (The Atlantic, 2023). His attempts to influence government operations and his support for far-right political movements align with the neo-reactionary belief that democracy leads to social decline (Financial Times, 2024). 

In Donald Joffrey Trump, the Afrikaners found their ideal front man: a blustering, racist of extremely limited intellect, all ego but no self-awareness, easily malleable with flattery and money (remember how he used to be stubbornly opposed to electric cars, cryptocurrency, and TikTok?). As an added bonus, he is anti-democratic, polarizing, mercurial — and expendable. Back to NYT:

As Thiel became wealthier and more powerful, he continued to help like-minded men accumulate their own wealth and power. They included a lot of Stanford Review alumni, like Josh Hawley, now the 44-year-old senator from Missouri, but also others who came to him via different routes — most prominently JD Vance, who has cited Yarvin as an influence himself. ...When Vance ran for Senate in 2022, Thiel was by far the biggest donor to his super PAC, giving $15 million.

If the day ever comes when Trump overplays his hand, his luck runs out, he outlives his usefulness, or gets to be the star at a state funeral, the Afrikaners' hand-picked protégé is right there presiding over the U.S. Senate. Even without impeachment and conviction, or the 25th Amendment, JD Vance will be the heir apparent in 2028 to continue the dismantling of democracy.

To which end Musk will have all the data he needs on every voter, polling place, and computer system in the country to pre-determine the outcome of any election he wants.

And no pesky bureaucracy in his way.

see also https://www.truthdig.com/articles/elon-musk-and-peter-thiels-war-on-democracy/

Q Toon: A Letter from Camp

A Letter From Concentration Camp, that is.

Obsessive readers of my toons will recall that Leo here got himself caught up in a dragnet of brown-skinned immigrants at the food pantry where he was volunteering. Having sent him off on this misadventure, I feel obligated to follow Leo’s story line and see where it goes.

I had originally intended for Leo and Max to stand in for our deeply divided country, engaging in a back-and-forth, getting each others' goats, and yet somehow remaining a couple. If I ever get Leo out of Trumplinka, I’m sure I’ll get back to that. 

Americans' divisions cut straight through family lines, as I was reminded during a big pre-Lenten party my husband's family has every year. I'm talking about a huge get-together of a hundred or so descendants of his great-grandparents, who came to the U.S. from Italy in the early years of the 20th Century. 

Most of the family recognizes that their forebears weren't exactly welcomed to this country with open arms. Yet until 1923, all they needed to do to be legal immigrants was secure passage on a boat, and once they came ashore, answer some questions from Port Authorities who spoke no Italian.

Those immigrants and their children opened up butcher shops and grocery stores, and/or went to work in the automobile factory. They built churches, founded social clubs, and went to war. More than a century later, some of the family are solid union Democrats and others are dyed-in-the-wool MAGA Republicans. Even among my husband's immediate siblings, nieces, and nephews, political conversations can get heated.

So, as an in-law, I didn't want to get into an argument when one of the cousins at Sunday's get-together started telling me how she only voted for Trump this time around because she operates a small business and Trump was supposedly good for small business. I wish nothing but the best for her small business, but I can't pretend that the Tigers Eating Faces Party is anything but a disaster for LGBTQ+ families like mine.

Or for Ukraine. Or for Palestinians. Or for our National Parks. Or for airline safety, Social Security, cities, farmers, home and auto buyers, health, the environment, our international alliances, or the price of eggs.

Or for the stock market. Or for the economy.

Or for small businesses.

We're starting to hear from Trump voters who are already getting hurt by Trump maladministration policies and are beginning to second-guess their votes. Unfortunately, the U.S. electoral system doesn't allow for do-overs.

One just has to hope that in 2026 and 2028, there will be enough of these voters who will have realized that there are issues more important to them than persecuting transgender people and Latinos.

Sheriff David Clarke

Here in the Milwaukee media market, we're watching a little drama surrounding our local mini-Trump, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

Unless you watched his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, you might not know much about Mr. Clarke. Nominally a Democrat, he was appointed Milwaukee County Sheriff by Republican Acting Governor Scott McCallum in 2002; while the Democrats were figuring out that he wasn't really one of them, Republicans with no local races of their own have been free to cross over to make sure he won every primary since then.

He has spent his tenure attacking every other elected Democratic official and endorsing Republican ones. Clarke hasn't been in town much lately; tired of just being the darling of Milwaukee AM radio, he's been working hard to take his shtick national. (There's also the pesky matter of inquests into some deaths including one of a newborn infant in his prison, which he has been happy to escape. The inquests, I mean, not the prison.)

And now he says he's been named Department of Homeland Security’s liaison to state and local authorities— although that's news that DHS and the guy currently in that position haven't heard from the White House.

Twitterer Charles Clymer, a genderqueer army veteran, and writer, noticed that the pins and medals festooning Sheriff Clarke's uniform when he appears in public were not ones that he had earned.

“Look at this fucking guy’s uniform,” Clymer said, in the second of a long string of tweets on the subject. “You see all that shit pinned all over his dress uniform jacket? That’s not supposed to be there.” Clymer went on to break down each individual medal, their placement and their apparently spurious provenance. Clymer acknowledged that legitimate medals are earned, and should be worn with pride, but accuses Clarke of “stolen valor” and calls Clarke’s collection, “a sloppy assortment of badge replicas arranged neatly, [that] looks imposing.” 

Clymer's not the only one noticing that Clarke's medals aren't exactly, shall we say, kosher.

Clymer’s Twitter rant led Daniel Sieradski (a former JTA staffer) to review Clarke’s photos. He found one where the sheriff is sporting the insignia of Israel’s traffic police. ...
Clarke may have received the pin when he toured Israel and Russia in 2015, in what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported was a trip funded by the National Rifle Association.
Okay, it’s possible. But it makes one wonder: Did he earn the pin? If so, how? Did he head off a battle royale on the notoriously clogged road straddling Jerusalem’s Old City and Sultan’s Pool? Did he avert a crisis on the LaGuardia ramp into Tel Aviv? Did he bring peace, love and understanding to the hot, messy hell that is the Checkpost road, connecting Haifa with its northern suburbs?
We asked Clarke for background on the pin. He has yet to reply.

Ten, Twenty, Thirty

The old calendar on the wall tells me that it's Snickerback Saturday yet again, and I haven't got a theme I'm raring to fulminate about. So, for no reason in particular, I'm hauling out cartoons I drew ten, twenty, and thirty Aprils ago.

Starting with the oldest:

In April of 1986, the House passed a bipartisan bill supported by the Reagan administration and pushed by the National Rifle Association (but opposed by law enforcement officers) to repeal many parts of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The Senate had already passed a similar bill ending federal control on the sale and transport of rifles and shotguns and creating the "gun show loophole." The McClure-Volkmer Act further protects dealers from federal prosecution unless authorities could prove "willful" violation of remaining gun laws, and prohibits any state or federal government from keeping "any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or disposition."

✒

By this point in April, 1996, the presidential primaries had settled on the major parties' nominees. President Clinton had no significant opposition for the Democratic nomination; that the Republicans would nominate Kansas Senator Bob Dole did not come as a surprise. The Republican nominee-apparent did, however, present a challenge in one part of the world:

✒

With this cartoon from April, 2006 we tie together sex and an oblique tangent off the first cartoon's theme of terrorism:

In order to cast DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff as Moe of the Three Stooges, I employed a cartoon cliché for depicting surprise and shock.

The Brian Doyle scandal was one of those quickly forgotten peccadilloes of the George W. Bush administration. Amid the ineffectual response to Hurricane Katrina and some careless treatment of an envelope containing white powder, the Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was caught soliciting sex from minors on the internet. Doyle, 55, was found guilty of seven counts of using a computer to seduce a child and sentenced to five years in Florida state prison for inappropriate e-mails he sent to an under-cover officer posing as a 14-year-old girl.

✒

While researching the background of the 1986 cartoon above, I happened to run across a letter to the editor in the April 21, 1986 issue of Time magazine from a 20-year-old Delavan lad who would someday become governor. I draw no conclusion from this and have no snide remarks to make; I simply share it for the sake of trivia:

Q Toon: The Mystery of Janet Napolitano's Vault

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate•Aug 22, 2012 EditorialCartoonists.com

This little news item somehow got buried beneath the gynecological expertise of Congressman Todd "Legitimate Rape"Akins (R-MO) and the swimming form of Congressman Kevin "Galilee Skinny Dipper" Yoder (R-KS) this week. Last Friday, "Fox and Friends" aired a story from which Geraldo Rivera concluded that lesbians are taking over the Department of Homeland Security.

Somehow, I thought this would be earthshaking news.

Geraldo: Is the subtext of the Department of Homeland Security Scandal that there is some sort of a lesbian cabal, that it's a same-sex takeover the the big agency?
Doocy: What do you think?
Kilmeade: Steve, what do you think?
Geraldo: I don't know. It just seems like everyone is talking around it. Is that really what people are saying? That men are disadvantaged because women, specifically lesbians, are ruling the roost there?
Carlson: I don't know about that last part.
Geraldo: It just seems that everyone is dancing around. No one's -- they're kind of making these inferences. That's what I'm saying.
Kilmeade: We don't know for sure, but it's easy to come to that conclusion, that there's some different type of glass ceiling separating the Homeland Security Department.
Geraldo: So, no, no machos need apply?

Where is Jack Bauer when we really need him?