Has It Only Been Four Years?

January, 2017

Instead of reaching back a century for classic editorial cartoons, or a few decades for my early work, your faithful servant today limits today's post to the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration. His has been an extraordinarily long quadrennium, and it might be easy to have forgotten just how gawdawful his presidency was in the days before impeachment (remember that?) and COVID-19.

January, 2017

Donald Berzelius Trump's first priorities upon taking office was to erase every trace of Barack Obama's presidency, and one of the earliest things to disappear was the White House LGBT Liaison office and its corresponding web page.

March, 2017

From Day One, the principal qualification for cabinet and sub-cabinet posts in the Corrupt Trump Administration has been complete and total opposition to the department or agency one would be placed in charge of.

March, 2017

That includes Roger Severino, who is still in charge of dismantling HHS's Office for Civil Rights, and Betsy DeVos, still in charge of defunding public education.

March, 2017

Fossil fuel fanatic Scott Pruitt left the Environmental Protection Agency under a cloud of ethics violations in 2018. His replacement, coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is hardly any improvement.

October, 2017

As Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions led the Corrupt Trump Administration's assault on the rights of minorities, especially the LGBTQ community. His one saving grace was that he did not see himself as the Trump family's personal lawyer, which is why he was replaced by lickspittle William Barr.

August, 2017

Trump has expended a lot of energy targeting transgender persons in general, and especially in the U.S. military. One of his justifications he gave for working to drum transgender personnel out of the military was the "tremendous" cost of their medical treatment... the total of which has proved to be far, far less than the cost of Trump's frequent golf trips. 

January, 2018

By the way, it was an exceptionally crass Trump tweet in June, 2017, alleging that a female cable TV host had been bleeding from cosmetic surgery, that got me to vow always to draw Trump with a pig's snout. His tweet came on top of a vulgar tweet about another female cable TV host menstruating, another tweet remarking that a female Republican senate candidate's face repulsed voters, and a retweet of a meme contrasting a flattering photo of Melania Trump with an unflattering one of a Republican senator's wife.

There was a flurry of pig-Trump cartoons that week; I have kept it as a leitmotif ever since, even when reconciling the snout with the needed facial expression was a real challenge. I have often also given him pig's hooves, thus breaking away from the editorial cartoon cliché of drawing him with tiny hands.

July, 2018

Let us not forget Trump's foreign policy, which consists largely of pissing off our democratic allies and sucking up to autocratic dictators. Especially the murderous ones.

July, 2018

You thought I was pivoting from foreign policy to the topic of our judicial system, didn't you? Well, perhaps you were right.

November, 2018

Through it all, Trump has behaved like a petty dictator, which explains his affinity for dictators abroad. He has been assisted by the Republican politburo in the House and Senate, and their mission to pack the courts with right-wing activists (which we discussed here more fully on Thursday).

January, 2018

Within the White House, we have Trump's Ministry of Truth, demonstrating why it's not such a great idea to run government like a business.

August, 2018

Q Toon: Small Enough to Fit in Your Genes

You've probably heard by now that the Corrupt Trump Administration plans to issue an executive order decreeing that gender is an immutable characteristic decided in the womb. That is to say that the order will decree transgender individuals out of existence.

The New York Times learned of the ruling through a memo circulated in the Department of Human Services, home of the rabidly anti-lgbtq Roger Severino and the Religious Liberty University, er, Task Force. Should the proposal be approved by DHS, the Departments of Education, Justice and Labor are expected to follow suit.

This affects more than just telling transgender people to use the wrong bathroom. It could affect the kind of medical treatment transgender patients may receive under Medicaid (assuming there's anything left of Medicaid once Republicans are done with it), or which prisons transgender inmates might be sentenced to. It could even disenfranchise the whole lot of them by requiring them to try to vote using their dead names, if they can get past the poll worker convinced that Glen is trying to impersonate Glenda or vice versa.

Perhaps I'm being unfair linking this anti-transgender policy to Donald Berzilius Trump. It's of great interest to the theocrats in his administration — Severino, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, and that ilk — but doesn't benefit Trump or his family personally.

On the other hand, it reverses a policy of the Obama administration, and Trump is more than eager to erase any vestige of his immediate predecessor, no matter what.

If Obama had built that wall across our southern border, Trump would be foaming at the mouth to tear it down.

Q Toon: No One Expects the Sessions Task Force

All ye faithful, genuflect!

Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions announced the establishment of a federal Religious Liberty Task Force with a mission to protect the rights of homophobic bakers, of Walmart greeters who firmly stand against wishing people happy holidays, and of pharmacists demanding to override the health care decisions of their female and transgender customers.

In his announcement statement Sessions stressed that the need for action was imperative:

 "A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom. There can be no doubt. This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated," Sessions said. "This election, and much that has flowed from it, gives us a rare opportunity to arrest these trends. Such a reversal will not just be done with electoral victories, but by intellectual victories."

Because the next time Donald Trump falls 2,864,974 ballots short in the popular vote, some Democrat might actually get elected president.

In the meantime, Mr. Sessions has at least provided gainful government employment for graduates of Jerry Falwell's Leviticus University. Just as long as they leave in the trash bin outside all that pesky biblical stuff about welcoming the sojourner and Lord, When Did We See You.

Q Toon: On a Roll

Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III this month delivered on a promise to grant Christian conservatives a "license to discriminate" against LGBTQ employees, consumers, patients, neighbors, students, and passers-by. Any victims of discrimination will find the Department of Justice deaf to their complaints.

[T]he relentless message [in Sessions' memo] is that whenever federal agents in the course of their activities collide with claims that they conflict with religious tenets, they should back off. One of its 20 “principles of religious liberty” bluntly tells federal entities that civil-rights laws protecting people of faith from employment discrimination on religious grounds must be strictly enforced — but they do not apply to religious employers themselves.

It's more than a question of wedding cakes and bathrooms. The Human Rights Campaign lists a number of ways Mr. Sessions' rules encourage antigay discrimination:

● A Social Security Administration employee could refuse to accept or process spousal or survivor benefits paperwork for a surviving same-sex spouse.
● A federal contractor could refuse to provide services to LGBTQ people, including in emergencies, without risk of losing federal contracts.
● Organizations that had previously been prohibited from requiring all of their employees from following the tenets of the organization's faith could now possibly discriminate against LGBTQ people in the provision of benefits and overall employment status.
● Agencies receiving federal funding, and even their individual staff members, could refuse to provide services to LGBTQ children in crisis, or to place adoptive or foster children with a same-sex couple or transgender couple.

The day before Sessions published his memo, he had released a memorandum excluding transgender persons from civil rights protections. These assaults on LGBTQ civil rights were written under the guiding hand of the theocratic Alliance Defending Freedom, a hard-line anti-LGBTQ activist legal advocacy group with deep pockets.

In 2012, [Alan] Sears, then-president of the ADF (called “Alliance Defense Fund” at the time) delivered remarks at a U.S-led conservative conference called the World Congress of Families in Madrid. “In the course of the now hundreds of cases the Alliance Defense Fund has now fought involving this homosexual agenda, one thing is certain,” said Sears at a session titled “The Homosexual Agenda.” “There is no room for compromise with those who would call evil ‘good’.”

So to all those gay Trump Loyalists over at Breitbart who post that one picture of Trump holding the rainbow flag upside-down as some sort of proof that he's not as bad as the people who make up his administration, I'm having none of it. Your president is not a details guy. Sessions, Pence, DeVos et al. are in charge of bringing back Puritan Rule, and no hastily scrawled message on a flag is going to change the fact that they are his legacy. He's just there for the signing ceremony and the applause.

“Trump’s supporters like to say, ‘It’s not what he says, it’s what he does that matters.’ That’s definitely the case when it comes to issues affecting LGBT Americans,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, who started the now-defunct conservative gay rights group GOProud along with Barron. “I never thought that Donald Trump was an anti-gay homophobe. I certainly didn’t think that when I met him back in 2011. But we’ve all learned a lot about who he really is since then. With his political pandering and posturing to endear himself to the intolerant wing of the GOP over the last few years, it doesn’t surprise me that this administration will go down as the most anti-LGBT in history.”

Denne Uken Snikitt

Happy Leif Erickson Day, everyone! Skøl!

In 1929, Wisconsin became the first U.S. state to officially adopt Leif Erickson Day as a state holiday, thanks in large part to efforts by Rasmus Anderson. In 1931, Minnesota did also. By 1956, Leif Erickson Day had been made an official observance in seven states (Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Illinois, Colorado, Washington, and California) and one Canadian province (Saskatchewan). In 2012, the day was also made official in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In 1963, the U.S. Representative from Duluth, John Blatnik, introduced a bill to observe Leif Erickson Day nationwide. The following year Congress adopted this unanimously. In 1964, the United States Congress authorized and requested the President to create the observance through an annual proclamation. Lyndon B. Johnson did so, as has each President since. Presidents have used the proclamation to praise the contributions of Americans of Nordic descent generally and the spirit of discovery. In addition to the federal observance, some states officially commemorate Leif Erickson Day, particularly in the Upper Midwest, where large numbers of people from the Nordic countries settled.

Q Toon: Soda Jerk

When I was drawing this cartoon this past Sunday, my chief concern was that before anyone would have a chance to read the cartoon, its subject, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, would become the latest Trump administration official to go down in history as having had the shortest tenure of anyone in his position.

By Tuesday, that concern was replaced by the prospect of nuclear war breaking out first.

I can't help but be distressed by Mr. Sessions's decree that his Justice Department will not defend the civil rights of LGBTQ citizens; but if Messrs. Trump and Kim goad each other into turning millions of human beings into radioactive ash, civil rights for anyone becomes a largely moot point.

Q Syndicate✍Aug 10, 2017

As for this cartoon, however, I made the conscious decision to keep most of the image in black-and-white, since I associate the pre-civil rights era with black-and-white photography. Googling and checking Time and Life coffee table books for images of Woolworth's lunch counters, my results were almost entirely limited to finding photos of sit-ins or empty counters. Several of the latter were color photos of counters now in museums or in long-closed Woolworth stores now converted to other purposes.

In no photo did I find Woolworth employees behind the counter.

Fifty years after the sit-ins, New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer Bill Minor explained why:

"The people working behind the counter at Woolworth's were afraid to serve anybody," Minor says. "They just let them sit there. They wouldn't serve them. That's what they were ordered to do--not serve any blacks."

It may soon be equally difficult to find photos of  Justice Department officials on the job.

Q Toon: Cover-Up at Justice

Donald Joffrey Trump's incoming cabinet is so overloaded with secretaries dedicated to the opposition of whatever it is their department is supposed to protect, it's hard to know where to focus first.

Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos is determined to build the best private school system anywhere and to make the public schools pay for it. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has made a career of suing to stop the agency from protecting the environment. Labor Secretary-designate Andrew Pudzer is devoted to the Republican theory of boosting the economy by depressing workers' wages.

And then there is Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Trump's choice to head the Department of Justice. Sessions, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate in 1986 over allegations of racist comments, has been a voice against the rights of African Americans, Latino immigrants, and LGBT citizens throughout his Senate career, and a champion of voter suppression.

My cartoon this week alludes to the well-publicized decision by John Ashcroft, George W. Bush's first Attorney General, to cover two statues in the Department of Justice's Great Hall. Spirit of Justice and Majesty of Law are a pair of ten-foot-tall art deco aluminum figures on either side of a podium at the front of the hall; Spirit of Justice is a woman, both arms raised, wearing a toga casually draped over one breast and her opposite hip. Majesty of Law is a man, left arm raised, right arm holding a lit torch, with a small towel protecting his modesty.

Installed in the 1930's, the statues have been a source of irritation for Attorneys General for decades. Titillated news photographers elbowed each other in order to get the angle with Spirit of Justice behind Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese when he released a 1986 report on the deleterious effects of pornography. Meese's successor, Dick Thornburgh, started the practice of renting drapes to cover the statues during formal events; Ashcroft's decision to cover the statues at all times was reversed by his successor, Alberto Gonzalez.

Q Toon: Gonna Party Like It's 1921

I figured that enough of the weekly papers which run my cartoon are going to run "double issues" this week (meaning that they won't publish next week), that their editors will be looking for something with a year-end theme.

Donald Berzilius Trump is assembling an incredibly right-wing cabinet. Recent Democratic presidents have always felt compelled to include some Republicans in their cabinet; Barack Obama named three to his inaugural cabinet and was vilified as a ultra-liberal extremist anyway. Even George W. Bush named a token Democrat as Secretary of Transportation. There's no seat at the table in Trump's White House for anyone but Republican ideologues, tycoons and racists, however.

But since I draw for the LGBT press, I couldn't draw this cartoon without sounding the alarm for the future of marriage equality.

If you think my concern is unwarranted, consider all the efforts in Republican statehouses to legislate marriage inequality. In Arkansas, the state Supreme Court ruled that while husband and wife are both recorded as parents to a child, even if one of them is not related by blood, same-sex parents are not.

Several states have put forth so-called religious liberty laws to the effect that anyone can discriminate against same-sex couples as long as they claim religious belief as their excuse. And by anyone, the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that that means any corporation: your employer can refuse family leave, your insurer can refuse to cover your spouse; your hospital can refuse to let one spouse make decisions on behalf of (or even visit) an unconscious spouse.

It's not just wedding cakes, and with no check on their power, Republicans have promised that it's about to go national.

Q Toon: Broadway Has Its Eyes On You

This kerfuffle over the cast of Hamilton addressing Vice President-elect Mike Pence in their audience over the weekend has served to distract national attention from a number of important stories about the incoming administration. Sure, some media reported that Donald Berzilius Trump settled the lawsuit over his Trump University Scam for $25 million; and the appointment of a racist Attorney General and a fascist Chief of Staff. But since a growing percentage of Americans get their news from late-night comedians, there is a danger of those of us in the Humor Biz aiding and abetting Trump's efforts to redirect the nation's attention toward issues of his choosing.

The curtain call speech was pretty mild stuff, especially if you compare it to the organized shout-downs of any attempt to discuss the Affordable Care Act in 2009. You'd never know it from the howls of indignation from the Tweeter-in-Chief, however.

What Brandon Victor Dixon (Vice President Aaron Burr in the play) actually said was:

“You know, we have a guest in the audience this evening — Vice President-elect Pence, I see you walking out but I hope you hear just a few more moments. Sir, we hope that you will hear us out.
“We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us — our planet, our children, our parents — or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us.”

To Trump's base, this was one more case of librul ayleets lookin' down there nozes at Middla Murkan Valews — because that's a one-way speedway, ain't it? — so Trump is delighted to divert their righteous indignation in the direction of the Great White Way.

So where do I get off calling Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the IIIrd a racist, antigay bigot?

• Testifying before the Senate as it considered Sessions's 1986 nomination for a judgeship on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Figures testified that Sessions said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was "OK until I found out they smoked pot." Sessions passed the comment off as a joke.
• Concerning another allegation, Sessions testified, "I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or Communist, but I meant no harm by it."
• As Attorney General of Alabama, Sessions worked to deny funding to student Gay-Straight Alliances at The University of Alabama, Auburn University and The University of South Alabama, stating "an organization that professes to be comprised of homosexuals and/or lesbians may not receive state funding or use state-supported facilities to foster or promote those illegal, sexually deviate activities defined in the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws."
• He is on the record against hate crime protections, marriage equality, and open military service by LGBT persons, calling gay rights "a threat to Western Civilization."

Well, I could be wrong about him.

He could, perhaps, be a complete misanthrope. My first cartoon about him, was back in 2009. A Filipino woman was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the "Uniting American Families Act," which would have granted the partners of same-sex binational couples the same protections different-sex couples have, when her 12-year-old son started crying over the prospect of one of his mothers being deported. Sessions reportedly muttered to his aides, "Enough with the histrionics!"

Donald Drumpf Carries a Toon

Now, if only I could have worked P.T. "There's A Sucker Born Every Minute" Barnum into this cartoon, I'd have a trifecta.

This past week, Donald Trump, whose mouth charges headlong into all sorts of rash statements, had a hard time deciding whether to renounce the support of David Duke. Duke is a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and former state representative from Metairie, Louisiana; he ran unsuccessfully for Congress and the governorship. (I'll have more on him in this blog tomorrow.)

Trump supporters have been desperately trying to tie the KKK to the Democratic Party lately. The KKK certainly was part of the Democratic coalition back in the days of buggy whips and flivvers -- even though that coalition also included Jews, Catholics and labor unions, groups the KKK has always been dead set against.

But as Democrats began to embrace the civil rights movement from the 1940s on, racists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms started to leave the party, bringing the KKK along with them. That exodus grew from a trickle to a flood as Democrats became the party of Civil Rights and Republicans became the party of Southern Strategy. The Republican Party doesn't like to talk openly about their racist supporters, but has been happy to have their votes.

And now the Donald has gained the support of another erstwhile embarrassment to the Democratic Party, Louis Farrakhan. And to think I doubted Republicans' talk of having a "big tent."

Suck it up, boy!

At senate hearings on the Uniting American Families Act bill, Alabama Republican Jefferson Sessions was reported responding to the tears of a 12-year-old, one of whose mothers faces deportation to her native Philippines, by muttering "Enough with the histrionics!"

Different-sex couples, of course, do not run the risk of one parent being deported when his or her visa runs out; they can get married. Same-sex couples, even those living in states which recognize same-sex marriage, do not.

Drawing about obscure stories

This week's cartoon (check back Wednesday for it) is about a pretty obscure news story, reported by James Kirchik on The New Republic's blog pages.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.

Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys. She originally left the Phillipines after suffering a violent attack from a man who murdered her mother and sister (one of the reasons why Tan does not want to return to her native country, aside from the fact that her partner and children live in the U.S., is that the man who brutalized her has since been released from prison.) Tan was originally scheduled to be deported on April 3rd, but won a reprieve after Senator Diane Feinstein introduced a private bill allowing her to stay in the country temporarily.

...[O]ne of Tan's children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics." Sessions's press secretary did not return a call seeking comment.

One can explain these stories on a blog (quoting entire paragraphs, for that matter), but that doesn't work in a cartoon -- unless, like Tom Tomorrow, you have no qualms about having smaller print in your cartoon than the legal disclaimers in the medical and insurance advertisements. It's impossible to be pithy; I'd like to have Sessions saying just "Enough with the histrionics" in it, but I need someone in the cartoon to explain why boys are crying, what Sessions has to do with them, what's going on, even who's who. So much for brevity, the soul of wit!

I'm therefore not very satisfied with this week's oeuvre. I'm also hoping that I can come up with a cartoon very soon that is NOT about marriage equality.