Q Toon: Prison Break

Out of the blue, Shittiest President Ever Donald Dump  Trump announced on the Ministry of Truth Social that he had commuted the prison sentence of disgraced former Congresscritter George Santos, a.k.a. Anthony Devolder, a.k.a. Kitara Rivera, who was less than three months into serving a five-year sentence on multiple federal charges of identity theft and wire fraud.

Commutation of Santos's sentence also means that he gets out of paying fines and restitution. And if you think that’s outrageous, just wait until you witness Infinitely Corrupt Emperor Trump awarding himself over a quarter billion-with-a-B of your tax dollars while the whole government is shut down.

Santos says that he's a changed man, which should alert everyone in the country to check whether they have just become a victim of identity theft.

"George Santos was somewhat of a 'rogue,' but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren't forced to serve seven years in prison," Trump wrote. Trump likened what prosecutors had called Santos's "mountain of lies, theft, and fraud" to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CN) having stolen Vietnam service valor, which he called "far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!"

So there we have the essence of Trumpism: loyalty to Boss Donald gets you absolved of all felonies and misdemeanors, whereas anyone who has ever crossed him gets persecuted by the full weight of the Department Formerly Known As Justice, the masked jack-booted thugs of ICE, and the Red State National Guard.

Should Zohran Mamdani win the mayoralty of New York as expected, count on Generalissimo Shit Dumper to issue an executive order naming George Santos-Devolder-Rivera-YourNameHere Emergency Military Mayor of Occupied New York.

Q Toon: Surrender Data

I could get into the debate over whether the Wicked Witch of the West was calling for Dorothy to surrender, or demanding that her friends surrender her, but here's the thing: Elphaba forgot the comma. Case closed.

Anyway, today's cartoon is about Attorney General Pam Bondi subpoenaing detailed information on minors who receive transgender therapy, including names and Social Security numbers of patients.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in a statement July 9 that the department had sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that provide [gender-affirming] care. The request represented an elevation in President Donald Trump’s administration’s effort to halt the medical treatment for transgender youth, even in states where it’s legal.

Bondi said the requests were part of investigations into “healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.” No charges have been announced so far, but the probes have had a chilling impact on the availability of care.

Specifics of the requests were not made public until a court filing in a separate lawsuit this week.

Court filings last month revealed that at least one of the subpoenas, sent to Children's Hospital of  Philadelphia, ran 18 pages long listing detailed patient documentation demanded by the Absolutely Corrupt Trump regime, HIPAA be damned. “It turns doctor-patient confidentiality into government surveillance,” said Jennifer Levi, GLAD Law’s senior director of Transgender and Queer Rights.

Republican state Attorneys General are sticking their noses into the confidential patient data of transgender minors, too. An appeals court this week overturned a lower court ruling and allowed Missouri's Attorney General to subpoena records of 1,165 patients of the Washington University Transgender Center in St. Louis.

On the other side of the political divide, Democratic Attorneys General from fourteen states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime to block Attorney General Bondi from seizing transgender youths' confidential patient records, charging, "The administration has explicitly threatened civil and criminal prosecution of providers of this care and launched criminal investigations into children’s hospitals."

“These threats have no basis in law. No federal law prohibits, much less criminalizes, the provision or receipt of gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents,” the attorneys general argued.

Will Democrats shut down the government if Republicans slip a provision changing that into the must-pass budget bill on Tuesday? Stay tuned.

Q Toon: Catching Up

It is finally time to extricate Leo the Liberal from Trumplinka Concentration Camp and extrajudicial expulsion to Shitholistan, so I've decided that his partner, MAGA Max, finally checked his phone messages and discovered that Leo was waiting for him at the Ottawa airport.

How they will explain returning to the United States without any luggage I leave to your own imagination.

Having recently traveled by car through southern Ontario, I can report that passing into Canada at Niagara Falls was a breeze, whereas coming back into the U.S. at Port Huron entailed a twenty-minute traffic jam at customs. The questioning at either border was friendly and non-problematic; we did see one car directed aside for further examination, but of course, we have no idea why.

But while a real human being who was returned from unjust banishment to a Salvadorian concentration camp is now being threatened with expulsion to Uganda, I'm going to let Leo fall between the cracks of Trump's lawless deportation purges. Probably.

The stumbling block I had to surmount for this cartoon (besides the Canadian flight attendants union strike) was Max's dialogue in the second and third panels. It doesn't quite sound like something a MAGAzoid would say.

But for the past several months, Trumpian fascism has affected Max directly. Now that it no longer does, Max, like the rest of the MAGA flock who used to see threats to democracy and the Constitution everywhere, will go back to blind Trump l'oeilty.

In 2020, Trump's blustering, blundering response to the COVID-19 pandemic was something that affected all of us directly, and helped convince a majority of the U.S. electorate that he had to go. 

Four years later, few of us were still directly affected by COVID-19; the pandemic seemed manageable. So a majority of the U.S. electorate decided, hey, what the heck, better to elect a manifestly corrupt, lying, self-absorbed, dim-witted, venal, seditious convicted felon who nearly got us all killed, than that Black woman.

Toon: Perhaps Ivermectin Would Help

Sigh. I've finally given in and drawn Donald Joffrey Trump again.

Try as I might, I just couldn't ignore him any more.

Heck, Stephen Colbert started referring to him by name again when The Late Show came back from the writers' strike. I guess I at least held out longer than Colbert did. 

Toon: The Verdict

I've been hesitant to weigh in on this story. I feel too close to it.

I work just up the street from the used car lot Kyle Rittenhouse was supposedly trying to defend, and just around the corner from Kenosha's Uptown district, which was almost completely destroyed as a result of the riot. The Kenosha Fire Department was still trying to put out the flames when I arrived at work the next morning. While our building was untouched by fire, the air inside reeked of smoke.

I know people who no longer speak to each other because of the Jacob Blake shooting, the riot, and the deaths that came from it all.

And yes, I call it a riot, not a protest.

There were protests that night. People may riot in protest.

But to call what happened a protest is like calling a hurricane "a weather event."

That said, a riot is no place for a 17-year-old boy to be gallivanting around with an AK-15. I really don't care if he had a father who lived in Kenosha once upon a time, or that he wanted practice being an Emergency Medical Technician. This was not the movies. It was not a video game.

Real people were bound to get hurt or killed.

Young Master Rittenhouse could just as easily have been one of them.

And his killer would have claimed self-defense.

Q Toon: Exemption Card

 

So here's the deal with those phony "Face Mask Exemption Cards" wielded by right-wing snowflakes who feel entitled to ignore the fact that there's a goddamn pandemic going on.

To begin with, they have no weight under U.S. law. They cite the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1989 (ADA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), and in at least one version, the Unruh Civial [sic] Rights Act. The card threatens that the bearer will report violations to the "Freedom to Breathe Agency," possibly resulting in a fine of $75,000 to $150,000. 

Said agency has nothing to do with federal, state, or local government. The FTBA is just another one of those Tea Party, Proud Boys, Sinclair Broadcasting, or Rush Limbaugh's Dittohead clubs with all the legal authority of a Facebook group. The Justice Department published a notice in June regarding a version of the card displaying the Department of Justice official seal:

U.S. Attorney [Matthew G.T.] Martin urges the public not to rely on the information contained in these postings and flyers and to visit http://www.ADA.gov for official information about the Americans with Disabilities Act. For more information and technical assistance about the ADA, please contact the ADA Information Line at 800-514-0301 (voice) and 800-514-0383 (TTY).

There is, one assumes, some tiny fraction of the population who might actually have some physical limitation that prevents wearing a face mask. Having no ears, for example. Or having an allergy to all manner of cloth, which must make it difficult to get dressed in the morning. (There is also mast cell activation syndrome, but check out what this woman with MCAS is wearing.)

If you are an earless victim of MCAS, I don't mean to make your life more difficult than it already is. You might want to invest in a plastic face shield or something. As for the rest of you MAGA snowflakes, there's a good chance that this country would be on its way to getting back to normal if you'd mask up... or put a sock in it.

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: 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: To Have and to Holder

When I pitched this cartoon to my editors, it was because U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would give same-sex married couples "full and equal recognition, to the greatest extent under the law" relative to mixed-sex married couples. The policy shift has ramifications in cases of bankruptcy, alimony, whether one spouse can be forced to testify against the other, bereavement leave, prison visitation, and myriad other situations.

The cartoon can also apply to various states' attorneys general as well. I drew just a couple weeks ago about Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring's decision not to defend his state's marriage inequality amendment. Just this week, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto decided that current case law renders moot any defense of her state's marriage equality ban (a decision backed by the state's Republican governor, incidentally).

In my home state of Wisconsin, on the other hand, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and the Republican running to replace him this year plan to defend mixed-sex marriage supremacy with vigor. The Democratic candidates for the office have announced that neither would defend that amendment to the state constitution.