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.

My Country, White or Wrong

Today's Graphical History Tour returns again to the Roaring 20's just in time to check in with the war between the Ku Klux Klan and bootleggers in Williamson County, Illinois.

"Active Again" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, April 17, 1924

The mining community of Herrin had been the scene a few years earlier of a violent strike, and more recently of raids against taverns, speakeasies, and private homes. The raids were led by S. Glenn Young, a former guard at the Herrin mine who had gone on to work for — and get fired from — the U.S. Treasury Department's Prohibition Unit. Young enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the local Ku Klux Klan in his mission to wipe out every trace of alcoholic beverages in the county.

There were union miners on both sides of the "booze war" that ensued, and local law enforcement, which had quietly ignored violations of the Volstead Act, was caught in the middle. Klan sympathizers accused the the area's Italian immigrants of wantonly disregarding Prohibition, so the divide fell primarily between the county's Catholic and Protestant citizens.

Violence between the two sides resulted in at least two deaths, a hospital placed under siege by armed klansmen, and Young placing Herrin Mayor C.A. "Mage" Anderson, Williamson County Sheriff George Galligan, and 38 others under arrest for the murder of a pro-Klan police constable. Sheriff Galligan declared, "I'm through being the goat." He told the media that he had discharged all his deputies, replacing them with klansmen. "I turned the reins over and concentrated on my coming trial. As far as I am concerned, they can dig trenches and fight it out."

Local elections in Herrin on April 15 were marred by fist fights and gunfire, allegedly sparked by a Klan poll watcher challenging several Catholic voters, including a nun who had lived in Herrin for two decades. Klan candidates swept the election, and over the next several days, three klansmen and three anti-Klan combatants were killed.

Young and Herrin Police Chief John Ford placed under arrest Judge E.M. Bowen, who had called a grand jury before the election to indict over 20 klansmen for their booze war activities. Bowen was charged with election fraud.

"State Konvention Kostume" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 18, 1924

The issue of denouncing the Klan was brought before both major party state conventions in Missouri that April. An anti-Klan plank was rejected by Missouri Democrats, who also failed to take any position on other controversial issues of the day such as Prohibition and the League of Nations. Nor could they agree on endorsing any of the Democratic presidential candidates, falling back instead on long-winded, generally vague criticism of Republicans.

"The first demonstration of the character of leadership of Missouri Democracy," opined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "does not presage a winning battle nor results that are worth while if the battle should be won by default."

"Mouse" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, April 29, 1924

Meeting later that month, Missouri Republicans also presented themselves with a proposed anti-Klan plank. It passed, but without any mention within it of the Klan by name.

Considering that there were a number of splinter groups rivaling the Klan primarily on the basis of leadership squabbles and what sorts of violence they condoned, not adding credence to any of them might have been the most prudent tactic.

"Left at the Dock" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. April 26, 1924

Race played a significant role in congressional passage of Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924. Placing draconian new limits on immigration into the U.S., especially from Italy and Eastern and Central Europe, it included the Asian Exclusion Act, which barred all immigrants from Asia.

Japan's Ambassador to the U.S., Masano Hanihara, conveyed to President Coolidge his government's strong objection to the bill, predicting "grave consequences" to relations between our two countries.

"Exclusion Laws and Japanese Pride" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1924

"And So the Board Is Nailed On" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 17, 1924

Ambassador Haniharo's letter backfired badly. Senators who had expressed skepticism about the bill took umbrage at what they viewed as foreign interference with U.S. domestic affairs. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority.

"No Discrimination Whatever" by Douglas Rodger in San Francisco Bulletin, April 18, 1924

There wasn't much sympathy for Japan's position among editorial cartoonists of the day. Orville Rodger, himself an immigrant from Scotland, appears to have dismissed Japanese complaints against the Asian Exclusion Act by pointing out that it excluded Chinese, the "Hindoo," and other Asians as well. (Chinese immigration and naturalization were already forbidden by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1887.)

The Supreme Court had ruled in 1923 that Asians were not eligible for naturalization in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. Congress used the language of the Court's ruling, quoted in Rodger's cartoon, to achieve racist aims without actually referencing race or nationality in its bill.

"The Face at the Window" by Orville Williams for Star Company, ca. April 24, 1924

Orville Williams communicated the Hearst chain race-baiting against the "Yellow Peril" in this and other cartoons. In this instance, Hearst was uncharacteristically in league with the isolationist Chicago Tribune, too.

"Our Neighbor's Dog" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1924

Why, no, Mr. McCutcheon. I cannot imagine why Ambassador Haniharo's pride would have been hurt.

"Keep the Flag Waving, Charley" by Robert Minor, in The Liberator, Chicago, May, 1924

Taking a different tack to the Japan-as-dog motif, Robert Minor's cartoon seems to depict "Jap Immigration" to a loud, yapping pup on a leash held by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes in fact opposed the Japanese Exclusion Act, but the political reality was that President Coolidge could not veto the bill without risking having his veto overridden. With the presidential election well underway and his nomination assured, Coolidge's main advantages were incumbency and, in contrast to the Democrats, party unity.

(Editor and cartoonist for the socialist The Liberator Robert Minor packs an awful lot of extraneous stuff into this cartoon. He includes Mexico — location of the Standard, Pan-American Petroleum, and Sinclair oilfields  — within Secretary Hughes's Japanese Exclusion Line. Oilmen connected to the Teapot Dome scandal encourage Hughes to keep waving his flag while they shelter in a teapot replacing the Capitol dome. James Pierpoint Morgan demands that Europe repay his wartime loans.

(Swimming off the coast of Florida, Washington Post publisher Ned McLean, a friend of disgraced former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, calls out "Yoo hoo! I haven't testified yet!" McLean had used his newspaper to defend Fall and counter other media's reporting of the Teapot Dome scandal.)

"An Ever Increasing Problem" by Sam Armstrong in Tacoma News Leader, April 21, 1924

Sam Armstrong lumped Japanese Exclusion in with another host of issues related only in the sense that our integrity of national borders lacked a force field keeping out undesirables. "The Excluded Jap" is encouraged by Mr. "Chinese Coolie Smuggler" to join the convoy of Mexican Peons, European Immigrants, The Dope Smuggler, Booze Smuggling, and Rum. His news note ominously predicts that smuggled Japanese would for some reason bring dope with them.

"He'd Better Look After that Back Fence" by Harold Talburt for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. April 21, 1924

You didn't think Mexican immigrants were going to be overlooked, did you?

"We All Have Our Problems" by William C. Morris for George Matthew Adams Service, ca. April 24, 1924

At least Canada was happy to help stop the influx into the United States of Canadians, apparently.

I skimmed weeks' worth of Montreal Gazette front pages in search of help explaining William Morris's cartoon. The U.S. Asian Exclusion Act was front page news almost every day. Canadian worries about emigration to their south? Not so much.

"America, I Love Your" by Harold Wahl in Sacramento Bee, April 29, 1924

The Gentlemen's Agreement cited by Harold Wahl dated from 1907 and the Theodore Roosevelt administration. In it, Japan voluntarily agreed to limit the number of workers allowed to emigrate to the U.S. Since the Asian Exclusion Act rendered the Gentlemen's Agreement moot, the idea that renewing it would mollify Japan is ridiculous on its face.

"America of the Melting Pot Comes to an End," crowed the banner headline of an April 27, 1924 New York Times column by Immigration Act sponsor Senator David Reed (R-PA). Thanks to passage of his bill, Reed confidently predicted that “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.”

April Generations

It's almost time for April showers to yield to May flowers, so I get around herewith to resurrecting a generation's worth of my cartoons from Aprils 1983, 1993, 2003, and 2013.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 12, 1983

I dated this cartoon in April, although it wasn't printed until well into the month of May, in the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper's last issue before summer break. 

A 1981 college graduate would typically be someone at the the tail end of the Baby Boom generation, depending on whether you draw the line at persons born in 1960, 1963, or 1965. If this fellow didn't have a job lined up straight out of college, he soon ran up against the recession that was only just beginning to fade away in 1983.

Such was also the fate also of Generation X (a term not yet coined) who bypassed college to head straight into manufacturing jobs — just as the manufacturing sector began to slip away, first to the anti-union South and then overseas. It was a good time to know how to program computers, but not a good time to follow your father to the foundry.

For the blue-collar middle class, "Morning in America" meant it was time to wake up from the American dream.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 19, 1993

Vaulting ahead ten years, I've got a Gen-Xer (or is he a Millennial?) leading off a local issue cartoon for another University of Wisconsin student paper. That spring, tap water in Milwaukee was contaminated with cryptosporidium, a microscopic, chlorine-resistant parasite that caused respiratory disease and diarrhea in some 403,000 Milwaukeeans. City government warned residents to boil water used for drinking, bathing, and dishwashing.

The contamination was caused by snow melt and storm run-off in the city's sewer system, and is the reason Milwaukee invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a new big tunnel sewer system and water treatment plants.

References made by the two characters in the cartoon to safe sex practices should, I hope, still be obvious. The guy in quasi-military get-up is Alderman Michael McGee, a firebrand who was not above threatening — or excusing — violence in the streets. (Note that this was one year after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and just as the nation was bracing for reaction to whatever verdict came down in the trial of the officers who had beaten him.)

And then, once more, some product placement for Old Milwaukee beer. Because you can't draw a cartoon about beverages of any kind in Milwaukee without bringing beer into it.

in The Biz, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, spring 2003

This cartoon accompanied an article generalizing about the respective attitudes of Boomers, Gen Xers, and Gen Y in The Biz, the glossy, full-color supplement to The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee.

The oldest Baby Boomers were still a decade away from retirement, but according to the article, impatient Gen Xers were complaining that we were old and in the way. Given that the leading presidential contenders 20 years later are the incumbent Silent Generationer and the most self-absorbed, spoiled Baby Boomer on the planet, perhaps they had a point.

Meanwhile, another generation was coming up inexorably behind GenX. I was hoping I could dig up a copy of the Biz this cartoon was in so I could pass along whatever it was the columnist had to say about Generation Y, but no such luck.

Chances are, however, that droopy drawers had nothing to do with it.

for Q Syndicate, April, 2013

Finally, I'll toss in this cartoon as a tribute to Louise Fletcher, who passed away last year. Fletcher is best known for her role as the authoritarian Head Administrative Nurse Mildred Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). I referenced Nurse Ratched for this cartoon about an incident in which Research Medical Facility in Kansas City, Missouri, had a man arrested for refusing to leave the bedside of his civilly unionized partner (marriage not being an option in Missouri at the time).

✍

By the way, I could have put together a post of April cartoons from 1983, 1993, 2003 and 2013 on a military theme. If I had, the 2013 cartoon would have posed a conundrum, given my cartoon earlier this week touching on the issue of deadnaming transgender persons.

I drew a cartoon in April, 2013, about a soldier who has since become transgender. The person doesn't appear in the cartoon, but their deadname does.

To what degree is it deadnaming to refer to a transgender person's pre-transition past if they were on magazine covers, cereal boxes, or their parents' variety TV show at the time? It isn't as if I'd be outing them. One can't entirely pretend that they had no existence and no effect on reality during their pre-transition years. 

On the other hand, it probably isn't exactly polite. So this time around, I'm giving them a pass.

But if that cartoon turns out to be perfect for some future Saturday History Tour, I won't promise that it will never, ever, show up here.

The Yanks Are Coming

Slackerback Saturday returns yet again to the thrilling days of World War I. When we last revisited events of a century ago, the U.S. just had declared war against Germany, which the Entente powers generally welcomed.

Cover of Fantasio, Paris, by Auguste Roubille, May 1, 1917

The question at this point was, "You and what army?"

"You Never Miss the Water 'Till the Well Runs Dry" by Robt. Satterfield in Cleveland News, April, 1917

The U.S. had been able to get by for generations with a volunteer army. The Spanish-American War had been decided in a matter of months, and the expeditionary foray into Mexico had faced only a small band of guerrillas. The U.S. had not defeated Pancho Villa's ragtag rebels, however, and the German war machine was anything but ragtag.

North of the border in British-ruled Quebec, the cartoonist for the Montreal Daily Mail had some disappointing news for "the slacker who went to the U.S."

"To-Day's Hero" by Lawrence (?) in Montreal Daily Mail, April 14, 1917

President Wilson realized that in spite of the patriotic fervor immediately following the declaration of war, the all-volunteer U.S. military would be insufficient to make a substantial difference in any long-term fighting overseas. The answer, of course, was to institute mandatory selective conscription of male citizens, an idea not without its detractors.

"Some of Those Opposed" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Eagle, April 27, 1917

Congressman James Beauchamp "Champ" Clark" (D-MO) had been a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912, entering the convention that year with more delegates than the eventual winner, Woodrow Wilson. In his role as Speaker of the House, he had done much to advance President Wilson's domestic agenda, so Harding's suggestion here that Clark was against conscription because Wilson was for it is a gross mischaracterization; but the Speaker did split with the President over America's entry into the war.

If not against involvement in European affairs generally, Clark was at least no fan of the British Empire, having argued forcefully in the House in favor of the U.S. annexing Canada.

"Backing Up Uncle Sam" by Winsor McCay in New York American, May 1, 1917

In spite of Speaker Clark's opposition, Congress overwhelmingly approved instituting the draft on April 28.

"Universal Training for These" by Jay N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, April, 1917

I include this John Darling cartoon because it features future U.S. President Herbert Hoover. "Ding" was a lifelong fan of fellow Iowan Hoover, whom President Wilson named to lead the U.S. Food Administration based on his indefatigable efforts in bringing relief aid to Belgium. In the cartoon above, Hoover's front line troops of produce and livestock are threatened from behind by "German plotters" cabbage worm, potato bug, and black dust.

"The Kaiser's Prop" in L'Asino, Italy, April, 1917

Meanwhile, as long as we brought up Messrs. Wilhelm Hohenzollern and Nicholas Romanov a moment ago, here's a prediction from a cartoonist for the Italian L'Asino that the sudden end of tsarism in Russia foretold doom for the German Kaiser. (The broken crutch is labeled "tsarism," and the fist is labeled "Russian Revolution.") The cartoonist wasn't about to let the inconvenient detail that Russia and Germany were on opposite sides of the war — and that continued unrest in Russia left its future commitment to the war in doubt — spoil a perfectly good cartoon.

After all, there was a new Triple Entente in town.

"Pals" by Sidney Greene in New York Evening Telegram, April 25, 1917

Q Toon: Mississcrimination Comes to a Head

Good Lord, people, this is the third week in a row I've had to come up with something about anti-LGBT "religious freedom" laws. States are passing them faster than I can draw them: this week, it was Mississippi, with Kansas also putting a bounty on transgendered students trying to take a bathroom break at school.

Lawmakers in Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, Tennessee, and (no surprise) Wisconsin have also hopped on the transbashing bathroom bill bandwagon.

For measures requiring that bathrooms be sex-segregated, the lawmakers needed to decide how, precisely, they would define biological sex. They used a range of definitions, and in two the definition was tautological (“as biologically defined”)
Other bills got a lot more specific. Thirteen specified that chromosomes should be taken into account to define sex, but only Indiana’s House Bill 1079 was detailed enough to say that a female was defined as someone with “at least one X chromosome and no Y chromosome” and that males included everyone with “at least one X chromosome and at least one Y chromosome.”

A friend tells me that he heard a caller in to one of those right-wingnut talk radio shows (and really, is there any other kind?) voice his support of this sort of legislation because he wanted his daughter to be able to use a public ladies' rest room without some guy waving his junk around at the next urinal.

I'll just give you a moment to think about that one.

Whose First Amendment First?

While I was away on vacation this month, there was a clash of competing First Amendment rights at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Because I was not closely following the news, I hadn't seen much about the racial tensions at UM-C that precipitated events; but I did see accounts of how the student athletes, by threatening to forfeit UM-C football games, forced the resignation of the university president and the chancellor.

But the protesters weren't done protesting -- although it turned out that they really objected to having their protest reported on:

First, a video surfaced of faculty, staff and students berating journalists and physically trying to remove a photographer from a public area on campus where protesters with the group Concerned Student 1950 set up a campsite.
Video showed the director of Greek Life, Janna Basler, screaming at a photographer to leave the area and later showed her and others physically forcing the journalist to back away from the campsite, even as the photographer noted his First Amendment right to be there. The same video showed an assistant professor of mass communications, Melissa Click, calling for "muscle" to help her eject the student journalist filming them and appeared to show her grabbing at his camera.

I'm too far removed to comment intelligently on the Mizzou protests, but I was reminded of a racially charged protest from my own college days 35 years ago.

The Political Activities Committee was the student group that arranged for public speakers to come to St. Olaf College to address students and answer questions in the chapel. Speakers during my years at St. Olaf included Nixon counsel John Dean, recent presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, South African journalist Donald Woods, the American Indian Movement's Vernon Bellecourt, and NAACP Executive Director Dr. Benjamin Hooks. Then, in the November of my senior year, they invited the recently overthrown Prime Minister of Rhodesia (since Zimbabwe), Ian Smith.

On the evening of Ian Smith's speech, protesters, some from largely Republican St. Olaf, and many from the much more liberal Carleton College across the river, armed with bullhorns and picket signs, took over the aisles of the chapel. Yelling accusations of murder against Smith and his racist regime for nearly an hour, they completely prevented the former head of state from speaking. [A classmate reminds me that the chant was "Ian Smith, you can't hide! We charge you with genocide!"]

That's my hand holding up the clipboard I'd brought to sketch on, there behind the fellow standing from East High. I was holding it up as a silent counter-protest, but others took up the idea and started adding to the raucous din by chanting "EE-NUFF! EE-NUFF!"

By that point, however, the original protesters had already succeeded in chasing Mr. Smith from the chapel to a small room in another building where the president of the Political Activities Committee had a one-on-one interview with the international pariah. Video of the interview was available to watch then next morning, and it was neatly summarized in the student newspaper.

But the rest of us who had questions we wanted to ask the disgraced former Prime Minister never got to ask them. So free speech won out that night, and free speech also lost.

Which is the way of things in an all-or-nothing environment. Whether it's so-called political correctness on campus, the politics of personal destruction, or a campaign season in which a candidate can propose having the U.S. government shut down places of worship and shadow everyone of that religious faith, and he can still be considered a front-runner, that's where we are today.

Q Toon: Health Care POA DOA

It seems like only two years ago that President Obama signed a directive that all hospitals that accept federal funding must allow patients' same-sex partners visitation rights. Why, yes, it was exactly two years ago this past Monday, in fact.

Last week, Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, hauled a patient's civil-union-husband away from his bedside in spite of that directive, and had him arrested for being "disruptive." The hospital even went so far as to file a restraining order against the C-U-H of five years, Roger Gorley.

“I was not recognized as being the husband, I wasn’t recognized as being the partner,” Gorley explained.
He said the nurse refused to confirm that the couple shared power of attorney and made medical decision for each other.
“She didn’t even bother to look it up, to check in to it,” the Lee’s Summit resident recalled.

The hospital defends itself by noting that it was the family of the patient who wanted Gorley evicted from his husband's room, and they were merely respecting the wishes of "the family":

We believe involving the family is an important part of the patient care process. And, the patient's needs are always our first priority. When anyone becomes disruptive to providing the necessary patient care, we involve our security team to help calm the situation and to protect our patients and staff. If the situation continues to escalate, we have no choice but to request police assistance.

Happily, I have a good relationship with my husband's family and he with mine, but you can be sure that either of us would raise a stink if we were prevented from seeing the other in the hospital.

QToon: Don't Say Gay

Republican legislators in Missouri and Tennessee are pushing "Don't Say Gay" bills, which prohibit any mention of homosexuality in sex education or, for that matter, any mention by a gay or lesbian teacher of his or her personal life at school. From a Huffington Post article:

[Missouri] House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Andrew Koenig (R-Winchester) told HuffPost. "It is a pretty political subject. I know there are a lot of parents that do not want the homosexual agenda taught in the schools." Koenig said he has heard of what he called a "homosexual agenda" being taught in elementary school, but when questioned, said he did not know of specific incidents "off the top of my head."

From that same article, there's this little insight into the mindset of the people who come up with this stuff:

State Rep. Steve Cookson (R-Fairdealing), the bill's principal author, was not available for comment. Cookson's assistant, Agnes Rackers, said Cookson rarely speaks to people from outside his southeastern Missouri district.