Q Toon: Bubble, Bubble, Toilet Trouble

Delaware, the First State in the Union, is now also the First State in the Union Represented by a Transgender American.

Democrat Sarah McBride, whose deadname is Nunnoyer Dambizness, won election as the state's one and only Representative in the 119th Congress, and Republican panties immediately entered into wad mode. South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace led the hue and cry that Congresswoman-elect McBride would not be welcome in women's rest rooms anywhere in the Capitol building.

Speaker Mike Johnson, whose duties include assigning toilet stalls, readily acquiesced to Mace's demands, publishing a new rule that lavatory use must align with one's gender as assigned at birth, no matter what changes may have taken place in the meantime. His order gently suggested that members can avail themselves of the personal lavatory facilities in their own offices; and McBride has accepted the crapper command calmly and professionally.

It may not have occurred to the Transphobic Caucus that not all transgender persons have transitioned from male to female. There are some people who have found their peace transitioning in the opposite direction. While none of those persons have yet been elected to Congress, I expect that Congresswoman Mace will suffer advanced conniptions if she ever hears that Chaz Bono has come to lobby the legislature after a heavy lunch.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi might offer that Mace's complaints are much ado about chicken shit. We all remember how much deference the Trumpster mob showed to female sensitivities when they came to lobby Capitol Hill to overturn the 2020 election on 1/6.

Q Toon: Lindsey Explains It All

 

I get annoyed by right-wing editorial cartoonists who do little more than illustrate a Republican Talking Point day after day, so I have to apologize for doing the same with a Democratic one.

My cartoon this week is taken almost verbatim from a comment I made on Facebook last week and subsequently saw made and memed by others. If I didn't find Lindsey Graham's duplicity particularly galling, I probably would have left this cartoon undrawn.

Senator Graham was a House trial manager in the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton over aforementioned blow job. On January 16, 1999, then-Representative Graham told Senators:

“When a president gets out of bounds, and doesn't do as he or she should do, constitutionally -- and I would argue that every president and every citizen has a constitutional duty not to cheat another citizen, especially the president -- and they get out of bounds, it is up to us to put them back in bounds or declare it illegal.

"And how do we do that? How do we regulate presidential misconduct when it's done in a presidential fashion? Through the laws and powers of impeachment. That is why we're here today. ...

What's a high crime? How 'bout if an important person hurt somebody of low means? It's not very scholarly, but I think it's the truth. I think that's what they meant by 'high crimes.' Doesn't even have to be a crime. Just when you start using your office and you're acting in a way that hurts people, you've committed a high crime. ...

You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”

Democratic House trial managers played Graham's argument at last year's impeachment over that perfect phone call to the President of Ukraine. It didn't sway him from his slavish fealty to Donald Berzelius Trump then, and neither did his momentary revulsion against the events of January 6 this time around.

Dismissing last week's House trial managers' presentation out of hand as "offensive and absurd," Graham went on to blame Speaker Nancy Pelosi for somehow having a hand in the insurrection, and he even threatened to impeach Vice President Kamala Harris over last year's Black Lives Matter riots as soon as Republicans win back the House.

Now that would be offensive and absurd.

Ta

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article230483449.html#storylink=cpy

Q Toon: Into the Spiderverse

In the early months of the Corrupt Trump Administration, six members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned in protest of Donald Joffrey Trump's inaction on HIV/AIDS issues.

The following December Trump then fired the rest of the council by FedEx letter, claiming that he wanted to take PACHA "in a new direction."

For the next year, it appeared that the "new direction" was "no direction at all." PACHA sat empty and dormant, like so many of Trump's ambassadorships and sub-cabinet offices. So it was a surprise to hear Trump promise in his State of the Union message that he was submitting a budget to Congress that would somehow bring an end to new HIV infections in the United States by 2030.

That's a welcome and laudable goal, to be sure, but you have to question his methods. His lackeys claim that he fired everyone in PACHA because it was full of Obama appointees — yet another example of his knee-jerk reaction against anybody and anything with his predecessor's name attached to it. There is value in continuity and institutional memory that utterly escapes this president.

When John Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, his first instinct was not to get rid of everybody at NASA.

Overshadowed by January's partial government shut-down, the Mueller investigation, and Adam Levine's tattoos, Trump has finally named two PACHA co-chairs: Washington State Secretary of Health John Wiesman and Deputy Executive Director of the AIDS Institute Carl Schmid.

This is, at least, somewhat encouraging. Wiesman's medical career began in 1986 as an HIV/AIDS test counselor and he is past president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. His successor, Nicole Alexander-Scott, commends him:

"Both as a clinician caring for patients with HIV and as a policymaker working to eliminate the disease, I have witnessed firsthand John's commitment, passion, and expertise when it comes to HIV. He is supremely qualified to co-chair the reconstituted Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and will lead bold public health actions to stop HIV."

Schmid spoke out last year about issues arising from provisions hidden in insurance plans that complicate access to affordable and effective drug treatment. He is encouraged by Trump having included HIV/AIDS treatment in the address, telling reporters, “There’s a lot of distrust between the community and the administration, understandably. This could be a good opportunity to show they’re committed to this.”

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Perhaps Wiesman and Schmid are Trump's two for today.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I'm not quite done drawing Trump's State of the Union address. I had to draw one more so I could get the color of Speaker Pelosi's outfit correct.

Here's a topic that is unlikely to come up at Trump's campaign rally this week.

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By the way, when Google+ goes bye-bye in a matter of weeks, I am told that any comments readers have left on this blog via Google+ will vanish into thin ethernet. It's not because I'm censoring anybody. That I can tell you.

Toon: Inflammatory Remarks

According to Politifact, Donald Joffrey Trump's 2018 State of the Union address contained only five "false" or "mostly false" statements; but by last summer, the rate of Trump's lies to the American people had increased to sixteen whoppers every day.

In his first year as President, Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to the Washington Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. In June and July, he averaged sixteen false claims a day. On July 5, the Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were “false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.” 

It has only gotten worse since then, and Lord knows how many lies per minute he tells to the people around him. Add to that the lies he forces Sarah Succubus Sanders and others to tell for him, and it's a wonder the White House hasn't burnt to the ground yet.

When the next President arrives at the executive mansion, she or he is going to be told not to mind the smell of smoke everywhere.

It's just the scorched brimstone.

Q Toon: The Journey of 1,000 Miles

Not knowing at my drawing board on Sunday how Mercurial American President Donald Trump's government shutdown, his Oval Office address to the nation, the Democrats' response, or even the Golden Globes was going to pan out, I came up instead with this.

Look, I don't know how much longer we can wait for Robert Mueller to wrap up his investigation; but impeaching a president requires finding an actual high crime or misdemeanor that will stand up in the Senate. The founding fathers didn't provide for impeachment in the case of a toxic presidency, and by the time Trump's mental instability becomes obvious enough for Section Four of the 25th Amendment to be unquestionably necessary, there won't be enough Principal Officers left in his cabinet to make a quorum.

But for now, the prospect of impeachment is overshadowed by more immediate issues. Trump is bound and determined to get that big ugly monument to His Panic along our southern border, and he doesn't care whom he has to starve into submission to get it. That's his idea of how negotiation works, and we're about to see how long Nancy Pelosi and her anxious car pool are willing to put up with him.

Week One's Sneak Peek

This could be the first time I've put Nancy Pelosi in a cartoon, if memory serves me correctly, and it's about time. I've drawn every Speaker of the House since Tip O'Neil at least once, although I think Denny Hastert only showed up as a former congressperson.