Sticking By Our Guns

Almost ten years ago, I posted a collection of my cartoons I drew in response to mass shootings in the U.S. Even though my bailiwick is the LGBTQ+ press, I'm still drawing cartoons on that same tragic topic, because the carnage hasn't stopped, and the LGBTQ+ community has by no means been spared.

Today's Graphical History Tour highlights one cartoon I've drawn about mass shootings in America per year since my last round-up of the damn things.

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After the Pulse nightclub massacre nine years ago, when a gunman killed 49 patrons of an Orlando nightclub with a predominantly Latino clientele, I submitted two cartoons to Q Syndicate. One, featuring an American flag at half staff, a rainbow rising out of black clouds, and a quotation attributed to one of the victims, was the one run by most (if not all) publications that printed my cartoons.

June, 2016

Because I thought that the cartoon did not work in grayscale, I also submitted this alternative cartoon, highlighting the callous reaction of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, and his non-apology apology for it. But even the Philadelphia Gay News, which prints my cartoon in grayscale, went with the flag and rainbow cartoon.

The next year, a heavily armed gunman holed up in an upper floor room of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas and opened fire on an outdoor country music festival across the strip. Armed with enough high-powered rifles and bump stocks to equip a battalion, the gunman fired 1,000 rounds into the crowd over the space of ten minutes. 58 concert goers were killed and hundreds injured before the gunman turned a gun on himself.

October, 2017

The list in this cartoon is tragically incomplete. I could have added Catholics at mass, Jews at synagogue, newspaper staffers, Veterans Home workers, Waffle House patrons, and on and on.

Some forty years ago, we used to call mass shootings "going postal," on account of cases of disgruntled postal workers shooting up their place of employment. Nowadays, we can just call it "going American."

February, 2018

In February of 2018, the scene of mass shooting was Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Death toll: 17 students and staff. Injured: 18. Response by the Florida legislature: legislation to protect students from the evils of pornography and requiring the posting of "In God We Trust" in every classroom in the state.

August, 2019

In one week in July and August, 2019, a mass shooting at a Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California left three dead; 23 were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and two at a Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi; yet another outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio killed nine; and one was killed and fourteen injured in a pair of mass shootings in Chicago.

Those were only five mass shootings out of 417 that year as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — more than one per day on average — with a total death toll of 15,381.

Such incidents dipped in the COVID year 2020. There were no mass shootings recorded between March 20 (Springfield, Missouri) and September 19 (Rochester, New York), the longest such gap since 2003.

And all it took was a mysterious, incurable disease taking hundreds of thousands of lives the old-fashioned way.

December, 2021

Congressional Gun Nuts Thomas Massie (R-KY, and yes, he's the Republican co-sponsoring a bill demanding release of the Epstein files) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) responded to a late 2021 school shooting by posting photos of themselves and their families posing in front of their Christmas trees, everyone brandishing a high-powered rifle.

November, 2022

Five patrons of Club Q, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, were killed and 25 injured when a gunman armed with an AR-15 style rifle, a Glock 17 style polymer handgun, and wearing protective body armor, shot his way into the LGBTQ+ nightclub. The attack took place the night of November 19, 2022, the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance. (Facing hate crime charges, the killer claimed after their arrest to identify as non-binary, but no acquaintances or family remember them so identifying before that.)

Colorado Springs is in Congressbanshee Boebert's district, so she dutifully issued the tweet I summarized within her Christmas card of the previous year.

You may have noticed that I didn't have a mass shooting cartoon for 2020; so here's an extra one from 2022 — because I've drawn more than one cartoon about mass shootings almost every year:

May, 2022

Americans were shocked by the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, in the spring of 2022, despite mass shootings having become commonplace in this country. While Uvalde police dithered around Robb Elementary School for over an hour, an 18-year-old with an assault rifle and black body armor went from room to room, methodically shooting children and staff. Children had to pretend they were dead as he returned to rooms he had left, shooting the wounded and anyone who called for help. 19 children and two teachers died before Border Control agents stormed the school and shot their murderer.

As in the aftermath of other school shootings, there was much talk by opponents of gun control of "hardening" our schools — making them impenetrable to mass murderers and just about everybody else. The nitwit Senator from my home state, on the other hand, went on TV to prescribe getting rid of "wokeness" and Critical Race Theory.

For the record: the Uvalde killer entered Robb Elementary through a locked door that failed to latch; and Critical Race Theory has never been part of the curriculum for schoolchildren in Uvalde or anywhere else.

April, 2023

Congresscretin Tim Burchett (R-TN) responded to the April, 2023 massacre of six schoolchildren and staff in Nashville, saying, "It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’"

September, 2024

There were some 50 or so school shootings in 2024, but what most concerned presidential candidate Donald The Terrible Trump was his bonkers delusion that kids were going to school and undergoing gender reassignment surgery in the nurse's office. (JD Vance's presence in my cartoon references an awkward campaign photo op in a doughnut shop.)

But yes, Trump literally did respond to a mass shooting in Iowa, in which a sixth grader was killed, with "It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it."

I nearly pulled this cartoon, drawn the same weekend that a bullet supposedly grazed Trump's ear at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. He got over it — you and I have had worse paper cuts — but his loyal minions spent the next week wearing gauze over the sympathetic injuries to their own right ears.

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I'm afraid I don't have any witty remarks to wrap up this week's Graphical History Tour. No words of encouragement. No easy answers. 

Just the Gun Violence Archive map of mass shootings so far this year.

There But For The Grace

The church from which I retired last year and the pastor with whom I served there have made national news — again — this past week. You can read coverage by the New York Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Kenosha News (subscriptions required) or Chicago Sun-Times. Or continue below for my own two cents worth.

New York Times, page 19A, August 20, 2025

I had taken the job as Grace Lutheran Church's parish secretary in 2017 against the advice of a former employee, who warned me of a toxic environment there. Grace Lutheran was founded in 1901 when English-speaking Lutheran Churches were somewhat of a novelty, located in what was once the city's fashionable uptown, but now in what is euphemistically described as "a changing neighborhood."

Your humble scribe answering the door to reporters after a 5-year-old child had been fatally shot in the house next door to the church

In its heyday, as with most mainline Christian churches the post-World War II baby boom era, it had hundreds of members on the rolls, including several faculty and administrators of Lutheran-founded Carthage College. There is a tension between folks with advanced degrees and people whose forebears are memorialized in the stained glass windows.

The following anecdote has nothing to do with this window.

I once came across a decades-old, five-page, hand-written letter to Grace's then pastor by the daughter of a founding family arguing strongly against the church's decision back then to participate in the INNS program, opening its doors as a homeless shelter one night per week. Her parents, she wrote, would be horrified to see their church abused in such a manner; the role of her church was to praise God, not to feed and house the poor.

If I know anything about Lutheran pastors of the 1990's, her pastor could hardly wait to preach on Matthew 25:41-46. And the lady who wrote that letter had probably left to join a nearby Wisconsin Synod or Missouri Synod congregation more in line with her idea of Christianity.

By the 2010's, Grace was an aging congregation, but one that wanted to be socially relevant, both to live the Gospel and also to attract younger members (while still clinging to century-old hymns every Sunday — a new music team switched to contemporary music in 2023). So they issued a call to a young firebrand pastor out of California, passionate about environmental issues and social justice.

They got more than they bargained for.

Rev. Barker speaking at a WisPIRG rally in front of Grace Lutheran Church

When I came along, the congregation was getting along financially thanks to a dozen or so of its wealthier members and outside grants to benefit its free diaper programs and its housing of a free breakfast and food bank service (the homeless shelter having moved out to its own permanent location years earlier). Then came COVID-19; as with many other mainline congregations, when the doors re-opened for in-person worship months later, attendance was way down.

In the middle of all that came the police shooting of Jacob Blake during a domestic disturbance call. Grace Lutheran Church was caught between the centers of riots, looting, and fires that followed. (See my post here.) The building was undamaged, but the inside reeked of smoke when I came to work the following Tuesday.

Rev. Jonathan Barker was on vacation at the time, but returned home to help lead Black Lives Matter protests (and, behind the scenes, to house water and first aid materials for protesters while the National Guard enforced a curfew). When the Greater Milwaukee Synod and churchwide office wanted to rally in support of the community, the front lawn of Grace Lutheran Church was its choice of venue.

Unbeknownst to nearly everyone at the rally, Grace had been recommended to the staff of Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden as the location for a listening session between the candidate and select representatives of the community the very next day. (See my account here.) First United Methodist was even closer to the rioting, but for whatever reason, Biden's people opted for Grace, and Pastor Barker was happy to oblige.

It was never intended to be a campaign event, but Pastor Barker's role in bringing Biden to Grace and his vocal advocacy of Black Lives Matter protesters drove away some church members, including some vital congregational leaders. Most Kenoshans did not appreciate their town being trashed and burned so that protesters could make a point about police violence.

Pastor Barker nevertheless devoted a lot of time to being a protester. He held weekly protests at one of Kenosha's busy intersections calling on Wisconsin's Republican Senator Ron Johnson to vote for President Biden's Green New Deal bill — a lost cause, since Johnson has always been firmly committed to despoiling the environment, slashing social services, and excusing the rich and powerful from paying their fair share to keep government running.

When the Republicans held their national convention in Milwaukee, Pastor Barker superglued his shoes (while wearing them) to the entrance of the convention's parking garage. He also tried disrupting a Trump campaign event, getting forcibly removed while Trump made fun of him.

I have to note that this was all on Pastor Barker's personal time, despite his choice of collar. Grace could not afford a full-time pastor, so he was only on the clock Saturdays through Tuesdays (plus Christmas Eve). Naturally, however, people expect their pastor to be available 24/7, regardless what they're paying him or her. Especially those members who spent a lifetime serving pot luck dinners and funeral luncheons, singing in the choir, volunteering at Vacation Bible School, or just putting $5.00 in the offering plate every week.

Grace is a congregation in crisis. Since my retirement, one member of the already short-handed church council quit after other members of the council had the leaders of the free breakfast and food pantry programs forcibly removed by police (the matter is the subject of continuing litigation; Grace tried and failed to keep the programs going on its own). Another council member quit the church over Pastor Barker's political activity. Yet another council member died suddenly.

With all this going on, Pastor Barker decided to respond to a new IRS ruling, allowing clergy to endorse political candidates from the pulpit without endangering their 401(c) charitable entity status, by announcing to the New York Times that he planned to endorse Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for President in his August 17 sermon.

Greater Milwaukee Synod Bishop Paul Erickson found out about Pastor Barker's plan when the Times contacted him for comment. The churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) had just ratified an official "social statement" opposing political endorsements from the pulpit, so Bishop Erickson warned Pastor Barker that his sermon was contrary to that social statement and would likely result in the ELCA revoking Grace Lutheran Church's coverage under the national church's group tax exempt status.

Rather than change his sermon, Barker posted a terse video message to the congregation, resigning as Grace's pastor and from the ELCA clergy roster. He delivered his sermon at some venue festooned with papel picado, and promises to continue preaching on his personal YouTube channel.

As for Grace Lutheran, Bishop Erickson was there this past Sunday, and issued a pastoral letter to the synod:

I also ask for your prayers for Grace Lutheran Church. I was present with them on Sunday, preaching and meeting with them as they consider whether they have a viable future. Many of you are aware of the recent challenges and controversies surrounding the congregation and their relationship with the former Grace Welcome Center. Please know that I have been and will continue to walk with the congregation and others in Kenosha and the surrounding communities as we work to discern God’s will for the future of ministry in that neighborhood.

What remains of the council has been disbanded, and my successor as office secretary has quit effective Monday. The synod office in Milwaukee will take over management of the church. Pastor Sheila Rawn, already planning to serve as interim pastor at Grace during what was to be Pastor Barker's upcoming family leave, has agreed to begin her service there right away. By ELCA practice, she would not be considered for a permanent position there, if in fact the congregation somehow becomes viable again.

I grieve with, and pray for, my sisters and brothers at Grace. I cannot offer much hope that all will turn out well in the end; but what hope there is will only come about after finding new paths through that old building. God's place is with the "changing neighborhoods" in which Grace stands, its people living up to the message of Matthew 25:35-40 as best they can.

Q Toon: A Hallowe'en Classic

This week's cartoon goes out especially to my readers in Philadelphia Gay News, where the Republican candidate for governor thinks a local hospital is abducting homeless children to practice gender reassignment surgery on them. (I'm not making this up. He is.) 

It was the latest in a series of extreme and false statements by Doug Mastriano, who made the comments during an interview with a right-wing network that features Steve Bannon and a steady stream QAnon conspiracies. ...

During a program this week the host of a program on the “Real America’s Voice” network asked Mastriano a loaded question about his Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race, Josh Shapiro, who is Pennsylvania’s Attorney General. Mastriano then took the opportunity to falsely claim: “He’s standing aside while the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is grabbing homeless kids and kids in foster care, apparently, and experimenting on them with gender transitioning, something that’s irreversible.”

Mr. Mastriano is not alone in fabricating false facts, of course. The Republicans' senatorial candidate in Georgia, football star Herschel Walker has become a laughingstock around the country for claiming that he's an FBI agent-cum-police special consultant who graduated valedictorian from the University of Georgia (no, he didn’t graduate at all) and started a breaded-chicken empire nobody else has ever heard of. Not to mention his denying the stray children and abortions he happens to be responsible for. 

Even his own campaign staffers admit that Walker is a serial liar.

And yet he stands an even or better chance of being Georgia's next senator.

The GQP candidate for governor in Arizona, Kari Lake, clings ferociously to the lie that some nefarious conspiracy stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Retrumplicans in her state tried over and over and over again to find evidence of massive voter fraud, only to come up with a greater Biden win in Arizona than in the original vote count.

If she is elected governor, she promises to add new restrictions on Arizonans' right to vote: only on Election Day, at a polling place, on paper (counted only by hand), and with voter identification on all ballots. That's right: no more secret ballot. And if she still doesn't like how the people vote, she'll simply refuse to certify the results.

And she has a five-point lead in the polls.

Here in Wisconsin, voters have already elected Ron Johnson to two craptastic terms in the U.S. Senate and may very well give him a third, in spite of his pretending that the January 6 insurrectionists were unarmed and peaceful, that mouthwash was as good or better at protecting against COVID-19 as the actual vaccines, and that Dr. Fauci had "overhyped" both COVID-19 and HIV-AIDS.

On January 6, 2021, Johnson sent lists of fraudulent electors to Vice President Mike Pence on the Senate floor in an effort to overturn the wills of Wisconsin — and Michigan — voters. Happily, Pence's staffer told Johnson's errand boy to get lost. Johnson's excuse once the episode came to light was that somebody, he doesn't know who, wanted something, he didn't know what, delivered to Pence that day, so he said, sure, whatever, what does it matter?

The list of these Republicans goes on and so forth, et cetera ad infinitum, with one after another running to be governor, secretary of state, attorney general, senator, congressperson, judge, district attorney, sheriff, school board member, and deputy assistant ombudsman of the water department from coast to coast — many of them firmly convinced that public schools are providing litter boxes for students who believe they are cats.

It's times like these when you wish the phrase "most important election in our lifetime" hadn't been used to describe every election in our lifetime.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Since you've wandered into one of my cartoons, sir, I suspect that the chances at this household are slim to none.

By the way: I had mentioned a while back that I had received July and August issues of Wisconsin Independent, but not a September issue by the end of the month. Wisconsin Independent is a twelve-page newspaper that appears to be campaign literature but doesn't include a disclaimer to that effect. 

Well, the September and October issues arrived in the mail in the past two weeks, with headlines including "Wisconsinites Stand to Benefit from Student Debt Relief" (byline Armand Jackson, Northern Wisconsin Times) and "Ron Johnson Campaign Employs Fraudulent Elector" (byline Josh Israel).

With the election on November 8, the latest possible date, there's plenty of time for them to get a November issue out.

But with no paid advertising in it, the prospects of a December issue are slim to none at best.

Independent (of Whom?)

Remember a couple months back when I asked whether anyone remembered a publication called the Madison Independent somewhere around 1982?

Nobody has stepped up with information about it, but we did receive two issues of this in the mail this summer:

The "About Us" insert that came with one of them claims that the Wisconsin Independent is staffed by experienced journalists, and there's a QR code if you care to send in recipes or to unsubscribe. In spite of a bare-bones crossword and articles about such things as blackbirds and the Packers, the rest does read like campaign literature.

There's no masthead, nor any boilerplate identifying it as campaign literature; just a return address for the American Independent at a P.O. box in Washington D.C.

Also, no cartoons, so, meh. 

There is a definite liberal tilt to the articles about politics. Not the sort of liberal bias conservatives complain about when the mainstream media don't act as docile cheerleaders parroting right-wing talking points. This stuff is a left-wing counterbalance to Fox News and talk radio. Or that complimentary issue of Epoch Times my dad got in his mail this week.

I figured the proof of the pudding would be if the Wisconsin Independent stopped coming to our house as soon as this year's election is over.

But we haven't received a September issue, so I guess we'll never know.

Q Toon: Sticking to His Guns

Last Thursday, Fox Business host Neil Cavuto asked Senator Ron Johnson for his reaction to the horrific murder of 19 third- and fourth-grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old armed with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.

"Do you think we would require stiffer background checks?" Cavuto asked RoJo.

“You know, no matter what you do, people fall through the cracks,” Johnson shot back. “You can’t identify all these problems. You can’t arrest somebody for a crime they haven’t committed yet. These are difficult issues.”

Reiterating his belief that the solution lies in “renewed faith” and “strong families, Johnson then quickly leaned into the latest right-wing moral panic.

“We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness,” the senator fumed. “We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling, you know, some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”

Pushing back, Cavuto interjected: “But school shootings have been happening long before CRT.”

Undeterred, Johnson asserted that “CRT’s been going on under the radar for quite some time as well,” declaring that “wokeness” and “liberal indoctrination” have also been going on for a long time.

“This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law’s going to, it’s not going to solve it, it’s not going to solve it,” he concluded.

If I shared Wisconsin's senior senator's confidence that banning "wokeness" was going to solve our gun problem, and if I thought that Critical Race Theory had the slightest relevance to any of this, I'd be right RoJo's pushing for a return to teaching heterosexual white male supremacy. 

But I don't.

Nor do I think that it's at all practical to post guards armed as if for World War III at every entrance to every school building, grocery store, hospital, movie theater, house of worship, fast food diner, office holiday party, and open-air garlic / music festival.

But since Ron Johnson, and the rest of the GOP, are steadfast in their belief that American gun killings have nothing whatsoever to do with American guns, give him an E for Effort for trying to link the carnage to some Republican talking point, any Republican talking point.

Q Toon: Set in Boldface Hype

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), a leader in his party's fight against the fight against global pandemics, was on Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade's podcast on World AIDS Day last week. He acknowledged the occasion by accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, of exaggerating the danger from COVID-19 as well as from HIV/AIDS.

“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it,” Johnson told Kilmeade.

“He created all kinds of fear, saying it could affect the entire population when it couldn’t,” Johnson said, without citing scientific evidence. “And he’s doing, he’s using the exact same playbook with COVID, ignoring therapy, pushing a vaccine.”

Update: And now, Johnson has told a "town-hall" phone call, “By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?” Do I really need to tell you that no medical professional or mouthwash company agrees with him?

Anti-vaxxer Johnson should, by all rights, be an embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin, except that there are vast expanses of the state where folks think that a background in business entitles one to spew bullshit at will. PolitiFact has no problem coming up with over a dozen "Mostly False" to "Pants On Fire" statements by him.

In March, he told radio host Joe "Pags" Pagliano that the Capitol rioters on January 6 "were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law. Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned."

And, yes, he doesn't think January 6 was an armed insurrection, but he does want Hunter Biden investigated.

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Johnson hasn't yet announced whether he'll run for a third term next year, although his full-throated endorsement of Trumpism, conspiracy nonsense, and COVID denial has convinced other Republicans to stay out of the race. On the other side of the primary ballot, twelve Democrats to date have launched campaigns to unseat him.

Democrats think Johnson's is the one Republican Senate seat they can flip in 2022, and a group called "Opportunity Wisconsin" has been advertising heavily here all year urging us to tell him to stop doing bad things. For much of the fall, its ads starred a former employee of Hufcor blaming Johnson for a tax break that rewarded Hufcor for moving overseas. The current TV ad features a navy submarine veteran accusing Johnson of voting for tax cuts that resulted in Johnson doubling his wealth.

The Opportunity Wisconsin ad blitz started last February by telling Johnson to stop blocking COVID-19 relief checks. No wonder he thinks the pandemic has been overhyped — relief checks only encourage people not to work. Tax cuts encourage employers to lay them off.

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Meanwhile, here are the facts about HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, just in case anyone out there actually thinks they have been overhyped:

New HIV infections have been reduced by 52% since the peak in 1997. 

• In 2020, around 1.5 million [1.0 million–2.0 million] people were newly infected with HIV, compared to 3.0 million [2.1 million–4.2 million] people in 1997.
• 37.7 million [30.2 million–45.1 million] people globally were living with HIV in 2020.
• 79.3 million [55.9 million–110 million] people have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic.
• 36.3 million [27.2 million–47.8 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.
  

AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by 64% since the peak in 2004 and by 47% since 2010.

• In 2020, around 680,000 [480,000–1 million] people died from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide, compared to 1.9 million [1.3 million–2.7 million] people in 2004 and 1.3 million [910,000–1.9 million] people in 2010.

People living with HIV experience more severe outcomes and have higher comorbidities from COVID-19 than people not living with HIV. In mid-2021, most people living with HIV did not have access to COVID-19 vaccines.

• Studies from England and South Africa have found that the risk of dying from COVID-19 among people with HIV was double that of the general population.
• Sub-Saharan Africa is home to two thirds (67%) of people living with HIV. But the COVID-19 vaccines that can protect them are not arriving fast enough. In July 2021, less than 3% of people in Africa had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

And here is the death toll from COVID-19, as of last night:

5,294,887 deaths worldwide; 813,904 in the U.S.

In just two years. 

 

Q Toon: As I Have Foreseen

Long ago, in a polity far away, having the Senate evenly split between fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats would have forced the two parties to work together to keep the government running. These days, however, we have one party interested in good government, and the other, led by Mitch McConnell (R-Byss), happy to see no government at all.

Barack Obama came into office in 2008 with a filibuster-proof 60-40 Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, and the the U.S. economy four months into the most serious collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s. McConnell had vowed that thwarting Obama at every turn would be the Number One priority of the Republican Party, over and above national interest, leaving Democrats to rescue the economy on their own.

From there, Obama and Senate Democrats tried a bipartisan approach to crafting the Affordable Care Act, trimming the bill a little here and gutting it a little there in a vain attempt to persuade even one Republican to sign onto it. But the GOP had their orders to stick together in intransigent opposition no matter what. Democrats might just as well have passed a Swedish-style single-payer system instead.

Then Ted Kennedy up and died and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown, handing McConnell effective veto power over all legislation and dozens upon dozens of judicial appointments.

Today, McConnell is still in charge of Senate Republicans, who continue to show remarkable unity when opportunities to do nothing arise. Ten Senate Republicans do not exist who will put the national interest above party politics.

None of the issues that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats ran on in 2020 can be dealt with as long as Mitch McConnell retains his veto power, so many Democrats are eager to scrap the filibuster— possible now if they have their 50 votes plus that of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But not so fast! Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) like the filibuster! Manchin cited the "Byrd Rule," named for the 1970's-80's leader of Senate Democrats and 1940's Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd. Byrd personally filibustered four fourteen hours against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with other Dixiecrats.

Sinema, this cartoon's link to being of interest to LGBTQ+ readers, avoided citing the filibuster's history of anti-civil rights, but told Politico, “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work.” (Emphasis mine.) Considering her experience as one of the very few Democratic members of the Arizona legislature, her love for the filibuster may be understandable — but self-defeating.

“I have long said that I oppose eliminating the filibuster for votes on legislation,” Sinema’s office went on to explain. “Retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done. Rather, it’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be. I believe the Senate has a responsibility to put politics aside and fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans.”

From this explanation, a voter might conclude that the Framers created the Senate to be some sort of debating society that occasionally passes bills, rather than an active and functional legislative chamber.

The Framers of the Constitution actually got rid of a forerunner of the filibuster, a requirement that "important resolutions" be approved by two-thirds of the states — a practice that had hobbled government under the Articles of Confederation. As Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #22, observed:

To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser. ... The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.

It was catchier when Lin Manuel-Miranda rapped it, but perhaps you get the point.

February on the Ones

I've used some of these Saturday posts to rehash my own cartoons from 30 years ago, which at this point in the calendar, has led up to Gulf War I. My problem this month is that I've already posted most of my February, 1991 cartoons for one reason or another. The cartoon below may very well be the only one previously unrehashed.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, February 12, 1991

So for a theme this week, here are some of my Wisconsin-themed cartoons from 2001 and 2011.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, February 23, 2001

This cartoon, drawn to accompany an editorial in the Business Journal, has a date written on it of February 16, but so does another Beej cartoon. I don't see a cartoon dated February 23, and I think this one is the one with the wrong date.

At any rate, Chuck Chvala (D-Madison) was the on-and-off Majority Leader in the Wisconsin State Senate from 1995 to 2002 — on at this point in time — and the Business Journal thought that a prescription drug bill in the state legislature was doomed and little more than a partisan ploy. Chvala ended up not looking so heroic when he was found guilty of violating campaign finance laws by having Democratic caucus staff do electioneering work on the state dime.

Quaint, aina?

Now Chvala podcasts political punditry with former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (R-Waukesha), who had his own run-in with ethics laws.

2011 was a tumultuous year in Wisconsin politics; Scott Walker took office as Governor with a Republican majority in both houses of the state legislature. Backed by an ad blitz from anti-union oligarchs, they launched an all-out assault against public employees (notably excepting the police and fire unions, the only unions to have backed Walker's campaign).

Wisconsin Club for [Cancerous] Growth took the lead in TV and radio advertising. One of their ads highlighted the wage and benefit cuts that unions at various private firms had been forced to swallow during the 2008-2009 economic crash, thanks to management's contempt for their own communities. Mercury Marine, for example, could threaten to close down its Fond du Lac plant and open shop in Bumm Fork, Alabama, instead; but the same can't be done with schools and snowplows, prisons and parole officers. So the voice-over announcer complained that public employee unions were not sharing in privately employed workers' pain:

 "All across Wisconsin, people are making sacrifices to save their jobs: frozen wages, pay cuts and paying more for health care. But state workers haven't had to sacrifice; they pay next to nothing for their pensions and a fraction of their health care. It's not fair. Call your state legislators and tell them to vote for Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill. It's time state employees paid their fair share, just like the rest of us."

It was cute that the folks at Wisconsin Club for [Cancerous] Growth included themselves in "the rest of us."

Act 10, as Walker's "budget repair bill" was officially called, gutted public employee unions' ability to negotiate salaries and benefits, banned those unions from collecting dues from public employees who chose not to belong to the union (but would continue to be included in whatever union contracts would follow). Having made union membership pointless, Act 10 also made mandatory annual recertification votes, further encouraging employees to bust their unions.

All in the name of fixing Republicans' "hole in the state budget."

Well, folks, as appreciation for your indulgence while I wallow down memory lane today, here's a February, 2021 cartoon featuring three members of Wisconsin's illustrious delegation to Washington, D.C.: Congressmen Glenn Grothman and Scott Fitzgerald, and Senator Ron "This Didn't Seem Like an Armed Insurrection to Me" Johnson.

Toon: Essentially

Wisconsin's own Ron Johnson wrote an op-ed for USA Today this week in which he lamented the steps taken here and elsewhere to control the spread of the coronavirus. Worrying that we're blowing the global pandemic out of proportion, Johnson thinks too much of the economy has been shut down. "Every premature death is a tragedy," the sage from Oshkosh wrote, "but death is an unavoidable part of life."

And further, while social distancing is helpful, "much of our economy must stay open to provide life’s basic necessities. Rather than announcing general shutdowns and drawing up lists of 'essential' business that can remain open, let’s draw up lists of 'nonessential' businesses that pose a risk for coronavirus spread."

Johnson, chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, announced an investigation in March into the threat Joe Biden's son Hunter poses to national security. That investigation does appear to be on hold during the coronacrisis.

But I'm sure it will kick into high gear sometime between Labor Day and Election Day.

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As long as this social distancing thing remains the norm, we cartoonists are going to have to come up with creative ways of keeping the characters in our cartoons six feet apart without screwing up the artistic balance of the 'toon.

Ready for Their Tax Cut

Here's an extra cartoon for your Christmas stocking:

As I write, we're waiting to see whether Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) can persuade his party's deficit chicken hawks to increase the child credit in their tax bill to double the current amount. This as a sop to lower and middle class taxpayers so that the Republicans' so-called reforms don't come off as a complete give-away to corporations and the rich.

Republicans and their benefactors have long complained that tax rates for U.S. corporations and the richest Americans are the highest in the world — which they're not, but we have to let that pass for now. They gloss over the fact that the overwhelming majority of these upper-bracket filers end up paying little or no taxes thanks to a wealth of deductions that they have lobbied for over the years.

Slashing the upper income tax rates was supposed to be accompanied by erasing significant numbers of those tax loopholes, but by some miracle, the only exemptions and deductions being eliminated are the ones used by lower and middle class filers. Exemptions and deductions that benefit the top 1% — including many Republican members of Congress — remain or are increased.

For example, during the fall, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson — the 26th-richest member of Congress — withheld his support for the bill, leveraging his vote to pressure lawmakers to add provisions to the bill increasing tax breaks for investors in pass-through entities. The most recent federal records show Johnson has up to $30 million of ownership stakes in three LLCs that generate rental income. Johnson earned between $115,000 and $1,050,000 of income from those investments in 2016.

And if you still believe the theory that coddling the rich will enable the benefits to trickle down to everybody else once their wealth finally achieves some mythical critical mass, think again. They have plenty of other plans for their tax breaks, starting with mergers and acquisitions and ending with trimming the newly redundant employees from their mega-companies.

Well, at least Monopoly Man at the southeast corner of this cartoon is generating jobs for all the attendants at the sexual harassment clinic.

Q Toon: I No Longer Approve This Message

Offer void in Louisiana.

Donald Trump, and shadowy Citizens United groups supporting him, advertised heavily on my local TV in October, as did Ron Johnson and Russ Feingold vying for one of Wisconsin's Senate seats. Hillary Clinton didn't invest quite as much on TV ads as Trump did; meanwhile, Paul Ryan was the only congressional candidate I saw advertising on Milwaukee TV (a market covering at least three congressional districts).

Perhaps the only bright spot in the advertising mess was a pro-Feingold ad from the Humane Society Legislative Fund, featuring a handsome German shepherd praising Feingold's voting record in favor of animal protection and conservation measures without claiming that Johnson favors animal cruelty and toxic waste. (The negative stuff is all in the press release you probably didn't read.)

While the candidates' ads were overwhelmingly negative, all but one candidate at least included some positive information about themselves or their agenda in at least one of their commercials. That one candidate with nothing positive to say, I'm very disappointed to report, was Hillary Clinton.

I know, I know: negative ads are more effective than positive ones. They tell us that every election season. But anyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock knows that Donald Trump says horrible things about women and boasts about behaving like a sexist pig. We know he mocks, denigrates and insults Mexicans, Muslims and handicapped reporters. It was all over the news. It was all over the late-night talk and comedy shows. It was all over our Facebook feed.

You know what was not all over the news, late-night shows and social media, Hillary? Any of the uplifting stuff in your stump speeches to the people at your rallies who were already planning to vote for you. Nor were there any policy goals for which you might have wanted to claim a mandate come January.

Trump, vile and offensive as he is, included in some of his advertising promises of making America great again and replacing Obamacare with, well, something swell. On your side, we've got, um, let me think... "I'm with Her." It doesn't exactly invite one to say, "Yeah! That's what I'm looking for!"

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I drew that cartoon on Sunday night and wrote the above on Monday, when I had no idea that all that Hillary Clinton was going to win was the worthless popular vote. The verbiage had been stewing in my head for weeks, but I'd decided against posting it earlier because I don't like all the attention the process of the campaign gets during the campaign at the expense of the issues of the campaign.

Clearly, the Humane Society Legislative Fund's ads were no more help to Russ Feingold than Hillary Clinton's ads were to herself. Health Insurance Profiteers, the FBI Director, Julian Assange and the Kremlin, however, were probably more influential in getting Ron Johnson and Donald Berzilius Trump elected than any commercial.

Q Toon: The Grim Sower

Today's cartoon uses a very peripheral sidebar to the Orlando massacre to comment on an aspect that isn't at all peripheral. But to begin with, the antiLGBT Lieutenant Governor of Texas tweeted the text of Galatians 6:7 on Sunday morning after the Orlando nightclub massacre. He deleted the tweet later that day, explaining that he didn't mean to say what it seemed to say about the terrorist victims.

If the gun-lovers in this country refuse to connect the dots between easy access to weapons of mass murder and mass murder itself, terrorists are more than happy to connect those dots.

I've seen plenty of arguments that the real issue is not assault weapons, and Republicans immediately looked for other ways to frame the issue. Donald Trump wasted no time congratulating himself for having called for quarantining the nation indefinitely (yeah, right: "until we figure out what's going on"). And Ron Johnson, Wisconsin's sorry excuse for a Senior Senator was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN this week:

“The AR-15 that was used in this terror attack, killing 49 people, you wouldn’t describe that as an assault weapon?” Blitzer asked. “You’re differentiating between that and a fully automatic assault weapon? Because that weapon certainly did kill a lot of people.”
“So do bombs,” Johnson replied. “So there are other ways that terrorists can slaughter people. It’s their ideology. Their ideology calls for the slaughter of innocents. That’s the root cause. It’s not law-abiding gun owners that are the problem here, it’s Islamic terrorists.”

Republicans have decided that real problem is that President Obama refuses to utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism." But even if saying "radical Islamic terrorism" somehow had a Rumpelstiltskin effect against those who inspired the slaughter in San Bernardino and Orlando, we'd still have the radical Christian terrorists who inspired the slaughter in Charleston and Oak Creek. And all the radical gun-worshiping terrorists from Littleton to Sandy Hook in order categorical.

There is a meme going around which attempts to counter the NRA argument that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" with a photograph pointing out all the armed "good guys" around President Ronald Reagan just before he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr. It somewhat misses the point in that Hinckley was indeed stopped by some of those good guys — after he had wounded four people, yes, but he did get stopped.

Hinckley was armed with a .22 caliber Röhm RG-14, and only hit Reagan at all because one of his six bullets ricocheted. Had he been able to get his hands on a a SIG Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle, or any of the other assault weapons made readily available to "bad guys" since 2004, Ronald Reagan's presidency would have been a historical footnote tucked between those of William Henry Harrison and James Abram Garfield, and there would probably be a monument somewhere in memory of many "good guys," photographers, and by-standers who were in front of the Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981.

Better Know a Stooge

Wisconsin legislators got some exposure on the late-night TV shows last night. It was finally Senator Ron Johnson's turn to be David Letterman's "Stooge of the Night," (at 13:12 here) and Congressman Gwen Moore from Milwaukee's Fightin' Fourth was featured in Steven Colbert's "Better Know a District" segment.

Rep. Moore held her own against Colbert's needling -- although I'm pretty sure she could have come up with something impolitic to say about Governor Snotwalker if she had had a mind to.

Q Toon: Post-Election Blues

It turns out that I didn't have to redraw a thing for this week's cartoon. This year's elections held absolutely no surprises, coming out pretty much exactly as those omnipresent polls told us they would — polls being those ever so newsworthy measurements of the truthiness of political campaigns, shadowy attack ads, and two years of unrelenting, well-coordinated attacks from conservative power brokers and conservative media.

Here in my home state, Senator Russ Feingold cast votes that Tea Partisans should have approved of -- against TARP and bank bailouts, for example — but he's a liberal with a "D" next to his name, so the Tea Party (and, significantly, the K Street Chamber of Commerce) came down hard on him and elected a pig-in-a-poke businessman from Oshkosh. Feingold also barely squeaked by in 1998 and 2004, years when there was not a strong Republican tide, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that time caught up with him.

And Scott Walker now gets to do to Wisconsin as governor what he has done for Milwaukee County as County Executive: bring it to the brink of bankruptcy and push it over the edge on his way out. And it won't take either him or the Republican legislature long to distract their supporters from their dismal economic record by attacking gays and lesbians (not to mention immigrants, Spanish-speakers, union workers, the University system, and whatever other minority right-wing radio chooses to demonize).

John Doe for Senate

Ron Johnson (R-Out of Nowhere), candidate for the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin, is introducing himself to voters with a TV ad that promises that he won't bother us with warm fuzzy TV ads about liking jobs and kittens and apple pie.

Republicans must be counting on voters to like the bland name. Doesn't everybody in Wisconsin know a Ron Johnson?

But for a cartoonist, it's a little frustrating that if I image-Google Ron Johnson, I find hardly any pictures of the guy I'm looking for. Page after page of ¡Los Links!, I find several more pictures of George Will than of the guy running against Russ Feingold.

In case you're wondering, none of the pictures from the above screensave of Page 1 of images.google.com for "Ron Johnson" are Wisconsin's Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. (And when I searched with Bing, the candidate turned up as the 35th and 40th picture.)