Marching Across the Decades

We've all been dealing with news of COVID-19, the War in Ukraine, inflation, the high price of gas, and Kanye West's feud with Pete Davidson for so, so, long now. How about looking back on my salad days for cartoons about something a little more pleasant?

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers WI, March 11, 1982

Er, maybe the heightened tensions between the two nations with the world's largest arsenals of nuclear weapons 40 years ago doesn't quite qualify as "something a little more pleasant."

Most of this cartoon was drawn with india ink on typing paper, but some of the shading utilizes that charcoal technique I described last month. In this case, the surface behind the paper had parallel ridges; it might have been a book cover or the back of a clipboard. I liked the effect, particularly with whatever that background was; other backboards with dotted and pebbled patterns came in handy from time to time. But india ink remained my primary medium.

In retrospect, I think shading the foreground characters — and, for that matter, the foreground ground — in charcoal instead of with straight ballpoint pen lines would have yielded a more effective drawing.

I couldn't get the same effect when I switched over to drawing on bristol board not long after this; smooth finish seems more accommodating to pen and ink than vellum finish as far as I'm concerned, but less useful for charcoal. So I still had the same charcoal pencil ten years later when the editors of the UW-Milwaukee Post asked me for some cover art for their "Adventures in Buying" issue. 

As I joked earlier this week, I really dislike drawing architecture; but the "Adventures in Buying" issue was the Post's way of thanking its advertisers, and my approach was to draw a street scene featuring some of the advertisers the editors were especially keen to highlight.

in UWM Post, March 23, 1992

By the way, if there's one thing I dislike drawing even more than architecture, it's bicycles.

Charcoal is a particularly unforgiving medium. For one thing, you can't go back and erase any of the pencil marks left showing. And if you make any mistakes, india ink's problems drawing over white-out are minuscule compared with charcoal's, because the surface area won't match the rest of the drawing. (I had to paste a revision over the film titles on the Oriental Theater's marquee — probably to fix a perspective problem.)

One does acquire a true appreciation for the "Ashcan School" of cartoonists who used grease pencil or charcoal for their entire careers.

Here's how the drawing looked after a no-doubt unhappy colorist on the Post staff added some blue to it. The original, drawn full size to the page dimensions, was too wide for the office photocopier, so the sides got cropped off.

That was not one of my favorite drawings, but this is:

for Q Syndicate, March, 2002

If I had published a book of my own cartoons in the 'aughts, this would have been on the cover.

Since Roy and Silo, the same-sex penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, were featured in national news reports, numerous other examples of same-sex coupling in the animal kingdom have come to light. In fact, homosexual behavior is well documented in many species, putting the lie to the old chestnut that same-sex attraction is "against nature."

It's so well documented that the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church preaches that the Russian military must stop the animal kingdom from achieving world domination. And the Florida legislature is crafting a bill to criminalize teaching about biology in their public schools.

Speaking of schools,

for Q Syndicate, March, 2012

I drew this cartoon after some pseudo-sincere apology from Rush Limbaugh in which he had excused whatever it was he had said that week — and I'm not interested in dredging it up again — by claiming to be an "entertainer."

What I'm interested in pointing out is that I used the map in the background as one of the cues to signal that the setting of the cartoon was set some 40 or 50 years earlier. I'm not sure whether a lot of people caught that, so dammit, I'm letting you know it was there on purpose.

Well, in light of current events, and boy oh boy do I detest drawing architecture, I'm going to wrap things up today by stepping outside of the Years Ending In 2 shtick. This 2014 cartoon showed up in my Facebook "Hey! Remember This? We do!" feed on Thursday.

for Q Syndicate, March 2014

Aw, heck, St. Patrick's Day falls on a weekend in two years, so I might just bring this one back for another Saturday retrospective post in 2024.

Who knows what Putin might be invading by then?

Impeaching Kenesaw Mountain Landis

Have you had enough of impeachment proceedings yet? If not, you're in luck! 100 years ago this month, there was a move in Congress to impeach Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Judge Landis was a crusty old fellow who had once told a convicted defendant who protested that he wouldn't live long enough to serve his five-year sentence, "You can try, can't you?" Two years after Teddy Roosevelt appointed him Judge of the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, he gained national prominence ruling against Standard Oil of Indiana in an antitrust case, fining the company the equivalent of $800 million in today's money. (His ruling was overturned in higher courts; it was not the only time that happened.) He also oversaw some high-profile draft resistance cases during World War I.

"It Must Be Some Job" by Harry Westerman in Ohio State Journal, Columbus, OH, Feb., 1921

And then there was baseball.

Landis had been the judge asked to rule in a 1915 antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Baseball League against the American and National Leagues; the Federal League ultimately withdrew its case and soon went out of business. Baseball fan Landis let it be known their lawsuit would have been "if not destructive, at least injurious to the game of baseball." 

In the shadow of the Black Sox Scandal, still making its way through the courts, the American and National Baseball Leagues turned to Judge Landis to be their commissioner in November, 1920, offering him a $42,500 salary (around $600,000 in 2021 dollars).

Charging that the leagues' hiring of Judge Landis was tantamount to bribery by "this illegal trust,"  Congressman Benjamin Welty (D-OH) urged Congress to impeach Landis and remove him from the bench:

"Judge Landis has a right to yield to the fleshpots of illegal combination, but he should not bring all our judiciary into ill-repute. If the country approves the dual role of Judge Landis, then the House will be called upon to preserve a new standard for our judiciary, because there are others who would be pleased to employ some judge 'for he is worth any price he might wish to ask."

In the Senate, Nathaniel Dial (D-SC) was also agitating for Landis to be tossed from the bench over the case of a bank clerk accused of embezzling $96,000 from the National City Bank of Ottawa, Illinois. Landis had let the clerk off with a light sentence, reasoning that the bank managers were themselves to blame, having paid the man a measly $90 per month. (According to Wikipedia, Landis issued this ruling in April, 1921, but I'm finding Dial citing the ruling as reason to impeach Landis in newspaper reports two months before that.) 

"That Kill the Umpire Spirit" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Feb. 24, 1921

Landis dismissed both congressmen's allegations, telling a caller, "I'm not worried about this thing. Why, I'm no more interested in this than I am in the appointment of a new bellhop in that hotel across the street."

Welty, a Democrat, had lost his seat in the 1920 Republican landslide, so he would be out of office less than three weeks after moving for Landis's impeachment on February 15, 1921. By the time the 67th Congress adjourned in March, Rep. Welty's impeachment motion had made it no further than a House Judicial Subcommittee, which did refer it favorably to the full committee.

"The Defi" by Harry Murphy for Star Company, ca. March 1, 1921

As far as I can tell, an impeachment trial was never held, although the American Bar Association would eventually vote to censure the judge. Landis resigned from the federal bench in February, 1922, and would remain Commissioner of Baseball for almost a quarter century. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame the year he retired; and his name was on the Most Valuable Player award until last year, when it was removed over his sorry record against integrating the all-White major leagues.

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I had considered returning to 1991 for today's blog post, but I found that I have already posted nearly every cartoon from that February in these Saturday retrospectives. I might have instead dug up any cartoons I've drawn about Rush Limbaugh, who shuffled off his fetid coil this week, but in the interest of "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," I just don't feel like it. (Well, if you really must see them, there's a keyword link at the bottom of this post.)

I might have liked to come up with something a propos for African-American History Month, but I just haven't found any cartoons from February, 1921 that aren't cringeworthy. It's not as if there was nothing a cartoonist couldn't have drawn about. The Klan assured the Dallas Express that it wasn't prejudiced against Blacks; White newspapers made sure that if a Black man were accused of a crime, the first word in the headline was "Negro"; and I was starting to think that there winter was a slow season for lynching, until I checked out the Black newspapers.

But, as I said, I found no cartoons about any of that.

So I went back to get a number of cartoons I'd come across about Judge Landis, only to find that quite a few of the websites I rely upon don't seem to be working. This week's weather may be to blame for a couple of them; others I can't explain. Once those sites are up and running again, I may come back and add some  more cartoons here.

Meanwhile, there's still another Saturday this month. Since when did February get to be so long?

Third Party Poopers

For this week's episode of S̄ī̀ s̄ib pædback Saturday, let's take a look at third-party options in the 1920 presidential election for those voters disenchanted with the choice between the pair of Buckeyes heading up the major party tickets.

"A Question" by Burt Thomas in Detroit News, June, 1920

For the fifth time, the Socialist Party of America nominated as its presidential candidate International Workers of the World founder Eugene V. Debs. Burt Thomas's cartoon, above, was drawn before the Democratic National Convention, when red-baiting Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was still in the running for that party's presidential nomination.

"There Are Worse Places Than a Front Porch" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, October 11, 1920

Debs would garner 913,664 votes in November, even though he was stuck in the Moundsville Federal Penitentiary in West Virginia, serving a ten-year sentence for sedition on account of antiwar passages in a speech he had given in Canton, Ohio in 1917. Berryman here compares Debs's campaign with the lackadaisical "front porch" campaign of Warren Harding.

"Now It's Triplets" by Billy Ireland in Columbus Dispatch, July, 2020

After they had been turned down by William Jennings Bryan, The Prohibition Party nominated Ohio minister Aaron Sherman Watkins as its presidential nominee. Watkins thus was the third Buckeye on those November ballots where the Prohibition Party appeared.

With Prohibition already the law of the land, enshrined in the Constitution and confirmed by the Supreme Court, Watkins came in fifth in November with 189,339 votes, the poorest showing for the Prohibition party since 1884.

"The Common Nurse" by Winsor McCay in New York American, July, 1920

As early as January 1919, a group calling itself the Committee of 48 (the name referred to the number of states then in the Union) began organizing toward nominating a leftist candidate for president. The Republicans were committed to a conservative agenda of high tariffs on imports and reducing taxes on the rich; yet while the Democratic platform promised to continue liberal policies of President Wilson's administration, they too were beholden to moneyed interests. "Our country is menaced," the Committee of 48 announced, "by the growing power of an autocratic and reactionary minority at home."

"All Aboard" by John Knott in Dallas News, July, 1920

The committee's manifesto, "Revolution or Reconstruction? A Call to Arms" vowed, "It is the purpose of the Committee of Forty-eight to summon from all parts of the country the leaders of its liberal thought and of its forward-looking citizens, to meet in conference. We hope that out of this assemblage of the scattered forces of Americanism will come a flexible statement of principles and methods that will permit effective cooperation with organized Labor and Agricultural workers in the tasks of social reconstruction."

"Look Who's Here" by Bob Satterfield with Edmund Vance Cooke for NEA, July, 1920

A list of those liberal policies included public ownership of transportation, stock yards, grain elevators, public utilities, coal, oil, natural gas, mineral deposits, timber, and water works. The "Forty-eighters" platform called for "Equal economic, political, and legal rights for all, irrespective of sex or color. The immediate and absolute restoration of free speech, free press, peaceable assembly, and all civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution."

"The New Party" by Harry Westerman in Ohio State Journal, July, 1920

Prominent leaders of the group were J.A.H. Hopkins and attorney Dudley Field Malone; other members of note were historian Will Durant and Rush Limbaugh Sr., grandfather of the conservative radio asshole.

"Plenty of Assistant Cooks" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, July, 1920

The Forty-Eighters convened in Chicago on July 10 with the aim of merging with the Labor Party convention scheduled there on the twelfth. They were joined by Single Tax advocates, who pushed for raising public revenue from land and privileges rather than from income and sales. Other participants included the Northwest Farmers' National Council, the Triple Alliance of the Northwest, the Consumers' League, and the socialist Non-Partisan League (off on a tangent about which I would like to go next Saturday. Stay tuned I hope you will).

"Now All Together for Victory" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, July 12, 1920

The merger got off to a smooth enough start. On July 13, the Forty-Eighters, Non-Partisans, and Single Taxers voted to merge with the Labor Party. Delegates at the Labor Party convention voted overwhelmingly to accept them in, and the Farmer-Labor Party was born.

"The Frog's Banquet..." by Jay N. "Ding" Darling in New York Tribune, July 16, 1920

But the harmony was short-lived once everyone sat down to work out a party platform. Derided by Illinois Federation of Labor president John Walker as "plutocratic philanthropists, lawyers and professional men who endeavor to solve the problems of the working people without themselves being members of that class," the leadership of the Forty-Eighters found themselves outnumbered by the more radical elements of the new party; even its name was a rejection of Committee of 48 desires.

"Not Conservative Enough for Me" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, July 17, 1920

The very next day, the Single Taxers pulled out from the new party over what appeared to be the likelihood of it nominating Bob LaFollette for president, and the rejection of a single tax plank in the party platform. Adopting their own single-plank platform, the Single Taxers nominated Robert Macauley of Philadelphia instead. (He, and running mate Richard Barnum of — wait for it — Ohio would get a measly 5,750 votes in November. By comparison, even American Party candidate James Ferguson, who was on the ballot only in Texas, got 47,968.)

The remaining Farmer-Labor delegates, however, insisted on a party platform LaFollette could not accept: in favor of the League of Nations, Irish independence, recognition of Soviet Russia, and nationalization of all industry and raw materials. He declared that he would not be their candidate. With that, the Forty-Eighters, save for a few western members, also quit the party.

"Getting Nowhere" by John H. Cassell in New York Evening World, by July 23, 1920

John Cassel here makes reference to the America's Cup race underway at the time.

Assessing the damage and answering IFL president Walker, LaFollette confidante Gilbert Roe told the press, "There isn't a more intolerant intellectual in this country than the labor leader is. You must understand you are not going to dictate to the intellectuals any more than the intellectuals are going to dictate to you."

The Forty-Eighters recognized that running their own candidate for President was pointless, but they lent their support to a handful of successful midwestern candidates in 1922 and LaFollette's 1924 presidential candidacy on the Progressive Party ticket.

"The Third Party" by Edward Gale in Los Angeles Times, July/August, 1920

Meanwhile, the Farmer-Labor party drafted Utah lawyer Parley P. Christensen as its standard bearer in the 1920 election, and he pulled a fairly respectable 265,398 votes in November. Would you like to guess which state his running mate was from?

Q Toon: How's This Going to Look

Rush Limbaugh spent a good portion of his program recently gloating over supposed anxiety among Democratic leadership over Pete Buttigieg's decent performance in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. The Presidential Medal of Trumpitude recipient imagined party leaders whimpering the sentence at the top of my cartoon this week.

That's a direct quote. For what it's worth, Pete Buttigieg turned 38 on January 19, three weeks before Rush's remarks, so don't sic the Snopes on me.

Buttigieg isn't ashamed of his PDAs; and to their credit, while the other candidates have plenty of grounds for grudges against the upstart former mayor, they have come to his defense on this little contretemps. Even some Republicans voiced criticism of Limbaugh's comments.

Meanwhile, Melania Trump's sentiments about PDAs with her husband are well documented. So, fine, let's bring it on, Rush.

This Week's Sneak Peek

How are we supposed to explain to our children that this wretched but prodigious spewer of bile over the airwaves was awarded a Presidential Medal of Trumpitude live on all TV networks?

School for Sex Scandal

I've been over the river and through the woods with family over the Thanksgiving holiday, so I may have missed whatever new accusations of sexual harassment or under age dating or indecent exposure have come out against whatever beloved, respected, or powerful politician, entertainer or sports figure came out Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. It's not as though I've been incommunicado with the world, but given the vast range of political opinions around our dinner table, some subjects just had to be ignored for a while.

But now that we're all back home with our Thanksgiving leftovers, Sexcapadeback Saturday reheats cartoons of selected sexual scandals that I've had the occasion to draw about. This mess didn't start with Harvey Weinstein, and it probably won't end with Charlie Rose. It goes way back, and there has often been one Usual Suspect in particular.

Because of the accusations against Alabama Inquisitor Judge Roy Moore, conservatives want to re-litigate the sexual dalliances of President Bill Clinton. His peccadilloes fall in that gray area between consensual affairs and clear and obvious sexual harassment; Monica Lewinsky was no 14-year-old, but she was a subordinate employee, and the episode displayed, more than any of Clinton's other affairs, a profound lapse of judgement on the President's part.

But if we are to re-litigate the Clinton imbroglio, it's only fair to file an amicus curiae brief about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, too. After all, unlike Bill Clinton, Justice Thomas is still regularly collecting a government paycheck.

Sexual harassment scandals are the exclusive province of no political party. But the Edwin Edwards test often determines the degree of damage to the accused: the Louisiana Democrat once boasted, "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy."

In 2006, Republican Congressman Mark Foley lost his reelection bid in Florida over revelations that he propositioned male pages who worked in his office.

Four years later, it was Democrat Eric Massa of New York who was compelled to resign as the House Ethics Committee investigated reports that he habitually groped male members of his staff. He admitted on Glenn Beck's Fox News program that "not only did I grope [a staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," but then he denied on Larry King's CNN program ever having groped anyone.

The revelations that House Speaker Dennis Hastert had molested student athletes when he was a high school wrestling coach in Illinois came out only after he had left office. The statute of limitations had run out on those incidents; he was convicted of violating banking rules when he paid hush money to the now adult victims of his predatory behavior.

Sexual harassment typically involves an imbalance of power: adult vs. adolescent or child; employer vs. employee; faculty vs. student; celebrity vs. average citizen. Or the strong arm of the law vs. the legally vulnerable:

Many of these cartoons have involved male-on-male misdeeds because I draw cartoons for the LGBTQ press, so unless the perpetrator has a history of telling us how immoral we are, it's extremely rare that I turn my pen to heterosexual hanky-panky. In part it's also because for so long, male-to-female sexual harassment was passed off as relatively normative — even funny. (You can draw a straight line from Pepe LePew to Al Franken.)

When it comes to sexual relationships between adults and children, however, we have always reacted with more seriousness, whether we're talking about girls or boys. (Gauzy recollections of heterosexual boys coming of age in The Graduate and The Summer of '42 notwithstanding.) Prior to the Roy Moore accusations, the right-wing media played up man-on-boy pedophilia scandals because it was so easy to extrapolate sexual misbehavior victimizing under-age males with consensual and healthy relationships between adult gay men.

The LGBTQ community constantly needs to remind Republican Puritans that one thing is not always like another thing. Again and again.

QToon: Don't Watch That! Watch This!

That's the problem with drawing a weekly cartoon. Remember that Hilary Rosen story? It's already been preëmted by the GSA Weekend In Las Vegas Scandal, which has already been superseded by the Secret Service - Colombian Hookers Imbroglio.

Since the Allen West story is now buried under layers of news cycle sediment, here's a quick reminder. At a public event last week, the Florida Republican and Tea Party darling was asked how many Marxists there are in Congress.

"That's a fair question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party. It's called the Congressional Progressive Caucus."

There was a brief flurry of calls for West to disavow that McCarthyist crack, but the Congressman has steadfastly refused to do so.

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My use of "Faux News" on the rolling anchor desk really does a disservice to the rest of the right-wing media who spent so much time and effort harping on Hilary Rosen's foolish crack about Ann Romney. The AM radio crowd and other Newsmaxis powers did their darnedest to keep the outrage going -- even Rush "She's A Slut" Limbaugh decried the supposed Liberal War on Women.

But not until I went looking for something to which this blog post could link did I find this tweet from America's own Torquemada, Bill Donohue:

“Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own."

Take that, you contumelious strumpet! 

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Meanwhile, on the Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite front, I've now found that CS5.1 does not include the ability to import an image from a scanner or other Twain source. I've been twunked!

It's a good thing that trusty old Ulead Photo Express 3.0 still accepts input from my scanner. If only it saved files that other programs were able to find...

Q Toon: That's Entertainment

This week's cartoon takes us back a few years. And away from the usual preoccupation with LGBT issues of marriage equality, gays in the military, etc.

In Mr. Limbaugh's latest attempt at an apology for calling Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute whose sexual activities he would like to see posted on YouTube, he claimed to have accidentally departed from lofty conservative standards and become as bad as those lefty liberals:

 "This is the mistake I made: In fighting them on this issue last week, I became like them. Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge, against everything that I know to be right and wrong, I descended to their level when I used those two words to describe Sandra Fluke. That was my error. I became like them."

Conscientious conservatives must be relieved to know that Mr. Limbaugh was in no way emulating the elevated likes of Ann Coulter, or Andrew Breitbart of sainted memory. Nope, it was only a momentary lapse into liberalism. Liberanazilism, even. Sexually demeaning personal attacks are so unlike him!

Columnist Molly Ivins reported (Arizona Republic 10/17/1993) this incident from Limbaugh's TV show—"Here is a Limbaugh joke: Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?" And he puts up a picture of [13-year-old] Chelsea Clinton.

"Some of these babes, I'm telling you, like the sexual harassment crowd. They're out there protesting what they actually wish would happen to them sometimes." [Reported by Media Matters, 4/26/04]

One may at least take solace in the fact that Mr. Limbaugh is merely an entertainer, as many in the conservative movement have pointed out, and not a leader whom Republican politicians cross at their peril.

Q Toon: Rush on Coach Sandusky

Last week, Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience, "[Jerry] Sandusky has to be — he’s a gay guy. Nobody’s mentioning that aspect, because it’s just too dangerous." The Gay Mafia, Limbaugh explained, is enforcing omertà on the mainstream media, keeping the former Penn State assistant football coach's homosexuality hidden way back in the closet.

This cartoon would have been easier to draw if Limbaugh hadn't taken the care to draw a distinction between gays and pedophiles. Right-wingers have a long history of broadcasting their belief that there is no difference between two consenting adults having a sexual relationship on the one hand and pedophiles or "Man-on-Dog" on the other. So I at least give Limbaugh credit for steering clear of that canard.

Another problem with this cartoon is that Limbaugh got more publicity out of calling Michelle Obama "uppity" this week, defending NASCAR fans who booed the First Lady as she, Dr. Jill Biden, a veteran and some children of servicemen prepared to say "Gentlemen, start your engines" a at a Florida race. Somewhere, an editor is wondering what Jerry Sandusky's legal problems have to do with a radio blowhard calling Mrs. Obama "uppity."

(Remember when all those elitist liberals booed First Lady Laura Bush at that one event? Yeah, neither do I.)

A couple weeks ago, when I drew a cartoon about Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh, I was happy to see that  videos of him were going viral in the meantime, because it meant that there would be more readers who had some idea who he was. I don't need to worry about people not knowing who Rush Limbaugh is (although I will never forget a guy I dated for a while who thought that Senator Jesse Helms was an ally of the LGBT community; you can fool some of the people all of the time). I do expect, however, that a lot of readers will have no knowledge of anything Rush Limbaugh has said about the scandal at Penn State. 

With any luck, there will be some news event of common knowledge to draw about next week -- although there's a big holiday this week shutting down Washington D.C. and many of the big-name newsmakers around the country are taking most of the week off. Unless I finally find some gay angle to the Occupy Movement (oh, God, I hope Offisa Pike is straight!), I suspect that next week's cartoon will be just as obscure as this week's.

Bergetoon: Pat Robertson Doesn't Want to Get Weird

Pat Robertson "doesn't want to get weird," but he just can't help it.

"Ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to get weird on this so please take it for what it’s worth. But it seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power, it has been the symbol of our great nation, we look at that monument and say this is one nation under God. Now there’s a crack in it, there’s a crack in it and it’s closed up. Is that a sign from the Lord? Is that something that has significance or is it just result of an earthquake? You judge, but I just want to bring that to your attention. It seems to me symbolic. When Jesus was crucified and when he died the curtain in the Temple was rent from top to bottom and there was a tear and it was extremely symbolic, is this symbolic? You judge."

As Pat Robertson pronouncements go, this one hardly raises an eyebrow. At least he wasn't blaming the earthquake on abortion, gay rights, or liberalism. Abortionists, gays, and liberals are not exactly running the show in Virginia politics.

On the other hand, I haven't heard what P.R. has had to say about Hurricane Irene's swath of destruction through New York and Vermont.

Last week's Virginia earthquake and Hurricane Irene spawned not just floods and tornadoes, but a whole lot of oral diarrhea and mental constipation. Take Michele Bachmann (please):

"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'"

Her campaign later said that this comment was meant to be a joke. Many people failed to see the humor in it, including people who think that Michele Bachmann herself is a joke.

Fellow presidential candidate Ron Paul thinks that we should leave disaster relief to the Job Creators:

"[FEMA's] system of bureaucratic centralized economic planning... is a policy that is deeply flawed... I want to transition us out of this dependency... The whole idea of FEMA is a gross distortion of insurance. It's so far removed from the market and what insurance should be about... There is no magic about FEMA."

Not to be outdone, Glenn Beck observed that this year's disasters are further proof that the Lord wants us to hoard:

"How many warnings do you think you're going to get, and how many warnings do you deserve? ... If you've waited [to prepare and stockpile food], this hurricane is a blessing. It is a blessing. It is God reminding you — as was the earthquake last week — it's God reminding you you're not in control. Things can happen."

And what round-up of right-wing stupidity would be complete without a word from Rump Blimpaugh:

"I'll guarantee you Obama was hoping this was going to be a disaster as another excuse for his failing economy... If he's out there blaming tsunamis, if he's blaming earthquakes, and whatever natural disasters there are, this one was made to order, but it just didn't measure up."

All of which is to say that the quake and hurricane pretty much obliterated coverage of any actual LGBT news last week. (Even of Puerto Rico Senator Roberto Arango, R-NSFW, and the on-line Grindr photos of him showing off his rectal weight loss.)