Cartoon Like a Lion, Out Like a Light

Having learned last week more than you'll ever need to know about the guy who didn't become Calvin Coolidge's Attorney General, today's Graphical History Tour rummages through my basement in search of new and interesting takes on my own old cartoons.

If we're lucky, we may even find some.

March, 2015

Before there was Project 2025, there was the ALEC Agenda. The corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council was founded in 1973 to create cookie-cutter right-wing legislation for state governments from one end of the country to the other.

The Wisconsin politicians in my cartoon are Assembly Leader Robin Vos, then Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, and then Governor Scott Walker. Walker is out of office now; Fitzgerald has gone on to Congress, and you may have seen him as one of the congresscretins confronted by angry constituents at his town hall meeting last week.

The character having the ALEC Agenda rammed down his throat — a term usually used by Republicans to vilify marriage equality, abortion rights, health care reform, and anything else they despise — is the laborer from the Wisconsin state flag.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, March 25, 2015

I didn't get to draw hard-hitting cartoons of Republicans ramming their agenda down Wisconsin throats during my stint illustrating the editorials of the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. Once in a while, however, I got to have a little fun with a topic, such as this one.

Investor Mark Attanasio purchased the Milwaukee Brewers Major League Baseball team from Bud Selig in 2004. The team, which hadn't made the MLB post-season since 1982, had a brand new ballpark, and Attanasio wanted to find out what else it was going to take to attract fans to the game.

The fourth panel is an homage to Richard Guindon, whose self-titled cartoon was a beloved feature in the Minneapolis Tribune when I was in college in Minnesota. Not that any regular readers of the Business Journal had any reason to know that; to my knowledge, Guindon's cartoons never appeared in any Wisconsin newspaper.

While lutefisk night at the ballpark might plausibly be a real thing at Target Field (yet certainly isn't), a more appropriate homage to Richard Guindon would have been for the lady in panel four to have cited her enthusiasm for Bring Your Carp to the Ballpark Night.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 6, 1995

Jumping back another decade, here's another cartoon that would never have run in the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. 

This was the first installment of a two-parter, satirizing some image-polishing television advertisements by a certain multinational corporation. Unlike the weeks that have passed between my current episodes of the Max & Leo Show, the student newspaper at UW-Milwaukee published twice a week; so readers could follow the sequel to the Exxtron commercial three days after the first episode.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., March 7, 1985

Finally, let us take a moment to honor the memory of Soviet General Secretary of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party, Konstantin Chernenko. 

Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, just shy of thirteen months in office, of cirrhosis of the liver, chronic emphesema, and congestive heart failure at age 73. He had come to office upon the death of Yuri Andropov, who had succeeded another elderly Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, only sixteen months earlier.

State-run media in the U.S.S.R. had consistently downplayed reports of the three leaders' declining health. On February 25, 1985, aides hauled the obviously ill Chernenko out of his hospital bed so that he could vote for himself (as candidate for Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) on live television. His last television appearance was three days later to read a brief victory statement celebrating his election.

In completely unrelated news, Donald Полезный Идиот Trump is older today than any of those three Soviet leaders were when they checked into their respective mausolea. 

WisconsInStep Cartoons

Paul "Dear Ruthie" Masterson writes about LGBTQ+ issues for the Milwaukee monthly Shepherd Express. In his October column on LGBTQ History Month, he reported on the efforts to preserve LGBTQ+ history in Wisconsin, including photographs and publications.

So, in the interest of doing my part to keep the past alive, I'm posting a handful of Wisconsin-LGBTQ-issue cartoons I drew for InStep News in the latter half of the 1990's.

in InStep News, Sept. 18-Oct. 1, 1996

This cartoon about Wisconsin's Democratic senior Senator and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act wasn't the first one I had printed in InStep, but with it, my cartoons became a regular feature.  

InStep was one of two rival LGBTQ+ newspapers published in Milwaukee in those days. InStep and Wisconsin Light published on alternating weeks, the former in magazine format, the latter as a tabloid, both on newsprint. (InStep converted to tabloid format with the May 29, 1997 Pride issue.)

in InStep News, Jan. 22-Feb. 7, 1997

This cartoon got a fair amount of reaction; a representative of AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, ARCW (now Vivent Health), wrote a letter to InStep to correct what she called the cartoon's "serious misinterpretation." 

Distribution by the state of Wisconsin of federal Ryan White HIV/AIDS funds had been cut from nine independent agencies that year to five, a major portion going to the ARCW. I don't think I can claim credit for subsequent Wisconsin's re-examination of its allocation of Ryan White funds, which ARCW participated in and fully supported.

I've told this story before, but I got the idea for this cartoon from my first night sleeping over with the man who is now my better half. I was the one hogging the blankets by morning.

March 20-April 2, 1997

The face of Republicans' Wisconsin iteration of a "Defense of Marriage Act" was that of State Rep. Lorraine Serrati (R-Spread Eagle, yes, that's a real place), who sponsored AB 104 to prohibit Wisconsin from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states. Although the federal DOMA was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton a year earlier, a court ruling in Hawai'i raised the possibility that same-sex marriage might become legal in the Aloha State.

May 1-15, 1997

It didn't, but AB 104's opponents, led by Assembly Reps. Tammy Baldwin (D-Madison, now U.S. Senator) and Barbara Notestein (D-Milwaukee), charged that Ms. Serrati's bill was divisive and redundant, in that the Wisconsin Constitution already defined marriage as between a "husband" and a "wife," and futile in that the Democratic majority in the State Senate was unlikely to bring the issue to a vote.

Democrats also viewed it as a cynical attempt by Republicans to expand their narrow majority in the Assembly; Rep. Baldwin told In Step, "What my colleagues fear is the 30-second radio or TV ad in their next election campaign, which proclaims that they support ho-mo-sex-u-al marriage." 

in InStep, March 19-April 1, 1998

Serrati was hardly alone in pushing antigay legislation. State Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Rep. Stephen Nass (R-Whitewater, now a state Senator) were among thirteen legislators behind Assembly and Senate bills to deny health insurance coverage to domestic partners of state and local government employees. The bills came in response to the Madison school district offering domestic partnership ("DP") benefits.

Again, the Democratic majority in the state Senate weren't interested in passing that legislation along to Governor Thompson. On the other hand, two of the bills' co-sponsors, Fitzgerald and Glenn Grothman, are now U.S. Congresslugs.

in InStep, June 12-26, 1997

After first pledging to the Wisconsin gay Republicans group that he would not discriminate against lesbians and gays in hiring his congressional staff, Congresswyrm Mark Neumann (R-WI1) completely backtracked when asked about it at a Christian Coalition meeting in La Crosse. "If someone walks in to me and says, 'I'm a gay person, I want a job in your office,' I would say that's inappropriate and they wouldn't be hired because that would mean they are promoting their agenda."

The other people in my cartoon are real Wisconsin persons. Scott Evertz, on the left, was head of the Log Cabin of Wisconsin; he would later be George W. Bush's Director of the White House Office of AIDS Policy for about a year. 

On the right, Rev. Ralph Ovadal of Wisconsin Christians United, was and is an extreme right-wing pastor; his church in Monroe is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. In addition to LGBTQ+ rights, he actively opposes nude beaches, women's reproductive rights, modern Bible translations, and the Roman Catholic Church.

in Q·Voice, September, 1997

In 1995, Jorge Cabal, life and business partner of InStep publisher William Attewell, launched Q·Voice, a feature magazine; this was months before they bought InStep from its founder, Ron Geiman. Q·Voice was published separately from InStep for a time, but within three years was folded back into it as an insert, then as an integrated section within the newspaper. 

I drew this caricature of  John Norquist for Q·Voice as a full-page illustration for an interview of then Mayor of Milwaukee. Time magazine had recently run its own glowing profile of Mr. Norquist, so I referenced that in the illustration.

✍

In the spring of 1998, David Bianco, then publisher of Q Syndicate, contacted me interested in syndicating my cartoons nationally, an opportunity I was happy to accept. It came with the stipulation that my LGBTQ+ cartoons would be exclusively for Q Syndicate (a provision that never caused conflict with my concurrent cartooning for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee).

Bianco promptly withheld my cartoons from InStep, charging that Attewell was behind in paying for Q Syndicate features.

From my standpoint, that could hardly have come at a worse time. Immensely popular Green Bay Packers star defensive end Reggie White had just gobsmacked Wisconsin politicians by attacking LGBTQ+ people in a rambling hour-long speech to a joint session of the legislatures.

As reported by William Attewell & Keith Clark:

"We have allowed sin to run rampant in our nation, and because we have, that is why our nation is in the condition that it is in," White told the legislators, saying that homosexuality was "one of the biggest sins."

White told the Wisconsin lawmakers that "homosexuality is a decision, not a race," and should not be protected under civil rights legislation the way race and ethnic minorities are.

How could I possibly not draw about that? And not have my cartoon seen anywhere in Packer Land?

in InStep, April 16-30, 1998

The issue between InStep and Q Syndicate was resolved within a few weeks, and what came out of it all was that InStep was grandfathered as an exception to the syndicate's LGBTQ+ content exclusivity clause. "Things to Do Today" would be my last editorial cartoon drawn specifically for InStep, although I did draw them a couple Pridefest Issue cover illustrations after this.

The only other time I sent InStep a local-issue editorial cartoon before the paper folded in 2003 was in July of 1999. Actually, it only involved changing a bit of the dialogue in a cartoon drawn for Q Syndicate. The cartoon was about Milwaukee's Common Council approving a registry for same-sex couples; but where the rest of the country read "the religious right," my special version for InStep had the name of a local person.

in InStep, July 29-August 11, 1999

(The other version of the cartoon is here.)

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: Snidely Skullduggery in Madison

Leaders in Wisconsin's Republican-run legislature want to use the coronacrisis to extort additional powers from Governor Tony Evers.

Recognizing the high costs of fighting the coronavirus, the Federal government made additional Medicaid funding available to states. In Wisconsin, the 2018 lame duck law [so called because it was rushed through the Republican lame duck legislature and signed by lame duck Republican Governor Scott Walker after Wisconsin elected Democrat Tony Evers over Walker] blocks Governor Evers from taking steps to accept this aid money without getting approval from the state legislature.
Also, the Federal government is newly offering to pay 100% of the cost of the first week of unemployment benefits for state residents. Currently, Wisconsin does not allow people to get benefits for the first week of unemployment, so both the Governor and the Legislature would have to sign off on the change to get the additional funding.
Governor Evers released an economic package that would gather both the additional Federal Medicaid dollars and the extra unemployment benefits. Republican legislative leaders ignored his proposal and released their own plan.
The alternative proposal included capturing both those sources of extra dollars, but also included a provision that would give the legislature’s budget committee – controlled by Republicans through a decade of gerrymandering election maps – unilateral power to make budget cuts during this crisis, without the approval of other legislators or the Governor.

If the Republicans pass their version of the bill, Governor Evers will be faced with the choice of signing this power grab into law or vetoing acceptance of the Medicaid and unemployment benefit funding. He can't use his line-item veto because this is not a budget bill.

If this power grab is ever signed into law, don't expect the budget process to return to normal after the coronacrisis is over. The Budget Committee's Absolute, Non-Overturnable Line Item Veto will become a permanent part of Wisconsin politics, enabling a select group of legislators to starve urban public schools, destroy public health care, scrap unemployment benefits, and any of a myriad of antisocial Republican pet projects at will.

Meanwhile, I am happy to report that enough of the Wisconsin electorate braved the risk of coronavirus to defeat the Republicans' candidate for the state Supreme Court last Tuesday. Results were tabulated yesterday, and Jill Karofsky overcame the Republican smear campaign to unseat Daniel Kelly, 55% to 45%.

There will still be a 4-to-3 right-wing, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce lobby majority on the court, so don't expect the Supreme Court to be a check on legislative overreach any time soon. Barring creation of a vacancy, the next Supreme Court election will be in 2023.

The race to succeed Chris Abele as Milwaukee County Executive resulted in a near tie. Having only five polling places in a city of 600,000 had to have made a big difference there, and a recount is certain. The new county exec's term is set to begin April 25.

The school funding referendum in my local school district passed by a margin of only five votes out of 33,491 cast. This really highlights how important it is to keep aware of local issues and to get out and vote.

In the presidential primary, Joe Biden won over Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. But, really, who cares about that right now?

Toon: Oh, Come On, Wisconsin

Considering that the presidential candidates are nowhere to be found this year, this is turning into a hotly contested election here in Wisconsin today.

Among the highlighted items on the ballot are a state Supreme Court Justice, a ballot measure to enshrine crime victim's rights in the state constitution, and mayoral and county executive positions around the state.

Over the weekend, Democratic Governor Tony Evers summoned the Republican-run legislature into emergency session, calling them to extend Tuesday's election. With over 1,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in Milwaukee County alone and rapidly rising numbers elsewhere around the state, especially in all urban counties, everyone concerned feared for the health and safety of voters and poll workers.

Everyone concerned, that is, except for the Republican majority in the state legislature.

They gavelled Saturday's emergency session to order and adjourned it in one second flat — a repeat of their emergency session last year on gun control measures. Another emergency session on Monday was just as abruptly cut off, adjourned until the day after the election.

So Monday afternoon, Evers issued an executive order postponing the election until June 9, and extending the terms of incumbent local politicians until after that election would have taken place. It was a move he had previously said he was powerless to make.

Within hours, the state Supreme Court — whose seven members are nominally non-partisan, but five of whom are bought and paid-for shills for the state Republican party — told Evers he was right: he is powerless to make that move. (They met virtually, by the way. I'll bet that's not in the constitution!) The U.S. Supreme Court was even speedier in quashing Evers' order to extend the date by which absentee ballots are due.

Robin Vos and Scott Fitzgerald, leaders of the Assembly and Senate respectively, are following Mitch McConnell's playbook from the Obama administration: block anything and everything; deny Evers even the most necessary legislation. No matter who gets hurt.

Many people will either put themselves at great risk or be disenfranchised by the Republicans' power play. Campaigns have been exhorting people for weeks to vote absentee or by mail. Our household has, but that leaves out voters who can't just up and get down to city hall whenever they want.

Demand for mail-in ballots quickly exceeded supply, and there are thousands of reports that ballots that were mailed to voters in mid-March never got delivered. Those ballots must be witnessed, but who is there to witness the ballots of older voters (exactly the ones most at risk of exposure to the virus) who live alone?

Others may have believed the President's promises that the crisis would have blown over around now. Voters who waited to cast their ballots in person may find their regular polling place closed because there aren't nearly enough poll workers, even with the National Guard called in. Milwaukee, with a population of over 600,000, will have a total of five polling locations open.

FIVE.

How many voters will be able to find their alternate poll location in time? Since many polling sites are limiting the number of persons allowed inside the building at a time, how many will bother to wait outside? (Stormy weather is predicted.)

I foresaw Republican mischief in this spring's election. I vastly underestimated how deadly serious it would be.

WisToon: That First Step Is a Doozy

In the wee hours of the morning, Republicans in an extraordinary session of the Wisconsin legislature approved hastily drawn-up bills to curtail the authority of the Democratic Governor-elect and Attorney General-elect. It's a blatant power grab by a legislature determined to safeguard minority rule in the state: Democrats consistently outvote Republicans in legislative races here, but 2011 gerrymandering has guaranteed lopsided Republican majorities in both the Assembly and Senate as well as our congressional delegation.

Assembly leader Robin Vos and Senate leader Scott Fitzgerald and their minions claim that the legislature has been considering these moves for a long time, and they probably have — at least since predictions of a "blue wave" began to cast its shadow over the un-gerrymander-able statewide races. As long as there was a Republican in the governor's office, they were happy to grant  him as much power as he could keep track of. Likewise with the past two Republican Attorneys General, J.B. Van Hollen and Brad Schimel.

But with Democrats due to assume those offices in January, Republicans rushed to make sure the new Governor and A.G. would have no power to shape the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (created by the GOP as a replacement for the Commerce Department), 2021 redistricting, or the Republican lawsuit against Obamacare.

Another of the bills they passed will move the state's 2020 presidential primary from April to March, between the nominally non-partisan February primary and April general election. Those bracketing elections will be for such positions as school boards, local sheriffs, and mayors; but most importantly to Republicans in Madison, for the state Supreme Court.

Republicans claim concern that it would be confusing, or unseemly, or gauche to have those non-partisan races on the same ballot as the partisan presidential primary.

Once upon a time, Wisconsin's Supreme Court was filled with respected, non-partisan legal judges; but in the past few decades it has become dominated by partisan stooges bought and paid for by the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce lobby and the Koch brothers. A Scott Walker appointee is up for election to a full ten-year term next spring, and Republicans don't want him to have to run in an election likely to attract lots of Democratic voters eager to have a say in whom their party should nominate for President.

It's not as if the Republicans don't already hold a majority on the state Supreme Court. But with their latest power grab likely to come up before the Court next year, they don't want to take any chances.

Update: Facing unanimous opposition from local election officials, the primary date change didn't pass the legislature after all.

WisToon: Hearing No Objection

After patiently ignoring hours of testimony against Right to Work for Less, Wisconsin's Republicans passed their union-busting bill in extraordinary session on a party line vote; and Darth Snotwalker quickly signed the bill he had publicly dismissed as "a distraction" but had privately described years ago as just one more "step" in his "divide and conquer" model of governance.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington, at left in the cartoon) told "Up Front with Mike Gousha" that he had only received a handful of messages from constituents against the proposed bill. He made no mention whether he had received more than a handful of messages from constituents in favor of it.

While RTWFL has been a priority for right-wingers at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce group, there has been no push for it from individual local chambers of commerce, as found by the Wisconsin Business Alliance's Lori Compas:

I wanted to learn the answer to this question: Is WMC really representing Wisconsin’s broad and diverse business community when it claims that businesses want legislators to enact “right to work” laws?

The answer was astonishing: I could not find a single Chamber in the districts of [Republican] senators Fitzgerald, Cowles, Olsen, Moulton, Petrowski, Nass, Lasee, or Harsdorf that supports “right to work.”

In fact, I heard statements like these again and again: “We’re not taking a position on that.” “We don’t take a stand on political issues.” “We only advocate for political issues when there’s a strong consensus among our members — and we don’t have consensus on this.”

A Chamber official in Senator [Scott] Fitzgerald’s [(R-Juneau), above right in my cartoon] district said, “We won’t take a stand on that one way or another. We’re part of WMC because we get a lot of resources from them, like mentoring and executive training and other benefits, but that doesn’t mean we support their legislative agenda.”

Another Chamber official, this time in Senator Lasee’s district, said, “Everyone I have talked to says that it is an issue that should be left between employers and their employees. I haven’t found anyone who says we need the government to tell us how to run our business.”

Me again: I've got to say, that is an astonishingly tepid response from a demographic that tends to skew Republican to a Republican bill guaranteed to pass a Republican legislature and be signed by a Republican governor.

It will take decades before the full effect of the push by Darth Snotwalker and his Madison Minions to depress wages, decimate benefits, and bring a third-world standard of living to the state of Wisconsin. To save their own jobs, Republicans have already begun their assault on the right to vote.  Our only hope is that Walker, notorious for not finishing what he starts, up and quits his current job in favor of heading some right-wing think tank somewhere -- rather than that other job he's got his eyes on.