Try to Remember

Some content in today's Graphical History Tour may be unsuitable for younger and more sensitive viewers. Reader discretion is advised.

University of Wisconsin-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Sept. 27, 1984

I had originally intended to start today's GHT with a different cartoon; but the passing this week of James Earl Jones behooved me to rerun this one instead. Jones played many roles in which he got to act with his face, but for most people of a certain generation, he will always be remembered as the voice of Darth Vader.

(Another generation will always remember him as the voice of Mufasa. And news junkies who never watch movies will always remember him as the voice of "This — is CNN.")

By the way, for those of you in the Mufasa generation, the lady winning tic-tac-toe in my cartoon was Anne Gorsuch Burford, who served as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during Ronald Reagan's first term as President. In that post, she slashed the EPA's budget by 22%, relaxed Clean Air Act regulations, and put industry insiders in charge of regulating their own businesses. She resigned in 1983 over allegations of illegally withholding EPA Superfund disbursements to benefit a Republican running for office in California.

Her son now sits on the Supreme Court.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 26, 1994

Jumping ahead ten Septembers, this cartoon addresses the damage to our cities promoted by people whose flight to the suburbs was facilitated by the advent of freeways in the 1950's and '60's. Having fled to those suburbs, they keep wanting more freeways bulldozed through the cities, the easier to drive back and forth. Or through.

By 1994, the drain from cities like Milwaukee was exacerbated by businesses moving their headquarters out to those suburbs, attracted by "Tax Incremental Financing" subsidies and encouraged by Republicans like Governor Tommy Thompson (holding the clipboard in my cartoon). There they could build bright shiny buildings and expansive parking lots far from the low-income workers who couldn't afford to live near or travel to them.

That's an issue that has been playing out practically in my back yard lately. The city of Racine and the village of Mount Pleasant cooperated in attracting first Foxconn's Potemkin factory and now a Microsoft data center to several square miles of mostly farmland in the village. As part of the deal between the two municipalities, Racine extended large-capacity fresh water and sewage lines to the plants, either one of which uses or will require millions of gallons of water every day. 

Foxconn turned out to have vastly overpromised how many jobs it would provide for the community. Microsoft anticipates hiring even fewer employees: about 300, a great many of whom will be involved in security, lawn care, janitorial work, and HVAC. 

So what is Racine getting out of the deal? The plants are over eight miles from the city, and over three miles from the nearest bus stops: at the Amtrak station and the Department of Motor Vehicles. (Two more things inconveniently located for the urban poor and lower middle class.)

Sept., 2004

Anyone who remembers the George W. Bush administration is probably okay with that former president taking a pass on joining the other former presidents who have endorsed the election of Kamala Harris.

Somewhere along the line, I taped a Q Syndicate credit to the original of this cartoon, but I doubt that I drew it for them. It has nothing to do with LGBTQ+ issues, after all, and I almost always draw a frame around their cartoons. I probably put the credit line on there in case I wanted to send it to Best Cartoons of the Year or submit it for an award consideration. 

The cartoon wasn't in color, either. But I figured that as long as I was going to scan it again for this blog post, wottheheckanwhynot.

Speaking of the moon: I promised unsuitable content; and since that's why some of you are still reading, here it comes.

for Q Syndicate, September, 2014

I definitely drew this cartoon for syndication. I don't recall how many client papers I had at that time, but I took the gamble that only a few of them would shy away from printing a cartoon with this much lunar display.

Decades before Michael Sam's very brief career as the first out gay player in the NFL, female sports reporters had won the right to cover the postgame in the teams' locker rooms. Perhaps the first was New York Times reporter Robin Herman, after Major League Baseball's 1975 All-Star game.

Of course, some of the players responded exactly as you would expect pro athletes to. As Herman interviewed player Denis Potvin, another player yanked Potvin’s towel off, leaving him completely exposed.
 Still, Herman said later “My post-locker room quotations showed patience and good cheer. I was 23-years old and fairly new to my job, and not yet beaten down by the abuse and slamming of doors that would follow this one-time opening.” Herman went on to say that wasn’t the end of the story. Owners and coaches in other cities continued to block locker room access to women, sometimes physically, sometimes using police. But once the barrier was broken, things started to change for women in sports.

Ashley Fox wrote for ESPN expressing her gratitude to her forebears who fought for access to those hot, stinky, and cramped locker rooms so that they could get the same stories that her male colleagues had covered for generations.

She shared one early experience:

One of my first days in [the Philadelphia Eagles locker room], a rookie offensive lineman walked in with a few teammates, saw me and said: "Bet you like seeing all of these swinging dicks in here, don't you?"

The guys laughed. I didn't. I had a choice: Say something, or say nothing.

The lockers to the right nearest me belonged to the defensive backs, including Brian Dawkins, Troy Vincent and Bobby Taylor, all established players. The lockers to the left nearest me belonged to the quarterbacks, including Donovan McNabb and A.J. Feeley.

In a raised voice, I said to the lineman: "If I wanted to see swinging dicks, I'd still be covering the Sixers."

Boom.

I wasn't trying to be crude. I was trying to stand my ground. The comment prompted laughter that was louder and no longer directed at me. Players were laughing at the lineman. Vincent stood up, walked over and told the rookie that he got what he deserved, that I was welcome in the locker room and that I was to be treated with respect and dignity. And that, mercifully, was that.

Which is not to say that every athlete is hunky-dory with reporters of the opposite sex in their locker rooms, but it's part of the game now. If you're man enough to take the field, you have to be man enough not to shriek when Michele Tafoya asks you what happened out there.

There is reason to expect that players can have the same professional attitude when asked to share a locker room with an LGBTQ+ colleague. Michael Sam faced some resistance, sure; but I haven't heard a disparaging word from any of Carl Nassib's former teammates.

✍

But what about women's sports? The WNBA would lose many of its star players if the straight ones could not abide sharing locker rooms with LGBTQ+ athletes; but as of April, 2023, the league does not allow reporters of any gender into their locker rooms.

So when the WNBA announced a change in the media policies on Monday, that locker rooms would be closed, and that players would be made available outside by request in addition to postgame press conferences, I had a visceral, emotional reaction. That a women’s league would deny access to a place that had been for so long a way to segregate women reporters, to single them out, to hold them back, feels incongruous. It also feels inevitable...

But closing the door to the locker room closes the door on things that can’t be replaced by a hallway interview. It closes the door on relationship-building, the ability to capture the color of pregame preparations or a postgame celebration. The ability to experience their collective joy or disappointment or frustration. The ability to experience their experience and then share it. —Michele Smith

This Week's Sneak Peek

It's a good thing I don't have to draw Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson together in a cartoon. 

How We Got Here

With the Supreme Court poised to eviscerate Roe v. Wade in the coming weeks, this week's Graphical History Tour dredges up a few of my cartoons on the topic over the years.

Just a teenager in 1973, I didn't draw any cartoons about the 7-2 Supreme Court ruling at the time. I don't recall it being a topic of conversation in my home, school, or church back then.

Nor do I have any examples of cartoons the professional editorial cartoonists drew about the ruling. I can't rule out the possibility that some of them drew their reactions to it, particularly conservatives such as Tom Curtis, Don Hesse, or Charles Brooks. The ruling was big news, and was the lead story in afternoon papers; but for most inkslingers, it was quickly overshadowed by the Paris Peace Accord ending U.S. participation in the War in Vietnam, and the death of former President Lyndon Johnson, both of which happened that same week (in LBJ's case, the same day — see yesterday's post).

I have a number of editorial cartooning books published in the mid 1970's, and Jerry Robinson's The 1970s: Best Political Cartoons of the Decade, and none of their editors included any cartoons about Roe v. Wade from 1973. Perhaps Charles Brooks approved one or two submitted for his Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year volume for 1973, but that book isn't in my collection.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April, 1989

One reason that the Court's ruling failed to settle the matter is that the two sides address the issue in mutually exclusive terms. If you believe that a zygote is a living human being, then abortion is murder. If you believe that a woman should have control of her own body, then the DNA of those cells is moot.

At first, the principal actors in the national debate were the women's rights movement (and this may or may not have been my earliest cartoon on the topic of abortion rights)...

in Manitou Messenger, Northfield Minn., April 30, 1981

...and on the other side, fundamentalist Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church.

in UW Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Nov. 24, 1982

As far as we cartoonists have been concerned, the pro-Roe side has relied on images of wire coat hangers, pregnant women considerably further along than the typical abortion patient, and the back-alley abortionists from back before the Court decriminalized the procedure.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 19, 1991

A favorite theme among anti-abortion cartoonists has been the swarm of toddler-sized angels in heaven to represent the zillions of innocents who somehow evaded that pesky baptism requirement to get in. I haven't drawn any such cartoon, but I have considered what a heaven teeming with the unborn might actually be like.

Q Syndicate, June, 2019

But seriously, folks. 

Over the years, the abortion divide has cleaved along party lines. Anti-abortion Democrats stuck with the party just long enough to thwart Bill Clinton's health care reform. Meanwhile, pro-choice Republicans quickly found themselves reduced to being, well, Susan Collins.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., May, 1990

The "pro-life" movement had become a significant force in the Republican party by 1990, but Republican politicians, such as Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, could still find it advantageous to maintain some slight distance from the movement's more absolutist positions. The captain of the ship in my cartoon is Randall Terry, the most prominent anti-abortion spokesman of the day, who opposes not only abortion in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, but also all forms of birth control.

Now, those absolutist positions are in the mainstream of anti-abortion movement. From the Washington Post today:

“What we are calling for is a total ban, no exceptions,” Matt Sande, legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, said in an interview. “We don’t think abortion is ever necessary to save the life of the mother.”

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 19, 1991

The grand plan for the anti-abortion movement has always been to take over the Supreme Court; but while the Republican Party platform has consistently called for stocking the courts with anti-abortion judges, their appointees have repeatedly taken the position that they must not address the reason they were nominated. Clarence Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee during the hearings on his nomination to the Court that he couldn't possibly express his opinions on a woman's right to choose because “I think it would undermine my ability to sit in an impartial way on an important case like that."

Oct., 2005

She's a footnote to history now, but it's instructive to remember George W. Bush's nomination of White House Counsel and longtime friend Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor and death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. With GOP Senators in the majority, she was forced to withdraw herself from consideration, not so much because of the appearance of cronyism or her lack of judicial experience, but because Republicans couldn't be sure whether her evasive answers on abortion rights were meant to hide anti-abortion intent or that she genuinely hadn't prejudged the issue.

So she was replaced by Samuel Alito, whose belief in overturning Roe v. Wade was well-known. He nevertheless dismissed his earlier writings, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Today if the issue were to come before me, if I am fortunate enough to be confirmed and the issue were to come before me, the first question would be the question that we’ve been discussing, and that’s the issue of stare decisis. And if the analysis were to get beyond that point, then I would approach the question with an open mind, and I would listen to the arguments that were made."

Each of Donald Joffrey Trump's nominees to the Court also expressed deference to stare decisis that promptly vanished when an opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade landed on their docket.

Neil Gorsuch: “I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. The reliance interest considerations are important there, and all of the other factors that go into analyzing precedent have to be considered. It is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”

Brett Kavanaugh: “As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By ‘it,’ I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They have been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent, which itself is an important factor to remember."

Q Syndicate, Sept. 2018

Amy Coney Barrett, as her nomination was rushed through the Senate, more closely followed Clarence Thomas's lead: “Senator, what I will commit is that I will obey all the rules of stare decisis."

✍

If Justice Alito's draft opinion is to be believed, the Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has no bearing on other starry decided cases involving personal liberties. "Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion," Alito wrote.

Ahem. If the clerk would please read the record...

Q Syndicate, Nov. 2020

Nothing in this opinion, perhaps. But just wait till you see the next one.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This has nothing to do with This Week's Sneak Peek, but have you noticed how time and time again, Trumpsters say that a primary reason that they support Donald Trump is because "he sticks it to the liberals"?

GREENE: What draws you to him? Like, if you were to talk about why you were going to cast a vote...

MARY JEAN: Well, he's a New Yorker. And he pisses people off, like, to no end. And...

GREENE: And you like that?

MARY JEAN: Yeah. I find him hysterical. My husband and I would sit here and laugh at him. They don't get his jokes. And people, like, go, oh, he said this. No. He was joking. It's like he kind of goes - he has a crassness about him that I kind of like, being a New Jersey girl (laughter). So I kind of like that.

In eight years of the Obama presidency, did you ever once hear anyone talk about how great it was to have a president who "sticks it to" conservatives? No. Barack Obama actually tried to get along with them. He came to office in a time of national crisis and named three Republicans to his cabinet (only to have Republicans decide that bipartisan cooperation was bad for the party).

You can buy "Make Liberals Cry Again" bumper stickers for your car, and a wide variety of "Fuck Liberals" t-shirts. You can even ruin the family Christmas with "Trump-Pence Snowflake Gift Wrap." And in case you want to argue that it's all harmless fun, the kid accused of murdering protesters in Kenosha is said to enjoy "Triggering the Libs." This time, he used an AR-15.

Trump l'oeilists drove through a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Oregon last night, spewing pepper spray at peaceful protesters. Can you imagine the uproar if liberals had driven through the "Reopen" rallies doing that back in May? 

I suppose it might have gotten them to wear masks, though.

This "stick it to liberals" is by no means unique to Donald Trump. Here in Wisconsin, we remember back in the 1990's when Republican Governor Tommy Thompson campaigned for the five-county stadium surtax by telling folks outside the southeast corner of the state that the surtax was an opportunity to "stick it to 'em" in Milwaukee.

And the folks in Red Wisconsin ate it up.

But at least Thompson later apologized for his "poor choice of words."

Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue ― by mistake ― and he still would never apologize for it.

And now he's bringing his crass ass here to Kenosha tomorrow to see how his pissing people off can boost his presidential campaign. God help us.

The Spearfishing Issue

I've just returned home from a two-week vacation in Spain, which is why Spearback Saturday falls on a Sunday this week. It also explains why my last two cartoons were curiously divorced from current events: they were drawn back when only moderate amounts of political shit were hitting the fan.

So anyway. In commemoration of Indigenous Americans Day this week, here are some of my cartoons about a local controversy coming to a head thirty years ago: spear fishing by members of the Ojibwe (Chippewa) Nation.

in the Journal Times, Racine, Wisconsin, May 1989

When the Ojibwe signed treaties with the United States federal government ceding away their land in 1837 and 1842, those treaties guaranteed the Ojibwes' continued right to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice and maple sap on those lands. In 1854, however, the state of Wisconsin began regulating hunting and fishing by both immigrant and Native Americans here. Ignoring federal precedent, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided in 1908 that since those treaties signed before Wisconsin became a state in 1848, Wisconsin was not bound by either one.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., March 18, 1988. Note: The Ojibwe did not wear such headdresses.

In 1940, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Ojibwe were free to fish and hunt as they pleased, but only on their reservation. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that Wisconsin had to abide by U.S. treaties with the Ojibwe and could not regulate their hunting and fishing rights on or off the reservation.

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette, Wis., August, 1987

Groups calling themselves Protect Americans' Rights and Resources (PARR) and the more militant Stop Treaty Abuse (STA), fancying that the Ojibwe weren't leaving any fish for paleface sportsmen, protested against the Ojibwe practice of springtime spearfishing at night. Traditionally, the Ojibwe had used torches to attract walleye and other fish; the modern-day Ojibwe used flashlights.

Large crowds gathered at boat landings to shout obscenities and ethnic slurs, and to hurl rocks and bottles at Ojibwe fishermen. In some cases, shots were fired; some whites used large motor boats to capsize Ojibwe boats in their wake. 1989 would be the peak year for violent incidents.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., October 3, 1989

Republican Tommy Thompson had campaigned for Governor of Wisconsin in 1986 promising to abrogate Ojibwe Treaty rights; Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI; just announced his retirement this year) introduced legislation in Congress toward the same end. Neither the courts, congressional leadership, nor the Bush administration were open to the idea.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., November 8, 1989

Thirty years later, Ojibwe spearfishing continues. Leaders of the anti-spearfishing groups grouse that the opening day of hook-and-line season ain't what it used to be, but overall, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources finds PARR-STA fears not to be supported by the facts.

“What we have seen over the last 20 years is that angler-catch rates, the number of walleye caught per hour fishing, have been stable,” said Joseph Hennessy, the DNR’s treaty fishing coordinator. “People have been as successful as they ever have been. Walleye populations remain strong in lakes with good natural reproduction.”

February Festivities

So you have a cartoon due for February 2 and you've got no ideas and there's nothing in the news to inspire you and your bristol board is as white and pristine as the newfallen snow. So you look at the calendar and see, Oh, Goody! February 2 is Presentation of Our Lord! I'm saved!

No, of course it's Ground Hog Day, that wonderful festival when we all suddenly care what the weather is in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for some reason (and how to spell it). I live in Wisconsin, where we're in for six more weeks of winter at the very least whether some overgrown rat sees its shadow or has the sense to stay in its burrow.

What's the ground hog got to do with it, anyway? Those Punxsutawney bastards don't have to drag the critter out of its box to figure out whether it's sunny or overcast.

But it's a holiday, even if it's rather one-dimensional, and you can always drag some inspiration for a hackneyed cartoon from it. Sadly, unlike Christmas, there's only one movie about Notorious GHD, and we've all drawn some version of this cartoon.

So perhaps you shouldn't discount Presentation of Our Lord Day so quickly. In Mexico, it's Candelaria, and time to take the yuletide decorations down. They celebrate forty days of Christmas, which is why having a live evergreen in the house and singing that partridge in a pear tree song have never caught on there.

Fortunately, February is chock full of holidays, unlike, say, August. With Valentines Day on the fourteenth, you have the quadrennial cartoons of presidential aspirants wooing the heart of the Republican elephant or Democratic donkey.

Or, if your governor's name is Tommy Thompson, you can pursue another Valentines Day theme.

Did you know that the Jewish equivalent of Valentines Day is Tu B'Av in August? Save that factoid for those late summer news doldrums!

Returning to February: Presidents' Day will come just in time so that the renewal of Trump's government shut-down can start on a day when the government was going to shut down anyway.

Just so you readers from around the world know, we don't celebrate all the presidents on Presidents' Day. Most Americans wouldn't know James Polk from Calvin Coolidge, and we'd be at each others' throats if someone tried to make the day about any president since JFK.

No, the day is all about Honest Abe Lincoln and Even More Honest George Washington, either of whom supplies our cartoonists with a smörgåsbord of clichés.

Finally, I'm not forgetting the most important February holiday of all: Superbowl Big Game Sunday. (Until I cough up the dough to be named Official Cartoonist of the NFL, I gotta be careful about infringement of that trademark.)

The story behind this cartoon is that when I was drawing for The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, editors Gary Miller, Mark Kass, or Steve Jagler would email me the topic (and usually the entire copy) of the coming issue's editorial so that I could draw a cartoon to accompany it. But this particular week, and they emailed me that the editorial board hadn't decided what the editorial should say; for a change, they were giving me carte blanche to draw about whatever I wanted (but taking into consideration that the Beej readership was very different from my audience at the UW-Milwaukee Post).

With the Green Bay Packers heading for The Big Game, however, there was precious little else being covered by Wisconsin news media. Packers cheerleading was the only memorable part of Tommy Thompson's State of the State message, fercryinoutloud.

I don't remember the editorial having been about managed stock funds, either.

Well, that's all for this edition of Sciuridaeback Saturday. It's time to take down the Christmas tree. We can't leave it up until Mardi Gras like we did last year.

Mardi Gras isn't until March.

UWM POSTer Child

A couple weeks ago, Supersizeback Saturday featured some cartoons I'd drawn in Augusts of years ending in -8. In digging through my archives for that post, I came across the oversize drawing for this UWM Post outerfold (like a centerfold, but wrapped around the outside of the newspaper) and considered including it.

I was thinking that I might have drawn it right after the 1988 Republican National Convention, but since the cartoon's publication date was the day after Labor Day, 1989, I realized that I had drawn it a year later and I'd have to leave it for another day.

Like today. I suppose I should have held it for a post next year of September cartoons in years ending in -9, but what the heck.

When I call this cartoon oversize, I mean that this "UWM POSTer," as the UWM Post called it, was printed on a sheet of newsprint larger than a typical newspaper page today. I had to make four scans of the newspaper and piece them together to end up with the above image.

My original pen-and-ink drawing is the same size as the printed cartoon. I generally prefer to draw my cartoons larger than they will be printed, but this drawing took up an entire sheet of the largest chunk of bristol board I could find. (The original was badly stained when our basement flooded several years ago, but the newspaper was in a box on a shelf and not in the artist portfolio standing in danger's way on the floor.)

Now, I get that my caricature of Dan Quayle cum Alfred E. Neumann might have needed to be identified for some college-age readers. Quayle had a bland, Wonder-bread average-ness to it, and giving him the missing tooth, orange hair, and aileron ears made him even less recognizable. What gets me about this cartoon is that  the editors of the Post felt that the headline needed the parenthetical "vice-president" for the benefit of readers who apparently wouldn't know who Dan Quayle was even given his full name.

(Note: his full name is actually J. Danforth Quayle; but what, me, quibble?)

The following year's back-to-school POSTer section served as a sort of voters' guide and includes a mention on the calliope wagon of my generic Democratic Congressman in those days, Luke Warmish. It appeared on campus one week before Wisconsin's partisan Primary Election Day; the most hotly contested contest that year was the Democratic race to challenge the Republican incumbent State Attorney General.

I have no idea why the African-American "Issues" guy is blue. There are three African-Americans in the crowd with reasonably rendered skin tones; but whoever got stuck with the task of colorizing all those people clearly got fed up with the process of cutting halftone sheets for the red, blue and yellow overlays. (Witness the Blue Man Group at the base of the light pole.)

In addition to the POSTer, the Post ran five of my illustrations and cartoons for articles inside the paper. (I have notes on all of these that they were drawn in August, so I must have had several days' lead time.) Issues ranged from cuts in student financial aid — the article it accompanied used as an example a student loan of $2,500, which would cover less than 10% of the estimated cost for a Wisconsin resident undergraduate taking six course credits in Fall, 2018  — to reproductive choice and Native American treaty rights.

The treaties were a hot-button issue in Wisconsin at the time, involving Euro-American complaints over Native American spear-fishing rights guaranteed in those treaties. At some point, I'll probably devote a blog post to that episode in Wisconsin history in order to give it the attention it deserves.

I had actually drawn this cartoon in May, but it made its way into the "Stop the Parade" issue anyway. Incumbent Republican Governor Tommy Thompson had attempted to give himself a little wiggle room on the abortion issue with his reelection campaign coming up. If the pro-life camp, here personified by activist Randall Terry, had any misgivings about Thompson's position, they never let on. They were leagues away from Democratic challenger Tom Loftus's position.

And then there was this sketch for an article about expectations for Women Trying To Have It All.

Finally, there were two editorial cartoons. This one was included in the Stop the Parade section; I blogged this cartoon not so long ago, but since it ran in the issue of the UWM Post at hand, here it is again, just in time for the reworked reboot of the Roseanne-free Roseanne show (and bitching about football players and the national anthem):

And, as another example of how everything old is new again, while also bringing this blog post around full circle, here's my cartoon for the editorial page of that September 4, 1990 edition of the Post.

Resign and Replace

Six members of the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned en bloc on June 16 to protest the Trump administration's disregard of their concerns. They announced their resignation in an open letter in Newsweek magazine. (A seventh PACHA member, Dr. Jeffrey Akman, has also resigned, although without public explanation.)

As one of the six, Dr. Michelle Ogle explained to Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio:

OGLE: Since the inauguration, the first thing that happened that was a clue — the Office of National AIDS Policy website was removed. And to our knowledge at this point, that website has not been restored. Also, we've made attempts to communicate with this administration. We sent a letter to Secretary Price and to Mr. Trump to basically let them know what the advisory council does, our goals, how we want to — you know, hope to work with them. And we've just gotten nothing but a very lackluster response from the administration.
INSKEEP: OK. Let's make sure we're clear here. Is it that he doesn't care about the issue or just that he's not listening to your advice?
OGLE: No, he doesn't care about the issue. The budget proposal that he sent forward shows that he doesn't care about the issue. Also, the American Health Care Act, the bill that he's put forward that they celebrated in the Rose Garden with, shows that he doesn't care.

The commission was formed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and renewed by George W. Bush and HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson in July of 2001.  Some 17 or 18 members of the commission remain, and, given the corrupt Trump administration's disinterest, one wonders who, if anyone, will fill the empty chairs now.

Trump couldn't even be bothered to tweet out a 140-characters-or-less congratulatory message for LGBTQ pride month, for crying out loud. He left that apparently onerous duty to daughter Ivanka, who is perhaps the closest thing to an LGBTQ ally in Daddy's administration as there is ever likely to be.

Okay, so it wasn't Jared and Ivanka's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was Eric and Lara Trump's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She’s arranged tournaments at Trump golf courses, served as the liaison to the Trump family during his presidential campaign, and even arranged Eric Trump’s wedding.

Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton — who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school [Quinnipiac University School of Law] says she never earned — to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York.

The sum total of housing or urban development experience in Ms. Patton's résumé is found in her five — count 'em on one hand: five — months as HUD's Director of Public Engagement from January to June, 2017.

But she's black, just like HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who by some amazing coincidence also has zero experience in housing or urban development. I don't know if that means that Trump doesn't have any white friends willing to work in the department, or if he thinks that Urban=Black and Those People are all interchangeable anyway.

So that's how I feel about the Trumps. They're all pretty interchangeable.

But I probably need to figure out how I want to draw Eric, and, for that matter, Donald Jr.  As long as the U.S. of A. is a wholly owned subsidiary branch of Trump Enterprises Inc., it makes more sense to be familiar with the people who are really in charge — as opposed to those titular heads of cabinet departments.

Further Apologies

Andrew Wheeler over at Editorial Explanations thought that my cartoon this week was "the most egregious example ever of 'two things make a cartoon."

Well, I never. In the first place, two things always make a cartoon. In the second place, I gave you at least nine things, which ought to count for something.

It's not as if describing as "a Christmas present" a Supreme Court decision whether or not to take a case was a strikingly original thought of mine -- so I guess I should have included the San Francisco Examiner, and NUVO, among others, in my list of apologies in the corner of the cartoon.

A 1994 Christmastime cartoon of mine.
In it, Governor Tommy Thompson was demoted from
having been the Grinch in a cartoon requested by
another editor a few years earlier.

As I noted in a reply on Wheeler's blog, editorial cartoonists are contractually obligated to draw Christmas-themed cartoons in December, whether we want to or not. Usually, that means portraying politicians we don't like as Ebeneezer Scrooge or the Grinch (even when they're not being miserly); sending the three wise men out in search of whatever goals seem illusive at the moment (or whatever is bright and shiny at the moment); planting anybody with a wish list on Santa's lap; or placing goodies under Christmas trees. Conservatives have enjoyed drawing President Obama as Santa dispensing "free stuff" to undeserving 47 percenters ever since being let down by Fox News's predictions of a Romney landslide. You're bound to see a coal-in-the-stocking cartoon somewhere before Christmas Day dawns.

Well, Merry Christmas, anyway. Because of my editors' schedules, I'm not likely to draw any more Christmas-themed cartoons this year. In fact, I'm frantically trying to come up with a couple of ideas before Christmas for release in January (just in case the Mayans were wrong).

QToon: Tommy v. Tammy

National media attention this week has been on tonight's debate between President Barack Obama and Bain Capitalist Mitt Romney. Less attention gets paid to the congressional and senatorial debates around the country, by and large, although the Elizabeth Warren v. Scott Brown debate over the weekend did get some tongues wagging.

(As an aside: I don't buy the media spin that it was a gaffe when Warren started to answer a question about which Republican now in the Senate she could work with on major issues by citing Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar is "now in the Senate," as David Gregory phrased the question, even if Lugar won't be there once the next Congress is sworn in. And while a Democrat might be able to work with, say, Marco Rubio on immigration reform, or Rand Paul on limiting government surveillance of private citizens, on "major issues," the Republicans who will be calling the shots if Scott Brown is reelected have no interest whatsoever in working with any Democrats.)

Last Friday in the race to succeed retiring Senator Herb Kohl, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and Madison area Congressman Tammy Baldwin met in what was billed as a debate. It was no such thing; the format consisted them taking turns answering questions from four TV/radio people. They each got to give one answer to each question, and there was no opportunity for rebuttal or response to each other. The one time a questioner asked what he called a follow-up question, he changed the subject from abortion to marriage equality. Well, that's not a follow-up question; that's a question asked out of turn.

Having breezed through several debates in his races for governor, Thompson was at ease with the format, repeating his favorite talking points frequently but as if they were fresh new thoughts each time -- so that any given one of those sound bites could be used in news reports or his own campaign commercials. Baldwin faltered a bit more at the outset, with enough umms and uhhs that I began to wonder if she had only crammed for the event on the drive to the studio. But she addressed the questions directly, with detailed facts, and without harping on a select few talking points all night; and she seemed more comfortable by the end of the hour.

And, unlike Thompson, Baldwin did not come off as downright scornful of her opponent. It rang strange when, after Baldwin had given her answer to a late-in-the-debate question asking what could be done to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, Thompson blurted out with mock astonishment, "I'm absolutely surprised! That's the first time I haven't been blamed for something or George W. Bush!"

Thompson brought up his wife three times during the debate, although, curiously, he never said her name. Now, admittedly, that's fewer times than he said that he'd cut taxes 91 times, but one wonders what kind of point he was trying to make. There was nothing all evening that he said that he hadn't planned beforehand to say. I have to suspect that this was a "dog whistle" to the people whom he wanted to remind that Ms. Baldwin is one of those scary lesbians.

What else went on during the evening?

We learned that somehow, when nobody was looking, Tommy Thompson built a hospital in Afghanistan. The morning-after research finds that not all is well with that particular project:

A contractor's assessment of the hospital found that Afghan physicians at the hospital often did not have basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology and lacked skills needed to resuscitate women and infants. In addition, the hospital routinely lacked basic supplies, including surgical gloves and antibiotics.

More impressively, he also built Wisconsin. He even claimed to have brought Wisconsin unemployment down below 2%. (Politifact disagreed with an earlier claim of 2.1%.) But don't blame him for any of today's problems. He's not in Congress, he's a private sector.

This Week's Sneak Peek

It's rare that I get to draw about Wisconsin issues for Q Syndicate, but this week, I'm afraid I'll have to insist.

Thompson Gubernatorial Toons from the Archive

These are some cartoons I had dug up and posted on my old GeoCities web page when Tommy Thompson made his eminently forgettable run for the presidency in 2007.

Thompson came into office as Governor of Wisconsin in 1987 making a lot of talk about cutting the budget. While Politifact has ruled that "Wisconsin’s overall tax burden went down while [Thompson] served as governor from 1987 to 2001," his budgets from 1995 to 1999 contained $188 million in general tax increases. The 1995-97 budget also contained $120 million in increased fees.

A column by Bruce Murphy this week argues that taxes went up considerably during his tenure as governor.

"A study by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that in his first 12 years of office, state spending rose by 101 percent — more than twice the rate of inflation. ...
"During Thompson’s first 12 years in office, the average Wisconsin citizen’s income tax payments rose by 127 percent — more than two-and-a-half times faster than inflation. Sales taxes rose by 90 percent, nearly twice as fast as inflation. As a study back then by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance found, income taxes had soared because in 1986 the state stopped “indexing” the income tax rates to account for inflation."

(Dave Blaska blames a good deal of the increase in taxes on Thompson's Democratic predecessor, Tony Earl. But now that blaming one's predecessor is anathema to conservative thought, let's just ignore Mr. Blaska, shall we?)

The catch was that Thompson was so gosh-darned passionate about spending for some pet items that it overwhelmed his gosh-darned passion for cutting taxes. He pushed through a voucher plan to spend public tax money on private schools. His other passions included trains, state worker pensions, and concentrating power in the Governor's Office (in particular, asserting control over the Department of Natural Resources).

Thompson's conservative legacy is based largely by the establishment in 1997 of Wisconsin Works, or W-2, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Like President Obama's Health Care Reform, W-2 was extremely complicated, with a lot of moving parts; a program to extend health care benefits to low-income families with children was added to W-2 in 1999.

Conservatives loved W-2, and that's how Thompson ended up as George W. Bush's Health and Human Secretary (when the post he really wanted was Transportation).

But let's return to the issue of the measure of conservatism as it's defined today. Again, from Bruce Murphy:

"Thompson crowned his tenure as a tax-and-spend governor with the passage of an outrageous 1999 law that sweetened the state pension system’s payoff for Thompson and other veterans. The law was championed by union leaders and Thompson and passed by a bipartisan legislature, sweetening an already generous state pension plan at a long-term cost of $5.5 billion.
"As with the infamous Milwaukee County pension plan, Thompson’s was skewed to deliver the big benefits to the insiders, the employees with the biggest salaries and longest tenure.  The lifetime value of Thompson’s already generous pension, for instance, grew by $111,000. "

While these pension plans won Thompson the endorsement of the state's public employee unions over his Democratic opponents in 1994 and 1998, they have not endeared him to the current Governor, whose first actions in office have been to unilaterally scuttle the agreements.

In the end, Thompson left his successor, Scott McCallum a precariously balanced budget when he left for Washington D.C.  in 2001.

WisToon: Tommy Thompson

First, a little background on this cartoon. Back in 2006, former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson had this to say about the "individual mandate," the feature of Romneycare that required all Massachusetts residents to buy health insurance whether they wanted to or not:

“This is a little bit opposed to what Republicans really think, but the truth of the matter is that just like automobile insurance; you gotta have coverage.”

...And in October 2009, Thompson joined former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt in calling the Senate Finance Committee version of the [Obamacare] bill “an important first step” that “moves us down the path of providing affordable high-quality health care for all and expanding coverage for millions.”

Now Thompson is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. He has a TV commercial out in which he stands next to a STOP sign, a cornfield in the background, and pledges to stop Obamacare and repeal that pesky individual mandate so that he can replace it with ... well, something. You know, deregulation and stuff, like the Republicans did with the banks.

~

Lastly, a few words about the nuts and bolts of the cartoon. I drew this cartoon on a sheet of Mead "Académie" drawing paper. I've had this pad for ages, because in spite of being advertised as "a textured, heavyweight (80#) drawing paper crafted to provide excellent results for pencil, ink, pastel, and color markers," it bleeds like a stuck pig. By "ink," they must mean ball-point pen ink, because india ink bleeds out in all directions (including onto the next page). It also claims to be "durable enough to accept watercolors," which I find hard to believe.

I had to edit the computer scan of this cartoon to put white in the whites of Thompson's eyes where bleeding ink had filled them in. But doing the same around all the lettering would be like redrawing the cartoon from scratch.

Which I might have done if I weren't so sure that Tommy is going to be upset in next month's primary.

This Week's Racine Post Cartoon

Paul Berge RacinePost.com Aug 18, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

Governor Jim Doyle announces he will not run for a third term in 2010, setting up the first gubernatorial election without an incumbent since the Earl-Kohler race of 1982. In his announcement, he makes subtle jabs at 3.5-term governor Tommy Thompson --

"This is the norm in this country. The President and most governors are limited to two terms by law. Most others have followed tradition. It has largely been Wisconsin’s practice over its history. I am already the longest serving Democratic governor and by the end of my term will be the second-longest serving governor in Wisconsin history. And I think this national norm serves good purpose. It keeps the political world from becoming stagnant. It allows new leaders to develop. It gives the voters more choices. It allows us to draw new insights and inspiration from the wellsprings of renewal in each generation."

...and at a certain quarterback...

"I personally would like to have put this decision off for another three or four months to see if I feel differently then. I know I will regret the decision many times over the coming year. But I am not going to go Brett Favre on you. I am announcing my decision now to allow other candidates to step forward and get going."

Doyle's successor will have to deal with the loss during the current recession of several of the state's major employers and the resulting hole in the state budget.