Q Toon: W-hoops

Perhaps if I had followed basketball more closely, I would remember who Royce White and Enes Kantor were; they retired from the NBA a couple years ago. 

Apparently, life outside of the limelight has been lonely for them, because they have decided to enlist in the Republican Culture War against transgender athletes by claiming to be transgender themselves as a ruse to qualify for the WNBA draft. Royce's pretense of being transgender has extended only as far as donning a blonde wig for a podcast; Kantor hasn't even committed to that much.

It can't be for the money. WNBA players, even the league's stars, make considerably less than their NBA counterparts. That's why they end up taking summer jobs overseas at the risk of becoming an international hostage, as happened to Brittney Griner.

White's and Kantor's purported reason for their ploy is that they are protesting that WNBA rules lack a definition of what a woman is and isn't. Never mind that there are no transgender women in the WNBA today, nor has any transgender woman beside these two fakers declared any intention of entering the WNBA draft. 

The sole exception has been Layshia Clarendon, a non-binary/trans woman who played on seven WNBA teams from 2013 to 2024. As I said, I don't follow basketball all that closely, but I think if there were any transgender basketballer coming up through the college system or making international waves in Croatia, I think I would have heard about it.

On the outside chance that White and Kantor are sincere in their concern for the integrity of women's basketball, trans athlete Karleigh Webb has suggested four approaches for the WNBA to "shut down the circus," as she puts it:

1. Ignore the two and refuse to draft them, then tough out the ginned-up outrage from right-wing agitators.
2. Require trans athletes to prove they have been on feminizing hormone replacement therapy for at least one year before becoming eligible to play.
3. Await the findings, expected next year, from the gender eligibility committee of FIBA, the international basketball governing association.
4. "Once the WNBA Finals end, owners, coaches and the players’ union, along with researchers and trans athletes well-versed in these policies, should come together and build an evidence-driven, basketball-specific eligibility policy. The objective shouldn’t be to balance inclusion against fairness, as though one must necessarily come at the expense of the other. The objective should be to align inclusion, competitive integrity, fairness and safety."

The ringleaders of the circus aren't likely to be assuaged by any of these suggestions. They have a vested interest in keeping the circus up and running. 

But you have to start somewhere.

fin

Victoria Day's Sneak Peek

There were topics I would dearly have loved to draw about this week but didn't because ideas stubbornly refused to gel.

I sketched out a memorial cartoon for Jason Collins, the gay basketball player who came out of the closet in Sports Illustrated in May of 2013 and succumbed to stage 4 glioblastoma on May 12 of this year at age 47. But I couldn't come up with anything besides a caricature that I wasn't entirely happy with — no trenchant quotation or iconic photo image — and I certainly was not about to draw a basketball shedding a tear.

Then there is a local story that I thought would be worthy of a cartoon for a national, if niche, audience: the school board in Watertown, Wisconsin, voted 7-to-1 to stop their high school's Wind Symphony from performing "A Mother of a Revolution!" by Omar Thomas at their spring concert this evening. Thomas wrote the instrumental piece as "a celebration of the bravery of trans women, and in particular, Marsha 'Pay It No Mind' Johnson. Marsha is credited with being one of the instigators of the famous Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969..."

It's a technically demanding work, but the hours of practice those kids in Watertown spent mastering the music were all for naught when the school board decreed that it violated the district's "controversial issues" policy. Board Vice President Sam Ouweneel called the board's action “a perfect example of what everyone here ran on, which was ending indoctrination and radical curriculum.”

Watertown students staged a walk-out protest that was duly reported on state television news. Someone with sympathies for the school board complained that the coverage was all one-sided, so one TV station sent a reporter and cameraman out to the board members' homes to offer them opportunity to comment. None of them would answer the door.

Over the weekend, the owner of Minocqua Brewing Company invited the Waterford Wind Symphony to perform "A Mother of a Revolution!" at the biergarten he is sponsoring in Madison this coming weekend. He soon realized that the band's director could be in trouble with the school board were he to participate, but the invitation to the band stands.

The guy in Minocqua is a leftwing gadfly perpetually in trouble with the Republicans in charge of Minocqua city government over zoning and licensing type issues. He has declared his candidacy for Wisconsin governor as a Democrat, to which the Democratic establishment has responded, "Gee, thanks, but we have enough candidates already." 

To give you an idea of the sort of person he is, he has publicly promised that his brewery will host a "Free Beer Day" when Donald Trump kicks the bucket. After the latest assassination attempt, he posted "Well, we almost got #freebeerday. Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle."

All of which seemed like a lot to cram into a cartoon for readers who may not have heard of any of this. So I ended up drawing about something else very late last night.

It's All Connected Somehow

Thursday morning, news broke  the Biden administration had secured the release from Russian prison of Olympic medalist and WNBA star Brittney Griner. As you surely know, last February, Griner had been arrested at a Moscow area airport arriving with a tiny amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, for which she was sentenced to nine years in a labor camp.

Given Russia's invasion of Ukraine very shortly after Griner's arrest, relations between the U.S. and Russia have been at their lowest point since what, the Vietnam War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Berlin airlift? The only two things President Biden had to offer in exchange for freeing Griner were looking the other way as Russia pummeled Ukraine, and/or handing over a Russian arms merchant convicted in U.S. courts in 2011 for his role in supplying weaponry to various revolutionary and terrorist groups around the world.

Biden traded the latter for Griner, and quickly Monday morning quarterbacks (power forwards?) here lambasted the administration for not also securing the freedom of Paul Whelan, a Marine imprisoned by Russia since 2018 on accusations of being a U.S. spy. 

Lost in the criticism of President Biden for not winning Whelan's freedom is the fact that his administration at least tried to include Whelan in the deal, whereas there was no indication that Donald Trump, who happened to be president in 2018, ever gave one bit of thought to Whelan before last Thursday.

He has, of course, had plenty to say about him since, taking some time away from his obsession with the idea that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him. At the moment, his story is that it was stolen by Twitter, because it didn't cooperate with right-wingers' efforts to whip up a scandal around Biden's son Hunter. 

You may recall that the New York Post published an exposé concerning a laptop containing compromising material Hunter Biden had supposedly left at a repair shop and never picked up.

The compromising information dealt with Hunter trading on his father's name in business (Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka must be shocked, shocked!), his drug use, and, we are now told, dick pics. If Papa Biden wasn't eager for this stuff to be spread across the internets, and if the folks then in charge of running Twitter thought it was tawdry, sketchy bullcrap, the incoming Republican majority in the House plans to make every effort to make daily headlines of this stuff from the moment the 118th Congress arrives in D.C.

Struggling to make the Hunter Biden laptop story seem relevant to anything going on today, the Republican conspiracy manufacturing mill is grinding away at full speed. Congressboob James Comer (R-KY) postulated on the GOP propaganda channel that there was somehow a direct link between Hunter and (did you ever imagine that I'd ever get back to the topic of today's cartoon?) Brittney Griner's release:

 “[W]e fear that this administration’s compromised because of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden have received from Russia and China. You look at just what happened yesterday. This bizarre prisoner swap that clearly was in the benefit of Russia, is another example of why we need to investigate to see if, in fact, this administration is compromised.”

You may rest assured that the Republican Truther squad will not rest until they have found how Hunter Biden fast-tracked the trademarking of Ivanka Trump-Kushner's couture line in China, authorized Don Jr. and Eric's tax cheating at the Trump Organization, and masterminded the fraud at the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

All part of a plot to cover up Barack Obama's birthplace in Kenya.

Q Toon: Nothing But Nyet

 

The Russian trial of Brittney Griner is now in the sentencing stage. The Olympian and WNBA star faces a possible ten years in prison for having arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in January with a cannabis vape cartridge in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charge and delivered an abject apology in court.

In the first days after Griner's arrest, the Biden administration was largely silent on her plight, and her wife publicly urged everyone to keep quiet in order to let the State Department work behind the scenes. Since then, Cherelle Griner, the WNBA, and the LGBTQ+ community have begun to speak out, more and more forcibly.

The State Department is publicly advocating for Griner's return to the U.S., proposing a prisoner swap of Brittney Griner and a retired marine convicted of spying, Paul Whelan, for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer currently serving time in a U.S. prison.

Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages.

Rumoured to speak six languages, Bout developed a decades-long career by acquiring Soviet military transport planes and filling them with various weapons that were left behind after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Since then, Bout has supplied weapons to conflicts around the world including Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen.

For decades, governments and rebels fought each other with weapons that Bout sold to either side.

In 2008, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after he was caught on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was convicted in a New York court in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

A third American, history teacher Marc Fogel, sentenced in Russia last year for having half an ounce of marijuana on him, has not so far been mentioned as part of any prisoner swap. If only we had another Russian "Merchant of Death" in Leavenworth or Florence ADMAX to sweeten the deal...

Putin's foreign ministry (and his foreign minions) have so far shown no interest in the Biden administration's proposal. Either Putin is waiting until the trial is officially over, or, following the example of the Iran hostage crisis, until the next administration is sworn into office.

Q Toon: From the Highest Court

 

The trial Olympic athlete and WNBA star Brittney Griner, accused of having cannabis oil in a vape cartridge when she arrived at the Moscow airport last winter, is set to begin sometime in the next few weeks. She was seen arriving for a pre-trial hearing last week, and a letter from her to President Biden asking for him to intervene on her behalf became public this week.

Clearly, she doesn't have much confidence in the Russian judicial system letting her return home any time soon.

My cartoon lawyer for her presents a gloomier picture for Mrs. Griner than the Russian legal system theoretically affords. She will, in fact, have an opportunity to address the court at the beginning of her trial and again before the judge, lay assessors, and/or jury decide on a verdict.* 

On the other hand, she is obviously being used as a political pawn toward the release of a Russian citizen convicted in the U.S. ten years ago of illegal arms dealing. Arms dealing vs. a trace of THC oil... yeah, sure, that's an even trade.

You can ask Alexei Navalny how fair the Russian judicial system is. (Well, no, you probably can't.) Russia having become under Vladimir Putin a highly autocratic state, even if Mrs. Griner should get a fair trial and either acquittal or sent home with a fine, authorities may not be done with her. Consider this:

The shakiness of the presumption of innocence in Russian criminal trials is reflected by the fact that acquittals are almost nonexistent. They occurred in only 0.36 percent of all cases in 1998. During the perestroika years the Soviet public was shocked by many stories of innocent people having been convicted due to coerced or tortured confessions and this was one reason why reforms were pushed, among them, that of returning to trial by jury. Indeed, juries have acquitted substantially more than nonjury courts, anywhere from 18–22 percent of the time. A disturbing development has been the refusal of law enforcement organs to accept acquittals. For instance, in November 1999 in Moscow, officers of the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB, entered a courtroom in camouflage uniforms and black masks and re-arrested two defendants who had been acquitted at trial by a military court. Such occurrences are not rare.

And that's before Mr. Putin became President.

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I'm gradually making adjustments to my fictional lawyer for Mrs. Griner (first appearing here), including reversing the N's and R's in his dialogue balloons — realizing, of course, that they are not the Cyrillic equivalent of Roman N's and R's.

Check back on Saturday for some further thoughts on How To Draw A Russian.

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*Update: Brittney Griner has entered a guilty plea, according to this morning's news reports. That does not necessarily mean that the trial skips ahead to sentencing; the prosecution is still allowed to present its case.

Q Toon: Yachta, Yachta, Yachta

Brittney Griner's trial has been delayed by another month, so I have taken the occasion to draw a reminder, amid all the war, gun violence, and baby formula shortages, that the WNBA star and Olympic medalist is still in a Russian prison. She has missed the May 6 opening of the WNBA season, and given how the Russian judicial system operates, stands to miss several more seasons.

Griner has been awaiting trial since February, accused of having a vape canister with hashish oil in her carry-on luggage when she arrived at the Moscow airport. When not playing for the Phoenix Mercury, has played on a Russian Premier League women's basketball team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, since 2014. (WNBA players are not paid as handsomely as their NBA counterparts, so many of them play for European teams in the off-season.)

Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department began dealing with her case through its Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, labeling her case as one of "wrongful" detention. The designation means that we are no longer patiently waiting for her legal case to play out in court.

Russian media have suggested that their government might offer a prisoner swap of Griner for convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, held since 2012 in U.S. Penitentiary, Marion, in Illinois. If that sounds like an uneven trade, it is; but the U.S. isn't currently holding any Russian Olympians in our prison system.

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What is a Russian lawyer supposed to look like in a cartoon these days?

There was a time when one would just draw a scarfaced apparatchik in an ushanka and pin-striped suit. While that image would still work if the character were a member of the politburo or Russian FSB, it seems to me that a Russian defense attorney would be someone at the beginning of his or her career, perhaps juggling a couple dozen clients at once.

Like the Miranda Rights attorney you get in the U.S. if you cannot afford one.

Those of us in the Entertainment Biz typically let you, the Entertained, know a character is a foreigner by tossing in a word or two from the foreign language into the dialogue — sí, señorita; non, monsieur; jawohl, mein Herr — no matter how fluent in English the character is otherwise. Alas, the lawyer in today's cartoon had no reason to say дa or нет, and it turns out that there is no Russian translation of "Ms." (Russian, moreover, simply transliterates Mr., Mrs., and Miss from English.)

I suppose I could have printed his dialogue with backwards И's and Я's — except that Ms. Griner's name includes both an N and two R's, and doing so would have been equally confusing.

You might, however, try reading his dialogue with a Boris And Natasha accent.

Q Toon: Free Brittney

I freely confess that I struggled coming up with anything to draw about Brittney Griner, the WNBA star and Olympic medalist who has gotten caught up in the international standoff between Putin's Russia and the rest of the world.

On February 17, one week before Putin's invasion of Ukraine but well after his troops were poised at the border, Russian police arrested Griner at Sheremetyevo airport, reportedly having found a vape cartridge and hashish oil in her luggage. Whether there is anything to the charges or if they were completely trumped up, none of us in the cheap seats may ever know.

Her wife has pleaded with everyone to honor their privacy, which also limits what one might say in a cartoon. Nor has her plight worsened to the level of so many citizens of Ukraine; a representative of the American embassy has been able to visit Griner in detention and reports that she is in good health and spirits.

As an American, a lesbian, and a black woman, Griner faces an uphill climb getting a fair trial in Russia. Instead of an American-style legal system in which a prosecutor presents one side of the case and the defense presents the other, in a Russian court, an investigator appointed by the government presents a case file that determines what can and cannot be argued in court. Her defense is free to conduct its own investigation, but concepts such as an impartial jury of one's peers and a right against self-incrimination simply do not exist.

If found guilty, Griner could face up to ten years in prison, or even in a labor camp.

Griner did not come to Russia as a tourist:

Ms Griner had a second job, and that was why she had flown to Russia — to play for EuroLeague team UMMC Ekaterinburg, where she had worked since 2014 during the US off-season.

Roughly half of WNBA players compete overseas in the off-season. For most, it's a way to augment their domestic income: WNBA players receive roughly five times more in Russia than they do in the US.

"If she were Steph Curry or LeBron James, she wouldn't be over there at all because she'd be making enough money," [sports journalist Tamryn] Spruill said. 

After Griner's detention and arrest, I'm fairly sure that any remaining WNBA players moonlighting on Russian basketball teams are seriously reconsidering whether any salary is worth being set up to be a pawn in geopolitical brinksmanship.

Cheer the Deer!

In honor of the Milwaukee Bucks clinching the national championship 50 years after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robinson, John McGlocklin and Bob Dandridge brought home the title, I've decided to dig up some of the Bucks-related cartoons I drew for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee back when I was their editorial cartoonist.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, January 15, 1999

The Beej, of course, didn't ask me for cartoons about the team per se; this cartoon drawn to accompany an editorial celebrating the end of the 1998-99 NBA lock-out is as close as we'll come today to a cartoon about the game itself.

in Business Journal oGM, Nov. 30, 2001

Most of these cartoons concern negotiations to merge the Bradley Center, the Bucks' home since 1988, with the Wisconsin Center, two blocks to its south.

in Business Journal, March 22, 2002

This one accompanied an editorial congratulating UHF Channel 41 for winning the rights to televise Bucks games for the 2002-03 season. Then using the call letters WMLW-LP (now WBME-CD), Channel 41 is a low-powered station whose broadcast signal has never extended far from Milwaukee County; local cable monopoly Time Warner only grudgingly added it to its line-up in 2003.

Channel 41 didn't retain the rights to Bucks games for long, however. It now runs TV reruns from the 1950's to '70's as part of the MeTV brand.

in Business Journal, Feb. 14, 2003

Now, this one was probably about the Bradley Center-Wisconsin Center merger, unless it was about the above-mentioned renovation plans, or something else entirely. I'm afraid I don't remember. Obviously, the Beej had some trepidations about whatever it was. What I really liked about this cartoon was that it didn't take very long to draw it.

I wish I could take credit for the composition of the cartoon, but credit is rightly due to the great Pat Oliphant. A basketball-themed cartoon of his years earlier demonstrated how to exaggerate height in a horizontally oriented cartoon, and I followed his example quite closely.

The bowling ball, however, was my idea.

in Business Journal, Dec. 19, 2003

Principals in the merger negotiations were Bradley Center Chair Ulice Payne, Jr. and Frank Gimbel, Chair of the Wisconsin Center District Board, so you'll be seeing them again in subsequent cartoons.

May 21, 2004

A proposal to rent out space at the Bradley Center was, of course, aimed at commercial development, but it was fun to imagine the Center opening up to residential occupancy instead. Of the cartoons in today's post, this is probably my favorite.

in Business Journal, Dec. 17, 2004

Editorially, the Business Journal was eager to see the Bradley Center-Wisconsin Center merger come through, and frustrated that negotiations were not getting anywhere.

in Business Journal, March 11, 2005

As negotiations dragged on, the Bucks' lease at the Bradley Center came due. Team management viewed the 17-year-old arena as out-of-date, and there was talk of the team considering pulling up stakes to find a more modern facility elsewhere.

in Business Journal, Oct. 14, 2005

The Business Journal decided to drop editorial cartoons at the end of 2005, before this merger business ever got settled. Once Wisconsin state government approved replacing the Bradley Center with Fiserve Forum in 2015, the merger was made moot. 

(If the merger ever happened, I've been unable to find a report of it. An on-line timeline from the Wisconsin Center District mentions the talks in the early '00's. It doesn't mention the Bradley Center again until July, 2015, when the Wisconsin State Senate's financing package for the Fiserv Forum included a provision for the WCD Board to oversee the Bradley Center. The Bradley Center was demolished in 2019, leaving plenty of room for the 65,000 fans massing outside Fiserv Forum on Tuesday.)

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I can't end today's post without adding a much earlier cartoon of then-owner of the Bucks, Herb Kohl, when he was running to succeed U.S. Senator Bill Proxmire (D-WI). Kohl won the September primary against former Governor Tony Earl, former Senate candidate Steve Garvey, Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug LaFollette, and perennial also-ran Edmond Hou-Seye; Republican nominee Susan Engeleiter was a State Senator from Brookfield who had won her nomination over state party Chair Steve King.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wis., Sept. 20, 1988

Kohl's deep pockets helped him to a decisive victory over Engeleiter; that he had brought the Bucks to Milwaukee didn't hurt, either. Kohl sold the Bucks in 2014, and a son of new co-owner Marc Lasry is one of a swarm of Democratic candidates vying for the nomination to challenge Senator Ron Johnson next year. Alex Lasry sponsors posts that show up in my Facebook feed every day.

Time — and there is plenty of it between now and August, 2022 — will tell whether the Bucks' championship is enough to propel Lasry to the front of the pack.

Q Toon: Repeal and Replace

The North Carolina legislature finally passed, and Governor Roy Cooper signed, a repeal of its odious HB2, better known as the Bathroom Bill, last week.

But before we all celebrate the triumph of reason over hysteria, there are one or two details lurking in the replacement bill, HB142.

The deal removes the requirement that transgender people must use the restroom that matches the sex on their birth certificate but leaves state legislators in charge of policy on public restrooms. The proposal also bans local governments from passing nondiscrimination ordinances affecting private employers until December 2020. 

Governor Cooper lamely explained that justice delayed was better than justice "permanently denied." Of more importance to him and to the millions of basketball fans in the state, however, was the NCAA's threat to permanently deny hosting championship basketball games to the Tarheel State if the law wasn't repealed by March 30. With the passage of HB142 just before the buzzer, the NCAA gave its half-hearted support to the less-than-half-hearted repeal.

While the new law meets the minimal NCAA requirements, the board remains concerned that some may perceive North Carolina’s moratorium against affording opportunities for communities to extend basic civil rights as a signal that discriminatory behavior is permitted and acceptable, which is inconsistent with the NCAA Bylaws.
However, we recognize the quality championships hosted by the people of North Carolina in years before HB2. And this new law restores the state to that legal landscape: a landscape similar to other jurisdictions presently hosting NCAA championships.
We are actively determining site selections, and this new law has minimally achieved a situation where we believe NCAA championships may be conducted in a nondiscriminatory environment.

The NBA has yet to weigh in on HB142; more important will be whether it will be enough to change the minds of companies who had been convinced not to invest, locate or expand in North Carolina. The loss of such firms as PayPal, CoStar Realty, Deutsche Bank, and Google Ventures, added to the lost sports events and concert performances has cost North Carolina over $630 million.

I wouldn't blame them if they decided to put off any further decisions until, oh, say, December, 2020.

Q Toon: Mike Rice

Looking back over this year's cartoons, I notice that I've drawn an awful lot of cartoons about marriage equality lately. My editors are probably happy to see that this week's cartoon is about something else.

Last December, Rutgers University suspended men's basketball coach Mike Rice after administrators were shown video of him verbally and physically abusing his players -- hurling basketballs at their heads, shoving, kicking and manhandling them, calling them faggots -- you know, motivational stuff. Then ESPN showed the videos to the world, and the University hastily fired Rice.

It probably helped that the season was over, too.