Q Toon: But We Play Woke on TV

I'm taking a week off from alarmist cartoons about the fascist wing of the Requblican Party.

And drawing instead about the corporations that fund them.

By now, you cannot but notice how interracial and non-intergenderal couples have begun to appear in television and internet commercials, once the exclusive domain of white heterosexuals. (Although I've always had my suspicions about Mr. Whipple.)

Leaving interracial families aside for the nonce, unless the same-sex couples are pressing you to ask your doctor about anti-retroviral medication, you might blink and miss them. Which is why the guys in today's cartoon are stuck in that split second of time.

Many of these same advertisers wanting to appear (for lack of a better word) woke have, however, been helping fill Republican politicians' campaign coffers for decades, even as the party marches farther and farther into antiLGBTQ and racist territory. Repressive and restrictive laws are proliferating in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and Iowa.

Chuck Magro. John May. Donnie King. Cory Harris. Charles Scharf.

These are the CEOs of five of the most powerful corporations operating in Iowa: Corteva. John Deere. Tyson. Wellmark. Wells Fargo.

Where are they? Should we request a wellness check to make sure they’re OK?

These CEOs lead corporate monopolies making billions every year off the bodies and brains of Iowans, including LGBTQ Iowans, yet they’ve been missing in action as Iowa Republicans propose the largest number of anti-LGBTQ bills ever in a single legislative session.

These bills include everything from attempts to ban books (because kids reading about LGBTQ characters is dangerous, while meatpacking plant child labor isn’t) to an attempt to ban same-sex marriage in the state (forget the issue of constitutionality).

The time has come to realize that corporate monopolies are no friend of the LGBTQ community when the going gets tough.

For these corporations, maintaining favor with the Republicans who run the state is more important than standing up for LGBTQ Iowans, including their own workers. They know if they dare defy Iowa Republicans, their ability to maintain the monopoly power they use to deliver their excessive profits will be threatened. ...

Perhaps one can't blame Corporate America for being intimidated by the example Florida has set after Disney Corporation dared to stand up for its LGBTQ employees and customers. Not every corporation has quite as sweet a deal as Disney had up to this year from the states where they operate; but nearly every major corporation has plied legislatures with campaign donations in order to secure special benefits of one kind or another: Tax Incremental Financing districts, property tax waivers, monopoly protection, taxpayer-funded stadiums, and so on and so forth.

And they don't want those bennies taken away after so much investment in those politicians.

If we in the LGBTQ+ community want to know who our real friends are in the business world, that Des Moines Register editorial suggests we look to the folks who can't afford to pay premium prices for friends in the statehouse:

[I]t’s again small-business owners who possess the courage to speak up. Dozens of small businesses like the print shop Raygun, the bookstore Reading in Public, and the brewery Firetrucker Brewery have all taken stands alongside LGBTQ Iowans and against Iowa Republicans’ proposed legislation.

Wouldn’t Iowa’s LGBTQ community be better off with fewer corporate monopolies and more Rayguns, Reading in Publics, and Firetruckers? The answer is yes.

Ask your doctor if small businesses are right for you.

You Say You Want a Free Election? Well, You Know

There's still just over a whole week of those ghastly campaign commercials bombarding us on the TV, radio, social media, YouTube, and front yards. So let's take a break from Election 2022...

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 21, 1982

...but first, this commercial from Election 1982.

Scott McCallum was running in Wisconsin for the senate seat held by William Proxmire, and aired a TV ad arguing that he was sympathetic to voters suffering from the Reagan recession and offering his unemployed brother John as proof. 

McCallum's ad didn't work, even though Proxmire didn't campaign on television at all. I suppose Wisconsin voters actually rewarded Proxmire for that.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 28, 1982

Pete Jansson was the Republican running against my district's congressman, Democrat Les Aspin. At a candidate forum hosted by the University of Wisconsin - Parkside, Jansson campaigned against what he called "Aspinomics." I suppose that was an applause line in any GOP crowd, but it fell flat in the mixed audience on a university campus.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 7, 1992

1982 was the Democrats' year, and Les Aspin cruised to a seventh term. By 1992, he was firmly ensconced as the First District's Congressman, Chair of the House Armed Service Committee, and running for his twelfth.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 20, 1992

Senator Robert Kasten (R-WI) came to office in the Republican sweep of 1980 and survived the Democratic wave of 1986, but sailed into strong headwinds in 1992. He painted his Democratic rival, Russ Feingold, as a dangerous radical — which is the standard Republican tactic — but then likened his own positions to those of Wisconsin's Junior Senator, Democrat Herb Kohl, and, incredibly, the Democrats' presidential candidate.

It is impossible to imagine any Republican since then offering themselves up as Almost Like Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat. Since the rise of Newt Gingrich in 1994, any hint of bipartisanship has become anathema in the GOP.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Oct. 29, 1992

Then there was the ad Feingold filmed greeting voters at The Joke Shop in Waukesha. The owner of the store, Jeffrey Campbell appeared in the ad, saying "Yes, it is," in response to Feingold asking "Is this a joke shop?"

Campbell was so upset afterward that Feingold's ad made him appear to support the Democratic candidate that he got himself into a Kasten ad swearing his loyalty to the Republican incumbent. Kasten's ad culminates with its narrator asking, "If we can't trust Russ Feingold's ads, can we trust Russ Feingold on crime, welfare reform or taxes?"

Jump we now to 2002: Drawing for a national LGBTQ+ audience, I only find an excuse to cartoon about local political races when there is a queer angle to one. My one such opportunity in October of 2002 came with the contest in Montana for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Max Baucus.

This time, it was the Democrats running a homophobic television spot.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2002

Challengers have one advantage in these ads in that they can pick and choose any one vote by the incumbent, even on a procedural matter, to accuse the incumbent of being against something that sounds popular or for something that can be given an unpleasant nickname. Republican Mike Taylor didn't have a voting record for Sen. Baucus to comb through, but someone at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up video of Taylor when he owned a cosmetology shop in Denver about ten or so years earlier.

The ad (paid for by the DSCC, not the Baucus campaign) accused Taylor of embezzling funds from the shop. The visual of Taylor massaging a male customer's face insinuated that Taylor might be gay. Whether it was due to the allegation or the insinuation, it was enough to prod a weepy Taylor to withdraw from the race at the 11th hour.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2012

Come 2012, I seized the opportunity to return to Wisconsin politics in my syndicated cartoon when former Governor Tommy Thompson challenged incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin in a televised debate. While he didn't engage in any overt anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric against the only openly lesbian Senator at the time, he did seem to make an unusual number of references to Mrs. Tommy Thompson.

I've found Senator Baldwin's a challenging face to draw, and I tried to make this caricature as simplified as possible. In the end, I don't think this approach worked, and I haven't used it since.

✍

That brings us up to the present, so that's it for today's installment of congressional campaign cartoons past. We now return you to your regularly scheduled campaign commercials.

Q Toon: A Hallowe'en Classic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toon: Pillow Talk

In his final hours as President, Donald Joffrey Trump has been quickly running out of allies. Cabinet members and even Yertle McConnell have turned their backs on him, now that they've gotten out of his corrupt administration everything they possibly can.

The only friends Trump has left are the ones who want a pardon out of him. And My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell, who stopped by the White House on Monday to offer his ideas on how to impose martial law on the U.S., just like all those leaders of shithole countries Trump used to look down upon.

Makes me wonder what Lindell needs a pardon for.

Q Toon: Televisibility

The LGBTQ community is more visible in television advertising these days than we were only a very short time ago.

Chalk it up to a greater sensitivity to diversity. When I was a tyke, the only faces we saw in television commercials were white, except for Jose the coffee farmer and the laundry woman whose "ancient Chinese secret, eh?" turned out to be a grocery store fabric softener. In the '70's, black faces began to show up: first football celebrities like O.J. Simpson and Mean Joe Green. Soon a hillside of multiracial folks offered "to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony," but it would still be a while before non-white actors would sell us cars, insurance, and other expensive stuff.

Now that societal attitudes toward the LGBTQ community have softened, folks like us have begun showing up in commercials, too. Their appearances are usually fleeting and might leave viewers thinking, "Did I just see what I think I saw?" The young woman who leaps enthusiastically into another young woman's arms at the airport in an amazon.com commercial ... are they a couple? Wasn't that a guy in make-up for nearly a full second in an Ulta ad?

Maybe the two gals dancing together at the house party in the Grey Goose commercial just happen to like dancing. And Spectrum Mobile made a point in its latest commercial of mentioning that the two guys featured in its ad campaign just happen to live together; they're not family. The framed pictures over their kitchen table of shirtless 1890's boxers don't mean a thing.

Advertisers and content carriers still get flack from older and more sensitive viewers when our presence in a commercial is impossible to overlook, even with the mute button on. Such was the case with an ad by Zola that ran on the Hallmark Channel. The setting for the commercial was the wedding of two women, which set off the alarm bells at One Million Moms Inc.

OMM has been battling against gays and lesbians in TV commercials ever since J.C. Penney hired Ellen DeGeneres as its spokesperson back in 2012. The then-110-year-old retailer was hoping that some gay cachet would give it a trendy vibe. It didn't work.

Flush with their seven-year-old success, Megamoms fired off a protest last week to Hallmark, which announced that it was pulling the ad "to avoid controversy." Zola, an on-line wedding gift registry company, replied by pulling the rest of its advertising from the Hallmark Channel, which shocked Hallmark into an immediate reversal.

“The Hallmark Channel will be reaching out to Zola to reestablish our partnership and reinstate the commercials,”  said Mike Perry, president and CEO of Hallmark Cards, which controls Crown Media Networks, the parent company of Hallmark Channel, in a prepared statement.  “Across our brand, we will continue to look for ways to be more inclusive and celebrate our differences.” He acknowledged the ban had caused “hurt and disappointment.”

I'm so glad that because I drew last week's cartoon about the Hallmark Channel, I gave this week's cartoon a more general focus. I didn't catch news of Hallmark's reversal until after I'd sent my cartoon off to the syndicate.

Besides, like the lady in the cartoon, I hadn't actually seen the commercial.

Cost Comparison

Mike Peterson posted this graph on his blog today. I can't tell where he originally found it, although the graphic includes his source's source material. (They don't work as links, however.)

Military Transgender Healthcare Costs, with Perspective

I've added a few graphics to the graphic just to save some readers from eye strain.

Burger King's Five Spot

According to their current ad campaign, Burger King wants to redesign the $5 bill...

Q Toon: Ex-Congressman Lee's New Job

What, a cartoon with no LGBT issue involved?

Yes, I confess. After weeks of drawing a guy and a runaway child dressed for snow, a family-values closet case, Old Father Time, and John McCain, I was aching to draw a half-naked buff dude. Thank you, Christopher Lee!

The best quip I've seen about this story was on cable news: Congressman Lee's claim on Craigslist that he was a divorced lobbyist was not so much a lie as it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon features the type of person whose vocabulary keeps "homosexual fornicators" at the ready, so tune in later this week for plenty of ad hominem fun!

Meanwhile, congratulations to the Green Bay Packers on their thirteenth championship title! Way to keep intact your reputation as the "heart attack Pack"!

I had the cartoon mostly finished by the time the big game got underway last night, but I kept on the ready for any commercial that might set off a firestorm at GLAAD. A few years before their hit with Betty White last year, Snickers won a scolding for its commercial featuring long-haired auto mechanics eating a Snickers bar from opposite ends, each somehow unaware of the other until their lips met. Viewers were invited to vote on four options for the end of the commercial, most of which involved some degree of violence.

If there was such a commercial this year, I missed it. This year, the umbrage can be taken by Tibetan sympathizers and Francis Scott Key enthusiasts.