Q Toon: Monkey Business

Congressional Republicans have proposed five anti-LGBTQ+ riders to the National Security and Department of State Appropriations Act, a must-pass funding bill for the State Department.

The riders range from restricting Pride flags in federal buildings to banning transgender healthcare; all attack the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans and have nothing whatsoever to do with funding the State Department or national security.

You might be thinking, wait, haven't Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ executive orders already accomplished all of the crap in those riders? Yes, exactly. 

But the point of Congress passing these discriminatory and homophobic provisions into law would be to prevent some future, more enlightened administration from signing an executive order to return things to pre-Trump conditions. It would take another act of Congress to undo this act of Congress.

So I came up with this literal interpretation of the figurative term "riders." Since primatologists have recently discovered that homosexual behaviors are not exclusive to humans and bonobos, I might have tried to depict the Republican riders as some creature more associated with LGBTQ+ophobia instead. 

But having the bicyclist carrying five GOP elephants would have been a difficult draw.

Besides, pachyderms aren't all that straight and narrow, either.

Presidents' Day's Sneak Peek

Keeping it clean this week:

 A propos of nothing, one thing among many that stood out during our recent vacation trip to Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, was the city flag of Cuzco. We saw it flying there and at the town square of Machu Picchu Pueblo, and repeated on scarves, punchus, hats, and so forth sold in the various markets.

Somebody in our travel group asked our tour guide whether the city of Cuzco had somehow infringed on the LGBTQ community's copyright or trademark on the rainbow pride flag; but there are clear differences between the two, starting with the Inca symbol at the center of Cuzco's flag.

Cuzco's flag also has seven stripes instead of the pride flag's six. Remember the mnemonic "Roy G. Biv" for remembering the colors of the spectrum? Cuzco's flag sports red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet stripes.

It's also much older than the flag designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978. One of the cathedrals in Cuzco (where, unfortunately, photography is not allowed) contains a 17th-Century painting commemorating a devastating earthquake that hit Cuzco in 1650. Many Spanish colonial buildings had collapsed and burned, while ancient Inca buildings and walls withstood the 7.5-Richter scale quake.

To represent the community's determination to rebuild, the painting shows a female figure carrying a rainbow banner, evoking the rainbow Noah reportedly saw as God's promise never again to destroy the earth with a flood. 

Well, there was another strong earthquake there in 1950, but the 17th Century painter and the city fathers who chose the rainbow for their civic flag couldn't possibly have foreseen that.

Now, I did happen to see a guy, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 years old, apparently one of the groundskeepers at Ollantaytambo, an Inca temple site in the Urubamba / Sacred Valley of the Incas, wearing a weather-beaten cap with an up-to-date LGBTQ+ pride flag on it — the flag with the transgender and POC chevrons on the hoist side.

Was he "family"? Maybe. Maybe not. Don't know. Didn't ask.

Q Toon: NSFWH

This week's cartoon posed a thorny challenge: how could I draw a cartoon fit for publication about campaign merchandise that is decidedly Not Safe For the White House?

The cartoon was inspired by a story on NPR last week about NSFW t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other gear proudly sold and worn at Trump rallies. They've got the President of the United States as the direct object of one of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can't Say on TV, and extremely crude insults about the Vice President.

“What's different about Donald Trump is that his campaign is not particularly worried about this type of misogyny being attached to his campaign, because at least to date, it hasn't hurt him that much,” explained Kelly Dittmar, director of research for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Furthermore, she says, this kind of language is often particularly directed at women of color, like Kamala Harris. The word “ho'” on the shirt undeniably makes this about race as well as sex.

Meanwhile, Dittmar says, the Republican base is majority-men.

“And of course,” she said, “of the women who do support [Republicans], they are more likely to say that this is just, you know, a joke.”

That was true of voter Christena Kincaid, who talked to me just after she had bought one of these shirts at a rally in Freeland, Michigan.

“It's just a slang. That's all it is,” she said. “It's a goofy – it is a little over the top. I get it. But they're just words.”

A pastor with whom I work was part of a protest group advocating the Green New Deal outside Trump's rally in Racine this week, and when he came back to the church that afternoon, he told me that he had never seen so many raised middle fingers — even those of children.

Now, he wasn't in clerical garb; he was wearing a tee shirt with a pro-environment slogan, so it wasn't as if all those people telling him what he could do off were necessarily aware that he was a man of the cloth. But I doubt more than a couple of them would have been deterred from flipping the bird had he been out in the hot sun wearing a full alb, stole, and collar.

It's all part of a general coarsening of society, and the corrupt former president and his congressional minions have certainly been leading by example.

Yes, if you want to play the Whataboutism Game, I've seen the internet posts of Melania Trump from her lingerie (and less) modeling days, and of Lauren Boebert on a bundt cake. But I don't think they have been sold on tee shirts at Biden campaign appearances or flying from flagpoles on Biden supporters' front lawns. (And I'm pretty sure that the bundt crack was an anti-Hillary Clinton meme first.)

Is there anything that can be done to bring back civility and decorum to our public discourse? Probably not. If there's one lesson we should have learned from Trump's Access Hollywood Tape through the Stormy Daniels verdict, it's that Trump l'oeilists have absolutely no shame.

Well, there was a guy in that NPR story who conceded that maybe he'd reconsider wearing his "🍆🌀🔥👿 Biden" tee shirt around his grandchildren.

So maybe they have just a wee tiny little vestige of a hint of a distant, fading memory of shame. Hidden away in the deep, dusty recesses of their empty souls.

Q Toon: D.C. Rider

Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson reached across the aisle to cobble together a stop-gap budget deal to keep the U.S. government running until September. The must-pass deal will probably pass the Senate in time to keep the government from shutting down when the last stop-gap budget deal expires at the end of March.

Johnson needed Democratic help passing the bill, because — let's be frank here — when it comes to running a government, today's Republicans are utterly incompetent.

What else could you expect? Today's Republicans are fundamentally opposed to government, so why would they be good at governing? Most of them hate the government and want to drown it in a bathtub of red ink. They are in Washington to get on TV and own libs and get shares on social media, not to pass budgets and accomplish stuff. 

They can't even accomplish stuff they claim they want when they have it handed to them all put together and tied up with ribbons and bows, like this year's border security bill.

What few Republicans who are actually interested in getting the government to do things are leaving town, and not waiting for the next election. The latest departure is Wisconsin's Mike Gallagher, who has represented the northeast corner of the state since 2017. He has had a 100% vote rating from the National Right to Life Committee and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, National Association of Manufacturers, Americans for Prosperity, Freedom First Society, and Gun Owners of America.

His approval ratings drop to 92% from the National Rifle Association, 82% from the Club for Cancerous Growth, and 79% from the American Conservative Union; but still, he's no middle-of-the-road Republican-In-Name-Only wishy-washy Alexander Throttlebottom.

But like Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), Gallagher simply couldn't wait to get the hell out of Washington, and is leaving Congress before his term ends. Democrats, expecting next month to pick up the seat vacated when George Santos (R-Living Island) was expelled, would then be only two votes shy of the majority. In other words, if only one Republican were to break ranks and votes with all the Democrats, the result would be a tie, enough to defeat any amendment, bill, or impeachment.

The previous must-pass stop-gap budget deal only passed because Mike Johnson's predecessor begged for Democratic support, which is why Kevin McCarthy is no longer Speaker of the House. Now Johnson has decided he had no alternative but to follow McCarthy's lead. As if to prove the point that Republicans simply cannot govern, Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Through the Looking Glass) wants to call for a vote of no confidence in Johnson.

And start the tortuous process of electing a Speaker of the House all over again.