Toon: Mayhem Like Him

Here's a list of U.S. Senators and Congressional Representatives who still stand by Mr. Trump's scurrilous, fantastical electoral conspiracy "theories" even after the riot of Qultists at the Capitol that he and they actively encouraged:

Senate:

Ted Cruz (TX); Josh Hawley (MO); Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS); Cynthia Lummis (WY); John Kennedy (LA); Roger Marshall (KS); Rick Scott (FL); Tommy Tuberville (AL)

House:

Robert Aderholt (AL); Rick Allen (GA); Jodey Arrington (TX); ; Brian Babin (TX); ; Jim Baird (IN); Jim Banks (IN); Cliff Bentz (OR); Jack Bergman (MI); Stephanie Bice (OK); Andy Biggs (AZ); Dan Bishop (NC); Lauren Boebert (CO); Mike Bost (IL); Mo Brooks (AL); Ted Budd (NC); Tim Burchett (TN); Michael Burgess (TX); Ken Calvert (CA); Kat Cammack (FL); Jerry Carl (AL); Buddy Carter (GA); John Carter (TX); Madison Cawthorn (NC); Steve Chabot (OH); Ben Cline (VA); Michael Cloud (TX); Andrew Clyde (GA); Tom Cole (OK); Rick Crawford (AR); Warren Davidson (OH); Scott DesJarlais (TN); Mario Diaz-Balart (FL); Byron Donalds (FL); Jeff Duncan (SC); Neal Dunn (FL); Ron Estes (KS); Pat Fallon (TX); Michelle Fischbach (MN); Scott Fitzgerald (WI); Chuck Fleischmann (TN); Virginia Foxx (NC); Scott Franklin (FL); Russ Fulcher (ID); Matt Gaetz (FL); Mike Garcia (CA); Bob Gibbs (OH); Carlos Gimenez (FL); Louie Goober Gohmert (TX); Bob Good (VA); Lance Gooden (TX); Paul Gosar (AZ); Garret Graves (LA); Sam Graves (MO); Mark Green (TN); Marjorie Greene (GA); Morgan Griffith (VA); Michael Guest (MS); Jim Hagedorn (MN); Andy Harris (MD); Diana Harshbarger (TN); Vicky Hartzler (MO); Kevin Hern (OK); Yvette Herrell (NM); Jody Hice (GA); Clay Higgins (LA); Richard Hudson (NC); Darrell Issa (CA); Ronny Jackson (TX); Chris Jacobs (NY); Mike Johnson (LA); Bill Johnson (OH); Jim Jordan (OH); John Joyce (PA); Fred Keller (PA); Trent Kelly (MS); Mike Kelly (PA); David Kustoff (TN); Doug LaMalfa (CA); Doug Lamborn (CO); Jacob LaTurner (KS); Debbie Lesko (AZ); Billy Long (MO); Barry Loudermilk (GA); Frank Lucas (OK); Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO); Nicole Malliotakis (NY); Tracey Mann (KS); Brian Mast (FL); Kevin McCarthy (CA); Lisa McClain (MI); Daniel Meuser (PA); Mary Miller (IL); Carol Miller (WV); Alex Mooney (WV); Barry Moore (AL); Markwayne Mullin (OK); Gregory Murphy (NC); Troy Nehls (TX); Ralph Norman (SC); Devin Nunes (CA); Jay Obernolte (CA); Burgess Owens (UT); Steven Palazzo (MS); Gary Palmer (AL); Greg Pence (IN); Scott Perry (PA); August Pfluger (TX); Bill Posey (FL); Guy Reschenthaler (PA); Tom Rice (SC); Mike Rogers (AL); Hal Rogers (KY); John Rose (TN); Matt Rosendale (MT); David Rouzer (NC); John Rutherford (FL); Steve Scalise (LA); David Schweikert (AZ); Pete Sessions (TX); Jason Smith (MO); Adrian Smith (NE); Lloyd Smucker (PA); Elise Stefanik (NY); Greg Steube (FL); Chris Stewart (UT); Glenn Thompson (PA); Tom Tiffany (WI); William Timmons (SC); Jefferson Van Drew (NJ); Beth Van Duyne (TX); Tim Walberg (MI); Jackie Walorski (IN); Randy Weber (TX); Daniel Webster (FL); Roger Williams (TX); Joe Wilson (SC); Rob Wittman (VA); Ron Wright (TX); Lee Zeldin (NY)

 

Toon: Wisconsin Burning

 

Sunday afternoon, police responding to a domestic violence complaint in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times at point-blank range as he ignored their orders and started to get into the driver's seat of the SUV his children were in. Blake, 29, has been left paralyzed from the waist down, according to his family. Blake is Black; the police officers at the scene are White.

A video filmed from inside a house across the street doesn't show what, if any, danger Blake posed to the officers or the public. A police source tells me that Blake had a knife; but at this point, I have to treat that as one of the many rumors swirling about here. This was not Blake's first encounter with police, yet nobody has claimed that he had no right to have a knife on his person. Second Amendment, you know.

Officially, Kenosha Police Department has been extremely tight-lipped about the incident. They haven't even said what role, if any, Blake played in the initial complaint. Citizens at the scene claim he was breaking up a fight. The officers have not been publicly identified. Kenosha Police are not equipped with body cameras.

Kenosha officials declared a curfew Sunday night, but protests were perverted into violence anyway. Dozens of downtown businesses were vandalized, and half of the inventory of a used car lot was completely burned.

Monday evening, hoodlums from Milwaukee drove to Kenosha in a caravan of cars for the express purpose of looting and rioting. The rest of the vehicles at Car Source were burned. A business owner was beaten trying to defend his shop. At least three uptown businesses were still on fire well into Tuesday and completely destroyed. The smell of smoke filled the nearby church where I work.

Last night, rumors flew that wherever you were, the rioters were coming to your block. As law enforcement and the National Guard continued to concentrate on protecting government facilities, self-styled militias joined the rioters roaming the streets, and property owners took up arms. Three people were shot, two fatally.

(Update: 17-year-old white vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse from Antioch, Illinois has since been arrested and charged with murder in the first degree.)

We expect things to get worse before they get better. 

Pray for justice.

Work for peace.

Q Toon: Left Unsaid

Nearly all LGBTQ Pride festivals were canceled in June because of the COVID-19 pandemic; but in the wake of George Floyd's murder and subsequent protests, many local LGBTQ groups reorganized their pride parades into protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"Black Trans Lives Matter" protesters have figured prominently among the LGBTQ contingent. Many LGBTQ communities have been shaken by murders of transgender persons — 18 so far this year — and those victims are disproportionately Black.

Transgender and gender non-conforming people face a heightened risk of fatal violence, and Black transgender women are especially vulnerable because of a "a toxic mix of transphobia, racism and misogyny," according to the Human Rights Campaign. Most transgender people who are killed are victims of gun violence, according to an analysis by research and advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Black transgender persons who wind up in the criminal justice system face discrimination, harsh treatment and worse, often being incarcerated according to their dead gender or else put in solitary confinement. They complain of not having their complaints taken seriously, either when they report a crime, or when they are behind bars.

In spite of this, Black transgender persons have long been overlooked by the White LGBTQ community and shunned by Black justice advocates. But things seem to be different this year.

Take, for example, a recent protest march in Raleigh, North Carolina:

“In many ways, for the LGBTQ community, this is going back to our roots,” said Kendra Johnson, executive director of Equality North Carolina, which has pushed for decades for rights and protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. ...
Johnson sees it as only natural to join forces, because of the overlap of issues but also the layering of identities that lead to multiple forms of discrimination. Johnson is a Black lesbian and says she has experienced prejudice based on her race, her gender and her sexual orientation.
“We’ve been creating space where we try to look at how multiple oppressions affect our lives, and the LGBTQ community is a part of every community,” she said. “And we can’t do our work without also considering how race plays a role in the lives of people in our community.”
...
[Kerwin] Pittman, who helped organize the Raleigh Demands Justice coalition to help push for police reform, said he has learned recently that LGBTQ people of all races continue to be victims of police harassment.
“As a straight Black male, I wanted other straight Black males to see that it’s OK to support these individuals fighting against police brutality,” he said.
Pittman, who plans to attend UNC Greensboro in the fall, said he helped organize the first protest in Raleigh that followed Floyd’s killing. While his group is not affiliated with the national Black Lives Matter organization, he said he wanted to give everyone — Blacks, LGBTQ people and allies of all races and ethnicity — a chance to show they agree with the sentiment that Black lives matter.
“When it comes to brutality, and especially police brutality, we are all the same,” Pittman said. “If you are LGBTQ and injustice is being done to you, I’m going to be there to push as hard for you as if you are someone who is straight. Because at the end of the day, I’m a part of your community and you’re a part of mine.
“When we say Black lives matter, we’re not saying only straight Black lives matter. We’re saying Black lives matter.”

Toon: Said the Cat, We're All Mad Here

This week's cartoons comprise a triptych of sorts.

Black Lives Matter Protests in Madison turned violent last week after the arrest of a Black male who brought a bullhorn and a baseball bat into a downtown restaurant and allegedly demanded free food. This was not an arrest in which a Black man was killed; but force was used, and video was shared on social media and tempers flared.

The protesters engaged in quite a lot of destruction of property — and there was absolutely no incidence of boogaloo droogs this time — windows broken at the capitol, molotov cocktails thrown into buildings, and two statues were torn down.

Protesters removed two Capitol statues from their pedestals, WPR reported: “the Forward statue, located on the west entrance of the Capitol at the end of State Street, and a statue of Col. Hans Christian Heg, located on the east entrance of the Capitol at the King Street corner of the square…. Protesters took the Heg statue and dumped it in Lake Monona, almost a half-mile from where it was toppled. And the Forward statue “as of early Wednesday morning, was about a block from the state Capitol in the middle of the street.”

We don't have monuments to Confederate generals in this state. "Forward" was a replica of an 1895 statue by Jean Pond Miner Stoneman of a woman gesturing in the direction of the state motto. The original was purchased by women's suffrage organizations and "presented to the state of Wisconsin on behalf of the women's suffrage movement." The copper statue was replaced in 1996 with a bronze one and moved to a museum. The replica was a frequent rallying spot for protests during the Scott Walker administration.

Far from being a slave-owner, Hans Christian Heg was a leader of a citizen militia that worked to thwart slave catchers. When the Civil War broke out, he was appointed colonel in charge of the largely Scandinavian 15th Wisconsin infantry, seeing action in Kentucky and Tennessee. After pursuing a retreating Confederate unit to Chickamauga, Georgia in September, 1863, he was fatally wounded by a shot to the abdomen.

But perhaps more to the interests of the spokesperson for the protesters, Heg was State Prison Commissioner in 1859, pushing for vocational training rather than the punishment of prisoners. I think that's actually one of the demands of this week's protesters. Too bad they never bothered to learn the history of the statue before tearing it down, beheading it, and dumping it in Lake Monona.

The protesters' spokesperson apparently had little to say about the Heg statue, which was a gift from the Norwegian Society of America in 1925, around the time that Confederate statues were spreading across Dixie like kudzu. Instead, she focused her contempt on Ms. Forward:

“We’re not moving forward, we’re moving backwards,” said Ebony Anderson-Carter. “This (statue) doesn’t need to be here until we’re ready to move forward.”
Anderson-Carter says she and the other protesters want to see something done about racial injustice in the state, and speak with the state’s Black youth.
“The Capitol is where we solve problems, and nobody’s coming here to solve problems,” said Anderson-Carter.

Statues can be repaired and replaced. But not all of the damage Tuesday night was to inanimate objects. I'll have more on that on Thursday.

Q Toon: No More Mr. & Mr. Nice Gay

I have no idea what possesses so many people to wave assault weapons around at these protests against emergency health measures.

Well, yes, I do. These protests are organized by right-wing tycoons who would never dare protest in person, but can easily hire enough gun nuts, Proud Boys, neo-nazis, Lost Cause warriors, and Trump l'oeilists to fill a TV screen for them. The Dorr brothers from Iowa behind this sudden explosion of MAGA rage are Second Half Of The Second Amendment absolutists, and their minions don't care whether they're supposed to be protesting stay-at-home orders, health care reform, tax cuts, or cancellation of Marvel's Howard the Duck, as long as they get to wave their semi-automatic phallic symbols in public.

About which, some cartoonists had a conversation recently about this photoshopped image of protesters against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer:

One of our most rock-ribbed right-wingers objected to the meme on the grounds that the rainbow dildo on the left was an example of "liberals using gay icons and visuals (YOU'RE GAY!!) to insult their enemies completely oblivious to the fact you're not insulting these men. You're insulting gays."

His complaint prompted a barrage of "nuh-UH!" responses, but he does indeed have a point, even if it does serve as a distraction. Whoever made the original meme could have easily found another dildo in the skin-tone of his/her choice — as long as he/she were careful not to provoke our right-wing friend's anti-racist sensibilities.

Speaking of which, many (myself among them) have pointed out that Black Lives Matter protesters would likely be slaughtered in the streets if they insisted upon bringing assault rifles to their rallies, while right-wing whiteys can goose-step right into the Michigan statehouse and spew their respiratory droplets at the faces of the Thin Blue Line and still be home in time to watch Spicer & Co. on NewsMax.

Michigan protester yelling, he says, at the space between two Michigan state police.

But they're only law-abiding citizens who just want to exercise their constitutional rights, right? Nothing anyone else ought to worry about, right?

Right.  Yeah,  right.
____________________
P.S.: This post has been edited to remove a photo that included text which has proven to be false.

Q Toon: Pussy Hats Galore

Perhaps you wonder why I have someone at the Women's March on Washington protesting Donald Joffrey Trump hiding his tax returns, instead of some traditional women's issue.

Yes, it was a women's march we witnessed on all seven continents last Saturday, but marchers represented many concerns. After all, the Dakota pipeline, immigration and global climate change don't just affect men, you know. I know personally at least one protester who did in fact carry a sign raising the issue of Donald Joffrey Trump evading taxes.

(If only there were some form he could release to prove he is not a tax cheat!)

I had been toying around with the sentiment expressed on this woman's protest sign, trying to come up with a setting in which to present it, when on Sunday morning, KellyAnne Conway gave me what I thought would make the perfect capper to it.

There's so much lag time between Sunday and Thursday! What was once a clever idea has turned into a cliché. Every cartoonist published cartoons with the administration's new term for its baldfaced lies on Monday morning; the internet memes were already flooding social media feeds before the NFL conference championship kickoffs.

(On the other hand, I remarked on "alternate realities" here over a month ago.)

It shouldn't be long until I find some obscure LGBT issue to draw about all to myself. When I do, hands off my idea, everybody else!

This Week's Sneak Peek

Video blogger Jackson Pearce last week proposed a counter-protest to Mikey Huckabee's Take a Boy Scout to Chick-Fil-A Day on Wednesday:

“There’s this bible passage, Proverbs 25:21 ‘If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.’ So if you are not a fan of Chick-Fil-A’s stand on hate, on August 1, I suggest you go there and ask for a large water. If they say you need to order something, cite Proverbs 25:21. I mean technically if they are operating on biblical principals they should give you an entire combo meal if your stomach growls but lets keep it simple. Just ask for a large water and nothing else. If they give it to you, you just got a few pennies of their profit and less money goes to their hate foundations. And if they don’t…”

Pity Party

After several months of gun-totin' and callin' the president a Socialist Nazi and threatenin' secession, the Tea Party movement has noticed that it has an image problem. Accordingly, they have decided that this is the media's fault.

Strangely enough, the people in government whom they've spit on and portrayed as the Joker and shouted down at town hall meetings just aren't listening to them. (That last summer the administration wasted trying to woo Republican votes for health care reform notwithstanding.) This has never happened before.

Or, to put it another way: how's that nopey angry thing working out for ya?