Q Toon: Nutcracker Suite

 

Fox Noise prime time talking head Jesse Watters was going off on petty shit that ticks him off the other day — his primary job at the news channel, apparently — fixing his pique upon holiday décor diversity.

Specifically, Watters is annoyed that Target stores offer LGBTQ+ Pride nutcrackers for sale. (Their dark-skinned Santas in wheelchairs also bug him.) 

Perhaps still smarting from the outrage ginned up by the snowflakes at Fox against its Pride merchandise displays last spring, Target offers the gay nutcracker only on line, not in their brick-and-mortar locations. Well, perhaps if Target has an outlet in the Castro or on Christopher Street, you might find one on the shelf there. Or locked away in a cabinet behind the jewelry and pain medications. I dunno.

The important thing, however, is that these Fox buddies must keep stoking this supposed "war on Christmas" to keep their audience engaged and enraged. Answering the call to arms, all the other right-wing culture warriors have joined the fight.

For its report on the LGBTQ+ Pride nutcracker, Catholic News Agency, instead of finding a picture of an actual nutcracker from Target's website, dug up this much more titillating image from Shutterstock:

A more accurate description of the product is in paragraph four, but no doubt most of CNA's readers think Leather Boi is what greets Christmas shoppers as soon as they walk in the doors of their local Target with little Patrick Xavier and Mary Elizabeth.

Our home has several wooden nutcracker dolls that we bring out every December: traditional, drummer, swordsman, king, wine steward, Packer fan, Santa, and on and on. Same basic woodwork, different paint job, maybe each its own prop.

No matter that the actual outfit LGBTQ+  Pride nutcracker wears is the same cut as all the others, just with rainbow colored paint and pinkish hair. It's the image from Shutterstock that will lodge in CNA's readers' heads, even if they did not skip over paragraph four in search of the address to complain to.

Just for that, next year’s nutcracker oughta be in drag.

Lambada Rising

Congresscretin Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was on Fox's Sunday Talking Points program this week. She was in high dudgeon, as all her fellow Requblicans are, that President Joe Biden had the temerity at a Democratic Party fundraiser to criticize the "semi-fascists" who have dominated the Requblican Party under Donald Trump, plotted to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, and attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government and hang the Vice President. An ideology that idolizes Hungary's dictator Viktor Orban. And as Requblican legislatures ban ideas they don't like and, by the way, have decided that if they don't like the election outcome of the people's votes, the Requblican legislatures can just declare Requblican candidates the winners no matter what.

Somehow, Boebert's word salad diatribe about Biden's remark included lambasting his student loan forgiveness program on the grounds that it will facilitate collegiate scholars majoring in "Lesbian Dance Theory."

It's a non sequitur, of course. But it's not as if Boebert can afford to disavow semi-fascism and offend her semi-fascist base.

To the best of my knowledge, no college, not even Barnard or Berkeley, offers a degree in Lesbian Dance Theory. I must note, however, that while I was an undergrad, my alma mater offered a "paracollege" program which allowed its students to fashion their own majors; so I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that someone between 1969 and 2000 developed a Lesbian Dance Theory major.

Although that really sounds more like a Ph.D. thesis to me, and St. Olaf offers only Bachelors degrees.

Now, originally, Boebert (who did in fact get her G.E.D. the same year she won election to Congress) said that hard-working Americans were being robbed so that "Karen's daughter" could get a B.A. in L.D.T. I'm not sure why Boebert chose to drag "Karens" into this.

"911? Some Black people are studying Lesbian Dance Theory in the park!"

I'm pretty sure that their demographic is solidly Requblican.

Q Toon: Definition of Character

Yes, folks: even the dictionary is suspect in Florida schools.

A school district in Florida could not accept a donation of dictionaries amid a new state law aimed at combating "wokeness" in classrooms.

The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club was prepared to give its annual donation of dictionaries to the Sarasota County Schools ahead of the new school year. But the district stopped all donations and purchases of books for school libraries until at least next year.

This came after HB 1467 took effect in July. The law requires school districts to have all reading and instructional materials reviewed by a district employee with a "valid educational media specialist certificate." ...

The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that they have donated about 300 dictionaries a year. After donating a total of 4,000 dictionaries to date, this is the first time they were denied.

I'm sure that Gubbner DeSantis will call this an overreaction; but since this anti-wokeness purge is an overreaction in the first place, surely an abundance of caution is called for.

After all, Florida and Texas have rejected math textbooks for not adhering to right-wing orthodoxy. If Johnny has seven apples and gives Susie two, that sounds too much like socialism.

Meanwhile, North Carolina's ignoramus Lieutenant Governor thinks that teaching history and science in elementary schools is dangerous, so they're verboten, too. 

(Don't even let's get started on foreign language education...)

And in Oklahoma, an English teacher was disciplined for displaying a QR code for the Brooklyn Library to their class – not assigning any subversive literature or putting actual books on the shelf, just letting their class know how to find books for themselves. Initial reports said they were fired, although the school district later said it was expecting them to return to class the next day pending a review of the incident. Instead, they quit.

For all the right-wing blather about leftist thought police demanding "political correctness" and coddling liberal snowflakes, it turns out that it's those right-wing thought police imposing their own political correctness by force of law.

Who's the snowflakes now?

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Although my original intention had always been to draw the stars of this week's cartoon in puritan outfits, I toyed with the idea of continuing a reference from a couple weeks ago by drawing Ron DeSantis in Spanish Inquisition garb.

I rejected that idea for two reasons. First, I didn't think that a cardinal's hat and cassock would be recognizable in grayscale. There is only one newspaper that I know of that still prints my cartoons that way, but it's worth taking it into account.

Second, it would mean having to clothe the third speaker in the uniform of a third rigidly intolerant stereotype. The most obvious would be an Iranian mullah or Afghan Taliban; but as Patrick Chappatte and others have found, some people interpret such depictions as a slam against Islam as a whole.

As a gay man and a feminist, I find antigay, misogynist Islamic fundamentalism reprehensible. And certainly, the targets of my cartoon would be more annoyed by being compared to the Taliban than to the Pilgrims. Yet anti-Asian hate is a real thing, and one does have to take care not to feed into that. 

Editorial cartooning often involves drawing how This is like That, even though This and That are completely separate things. In the end, however, I decided that there was no need to draw our home-grown christofascisti as non-Christians. I may well revisit the DeSantis Inquisition someday. But for now, I think I'll stick to drawing imams and the Taliban when I'm actually criticizing imams and the Taliban.

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Oh, by the way, dear reader, since you've read this far, I won't make you look it up:

Q Toon: Driven to Distruction

 

So I've finally gotten a cartoon drawn about the arrest almost two weeks ago of the 31 white heterosexuosupremacists in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. With them in their van were plans to attack the LGBTQ+ Pride event underway there that weekend.

Eric Ward, executive director of the Western States Center, a community organizing group that advocates for inclusivity and democratic principles, said [the planned attack was] a far cry from an isolated incident.

“People should be paying attention to these arrests far beyond Coeur d’Alene,” Ward said via email. “Idaho is a bellwether state for where the rest of the country may be headed in terms of how anti-democracy groups try to build power and how effectively they’re blunted.” He noted that in 2020, Idaho was among the first states to “turn anti-transgender attacks into law” by banning trans women and girls from school sports and that the local Republican Party has supported candidates for the library board who ran on pulling LGBTQ books from shelves.

Republican politicians have been whipping up these amateur fascists with a constant drumbeat of anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant, racist, pro-violence rhetoric and legislation. Their ranting seems especially heated this year, but it has been going on for decades now, amplified by their cheerleaders and coaches at Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and social media echo chambers.

Perhaps I should have identified the politicians in the lower panel of this cartoon. I've drawn about some of them before; Idaho Governor Brad Little is a newcomer here, however. 

The Idaho House passed legislation in March that would criminalize gender-affirming medical treatment for minors, tacking it onto existing laws banning female genital mutilation. The state Senate refused to take up the bill, thus saving Gov. Little from having to sign or veto it.

As for the rest of the motley crew in my cartoon, we've already discussed Texas Governor Greg Abbott's executive order classifying transgender therapy as child abuse, the "Don't Say Gay" law signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Congresstroll Lauren Boebert's malice against colleagues' transgender children, Ohio's pending bill, and Reprehensible Marjorie Taylor-Greene's anti-LGBTQ+ rantings and ravings. I just haven't gotten around to those same policies in Alabama, Arizona, and a host of other GQP-run states. 

That, along with their racist appeals to get "Critical Race Theory" — an academic topic on the level of multivariate calculus and quantum physics — out of public elementary schools is exactly what drives neoNazis like these "Patriot Front" lunatics to think they must save the White Cis Male Race from replacement by colored transgender wimminfolk.

Heck, I certainly understand the appeal of the LGBTQ+ experience.

Is it that attractive to everyone? Probably not.

But you can't tell that to the idiots in the U-Haul. They're listening to someone else.

[J]ust as police must contend with the growth of extremist groups, the public must pay attention to the elected officials and personalities in the mainstream who ignite the talking points that ultimately animate far-right groups.

When they see a mainstream politician pick up on something they agree with, they see that as validation,” [Kurt Braddock, a professor at American University] said of false claims some Republican lawmakers have made about trans people being “groomers” and “pedophiles.” “Just like the ‘great replacement theory,’ it trickles down to the far-right elements and they run with it.”

Q Toon: Groomer Has It

I finally got around this week to commending Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak) for rising to the defense of LGBTQ+ youth last month. Then somebody leaked Samuel Alito's screed draft opinion rejecting women's reproductive rights, and I quickly churned out a cartoon in response to that, putting this one again on the back burner.

Well, here it is at long last. 

McMorrow's floor speech, recounted in her Twitter thread shortly afterward, came in response to a fundraising email from fellow State Senator Lana Theis (R-Brighton) in which Theis accused McMorrow of "grooming and sexualizing children" for the evil LGBTQ conspiracy.

It might have been a simple thing to draw Sen. Theis as the other person in my cartoon, but this "groomer" label issue is so much bigger than one obscure Republican from Brighton, Michigan. The label has been embraced and bandied about by the entire fascist wing of the Republican party and their propagandists in mass and social media.

Daily Cartoonist columnist Mike Peterson came up with the observation that "groomer" is the right-wingers' new "n―― lover." I have to agree; and it would make for a powerful cartoon if there were any way to make the point without actually using that word.

Instead, I settled on picking out a few quotations from Sen. McMorrow's speech, and creating a foil as the opposition's Picture of Dorian Gray. I regret having to leave out so much of her speech, such as her describing herself as a "straight, White, Christian, suburban mom," instilled by her mother with a belief that faith is "about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we could to be of service to others, especially people who were marginalized, targeted, who had less... often unfairly."

It ain't easy coming up with a cartoon saying "Good job!" in any original way; Michigan cartoonist John Auchter settled for quoting the last sentence of her speech, adding himself in the corner offering only, "What more needs to be said?"

What more, indeed.

Q Toon: He/Him/Hissy Fit

Newly elected Republican darling Glenn Youngkin hasn't even been sworn in as Governor of Virginia yet, and already the Trumpist-CrazyAss wing of the party is pissed at him.

To begin with, Youngkin is promising not to overrule local COVID-19 protective measures. Republicans who believe in small government except when they are in charge of it are upset that he won't dictate that local municipalities must allow COVID-19 to spread like wildfire.

They also have their panties in a wad over Joshua Marin-Mora, a 2021 Georgetown University graduate whom Youngkin brought over from his campaign staff to work under his Press Secretary. It seems that young Mr. Marin-Mora is openly  LGBTQ+ and openly Latinx, and — horrors! — lists "he/him" as his preferred pronouns in his Twitter bio.

“So, Youngkin chose a guy with pronouns in his bio to do his comms who also served on the Georgetown Latinx Leadership Forum and supports virtually everything Youngkin's voters voted against,” blared Pedro L. Gonzalez, a writer for the influential conservative think tank Claremont Institute, in a series of tweets. When other Twitter users unearthed pictures of Marin-Mora wearing LGBTQ Pride clothing, Gonzalez snarled, “The new GOP is actually worse than the old GOP.”

The lengthy thread attacking Marin-Mora was elevated by the likes of Pizzagate conspiracy [fabulist] Jack Posobiec and far-right activist Lauren Witzke.

Not every conservative shares the umbrage of the right-wing wackosphere. Some of them can actually conceive of the possibility that attracting LGBTQ+ Latinxes might help Republicans hold onto Arizona or Texas someday. (I can hear the campaign rally music already: "All My Latinxes Live In Texas.")

I have no doubt that Gonzalez, Posibiec, Witzke and their ilk will soon forget all about the underlings in Youngkin's press office anyway. Before you know it, they'll be back attacking Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Larry Hogan, and whatever other counterrevolutionary criminals they root out of  the Republican ranks.

Q Toon: Hungary and Thirst for Rightwingness

This is one of those weeks when I wish I were one of those cartoonists who didn't care whether the subject of my cartoon bore the slightest resemblance to my caricature of them.

 

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is an ultra-right-wing politician who came to power in 2010 whipping up fear and anger against Muslim refugees fleeing civil wars in Syria, Sudan, Libya and Afghanistan. His administration has been marked by an assault on press freedoms and dissent, and by unchecked kleptocracy.

Part and parcel of this right-wing package has been enforcement of a conservative brand of Christian "traditional values," primarily by attacking LGBTQ+ rights in every aspect of Hungarian life. The latest move has been a law prohibiting any positive mention of LGBTQ+ orientation or persons in the nation's education system.

Faced with outrage from Western members of the European Union, Orbán has proposed a national referendum to prove that his criminalization of LGBTQ+ discussion in schools enjoys popular support. Arriving at a meeting of his fellow EU leaders last month, Orbán claimed that there was nothing at all antigay about his antigay law.

He even portrayed himself as an LGBTQ+ rights hero:

"I am a fighter for their rights. I am a freedom fighter in the communist regime. Homosexuality was punished and I fought for their freedom and their rights. So I am defending the rights of the homosexual guys, but this law is not about that."

His anticommunist activities in 1989 notwithstanding, in the last two years, his agenda to defend the rights of the homosexual guys has involved rescinding recognition of transgender persons, and censoring LGBTQ+-positive content from television and film.

Orbán last appeared in this blog last December, when Hungarian representative to the European Union Parliament, József Szájer, a founder of Orbán's Fidesz Party, was caught at a gay sex party in Brussels that had too many participants according to Belgian COVID-19 restrictions then in effect. Orbán quickly accepted Szájer's resignation, telling the Hungarian press that "What our fellow member József Szájer has done does not fit into the values of our political community."

I doubt that Orbán's concern for the values of his political community was that there had been too many homosexual guys in that apartment.

Q Toon: The Hungary Games

You may have seen news reports about József Szájer, 59, Hungary's representative to the European Union Parliament in Brussels, getting himself arrested after police broke up a 25-man sex party above a gay bar. It wasn't the orgy per se that broke the law; the problem was that the number of men gathered exceeded COVID-19 restrictions.

I have no idea how many guys one is allowed to have at an orgy in Brussels. I suppose that's one of the things one is expected to check before traveling abroad.

The gay sex stuff is somewhat more at issue for Szájer back home in Budapest, however. Szajer is one of the founders of the ruling Fidesz Party, originally a liberal anti-communist organization, but which has veered hard to the right under the leadership of Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister since 2010. Criminalization of homosexuality is prominent among Orbán's policies. 

Szájer has resigned from the EU Parliament and from Fidesz. He doesn't deny being at the orgy, but does say that the ecstasy police found on him didn't belong to him. Expect him to revise and extend his remarks in order to join a long line of disgraced preachers and politicians from Ted Haggard to Andrew Gillum blaming drugs for their walk on the wild side.

Orbán wasted no time accepting Szájer's resignation, telling Magyar Nemzet, "What our fellow member József Szájer has done does not fit into the values of our political community. We will not forget and refuse his thirty years of work, but his actions are unacceptable and indefensible."

In addition to homophobia, Orbán has served up a right-wing stew of anti-immigrant legislation, obsessing over racial purity, outlawing homeless persons, stifling the press, and stacking the courts with compliant lackeys. Some of this should sound familiar to you even if you don't follow Hungarian politics.

Orbán's election in 2010 heralded a rising tide of fascism around the globe: Duda in Poland, Duterte in the Philippines, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Trump in the U.S., and the chronic threat of Le Penisme in France.

(Le Penisme refers to the right-wing politics of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Le Pen. Don't be a dick.)

Q Toon: Exemption Card

 

So here's the deal with those phony "Face Mask Exemption Cards" wielded by right-wing snowflakes who feel entitled to ignore the fact that there's a goddamn pandemic going on.

To begin with, they have no weight under U.S. law. They cite the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1989 (ADA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), and in at least one version, the Unruh Civial [sic] Rights Act. The card threatens that the bearer will report violations to the "Freedom to Breathe Agency," possibly resulting in a fine of $75,000 to $150,000. 

Said agency has nothing to do with federal, state, or local government. The FTBA is just another one of those Tea Party, Proud Boys, Sinclair Broadcasting, or Rush Limbaugh's Dittohead clubs with all the legal authority of a Facebook group. The Justice Department published a notice in June regarding a version of the card displaying the Department of Justice official seal:

U.S. Attorney [Matthew G.T.] Martin urges the public not to rely on the information contained in these postings and flyers and to visit http://www.ADA.gov for official information about the Americans with Disabilities Act. For more information and technical assistance about the ADA, please contact the ADA Information Line at 800-514-0301 (voice) and 800-514-0383 (TTY).

There is, one assumes, some tiny fraction of the population who might actually have some physical limitation that prevents wearing a face mask. Having no ears, for example. Or having an allergy to all manner of cloth, which must make it difficult to get dressed in the morning. (There is also mast cell activation syndrome, but check out what this woman with MCAS is wearing.)

If you are an earless victim of MCAS, I don't mean to make your life more difficult than it already is. You might want to invest in a plastic face shield or something. As for the rest of you MAGA snowflakes, there's a good chance that this country would be on its way to getting back to normal if you'd mask up... or put a sock in it.

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.

Toon: Coronaspiracy

Conservative media are at it again, and their captivated audience is eating it up.

Everything is fine.
Rush Limbaugh, who was recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his audience of millions that the [COVID-19] virus is really just the “common cold.” He claimed that it was being overhyped by the director of the National Center of Immunization—who just happens to be the sister of former acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a bad guy in the world of conservative infotainment, thanks to his role in the Mueller investigation—to damage the president.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed the fear about a potential pandemic as “a new pathway for hitting President Trump,” and speculated that it had been engineered by China as payback for the president’s trade war.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity said on Thursday that there was little to be afraid of—no Americans had died, he noted, days before they inevitably did—and that the virus was simply the latest desperate anti-Trump ploy from Democrats. Having struck out on impeachment, they were now “sadly politicizing and weaponizing an infectious disease as their next effort to bludgeon President Trump.”
It is the same defense that Trump’s supporters have trotted out for the past four years: Obfuscate the truth, laud the president, blame the Democrats.

This denialism is mother's milk to Donald Berzelius Trump, who tweeted, “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible."

It is true that the markets have been severely shaken by having one of the world's most important suppliers and consumers virtually shut down, and by discovering a turd in the vacation travel industry punch bowl.

Oh, and there is the matter of thousands of deaths and the prospect of there not being a cure for over a year, too. But the stock market doesn't usually have a problem with matters of mortality and morbidity.

But contagion is highly unpredictable — who foresaw Italy and Iran becoming such hot spots? — and if there's anything stock markets hate, it's unpredictability.

That unpredictability is what makes the denialism of Limbaugh, Ingraham, Hannity and their ilk so dangerous. We've seen the danger in the form of the anti-vaxxers who put not only their own children at risk but also any children who have the misfortune to be around them. COVID-19 appears not to pose a lethal threat to the young and hardy at this point, but we know that it has a latency period of several days and is communicable before symptoms are evident.

None of those nursing home residents in Kirkland, Washington had been to China, Iran, or Italy lately, you know.

Well, I'm not a doctor, and I don't even play one on TV, so I'll leave you with this link to the Center for Disease Control if you want to keep up with more authoritative information than your humble ink-slinger can provide.

A Brazilian Reasons

Last week, Brazil elected a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has been called the Brazilian Trump.

Like Trump, Bolsonaro was dismissed as a fascist fringe candidate with no real chance of getting elected when he first declared his candidacy. During his 30-year career in politics, he has praised Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship and advocated the use of torture and murder against dissidents. He advocates loosening gun controls as the answer to Brazil's shockingly high murder rate (175 per day in 2017).

At issue in my cartoon this week is a 2011 interview Bolsonaro gave to Playboy magazine in which he said,

“I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son. I won’t be a hypocrite: I prefer a son to die in an accident than show up with a mustachioed guy. He’d be dead to me anyway.”

On an appearance with Bolsonaro on Brazilian television, Preta Gil, daughter of Gilberto Gil, asked Bolsonaro how he'd feel if one of his sons fell in love with a black woman, and he snapped that "my sons were brought up very well and they haven't lived in environments such as is, unfortunately, yours." He later claimed that he had misheard the question as having suggested that his son fall in love with a black man.

Bolsonaro's election has to be seen as part of a trend favoring fascists here in the U.S. as well as in the Philippines, Italy, Hungary and Poland. In Bolsonaro's case, he benefited from public weariness with corruption allegations against the previous administration, coupled with the hangover that has followed the sugar rush of some phenomenal economic growth in the first half of this decade.

But as experience has shown throughout history, fascists may make the trains run on time, but there is absolutely nothing mutually exclusive about fascism and corruption.

Q Toon: One Man In His Time

We now return you to our regular programming.

We don't have Showtime at our house, so I haven't seen Mr. Cohen's latest TV show; I've only read reports of how the shapeshifting chameleon has been able to con several right-wing and alt-right-wing politicians into saying and performing things that will be the wet dreams of the opposition research for their opponents in the next election.

Mr. Cohen's characters are way over the top, but are camouflaged among a cast of real-life characters who are way over the top themselves. From our Corrupt President to his venal minions, and the hordes of adoring, frenzied fans willing to accept any crackpot conspiracy theory as long as there isn't a whiff of truth in it, it's easy to see how Cohen's outrageous characters blend in virtually undetectably.

But as long as we're going to hell in a handbasket of deplorables, we might as well enjoy the ride.

You'll never guess whom Waldo is disguised as.

Milos to Go Before I Sleep

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been rounding up undocumented immigrants who have run afoul of the law lately. In a departure from previous policy, the immigrants do not even need to have been proved guilty of any crime; the mere accusation of an offense, even as trivial as a parking ticket, can now lead to being shipped off to Mexico.

Even if that's not where they came from.

I had been resisting drawing another cartoon about this Milo Yiannopoulos creature. He's an import from Britain who made a splash on this side of the pond as Breitbart News's ubergay senior provocateur against feminism, Islam, LGBT rights and Leslie Jones. He provoked a riot at Berkeley, mocked from on stage a transgender graduate at UW-Milwaukee, and got himself banned from Twitter.

Then he got caught seeming to be okay with sexual relationships between adults and 13-year-old boys. Even Breitbart News has to maintain some minimal standards.

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I wasn't sure readers would recognize the acronym "ICE," which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Homeland Security Department. Many people I work with are well acquainted with ICE, but it may be unfamiliar to people who don't have to deal with it.

In the previous century, we had "INS," Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the Department of Justice; but after 9/11, the focus was less on "service" or "justice" than "enforcement." The INS was split into three new entities during the George W. Bush administration: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with all the new regulations required by creating three agencies out of one.

No existing regulations were removed to make way for them, either.

WisToon: Hearing No Objection

After patiently ignoring hours of testimony against Right to Work for Less, Wisconsin's Republicans passed their union-busting bill in extraordinary session on a party line vote; and Darth Snotwalker quickly signed the bill he had publicly dismissed as "a distraction" but had privately described years ago as just one more "step" in his "divide and conquer" model of governance.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington, at left in the cartoon) told "Up Front with Mike Gousha" that he had only received a handful of messages from constituents against the proposed bill. He made no mention whether he had received more than a handful of messages from constituents in favor of it.

While RTWFL has been a priority for right-wingers at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce group, there has been no push for it from individual local chambers of commerce, as found by the Wisconsin Business Alliance's Lori Compas:

I wanted to learn the answer to this question: Is WMC really representing Wisconsin’s broad and diverse business community when it claims that businesses want legislators to enact “right to work” laws?

The answer was astonishing: I could not find a single Chamber in the districts of [Republican] senators Fitzgerald, Cowles, Olsen, Moulton, Petrowski, Nass, Lasee, or Harsdorf that supports “right to work.”

In fact, I heard statements like these again and again: “We’re not taking a position on that.” “We don’t take a stand on political issues.” “We only advocate for political issues when there’s a strong consensus among our members — and we don’t have consensus on this.”

A Chamber official in Senator [Scott] Fitzgerald’s [(R-Juneau), above right in my cartoon] district said, “We won’t take a stand on that one way or another. We’re part of WMC because we get a lot of resources from them, like mentoring and executive training and other benefits, but that doesn’t mean we support their legislative agenda.”

Another Chamber official, this time in Senator Lasee’s district, said, “Everyone I have talked to says that it is an issue that should be left between employers and their employees. I haven’t found anyone who says we need the government to tell us how to run our business.”

Me again: I've got to say, that is an astonishingly tepid response from a demographic that tends to skew Republican to a Republican bill guaranteed to pass a Republican legislature and be signed by a Republican governor.

It will take decades before the full effect of the push by Darth Snotwalker and his Madison Minions to depress wages, decimate benefits, and bring a third-world standard of living to the state of Wisconsin. To save their own jobs, Republicans have already begun their assault on the right to vote.  Our only hope is that Walker, notorious for not finishing what he starts, up and quits his current job in favor of heading some right-wing think tank somewhere -- rather than that other job he's got his eyes on.

Q Toon for Chick-Fil-A Day

Obsessive readers of this feature may recognize the lady on the left from last month's cartoon about the One Million Moms' boycott of J.C. Penney over the inclusion in its Mothers' and Fathers' Day catalog of same-sex parents. She's the only one in the earlier cartoon who didn't have any dialogue, and she felt it was her turn to speak out this week.

I include her also because one of the arguments coming from Chick-Fil-A's apologists is that any sort of protest against Chick-Fil-A because its COO Dan Cathy is vocally against marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples is somehow a violation of his right to free speech. We who disagree with Mr. Cathy have the right of free speech, too -- as do J.C. Penney, Jeff Bezos, Home Depot, et al.

And by the way, before all the comic nerds get on my case, I'm fully aware that Green Lantern is not the only gay comic book character out there. I just didn't have room to include Marvel and Archie comics in that panel. My apologies to Northstar fans.

Q Toon: Guns Don't Protect People

Mr. Jackson, News Director for the American Family Association, actually blames the Aurora, Colorado shootings on more than teh gays.

Jackson: I have to think that all of this, whether it’s the Hollywood movies, whether it’s what we see on the internets [sic], whether it’s liberal bias in the media, whether it’s our politicians changing public policy, I think all of those somehow have fit together—and I have to say also churches who are leaving the authority of Scripture and losing their fear of God—all of those things have seem to have come together to give us these kinds of incidents.

Jackson's discussion on "AFA Today," with co-host Teddy James continued:

Jackson: We’ve been dealing Teddy and I know the AFA Journal has been dealing with denominations that no longer believe in the God of the Bible, they no longer believe that Jesus is the only way of salvation, they teach that God is OK with homosexuality, this is just increasing more and more. It is mankind shaking its fist at the authority of God.

James: And God will not be silent when he’s mocked, and we need to remember that.

Jackson: We are seeing his judgment. You know, some people talk about ‘God’s judgment must be just around the corner,’ we are seeing it.

Guns don't kill people.

God kills people.

QToon: Romney's Gay Ex-Spokesman

You might have missed the resignation of Mitt Romney foreign policy spokesman Ric Grenell last week. Grenell, who had served at the U.N. under John Bolton as the Bush administration's Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy, was named as the Romney campaign's foreign policy spokesman at the end of April. His appointment was greeted with howls of protest from the Religiositous Right because he is openly gay; his partner of nine years is Matthew Lashey, a media and entertainment company executive.

The American Family Association's Bryan Fischer attacked Romney for associating with a "sex-obsessed homosexual." Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins chimed in as well, and Matthew Franck mused in the National Review that Grenell's commitment to same-sex marriage would trump his loyalty to the Republican party: “Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?”

With the Romney campaign cowering in the corner, and telling Grenell to keep quiet, Grenell withdrew on May 1.

Mention has been made in the press of dozens of misogynistic tweets Grenell had made, and quickly scrubbed after the Romney campaign had named him spokesman, but it is generally agreed that they played no role in his resignation. I can only assume they would only have forced his resignation if he were a Democrat.

Q Toon: Boycotting the Gay Away

"One Million Moms" has decided to boycott J.C. Penney because they've signed Ellen deGeneres on as their advertising pitchperson:

“Funny that JC Penney thinks hiring an open homosexual spokesperson will help their business when most of their customers are traditional families. More sales will be lost than gained unless they replace their spokesperson quickly. Unless JC Penney decides to be neutral in the culture war then their brand transformation will be unsuccessful.” -- OMM statement

The American Family Association quickly joined OMM in their boycott effort:

"Does it offend you? Are you offended by this or are you kind of just ‘ho hum, so be it’? There comes a time when there needs to be a holy rejection of corruption that is literally putrefying our families. It’s time, long overdue, and too many people are sitting back and just letting Sodom and Gomorrah come walking in the door.
…
"Does it offend you, when you hear what retailers now—putting icons before you and your kids who are known, and according to some, flaming homosexuals?"

Meanwhile, right wing organizations are also trying to boycott Starbucks because the coffee vendor has come out in support the current bill to legalize marriage equality for same-sex couples in the state of Washington. So have Google and Microsoft; can One Million Moms chuck their PCs and learn to Bing on their Apples? Wait a minute -- Bing is Microsoft! Oh, when oh when will Rupert Murdoch buy up a search engine that will be "fair and balanced" and "neutral in the culture war" as conservatives see it?

And are the wingnuts still boycotting Ford?

Dancing with the Stars 'toon

Religious conservatives have found a new frenzy to get into with the announcement that Chaz Bono will be on this fall's Dancing With the Stars. Chaz is famous for having been the goldilocked baby daughter of Sonny and Cher, who would bring her out at the end of their 1970's TV show to be cute while they sang "I Got You, Babe."

At 42, Chaz is now Cher's son, which deeply upsets the moral monopoly in America. They are very concerned with the question of which lavatory people go to the bathroom in, and their Dancing With the Stars experience will be totally ruined because they can't help but spend the entire show picturing Chaz taking a dump.
Tony Perkins at the Family Research Council is urging his minions to boycott the show:

"Email ABC Network and let them know that we will not tolerate these subjects being forced into our homes. DWTS airs 8/7 central when children are awake and Christian families will not enhance the ratings by watching the show when it returns September 19 unless this issue is taken care of and these cast members are replaced."

"One Million Moms" whine "This is completely unacceptable, and Christians should not watch the show. No excuses." Fox News Asshat Dr. Keith Ablow advises the nation not to let children watch any DWTS episodes in which Chaz appears, adding, "Chaz Bono should not be applauded for asserting she is a man (and goes about trying to look like one) any more than a woman who believes she will be happier without arms, has them removed and then continues to assert that she was right all along—her self-concept was that of a double amputee." (I'm sure that Ablow is similarly against facelifts, tummy tucks, and hair plugs.)

I haven't been watching DWTS, but now I suppose I'll have to just to offset one of those transphobic Moms... even though I'm not a Nielsen Family, and it won't make a difference to the show's ratings.
Meanwhile, if you're one of those Million Moms, and Dancing With the Stars has been part of your family's weekly routine all these years, and you're petrified of having to explain to your children how Chaz used to be Chastity, I have a suggestion. Instead of boycotting Dancing With the Stars, it might be easier to keep your children from watching 40-year-old reruns of Sonny and Cher.