Q Toon: Make America Date Again

Turns out gay MAGAs can be incels, too.

Somebody in the Facebook group "Conservative Gay Singles" made a snarky post threatening a class action suit against "the Dems" because hook-ups refuse to sleep with him once they find out his MAGA proclivities. 

The post went viral on Threads (with the original poster's identity redacted), earning howls of derisive chatter from the very sort of people who have been swiping left on the guy's Grindr profile.

Now, I thought Republicans were enthusiastically in favor of discrimination based on deeply held beliefs (especially against gays), which might be the Achilles Heel of that Conservative Gay Single's class action suit. 

Mr. Conservative Gay Single wasn't content to limit his proposed class action suit against non-MAGA gays. He invited the rest of the CGS group to join him in suing family members and former friends who have shunned them over political differences. 

Gee, the poor guys can't get laid, their friends have ghosted them, and their families won't talk to them? What could be the problem?

Oh, yeah, must be the Democrats. I almost forgot.

Good thing those guys are so good at "owning" us libs. Maybe they ought to learn how to be happy with that.

Q Toon: It's About Time

Say what you will about Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA). Republicans came to Congress with a majority pledging openness and transparency, and Johnson has been very open and transparent about not having taken the time to find out what's going on in the country.

You can ask him about the Trump regime's graft and corruption, Trump's granting pardons to people the President has never heard of, Trump posting scatological videos on Ministry of Truth Social, Trump bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela seemingly at random, Trump bailing out the Milei regime in Argentina and taking in shiploads of Argentinian beef while our own government is shut down and our farmers are losing markets to China thanks to Trump's misguided tariff policies. 

Johnson's answer is pretty much the same.

“I’m not trying to dodge the question,” the top lawmaker said. “I haven’t had time to get the details, OK? That’s still on my list, things-to-do list.”

We know that whatever is keeping Speaker Johnson so busy he can't get around to his things-to-do list, it isn't running the House of Representatives. When Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open, he sent the members home. When Arizona voters sent Adelita Grijalva to succeed her late father in Congress, Johnson told them, "All representatives are currently out of the office, but your call is very important to us. Please hang up and your vote will be ignored in the order you get redistricted."

Why, then, is Speaker Johnson unable to find the time to get anything done, to catch up on the news, to notice that a 34-time-convicted felon is running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution?

You may be holding it in your hands right now.

Every app on your phone is designed to be a bigger timesuck than the others.

I don't know much about that app Mr. Johnson and Mr. Johnsonson use to keep tabs on each other's sexual activity, but you have to know that it sucks its users in and keeps them engaged with the promise that if they just keep reading on, pushing its buttons, racking up higher scores, clicking on those video reels of attractive people abstaining from sex, something really worthwhile is bound to come up on the screen any minute.

By the way, if you liked this cartoon about Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, here are some others you might enjoy.

Q Toon: Attention Get Her

Rosie O'Donnell, whom I haven't cartooned since she had her own talk show, once upon a time said something nasty about Donald Joffrey Trump — and probably true, whatever it was — setting off a celebrity feud with the thin-skinned whiny snowflake.

The rest of the world has forgotten their feud, but petty tyrant Trump nurses a grudge like it's Baby Jesus. So when he somehow convinced a majority of U.S. voters to return him to the office he had not been able to hold onto by force, promising to wreak vengeance upon all his enemies, perceived, imagined, immigrant and transgender, Ms. O'Donnell decided it was time to take her wife and their genderqueer child and hie them to the Emerald Isle.

That was months ago, which didn't stop Trump from taking to his social media app (which I refuse to call by its very misleading preferred noun), foaming at the mouse that he will issue a presidential proclamation stripping O'Donnell of her U.S. citizenship. 

I had completely finished drawing this cartoon and cleaned my pens when I checked my own phone and learned that Little Lord Trump le Roi had added to his list of presidential priorities unrenaming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians. Because as far as he's concerned, they're genetically Redskins and Indians, and they had better not get caught using Commanders and Guardians rest rooms if they want funding for their new stadiums.

Fortunately, Photoshop means I didn't have to try drawing over half a bottle's worth of Whiteout.

The additional distractions Mr. Stable Genius has come up with after my Monday morning cartoon deadline — teasing irrefutable proof of Barack Obama's sedatious impudistry, releasing J. Edgar Hoover's files on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sending cabinet members to tour Alcatraz, gloating over CBS cancelling The Late Show with or without Stephen Colbert — and wait, I need a whole new paragraph for this next one —

promising “We will have reduced drug prices by 1,000%, by eleven hundred, twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred, 700, 600,” which means that drug companies will pay customers huge sums of money to take their products, which Trump will achieve by threatening to ban the import and sale of Volkswagens, BMWs, Volvos, and Lamborghinis —

— all that will have to wait for another day. By which time he will have declared covfefe a vegetable, accused Hillary Clinton of masterminding Hurricane Katrina, named son Barron permanent Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and babbled obsessively to the Prime Minister of Iceland about Arnold Palmer's penis.

Got a Feeling Kansas Is Not on Meta Any More

Screenshot from my phone

I was taken aback to find this notification on my Facebook feed this morning .

Last August, I had posted a link to a news story about a Kansas sheriff who raided the office of a local weekly newspaper, the Marion Record, and the home of its publisher, confiscating the newspaper's computers and resulting in the death of the publisher's elderly mother. The reporting by a progressive online news organization in Kansas was picked up by national media and others like me who were alarmed by this fundamental violation of freedom of the press.

Clicking the "See why" bar, I was told that my post presented a cybersecurity hazard to the metaverse.

Turns out I was by no means alone.

The Kansas Reflector article had been shared by several others in the journalism biz, and everyone who had shared that story on Facebook woke up to the same We Removed Your Content warning.

In fact, so had everyone who had shared any Kansas Reflector article on Facebook.

For the reason why, you'd have to go to the Kansas Reflector itself, because you can't read it on Facebook.

This morning, sometime between 8:20 and 8:50 a.m. Thursday, Facebook removed all posts linking to Kansas Reflector’s website.

This move not only affected Kansas Reflector’s Facebook page, where we link to nearly every story we publish, but the pages of everyone who has ever shared a story from us.

That’s the short version of the virtual earthquake that has shaken our readers. We’ve been flooded with instant messages and emails from readers asking what happened, how they can help and why the platform now falsely claims we’re a cybersecurity risk.

Allow us to assuage the biggest concerns first.

We were not hacked, and our website does not pose a cybersecurity threat. You and your devices are safe while reading our stories and sharing them. Facebook won’t let you do so at present, but other, non-Meta-owned platforms should be fine.

As to what happened, we’re still working on finding out. Many have wondered if one story or another was responsible, highlighting our coverage of the Marion newspaper raid or state government.

Coincidentally, the removals happened the same day we published a column from Dave Kendall that is critical of Facebook’s decision to reject certain types of advertising: “When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet’s future.”

When we attempted to share the column on Facebook this morning — shortly after 8 a.m. — the link was summarily rejected. After a second attempt at posting, we instead simply linked to our website with advice to find the story there. Within the next half-hour, all posts linking to our site were gone. For reference, we have published more than 6,000 news stories, briefs and opinion columns since Kansas Reflector’s founding in 2020.

Now, it is true that the Marion newspaper raid is an ongoing story; the Marion County Record filed a court case against the mayor, police chief, and sheriff just this week. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Facebook isn't desperate to protect Sheriff Roscoe Coltrane and Boss Hogg. To my mind, there is no coincidence that the Dave Kendall article complaining about Facebook was published the very morning that the Zuckerverse came crashing down on the Reflector. 

Kendall had produced a documentary film about local efforts to combat climate change. He then decided to "boost" a Facebook post advertising screenings of his film.

Imagine my surprise when I attempted to “boost” a post on Meta’s Facebook to begin our online promotional efforts — and the company summarily rejected it.

Why? According to the automated response I received, the post “doesn’t comply with our Ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics policy.”

Apparently, Meta deems climate change too controversial for discussion on their platforms.

I had suspected such might be the case, because all the posts I made prior to the attempted boost seemed to drop off the radar with little response. As I took a closer look, I found others complaining about Facebook squelching posts related to climate change.

... [I]n the Meta-verse, where it seems virtually impossible to connect with a human being associated with the administration of the platform, rules are rules, and it appears they would prefer to suppress anything that might prove problematic for them.

 By mid afternoon, the Reflector had updated the story about Facebook shutting them down:

Facebook appears to have restored Kansas Reflector’s ability to share links to our website and our past posts, approximately seven hours after the problem was first reported. We have not received an explanation about why our stories were blocked.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone offered the following response on Twitter: “This was an error that had nothing to do with the Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta. It has since been reversed and we apologize to the Reflector and its readers for the mistake.”

As of Thursday evening, the column criticizing Meta still cannot be shared on Facebook. We are continuing to monitor the situation. If you experience any difficulties with the platform and Reflector articles, please let us know. If you want to support our work, please donate.

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.

Q Toon: Shelved

It's time for the obligatory Merry Christmas cartoon!

Carolyn Aebersold popularized her family tradition of Elf on the Shelf in a 2005 children's picture book, telling the chilling story of how elves would steal into households around the world to spy on children and report their behavior back to Santa Claus.

Little did Ms. Aebersold realize that Mark Zuckerberg had already released his Facebook into the world, harnessing people's eagerness to talk about themselves in order for him to harvest information on the behavior of kids from one to 92. It's not only the stuff you post on Facebook, but anything else you do on your computer when you foolishly think Facebook isn't looking. The data is then sold to the highest bidder, the lowest bidder, and all the myriad bidders inbetween.

Then Google and Twitter came along to fill in whatever blanks in our on-line behavior Facebook might have overlooked, but at least they only captured what we were doing on our computer, tablet, phone, or FitBit.

So, to make the spy network of things complete, every room in the house now has Siri, Alexa, Hey Google, and whatever dumbed-down gadget Cricket Wireless is going to come up with for us old fogeys, reporting to the Valley of the Shadow of Silicon what's in our refrigerators, how long we leave the lights on, who rang our doorbells, and whatever the Roomba found on the floor. They're willing to testify in court against us, and we've already signed away our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights somewhere in volume 87 of the Terms of Service Agreement.

So you better look out; you better not cry; you better not pout. I'm telling you why:

Watson's taking everything down.

Merry Christmas!

Q Toon: Xi Who Must Be Obeyed

In a move supposedly to comply with China's new cybersecurity laws, the country's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, began a crackdown last week against material deemed to run counter to socialist ideals. Prominent among the material censored by Weibo were gay-themed texts, games, and anime.

The Cybersecurity Law doesn’t mention LGBT issues, and the Chinese Psychiatric Association in 2001 removed homosexuality and bisexuality from their list of illnesses. However, a ban on depictions of gay people in online video and audio content was unveiled last year.
The China Netcasting Services Association, the industry group that launched the ban, said that gay people have “abnormal sexual relationships” similar to incest or rape.

An on-line protest with the hashtag #IAmGay (wo shi tongxinglian) sprang up immediately against the move, and appears to have succeeded in getting Weibo to recalibrate its censorship. On Monday, Weibo announced:

“This time, the cleanup of anime and games won’t target gay content. It is mainly [meant] to clean up content related to pornography, violence, and gore. Thank you for your discussions and suggestions,” as translated by WhatsonWeibo.

 Although homosexuality was not specifically mentioned in the 2017 cybersecurity law, Chinese officials including President Xi Jinping are on record including homosexuality as a violation of communist ideology. Rules laid out by the Chinese government last summer provided for censorship of any content published on line or elsewhere that doesn't "adhere to Chinese values."

Programs that undermined a respectful national image, ridiculed leaders, promoted negative or decadent views of life and showed the “dark side” of society would be edited, or in severe cases stopped.
President Xi Jinping has overseen measures to clamp down on independent online media, while reasserting the ruling Communist Party’s role in limiting and guiding online discussion....
The new rules also laid out a range of issues that did not meet with approval, including violence, drug addiction, extramarital affairs and religious cults.
Also on the list was homosexuality, underlining the conservative official view on same-sex relations.

So we'll see how long #IAmGay wins out over #IAmPresidentForLife.

Stop the #Presses!

In case you get your news from your Twitter feed:

And in case you just got a smug look on your face because you get your news from TV's Most Trusted Name In News...

...or your venerable, black and white and red all over newspaper:

Q Toon: Trouble at Prom

At this time of year, I have often drawn a cartoon about high school prom. There is usually some story making the news about a school system forbidding same-sex dating or transgender outfits at prom, but that is kind of boring, cartoon-wise. I mean, how many ways can you draw cartoons about hidebound wet blanket school administrators denying Romeo and Julio from getting footloose on the dance floor?

Accordingly, several of my more recent cartoons have been set at schools where same-sex dating and girls in tuxes are no more remarkable than pink hair and tattoos. Which is to say: stop gawking, gramps. After all, polls show that there is greater acceptance of issues such as marriage equality among seniors in high schools than seniors in retirement homes.

Yet I realize that all is not all sweetness and enlightenment, even in the dance halls of academe.

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒Apr 23, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

I have probably given away my age simply by including my AOL address in this week's cartoon (the Q Syndicate email service has been down for a couple of weeks for reasons to which I am not privy). I got the AOL address at the behest of an editor decades ago who wanted to be able to Instant Message us contributors. I already have more email addresses than I care to check on a daily basis, and I've never bothered to swap this one out for a hipper Hotmail or Gmail account.

Nor do I text.

Recently, I was trying to think of some advice to give my nephew, who plans to return to school after a few years of Army training. It occurred to me that before he was born, his mother and I took college computer courses with an eye to furthering our chosen careers. We took these courses ten years apart; she learned how to punch Hollerith cards, and my computer graphics instructor spent what I thought even then to be an inordinate amount of time teaching us dBaseIII.

Both skill sets were obsolete within a matter of months.

So what's my advice? Yeah, sure, take those computer and technical courses with an eye for getting a job after graduation. But don't overlook those liberal arts courses, and save time in your courseload for stuff you're interested in purely because you're interested in it. Unless you become the next Steve Case, Mark Zuckerberg, or Evan Spiegel, you're going to have to change careers several times in your life as the job market shifts beneath your feet; and being able to carry on an intelligent conversation will serve you better than any single skill that employers might happen to be looking for this week.

And remember: nobody likes a jerk. On either side of the punch bowl.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I'm back home after attending a two-day seminar in St. Paul last week.

The seminar was for one of my other jobs and focused on web site design and using social media. Apparently, one should keeps one's Facebook posts shorter than one's tweets. One should also budget one hour every day to social media tasks, although I thought people expected prompt responses to their on-line feedback, complaints and suggestions. I mean, think how frustrated the customer would become if one's office devoted only one hour per day to the phone.

None of which has any relevance to this week's Sneak Peek, but serves as a foreword to my humble apology for not having posted something in this cyberspace every day in spite of having taken my laptop along with me.