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…”

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.

This Week's Sneak Peek

The cartoon takes a serious tone this week.

Online Public Yellow Pages

While the primary focus of my blog is editorial cartooning, I occasionally feel compelled to offer public service to my fellow consumers. Online Public Yellow Pages is a firm with a mailing address in Mooers Forks, New York. Another one of the myriad on-line phone listing knock-offs, they offer to improve the Google ranking of businesses, schools, religious institutions, and whatever other gullible customers they can snag through their phone solicitations -- a service for which they charge upwards of $599.99 per year.

If they had any talent at improving the Google ranking of their customers, would the first page of a Google search of their own name look like this?

P.S.: See also "Fraudulent Yellow Pages Scam: Beware It's Back!" by Denise Richardson.

Q Toon: Voter ID-OC

Yeah, yeah, I know the argument. You need a photo ID to board an airplane, open a bank account, buy a house or join a country club -- all sorts of things that some of the poor, elderly, students, blind, minorities and whatnot try to get along without. The fact is that these laws have been crafted to include Republican-leaning groups (gun licenses are okay) and inconvenience Democratic-leaning groups (student IDs are not).

But it's only a photo ID, they say. And if cataracts keep your great-grandmother from schlepping out to spend a day at wherever the heck they moved the DMV these days, that's a small cost to prevent the .0000003% of voters who have no business exercising their civic responsibility.

Wisconsin voters have just been through a nasty series of recall elections, and with Democrats having eked out a narrow victory in just one election in my own State Senate District (enough to cost Republicans their senate majority), local Republicans have been literally digging through garbage dumpsters in a desperate effort to rustle up something to allege voter fraud. Our Republican dumpster diver found -- stop the presses! -- "some ripped up voter registration forms which he [placed] in a garbage bag along with a prescription bottle, a couple of bills and - get this - a MacDonald's food bag," which he duly turned over to sheriff's deputies.

After a thorough investigation, the Racine County Sheriff's report concluded:

"In summary, none of the items brought to the Sheriff's Office removed from the dumpster by Ottelien prove or even suggest voter fraud had occurred at the Cesar Chavez Center. The items discarded in the trash are just that, trash."

Aside from that, some poll workers around the state -- those nice ladies who sit in that voting room all day from before the polls open until the last vote is counted -- made occasional mistakes about which parts of the Voter ID law had and had not been stopped by judicial injunction. Republican provocateurs have highlighted a few isolated cases in which a voter did not sign a registration sheet (the only part of the law currently in effect in Wisconsin). Yet elsewhere, voters were turned away for not having the photo ID the injunction expressly said they wouldn't need.

Clearly, Republicans have their work cut out for them as they seek to level the playing field between their multimillionaire campaign contributors and the hoi polloi whose free speech under Citizens United is barely audible, but make up the other 99.99999% of voters.

There are other groups whose influence in elections Republicans would like to cut down. In the future, we can look forward to Republicans whittling down workers' ability to vote by shortening voting time to between the hours of 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. and require that you fill out and seal absentee ballots at the state capitol in the presence of your Congressman and FedEx them to your local elections office. In a hermetically sealed box the size of a grand piano.

Thompson Gubernatorial Toons from the Archive

These are some cartoons I had dug up and posted on my old GeoCities web page when Tommy Thompson made his eminently forgettable run for the presidency in 2007.

Thompson came into office as Governor of Wisconsin in 1987 making a lot of talk about cutting the budget. While Politifact has ruled that "Wisconsin’s overall tax burden went down while [Thompson] served as governor from 1987 to 2001," his budgets from 1995 to 1999 contained $188 million in general tax increases. The 1995-97 budget also contained $120 million in increased fees.

A column by Bruce Murphy this week argues that taxes went up considerably during his tenure as governor.

"A study by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that in his first 12 years of office, state spending rose by 101 percent — more than twice the rate of inflation. ...
"During Thompson’s first 12 years in office, the average Wisconsin citizen’s income tax payments rose by 127 percent — more than two-and-a-half times faster than inflation. Sales taxes rose by 90 percent, nearly twice as fast as inflation. As a study back then by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance found, income taxes had soared because in 1986 the state stopped “indexing” the income tax rates to account for inflation."

(Dave Blaska blames a good deal of the increase in taxes on Thompson's Democratic predecessor, Tony Earl. But now that blaming one's predecessor is anathema to conservative thought, let's just ignore Mr. Blaska, shall we?)

The catch was that Thompson was so gosh-darned passionate about spending for some pet items that it overwhelmed his gosh-darned passion for cutting taxes. He pushed through a voucher plan to spend public tax money on private schools. His other passions included trains, state worker pensions, and concentrating power in the Governor's Office (in particular, asserting control over the Department of Natural Resources).

Thompson's conservative legacy is based largely by the establishment in 1997 of Wisconsin Works, or W-2, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Like President Obama's Health Care Reform, W-2 was extremely complicated, with a lot of moving parts; a program to extend health care benefits to low-income families with children was added to W-2 in 1999.

Conservatives loved W-2, and that's how Thompson ended up as George W. Bush's Health and Human Secretary (when the post he really wanted was Transportation).

But let's return to the issue of the measure of conservatism as it's defined today. Again, from Bruce Murphy:

"Thompson crowned his tenure as a tax-and-spend governor with the passage of an outrageous 1999 law that sweetened the state pension system’s payoff for Thompson and other veterans. The law was championed by union leaders and Thompson and passed by a bipartisan legislature, sweetening an already generous state pension plan at a long-term cost of $5.5 billion.
"As with the infamous Milwaukee County pension plan, Thompson’s was skewed to deliver the big benefits to the insiders, the employees with the biggest salaries and longest tenure.  The lifetime value of Thompson’s already generous pension, for instance, grew by $111,000. "

While these pension plans won Thompson the endorsement of the state's public employee unions over his Democratic opponents in 1994 and 1998, they have not endeared him to the current Governor, whose first actions in office have been to unilaterally scuttle the agreements.

In the end, Thompson left his successor, Scott McCallum a precariously balanced budget when he left for Washington D.C.  in 2001.

This Week's Sneak Peak

As you ought to be able to guess from the sneak peek at this week's cartoon, the topic is Voter ID, and it involves one of those cable news opinion shows that feature discussion between or among panelists of widely differing viewpoints.


I've chosen to call this fictional program "Cross Talk," after the late CNN program "Crossfire." The reference is not to Christianity, but to the term for a major feature of these programs: multiple people talking simultaneously.