Q Toon: Resolutely Fabulist

From the outside, it looks like January has been a bad month for Mercurial American President Donald Joffrey Trump. Nancy Pelosi called his bluff on shutting down the government over Trump's Ugly Border Wall, and Trump punted.

Robert Mueller is coming down hard on Trump's lawyers, co-conspirators and trusted confidantes, and they're all singing like canaries, hitting the talk-show circuit with their tell-all books, or, in the case of Rudy Giuliani, establishing their insanity defense.

Testifying before Congress, his own highest ranking intelligence advisers publicly disagreed with him on the level of threats posed by ISIS, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Latin America, NATO and Jared Kushner.

And he had nothing to serve the collegiate champion Clemson Tigers but junk food from the drive-thru window.

But lest you forget, Trump gets to shut the government down again on February 15, and Nancy Pelosi won't be able to take away his State of the Union privileges then!

And you know what? He can still rely on the loyalty of Roger Stone. Just look at the guy. You can always trust a fella who dresses like a Batman villain and has a tattoo on his back of the only President ever to resign in disgrace. He certainly seems like a stable genius, just like Trump himself.

Speaking of which, Trump knows so much more about foreign affairs than all those people who actually bothered to do any research on the subject. Books? Experience? A lifelong career in the CIA? Who needs it? Trump is the foremost expert on everything anyone ever needs to know about anything from Nambian health care to Swedish terrorism! Brains? He don't need no stinking brains! Trump has his gut!

Furthermore, he's been feeding that gut nothing but KFC nuggets, McDonalds Big Macs, and Taco Bell salad bowls all his life. That gut got him elected President of the United States in spite of the worst second-place finish of any candidate since John Quincy Adams. So there!

Besides, the Supreme Court said he could go ahead and kick all the transgender service members out of the military, at least while their appeals make their way on up to the Supreme Court. Gee, I wonder what the GOP majority on the Supreme Court will decide when they're asked to rule a second time?

Clarence Thomas's wife met with Major Bonespurs the other day. Perhaps she knows.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Isn't it time for an intervention yet?

Apologies to Shortlen and Fagaly

A propos of nothing, this week's Snowback Saturday feature revisits a handful of my cartoons from the winter of 1989.

I was freelancing for the Racine Journal Times in those days, and editor Sean Devlin alerted me that the editorial page was going to invite readers to send in their ideas for a "There Oughta Be a Law" feature. The above cartoon appeared with the announcement of the invitation on January 29. The cartoon below illustrated a selection of the responses the Journal Times received, from serious proposals such as regulating congressional pay raises to pet peeves like prohibiting retail stores from "jumping the season."

"There oughta be a law against obscene bumper stickers." — Barbara Smith

I really goofed by drawing the above —and being paid for it— as a single cartoon instead of six separate ones. The Journal Times broke it up and scattered the panels around the page, coupled with the responses each one illustrated. They also printed each panel larger than I drew them; I prefer to draw my cartoons larger than they will appear in print.

At least they reprinted my signature in each of the panels.

My cartoons for the Journal Times focused primarily on local issues, but I continued drawing about national and world issues for a couple of University of Wisconsin student newspapers in the area.

If activists defending and attacking abortion rights are dismayed that they don't get widespread press coverage these days, it's partly because the protests have been covering the same ground for nearly half a century. If the only news is that a bunch of white teenage boys smirked at some Native American protesters who wouldn't have otherwise gotten any press coverage either, well, that's all that's going to get any media exposure beyond Fox News, CBN, and the Sun Myung Moon press.

With authoritarian dictatorship on the resurgence around the world today, let's take a moment to recall how 1989 seemed to herald a global rise of democracy. The fall of the Iron Curtain would be more memorable, but the year started with the overthrow of Paraguay's President Alfredo Stroessner on la Noche de la Candelaria, almost 35 years after the then-Army General had overthrown the country's democracy.

Unlike the Eastern European revolutions to come, Stroessner's ouster was not due to a popular uprising, however, but a military coup led by one of his own most trusted confidantes. It is alleged that the coup plotters detested the prospect of Stroessner installing either of his sons as his successor: Alfredo Jr. was a coke head, and Gustavo was gay. Nevertheless, the new regime liberalized the Paraguayan constitution and willingly turned the government over to a popularly elected President in 1993.

Other issues, however, remain evergreen, constant, same as it ever was. In spite of being older than Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And older still than the latest asshole who fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a senseless mass murderer.

You'd think that there oughta be a law by now.

A Rerz Izza Rerz Izza Rerz

Q Toon: Room Catch-222

Religious conservatives are defending Karen Pence's decision to return to her job teaching art at Immanuel Christian School of Springfield, Virginia, a private school that bans LGBTQ students and staff. Mrs. Pence had taught there for twelve years while her husband was a Congressman, and their daughter Charlotte matriculated there.

(The sound you hear is that of the administrators of Immanuel Christian School scurrying to check whether the Bible approves of pre-marital matriculation.)

Defenders of the school and the Pences protest that the school has nothing against LGBTQ youth, it's just adhering to biblical principles and expects its straight boys and girls to do the same, too. Of course, little Valerie is not going to get kicked out of school merely for letting it slip that she has a boyfriend, but young Bradley will.

Since the students at Immanuel are all eighth grade and younger, most people would agree that they shouldn't be having sex at that age anyway. But Immanuel's restrictive policy goes further, extending to faculty, staff and parents.

Immanuel's admission policy requires the parents of students to be "born-again, Bible-believing" exemplars of right-wing Christian orthodoxy. Its "Parent Agreement" (revised last October 29) includes a clause reading:

"I understand that the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission to an applicant or to discontinue the enrollment of a student if the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home, the activities of a parent or guardian, or the activities of the student are counter to, or in opposition to, the biblical lifestyle the school teaches. This includes, but is not limited to, contumacious behavior, divisive conduct, and participating in, supporting, or condoning sexual immorality, homosexual activity or bi-sexual [sic] activity, promoting such practices, or being able to support the moral principles of the school. (Lev. 20:13 and Romans 1:27.) I acknowledge the importance of a family culture based on biblical principles and embrace biblical family values such as a healthy marriage between one man and one woman."

Huffington Post's link to the school's employment application form is broken, but it's safe to assume that Immanuel's faculty (and their different-sex spouses) are also expected also to forswear "supporting, or condoning" homosexual or bisexual activity or marriage equality in any way.

So while Immanuel is legally protected by Virginia law to be as intolerant and bigoted as they want to be and there's nothing you can do about it, it's not intolerant on the part of the rest of us to observe that LGBTQ persons are never going to get fair treatment from Mrs. Pence's husband. Not without putting her out of a job.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Not much mystery over what this week's cartoon is about.

For the record and by the way, the Vice President appeared in only four of my cartoons last year.

EnviroStewardship: Measuring Costs and Benefits

Once a month, I turn the blog over to my dad, a chemistry Ph.D. who writes an "Environmental Stewardship" column for local church newsletters. The following is by John Berge:

Recently there have been published a number of interesting and informative scientific review papers published on the environment and therefore on Environmental Stewardship. One published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters used 2016 data from the Global Burden of Disease project to calculate loss in life expectancy as a function of small particle (2.5 micrometers or less) pollution in various countries.

Obviously, small particles are just one type of pollution, but one that is very significant around coal-fired power plants and the rail lines leading to them. On  average in the USA, the drop in life expectancy is only about four months; but these data fall in the portion of the response curve that is steepest, so a small change in pollution, in either direction, has a corresponding large effect.

In Bangladesh, Egypt and Niger, the curve has leveled off, and it will take great reductions in pollution to change their almost two-year reduction in life expectancy. The report also noted that in Southeast Asia, PM2.5 pollution had a bigger effect on life expectancy than all cancers combined.

Thou shalt not pollute thy neighbors’ land, nor thy neighbors’ water nor thy neighbors’ air, so that thy days and thy neighbors’ days shall be longer and healthier.

Another report was from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They were asked by the United Nations to examine how much better off we would be if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced sufficient to limit temperature increase to 1.5ºC rather than the goal of 2.0ºC set by the Paris Agreement on Global Warming.

They reported that global average sea level rise would be reduced from 56 cm to 48 cm (1.84 feet to 1.58 feet). The ocean’s acidity increase would be reduced from 24% to 9% and the probability of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in any given year would go down from 16% to 3%. The proportion of global population facing at least one severe heat wave every five years would drop from 37% to 14%. The number of vertebrate species that would lose at least half of their viable range would be cut in half, from 8% to 4%.

Carbon dioxide, the most abundant of the greenhouse gases that we humans have been increasingly producing since the start of the industrial revolution, is a natural component of the atmosphere. Without it, our planet would revert to a “Snowball Earth,” which it is believed by many geologists to have been 600 million years ago. It is the rise from 270 ppm before our increasing use of fossil fuels to the current approximately 412 ppm that is the problem. We, and the rest of nature, have evolved with the lower levels of greenhouse gases and we are now seeing the consequences of this rapid, human-caused rise.

While much of the corrective actions to avert the damages of global warming may depend upon governments, there is much that we as individuals and families can do:

• Buy gas-sipping automobiles rather than gas-guzzlers.
• Switch from coal-fired electricity to wind or solar power. 
• Travel less, whether it is local driving, business which could be done electronically, or vacations. 
• Eat less meat, especially high energy-requiring corn-fed beef. 
• Buy and use only the most energy efficient appliances. 
• Turn down the thermostat a few degrees in winter and up in the summer. 

Carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons are pollutants; good environmental stewards should treat them as in my imaginary umpteenth commandment above.