Q Toon: I'll Get You, My Pretty

By now, you are probably well aware that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Idiocracy) last week responded to a colleague's transgender rights flag across the hall from her office by posting a sign reading "There are two genders: male and female. Respect the science."

If you really want to respect the science, you have to acknowledge that reality is not as simple as that. I'm no biologist; but someone who is attempted to explain the possible and existing complications in a Twitter thread a couple years ago. For example,

Turns out there is only ONE GENE on the Y chromosome that really matters to sex. It’s called the SRY gene. During human embryonic development the SRY protein turns on male-associated genes. Having an SRY gene makes you “genetically male”. But is this “biological sex”?

Sometimes that SRY gene pops off the Y chromosome and over to an X chromosome. Surprise! So now you’ve got an X with an SRY and a Y without an SRY. What does this mean?
A Y with no SRY means physically you’re female, chromosomally you’re male (XY) and genetically you’re female (no SRY). An X with an SRY means you’re physically male, chromsomally female (XX) and genetically male (SRY). But biological sex is simple! There must be another answer...

Most of what I know about biology comes from BBC nature programs, so genes and chromosomes are beyond what I could ever hope to explain. I also have no idea what it's like to feel that your gender doesn't match your genitalia. 

Heck, I couldn't tell you why I write and draw with my left hand yet shave and use silverware with my right. Maybe some L2R protein leapt from one chromosome to another somewhere along the line. It is what it is and thank God I don't need surgery or hormones to make me fit someone else's ideas of who or what I am.

So Biologist Tweeter Rebecca Helm can have the last word today.

[P]lease be kind, respect people’s right to tell you who they are, and remember that you don’t have all the answers. Again: biology is complicated. Kindness and respect don’t have to be.

This Week's Sneak Peek

The first sneak peek of March comes in like a flying monkey.

P.S.: Daily Cartoonist posted their tribute to Bill Sanders today, including a link to his cartoons at Western Kentucky University.

The second cartoon in that collection displays Sanders's support of LGBTQ rights, long before anybody called them that. (Heck, back then, I myself wasn't touching the topic with a ten-foot pen!) Since LGBTQ issues are a primary focus of this here blog, I'd like to share that cartoon here.

"Gays March in Washington..." by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 18, 1979

I encourage you to go visit the WKU archive for the rest.

Or buy the book.

"Amendment to the 14th Amendment" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, May 12, 1978

R.I.P. Bill Sanders

"Put It Back" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, July 1, 1971

 

The family of past AAEC President Bill Sanders announced his passing today.

Editorial cartoonist during his life at the Japan Times (English edition), Greensboro Daily News, Kansas City Star, and Milwaukee Journal, he had time in his busy schedule to give this aspiring cartoonist valuable tips and insight when I was still scribbling on typing paper with ballpoint pen.

Rest In Power, sir!

February on the Ones

I've used some of these Saturday posts to rehash my own cartoons from 30 years ago, which at this point in the calendar, has led up to Gulf War I. My problem this month is that I've already posted most of my February, 1991 cartoons for one reason or another. The cartoon below may very well be the only one previously unrehashed.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, February 12, 1991

So for a theme this week, here are some of my Wisconsin-themed cartoons from 2001 and 2011.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, February 23, 2001

This cartoon, drawn to accompany an editorial in the Business Journal, has a date written on it of February 16, but so does another Beej cartoon. I don't see a cartoon dated February 23, and I think this one is the one with the wrong date.

At any rate, Chuck Chvala (D-Madison) was the on-and-off Majority Leader in the Wisconsin State Senate from 1995 to 2002 — on at this point in time — and the Business Journal thought that a prescription drug bill in the state legislature was doomed and little more than a partisan ploy. Chvala ended up not looking so heroic when he was found guilty of violating campaign finance laws by having Democratic caucus staff do electioneering work on the state dime.

Quaint, aina?

Now Chvala podcasts political punditry with former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (R-Waukesha), who had his own run-in with ethics laws.

2011 was a tumultuous year in Wisconsin politics; Scott Walker took office as Governor with a Republican majority in both houses of the state legislature. Backed by an ad blitz from anti-union oligarchs, they launched an all-out assault against public employees (notably excepting the police and fire unions, the only unions to have backed Walker's campaign).

Wisconsin Club for [Cancerous] Growth took the lead in TV and radio advertising. One of their ads highlighted the wage and benefit cuts that unions at various private firms had been forced to swallow during the 2008-2009 economic crash, thanks to management's contempt for their own communities. Mercury Marine, for example, could threaten to close down its Fond du Lac plant and open shop in Bumm Fork, Alabama, instead; but the same can't be done with schools and snowplows, prisons and parole officers. So the voice-over announcer complained that public employee unions were not sharing in privately employed workers' pain:

 "All across Wisconsin, people are making sacrifices to save their jobs: frozen wages, pay cuts and paying more for health care. But state workers haven't had to sacrifice; they pay next to nothing for their pensions and a fraction of their health care. It's not fair. Call your state legislators and tell them to vote for Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill. It's time state employees paid their fair share, just like the rest of us."

It was cute that the folks at Wisconsin Club for [Cancerous] Growth included themselves in "the rest of us."

Act 10, as Walker's "budget repair bill" was officially called, gutted public employee unions' ability to negotiate salaries and benefits, banned those unions from collecting dues from public employees who chose not to belong to the union (but would continue to be included in whatever union contracts would follow). Having made union membership pointless, Act 10 also made mandatory annual recertification votes, further encouraging employees to bust their unions.

All in the name of fixing Republicans' "hole in the state budget."

Well, folks, as appreciation for your indulgence while I wallow down memory lane today, here's a February, 2021 cartoon featuring three members of Wisconsin's illustrious delegation to Washington, D.C.: Congressmen Glenn Grothman and Scott Fitzgerald, and Senator Ron "This Didn't Seem Like an Armed Insurrection to Me" Johnson.

Q Toon: Exceptionalism

The House is expected to vote this week on the Equality Act sponsored by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to extend its protections to LGBTQ citizens. President Biden has vowed that signing it into law is one of the first priorities of his administration.

But first, it has to get through the U.S. Senate.

Requblicans object to the bill, claiming that it discriminates against religious people's belief in discriminating against LGBTQ people. They have also raised fears that men in sports will rush to transition to female in order to put women in sports at a competitive disadvantage, or at least to get into the ladies' locker room. And of course, everybody's bathrooms.

Democrats and Requblicans are evenly split in the Senate, and Vice President Kamala Harris could vote in the case of a tie. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) was a co-sponsor of the Equality Act in 2019, in case you'd still like to get your unrealistic hopes up for her again. But there doesn't appear to be much likelihood of any other Requblicans supporting the bill; Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rob Portman (R-OH) aren't making any promises, and Mitt Romney (R-UT) declared his opposition just last week.

Since, under current rules, any bill needs to have the support of 60 senators in order to get anywhere, Requblicans can filibuster the Equality Act without lifting a finger. Almost literally. We tend to think of a filibuster as involving some senator speaking for hours on end until he/she collapses from exhaustion. Nowadays, all it takes is 40 votes against a motion to close debate. Actual debate need not even follow.

There used to be a saying that the Senate was the saucer in which the overheated soup from the House was allowed to cool. Now the Senate is the arctic vortex that freezes the whole bowl of soup, a plate of lasagna, a bunch of bananas and the rest of the whole damned kitchen into an impenetrable block of ice.

This Week's Sneak Peek

  Mix in a little foreshortening and stir well.

Impeaching Kenesaw Mountain Landis

Have you had enough of impeachment proceedings yet? If not, you're in luck! 100 years ago this month, there was a move in Congress to impeach Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Judge Landis was a crusty old fellow who had once told a convicted defendant who protested that he wouldn't live long enough to serve his five-year sentence, "You can try, can't you?" Two years after Teddy Roosevelt appointed him Judge of the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois, he gained national prominence ruling against Standard Oil of Indiana in an antitrust case, fining the company the equivalent of $800 million in today's money. (His ruling was overturned in higher courts; it was not the only time that happened.) He also oversaw some high-profile draft resistance cases during World War I.

"It Must Be Some Job" by Harry Westerman in Ohio State Journal, Columbus, OH, Feb., 1921

And then there was baseball.

Landis had been the judge asked to rule in a 1915 antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Baseball League against the American and National Leagues; the Federal League ultimately withdrew its case and soon went out of business. Baseball fan Landis let it be known their lawsuit would have been "if not destructive, at least injurious to the game of baseball." 

In the shadow of the Black Sox Scandal, still making its way through the courts, the American and National Baseball Leagues turned to Judge Landis to be their commissioner in November, 1920, offering him a $42,500 salary (around $600,000 in 2021 dollars).

Charging that the leagues' hiring of Judge Landis was tantamount to bribery by "this illegal trust,"  Congressman Benjamin Welty (D-OH) urged Congress to impeach Landis and remove him from the bench:

"Judge Landis has a right to yield to the fleshpots of illegal combination, but he should not bring all our judiciary into ill-repute. If the country approves the dual role of Judge Landis, then the House will be called upon to preserve a new standard for our judiciary, because there are others who would be pleased to employ some judge 'for he is worth any price he might wish to ask."

In the Senate, Nathaniel Dial (D-SC) was also agitating for Landis to be tossed from the bench over the case of a bank clerk accused of embezzling $96,000 from the National City Bank of Ottawa, Illinois. Landis had let the clerk off with a light sentence, reasoning that the bank managers were themselves to blame, having paid the man a measly $90 per month. (According to Wikipedia, Landis issued this ruling in April, 1921, but I'm finding Dial citing the ruling as reason to impeach Landis in newspaper reports two months before that.) 

"That Kill the Umpire Spirit" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Feb. 24, 1921

Landis dismissed both congressmen's allegations, telling a caller, "I'm not worried about this thing. Why, I'm no more interested in this than I am in the appointment of a new bellhop in that hotel across the street."

Welty, a Democrat, had lost his seat in the 1920 Republican landslide, so he would be out of office less than three weeks after moving for Landis's impeachment on February 15, 1921. By the time the 67th Congress adjourned in March, Rep. Welty's impeachment motion had made it no further than a House Judicial Subcommittee, which did refer it favorably to the full committee.

"The Defi" by Harry Murphy for Star Company, ca. March 1, 1921

As far as I can tell, an impeachment trial was never held, although the American Bar Association would eventually vote to censure the judge. Landis resigned from the federal bench in February, 1922, and would remain Commissioner of Baseball for almost a quarter century. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame the year he retired; and his name was on the Most Valuable Player award until last year, when it was removed over his sorry record against integrating the all-White major leagues.

✍

I had considered returning to 1991 for today's blog post, but I found that I have already posted nearly every cartoon from that February in these Saturday retrospectives. I might have instead dug up any cartoons I've drawn about Rush Limbaugh, who shuffled off his fetid coil this week, but in the interest of "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," I just don't feel like it. (Well, if you really must see them, there's a keyword link at the bottom of this post.)

I might have liked to come up with something a propos for African-American History Month, but I just haven't found any cartoons from February, 1921 that aren't cringeworthy. It's not as if there was nothing a cartoonist couldn't have drawn about. The Klan assured the Dallas Express that it wasn't prejudiced against Blacks; White newspapers made sure that if a Black man were accused of a crime, the first word in the headline was "Negro"; and I was starting to think that there winter was a slow season for lynching, until I checked out the Black newspapers.

But, as I said, I found no cartoons about any of that.

So I went back to get a number of cartoons I'd come across about Judge Landis, only to find that quite a few of the websites I rely upon don't seem to be working. This week's weather may be to blame for a couple of them; others I can't explain. Once those sites are up and running again, I may come back and add some  more cartoons here.

Meanwhile, there's still another Saturday this month. Since when did February get to be so long?