Q Toon: AG Stands for Almira Gulch

Impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton isn't going to let a little thing like his state's borders stop him from going after transgender kids and their families.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is requesting medical records of Texas youth who have received gender-affirming care from a Georgia telehealth clinic, marking at least the second time he’s sought such records from providers in another state.

The clinic, QueerMed, confirmed on Friday morning that they received the request. QueerMed said it stopped servicing youth in Texas after the state banned transition-related care last year. The clinic’s founder said the attorney general requested information about patients dating back to Jan. 1, 2022, before the ban took effect.

The clinic said that Paxton asked for private information about Texas residents who were provided with telehealth care in Texas before the ban, and residents provided with care outside of Texas after the ban. The request, they said, nearly mirrors one the attorney general sent to Seattle Children’s Hospital last year.

Paxton asked Seattle Children’s for a variety of patient information, including the number of Texas children they have treated, medications prescribed to children, the children’s diagnoses and the name of Texas laboratories where tests for youth are administered.

In response to that request, known as a civil investigative demand, Seattle Children’s sued the Texas Office of the Attorney General in December.

QueerMed confirmed that Paxton sent his request to them on Nov. 17, the same day that Seattle Children’s received the similar demand for documents. QueerMed received the request Dec. 7, due to mail delays. Its receipt of the letter was first reported by The Houston Chronicle on Friday morning.

I'm going to level with you here: I'm mighty sick and tired of having to come up with new things to say about Republicans' psychotic vendetta against transgender citizens. You think you're tired of hearing about Taylor Swift showing up at every Kansas City Chiefs game? Puh-leeze. Republicans launched this crusade over a decade ago, and now it's everywhere you look.

They started by frightening their impressionable minions with fanciful tales of hairy, brutish men in dresses lurking in women's bathrooms. Then they moved on to keeping transgender girls out of locker rooms, out of pools, out of sports. Now they're attacking transgender people's rights to vote, to work, to drive, to cross state lines, to be called by their own names. Above all, they keep passing laws to criminalize transgender persons' health care.

And yet it's those whiny MAGA snowflakes who think they're the ones someone is trying to "erase."

This Week's Sneak Peek

They made me get my flying monkeys again...

Tempest in a Teapot Dome

The Harding Teapot Dome scandal broke wide open in January, 1924, so it's time for our Graphical History Tour to break out the toons.

No caption, by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 28, 1924

If I had a dime for every cartoon I've seen of a teapot boiling over — or, since the scandal was over oilfields, becoming a gusher — I'd have a couple of bucks. 

Daniel Fitzpatrick's cartoon stands out for incorporating the Capitol dome into the idea.

"Mister Fall Seems to Have Been the Only One Who could 'See' Anything" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Jan. 27, 1924

In the opening months of the Harding administration, Interior Secretary Albert Fall — one of the Harding administration's "Ohio Gang" — had convinced  Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby that the Interior Department was better suited than the Department of the Navy to manage the naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming and Elk Hills, California. President Warren Harding authorized the transfer, and Fall then leased the oilfields to buddies of his in exchange for over $400,000 in personal loans.

The Senate investigation led by Sen. Thomas Walsh (D-MT) centered on the oil leasing deal under Fall,  who had since resigned, but also faulted Denby and Attorney General Harry Daugherty (another member of the Ohio Gang) for failure to pay attention.

"I'd Do It Again" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, Jan. 31, 1924

Denby testified that he saw nothing wrong with having Interior manage the naval oil reserves. He would not last three more months at his post. Coolidge would ask for Daugherty's resignation as well.

"Rushing with First Aid to the Injured" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Jan. 29, 1924

Even though the Teapot Dome scandal was a sensation in January, blared across front pages in banner headlines, most of the Republican-oriented cartoonists I've found ignored it. "Ding" Darling was a prominent exception, perhaps explained by his strong differences with Albert Fall over issues of environmental protection.

Here "Ding" complains that the scandal would only benefit the field of Democratic presidential candidates, singling out front-runner William McAdoo, dark horse Sen. Sam Ralston (D-IN), and also-ran Sen. Oscar Underwood (D-AL).

"It's an Ill Wind" by Douglas Rodgers in San Francisco Bulletin, Jan. 31, 1924

Douglas Rodgers adds progressive Republican Senator William Borah of Idaho and Democratic elder statesman William Jennings Bryan to the list of those relishing the Republican scandal. He could well have added Bob LaFollette and several other progressives.

"Beyond Control" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Jan. 31, 1924

Congress voted overwhelmingly to cancel the oil leases made by Fall, and President Coolidge appointed a special prosecutor to handle the case. Democrat-leaning cartoonists eagerly tied the entire Republican Party to the scandal.

"Can't Get Away from It" by Harold Talburt for Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Jan. 31, 1924

"The Tea(Pot Dome) Party" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Jan. 29, 1924

But not so fast, O Party of Andrew Jackson!

"What Dirty Boys..." by Sam Armstrong in Tacoma News Tribune, Feb. 7, 1924

Democrat McAdoo's presidential aspirations would be hobbled by his association with one of the oilmen implicated in the scandal. Edward Doheny, a major donor to the Democratic Party and chair of its Resolutions Committee in 1920, was accused of offering Albert Fall a $100,000 bribe in exchange for his company managing some of the Elk Hills oil reserves. 

"Phew" by Sam Armstrong in Tacoma News Tribune, Jan. 25, 1924

Doheny would be acquitted of the charge; his son Ned would murder an accused accomplice and commit suicide before going to trial for delivering the bribe; Fall would be found guilty of accepting it.

"It Backfired" by Ed Gale in Los Angeles Times, Feb. 3, 1924

That would be years down the road. McAdoo had nothing to do with approval of the oil leases, but his being a fellow Democrat in California was kind of like having one's picture taken with Jeffrey Epstein. Guilt by association was good enough to get Republican cartoonists to argue "they all do it."

"Laocoon" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Feb. 5, 1924

A Seat at the Table

Yesterday's Comic Strip of the Day included a cartoon of mine that I had posted to my Facebook and Xitter pages after this week's New Hampshire primary:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Feb. 1988

I'm honored and flattered, and accept the mild criticism leveled at it. The thing, however, is that it's a 36-year-old cartoon.

The first-in-the-nation status of Iowa's presidential caucus and New Hampshire's presidential primary are cherished among media types and natives of those two states, but have long been resented elsewhere. The states are predominantly rural and overwhelmingly white, and rather unrepresentative of the nation at large. The candidates have months to meet and mingle with the hoi polloi there, who talk jokingly of deciding against a particular candidate because they got to meet him or her only once.

In years when the race is still competitive after New Hampshire, the candidates dash through the ensuing states — blink and they're gone. This year, of course, the media have declared the race over and are impatiently tapping their toes for Trump and Biden to give their nomination acceptance speeches, the other 48 states rendered irrelevant to having any say in who will be on the November ballot (take that, Colorado and Maine!).

I was a college student in Minnesota in 1980 when that state tried to move its presidential caucuses to the same date as New Hampshire's primary. The Democratic Party punished Minnesota for that effrontery, warning that the delegates Minnesota caucus-goers selected that night would not be seated at the national convention — since it had been the 1976 New Hampshire that vaulted Jimmy Carter from obscurity to front-runner status, the incumbent president owed the Granite State that much consideration.

If one were to pick some state to replace Iowa and New Hampshire at the front of the line, which one is more representative of the nation at large?

How about Illinois?

It's got urban. It's got rural. It's got Chicago and Cairo. It's got Blacks, Latinos, Italians, Poles, Irish, Swedes, Serbs, and Lithuanians. It's got corn and coastline. It's got baseball, football, basketball and hockey. It's got hundreds of undocumented immigrants stuck at O'Hare. It's got weekend hunters and career criminals, both of whom cherish their stockpile of guns and screw the rest of Illinoisans who get in their way. It's got Boystown and Cardinal Cupich.

Let's see Iowa or New Hampshire top that!

Q Toon: In the Heart of Africa (Updated)

Last Saturday, I wrapped up my rehashing of old cartoons with a few paragraphs about a cartoon I had not drawn.

Then I decided to draw it anyway.

On December 29, the President of Burundi, Évariste Ndayishimiye, was asked about respecting LGBTQ+ rights in order not to offend the sensibilities of western nations offering his country humanitarian aid. President Ndayishimiye spewed some shockingly vicious antigay hatred:

"For me, I think that if we find these people in Burundi they should be taken to stadiums and be stoned, and doing so would not be a crime," he said.

What can I say other than what I wrote about Mr. Ndayishimiye on Saturday? I can add the dry factoids that Ndayishimiye was elected to a seven-year term as President of Burundi in 2020; and, for the moment at least, the state punishment in Burundi for homosexuality is up to two years in jail.

The more you know.

So I'll just add this: At the risk of being accused of cultural imperialism, I think that imposing an intentionally cruel and torturous death penalty on people whose only supposed crime is that they love someone of the same sex is unforgivably reprehensible, no matter what continent you live on, what color your skin is, and what house of worship you visit.

________________________________

Update: The Ambassador Burundais to Brussels tweeted a January 2 press release at me in response to this week's cartoon today. It's in French, a language I took in high school and college (but when I left grammar behind and enrolled in L'histoire des Pensées Françaises, I found myself hopelessly at C-).

If I understand it correctly, Ambassador Thérence Ntahiraja pointed out that Burundi does not, in fact, stone homosexuals (see my stipulation to that fact above). Amb. Ntahiraja further claims that President Ndayishimiye was merely using a figure of speech ("figure de style et d'images linguistiques") referencing biblical admonitions against acts which are against the law in Burundi ("pour montrer le gravité de ces practiques qui sont contraires aux lois et valeurs culturelles du Burundi").

I searched in vain for any translation of President Ndayishimiye's remarks that included the phrase "the Bible says" somewhere after “I think” in the quotation above.

I stand by my cartoon.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I went there anyway.

Januaries '4eign and Domestic

It's time to ease back on the wayback machine just a little bit, so here are a few cartoons I drew in Januaries of years ending in -4. (Which was coincidentally the high temperature here the other day.)

1984 was a presidential election year, of course; and like today, the United States was bedeviled by hostilities in the Middle East.

The U.S.S. John F. Kennedy had been on patrol off the coast of Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, in which 241 soldiers had died. In response to some hostile fire, the JFK launched a bombing raid on December 4. The plane of Navy Lts. Mark Lange and Robert Goodman was shot down by a Syrian ground missile. Lange did not survive; Goodman was taken captive in Damascus.

Unwilling to accede to the conditions set by Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad that the U.S. withdraw forces from Lebanon, the Reagan Administration's efforts to win Goodman's freedom were getting nowhere. Then a delegation led by by Rev. Jesse Jackson went to Damascus, and Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, succeeded where Reagan had failed.

Jackson nevertheless came in seventh place in the Iowa caucuses. Go figure. Must have been because there are no naval bases in Iowa.

I drew the above cartoon for the January 12, 1984 edition of the University of Wisconsin - Parkside student newspaper; but they still had an unused cartoon from December and ran that one instead.

Moving on to 1994, and the aftermath of more U.S. soldiers killed in a far-off civil war:

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 24, 1994

President Clinton's first Defense Secretary, Les Aspin, resigned at the end of 1993, tacitly taking the fall for the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia. Clinton's nomination of Admiral Bobby Ray Inman as Aspin's replacement was greeted initially with bipartisan praise — save for New York Times columnist William Safire, who alleged that Inman was biased against Israel. 

Inman withdrew his name from consideration at a stormy press conference, where he blasted Safire and complained that Republican Senators Bob Dole and Trent Lott were out to get him. Both Senate leaders expressed surprise and shock at Inman's accusation, and the White House was taken totally off guard.

Clinton's subsequent nomination of William Perry to the post went off smoothly. There was later speculation that Inman was actually trying to head off being connected to a scandal at International Signal and Control, where he served on the board of directors.

for Q Syndicate, January, 2004

I don't have a cartoon from January of 2004 that fits with the general topic of today's post; so instead, I'll include this homage to P.T. Bridgeport, a recurring character in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" whose dialogue always appeared in late-1800's advertising fonts. 

Lettering dialogue is usually my least favorite part of drawing a cartoon. This was an exception.

for Q Syndicate, January, 2014

Returning to foreign issues, I chose this cartoon from ten years ago because it gives me an opportunity to address a cartoon I haven't drawn this month.

On December 29, the President of Burundi, Évariste Ndayishimiye, was asked about respecting LGBTQ+ rights.

"For me, I think that if we find these people in Burundi they should be taken to stadiums and be stoned, and doing so would not be a crime," he said.

If any U.S. politician had spewed such hate-filled bile in the no-news week between Christmas and New Year's, I would have been all over that story in that week's cartoon. But doing so about a politician none of my readers had ever heard of from a country that many could not find on a map (present company excepted, of course) with a history of Western colonialism and yada yada is fraught with danger.

Would it be possible to condemn Mr. Ndayishimiye without risking accusations of racism and cultural imperialism?

We could debate whether homosexuality existed in Africa before Christian and Islamic missionaries preached anti-LGBTQ+ persecution there. Western colonizers did everything they could to erase local culture and history wherever they went; yet it beggars belief to imagine that homosexuality existed only in Europe and in scattered Native American nations before Christopher Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Francis Drake set sail.

Mr. Ndayishimiye, as it happens, is Roman Catholic, but with some glaringly apparent differences with the current Pope.

My 2014 cartoon attempted to argue that institutionalized homophobia rather than homosexuality is the Western export to Africa (at least as far as Christianity is concerned). Not that I have never leveled criticism at African politicians —viz. here and e.g. here — but I don't have much of a readership in Burundi, Uganda, or Kenya.

Or anywhere else on the continent.

Lo, mbaya sana. I'm better off sticking to cartooning politicians my readers can vote for or against.

One reference to The African Queen in that regard is probably my total allotment, anyway. At least until I manage to draw a better Katherine Hepburn.