Q Toon: We Have a Problem

Houston voted overwhelmingly to overturn the city's Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), dubbed the "Bathroom Act" by its opponents. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick campaigned against HERO with ads showing a scary-looking man opening a rest room stall door and frightening a little girl inside the stall.

The results of last Tuesday's offyear elections were not all bad news for LGBT citizens. Salt Lake City, Utah, of all places, elected a lesbian mayor, Jackie Biskupski, over incumbent Ralph Becker (pending the results of counting absentee ballots), as well as a second gay city council member.

+ To all our veterans out there, from wars past and present, and especially to those still fighting wars within, my deepest gratitude for your service. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

I guess we do need another HERO, after all.

Scatterback Saturday

This is going to be a very random edition of Scatterback Saturday. Former Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) passed away last weekend, so I'll start with this caricature of him from his short-lived 2007 presidential campaign.

Originally a Tennessee lawyer, Thompson first made his mark on the national stage as the 30-year-old staff lawyer for Republicans on the Senate committee investigating the Watergate break-in. He was the one who asked Alexander Butterfield whether the Nixon White House had a secret taping system. The answer led ultimately to Nixon's resignation, while the question led to Thompson's career in movies and television.

Thompson played up his folksy, laid-back persona in his acting career as well has his political one -- so well that people thought he had given up his presidential campaign months before he actually got around to announcing his withdrawal. He went on to pitch reverse mortgages to senior citizens in television commercials.

 ✒

On a totally unrelated subject, the Notebook of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists arrived in the mail last week with its coverage of our convention in Columbus. I found myself in a half dozen or so photos, including this one of several of us walking down Gay Street.

As the convention wound up, I was kicking myself for not having said hello to the Detroit Free Press's Mike Thompson, whom I succeeded as editorial cartoonist at the UW-Milwaukee Post. And here I see that on the very first day of the convention, he was immediately behind and to the right of me as a bunch of us walked from the hotel to the Columbia College of Art and Design.

Which is not to say that I didn't get into a lot of valuable conversations with my fellow ink slingers, including that six-block long conversation with Nebraskan Paul Fell (on my right) during that Day One walk.

I also took some sage advice from Jeff Danziger, whom I wanted to tell how much I admired the sense of place he imbues in his cartoons. You really get a feel for the British pubs, Florida swamps, or seedy red-light districts he draws, and I mentioned having referred to his cartoons for tips on adding detail to a tavern cartoon. "There's no substitute for going to see the real thing," he told me.

My travel budget might cover a visit to a nearby red-light district, but any tour of London pubs is going to have to wait.

(My thanks to Scott Burns for making so many of his photos available!)

Miss Characterization!

In the interest of dialogue, here's a note I received today about this week's cartoon from a reader named Ron in Lincoln, Nebraska:

Tomorrow, I'm going to pull up your cartoon on my laptop to start a discussion in my political science class on media bias. Discuss why today the media's approval rating is below even Congress. I'm not even a Republican and I find your cartoon a willful miss characterization, propaganda and simply astroturfing. It's going to be interesting to see how the students look at your bias creditability. Also, if your cartoon would have been just about Trump, it will be interesting to hear the students' reaction and opinions. My take, the reason the main stream media is going to be so vicious this year is because both you and I know that our candidate Hillary Clinton is extremely weak, and the polar opposite of her smooth husband. Because of Twitter, Facebook, and Internet news sources, I personally question if people are swayed by this type of mudslinging anymore. Today's college students are perceptive enough and understand that you can't put all the Republicans in one pot anymore. At least in my class they recognize the huge political and philosophical differences between Trump vs Carson, Paul vs Christie, Clinton vs Sanders, etc. Democrats better wake up to the digital era because voters, especially college age, are far more sophisticated and informed than they were just four years ago. Or, come November next year we're going to have another Kentucky where the Democrats ran an aggressive negative mudslinging campaign.   

Well, I'm hurt and offended. I've never astroturfed in my life! On the other hand, thank you for inducting me into the main stream media.

I wish you a lively discussion in class, Ron. I suspect that few, if any, of your students are old enough to remember what the Republican Party was like before it was taken over by Tea Partisans, Truthers, Birthers, and Libertarianarchists, but if you have any students from a blue state who have been as dismayed by what the Republican Party has become in the 2010s as I have, I hope they feel as free to speak up as your fellow Nebraskans.

Q Toon: The Debate System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether

I apologize that this week's cartoon touches only tangentially on LGBT issues, but I couldn't possibly ignore the hot mess of last week's CNBC "debate" among ten of the baker's dozen Republican candidates for president. In case you missed it, Ted Cruz responded to a serious question about his signature issue, raising the federal debt ceiling, by attacking the hapless moderators for asking frivolous questions.

As a result, Cruz was declared the winner of the debate between the candidates and the press.

And now, flush with their victory over those raving socialists at CNBC, the Republican candidates are demanding to have only card-carrying Republican partisans ask them questions. As Cruz told Las Vegas AM radio host Heidi Harris:

"I think it's crazy that we have Republican primary debates moderated by people who would never in a million years vote in a Republican primary. It's not helpful, and it is an example of the media's leftwing agenda."

Let's leave out for a moment that most mainstream journalists consider it a violation of journalistic ethics to endorse a candidate publicly by telling everyone how they vote. To be perfectly honest, it doesn't matter if the Republican debates are moderated by Sean Hannity or John Fugelsang: there are too many candidates up on the stage for any debate format to work. I get more insight into these candidates when one of them shows up on Late Night with Stephen Colbert.

The CNBC format, furthermore, only confirms my long-standing observation that having multiple moderators is a huge mistake. The combination of so many candidates and so many moderators makes it that much easier for a candidate to get away with flat-out lying or completely ignoring a question from White House reporter Brock Brockman, because the next moderator isn't going to follow up on Brock Brockman's question, and when it gets around to Brock Brockman's turn to ask another question, he's going to address it to one of the other candidates.

It now appears that the candidates themselves cannot agree on debate conditions, so perhaps we'll see one debate for candidates who want brown M&Ms, the air conditioning set at 67°, and equal time for everybody for three hours; and another debate for candidates who prefer red M&Ms, the A/C set to 70°, and time allotted proportionately to poll numbers for 90 minutes.

And maybe we'll have the moderators walk off the set after 20 minutes of whiny, unfactual non-responses and leave the candidates to fill the remaining air time on their own.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Everybody's getting into the act in this week's installment of Bergetoons.

Gosh, I hope this election doesn't go into extra innings.

Spooky Toons

Welcome to a special Halloween edition of Spookback Saturday! My cartoon this week was about an actual Halloween costume, but usually, we cartoonists mine this holiday for metaphors we can apply to whatever political story is in the headlines.

And I'm no exception. The charge that one's political opponent was attempting to scare seniors on the issue of social security was ready-made for a Halloween cartoon -- this one featuring the candidates for Wisconsin's 1st congressional seat in 1996 (Republican Mark Neumann and Democrat Lydia Spottswood).

Halloween and elections are made for each other. You can illustrate a charge that Candidate A is a Republican or Democrat in name only, for example, by having a donkey trick-or-treating in an elephant mask or vice versa. Just having kids dressed as political candidates and declaring that to be the scariest costume ever is overdone, I think -- I've seen way too many of such cartoons this season -- so the challenge is to find some way to turn that idea on its head.

I tried doing that in 2006 by portraying right-wingers attempting to be the very opposite of scary as they bemoaned Republicans' dismal chances in off-year elections. Fortunately, they did not succeed in convincing Democrats to stay home on Election Day that year.

Jumping ahead to 2013, these two persistent trick-or-treaters weren't being scary; but they were going to be disappointed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on the issue of marriage equality.

Another use for Halloween imagery is when there is some issue that "just won't die," as in this 1986 cartoon for the NorthCountry Journal about a dam on the Kickapoo River, started in the 1960's; the Army Corps of Engineers ended up leaving the gates open, however, yielding to environmental concerns. A Democrat running for Wisconsin State Assembly in 1986 wanted the project completed.

This cartoon actually ran in the November issue, so I had to frame it from the vantage point of being after Halloween.

A big problem with Halloween is that it is so prone to cliché. Do you think taxes, prices, or the rent is too damn high? Vampire cartoon! Do you think somebody doesn't realize how hopeless they are? Great Pumpkin cartoon! Do you think Tea Partisans are mindlessly reckless and bent on destruction? Zombie (or Frankenstein) cartoon! Do you hate Hillary Clinton? Witch cartoon!

I can't be sure whether this 1900 R. C. Bowman cartoon was drawn for Halloween, but it illustrates how old these spooky ideas are. There is very little new material without having to dig very deep (oh, about six feet) to find anything original on which to hang a cartoon.

The most famous Halloween editorial cartoon of all time was drawn in 1936 by J. "Ding" Darling, showing Harry Hopkins, James Farley and Franklin Roosevelt running off with a family's outhouse, labeled "Private Rights," with an alarmed John Q. Public peering out from inside. Darling hadn't actually meant the cartoon for publication, and his editor at the Des Moines Register thought it was in bad taste; but the wife of his syndicate publisher reportedly told the New York Herald Tribune editors, "If you don't publish it, I'll put it on the woman's page!"

If you're going to swipe an old cartoon idea from someone else, at least give them the credit for it.