Not Suitable for General Audiences

With apologies to Charles Addams...

...and to anybody lacking an encyclopedic knowledge of his work.

I'll explain later.

Q Toon: 107 Days

Former Vice President Kamala Harris published a memoir of her thwarted dash for the Oval Office last week, and it caused quite the hubbub in Washington (until our Felon In Chief and his Martini Martinet bombed in front of a command audience of every general, admiral, and space marshall  in the U.S. military).

No doubt, books like 107 Days will be of great value to future historians trying to figure out how American democracy came to a tragic end. But for now, it joins a select few literary tomes by presidential runners-up — Hilary Clinton's What Happened and Richard Nixon's Six Crises come to mind — laboring to deflect the blame for coming up short in the Electoral College.

In so doing, Harris steps on a few toes.

Would we be better off had President Biden recognized his declining faculties? Well, duh. Nearly everybody in the Democratic Party wishes that Dean Phillips and Jason Palmer weren't the only ones willing to step up and advocate for a little age discrimination.

Would it have helped if Tim Walz had gone more forcefully for JD Vance's jugular in their televised debate? Well, maybe. But if you pick the Governor of Minnesota as your running mate, don't be surprised if you get a heap o' Minnesota Nice.

Harris explains that she passed over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because he was too interested in the top job someday. Which is a hoot, because Harris herself was a rival to Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020. Besides, I don't know where she could possibly have found a Democrat qualified to be Vice President with no interest in redecorating the Oval Office.

Her reasoning against naming Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate was that while she likes him personally and politically, she didn't think U.S. voters were ready to elect the ticket of a Black-Asian woman with a Jewish husband and a gay man with a husband of his own.

Buttigieg has responded that he was surprised by Harris's reasoning, and believes in "giving Americans more credit" in accepting the possibility of having a First and Second Gentleman at the same time. Harris might have had a point, however; the Trump campaign was able to successfully attack Harris as being "for they/them" even without Buttigieg on the ticket.

107 Days also includes swipes at Democrats Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzger, and Mark Kelly. Since just about every Democrat I've named in these paragraphs is considering a run for the presidency in 2028 (maybe not Joe Biden — I sure hope not), I'm pretty sure that Kamala Harris is not on their short lists for their own running mate.

Not that she'd be interested in the vice presidency.

Thomas Marshall, John Nance Garner, and Selina Meyer could tell you why.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's sneak peek is a sketch I was working on last night before deciding to start over and to take the cartoon in a different direction.

By the way, it's amazing to me that in grayscale, every scanner that I've ever worked with thinks that white bristol board is this dark. Had I scanned this sketch in color, I'm sure that the paper would have read as cyan to blue.

Robert Junior Steps Into Dad's Shoes

The star of this week's Graphical History Tour is Robert Jr., the son and namesake of a famous father, following in Daddy's footsteps all the way to Washington, D.C.

Detail from "Politics Again Attracts Attention" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Sept. 15, 1925

Not a Kennedy.

Robert M. La Follette Jr. was 30 years old when he declared candidacy for the Senate seat of his late father, "Fighting Bob" La Follette. Called "Young Bob" to distinguish him from his namesake, he was just old enough to qualify for the Senate under the U.S. Constitution.

"Practicing Those 'Thunderous Footfalls'" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Sept. 20, 1925

Skeptical political cartoonists naturally questioned the young man's qualifications to fill his father's shoes, even if they weren't fans of the elder La Follette when he was alive. I will give J.P. Alley (whose editorial cartooning shoes at the Commercial Appeal would later be filled by his son, Cal Alley) credit for the unique and unorthodox observation that "Radicals" had cause for concern.

"On to Washington" by Jesse Cargill for Central Press Assn., ca. Oct. 3, 1925

Outlook magazine expressed the more conventional view that

"During [Robert La Follette Sr.']s lifetime, he found an able lieutenant in his son, Robert M. La Follette, Jr.; and now that La Follette is regarded as his successor. This is partly because the younger La Follette has explicitly subscribed to the political beliefs of his father, but in no small measure because he has an engaging personality of his own."

"Young Independence Is On His Way" by (Louis T.?) Merrill in Beloit Daily News, Sept. 8, 1925

It wasn't just the senior La Follette's shoes that were too big for his son, according to this Wisconsin cartoonist; so were his reputation and his hat. Blaine, whose collar Merrill drew chained around Young Bob's neck, was Governor John J. Blaine, a Progressive Republican.

I haven't come across any other cartoons by Merrill; this cartoon originally appeared in the Beloit Daily News and was reprinted in a few other newspapers around the state. Louis Taylor Merrill was on the Daily News masthead as the newspaper's Editorial Writer, so my guess is that this cartoon was drawn by him or someone in his household. 

Maybe his son.

"It's The Old Familiar Touch" by Guy R. Spencer in Omaha World Herald, Sept. 17, 1925

Footwear notwithstanding, La Follette decisively won the September 15 primary over Roy P. Wilcox of Eau Claire, the Coolidge Republican candidate, and half a dozen other candidates.

"Where It Fades Out" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 19, 1925

The general election two weeks later was universally expected to merely ratify the primary election results. La Follette received more votes in the open primary than all the other candidates put together. The Democratic candidate, William George Bruce, ran so poorly in the primary that under state election rules, he didn’t even qualify to appear on the September 29 ballot.

"La Follettes All Look Alike to Him" by Edmund Duffy in Baltimore Sun, Sept. 18, 1925

Head of the Republican National Committee Senator William Butler (R-MA) called upon Wisconsin Republicans not to back Young Bob.

"Regardless of the fact that Mr. La Follette is running under the Republican machinery, he supported a candidate and platform in the last national election opposed to the candidate and platform of the Cleveland convention, [Calvin Coolidge,] and the Republican committee will not support him in any event. I cannot look upon a man who opposes the candidate of a party and the principles of a convention as a Republican, whether he runs under the Republican machinery or not."

"Sort of a Beauty Spot to Her" by Chas Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Sept. 18, 1925

Following Senator Butler's lead, the Wisconsin Republican Party met to endorse an alternative to La Follette. Wilcox yielded to pressure from party leaders to withdraw in favor of former Lt. Governor Edward Dithmar of Baraboo. A telegram from Sen. Irvine Lenroot (R-WA) urged "Wilcox  should let Dithmar try in view of his poor showing in the primary" — in which Dithmar had not been a candidate.

"Weather Report" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, Sept. 29, 1925

The general election results were so pre-ordained that over the state line in Minneapolis, Tom Foley could confidently draw the above cartoon for the day of the vote. Young Bob La Follette carried every county in the state except for Rock County (which happens to include Beloit).

"The La Follette Estate" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, Oct. 1, 1925

Running nominally as an Independent, Dithmar finished a distant second to La Follette. Socialist John M. Work came in third, largely due to votes from Milwaukee (yet underperforming previous Socialist candidates there); Democrat Bruce, waging a write-in campaign, placed fourth.

Unsigned cartoon in Capital Times, Madison, Sept. 30, 1925

If there was a signature on this cartoon, the Cap Times cropped it out. Whoever drew it included Senators Butler and Lenroot among the "old guard" bowled over backward by "Young Fighting Bob" striding toward Progress — in reasonably sized shoes.

"Seeing Things in Wisconsin" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, ca. Oct. 7, 1925

Editorial cartoonists never quite agreed on what animal should represent the Progressive Party. Some drew it as a goat, while others, seizing on the La Follettes' first name, drew it as a bobcat. Use of the Bull Moose to represent the Progressive Party had ended with the death of Theodore Roosevelt.

Robert M. La Follette Jr. may have run as a Republican, but Ted Brown agreed with the Stand Pat Republicans that La Follette was not purebred GOP.

"Don't I Look Like Dad" by Edward G. McCandlish in Washington Post, Oct. 5, 1925

Actually, doesn't he kind of look like a young Marlon Brando?

Cartoonist Edward McCandlish (1887-1946) had a varied career, authoring 21 children's books and designing toys; during World War I, he painted camouflage markings on military uniforms, that being how it was done back then. He was perhaps best known for his "Bootlegger's Map of the United States," which first appeared as a two-page spread in Washington Post on March 14, 1926. (News reports at his death state that the map first appeared in the Detroit Free Press, but I don't find it printed there until 1930, and then much smaller.) 

"It's Sink or Swim for Young Bob Now" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Oct. 5, 1925

Young Bob would win reelection to the Senate as a Republican in 1928, and as a Progressive in 1934 and 1940, championing organized labor and supporting much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, but also advocating isolationist foreign policies. He was defeated for reelection to a fourth full term in 1946 by a Wisconsin Republican you might have heard of.

Joseph R. McCarthy.

Q Toon: Surrender Data

I could get into the debate over whether the Wicked Witch of the West was calling for Dorothy to surrender, or demanding that her friends surrender her, but here's the thing: Elphaba forgot the comma. Case closed.

Anyway, today's cartoon is about Attorney General Pam Bondi subpoenaing detailed information on minors who receive transgender therapy, including names and Social Security numbers of patients.

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in a statement July 9 that the department had sent more than 20 subpoenas to doctors and clinics that provide [gender-affirming] care. The request represented an elevation in President Donald Trump’s administration’s effort to halt the medical treatment for transgender youth, even in states where it’s legal.

Bondi said the requests were part of investigations into “healthcare fraud, false statements, and more.” No charges have been announced so far, but the probes have had a chilling impact on the availability of care.

Specifics of the requests were not made public until a court filing in a separate lawsuit this week.

Court filings last month revealed that at least one of the subpoenas, sent to Children's Hospital of  Philadelphia, ran 18 pages long listing detailed patient documentation demanded by the Absolutely Corrupt Trump regime, HIPAA be damned. “It turns doctor-patient confidentiality into government surveillance,” said Jennifer Levi, GLAD Law’s senior director of Transgender and Queer Rights.

Republican state Attorneys General are sticking their noses into the confidential patient data of transgender minors, too. An appeals court this week overturned a lower court ruling and allowed Missouri's Attorney General to subpoena records of 1,165 patients of the Washington University Transgender Center in St. Louis.

On the other side of the political divide, Democratic Attorneys General from fourteen states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit against the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime to block Attorney General Bondi from seizing transgender youths' confidential patient records, charging, "The administration has explicitly threatened civil and criminal prosecution of providers of this care and launched criminal investigations into children’s hospitals."

“These threats have no basis in law. No federal law prohibits, much less criminalizes, the provision or receipt of gender-affirming care for transgender adolescents,” the attorneys general argued.

Will Democrats shut down the government if Republicans slip a provision changing that into the must-pass budget bill on Tuesday? Stay tuned.

Let's Fix That Headline, Shall We?

Absolutely Corrupt President Donald Joffrey Trump went before the United Nations General Assembly yesterday and delivered an unhinged, hour-long rant; and somehow, Americans from Alabama to Wyoming can still wake up to this anodyne headline in their morning paper.

A kudos or two goes to the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel for hitting closer to the mark, but my collage above doesn't quite include all the cookie cutter front pages of whatever vulture capitalist corporation owns these ten newspapers.

But I thought I'd help out any of them planning to put out a second edition today.

This Week's Sneak Peek

The more I think about it, I wish I had used "You're fired" as the punch line for last week's cartoon.

The "indefinite suspension" of Jimmy Kimmel after direct and explicit demands from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr that ABC cancel Kimmel's late night television show – and after Reichsfuhrer Donald Berzelius Trump promised after Colbert's cancelation that Kimmel would be next – was the real story of the week, not social media's wild speculation as to the motives of Charlie Kirk's assassin.

Somebody must get Carr to answer what exactly, was Kimmel's offense. Did he quote the nasty things Kirk has said over the years after George Floyd was killed, or Paul Pelosi was attacked? Did he mock him for saying that school shootings and the other thousands of gun deaths every year were worth it to keep Second Amendment rights? Did he say that Kirk deserved what he got?

No, no, and no.

You don't have to judge Kimmel by the no-context chyrons on the evening news, or the ten-second clip shared by Colbert, Fallon, Meyers, Oliver, et al. Here is how Kimmel's final monologue actually went:

"We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

"In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this."

The late-night host then played a clip of President Trump being asked how he has been holding up since the killing, to which Trump responds: "I think very good" and begins to talk about plans for the new White House ballroom.

The show then cuts back to Kimmel, who continues: "Yes, he's at the fourth stage of grief; construction.

"Demolition..construction...

"This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend, this is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, ok. And it didn't just happen once".

The host then played another clip of the President on Fox News revealing the moment he was told Kirk had been shot while he was with the architects for the new White House ballroom.

The show cuts back to Kimmel, who says: "And then we installed the most beautiful chandelier...[inaudible] you wouldn't believe.

"There's something wrong with him — there really is. I mean, who thinks like that and why are we building a $200million ballroom in the White..., Is it possible that he is doing it intentionally, so we can be mad about that instead of the Epstein list?

"By the time he's out of office, the White House will have slot machines and a water slide.

"Trump is in major change the subject mode, on Friday he stopped by the always friendly morning crew at Fox. Whenever Trump goes on Fox & Friends it's funny because the hosts are so eager for him to be reasonable, they spell it all out for him. They desperately want to avoid having to nod along with anything crazy or contradict him so they give him the question, and their preferred answer too.

Kimmel then plays a clip from the Fox & Friends interview where the hosts asked the President: "Is the message too, to the right, the people who are going to go 'I want revenge', not to have revenge, Charlie Kirk would not want revenge?" To which the President responds "he would want revenge at the voter [ballot] box"

The show cuts back to Kimmel, who says: "Good answer right, take it to the ballot box. That's reasonable, that's almost presidential but that's the thing, he can never just stop right there."

The late-night host then plays another clip from the Fox & Friends interview where the President remarks that California "doesn't have ballot boxes."

The show cuts back to Kimmel, who says: "Oh well, in that case begin the purge."

"For the record, we live in California we do have ballot boxes, we've got mail boxes, we have lunch boxes, we have all kinds of boxes, you should come see them sometime, we'll give you a toolbox, you can live in it.

"And then we have this head of the FBI, this character Kash Patel who so far has handled this investigation into the murder of Charlie Kirk like a kid who didn't read the book BS-ing his way through an oral report."

The show cuts to the FBI director on Fox, defending a social media post he made about the arrest of a "subject" in the hours after Kirk was shot, who was later released, telling the show: "I was telling the world what the FBI was doing as we were doing."

The show cut backs to Kimmel, who says: "...which was claiming we caught the killer when we had not.

"Kash Patel always looks like he just got hit by a Volkswagen."

He continues: "The Governor of Utah, Governor Spencer Cox, has been a rare voice of sanity after what happened in his state, he urged Americans to choose humanity, connection and love and even encouraged us to listen to people we disagree with, which is not the plan according to Marjorie Taylor Greene.

"Klan Mom wrote today, 'There's nothing left to talk about with the left, they hate us. They assassinated our nice guy who actually talked to them, peacefully debating ideas. Then millions on the left celebrated and made clear they want all of us dead. To be honest I want a peaceful, national divorce,' the same thing her husband said about two and half years ago.

"But a peaceful national divorce, how would that work? You get Florida, we get Vermont? We share custody of Disney World every other weekend? She's right. The right it feels like we are all stuck in a marriage to Marjorie Taylor Greene right now."