Clay Jones on POTUS 5/2

MAGA Grouch by Clay Jones

After seeing this cartoon, my friend John Kovalic wrote, “Sesame Street is brought to you today by the letter ‘F’ and the number 47.”

Late last night (Thursday), Donald Trump issued another illegal executive order, with this one ordering the board of directors for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to “cease federal funding for NPR and PBS” because Trump claims they’re woke and liberally biased.

The problem with liberal bias is that facts have a liberal bias. If everything you say is a lie and everything you do is corrupt, illegal, sick, depraved, inhumane, racist, and fucked up, then factual reporting is not your friend.

Trump can’t do anything official against the free press, but he can put his weight on them, which seems to be working on The Washington Post and CBS News, but he can meddle with government programs…to an extent.

The order says, “Neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens. The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

The good news is, the government will continue to fund Trump’s golf games.

PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger called it a “blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night.” The middle of the night is when authoritarian governments tend to do their best work, like sending stormtroopers to break down your door, drag every member of your family out, and then put them in a train cattle car.

CPB issued a statement saying, “CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

I bet Trump’s thinking that’s the kind of biased reporting that is costing PBS and NPR their funding. He’s probably also thinking, “Respect my authority!”

The CPB noted that the statute Congress passed to create it “expressly forbade any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”

Congress said that such funds “may be used at the discretion of the recipient” for producing or acquiring programs to put on the air.

Trump has already asked Congress to rescind funds already approved for public broadcasting. Fascists always murder a free press.

CPB is already suing the regime over Trump’s executive order seeking to fire three of its five board members.

Trump recently attacked PBS and NPR on his platform ShitSocial, saying, “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”

Does Big Bird look like a radical left monster?

Conservatives have been howling for years that NPR and PBS are liberally biased while the progressive group Fair (Fairness in Accuracy in Reporting) once issued a report blasting PBS and NPR for being too conservative.

That’s the thing with the media. It’s never conservative enough for conservatives or liberal enough for liberals.

We got that complaint all the time when I was at The Free Lance-Star. Our page at that time was conservative, but we ran liberal columns and my pinko and unpatriotic cartoons. My editors sought balance, but there was still more conservative content than liberal, yet the conservatives still howled.

Each week, Politico publishes what they call the “Cartoon Carousel,” which is a collection of cartoons from the past week (USA Today and The Washington Post both used to do this, but they stopped). It too seeks balance and publishes an equal number of conservative and liberal cartoons, which means half the cartoons suck. I support diversity in news content, but I hate when it’s chosen over quality.

Now, one of those who complain irrationally about balance is in the White House, and he’ll abuse his power to do things the Constitution doesn’t give him the power to do.

Trump’s first 100 days have been a total disaster. Defunding public broadcasting is the kind of messed up crap we can expect for the next 100 days and every day after that until we get this orange ogre out of the White House.

Creative note: My brain was slow-moving today, and I have about ten subjects written down to choose from. Sometimes it’s harder to choose your subject than it is to write the cartoon. When you have a long list of subjects, it’s nice when you can combine two of them, which I did today. Oscar came to me around noon. I need to move on to those other subjects, but while writing this blog, I got a great idea featuring Bert and Ernie.

Music note: Have you ever noticed that the Sesame Street theme is the same song as Sunshine Day by The Brady Bunch?

Drawn in 30 seconds: From TikTok, and with music. (snip-MORE)