As many of you mentioned in the comments, my previous cartoon was based on the globe scene from “The Great Dictator”. Putting aside that Trump couldn’t possibly be that athletic, I chose to base my multi-panel cartoon on that scene because I was looking for a concept which illustrated Trump’s need to project that he’s the big guy, the leader of the free world who summons all the other little countries. All the theater and pageantry the White House put on the last several days had everything to do with Trump’s narcissism and desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
If you haven’t seen the Charlie Chaplin film and that brilliant scene, I encourage you to do so. Chaplin was prescient in his urgent warning to the world about Hitler and the Nazi ideology. I wish we could see what he would have created for our situation today.
D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office instructs federal prosecutors not to press felony charges against people openly carrying shotguns and rifles in the Capital.
August 22, 1958 President Dwight Eisenhower announced a voluntary moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. A report outlining a system for monitoring and verifying compliance of a complete ban on such testing had been released just the day before. The Conference of Experts, as it was known, had been meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to work out the details on detection of violations of such a treaty. The U.S. delegation was led by Nobel physics laureate Ernest Lawrence from the University of California (the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is named after him). Eisenhower predicated his moratorium on U.S.S.R. and U.K. agreement to the same limitations. All three countries agreed to the one-year halt in testing and to begin negotiations on a complete test ban at the end of October; all three performed last-minute (atmospheric) tests before the opening of talks.
August 22, 1964 Singing at a boardwalk demonstration: Hamer (with microphone), Stokely Carmichael, (in hat), Eleanor Holmes Norton, Ella Baker. Fannie Lou Hamer, leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), testified in front of the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention. She was challenging the all-white delegation that the segregated regular Mississippi Democrats had sent to the presidential nominating convention. Mississippi’s Democratic Party excluded African Americans from participation. The MFDP, on the other hand, sought to create a racially inclusive new party, signing up 60,000 members. The hearing was televised live and many heard Hamer’s impassioned plea for inclusion of all Democrats from her state.The hearing was televised live and many heard Hamer’s impassioned plea for inclusion of all Democrats from her state. In her testimony she spoke about black Mississippians not only being denied the right to register to vote, but being harassed, beaten, shot at, and arrested for trying. Concerned about the political reaction to her statement, President Lyndon Johnson suddenly called an impromptu press conference, thereby interrupting television broadcast of the hearing. Hear her testimony Link to photo gallery
August 22, 1971 The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) arrested twenty in Camden, New Jersey, and five in Buffalo, New York, for conspiracy to steal and destroy draft records. Eventually known as the Camden 28, most were Roman Catholic activists, including four priests, and a Lutheran minister.“We are not here because of a crime committed in Camden but because of a war committed in Indochina….” Cookie Ridolfi The Camden 28
August 22, 1972 Rhodesia’s team was banned from competing in the Olympic Games with just four days to go before the opening ceremony in Munich, Germany. The National Olympic Committees of Africa had threatened to pull out of the games unless Rhodesia was barred from competing. Though the Rhodesian team included both whites and blacks, the government was an illegal one, controlled by whites though they represented just 5% of the country’s population. It had broken away from the British Commonwealth over demands from Commonwealth member nations that power be yielded to the majority. Read more
August 22, 1986 The Kerr-McGee Corporation agreed to pay the estate of the late Karen Silkwood $1.38 million ($2.68 in 2008), settling a 10-year-old nuclear contamination lawsuit. She had been active in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, specifically looking into radiation exposure of workers, and spills and leaks of plutonium. The story of Karen Silkwood
Trump-Approved African American History by Clay Jones
Donald Trump wants to make the nation as stupid and racist as he is Read on Substack
On Tuesday, Donald Trump posted on ShitSocial, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.”
That doesn’t sound good. What he’s doing to the universities and the government in his efforts to eliminate “woke” is destroying our institutions, historical culture, and progress in anti-discrimination.
Trump is a champion of discrimination. These edicts he’s sending out daily sound like crap you’d hear from a dictator. Our history is being rewritten by the dumbest kid in the classroom. Even his social media posts prove he’s a moron. Typically, bigots are morons.
Trump is choosing Kennedy Center honorees and trying to influence what universities teach. He’s choosing what information is documented and archived by our military. They’re removing anything that honors gay, Black, Latino, and female. They had a hissy fit over the name “Enola Gay.” They even removed Harvey Milk’s name from a ship.
Trump’s ordering the Smithsonian to get rid of anything that’s “woke.” Naturally, they’re getting rid of whatever they believe is woke because wokeness is a good thing.
I’m not on the talking point that Trump is dying, but he can’t be healthy. We’ve seen photos of Trump with food from McDonald’s, KFC, and even a taco bowl, but when’s the last time you saw a pic of him with a salad? You would think he’d at least do a photo-op with one. I don’t like to wish death on anyone. I think it’s kinda tacky, even for a piece of crap like Trump, and I’m afraid it might bounce back onto me.
A couple of days ago, Trump called into Fox News, because he’s the kind of guy with lots of time on his hands (it’s not like he has an important job or anything), and said his motivation for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, other than a Nobel Peace Prize, is to win a spot in Heaven. There’s a LOT to pack in here.
Trump called and said, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he explained. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.” (snip-MORE, also great)
PS: Suppose South Park is making Trump nervous, with all the Satan in his bed stuff? Also, repealing the OBBB will help him a lot more than meddling in other countries’s business. -A)
Hi Everyone. I’ve spoken with Scottie about this, but I don’t think I’ve brought it up here. These past couple of weeks have been very hard. My crew has been down to 32 hours since April, and now we’ve had to make the hard decision of lay-offs. I barely have enough work right now to keep half my people busy, and next month is looking like we will be lucky to pay the power bill much less payroll. My people are worried about their bills, putting food on the table, clothing their children for the school year. I gave money out of my wallet to one of our workers today because he couldn’t figure out how he was going go get his son home from spending time with the grandparents. That same employee is recently homeless, living out of a tent in a near by campground. But, thank God we made sure those billionaires got a tax break! Biden was such a horrible president, they say, yet everyone was working. I don’t understand their method of measurement.
Sorry for the lack of posting and no cartoon meme post tomorrow morning. I have been very sick all day with vomiting and diarrhea. From the morphines and muscle relaxers I was impacted, which was a harder constipation. I had taken fiber and it did not help, so I took 2 laxatives. They did not work so the next day I took 2 more. I have been diagnosed with a sensitive stomach meaning it can’t take pressure so it was refusing to let me eat / swallow anything and the bile and acids needed to be vomited up. By noon the dam broke and I have spent most of the day near or on the toilet or in bed. At 1 pm Ron made me some chicken noodle soup. It helped calm my stomach but did not help the other end. I am trying to eat something now due to my blood sugar but I can only do a chicken strip and a few french fries. Tomorrow we go out for our big shopping day, glad it was not today which we had planned. By the way I was stationed in West Berlin in the 1980s. Hugs.
Pentagon asks civilian employees to join ‘volunteer force’ to aid Ice deportations
Selected employees will join Trump’s mass deportation campaign and ‘offer critical support’ to Ice operations
The excellent Minnesota Vikings cheer squad. Image credit: David Berding // Getty Images)
The American economy has become sluggish, Trump’s foreign policy has been abysmal, and we still don’t have the Epstein files that likely implicate Trump’s role in a massive sex operation that targeted children.
Thus, the distractions keep on comin’, and the latest culture war fiasco being trial-ballooned by rightwing media is… male cheerleaders in the NFL.
If you’ve spent any time on social media over the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen the predictable, manufactured outrage over the Minnesota Vikings adding two men to their cheer squad this season.
Fox News, conservative influencers, and even Republican elected officials are getting in the mix, desperate to find any damn distraction they can to keep folks from paying attention to the massive failures and glaring scandals of the Trump administration and Republican Party across-the-board this year.
But this ain’t a new thing. There have been male cheerleaders in the NFL since 2018, when the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints became the first franchises to add men to their cheer squads.
Since then, the Carolina Panthers, Seattle Seahawks, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, New England Patriots, Kansas City Chiefs, Indianapolis Colts, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens have selected male cheerleaders.
This season, a full third of NFL teams have men on their cheerleading squads, but what I find truly hilarious is that the past eight winners of the Super Bowl have male cheerleaders.
In fact, the past eight Super Bowls have only featured teams with male cheerleaders.
Yesterday, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama—a former college coach—weakly attempted to fear-monger over the issue with one of the more bizarre claims he’s made in a while:
But if you’re going to be woke and you’re gonna try to take the men out of men’s sports, which is what you’re doing. They’re trying to take gender and say, ‘OK, we’re going to make it more about gender than we are about masculinity.’ Then, you’re going to have a huge problem. It’s coming.
I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, either. I caught the oblique reference to trans women in women’s sports, but good lord, what an awkward way of framing the argument.
This is all the more amusing when you consider the long history of Republican politicians who were male cheerleaders.
That includes four Republican presidents in their college years: both George W. Bush and his father George H. W. Bush at Yale, Ronald Reagan at Eureka, and Dwight D. Eisenhower at West Point.
Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was a cheerleader at Texas A&M. So was Senator Trent Lott at Ole Miss. So was Mitt Romney at Stanford.
The Republican Party has a long and proud history of producing the nation’s finest male cheerleaders. In the past 50 years, more Republican presidents have been male cheerleaders than seen combat.
So, what’s the play here? We all know it’s a distraction, but why are Republicans and conservative media hoping this’ll stick?
Some rightwing men are angry over male cheerleaders because male cheerleaders distract from their open lusting toward women cheerleaders.
They see male cheerleaders as a distraction because they might “accidentally” objectify a male cheerleader amidst all the pretty ladies and that puts them on edge.
Yet they’re openly lusting for women cheerleaders at a public venue in front of kids.
These are the same dudes who claim any LGBTQ content in any public context is harmful to kids because from the warped and sad perspective of these dudes, merely the presence of LGBTQ visibility is always sexual in nature.
But they’re actually very pleased to ogle sexy women and see no problem doing so in front of kids. Sexual performance is never a problem when it caters to straight men.
As always, this goes back to the male gaze and some straight men being entirely incapable of reconciling their own sexuality and religious hypocrisy and using the “safety of kids” to alleviate their own discomfort.
The problem isn’t the presence of sexy cheerleaders, regardless of gender. It isn’t the presence of children. It isn’t even supposed religious teachings.
The problem, as always, are some straight, conservative men needing the entire world to cater to all their whims and all their discomforts and holding up a Bible to cover for that, which immediately gets set back down the moment there are sexy ladies to ogle.
It’s pathetic, but what would you expect from a political party that’s doing everything it can to distract from its leader, Donald Trump, being connected to a massive sex trafficking operation?
The Republican Party is in desperate need of better crowd chants. Maybe they should ask their own male cheerleaders to help them out.
August 21, 1831 Nat Turner, a 30-year-old man legally owned by a child, and six other slaves began a violent insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia.They began by killing the child’s stepfather, Joseph Travis, and his family. Within the next 24 hours, Turner and, ultimately, about 40 followers killed the families who owned adjacent slaveholding properties, nearly 60 whites, while freeing and inciting other slaves to join them.Militia and federal troops were called out, and the uprising was suppressed with 55 African Americans including Turner executed by hanging in Jerusalem, Virginia, and hundreds more killed by white mobs and vigilantes in revenge. More about Nat Turner Nat Turner’s confession
August 21, 1968 The Czechoslovakian people spontaneously and nonviolently resisted invasion of their country of 14 million by hundreds of thousands of troops and 5000+ tanks from the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact countries.The troops were enforcing the overthrow and arrest of Alexander Dubcek and his government. They had been implementing significant democratic reforms known collectively as “socialism with a human face,” or the Prague Spring. Cover of the magazine Kvety, with a photograph of the statue of St. Wenceslas in Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague. Graffiti on the statue reads “Soldiers go home” in Russian and “Dubcek – Svoboda” in Czech. Hundreds attempted to obstruct invading tanks. Both Czechs and Slovaks argued with the soldiers and refused all cooperation with the occupying armies while showing broad support for the deposed government and its reform program. Moscow relented and returned Dubcek to office, at least temporarily. Prague Spring in retrospect Czech perspective
August 21, 1971 Two grenades killed and wounded members of the leadership of the Philippines’ Liberal Party during a rally in Manila’s Plaza Miranda. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos accused a leader of the party, Benigno Aquino, of the bombing and arrested him, labeling him a communist. Liberal Party Secretary-General Aquino, an effective young leader and Marcos opponent, was imprisoned, mostly in solitary confinement, for seven years until allowed exile to the U.S., ostensibly for medical treatment.
August 21, 1976 Approximately 20,000 people, mainly women, from both Protestant and Catholic areas of Belfast, Northern Ireland, attended a Peace People’s rally at Ormeau Park.
August 21, 1983 Exiled popular Philippine political leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated by soldiers of the Aviation Security Command as he crossed the tarmac at Manila International Airport. Benigno Aquino He had spent three years of asylum in the U.S. Upon his return, he intended to lead the political opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos and the martial law he had imposed. During the plane trip across the Pacific, he had commented to reporters, “I suppose there’s a physical danger because you know assassination’s part of public service . . . My feeling is we all have to die sometime and if it’s my fate to die by an assassin’s bullet, so be it.” Hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Marcos.
Ferdinand Marcos The Aquino funeral drew millions and gave impetus to the broad-based People’s Power movement which eventually forced Marcos from power. Read more about Aquino
August 21, 1991 A coup against Soviet Union President Mikhail S. Gorbachev by hard-line Communist Party members (State Emergency Committee), collapsed in the face of popular opposition. Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, having quit the Party the previous year, had called for a general strike. Mikhail S. Gorbachev | Boris N.Yelsin
August 21, 1998 Samuel Bowers, the 73-year-old former Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, of ordering a firebombing that killed civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer 32 years before. Bowers had also been instrumental in the killing of three other civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi for which he was never charged. On Vernon Dahmer’s tombstone are the words, “If you don’t vote, you don’t count.” Samuel Bowers 32 years to justice Dahmer’s home after the bombing
(It’s a newsletter I receive, and I don’t have a link for what I’ve copied and am pasting, but there are links within the piece. Enjoy.)
AUGUST 17 — AUGUST 23
Angela Davis debuts on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. In 1969, the legendary author and activist Angela Davis was a newly minted assistant philosophy processor at UCLA. But she was also an avowed Communist, and as a result, then-Governor Ronald Regan tried to have her fired before she’d begun any actual teaching. No luck: Davis’s dismissal didn’t hold up in court, and her first class had to be moved to a bigger classroom to accommodate the 2,000 students who had signed up for it—but she would finally be fired again nine months later, for “inflammatory rhetoric” in public speeches. Davis was an outspoken supporter of the Black Panthers and was fervently against the Vietnam War, but arguably her most scandalous activist activities at the time were in defense of the Soledad Brothers, three Black inmates imprisoned in Soledad, CA, who were accused of killing a white guard. In 1970, guns registered to Davis were used in an attack on the nearby Marin County Civic Center; the perpetrators hoped to take hostages to bargain for the inmates’ release, but instead left four casualties. Davis, despite not being at the scene, was charged with murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges. She couldn’t be found, and so on August 18, 1970, by order of J. Edgar Hoover, Davis became the third woman ever to be included on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Eight weeks later, Davis was finally arrested in a New York motel; the trial that followed catapulted her to international fame—and turned her into a revolutionary icon—as her supporters, who viewed her as a political prisoner, chanted “Free Angela!” across the globe.In 1972, after 16 months in prison, she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury. “It took a worldwide movement of people to acquit Miss Davis,” noted one of her attorneys, Howard Moore Jr., but it shouldn’t have. “Justice should be the routine of the system,” he added.
THIS IS WHY THEY BAN IT: “Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation. ” –Angela Davis
Scottie's Playtime 