Odds and ends

A couple things I’ve been up to lately: I edited this illustrated essay by Juana Medina about her Kafkaesque experience immigrating to the U.S. Moving here legally and permanently from another country isn’t as easy as some people think.

I also had the pleasure of interviewing comedy writer Nell Scovell (credits: The Simpsons, The Muppets, Spy Magazine, among many others) for the Austin Chronicle’s SXSW coverage. We had a nice chat about bullshit and women in comedy.

Candidates we can all get behind

Just having some fun this week. If you do a Google image search for “Justin Trudeau boxing” you get some interesting results.

North Carolina’s anti-trans bathroom law stinks

Seems like the GOP wastes an awful lot of time and money creating solutions to problems that don’t exist. Voter ID laws are one example. North Carolina’s recent anti-LGBT law concerning public restrooms is another. Now, stop me if I’m going out on a limb here, folks, but it’s almost as if Republicans have some sort of agenda against certain groups of people.

The billboard slogan in the last panel is inspired by North Carolina’s “First in Flight” motto. I’ll bet even Orville and Wilbur would be ashamed.

Obama Nominates Fern to Supreme Court

Apologies to the Honorable Merrick Garland for the comparison to a moisture-loving houseplant. I’m sure he has more going on upstairs than your average Nephrolepis exaltata. It’s just that he was not the most inspiring pick in a year when the Democrats really need to inspire the base.  The choice of Garland was likely intended to highlight the GOP’s absurd obstructionism. Perhaps he’s the only pick Dems think can make it through the blockade, somehow. While he would almost certainly be much better than any Republican nominee, it’s not clear to me that the “reasonable bipartisan” approach Obama often favors actually gets results at the polls, or in the court of public opinion.

For more on fern sex, please consult The American Fern Society.

The 2016 elections and the Elvis Factor

In a 2003 column (“Who Can Beat President Doofus?”), Molly Ivins wrote about John Kerry’s lack of Elvis:

My early take on Kerry was that he has gravitas–sumbitch about bent over double with gravitas–but that he has no Elvis. Minus-zero on the Elvis Scale was my first read. No point in nominating some good and worthy candidate, like Fritz Mondale or Michael Dukakis, if they got no Elvis. The object is to get these people elected. Can’t get elected without a soupçon of Elvis.

Ivins noted that Kerry seemed to be working on his Elvis, which gave her some hope, though as we now know, her initial judgment was unfortunately correct.

I imagine some will dismiss this as a silly way of evaluating candidates, but I think the Elvis Factor is to be taken seriously. We can parse the candidates’ utterances until the cows come home, but the fact remains that elections are largely irrational. I’m assuming a certain level of wonkery among readers of this cartoon. (You’re welcome!) Imagine for a moment that everything you know about politics vanishes except for what you’ve heard on cable news. All the book learnin’ and well-reported articles, gone in a puff. This is the starting point for many voters. And they value certain personality traits, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Honestly, I’m a little worried that both Hillary and Bernie are low on Elvis. Those who feel Sanders is a Hunka Hunka Bernin’ Love are free to disagree.

Proof of density: The Supreme Court weighs Texas abortion laws

As if Texas’s over-the-top regulation of abortion clinics in the name of “protecting women’s health” wasn’t ridiculous enough, enter the spectacularly misplaced skepticism of Justice Alito during oral arguments at the Supreme Court last week. While questioning the clinics’ counsel Stephanie Toti, Alito asserted, “There is very little specific evidence in the record in this case with respect to why any particular clinic closed.” This prompted an awesome rebuttal from Justice Kagan. From the great Dahlia Lithwick:

So frustrated is Justice Elena Kagan by the conservatives’ repeated insistence that perhaps the clinics just coincidentally all closed within days of HB 2’s passage that she finally has to intervene. “Is it right,” she asks Toti, “that in the two­-week period that the ASC requirement was in effect, that over a dozen facilities shut their doors, and then when that was stayed, when that was lifted, they reopened again immediately?” Toti agrees. “It’s almost like the perfect controlled experiment,” continues Kagan, “as to the effect of the law, isn’t it? It’s like you put the law into effect, 12 clinics closed. You take the law out of effect, they reopen?”

Here’s an argument I haven’t heard yet: given that the state’s requirements are medically unnecessary — there was no problem in the first place — it seems to me that women will face statistically greater risk of death or injury driving on Texas highways to get to a clinic 200 miles away than if their local clinic remained open. If Texas Republicans are so incredibly serious about protecting the safety of ladies, should that not factor into the equation? Not to mention the botched back-alley abortions, of course. Those never factor into the equation.

That tweet from former Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst is here.

The New Normal

How not to be a sexist jerk this election season

I swore I wasn’t going to do an election strip this week, but the alternative was a comic about excessive amounts of cellulose filler found in cans of grated Parmesan cheese. You can guess how well that went.

Let me say up front that I do not consider Bernie to be a sexist jerk, since I know that’s what many people are going to assume. To the contrary, I think he’s a feminist. He did, however, say something uncool that I felt needed calling out (in the same spirit, let’s say, that he publicly criticizes Obama when he disagrees with him). For those unfamiliar with the backstory, Bernie was defending a controversial comment made by the rapper Killer Mike (who was actually quoting a feminist scholar friend) about a uterus not qualifying one to be president. Setting aside the point that I think most Hillary supporters are factoring in more than just the uterus situation, Bernie’s claim that he would never ask voters to support him because he’s a man struck me as an odd case of false equivalence, the kind of context-free, ahistorical argument we tend to hear from right-wingers shooting down affirmative action or calls for greater workplace diversity. Of course he wouldn’t ask people to vote for him because he’s a man. There’s no need!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not particularly attached to either Hillary or Bernie, but I do think we need more women in politics. While gender certainly — obviously! — shouldn’t be the only factor, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting a female president. And while I think the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon has been somewhat overstated, I’ve come to realize that a lot of otherwise well-meaning people just don’t quite take our nation’s glaring absence of a single female president or vice president very seriously. You don’t even have to support Hillary to acknowledge that solving the problem is important. Just as President Obama has provided a positive role model and sense of possibility to countless numbers of people, a woman in the Oval Office would have a powerful effect.

SCANDAL: President to nominate Supreme Court justice

If Scalia had died during the final year of the George W. Bush administration, can you imagine the GOP making the absurd claim that a successor must not be named in an election year? There is no debate to be had here. It’s Obama’s turn.

May this be the beginning of the end of a retrograde Supreme Court that has been so destructive to our democracy and civil rights, a court more interested in protecting the lives of coal companies than those of Earth’s seven billion human beings. Time for a new era.

Hillary and Bernie supporter smackdown

I usually hate it when pundits try to play peacemaker, lamenting divisiveness and partisanship when there may be very good reasons for such behaviors to exist. But when it comes to the Democratic primaries, which I’m observing with no particular sense of attachment, I think things have taken an unnecessarily ugly turn lately. Yes, supporters and surrogates of both candidates have said stupid things. Hillary would do herself a favor by avoiding going negative on Bernie and his supporters, which only backfires (as some of her more prominent defenders demonstrated spectacularly over the weekend). I question some aspects of Hillary’s record, but she doesn’t deserve the outright demonization coming from some quarters of the left.

Let’s not lose sight of the big picture. Ted Cruz is my senator, okay? We’re bickering over two pretty acceptable candidates while the political equivalent of the bubonic plague is threatening to descend on the United States.

The Trump-supporting union member

Well, Ted Cruz has won Iowa, an outcome I find no less gooseflesh-inducing than a Trump victory.  A few days ago, a disturbing report surfaced about Trump making inroads among union members. According to a study conducted by Working America, white working-class voters who support Trump cited his tendency to “speak his mind” as the quality they most admired. This attribute was more of a driving factor among his supporters than agreement with his policy positions.

Possibly the biggest blow to labor under a Trump or Cruz presidency would come in the form of extremist Supreme Court nominees. Trump has mentioned Clarence Thomas as his favorite justice. With unions already under assault at the state level, a Supreme Court tilted even more toward radical market fundamentalism and against worker rights would be absolutely devastating.