Today’s news

This just in:

  • In 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all Americans should get punched in the mouth every day; writing for the conservative majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett says the constitution does not protect citizens from a daily trip to “loose-tooth city.” In a blistering dissent, the liberal justices wrote “What the Fuck” over and over again in 48-point type.
  • During a late-night posting frenzy on Truth Social, President Trump threatened to bomb Massachusetts and outlaw bananas. “You get ’em and they’re so green, and then right away they turn brown! NO GOOD!”
  • The National Park Service announced it will sell the Lincoln Memorial to an operator of self-storage warehouses. Other moves aimed at shrinking the federal government include plans to turn the Gettysburg National Cemetery into a Sheetz and self-service car-wash.
  • Secretary of Health & Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that in-school scoliosis screenings cause autism and announced they will be replaced by mandatory coffee enemas for all students and teachers by 2027.
  • The State of Alabama this week began issuing hunting licenses allowing residents to hunt LGBTQ people during Pride Month. There will be a bag limit of no more than five LGBTQ people between June 1 and June 30, the state said.
  • In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of Alabama’s new LGBTQ hunting license.
  • A heat advisory continues for most of the eastern United States as temperatures topped 150 degrees in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Scientists, looking cautiously over their shoulders at a large man standing behind them while wearing a MAGA hat and holding a baseball bat, declined to blame climate change.
  • A coalition of directors of 1980s and 1990s horror movies issued a statement saying that their works of dystopian fiction — such as RoboCop, Blade Runner, The Running Man, Starship Troopers, Brave New World, and other film classics — were supposed to be cautionary tales for Americans, not models for society to emulate. At a press conference in Hollywood, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven said, “for fuck’s sake, would you people take a look around at what you’re doing to yourselves? You’re completely off the rails.”
  • Dutch director Paul Verhoeven was apparently injured after being tackled by masked federal officers at a press conference in Hollywood and arrested. Witnesses said Verhoeven was thrown into an unmarked, windowless van and driven from the scene. A spokesperson for ICE said Verhoeven was deported to El Salvador “because Dutch isn’t even a country, did you know that?”

“Pen Avenue” for June 2025

Here’s this month’s “Pen Avenue,” my cartoon for Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper.

There are about 70 Rite Aid stores in the Pittsburgh area, all of which are scheduled to close (or have already closed). At one point, the company had more than 5,000 stores, but after two bankruptcies, it’s been steadily shrinking, and the end is now apparently near for all of the remaining 1,200 stores.

(For months, the stores near my home have already looked like they were out of business, with empty shelves and no stock on basic items such as Band-Aids, cotton balls and other drug store staples.)

Supposedly, there has been a lot of discussion around the country among community development officers about what to do with to do with all of the vacant Rite Aid locations that will soon be blighting small-town and neighborhood business districts.

Cartoon by Jay Togyer says, “With dozens of Rite Aid Stores around Pittsburgh getting ready to close, what should replace them?” Pittsburgh themed suggestions include “Sip ‘n’ Paint Parking Chairs,” “Pre-Owned Smiley Cookie Outlet,” “Museum of Steelers Quarterback Controversies,” and then an unidentified woman interrupts to say, “How about a drug store not owned by venture capital jagoffs …” who herself is then interrupted by the cartoonist.

Print is not available online; you can only read it in (what else?) print. It’s available at Giant Eagle and other stores in Pittsburgh’s East End, or subscribe on the website.

Bombs away

At least we have calm, clear-headed people in charge on both sides

Apologies to Country Joe McDonald:

Yeah, c’mon on all you big strong men
Don the Con needs your help again
He’s makin’ threats without a plan
Against the mullahs in Teheran
So put down your phones
And launch some drones
We’re gonna go to war with Iran

Chorus:

And it’s 1, 2, 3
What’re we fighting for?
Bibi’s in the commode
So we’ll watch Iran explode
And it’s 5, 6, 7
Let’s make America great
Well, it ain’t no use to wait ‘n see
Ayatollah, it’s tollin’ for thee

Now, onward, Christians, let’s move fast
Our big chance has come at last
We gotta go out and bomb some sand
‘Cause eschatology is at hand
And y’all know Jesus will return
When the Holy Land starts to burn

(Chorus)

Chevron and Exxon, don’t move slow
‘Cause Armageddon is a-go-go-go
Just wait for the signal from Mr. Trump
Then raise the prices at the pump
And even if the worst don’t come to pass
It’ll still be a real gas

(Chorus)

Well, MAGA voters have dissatisfaction
Better get the military into action
The orders came down from Donald Trump
We gotta get him out of his ratings slump
And so we’ll do the best we can
To bomb the shit out of Iran

Look who blinked

Elon Musk, like Daffy Duck, finally came up against his own limitations — including a possibly vestigial sense of shame

Over the weekend, my best friend was playing “Looney Tunes” clips for the amusement of his kids, and we started talking about the cartoon where Daffy Duck — frustrated by Bugs Bunny’s popularity — keeps trying to one-up him, until finally, Daffy swallows explosives and blows himself up.

The audience goes wild and even Bugs Bunny is impressed: “That’s terrific, Daffy! They want more!”

Daffy, who is now a ghost floating up to heaven, laments, “I know, but I can only do it once.”

(The cartoon, from 1957, is called “Show Biz Bugs.”)

I’ve been thinking about the cartoon in relation to you-know-who. I’ve developed a theory about you-know-who and the people around him.

Continue reading “Look who blinked”

This just in

BREAKING: Right-wing backlash to Cole Escola’s outfit at the Tony Awards raises fears that the national tour of “Oh, Mary!” may skip its planned stop at the Yakov Smirnoff Theater in Branson, Mo.

More news any moment.

(H/T: Alert Listener Darya)

It’s all going to pot

Optional soundtrack

I have no problem with marijuana; I think they ought to legalize it everywhere and sell it in drug stores and anywhere alcohol is available. The fact that people — mostly young Black men — are still being jailed for selling pot is insane to me, and it amazes me that more people aren’t offended.

If I can buy a 1.5L of Scotch at the state liquor store, you ought to be able to buy a bag of primo indica there, too. And then go home and roll up a fatty as big as a telephone pole and blaze away and see if I care.

But man, the constant smell of it everywhere is starting to get to me.

On the bus, in the supermarket — today, I was waiting for my wife to finish with a doctor’s appointment at a large Pittsburgh hospital, and someone walked past me just reeking of skunkweed.

Two weeks ago, while my buddy and I were in Dayton for the radio convention, our hotel room was unusable one night for the smell of marijuana. Our strong suspicion was that the employees were smoking it; although the front desk told us it was coming from outside, we saw a large piece of PVC pipe sticking out of a window in the employees-only area, as well as tell-tale signs of masking tape around smoke detectors (as if they’d been covering them up).

I filed a complaint with the hotel chain’s corporate office; they told me “well, recreational marijuana is legal in Ohio now.” I said, yes, but your hotel is non-smoking, and it shouldn’t matter if it’s tobacco or pot. Firepits are legal in Ohio, too — could I bring one of those into my hotel room and start a camp fire?

It reminds me of when I was a kid and everyone smoked tobacco, and didn’t realize how badly they reeked of cigarette smoke. I don’t miss those days at all, when you’d open the door of a bar or restaurant and a cloud of smog would roll out.

I’m not sure if the dank stank is better or worse than stale cigarettes, but it’s just as pervasive as nicotine stains were 40 years ago.

Where the air is rarefied

Come grift with me, I’ll take a bribe, it’s true / In Mar-a-Lago, there’s a greedy schmo, who will toot his flute for you

Click to embiggen

If you’re enough to remember an advertising campaign by National Airlines where pretty female flight attendants said things like, “I’m Marla. Fly me,” well, you should probably schedule a colon cancer screening.

I heard stories this morning that the U.S. has officially accepted a luxury jet from the Government of Qatar to be used as President Trump’s personal airplane.

It’s a luxury jet, mind you, that the Qataris have been trying unsuccessfully to sell for years, because it’s obsolete and a gas hog. And no one wanted it, so they had to wait for the right sucker to come along.

Step up, step up, Mr. Art of the Deal, and win a prize!

It will likely cost another $100 million or more to rip the jet apart and make it safe for the president to fly on.

Anyway, I immediately thought of that ad campaign.

Here’s the text, in case you can’t read it:

I’m Donald. Fly Me.

You’ve met my friend Tamim.
And some more friends like Vladimir, Viktor,
Jong Un, Bashar, and Jinping.
My friends like to give me things. Like luxury jets.
My other friends, like Jeff, Mark, and Elon
like to give me cash and cryptocurrency.
(Whatever that is).
I must be doing something they like.
If you want me to do something you like,
you know what to do. Just slip me some cash.
Or property.
Does it sound like bribery? Sure.
But the Supreme Court says as long
as I do it in the Oval Office while I’m President,
it’s all legal.
And I intend to stay President for a long, long time.
Fly Donald. Fly MAGA.
Donald Trump accepts Bitcoin, cash, and American Express

And here’s what the original campaign looked like:

“Pen Avenue” for May 2025

Here’s this month’s “Pen Avenue,” my cartoon for Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper. The theme is the April 29 storm that knocked out power to a large section of the county — in some neighborhoods, for several days:

Incidentally, I do not see Print before it goes to … well, print. I was surprised to see that the photo on the front page, about the storm, looked so much like my cartoon. Great minds? I’ll have to ask Ann Belser, the editor, if the cartoon influenced her photo choice.

Print is not available online; you can only read it in (what else?) print. It’s available at Giant Eagle and other stores in Pittsburgh’s East End, or subscribe on the website.

Joe versus the volcano

They said Joe wasn’t so, but he was, and the whole world is paying for their arrogance

I used to think that Joe Biden’s presidential library should be built on the lip of an active volcano.

To me, it would symbolize that he and his team knew that the return of Donald Trump to the White House was a constant threat to the future of the United States of America and the peace and stability of the free world, and yet they pretended nothing was happening, and did almost nothing to thwart it. That includes Attorney General Merrick Garland’s half-assed prosecution of Trump’s criminal cases. “Slow” doesn’t begin to describe Garland’s behavior; “stationary” is more like it. If the Justice Department had gone any slower in attempting to bring Trump’s crimes to light, they would have been going backwards.

Now, stories are starting to emerge about how Biden’s family and staff worked to cover up evidence of his physical and mental decline, until the disastrous June 2024 debate demonstrated that the president was falling apart:

In a new book, Joe Biden’s former White House chief of staff paints a devastating picture of the then US president’s mental and physical state before the debate with Donald Trump that sent his 2024 campaign into a tailspin, resulting in his relinquishing the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris.

According to Klain, it turned out that Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was”; left preparation and fell asleep by the pool; obsessed about foreign leaders, saying “these guys say I’m doing a great job as president so I must be a great president”; “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation”; and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job.” (The Guardian, UK)

I never much trusted Joe Biden. The first time I ever saw Joe Biden on TV, I was a little kid, and he was being interviewed on NBC’s “Today” Show about his presidential campaign. It would have had to have been 1987.

What I remember most clearly was that he said to the interviewer, “I will be the next president of the United States.”

Not, “when I am,” or “if I am elected.” I will be the next president of the United States.

Even as a grade-schooler, that struck me as a shocking thing to say.

Within a few weeks, his campaign imploded when it was revealed that he’d plagiarized his campaign speech from British politician Neil Kinnock.

As I got older and began to pay attention to politics, I heard stories about his temper, arrogance, and enormous ego. I watched him grill Anita Hill after Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court. I read stories about back-room deals that he cut on behalf of predatory banks and credit-card lenders (some people called him “the Senator from MBNA,” MBNA being a big Delaware-based credit-card company that sometimes doubled and tripled people’s interest rates without warning).

During his time as Obama’s vice president, he seemed to have mellowed. The Onion depicted him as an aging, hard-drinking surfer, waxing his Trans-Am in the White House driveway. Somehow, he morphed into America’s cool uncle. But I still didn’t trust him.

So when he ran for president again in 2020, he would have been my 12th or 13th favorite choice in the Democratic Party.

I was pleasantly surprised during his first year in office. It did, indeed, seem like a kinder, gentler Joe Biden — to quote another former president.

Then, during his second year, Biden seemed to revert to type — selfish, egotistical, and a little bit nasty and sarcastic.

That’s the guy I remembered. Not Cool Uncle Joe.

Of course, during his final two years in office, he seemed to disappear from public entirely. According to another new book, Biden was “a shell of himself” by 2023 (Vanity Fair), and everyone around him knew it.

Rumors about his decline were rampant; Republicans kept pointing out that Biden rarely spoke to reporters or held press conferences, implying that something was seriously wrong with him. Democrats replied that the Republicans were engaged in a dirty tricks campaign of character assassination; and certainly, that’s what it was, but it also apparently was more accurate than anyone knew.

His staff and family knew that he was in no shape to run for a second term. But they kept it from the public until it was too late.

And now, here we are, on the verge of an economic collapse, widespread civil unrest and the dissolution of worldwide alliances that have endured for more than 70 years.

Not only did Biden’s staff cover up his mental and physical decline, they actively worked to undermine Vice President Kamala Harris, so that when he finally dropped out of the race — much too late, everyone agrees — they had already fatally crippled her attempt to beat Trump.

Anyway, I no longer think Biden’s library should be built on the lip of an active volcano.

I now think it should be built over an active septic drainage field — a fitting monument to the hubris of a man whose shortsightedness has left the entire country sinking into the muck.