A synoptic history of the separation of church and state: Our first update for 2017!

(And it's a doozy!):We update this history today for the first time since 2015 when  Jeb! Bush, who almost – but not quite – reclaimed some Kennedy territory. But p3 First Amendment fans ain't seen nothin'  yet!

(NOTE: This timeline was originally published in shorter form in 2009, driven by the somewhat-naive thoug ht that the time that then the process of theocratic overreach in the US was probably already at or near its zenith. Now it appears that p3 must stand ready for further revisions from time to time, as the exigencies of Republican electoral politics require it. We welcome the task.)

1791 James Madison: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

1802 Thomas Jefferson: The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment guarantees Americans a wall of separation between church and state.

1954 Dwight Eisenhower: The separation of church and state surely won't be hurt by adding "under God" to The Pledge of Allegiance in the name of anti-Communism, will it?

1960 John F. Kennedy: The separation of church and state is absolute. My church will not dictate my policy decisions.

2008 Mitt Romney: The separation of church and state is relative. My church will dictate my policy decisions, but only to the extent that I will discriminate against the same people Christian conservatives would already be discriminating against anyway.

2009 Bart Stupack: The separation of church and state is a fairy tale. My church will show up at the Capitol steps in a limo to dictate policy.

2012 Rick Santorum: The separation of church and state is an abomination. "Earlier in my political career, I had the opportunity to read the speech [by JFK to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960], and I almost threw up."

2012 Sally Quinn: The separation of church and state is impossible. “This is a religious country. Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian.” Agnostics, atheists, and other nonbelievers need not apply.

2014 Rick Santorum (again): The very notion of the separation of church and state is "a Communist idea that has no place in America."

2015 Fifty-seven percent of surveyed Republicans: The separation of church and state is sacreligious, since the U.S. Constitution is a document inspired by Our Lord Jesus Christ, so it counts as Holy Scripture.

2015 Rand Paul, libertarian-of-convenience:  The separation of church and state is a one-way street: "The First Amendment says keep government out of religion. It doesn't say keep religion out of government."

2015 Jeb Bush, "moderate" GOP presidential candidate: The separation of church and state is nothing more than a "game" of "political correctness."

2015 Bobby Jindal, 2016 vice-presidential hopeful (and staunch opponent of executive orders, when it's Obama, who not that long ago told fellow Republicans they had to stop being "the party of stupid"): The separation of church and state can be disposed of by simple executive order from the governor, even after the GOP-controlled state legislature killed the same anti-LGBT bill the week before.

2015 Jeb Bush (again), apparently ignoring his promise of roughly six weeks earlier (see above) that his Catholic faith would naturally influence how he governed as president: "I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope," adding "I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”

Ooh! So close to what JFK promised in 1960 (also above) – so close! Except that Kennedy pledged that the church would not dictate his policy decisions – Period. Full stop. – whereas Jeb only pledges that the church won't dictate his economic decisions. This means that, as both a good Cafeteria Catholic and a Republican candidate who must pander to his base to make it through the primaries alive, he feels free to ignore anything he doesn't like that the Pope says about matters like climate change, economic inequality, privatizing Social Security, or similar things that could make a difference to his donors' bottom line.

But, of course, he considers himself totally free to invoke his faith in the name of being anti-choice and anti-contraception, to say nothing of attempting to use the Florida National Guard to cruelly prolong the life of Terri Schiavo. (You didn't forget that one, did you?)

2017 45th President and widey-noted Christianity practitioner Donald J. Trump,signing his "Religious Liberty Executive Order" coinciding with National Prayer Day: "The order, which Trump inked during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, directs the IRS to exercise "maximum enforcement discretion" over the Johnson amendment, which prevents churches and other tax-exempt religious organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. It also provides "regulatory relief" for organizations that object on religious grounds to a provision in Obamacare that mandates employers provide certain health services, including coverage for contraception."We will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced anymore," Trump proclaimed during his remarks.

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Presented without further comment:

Place your bets it'll probably be as safe as putting the money toward your 401K)

The p3 over-under for the moment (assuming it didn't already happen and I missed it) when a congressional Republican, or a member of the Trump inner circle, or one of their spokespersons goes on TV and proclaims that deficits no longer matter (again):  11:00am Sunday, November 27th.

Tie-breaker: Whether the interviewer pushes back in any detectable way.

Quote of the day: Special Fact-Check Edition

(Updated below.)

They are truly floundering now, and it's a marvel to see, like watching armadillos try to swim.

- Charlie Pierce, the Sultan of Similes, the Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors, marveling at the dreadful performance byTrump surrogates in the run-up to Election Day.

It's a wonderful image – suggestive of plummeting to the bottom of the lake with a minimum of satisfaction and a maximum of splash. And that's certainly the situation Trump surrogates find themselves in these days.

But as it turns out, it's not the situation that actual living armadillos find themselves in. The Google thing took less than a second to point me to a web page called Armadillo Fact File (yes, of course it exists) in response to my three word search query: can armadillos swim? (Click to enlarge. )

One tinkers with brother Pierce's prose at one's peril, but I modestly – humbly – suggest that the position that Trump surrogates like Gingrich are finding themselves in is less like a happy armadillo skillfully crossing a river (although the disturbing image of “gulping air into their intestines” sounds nearer the mark than any of us should find comfortable) and more instead like a luckless, lumbering creature trying desperately but unsuccessfully to avoid a particularly unattractive Nemesis.

Perhaps it's more like watching an armadillo try to outrun a 1958 Buick Roadmaster.

Just a suggestion.


(Updated, later the same day:

Okay, now I'm flattering myself that Pierce is just messing with my head. Here he is, reflecting on the $100 eponymous signature cocktail at the newly opened Trump International Hotel, a few blocks away from -- and as close as Trump'll ever get to -- the White House:

I'm really not ready for someone to tell me that the problem with my Bloody Mary is that there isn't enough winter-wheat in the Yeltsin Juice. But it is of a piece with the candidate himself, who has the over-aesthetic taste of a Bonobo in a $1,000 tux.

Yes, the somber, sad-eyed bonobo does look dreadful in a $1000 tux.

Ì Googled it.)

You heard it here at p3 first!

(Welcome Crooks & Liars readers! And thanks yet again to friend of p3 Batocchio!)

So Donald Trump Jr. (that's the brother who takes his hair grooming tips from early-1990s Bret Easton Ellis serial killers rather than from his father) had this to say about his father and the presidency:

“Unlike Hillary Clinton ― who’s gotten very rich being a politician, peddling American influence ― he hasn’t,” he continued. “This isn’t only a step down, but he wants to make sure that all Americans, all ethnicities and backgrounds, have the same opportunities to do what he’s been able to do, to start a great family, start a great business.”

Really. Seriously. This is what Donald Jr. considers a “step down” for his dad:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Well, first of all, of course he thinks that, because it's never entered the head of father or son that this might be about anything but money and brand.

But second, I called this! I called this back on July 5!

If Trump does bail out, I'd expect him to justify it much like Farage did: He's accomplished everything he set out to do (of course he has! he always does!), so why waste his time actually being President of the United States -- which he could easily do, if he wanted, and he'd be so good at it you wouldn't believe it -- when it's so obviously a step down from being Himself?

You're welcome, America.

Quote of the day: Trophy kills

Adventure tourism for the idiot rich

- Matt Tiabbi, describing the buzz driving Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The description could be applied just as appropriately to the “big game” African safaris of his two sons. The only difference would be that the carcasses left behind by the father include the traditional transfer of presidential power, the modern Republican party, and the very idea of an American political commonwealth, whereas his sons left behind a trail of needlessly dead elephants, leopards, et cetera.

Donald Jr. (that's the one who takes his hair grooming tips from early-1990s Bret Easton Ellis serial killers rather than from his father) even carried on the family tradition of Love for the Little Guy by insisting that “the villagers were so happy for the meat which they don't often get to eat. Very grateful.”

Quote of the day: Dodging versus deferment

(Also known as the First Law of Conservation of Schmuckiness.)

If Trump is a draft-dodger for having taken a II-S (or four of them), he is among millions of "draft dodgers" and so you need to STFU because you're outnumbered.

The heel spurs letter is more interesting, mostly because of the timing.

Spurs are not permanent and, had the lottery not made it irrelevant, he'd have had to go back to confirm that they were still an issue, but, yes, he dodged the draft, based on one medical deferment. And, as Chris Britt notes, it puts him in no position to comment on other people's service.

Here's the thing: You don't have to lie to make this guy look like a schmuck, and you don't even have to lie to make him look like a draft dodger.

And you sure as hell don't have to slander the millions of us who took student deferments.

That's Mike Peterson, known to loyal p3 readers for his blog Comic Strip of the Day, clarifying an important legal and ethical distinction that seems poorly (sometimes, I suspect, willfully) misunderstood in the age of the all-volunteer army.

Eleven years ago, I found myself in the wretched position of having to defend the bloodthirsty likes of John Bolton and Dick “five deferments – count 'em, five!” Cheney, in defense of a larger principle. Or at least to make sure that they were damned for what they really are. As I wrote at the time:

Claiming a legal deferment instead of enlisting is no more "draft dodging" than taking the standard exemption on your 1040 form is "tax evasion."

On the subject of "dodging" the draft: If you don't want people to have legal ways of getting out of military service, don't create legal ways for them to get out of military service. If they avoided service legally, and you still don't like it, then your problem is with the law, not the person.

And--here's where the trouble lives--a law that's administered unequally, depending on how wealthy and connected you are, is a law worth having a problem with.

Legal ways to avoid service have always existed, often but not always tied to how much disposable income you have. The thing about Trump is that he thinks anything that doesn't benefit him first, most, and – ideally – alone, is for chumps. If, instead of a military draft, we'd had a Clinton-style national service program at the time, he'd have pulled whatever strings he could to get out of that, too. It's of a piece with his stated belief that not paying taxes makes him “smart” – he believes the opposite, that the idea of a commonwealth is stupid.


(And no one asked me, but I have to say that giving Ann Telnaes a live target would almost -- not quite, but almost -- be worth having Cheney back in the public light again.)

Quote of the day: The great white absence-of-hope

If all the jobs are moving overseas, why wouldn’t the white working class vote for Trump? What good reason do they have for not doing so? I know why the black and Latino working class won’t–because of the racism of the Trump campaign. But if you have no hope except for being white, why not vote for your racial dominance? That’s what Trump offers.

- That's Erik Loomis, putting it about as clearly as I've ever seen it. Jeezus.

Sunday afternoon toons: A Trump-heavy week. Alas.

(I haven't updated the list of epithets and sobriquets for Donald Trump lately, but midway through AMC's airing of all three "Back to the Future" films yesterday a new and especially apt one re-entered my head: "Alternate-Reality Biff Tannen." Story here.)

Yes, Trump claimed that Hillary started Obama Trutherism and that he himself put a stop to it. And yes, Trump speculated again about what would happen if Second Amendment types got an open shot at Hillary. Are you thinking that this one is finally The One? Silly you.

Also: Who really cares in 2016 about Colin Powell's opinion? About anything?

I suppose the only thing that's good about Trump putting thinly dog-whistled threats out there against Hillary this time is that it briefly diverted attention from Hillary's health, which briefly diverted attention from Hillary's foundation, which briefly diverted attention from Hillary's email accounts, which brifely diverted attention from Benghazi!!! Gosh, do you thik there's a pattern here?

Today's toons were selected from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, The Nib, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: MikeBob Gorell, Drew Sheneman, SigneWilkinson, Steve Benson, Matt Weurker, Jeff Koterba, Pat Bagley, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Chan Lowe.

p3 Legion of Merit: Jeff Danziger.

Ann Telnaes wonders why, after a quarter-century in the game, things like this keep happening to Hillary. (For a possible answer, see Jen Sorenson's bit, below.)

Mark Fiore digs into Hillary's "deplorable" comment (which has been superseded by about five other things since she said it only days ago). He seems to think it was more of an unforced error on her part than I do.

Follow along in your guide books, everyone, as Tom Tomorrow teaches you to say "loser" in Russian!

Keith Knight imagines a better world.

But Reuben Bolling doesn't.

Carol Lay has another happy ending. Seriously. It ends happily.

Red Meat presents The Priest, contemplating the face of the divine.

Comic Strip of the Day manages to use both "priate" and "lapriscopically" in the same post. That alone makes it worth the click, in my judgment. The main story does raise an important question, though: Aren't libertarians the ones who hold property rights and contracts as sacred?

"Did you ever see a dream walking? Well, I did." "A Dream Walking," directed in 1934 by Dave Fleischer, cashes in on the popularity of the title song, which had been recorded the previous year by fellow Paramount star Bing Crosby. Uncredited: Seymour Kneitel (animation direction), Sammy Timberg (music direction), Billy Costello (Popeye), William Pinnell (Bluto), and Mae Questel (the (The Slender One).

The Unbelievably Great Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman is too nice to Wells Fargo.

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen advances one explanation for why things like this keep happening to Hillary.

Matt Bors marks upon the intelligence of the contrarians!

Jesse Springer points out that the economic good times in Portland have gone off the rails for some.

Test your toon-captioning mojo at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

Quote of the day: And for this America should be grateful?

With every new poll that is released, I comfort myself with the knowledge that Donald Trump is not willing to put in the hours to be a competent authoritarian, which is cold comfort, I know, but you take what you can get.

That cannot be said of the next guy to try it, and there will be a next time, because the basic tectonic plates beneath our democracy have shifted so as to make the next guy inevitable.

- Charlie Pierce, who sees the fault as not being in The Media, but in our apathetic,lassitudinous selves.

No big, funny mammal analogies today.

Sunday early afternoon toons: Lauer-ing the bar, monetizing the memory

The sad part is that, just as Trump will apparently never be able to blurt out something so toxic that he can't recover from it (assuming it doesn't increase his approval rating from the get-go), my guess is that Matt Lauer's terrible job as the overmatched host of the Commander in Chief forum last week will soon disappear down the memory hole. Using one third of his time with Clinton rehashing the asked-and-answered "questions" the emails? Ignoring the Dye-Blond Buffoon's lies, evasions, and inaccuracies? Pffft. Put Matt back on the Today show for a week and let him land that day's "get" – perhaps a collie who rescued a boy from a mine by running to town for the sheriff – and all will not only be forgiven, it'll be forgotten.

And, for the record, I'm with Brother Pierce: I object to calling it the "Commander In Chief Forum," because the country is slowly but surely coming to think that the Presidency has no other function, and that being CinC makes the president the boss of me. (Spoiler: Nope.) And, although Pierce doesn't mention this himself, I object to the symbolism of holding it on an aircraft carrier. Have we really forgotten the last time a big press draw like this was held on an aircraft carrier? A Facebook commenter said yeah, but what about veterans' issues, to which I should have replied (but didn't, alas) that Veterans' Affairs is a cabinet post (hence, part of the Executive branch), not a wartime responsibility of the CinC, and so we don't need the invocation of the latter role to expect presidential candidates to answer policy questions on the topic. If I really wanted gratuitous military symbolism, I'd be watching an NFL game right now. Unfortunately, I imagine the CinC Forum is here to stay as a part of the presidential election ritual.

Also, what's the big deal about athletes kneeling during the national anthem, rather than standing at attention with hand over heart? First amendment issues aside, we're once again confusing football and soccer uniforms with military uniforms, and the standards of behavior appropriate to each. Besides, kneeling is also a way to show respect, and even subservience – ask Zod.

And finally, our highest honors to to ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman for recognizing that we will never forget the meaning of today's anniversary until the last advertising account manager no longer remembers. As a parallel piece, Comic Strip of the Day looks back at what was not political cartooning's finest hour.

Today's toons were selected by an underqualified morning talk show host from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, The Nib, and other fine sources of cartoon goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Jeff Danziger, John Deering, Lisa Benson, Tim Eagan, SigneWilkinson, Jeff Stahler, Matt Weurker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Matt Davies.

p3 Legion of Merit: Stuart Carlson.

p3 Medal of Mandatory Freedom (tie): Jim Morin and Brian McFadden.

Ann Telnaes is relieved: Trump does have a plan after all.

Mark Fiore presents Suzie Newsykins, whose only summer mistake was listening to grown-ups.

Tom Tomorrow has too nearly captured the essence of my Twitter feed.

Keith Knight asks an interesting question, but it's hard to tell which answers (if any) are made up.

Reuben Bolling wins the Saul Steinberg Prize.

Carol Lay returns to a theme she owns: the search for the perfect Other. Once again: happy ending or not?

Red Meat celebrates a generational rite of passage: summer camp.

The Comic Curmudgeon salutes Six Chicks for committing.

Sometimes it seems like Comic Strip of the Day and Sophie Yanow are about the only ones out there in the Tooniverse paying attention to Standing Rock. Although I suppose that may change if Amy Goodman is indeed arrested. To be clear, I'm a fan of both Goodman and the First Amendment, but I suppose I feel the same way about Standing Rock and the prospect of its white First Amendment martyr as I used to feel about the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association: If a spectacle like this is what it takes to get some action on the problem, then so be it.

Read the label! As a shout-out to a friend, here's "Hopalong Casualty," directed in 1960 by Chuck Jones from his own story. I usually don't feature Warner Bros cartoons from beyond the mid-1950s because the production values got poorer and poorer (and you can see it happening here), but this is a gem, mainly because Jones is a master of timing and understood the logic of the Coyote and Road Runner (his own creations, after all) so well. Almost half of this toon is taken up with the "Acme Earthquake Pills" gag, which is one of the funniest bits in all of cartoondom. If you Google "acme earthquake pills" you'll find there are two or three clips of just that three-minute bit, but they're all ruined by the same well-meaning but thoroughly misguided overdubbing of music director Milt Franklyn's minimalist soft-tympani-roll driven build-up and use of bizarre sound effects – and silences, which always signaled something worse was to come – with someone's heavy-handed use of "creeepy music" that only occasionally syncs with the mood of the exact moment. (No links.) Enjoy Hopalong Casualty at Vimeo.

The Magnificent Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman observes that everyone in Casablanca has problems. Maybe theirs will work out.

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen watches as the world reacts to the EpiPen scandal in the US.

Matt Bors hits it on the nose: This election though, am I right?

Jesse Springer looks on with concern at the latest symptom of Oregon's seemingly perpetual budget woes.

Test your toon-captioning mojo at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

Quote of the day: The Caudillo's rhinocerous

If you assume, as I do, that simply telling El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago that he is a lying sack of hair who knows less about most major issues than a rhino knows about differential calculus would be frowned upon at the upper echelons of NBC, then there wasn't much for poor Lauer to do.

Charlie Pierce – the Sultan of Similies, the Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors – on the bad hand that Matt Lauer was dealt last night at the so-called Commander-in-Chief Forum.*

Other examples of his craft here.
______________

*Note that the fact that Lauer was dealt a bad hand doesn't get him off the hook for playing the cards he did get so badly. Even in bridge, with the worst hand imaginable, there's still a right way and a wrong way to bid and play it. (Really? Half of your Clinton questions about emails? Seriously>)

Sunday morning toons: On the political-cultural significance of Reno

I'm probably the last to finally allude to the Johnny Cash lyric to describe Hillary Clinton's speech last week on Donald Trump's many shortcomings as a candidate, a leader of a party, and a human being, and anyway – strictly speaking – she didn't shoot him in Reno "just to watch him die."

I'm also one of those who put aside his initial disappointment that she didn't target the entire GOP apparatus that has been building Trump in its basement laboratory since the early 1980s. Partly that's because declining to go full slaughterhouse mode on them slightly ups the odds that those voters will stay home out of embarrassment, waste their vote on a third-party candidate, or (least likely) actually vote for Clinton – in each case driving up the margin of her increasingly-likely victory. Along the same lines, elected Republicans who appreciate that they were allowed to save some small amount of face (however undeserved) when Clinton declined to lump them into the same crazy-bowl as their candidate, might have at least some tiny motivation to do their damned jobs and work with her administration on some things at least, whereas history teaches us that they will have zero motivation to do so otherwise. (Pierce cites evidence this last is even more of a pipe dream than I'd guessed. Ah well.)

As fun as it is to imagine the Republican party collapsing like a wet taco – or the Whig Party – over the next four to eight years, I confess I wouldn't want to be the Democratic president trying to keep a lid on things while the Grand Old Party was going through its death throes at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. I imagine it would look a lot like the T-1000 falling into the vat of molten metal, flailing and shrieking and spasming through every guise it had ever taken on to do its evil work as it went down. Not something you'd want to be standing near as it happened. (And even if every congressional Republican resigned his or her seat tomorrow, the state-level incubators from which many of the worst of them first emerged will still be operating around the clock.)

And of course, the conspicuous silence of every top Republican (except for the Trump campaign itself, which unsurprisingly squealed like a stuck pig in 140 characters or less) after Clinton's take-down was eloquent.

They've got the slow drip of Clinton's e-mails and foundation, stories which continue to go nowhere at twice the speed of sound, but that's really it. Things could somehow turn around for the GOP in the next 71 days, but it would take a miracle (actually, it would take a disaster), so for now, sucks to be them.

Oddly enough, although Clinton's Reno speech came early enough in the week that political cartoonists had time to think it through, we didn't see a lot about it in this week's p3 toon review, although some harmless fun was had at the expense of Trump campaign handlers and surrogates. Perhaps this is evidence supporting the theory that the smartest thing for the Republican establishment to do, post-Reno, is to ignore it and deny the political press any fuel for the fire. 

In any case, people with life-threatening allergies got a blunt reminder this week of why public health shouldn't be traded on the stock exchange.

Today's toons were selected from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Chan Lowe, Steve Benson, Jeff Danziger, Glenn McCoy, Steve Breen, Tim Eagan, Clay Jones, Matt Weurker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Walt Handlesman.

p3 Legion of Merit: Brian McFadden.

p3 Certificate of Achievement for Ignoring Away Trump Campaign's Billions in Free Media: Bob Gorrell.

Ann Telnaes has a simple request.

Mark Fiore invites us to celebrate some of America's Worst Ideas.

Tom Tomorrow charts election phenomena in 2016 – and beyond.

Keith Knight shares a golden oldie: Wondering what the heck is all this commotion?

Reuben Bolling's Super-Fun-Pak Comix features the return of a p3 favorite: Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Time Traveler from 1909. But it's Imaginary Friends & Their Imaginary Friends that really made me laugh. And then go, "hmm."

Carol Lay shares the truth about creativity and love. Happy ending? You tell me.

Red Meat probes the eternal optimism of Milkman Dan.

The Comic Curmudgeon is enjoying the current story arc in Spider-Man, but fails to appreciate Stan Lee and Larry Lieber's awesome shout-out to Dorothy Parker and her review of House on Pooh Corner in the second panel.

Comic Strip of the Day discusses scandals, knife fights, and things that were horrifying in 1971, finding time along the way to be provoked by the same Jen Sorenson toon I did (below).

"If that cat's been in that kitchen . . . !" And there you have most of the plot of "The Midnight Snack," directed by Joe Hanna and William Barbera (uncredited) in 1941, the second Tom and Jerry cartoon, although the first in which they're referred to by their now-familiar names. (In their first short, "Puss Gets the Boot," they're named, respectively, Jasper and Jinx.) I love the deep blues and shadows – like "Puss Gets the Boot," "The Midnight Snack" is set in a darkened house, lit mainly by refrigerator lights, radio dials, etc. And, of course, Tom still looks like a Russian Blue cat. The character of the black house maid, nearly always shown only from the shoulders down (sometimes knees down) was voiced by veteran radio/TV/film actor Lillian Randolph, who made a pretty successful alt-career playing black house maids and similar characters during that era. (She did the maid in several Tom and Jerry shorts between 1940 and 1952. The character's name, which I don't recall ever being used on-screen, is Mammy Two-Shoes. Consider yourself warned. For TV syndication, the voice of Mammy Two-Shoes was redubbed by other actors, notably June Foray – later to voice Rocky the Flying Squirrel and many others – as a white teenager. Sometimes Mammy's lower body was replaced with that of a typical teenaged bobby-soxer from the era and sometimes – inexplicably – not.) Watch "The Midnight Snack" at Vimeo.com.

The Transplendent Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman demonstrates the fundamentals of the pivot.

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen has a strip today that reminds me of a store about three blocks from where I'm sitting right now, called Nature's Grocery. Despite the friendly green store name, most of its products are wrapped and packaged like they're expecting a drive-by shooting on the way to check-out. Do ramen noodles really need two layers of packaging?

Matt Bors outlines a perfectly understandable good-faith error.

Jesse Springer looks at another victim of Oregon's pattern of nickel and diming things that should be top priorities: the chronically underfunded and understaffed Oregon Department of Forestry.

Test your toon-captioning kung fu at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

Sunday morning toons: Rumors of Trump campaign demise "somewhat exaggerated"

I know candidate Clinton has made some speeches last week, captured some news – but for the life of me, I can't recall what at the moment.

I mean, really, all she had to do was bat away a forged document casting doubt on her health, and then pour a cold drink and kick back to watch the Trump campaign crash into tree after tree while proclaiming the Vulgar Talking Yam to be king of the forest.

But it has been a week for rumors. Oh, it has indeed.

Trump made an unprecedented public apology a couple of days ago for . . . something. Many hailed this as the long-awaited "pivot" toward "the center," until someone finally noticed he never really said what he was apologizing for. So it was rumored to be a sign of the backstage maneuvering in his campaign. Anyway, it was quickly forgotten, partly because it was such an obvious one-off for the campaign and partly because--

The word then came out that Roger Ailes, in disgrace with fortune and women's eyes, was coming on board the campaign. This rumor was immediately denied by all parties, until it was confirmed about a day later.

Next, the former Breitbart bomb-thrower Steve Bannon joined as campaign director, although this was never actually denied so it never really got legs as a rumor. Ailes brought the misogyny, Bannon brought the white supremacy, and the two joined long time rat-fucker and Hillary hater Roger Stone, plus Trump himself. The total effect was something like an alt-right potluck, or perhaps the Republican campaign equivalent of "The Suicide Squad" (with roughly comparable reviews).

The addition of Bannon triggered rumors that Paul Manafort, erstwhile-campaign director and part-time empresario to oligarchs from the former Soviet empire, might be on his way out the door. Those rumors lasted until this morning, when evidence that Manafort might have been paid millions as an unregistered foreign agent appeared, eliminating the need to call the story a rumor. He promptly left the pot-luck, which is just as well because he brought potato salad and so did everyone else.

But now that Ailes and Bannon have solidified their positions, it has breathed new life into rumors from a few weeks ago that this has all been a long con on Trump's part, positioning him to launch his own cable vanity network – one imagines something between Oprah's OWN network and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News – spearheaded by two former right-wing media dons and aimed at the Trump base his campaign has brought into the light. I'm not very convinced about this; Occam's Razor suggests that the more likely explanation is simply stumblebum luck rather than fiendishly clever and patient plan.

Today's toons were selected from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Khalid Cherradi, Clay Bennett, Terry Mosher, Matt Davies, Chan Lowe, Matt Weurker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Jeff Danziger.

p3 Legion of Merit: Clay Jones.

p3 Certificate of Harmonic Toon Convergence: Jack Ohman and Glenn McCoy (and how often do those two turn up in the same breath?).

Ann Telnaes asks – and answers – the question how did we get here?

Mark Fiore drops the latest Trump campaign ad. Do not worry. Trust us.

Take my wife – please! Tom Tomorrow presents the Donald Trump Comedy Hour. (thump! thump!) Is this mike on? What is this – an audience or an oil painting?

Keith Knight has a fun fact: Think of it as our way of repaying everything Germany did for us in the 20th century.

Reuben Bolling brings us another installment of Billy Dare, Boy Adventurer, in the most meta- story you're going to read today.

Carol Lay presents a light bit of Hitchcockean fun, in which the third wedding invitation plays the part of the McGuffin.

The Comic Curmudgeon watches, first in horror at the darker practices of the Shoe-niverse, and then in disappointment as Beetle Bailey flubs one of the fundamental cartoon strip signifiers.

Comic Strip of the Day correctly identifies the real problem arising from the abusive, depressing factory farm run-off that is the typical news site's comment's section.

"Whoa, camel, whoa! Whoa!! WHOA!" To mark the occasion of Oregon's three days of temperatures circling the 100-degree mark this week, here's "Sahara Hare," directed in 1955 by Friz Freleng, from a story by Warren Foster (uncredited: Portland's own Mel Blanc as Bugs and Yosemite Sam, and musical director Milt Franklyn). Watch Sahara Hare at DailyMotion.

The Magnificent, Mighty Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman watches candidate Clinton execute.

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen points out that the chickens are unable to come home to roost.

Matt Bors totally gets the latest iteration of Trump's immigration policy.

Jesse Springer seems to be settling into a pox-on-both-your-houses posture regarding the plan to raise corporate taxes on large and mostly out-of-state corporations (Oregon's corporate taxes are currently lowest in the nation).

Test your toon-captioning mojo at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

Sunday afternoon toons: Parsing the Vulgarian, and other low return-on-investment pastimes

(This week's guest p3 Toon Review Avatar.
Betty will be back next week.)

Okay, I stand by my Eeyore-style rant from a couple of days ago, at least in its main outline: The way things are going, whether Trump drops out of the race, or stays and loses, or – lord help us – stays and wins, we're headed for a political crisis at best, a constitutional crisis at worst.

But I'm beginning to feel differently about the incident that prompted it – Trump's possibly-throwaway line about a "Second Amendment" remedy to the problem of Hillary Clinton unilaterally placing rabid anti-gun Supreme Court justices on the bench.

Lower electric — lower electric bills, folks. Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick…

(CROWD BOOING) If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But — but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we’re tied. You see what’s going on.

XXX you see what’s going on? We tied because Scalia – this was not suppose to happen. Justice Scalia was going to be around for ten more years at least and this is what happens. That was a horrible thing.

Now it's true that, earlier in the same speech, Trump could be read as coming close to equating the Second Amendment and the National Rifle Association –

Your Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association endorsed and they endorsed me early, a long time ago. And they’re great people, Wayne and Chris, they are great people.

– which would give some support to those Trump defenders saying that the "maybe there is" line simply meant that the NRA's clout might prevent a pro-gun control nomination from getting confirmed. And that reading, however self-interested, got buttressed soon after when the NRA announced a big media buy on Trump's behalf.

But really, such arguments are never going to get anywhere. There's no way to pin down what he was trying to say in the original speech. The plain fact is that Trump's public language skills are barely those of a sixth-grader, with a limited vocabulary plus grammar and syntax more stream-of-consciousness (trickle-of-consciousness?) than Kennedyesque. And when it comes time to figure out what he meant in a given case, we don't even have the option of appealing to authorial intent, since when Trump is challenged on something he said, he's apt either to deny what he said on-camera or in front of witnesses, or to dismiss it however implausibly as a joke.

Short version: When Trump says something, there's really no reliable way to say what he meant – not at the moment, and not later. As Charlie Pierce is wont to say: This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Trump lit the fuse on this early enough in the week that nearly every cartoonist out there had time to take a whack at it.

Oh yeah – and US Olympic gold medals something-something breaking all historical records something-something historically-awful coverage something-something.

Today's toons were selected, however improbably, from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Dan Wasserman, Jerry Holbert, Jim Morin, Matt Weurker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Darrin Bell.

p3 Legion of Merit: Jeff Danziger.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation From Another Medium: Clay Jones.

p3 "Humor Is Such A Subjective Thing" Award: Tim Eagan. (Source.)

Try as I might, I can't unsee Ann Telnaes's mashup of the week in Trump and the week in Rio.

Mark Fiore has an update for people who never made it farther than Rio or Trump's brain this week.

Tom Tomorrow presents Peter Thiel's Modest Proposal.

Keith Knight looks at the world back in Clint's day.

Reuben Bolling delivers the seventh in a series of government information brochures.

Carol Lay looks at those magic words: You must need something.

Red Meat's Old Cowboy takes the ride.

Comic Strip of the Day meditates on (among other things) the takeaway from the self-described "survivor's tale" Maus. Like many other readers, my introduction to graphic novels was through that book. (By coincidence, at the beginning of the summer I finally got around to reading – and thoroughly enjoying – Jeff Smith's Bone.)

Road runners can't read! A friend reposted this video of three bear cubs playing on a hammock on Facebook this morning. I told her it felt like discovering a lost Chuck Jones "Road Runner" cartoon: It's got nature. It's got a very simple concept. It's got perfect timing. It's got single-minded pursuit of a goal. It's got about a dozen increasingly-baroque variations on failure. No matter how many times they hit the ground, they're back up, apparently having learned nothing except to redouble their efforts. Then comes the final moment, when they think they've finally got it, but . . . In fact, all it needs is a caption, perhaps: "Bear (Hammockii Obsessivus)." In honor of those cubs and their wild ride, here's the very first Road Runner cartoon, "Fast and Furry-ous," directed by Jones in 1949 from a story by Michael Maltese. (Attentive readers may note that, in this premiere effort, Jones does briefly violate Rule #5 of the Road Runner / Coyote discipline to make the boomerang gag work. But it's about the only such instance I can recall. Sentence reduced to time served.) Watch "Fast and Furry-ous" at DailyMotion.

The Totally Classy Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman looks for the position of the next gunman.

Documented Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen pays tribute to a chickenshit euphemism run amok.

Matt Bors has grave concerns about the next 85 days. Grave. Concerns.

Jesse Springer wonders if the fact that both timber trade groups and environmental organizations are filing lawsuits against the BLM's latest timber management plan for Western Oregon, means the two sides have finally found common ground and decides, on balance, no.

Test your toon-captioning mojo at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.