Auchtoon!

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
May 19, 2013

Next week, my daughter Natalina will be graduating from Grandville High School with an excellent public education that has engaged her, challenged her, and prepared her for college and beyond. It has been an extraordinary return on value. The system has served her and her classmates well. A few weeks ago, the Buena Vista school district shut down and ended the school year early for some 400 students. The state and local school board dithered till last week and now have figured a stop-gap way to allow school to complete the year. The system has not served those students well.

Of course there are all whole host of social, political, and economic reasons for why all this is. Which is to say, there is no simple solution to “fixing” Michigan’s public education system. But maybe the first step is admitting that it is difficult and going from there.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
May 12, 2013

Here’s the backstory:

The Michigan Natural Resources Commission has approved a wolf hunting season this fall for parts of the Upper Peninsula.

The regulations approved Thursday establish a target of 43 wolves to be killed. Michigan has an estimated 658 wolves in the Upper Peninsula overall, according to the Department of Natural Resources.

The DNR recommended the limited hunt as part of a strategy aimed at cutting down on the number of wolves in parts of the U.P. where wolves have attacked livestock and pets. But allowing a hunt will upset a coalition that was formed with the intent of blocking a wolf hunt through a voter referendum. (Click here to read the full article.)

So while I believe all Michigan residents have a right to their opinion and I personally don’t know if a wolf hunt is the way to go, determining the best course of action shouldn’t come down to a popularity contest. Not when my greatest predator concern is for the moles that are making my lawn lumpy.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
May 5, 2013

I didn’t want to do a cartoon about the bill in the Michigan legislature that proposes to reform Michigan’s automobile insurance laws. Even though it affects me and my family directly, I find it, well, boring. But I decided it was certainly relevant and I should do some research. As I was reading this article, my eyes glazed over when I read the quote from the insurance industry spokesperson. I woke up enough to realize, “This is exactly the problem. These guys depend on knocking me out with their insurance-speak so I don’t realize the money they’re taking out of my back pocket.” It’s kinda like free drinks in a casino. So I lifted the quote word-for-word and used it in Panels 2 and 3.

My new favorite defense for anything is “much of the information is available online.”

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
April 28, 2013

For all of you who live in Michigan, particularly West Michigan, I’m not telling you anything when I say April has been horrific. The second or third wettest month on record, cold, nasty, windy, flooding. The Grand River crested a week ago in downtown Grand Rapids inches from the top of flood walls. Wet basements. Cancelled sports. Closings and postponements. (Grandville actually had a “flood” day off school!) So this cartoon isn’t really so much an editorial cartoon as it is a reflection (and, hopefully, a post-mortem for the crappy weather).

Side note (and in the interest of full disclosure): Somewhere in the archives of my head I remembered doing a similar cartoon. But it wasn’t until I finished this one and sent for printing that I found the cartoon below, which I did for the Grand Rapids Business Journal. Back in 1997, any decent rain would overflow the sewage treatment plant, which would dump nastiness into the Grand River. A huge effort to upgrade the system has largely fixed this, although the record-breaking rains recently did overflow the system. This time, folks were more concerned with the walls of water than a few turds getting loose.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
April 21, 2013

Didn’t break a lot of new ground with this one. Basically, everybody knows in Michigan that we have to do something to fund road repair. The old model doesn’t work anymore because it taxes sales of gasoline and with more efficient cars we use a lot less. Governor Snyder has proposed a solution. Democrats don’t like it because it’s his solution. Republicans don’t like it because it has the work “tax” in it. So …nothing.

My starting point — and what I really wanted to talk about — was the recent failure of the US Senate to pass gun violence legislation. There’s is lots to be disappointed about, but maybe the biggest one for me is that the argument “well nothing can be done about criminals so it is best to do nothing” won the day. It seemed, in a word, pathetic. I had no Michigan angle on that so I ended up with the cartoon you see.

However, there was a group of cartoonists who were able to express their disappointment in a very poignant way. Here’s a short video created for Demand Action Against Gun Violence. It’s only a couple of minutes and definitely worthwhile. Click HERE to see the video on the Demand Action website, with a slideshow of the artwork.

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
April 14, 2013

I don’t think he would like me saying this (but then there are a lot of things I haven’t liked him saying), but I think Dave Agema is West Michigan’s answer to Coleman Young. Do you remember former Detroit mayor Coleman Young? He would do or say (especially say) really dumb, sometimes horrible things. And when the media would call him out on it, he would immediately run to his political base, plead persecution, and rally their support. It usually worked. And it usually works for Mr. Agema.

Recently Mr Agema reposted on his Facebook page an essay entitled ”Everyone Should Know These Statistics on Homosexuals.” Now we’re all more or less used to folks reposting not-so-vetted content on their Facebook pages. However, when you are a veteran elected official and a current paid representative of you political party, you might want to check your sources. (Actually, spouting off on stereotypes should be the first red flag.) But when the source of any material turns out to be white supremacists, it’s time to stop. And certainly if you went ahead and posted anyway, you should resign and apologize, not declare yourself misunderstood as the defender of conservative values.

This was not Mr. Agema’s first Coleman Young routine, and as I read about it I thought, “Man, this is like a bad infomercial.”

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
April 7, 2013

Sometimes for me it’s not about the statement a cartoon makes or how well it’s drawn or its structure or timing — you know, the important things. Sometimes, I’m just happy with the timeliness. I managed to tie together fairly nicely a few different events with this one. (I’d be really happy if U of M had won the stupid game last night…..)

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
March 31, 2013

This one is mostly making fun of …me. Recently there has been a series of public forums on fracking in Michigan. I found myself with some very strong opinions (It’s awful — it ruins the environment!  It’s wonderful — it provides cheap, clean energy!), but without any real context. I don’t have the time — or I guess more correctly, I haven’t taken the time — to educate myself by researching the science, the evidence, the studies about it. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to believe my opinions. So instead of actually doing the hard work, I weaseled out by illustrating how to avoid the hard work….

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
March 24, 2013

It kind of got lost in the news shuffle last week, but in an amazing instance of honesty, the Republican National Committee put out a “what went wrong for us in 2012″ report that actually self-reflected (which almost never happens in any big organization, government or otherwise). They squarely put a large part of the blame on themselves, which was, the concepts of conservatism are good but we do a lousy job of selling them. This is what I’ve been drawing about for years! Living within your means, self-reliance, grow slowly but consistently — sensible, positive ideas that are easily embraced. Instead in 2012, the GOP spent the majority of their time and money beating us over the head with how bad guys are plotting to take all our stuff. Fear is an even easier sell but it eventually gets tiresome you see the results. Why do Republicans consistently behave like Dick Cheney when they could embrace their inner Jerry Ford?

Case in point, in a lame duck session last December the Michigan legislature rammed through a right-to-work law. It was legal (despite continuing efforts by Democrats to find a legal loophole to prove otherwise), but it certainly violated the spirit of fairness and open debate. Now several unions, including those at Michigan universities, have been trying to lock in multiple year contracts before the law takes effect this month. Again, legal. Some have tried to set the terms of a new contract to, like, 10 years (whereas 3 would be more the norm) — that’s clearly violating the spirit of law. But getting a contract in before the new terms is understandable. Grouchy old Republicans in the Michigan legislature (aka, the pot calling the kettle black) were shocked at this violating of the spirit of the law and threatened to cut funding to universities who sign those contracts. And this is how you plan to win young voters in the next election?…

Originally published in the Ann Arbor News, Bay City Times, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Kalamazoo Gazette, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News
March 17, 2013

Last week, Carl Levin, the senior Senator from the great state of Michigan, announced that he will not seek a seventh term in 2014. So doing the math, that means that Levin has been a senator …forever (or almost as long as Strom Thurmond was, which was infinity). I like Levin. I rode on a plane from Detroit to Washington DC with him once. He rode in steerage with the rest of us schlubs. Rumpled shirt, tie askew, old tweed sportcoat, exceedingly bad combover — looking as uncomfortable as the rest of us but still shuffling through papers trying to get some work done. A man of the people. And by all accounts, smart and sincere. That’s pretty rare for any longtime politician. It will be interesting to see if Michigan gets anybody like him in 2014.