We’re having an alarming increase in coronavirus cases in Southern California. Restaurants are closed. Hospitals are filling up. Masks are mandatory as Trumpies demand their rights to go maskless. Fox News and President Trump tell us not to believe our lying eyes.
This California Bear cartoon seems especially apt right now. I drew this one a few years ago as California was suffering from an economic malaise and a variety of other problems that seem trivial now. I dusted this oldie off, gave it a fresh coat of paint and it is better now than ever, so I sent it out to newspapers again.
Our past economic problems seem quaint now. As I was rummaging around in my bear flag oldies I found the next one about California drowning in a sea of red ink. Cartoons like this don’t travel well. Outside of the USA, people don’t know our California flag, and they don’t know what “red ink” means (it means debt). To freshen this oldie up I added some coronavirus balls to the drowning bear in the red-ink red-stripe.
Back in the old days, California was drowning in red ink because of unfunded pension obligations and poor financial decisions by our irresponsible elected officials; the good old days. I exaggerate so much in my cartoons that my drawings for mildly bad times seem just as appropriate when times are much worse –there’s a cartoon “silver-lining” that we can all be grateful for.
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My cartoon today depicts the bear on the California flag pulling down a statue of Junipero Serra, the controversial Catholic saint who oversaw the opening of nine missions in colonial California. Serra participated in the Spanish Inquisition and enslaved native Americans, imprisoning them at his missions. Statues of Serra have been vandalized recently as many protests toppling statues commemorating racist historical figures have swept the nation, and the world, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
The California bear is something of an “everyman” character. I like seeing the movement to purge symbols honoring racist, historical figures; perhaps it is a bit of wishful thinking on my part to see California’s “everyman” tearing down Serra since there is quite a bit of support for defending the many Serra statues that dot our state like a pox. President Trump is using an executive order to boost penalties for defacing racist, historical monuments. My depiction of the California flag today is more a symbol of hope that these protests succeed than than a depiction of today’s reality.
The statue is based on one located in San Juan Capistrano that was relocated recently to protect it from protesters. I lifted Serra’s robe a bit so that I could get some Saddam Hussein action going with his ankles.
When I was in third grade I was required to build a model of a California mission and I was taught a false, fairy tale story about Padre Serra. Thirty years later my kids went through the same thing in school. California students have been required to build those models and have been fed a whitewashed version of history for many decades. That may be changing now as the protests continue. Maybe our “everyman” bear will finally tear down that statue!
Scroll down to see some more of my favorite “everyman” California bears.
California always has a drought …
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Sometimes the drought is worse …
Even when it floods, we still have a drought …
We have fires too. And heroic firemen …
And we have legal marijuana …
And California was one of the first states to legalize gay marriage …
And president Trump doesn’t like California’s auto emissions standards …
Our reader supported site, Cagle.com, still needs you! Journalism is threatened with the pandemic that has shuttered newspaper advertisers. Some pundits predict that a large percentage of newspapers won’t survive the pandemic economic slump, and as newspapers sink, so do editorial cartoonists who depend on newspapers, and along with them, our Cagle.com site, that our small, sinking syndicate largely supports, along with our fans.
Two sweeping new laws in California have been a heavy burden for us to bear here at Cagle Cartoons, Inc. I wrote about Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) that limits California freelance cartoonists and columnists to 35 contributions to a publisher each year. Because of this limit, we will no longer consider submissions from California creators and we have dropped a number of California contributors from our Cagle.com site and our PoliticalCartoons.com store. Other California freelance contributors that stayed with us are no longer paid, because of AB 5.
Cartoon by the brilliant Dario Castillejos from Mexico.
The California legislature dropped a second bomb on us with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This poorly written, overly broad law is intended to affect only very large companies and protect consumer information that should be kept private, but in their sweeping ignorance, the legislature has swept up Cagle.com along with the Silicon Valley giants.
The CCPA imposes a huge $7,500.00 per violation fine for failing to properly disclose information about an individual and delete a user’s data upon request; the colossal fine is intended to threaten Web behemoths like Google and Facebook, who make billions of dollars reselling consumer data. The law applies to companies with over $25 million of revenue, or companies that earn over half of their annual gross income from reselling consumer information, or who maintain data on 50,000 or more people –it is the 50,000 threshold that snares our tiny, little business along with many other unintended small business victims.
We have about 85,000 fans who have opted to subscribe to Cagle.com’s free, cartoon-a-day, email newsletter. We use the mailing list to maintain the community of fans on Cagle.com. The emails include links to my blog posts and new topical sections on Cagle.com; most of the traffic to Cagle.com is sustained by churning, with emails enticing the same fans to come back again and again to look at our new content. (Sign up for our Free Daily Newsletter here.)
50,000 sounds like a lot, but it is a small drop in the ocean of the internet.
Here’s how it works: if one of our emails has an enticing subject line we’ll get about 20% of the recipients to open the email; then, if the cartoon and link look interesting enough, another 20% of that number will click on the link to go to our site; so, perhaps 4% of the list, or around 3,400 fans, end up visiting Cagle.com from a typical email link. Since we have no outside site feeding traffic to us (as we used to have with msnbc.com), the newsletter keeps an active, but small community of political cartoon fans engaged with our cartoons and columns.
We’ve spent thousands of dollars in legal fees to comply with AB 5 and CCPA. The fines for failing to comply with AB 5 are steep, but a handful of $7,500.00 CCPA compliance fines are worse and could put our small business out of business.
Cartoon by the talented Michael Kountouris, from Greece.
Here’s some background to illustrate our risk …
Cagle.com is a target for hackers who we believe come from third world regimes with humorless dictators who don’t like how they are depicted in our cartoons; there are clues that lead us to this conclusion, including the content on our site at the times of the worst attacks and the distribution of the servers delivering the attacks. The hacks we suffer from are often unusually large, complex and sophisticated; they are designed to bring our business and Cagle.com down –unlike the common attacks that normal Web sites see, that are only looking to steal credit card information or to hijack servers for Bitcoin mining. A good example is a sophisticated attack about five years ago on our email server that we used for our Free Daily Newsletter.
Five years ago we had about 150,000 opt-in email addresses on our list. Hackers broke into our email server and, over the course of about eight months, slowly, daily, methodically, added small batches of valid email addresses to our list, which grew over the months of the hack to nearly 800,000 email addresses. We didn’t notice the added addresses. Unlike a more typical attack that would try to delete the data on our servers and bring Cagle.com down, the daily email list continued to be delivered everyday without an apparent problem; we received the newsletters in our own accounts, as did all of our subscribers. We got few complaints from the hundreds of thousands of people who were added to the list by the hackers. We didn’t realize there was a problem over the months as determined hackers were bloating our email list.
Another great cartoon by Michael Kountouris, from Greece.
People who didn’t sign up for our newsletter didn’t complain to us –but some of them complained to their own email providers who placed Cagle.com on blacklists as a spammer. We ended up on all of the major email blacklists. Our newsletters, and our other business emails, were blocked and the newsletter stopped churning our traffic. It took some time for us to figure out what happened. We replaced the newsletter list with a backup we had from a year earlier and set out on a quest to get off of the blacklists, a difficult process that took a couple of years. We moved our email newsletter to MailChimp, which is more expensive but which has better security than we could manage on our own.
The experts who looked at the history of this hack told us that the attack was very unusual, and that the hackers were surprisingly sophisticated, motivated and patient, spending countless hours over the months, manually adding valid email addresses to our list. The experts hadn’t seen anything like it before. Instead of simply taking down our server such that we could put the server back up from a backup copy, this hack poisoned the well for us, with blacklisting that crippled our newsletter and our traffic for years to come. One comment the experts made was memorable, “Those guys must really, really hate you.”
With continuing attacks, we can’t really be sure of what data is on our servers, we react and make fixes as we go along. We don’t keep sensitive data on our servers (like credit card numbers that can be stolen). We don’t run advertising on our sites. We never have and never will sell our data to anyone else.
Which brings me back to CCPA. Our modest, Free Daily Newsletter, that allows our community of fans to function, and which subjects us to a potential $7,500.00 per-violation fine if we’re found to have data on our servers that we didn’t report to any inquiring user. This opens us up to a potential hacker attack that would threaten us with potential CCPA fines for non-compliance in disclosing or deleting data that we never knew had been placed on our servers. It wouldn’t take much of an effort for hackers to subject us to a handful of $7,500.00 fines that could take down our small business.
Companies in California are expected to spend an initial $55 billion simply complying with CCPA, according to The Los Angeles Times, with a “gold rush” of start-ups and consultants looking to take advantage of the anxiety that CCPA is causing countless small businesses in California, like ours.
Beyond the risk, the cost of legal compliance, the programming changes and the fact that we’re not the intended target of this poorly written law, some of the hoops we’re required to jump through are ridiculous; the misleading statements that we’re required to make in our online Privacy Policy are a great example.
As a companion to to Cagle.com, we run a small newspaper syndicate that licenses editorial cartoons and columns to newspaper editorial page editors. We maintain a database of editors at papers that subscribe, for delivery and billing; we also maintain a list of editors who don’t subscribe, who we pitch, trying to get them to subscribe. The newspaper editors list includes the names of editors, publication titles, addresses, and the standard field, “Mr./Ms.” which under CCPA, means that we are collecting and storing sexual identification data on individuals. Because of the “Mr./Ms.” field in our editor database, this is the wording CCPA requires us to post in our required Privacy Policy: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: C. Protected classification characteristics under California or federal law. Age (40 years or older), race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, religion or creed, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, sex (including gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy or childbirth and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, veteran or military status, genetic information (including familial genetic information).
Cartoon by the stupendous Angel Boligan from Mexico.
Since we store street addresses for these editors, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: G. Geolocation data. Physical location or movements.
Since we keep notes on our contacts with the editors, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: K. Inferences drawn from other personal information. Profile reflecting a person’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.
Since we store names and email addresses, we must post this: … In particular, we have collected the following categories of personal information from its consumers within the last twelve (12) months: A. Identifiers. A real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, Social Security number, driver’s license number, passport number, or other similar identifiers. B. Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)). A name, signature, Social Security number, physical characteristics or description, address, telephone number, passport number, driver’s license or state identification card number, insurance policy number, education, employment, employment history, bank account number, credit card number, debit card number, or any other financial information, medical information, or health insurance information. Some personal information included in this category may overlap with other categories.
The required Privacy Policy could give pertinent information about what data Web sites really gather and store about users, but the crazy, hyperbolic wording that CCPA requires gives the impression that every site is spying and keeping intrusive data on everyone.
Since we acknowledge that we haven’t sold our data, we’re excused from some of the requirements of CCPA, for example, we’re not required to maintain a toll-free telephone number, posting our regular phone number is sufficient. But we’re not allowed to broadly state that we have not sold our data in the past and we won’t sell it in the future, we have to use this wording: In the preceding twelve (12) months, the Company has not sold personal information.
Another cartoon by the brilliant Mexican cartoonist, Dario Castillejos from Oaxaca.
The first advice my attorney gave me, before embarking on our expensive compliance journey under CCPA and AB 5, was, “You should move out of California.”
I’ve lived most of my life in California and I don’t want to move away from family and friends, so Cagle Cartoons, Inc. is suffering through the muck of risky, expensive, bone-headed, bad legislation. Since our business is small, it is fragile. Since we speak truth to power, we have many enemies around the world who would seek to take us down and it is ironic that the worst threats to us, and to the press in California, come from our Democrat controlled legislature in California.
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Today’s cartoon is about California’s new law, AB 5, that went into effect this week. The law is terrible for cartoonists and Cagle.com. It was intended to force Uber to make their drivers into employees, but overzealous lawmakers overextended into other areas that they didn’t understand, including journalism. Here’s my cartoon …
The law is decimating publishers throughout California. AB 5 affects us at California-based Cagle Cartoons also, because we publish Cagle.com, we’re defined as a publisher rather than just as a syndicate. We’ve dropped a number of California cartoonists from our roster and some of the changes that we were forced to make were painful. Some contributors who were paid are now paid nothing, to comply with AB 5. Cagle.com features almost all non-California cartoonists and columnists now. (Out-of-state cartoonists and columnists are exempt from AB 5.)
Under AB 5, self-syndicating California cartoonists and columnists are screwed. The bill has a limit of 35 “contributions” per year that a writer or cartoonist can make to a publisher. The bill’s author is quoted as saying that the arbitrary number was selected so that weekly newspaper columnists could not be freelancers and must be employees.
A self-syndicating California cartoonist or columnist might have ten newspaper clients who each subscribe to the same cartoons or columns, each might pay $40/month; AB 5 mandates that this cartoonist or columnist has to be taken on as an hourly employee by each and all of her ten subscribers –of-course, no subscriber would take on a self-syndicating cartoonist or columnist as an employee.
Thirty years ago, altie weeklies were thriving and there were a bunch of self-syndicating cartoonists. It used to be that young cartoonists were advised to start their careers drawing local cartoons for their local paper for a tiny fee. Self-syndicating cartoonists were diverse, with more women and minorities and more diverse points of view than among the mainstream editorial cartoonists. AB 5 would have had a big impact years ago, snuffing out these California cartoonists –but today I fear that the self-syndicating California cartoonists have already died off; young, local cartoonists no longer exist, so there are few or no independent newspaper cartoonists that are left for AB 5 to crush. (If there are any, I’d like to hear about them.)
There’s another interesting point about AB 5 and editorial cartoonists. Some years ago it was conventional wisdom that, “in the future,” editorial cartoons would be animated. The big editorial cartooning awards wanted to be seen as forward-thinking so they selected award winners who did animated cartoons and many award-hungry editorial cartoonists spent a lot of time learning animation techniques. With very few exceptions, animation never caught on in the editorial cartooning business. The Web never developed a culture of paying for content and the remaining political cartoonists have been clinging to the sinking ship of print. AB 5 expressly bans freelance cartoonists from doing even one animation. Animated editorial cartoons can only be done by employees in California. California Democrats slammed the door on our future that never happened.
Legislators who supported AB 5 argue that it is good for journalists and cartoonists, because they need better jobs that get employee benefits. What is actually happening is that the journalists simply don’t get hired and they lose their freelance gigs; the journalism doesn’t get done and the publishers are shrinking and suffering even more. At Cagle Cartoons, we can’t afford to hire any cartoonists or columnists as employees, and none of them would want to suffer the restrictions of being our employees. The idea that publishers, including little Web sites, would hire cartoonists as employees now is whimsical nonsense from another era. In California, the “Gig Economy” is now the “can’t get a gig” economy.
It is ironic that we read so much about President Trump attacking journalism, but the truly effective attacks on journalism come from liberal Democrats in Sacramento.
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Anti-Vaxxers have been out in force, protesting California’s Senate Bill 276 that would make it harder for unethical doctors to grant bogus medical exemptions to parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children. Ignorant celebrities have been leading the charge. Last week we got stories about Justin Timberlake’s wife, Jessica Biel doing the lobbying rounds both evil. anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The dangerous, celebrity idiots don’t like to be called “anti-vaxxers,” they prefer to be described as “pro-informed consent,” or “pro-vaccine choice,” or “anti-forced vaccination,” or “vaccine risk aware,” all of which mean the same thing. Dangerous and ignorant. Here’s an cartoon about the anti-vaxxers that I drew three years ago …
Here are some of my favorite anti-vaxxer cartoons by my buddies – these first two are by Nate Beeler.
President Trump threatened to dump migrants on sanctuary cities last week. The mayors of the sanctuary cities, and the governor of my sanctuary state, California, all say that they welcome the refugees and I think they are sincere in that. What Trump sees as dumping human garbage on his political opponents to prove their hypocrisy would really amount to placing the migrants in places that are the most likely to truly welcome them and help them on their difficult journey. Much of the media buzz has been about how terrible Trump’s intentions are and how the move would be illegal; little attention has been paid to the fact that it is could be good for the migrants.
My cartoon shows how Trump views the plan.
Here are some of my recent migrant favorites by my cartoonist buddies. The migrant plan is the brainchild of Trump’s nefarious advisor, Stephen Miller, who Steve Sack contrasts with Melania.
My pal, Monte Wolverton draws the weaponization of migrants.
Trump seems to be fenced in by the law, as seen by my pal, John Cole.
California is considering legislation that would ban Teach for America, an organization that recruits college kids for a short stint as teachers in inner city schools. Teach for America (TFA) looks attractive, with a pitch like the Peace Corps, urging bright college kids to serve society by teaching in the most troubled schools that have difficulty finding good teachers.
The group is disturbing to many traditional teachers because they reinforce the notion that teaching is something we can all just jump into, undermining the notion of teachers as professionals; after all, everyone knows how to be a teacher because we all went to school ourselves, right? Traditional teachers spend years in college earning a degree in education to qualify for their teaching credentials, but the young TFA teachers get only a five week crash course.
School districts pay TFA teachers the same as starting teachers, but have to pay many thousands of additional dollars as a fee to TFA, a fee that the California Assembly threatens to ban. California further threatens to bar TFA from the troubled schools that need the best teachers, and that are the only places where TFA places their teachers. A very low percentage of the young TFA teachers remain in the classroom after their short teaching stint, so TFA doesn’t offer a long term fix for the shortage of good teachers in bad schools.
TFA annoyed traditional teachers recently when they seemed to encourage their recruits to cross picket lines in the Oakland teachers strike, and they have annoyed teachers unions by their close affiliation with charter schools, a teacher union bugaboo.
Get a group of teachers together and it won’t be long before the conversation turns to bashing TFA. It looks like I’m the only cartoonist in our PoliticalCartoons.com group who has drawn anything on this topic –which is interesting in itself. Since the controversy about TFA isn’t in the news much, my cartoon takes the form of an explainer. I expect we’ll hear much more about TFA and the professionalism of the teaching profession if the proposed California legislation passes.
My cartoon today is bound to anger many of my readers, who expect me to draw liberal cartoons consistently. I’ll explain it! (But my readers will still be angry. Sorry.)
First, notice how I made San Francisco Bay into the state’s mouth? (You have to consider his purple tongue as part of the land defining the shape of the bay.)
My blue, California Burger Policeman is yelling a list of War Against Burgers issues that I face when I go out to eat in Los Angeles. Here’s what the burger policeman is yelling about …
Only small cups for soda!
The California legislature is expected to pass a bill soon that will limit restaurant sales of sugary drinks, like Coca Cola, to small sized cups only. A punitive tax on sugary drinks is also expected to pass statewide, following a similar measure in the city of Berkeley that is seen as successful because it has succeeded in getting poor people to drink more water instead of more expensive soda.
Use this paper straw!
Plastic straws are being banned throughout California, replaced by paper straws that get soggy quickly.
Pay an extra waiter surcharge! The City of San Francisco has passed a law requiring restaurants to pay underpaid waiters much more. Most restaurants have passed the increased costs on to customers by raising food prices, but many San Francisco restaurants have added a separate surcharge to the bill to account for for the extra cost.
Did you request this straw first? NO? Then FIRE the waiter! Some jurisdictions in California, including Los Angeles, have new laws that impose severe penalties on restaurants that give straws to customers who didn’t ask for a straw first. There are inspectors who go to restaurants to check on compliance with the straw law, and if they find a customer didn’t ask for a straw before the waiter gave out a straw, they sock the restaurant with a big fine –this leaves restaurants in the position of mitigating the risk of big fines by clamping down on employees. I went out to dinner at the Olive Garden last week and the waitress told me that the staff was warned that if they ever handed out a straw, without the customer asking for it first, they would be fired on the spot. Of-course, the law doesn’t require that waiters be fired, but the penalties are so severe that restaurants threaten the waiters with similarly severe penalties to strike the fear of non-compliance in the waiters.
Free the chickens! California passed a law not long ago, that requires better living conditions for chickens, who can no longer be kept in small, efficient cages, thereby giving the chickens a better, and more costly, free-range lifestyle.
Cow Farts, Styrofoam and Banning Beef
These issues transcend California, so no explanation here.
I’m usually a liberal cartoonist, but I love my burgers and conservative complaints about the War on Burgers resonate with me, unlike the fictional War on Christmas.
My buddy Pat Bagley drew a similar cartoon from the opposite point of view, that is surely more acceptable to our liberal readers …
If I drew conservative cartoons all the time, I would have a much more successful career as an editorial cartoonist.
I expect that the Los Angeles teacher strike will be ending this afternoon. My teacher/wife just went to her school to vote on the settlement. Here’s my cartoon anticipating a deal.
In case everyone forgot, here’s my teacher strike cartoon from last weekend!
I think the strike left teachers with a better sense of camaraderie, and even more disgust for superintendent Austin Beutner and the school board.
Here’s another new batch of my old TRUE cartoons from the 1990’s – at least the ones that look like they could still be true. This is from a batch about government.
The group is disturbing to many traditional teachers because they reinforce the notion that teaching is something we can all just jump into, undermining the notion of teachers as professionals; after all, everyone knows how to be a teacher because we all went to school ourselves, right? Traditional teachers spend years in college earning a degree in education to qualify for their teaching credentials, but the young TFA teachers get only a five week crash course.
